Managing a bullpen is one of the biggest challenges a big-league skipper faces. Starters are going fewer and fewer innings, multi-inning closers have gone the way of the dinosaur, and roles have begun to blur. Matc-ups have thus become increasingly important, and determining them isn’t as simple as scanning a stat sheet. This isn’t Strat-O-Matic, it’s real life, and workloads and psyches need to be factored into the equation.

A.J. Hinch has done a good job with this balancing act. Having quality arms at one’s disposal obviously helps — and the Astros clearly have some quality arms — but optimizing their usage is nonetheless an art form. The numbers suggest that Hinch is more of a Rembrandt van Rijn than a Jackson Pollock (no disrespect to the latter, the reference is to technical proficiency). Houston relievers have both the best ERA and best FIP of any team in the majors, while their walk and strikeout rates are things of beauty. By and large, Hinch knows which buttons to push… and when to push them.

———

A.J. Hinch: “It’s definitely changed from my playing days to now. We’ve been softly eliminating perfect roles. I think there will always be a closer. There will always be setup guys. There will always be guys who are long men or lefty specialists. I’m not taking about those roles. It’s more that I’ve watched the game evolve to the point where managers are using their relievers creatively.

“There’s how Terry Francona used Andrew Miller a couple of years ago. There’s how we used the bullpen in the playoffs last year. Closers are being used on the road more often. Lefties are getting righties out if the numbers suggest you don’t have to play a perfect matchup. I think the creativity within organizations has grown, and that’s impacted the manager role, how we utilize our weapons.

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A writer — even a below-average baseball writer — needn’t worry much about finding a pretense upon which to invoke space. To the extent that night exists, the prospect of that distant, empty hellscape is, basically by definition, never far from one’s experience of the world. Space, as a notion, is inescapable.

During one recent night, I stumbled upon a dumb thought regarding that inescapable notion. Or, to put it more accurately, what I stumbled upon was less a thought and more a fleeting vision — a vision, specifically, of a baseball game being played in space.

There are obviously a lot of logistical concerns that attend such a vision. How are the players able to breathe? By what means do they move from base to base? Who washes the uniforms? Blessed with little in the way of intellectual curiosity and even less in the way of intellectual aptitude, I was fortunately untroubled by most such questions, allowing them to drift away unanswered. For the most part, I survived this reverie without having endured improvement of any kind.

One concern did emerge, however, that I was ultimately unable to escape. As to why it stayed with me, I’m unable to say, although I suspect it’s because, as one of this site’s editors, I’m compelled to work frequently with the sort of tools that might help one to answer it. What I wanted to know, specifically, was this: who, among baseball’s current hitters, would be the home-run leader in space?

Already you might see what’s at work here — namely, that physical strength isn’t of much use in space. Assuming a park environment with zero gravity — and that’s the assumption I’ve made for the sake of answering this question — the need for a batter to hit the ball with any great force disappears. Exit velocity is what allows earthbound hitters to briefly counteract the influence of gravity. In the starry abyss, however, there’s no need to counteract anything. A batted ball in motion will stay in motion — theoretically, to the end of the universe. Any exit velocity above zero is sufficient.

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Introduction to the McDongenhagen Project
This represents the first episode of a weekly program co-hosted by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel about player evaluation in all its forms. The new show, which will be available through the normal FanGraphs Audio feed, doesn’t have a name yet, but reader input is invited. The show won’t be all prospect stuff, but there will be plenty of that, as the hosts are Prospect Men. Below are some timestamps to make listening and navigation easier.

2:13 – What Eric’s been up to feat. reggaeton horn.
3:49 – What Kiley’s been up to feat. self-promotion.
6:31 – TOPIC ONE: September call-ups that will impact the NL races.
7:24 – Arizona Diamondbacks, including a big picture discussion.
13:15 – Atlanta Braves, including a guy you didn’t think we’d talk about.
19:30 – St. Louis Cardinals, including lots of Harrison Bader talk.
22:31 – Chicago Cubs, briefly.
22:58 – Milwaukee Brewers, including Robin Hood talk.
24:26 – Colorado Rockies, eternally confusing, including eye-level science.
28:43 – Los Angeles Dodgers, including Joe Arpaio talk.
29:46 – Philadelphia Phillies, including Scott Kingery symposium.
36:05 – TOPIC TWO: Should we change how we evaluate pitching prospects?
41:45 – Kiley tries to shoehorn more Nassim Taleb into conversation.
46:28 – Objectively measuring command: ¯\_(ｯ)_/¯.
50:02 – Eric compares these challenges to the NFL combine.
52:23 – TOPIC THREE: 2019 MLB Draft overview.
1:01:50 – Eric reveals his West Coast draft fascination.
1:03:06 – Kiley brings this to a merciful end.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @kileymcd or @longenhagen on Twitter or at prospects@fangraphs.com.

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

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 4 min play time.)

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Detroit’s contention window didn’t just close in 2017, it dramatically shut on the team’s fingers, the paramedics arrived and kicked them in the groin, and then everything caught on fire. I have zero problems regarding the 2006-14 team as a dynasty even if they failed to to win a championship. At their best, they were as dangerous a team as the Tigers of the mid-1980s.

The Setup

The Tigers squeezed out an 86-75 season in 2016, but they were also clearly a team on the downswing, with most of the key contributors approaching free agency, well into their 30s, and sometimes both things. With a 56-48 record at the trade deadline and sitting just 4.5 games back in the AL Central, the Tigers did precisely nothing, likely a result both of a farm system weakened by previous trades and a lack of understanding between the front office and ownership about what lay ahead for the team.

In this case, rather than a stubborn inability to agree, the discord (such as it was) was a product of owner Mike Ilitch’s interest in winning a championship before his passing, a fact which his age (he was 87 at the time) dictated must occur sooner than later.

This après moi, le déluge was, of course absolutely justified — even if it wasn’t necessarily great for someone who’d remain a fan of the Tigers into the 2018 and -19 seasons. After all, this is a sports team. The only consequences for unwise spending in the present are (a) fewer wins in the future and (b) slightly fewer millions of dollars for the billionaire’s heirs.

Ilitch passed away before the 2017 season, but there were no big offseason additions — unless you’re the world’s biggest Brendan Ryan or Alex Avila fan. The team managed to lurk around .500 into early June, 29-29 representing their final .500 record, but the club struggled after that, going 18-28 in the period from then to the trade deadline, and I don’t think any analyst (and I doubt anyone internally) really thought Detroit was going anywhere.

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The American League Cy Young race is pretty messed up this season. The current WAR leader, while apparently healthy, might throw so few innings in September that he fails to qualify for the ERA title as a result. The pitcher currently ranked second by WAR in the league hasn’t pitched in a month. A third pitcher who, as of July 1, had authored a sub-2.00 ERA and fantastic peripherals — and was probably the favorite for the award — is now an afterthought.

Overall, there are probably eight candidates who deserve to appear on a ballot — and that’s without even considering the credentials of dominant relievers like Edwin Diaz and Blake Treinen. Voters, however, can only choose five names — and, as a result, it is possible that totally defensible ballots will omit the eventual winner (or that a pitcher who would have otherwise won will be omitted from a totally defensible ballot).

As I noted yesterday with regard to the NL’s Cy Young field, this award invites multiple questions about how best to evaluate pitching performance. Unavoidably, one’s choice for Cy Young will depend on how one weighs what a pitcher can and cannot control — and how best to quantify those effects. In this post, I’ll look at various metrics and consider the implications of each regarding luck, defense, and pitcher skill.

Before we get to how contact and defense might be playing a role in voters’ minds, though, let’s look at some fairly standard statistics at FanGraphs.

Jay Jaffe made the case for Chris Sale’s candidacy last week, and that case certainly looks quite strong — or would, if the season ended today. Problem is, Sale might not get too many more opportunities to build said case. The left-hander is scheduled to throw two innings for Boston today and then another three innings on the 16th. If he records those five innings and then, say, another 10 over his final two starters, he won’t qualify for the ERA title and will potentially allow other pitchers the opportunity to catch up in value.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Gerrit Cole, Dallas Keuchel, and Charlie Morton — on how they learned and/or developed their go-to fastballs.

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Gerrit Cole, Astros

“It’s all about the fastball. From a young age, I’ve thrown both the two-seam and the four-seam. I just try to keep my fingers on top of the ball and get after it, man. It’s pretty simple.

“You try to locate it the best you can, knowing that overcooking the pitch — whether that’s overthrowing it or overthinking it — can cause you to maybe leak the ball over the plate or simply lose some of the quality of the pitch. You try to be as relaxed as you can, and have the most-connected delivery that you can. You keep your fingers on top of the ball, spin it, and take it right through the glove. Don’t try to do too much. Just let it eat.

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If there’s an upside to the Blue Jays’ decision to avoid promoting Vladimir Guerrero Jr. for service-time reasons — which is to say if even the dumbest of clouds has a silver lining — it is in the arrival of Rowdy Tellez. The burly 23-year-old, who has endured not only the fall of his star as a prospect but also the recent death of his mother from brain cancer, recently began his major-league stay with a bang while taking advantage of playing time that might not have been available with Guerrero’s arrival. But really, what the hell more do you need to know before you embrace a player who acquired the nickname of Rowdy while still in the womb?

Tellez (pronounced Tuh-LEZ) spent the entire 2018 minor-league season at Triple-A Buffalo, an assignment he repeated after bombing in 2017 (more on which below). His modest final line (.270/.340/.425 with 13 homers) doesn’t exactly suggest an impact bat at first base or designated hitter, though he did improve over the course of the season, hitting .248/.329/.382 with six homers in 280 PA before the All-Star break and .306/.360/.497 with seven homers in 164 PA after it. What’s more, that improvement occurred against the unimaginably sad backdrop of his mom’s decline and, ultimately, her death on August 19 at the too-young age of 53.

Just over two weeks after Lori Tellez passed away, on September 5, her son was wearing a Blue Jays uniform, pinch-hitting for Jonathan Davis in the eighth inning, roping an RBI double into the right-center gap on the first pitch from the Rays’ Jake Faria, and, after receiving a rousing ovation from the Rogers Centre crowd, pointing to the sky in tribute to his mother:

Did it just get dusty in here, or is that my contact lenses going off? Pardon me for a moment… The next night, Tellez collected three hits, all doubles, off Shane Bieber (two) and Cody Allen (one). The night after that, he hit a pair of doubles off Carlos Carrasco, and then on Saturday, his first big-league homer, off Adam Plutko:

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo, Jeff’s ideal afterlife, Mike Trout‘s future and what an extension for Trout might look like, the Tyler Flowers extension, Michael Kopech‘s impending Tommy John surgery and the UCL scourge, how being Tampa Bay’s “bulk guy” is affecting Ryan Yarbrough‘s WAR, Mallex Smith vs. Giancarlo Stanton, a divisive call against the Astros and the state of replay review, the Cubs and bad weather, Oakland’s incredible bullpen, John Gant’s odd batting line, a wild Triple-A ending involving Giovanny Gallegos, and more.

Audio intro: T-Bone Walker, "Stormy Monday"
Audio outro: Rilo Kiley, "Close Call"

Link to Ken Rosenthal on Trout
Link to Jay Jaffe on Tommy John surgery
Link to Yarbrough WAR article
Link to Astros-Red Sox call
Link to Jeff’s A’s bullpen post
Link to Meg Rowley on replay

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