Outside of the salaries and facilities and attendance and everything, there are two significant differences between the minors and the majors. One big difference is that the players in the majors are a whole lot better. There’s a stark difference in the quality of gameplay. Another big difference is that the players in the majors are first and foremost trying to win. In the minors, players get to be more selfish; they have to be more selfish, because the goal is to draw attention and get promoted. The minors are all about player development, because no one goes into baseball with the dream of topping out in Double-A. Players want to be as good as they can be. If their team wins more than it loses, all the better, but that’s a secondary concern.

So consider the hidden-ball trick. There’s less incentive to try it in the minors, because the idea is to get a cheap out, and, in the minors, players don’t care so much about cheap outs. If anything, a well-executed hidden-ball trick robs the pitcher of a development opportunity. At the same time, there’s more incentive to try it in the minors, because it’s clever and delightful, and you have to pass the time somehow. The stakes are lower, and trick plays are fun to be a part of. This season, the Rochester Red Wings have pulled off the hidden-ball trick two times.

The most recent occasion was made possible by Willians Astudillo. By the terms of my contract with FanGraphs, I can’t allow this to pass without it being remarked upon. So let’s review what happened to the poor, unsuspecting Dawel Lugo.

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Derek Shelton is a bit of an outlier in this series. Unlike the 11 subjects who preceded him, he isn’t currently a manager. Shelton is the bench coach in Minnesota, and outside of filling in for two games while Paul Molitor was in Cooperstown last month, he’s never been in that role at the highest level. His only full-time managerial experience is in A-ball, from 2000-2002 in the New York Yankees organization.

That may change. Shelton would like to manage in the big leagues some day, and he’s on a path to do. After serving as the hitting coach for the Cleveland Indians from 2005-2009, and the Tampa Bay Rays from 2010-2016, the 49-year-old former catcher spent last season as the quality control coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. A multi-faceted job, it segued well into the bench coach position that he now holds.

What type of manager will Shelton be if he’s able to take that next step? He did his best to answer that question when the Twins visited Fenway Park a few weeks ago.

———

Derek Shelton: “First and foremost, the game is about the players. It’s about communication and how you interact with them. With the way the game has changed, particularly in terms of all the information that’s available, you have to make sure you’re communicating what you’re going to do, and how you’re going to do it. You want an open dialogue with not only your staff, but also with the players.

“I would hope that [having a good understanding of analytics] would be a plus. I worked in Cleveland, at the forefront of analytics, with Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti. Then I had the opportunity to work for the Rays, who are obviously not afraid to look outside the box on anything. And one thing the Rays do a very good job of — especially between their major league coaching staff and the front office — is having a very open dialogue. There’s kind of a no-ego relationship where you’re free to ask questions. Read the rest of this entry »

The outcome seems unthinkable, but the trendlines are undeniable and the conclusion unavoidable: Félix Hernández, for so long the ace of the Mariners, is doing more to hinder the team’s bid for a playoff spot — and thus end the longest drought in North American professional sports — than to help it. As the Mariners try to claw their way back into the second AL Wild Card spot, his place in the rotation is in jeopardy. The 32-year-old righty fondly known as “King Félix” may not be dead, but his exile from a job at which he’s excelled for so long may be imminent.

On Tuesday night against the Rangers in Arlington, a hellish place for a hurler even when the first-pitch temperature isn’t 98 degrees, Hernández was torched for a career-high 11 runs. Granted, just seven of those were earned, due to a pair of errors when hot smashes deflected off the normally reliable glove of Kyle Seager, but by the time those happened, the reality was already clear: the Hernández who had breezed through the first two innings on just 23 pitches, retiring all six hitters and making his pal Adrián Beltré look silly on an 0-2 curve, had left the building:

Alas, there was little joy in what transpired after that. After getting ahead of Robinson Chirinos 1-2 to start the third, Hernández’s command deserted him. He threw three straight balls for a leadoff walk, then surrendered hits to four of the next five batters, plating four runs (two on Rougned Odor’s double) before Beltré grounded into a double play. A one-out walk to Joey Gallo in the fourth, followed by Seager’s first error, set up the Rangers’ fifth run, via a Willie Calhoun sacrifice fly. A two-out, one-on error by Seager in the fifth was soon followed by a three-run homer off the bat of Jurickson Profar to run the score to 8-4.

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Without a doubt — and this is an objective fact — the best thing about baseball in 2018 has been Juan Soto. I mean, you could say it’s Mike Trout, because the answer to almost every baseball question is Mike Trout. But Juan Soto is probably the best teenager baseball has ever seen, and baseball’s been around a while. Juan Soto has posted a .415 wOBA and 161 wRC+, both marks fifth in baseball among players with 200 or more plate appearances. He’s outhit Aaron Judge (157 wRC+) and Freddie Freeman (143) and Paul Goldschmidt (141) and a whole bunch of other people he has no business outhitting. Juan Soto is third on the Nationals in WAR (2.7) and has played in 68 games. Trea Turner, who leads the team with 3.5 WAR, has played in 113 games. Juan Soto is so good. And he’s doing this, again, at 19 years old.

For no other reason than because Juan Soto is my favorite thing about 2018 Major League Baseball, here is Juan Soto hitting a ball to somewhere past Saturn — off fellow southpaw Chasen Shreve:

And an even more impressive dinger on a pitch that was probably off the plate inside:

Juan Soto doing Juan Soto things has brought him some degree of attention around the league, and Soto might be, at just 19, the best position player on a Nationals team that also employs Bryce Harper and Anthony Rendon. And it’s likely because of his surprising ascent that, when he came up to bat against Atlanta earlier this week, Braves announcer Joe Simpson made a comment that raised a few eyebrows. You can hear the audio here, but here’s what he said as relayed by the New York Post:

“If he’s 19, he certainly has his man-growth,” Simpson said. “He is big and strong.”

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This author has some bittersweet personal news to report: I am leaving FanGraphs. Next week, I will join the team at FiveThirtyEight, where I will continue to write about and report on baseball. While I am excited to begin a new chapter and enter into a new challenge, I will miss being a part of the FanGraphs family.

I will always be indebted to David Appelman and Dave Cameron, who took a chance on me 19 months ago as an non-traditional hire. I wasn’t an obvious choice, having taken an unusual career trajectory to FanGraphs from my work as a newspaperman.

While I hope I have provided the FanGraphs audience with some fodder for thought and distracted you from some of your day-to-day over the last year and a half, I was a mere cog in a team effort here at FanGraphs. Every day I visit the site — and I will continue to visit the site daily — I am amazed at the quality of thought, analysis, writing, and the ease of accessing the site’s wealth of information.

Yes, some FanGraphs writers have left for opportunities over the last year after an uncommonly long run of staff continuity, but each of those trends says a lot about the quality of this website. One reason to be very optimistic about the future of this website is the talent that FanGraphs attracts, apparent in the most recent hiring process, of which I was a small part earlier this year.

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Once baseball’s non-waiver trade deadline passes, you start to see the conversations shift from fantasy to terra firma. Almost all the big-name players who are likely to make Chicxulub-sized impacts on team rosters have already been traded. The focus shifts squarely back to the pennant races, and with them, talk of individual player awards.

It will come as no surprise to most readers that I love working on predictive models. It’s not just about trying to predict the future — though that is inevitably a large part of it — it’s also about dissecting things to see how they work. Awards are something I’ve always found fascinating because they not only deal with truths in baseball but also with the psychology and mindset of the people covering the sport. We talk a lot about baseball writers believing more in stats like OBP and SLG, and eventually WAR, but the proof in the pudding is in the eating. If advanced stats don’t budge how writers are judging the best players in the league, are they truly accepted?

We’ll start this trio of pieces with the current MVP races. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past decade modeling MVP votes, and the truth is that things have, in fact, shifted considerably. Slugging percentage and wins above replacement do have more predictive value than they did in the past, as does on-base percentage (albeit to a lesser extent). The defensive players who get a larger share of the vote than one expects tend to be players who do well in the sabermetric defensive measures. Team quality and the Triple Crown stats still play the largest role, however, and even though the MVP award doesn’t specify hitters over pitchers, pitchers still make far less of a dent than one would expect from their impact.

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To be an umpire is to be something of a bad time. Umpires embody the same spirit that leads our mothers to force a helmet on us at the roller rink. They’re your friend Wanda, who just wants to remind you, because you did complain last time, that strong beers give you heartburn, so even though it’s your birthday and you just want to have some fun, you might want to lay off. Wanda isn’t wrong — your body doesn’t do well with all sorts of things anymore — but she could also be described as “harshing the vibe.”

Umpires stomp on our good time and get in the way of our boys and their wins, so we yell and squawk their way, but we’d be lost without them. They’re a very necessary bummer and they normally perform their bummering quite ably. You can tell, because we have baseball at all. They aren’t perfect, and they have their foul-ups and biases, but if umpires were much worse at their very hard jobs, even just some medium amount worse, we couldn’t have the sport. It would offend us; it would get us down. The action on the field would grind to a halt. We’d say baseball was stupid.

The calls, especially at home plate, have to be mostly very good mostly all the time, or the whole thing comes tumbling down. And so umpires do their very hard jobs mostly very well with very little thanks and a not small amount of jeering. And what’s more, they’re calm while they do it. That mellow is important. The job well done keeps us moving; the calm lets us believe it’s fair. The calm lets us trust it. And so they’re calm. Not perfectly so; not when the yelling and the squawking really pick up. But usually? Quite calm.

Case in point: on Wednesday evening, a bug flew into second base umpire Bruce Dreckman’s ear during the ninth inning of the Yankees-White Sox game. Here is Dreckman, running in from the infield as Jonathan Holder prepared to pitch to Nicky Delmonico. He calls for a trainer, looking vaguely stricken, but only vaguely. Greg Bird appears confused. What’s going on here? Well jeez, Greg, he has a moth in his ear.

Dreckman grasps the shoulders of Steve Donohue, head athletic trainer for the Yankees. It’s moving around in there, Steve. Oh god, it tickles.

Bruce and Steve descend into the dugout, with Bruce giving his ear the little dig-and-flick of a man who has just gotten out of the pool and is unable to shake that last. little. bit. of. water. Except it is not water. It is a bug.

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By just about any measure that counts, Alex Bregman has been one of the best players in baseball. In fairness, Alex Bregman was expected to be one of the best players in baseball, but not quite to this degree. I can explain, using our old standards — projections and WAR! Coming into the year, among both hitters and pitchers, Bregman was tied for the 45th-highest projected WAR. He was sixth in projected WAR among Astros, behind Carlos Correa, Jose Altuve, Justin Verlander, Dallas Keuchel, and George Springer.

Right now, Bregman and Verlander are tied atop the Astros’ WAR leaderboard. And Bregman is tied for 10th in all of baseball, around names like Matt Carpenter and Nolan Arenado. It’s not that no one ever saw Bregman coming — he was already a good everyday player, and the Astros did, after all, select him second overall in the 2015 draft. But Bregman has steadily continued to improve, to the point where he’s nearly maxing out his skills. Because of how loaded the Astros’ roster has been, it’s been more difficult for Bregman to stand out. It’s funny to refer to someone as having played in Altuve’s shadow, but Bregman’s completing his star turn, and he should be recognized as such.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jacoby Ellsbury‘s latest injury, Jayson Werth‘s anti-analytics rant, Luke Heimlich, and Shohei Ohtani, then answer listener emails about how defensive positioning is affecting positions themselves, throwing strikes to Jorge Alfaro, bringing “the wall” to baseball, why so many pitchers are throwing 100 mph, how the Orioles fit their new minor leaguers into their farm system, Collin McHugh‘s recent success, Bartolo Colon’s Hall of Fame case, Mike Trout without a sense of the strike zone, and the differences between baseball and soccer when it comes to player fraternization, plus Stat Blasts about the most unlikely five-walk performances, baseball Scorigami, and the days with the most one-run games.

Audio intro: The Aquabats!, "Nerd Alert"
Audio outro: Tacocat, "I Love Seattle"

Link to article about defense and three true outcomes
Link to picture of cricket’s “silly position”
Link to second picture of cricket’s “silly position”
Link to baseball Scorigami diagram
Link to Sam’s Colon article

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