The New York Mets are currently not a good baseball team. This isn’t news, and it can also be the source of occasional amusement. In the future envisioned by Futurama, the New New York Mets are the worst team in baseball’s successor, blernsball. But the humor provided by the Mets isn’t solely confined to the future; it provides comedy in the present as well. Upon Wednesday’s announcement of the 2019 MLB schedule, our own Dan Szymborski got in a dig at New York’s second-favorite team.

This current state of Mets-dom is unlikely to change anytime soon. That said, the Mets are actually having a decent August. At 12-11, with three series wins and one split in six series against admittedly weak competition, August represents a major improvement over the months of May through July (27-51 combined record).

The underlying numbers back up this August run. Most important of all is the fact that the Mets have put up the third-highest pitching WAR for the month, trailing only the Indians and Braves in that timespan. Their staff has been led by Jacob deGrom (1.7 WAR, best in MLB in August), Noah Syndergaard (0.8 WAR, 17th-best), and Zack Wheeler (1.0 WAR, eighth-best). While this level of performance isn’t out of the ordinary for deGrom or Syndergaard, Wheeler’s appearance alongside them is little surprising, at least relative to expectations. Prior to the season, the projection systems placed Wheeler at around 1.2 WAR, with all three of ZiPS, Steamer, and Depth Charts projecting him to be worth less than Jason Vargas.

That’s not to say that Wheeler’s talent level was expected to be worse than Vargas’s. It was just hard to know. After 2015 and 2016 seasons wiped out by Tommy John surgery and then a poor 2017, there was little sense of what to expect from the former top prospect. However, Wheeler has rebounded in 2018 to the tune of 3.3 WAR, 15th-best among pitchers in all of baseball. This turnaround has come at a beneficial time for the Mets, a club now looking to build for 2019 and beyond.

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Almost two months ago, I talked about how the Mariners were on a record pace for team Clutch. This is never a fun statistic to explain, since it’s rooted in win probability, which is already complicated enough, but in short, Clutch measures whether a player or team has done better or worse than expected in higher-leverage situations. A player who knocks in the game-winning run will have a high Clutch score for the day. The opposite would be true of the pitcher. The stat is hard to explain in a paragraph, but it still manages to be intuitive, if that makes any sense.

Since that post was written in early July, the Mariners have slumped and fallen well out of playoff position. Nevertheless, they’re still on pace to finish with the highest team Clutch score since 1974, which is as far back as our data goes. If you want to understand how exceptional the Mariners have been, you might consider this plot of all 30 team Clutch scores:

The Mariners are way out in front, with five extra wins even just compared to the next-most clutch team. Clutch performance explains why the Mariners have been able to overachieve their underlying numbers. But, you know, let’s look at that same plot again. Let’s just change what we highlight.

We can use this to talk about the Dodgers, too. Like the Mariners, the Dodgers presently find themselves several games removed from a playoff spot. Unlike the Mariners, the Dodgers were supposed to be good.

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A few weeks ago, when the A’s traded for Mike Fiers, I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say. It’s not that I thought it was a bad move — it’s that I thought it was a boring move, an unremarkable move. A very modest rotation upgrade that would be hard to dress up for FanGraphs readers over 900 words. I tried — I dug into all the familiar statistics and websites — but nothing jumped out. The Mike Fiers trade, to me, belonged in the same transaction category as the Aaron Loup trade. It was a move that happened that I didn’t need to analyze.

Fiers has started three times for the A’s. The A’s have won all three games, and Fiers has allowed three runs over 18.1 innings. Even more, he’s allowed only one walk, while racking up 21 strikeouts. In a short amount of time, Fiers has made himself remarkable. He’s done enough to draw my attention again. When a player goes on a hot streak, it’s natural to wonder what might be different about him. Sometimes — many times — a hot streak is just a hot streak. Fiers, though, has indeed made a few tweaks. Understanding it’s always impossible to conclude that a given tweak has directly led to greater success, let’s take a look at how Fiers has changed since getting to Oakland.

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Yesterday, Jeff Sullivan wondered aloud why the Rockies, a contending club that would benefit from some offensive help, hadn’t taken any steps to address a pretty clear weakness. Today, Colorado responded by calling up a 38-year-old outfielder who couldn’t get a major-league deal this season. If nostalgia is your thing, the Rockies’ decision to bring back Matt Holliday is a clear winner. Whatever questions Sullivan had yesterday, however, likely weren’t cleared up by this most recent move. That doesn’t mean it won’t work, of course.

From a feel-good perspective, the move is a no-brainer. Below is a WAR leaderboard for position players in Rockies franchise history.

Holliday is one of the franchise’s greatest players, arguably the team’s best hitter of all time after Larry Walker. In 2007, Holliday hit .340/.405/.607 with a 151 wRC+ and 6.9 WAR, that last figure still the best a Rockies player has recorded since Holliday was traded to the A’s ahead of the 2009 season. He finished second in the MVP voting that year, was called safe at home, and won the NLCS MVP as the franchise advanced to their only World Series appearance. Holliday would go on to capture a title with the Cardinals, but as the place where his career started, Denver clearly has some significance to the outfielder.

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Over the past few months, within the estimable pages of this very site, Nathaniel Grow and I have both discussed at some length the consequences of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association’s exclusion of minor leaguers. The most obvious, of course, is minor leaguers’ pay. But there’s another less obvious consequence of the MLBPA’s current membership approach, stemming from the reality that minor leaguers become major leaguers. Not all of them, of course, but there are very few players who jump straight to the bigs without having ever graced a minor-league field. And that means that the vast majority of major leaguers will spend at least some period of time without union representation, during which they will do things, and say things, which eventually will reflect on the union and its membership as a whole.

Now, unions serve a lot of purposes — more than just negotiating for higher wages. They improve workplace safety, secure healthcare and other benefits, and can provide a counterbalance against the structural mismatch of a large employer. But they do all of this by representing their members, and helping those members put their best foot forward, whether by training or otherwise.

What unions can’t (or don’t) do, however, is provide these services for non-members. This makes sense: a union won’t want to make non-members better able to compete with people whose interests it’s protecting. So while it’s somewhat understandable that the current members of the MLBPA don’t want to expand their protections to include non-members, the problem is that minor leaguers and major leaguers don’t really compete for the same job in the sense that a union electrician and non-union electrician compete for the same job. When a minor leaguer gets called up, he becomes a union member. Two 40-man roster players competing for a spot are both already union members. So excluding minor leaguers doesn’t limit competition; it just makes future members worse off.

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It didn’t get nearly as much press coverage as fake news tweets about CIA nanites, but back in June, injured Indians hurler Trevor Bauer filed a lawsuit against a company called Top Velocity, LLC, alleging that Top Velocity and its owner, Brett Pourciau, illegally used his license in violation of federal, Texas, and Louisiana law. You can read his Complaint here.

There’s a lot to unpack. Remember that this is, as always, a simplified overview: don’t go practicing law or filing lawsuits based on what you see here.

Let’s start with the crux of what Bauer is saying.

This might seem kind of funny (Bauer is alleging he is World Famous!), but it’ll be important later. Now to what Bauer is saying Top Velocity and Pourciau did wrong:

Bauer also alleges that his attorney made repeated requests that Pourciau and Top Velocity remove Bauer’s name and likeness from their website. According to Bauer, after some back-and-forth, they agreed.

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Cody Allen throws a lot of curveballs. As a matter of fact, the Cleveland closer has thrown the second-highest percentage (38.9%) of curveballs among qualified relievers since the start of the 2014 season. It’s hard to argue with success. Allen’s signature pitch has helped him amass 147 saves, the most in Indians history.

His grip, while not uncommon, isn’t entirely traditional, either. The 29-year-old right-hander throws a spiked curveball, which he learned and developed through the insistence of someone whose advice he’s always taken to heart. It was career-altering advice. Were it not for the pitch, Allen’s day-to-day experiences with rotation would be markedly different than they are on a mound.

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Cody Allen: “My freshman year of college, I was pretty much just a fastball-slider guy. My slider was OK. I have a twin brother, Chad, who pitched at the University of West Florida, and he had a really good breaking ball. He spiked his. He would always tell me, ‘Hey, man, try spiking it.’ I did, but I had no feel for it. It had good spin and was doing the things I wanted it to, but I felt there was no way I could throw it for a strike.

“When I was coming back from Tommy John surgery the next year, I had an extended throwing program. That gave me a window to see if I could maybe iron this pitch out. So the fall of 2009, and the spring of 2010, is when I really stuck with it. I kept throwing it, and it got better and better.

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Over the All-Star break, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred addressed the Oakland A’s, their quest for a new ballpark, and their remarkably low payroll. With regard to the last of those items, Manfred exhibited little concern, suggesting there was almost no correlation between a club’s capacity to spend money and its ability to win games. John Shea reproduced and retransmitted the following comments, care of Manfred, at the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I categorically reject the notion that payroll should be the measure of whether somebody is trying to win in our game today. I reject that not because I prefer low payrolls to high payrolls. I reject that because I know that the correlation between payroll and winning in baseball is extraordinarily weak.

“You do not guarantee yourself wins by having a high payroll, and as the Oakland A’s have showed, you can win with a low payroll. So I really reject the premise of that question. Those are the economic facts.

“Falling into this notion that payroll is a measure of whether an owner is trying to win is literally sophistry.”

I’ve got good news and bad news for the Commissioner. The good news is that, in six out of the last seven individual seasons, the correlation between wins and payroll hasn’t been very strong, as the graph below suggests.

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