Baseballs have continued to fly out of the park in 2018, if not at a record pace — the current per-team, per-game rate of 1.15 is the fourth-highest of all time, after 2017 (1.26), 2000 (1.17), and 2016 (1.16) — then nearly so. Nonetheless, over the past week-and-change, the game has produced something previously unseen amid this recent surge: a player challenging the major-league record of homers in eight consecutive games, a feat last completed by Ken Griffey Jr. in 1993. Blue Jays designated hitter and occasional first baseman Kendrys Morales has homered in seven straight, something unseen in 12 years. Tonight in Baltimore, he’ll have a chance to put himself in the record books.

Here’s Morales’s entry from Sunday, a towering two-run blast off the Phillies’ Vince Velasquez:

Alas, the homer, Morales’s 21st of the season, wasn’t enough to help the Blue Jays continue their season-high five-game winning streak, which has been fueled by the 35-year-old switch-hitting slugger’s power burst.

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This is Nate Freiman’s third post as part of his August residency. Nate is a former MLB first baseman. He also played for Team Israel in the 2017 World Baseball Classic and spent time in the Atlantic and Mexican Leagues. He can be found on Twitter @natefreiman. His wife Amanda routinely beats him at golf. To read work by earlier residents, click here.

One of my favorite people in baseball is Tom Tornincasa. He was my hitting coach in the Double-A Texas League in 2012. Apart from being a great coach, he kept the clubhouse loose. Ask anyone who played for him; they’ll know what I mean.

At about 6:50, we’d be stretching on the foul line, and he’d walk out with his notebook.

“Straily.”

That was the start of our advance scouting meeting.

“Ninety to ninety-four, slider, changeup. Sixty percent fastball, thirty percent slider.”

Dan Straily led the minor leagues in strikeouts that year, spotting his fastball to both sides of the plate and mixing in an almost unhittable slider — unhittable in that it was un-layoff-able — that he’d throw in any count. He was in the big leagues that September.

“One more thing. He sucks.”

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The Baltimore Orioles now have some friends on the other side: the Kansas City Royals recently shuffled off the mortal coil of contention and have now joined the Orioles among those clubs mathematically eliminated from the postseason. While the competition for the No. 1 pick rolls on, Kansas City’s season is otherwise dead. Today, they’re the topic in our series of post-mortems on 2018 clubs.

The Setup

The 2018 season was always going to be a dreadful one for the Kansas City Royals, no matter the objections lodged by the franchise to the contrary. The 2017 campaign was the final one before free agency for most of Kansas City’s core contributors, with Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Mike Minor, Mike Moustakas, and Jason Vargas all departing — a group, incidentally, that combined for 14.2 WAR in their final season together. That’s not to say the Royals should have attempted to retain most of those players — after pitching like Greg “Mad Dog” Maddux in the first half, for example, Jason Vargas more resembled Chris “Mad Dog” Russo” in the second — but the departure of 14 wins was a real loss for a team that only won 80 total (72 in terms of Pythagoras).

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It’s safe to say that the Tampa Bay Rays aren’t following a paint-by-numbers script. Casting convention to the wind, they employ “an opener,” they station their relievers on corners, they… do just about anything to gain a potential edge. As a small-market team in the A.L. East, they need to be creative in order to compete. It makes sense.

But not to everybody, and that includes a fair share of their fanbase. And even if it does make sense to the fanbase — sorta, kinda, at least — that wasn’t always the case. They had to be brought up to speed on the methods behind the madness, and that job fell squarely on the shoulders of the people who report on, and broadcast, the games.

Andy Freed and Dave Wills — the radio voices of Rays baseball — were front and center. According to the latter, they at least had a head start.

“We were trained a little bit by Joe Maddon,” said Wills, who along with Freed has called games in Tampa since 2005. “Joe was kind of the leader with doing different things, such as shifts and putting four men in the outfield. He’d set lineups differently than other people. So when it comes to what they’re doing now, we’re already in grad school. We’ve seen it, we’ve been there, we’ve done that.”

Which doesn’t mean advance warning from Kevin Cash wasn’t appreciated when the team introduced the “opener” concept. Wills may have an advanced degree in understanding-out-of-the-box, but what the Rays manager told him and his broadcast partner was straight out of left field. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the returns of Mike Trout and Willians Astudillo, Astudillo’s new hobby, Jose Ramirez‘s power/speed combo, the NL Rookie of the Year race between Ronald Acuna, Juan Soto, Harrison Bader, and Brian Anderson, the decreasing incidence of stolen bases and sacrifice bunts, the Angels’ active offseason in retrospect, the Angels’ lack of playoff appearances with Trout vs. the Mariners’ lack of playoff appearances with Felix Hernandez, David Wright’s painful latest comeback attempt, and a Rich Hill (AKA Dick Mountain) anniversary, in addition to a deeper discussion about the role of randomness in baseball, what the standings “should” look like, and how luck, timing, and clutch hits are saving the season from the boring stretch run that some fans feared before the season.

Audio intro: The Byrds, "Welcome Back Home"
Audio outro: Dandy Livingstone, "There is a Mountain"

Link to picture of Astudillo drawing his bow
Link to Ben’s preseason piece about hope and faith
Link to Jeff’s post about the Dodgers and Mariners
Link to Marc Carig’s David Wright rehab article

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Episode 831
Unlike the top European leagues, where a few wealthy clubs enter each season virtually assured of finishing atop their respective country’s tables, Major League Soccer offers considerable parity. On this edition of FanGraphs Audio, Harrison Crow of American Soccer Analysis addresses the implications of that parity, while also discussing certain notable concepts in soccer analytics and the players who best illustrate them — for example, Sebastian Giovinco and the myth of “finishing skill,” Ilsinho and what constitutes a successful dribble, and every player on Sporting Kansas City as they relate to the value of shot volume.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 10 min play time.)

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This past weekend’s Sunday Notes column included a section on Brock Deatherage, a self-described “country boy from North Carolina” who aspires to be a farmer after his playing days are over. As promised within those paragraphs, we’ll now hear much more from the 22-year-old Detroit Tigers outfield prospect. More specifically, we’ll learn the reasons behind his poor junior season at North Carolina State and how that experience made him a better player today.

Deatherage is thriving in his first taste of professional baseball. In 231 plate appearances between the GCL, West Michigan, and (most recently) Lakeland, the left-handed-hitting speed burner is slashing .329/.383/.512 with six home runs and 16 stolen bases. He’s doing so after being selected by Detroit in the 10th round of this year’s June draft, one year after choosing to return to school rather than sign with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Deatherage discussed his tumultuous penultimate collegiate campaign, and how he subsequently turned things around, prior to a recent game.

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Brock Deatherage: “I had a pretty tough junior year. I started the season really well — I was hitting .400-plus — but then I kind of ran into a little wall. I was having some good at-bats, a lot of hard contact, but balls weren’t falling. From there, the mental side of the game kind of took over. I obviously knew it was my draft year, and I was projected to go pretty high, so I started to press at the plate. A lot of those little mental things started piling on, piling on.

“Then I started to make physical adjustments. I tried everything. I widened out. I shortened up. I stood up taller. I leg-kicked. I started open and strided in. I started with my hands a little bit lower, a little higher. I was trying everything to get out of that funk, but you can’t go in there and hit one way and then show up the next day and hit another way. Basically, I was trying to figure out what worked for me rather than sticking with what got me there and just working through it. I kept making all of these changes and adjustments, and it obviously didn’t work.

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It’s been a forgettable season for the Giants as a team (63-66 at this writing), and earlier this week, we got a clue as to why — at least with regards to Buster Posey. The 31-year-old catcher has been hobbled by a right hip injury, and season-ending surgery to repair his labrum and clean out bone spurs is reportedly “imminent,” according to executive vice president of baseball operations Brian Sabean. While there’s no concern that Posey will do additional damage by continuing to play, the goal is to give him enough time to recover from the surgery before the beginning of next season.

“Recovery time is what it is, it’s six-plus months,” Sabean told KNBR on Thursday night, “and if you hit the mark well enough you should be able to perform in spring training and hopefully start the season on time.”

With MLB announcing this week that Opening Day for the 2019 season would be on March 28 — just over seven months away — Sabean’s timeline leaves relatively little margin for setbacks. Cactus League action will have just gotten underway by the time he hits the six-month mark.

Via the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea, Posey began experience soreness in the hip in late May and the problem has lingered, bothering him both while catching and while hitting. Via MLB.com’s Joe Trezza, he’s known about the looming likelihood of surgery since before the All-Star break. Selected to the NL All-Star team for the sixth time in his 10-year career, he opted to miss the game, receive a cortisone shot, and rest. Some break.

“You know me pretty well,” Posey told a Chronicle reporter regarding the hip, “and I don’t want to make any excuses for anything. It’s been something I’ve kind of pushed through and played through.”

The injury is the primary culprit in The Case of Buster’s Missing Power, as Posey has been unable to fully utilize his lower half in the service of driving the ball. He’s gone 44 consecutive games without a home run, tied for the second-longest streak of his career; he went 47 games during the second half of 2016 and 44 games from last August 9 until April 4 of this season. Posey’s current numbers (.284/.357/.382, five homers, 106 wRC+) all represent career lows, excluding his incomplete 2009 and 2011 seasons (a cup of coffee in the former, a gruesome collision — you know the one — in the latter). Since the All-Star break, Posey is hitting just .271/.327/.302 for a 78 wRC+ in 104 plate appearances, with three doubles representing the entirety of his extra-base hits total in that span. For an elite hitter with a career line of .306/.374/.465 (132 wRC+), that’s way out of character.

On the one hand, it would seem to be good news that the cause of Posey’s sagging production has been diagnosed and is treatable. On the other, one has to wonder how much impact such a surgery will have on a catcher heading into his age-32 season. While several position players have undergone hip surgeries in the past decade — a partial list would include Ike Davis, Carlos Delgado, Jacoby Ellsbury, Alex Gordon, Mike Lowell, Logan Morrison, Alex Rodriguez, Corey Seager, Steven Souza, and Chase Utley — it would appear that relatively few catchers have done so.

Via the subscription-based Baseball Injury Consultants site, run by my former Baseball Prospectus colleague Corey Dawkins (who set up BP’s injury database which, lamentably, is no longer being updated), I found only four major-league catchers who underwent what was described as a hip labrum surgery: Todd Hundley (2004), Matt Treanor (2008), Rob Johnson (2009), and Devin Mesoraco (2016). Treanor and Johnson were light-hitting backups, and Hundley, an NL All-Star in 1996-97, had become one by that point; in fact, he never played professionally after the surgery.

That leaves Mesoraco as the closest comp, but not necessarily an apt one. A former first-round pick and touted prospect — he made the top 25 on the lists of Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, and MLB Pipeline in 2012 — Mesoraco didn’t hit much from 2011 to -13 (.225/.282/.359, 69 wRC+) but broke out in 2014 to bat .273/.359/.534 with 25 homers and a 147 wRC+, a performance that earned him an All-Star berth. He was limited to just 39 games (including a mere 18 starts behind the plate) in 2015-16, undergoing left hip surgery in the former year and both left shoulder and right hip surgeries in the latter year. Since that nightmarish stretch, he’s hit just .214/.307/.384 (86 wRC+), and earlier this year was traded from the Reds to the Mets in exchange for Matt Harvey. Given so many major injuries, it’s fair to wonder how much of Mesoraco was left on operating tables, but I don’t think his plight offers much insight into Posey’s future, either as a catcher or as a hitter.

It’s a future the Giants are heavily invested in, with salaries of $21.4 million per year from 2019-21 and then a $22 million option and $3 million buyout for 2022, Posey’s age-35 season. That the Giants have made a habit of playing Posey at first base regularly — 13 times this year and an average of 28 a year since 2010 (excluding 2011) — probably works in his favor in the long run. He’s caught 885 games in his career, never more than 123 in a season. By comparison, the top 10 catchers in JAWS — a group that I believe will one day include Posey — averaged 1,265 games caught through age 31. Reprising the upper end of a table that I created for a recent piece about Yadier Molina (1,302 games caught through age 31, if you’re asking):

Given that the next three guys in the JAWS rankings are a pre-war catcher (Gabby Hartnett), a guy who died in a plane crash at age 32 (Thurman Munson), and a guy who spent substantial time at first base (Gene Tenace), I figured cutting the table short would suffice. Posey currently ranks 16th in JAWS among catchers (40.7 career WAR/37.1 peak WAR/38.9 JAWS). He’s already surpassed the peak standard (34.5, seventh all-time) but is short of those for career WAR (53.5) and JAWS (44.0). Via Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, Posey was forecast to wind up sixth on that table above, with a line of 60.7/37.9/49.3.

I don’t know what moving Posey to first base would do to the projections, but the concept has relatively little appeal for the Giants, both because he’s an excellent defender and because the team also has a very good first baseman in Brandon Belt. On the first note, Baseball Prospectus, whose Fielding Runs Above Average metric includes pitch-framing, rates Posey as 156 runs above average for his career; that’s fifth since 1949, though the framing element of that overall figure only goes back to 1988. Posey is 4.4 runs above average this year. As for Belt, signed through 2021 with an annual salary of $16 million, he’s an above-average first baseman (5.9 UZR/150) as well as hitter (127 career wRC+, 120 this year). While he’s played 78 career games in the outfield, mostly in left, his UZR/150 there is -5.9. He might improve with more reps there, but such a chain of events clearly isn’t one the Giants are eager to pursue.

The Giants have deferred questions about the ramifications of Posey’s surgery until after it’s done, but as I noted in my post-mortem a couple of weeks back, it’s already clear that while he may remain the face of the franchise, the team can no longer afford to treat him as the centerpiece of the lineup given his health and what now amounts to two years of good-not-great production out of the last three (he had a 115 wRC+ in 2016, 128 last year). Nonetheless, here’s hoping that he comes back strong enough to regain some of the offensive stature he’s lost and to continue his Cooperstown-bound career behind the plate.

Entering the year, the Giants had hopes of contention, with Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen joining a core of position players that included Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford, and Buster Posey plus Madison Bumgarner and Johnny Cueto to lead the rotation .

Roughly four-fifths of the way through the year, however, the Giants have no hopes of contention. With a record under .500 and a competitive National League landscape, it is pretty clear that this will not be their season. Further dooming their 2018 campaign is the news that Posey will be out the remainder of the season with hip surgery. The Giants are passing players through waivers to prepare for any trades that might benefit the club. The most likely candidate at this point appears to be Andrew McCutchen.

The Giants’ troubles aren’t McCutchen’s fault. The former Pirates star has put up a 112 wRC+ and 1.4 WAR on the season. That’s less impressive than nearly all his seasons in Pittsburgh but still a rough approximation of the 119 wRC+ and 2.2 WAR for which he was projected before the start of the year. That makes McCutchen a productive player, one who would serve as an upgrade on a team with a hole, if not over a decent everyday player. Along with McCutchen comes his remaining salary which is somewhere, in the neighborhood of $3 million. The combination of McCutchen’s play and his salary scared teams off during the waiver process as he reportedly went unclaimed.

Unclaimed doesn’t necessarily mean unwanted: there are teams that could use McCutchen that might not love the idea of taking on his salary, as well. San Francisco can now negotiate with any team and can, if they choose, pay down some of McCutchen’s salary in an effort to make a deal more attractive. At the trade deadline, Jay Jaffe surveyed the positional replacement-level killers and found several teams — including the Astros, Diamondbacks, Phillies, and Rockies — lacking in the corner-outfield spots. For the most part, those teams have opted not to fill those holes.

Taking a look at the potential landing spots from another angle, let’s look at each contenders’ projections at both corner-outfield spots.

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