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Back in March, this contributor presented Billy Hamilton with an idea that he described as the “stupidest thing” he had heard in his life. I didn’t think it was so bad and neither did his spring-training clubhouse neighbor, Scooter Gennett. Today, this author thought he’d revisit the subject.

Hamilton is one of the game’s fastest players — he ranks third in sprint speed this season. He is one of the game’s best outfield defenders and most efficient baserunners. But his bat has eroded his value throughout his career and is doing so again this season. The idea I presented to Hamilton basically was this: to artificially increase his on-base percentage — to get Hamilton and his game-changing speed on the bases more often — Hamilton should be employed as a pinch-runner very early in games and then remain in games to take advantage of his outfield defense and speed.

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Ever since Rich Hill tossed convention aside and began using his curveball at an unusually high usage rate, other pitchers have followed the template. That’s how copy-catting best practices typically work. Drew Pomeranz started Hill-ing. So did Lance McCullers and, to a slightly less pronounced degree, Charlie Morton. Other have followed suit, too.

Well, we might have another pitcher on the Hill Plan — or, at least a modified version of the plan.

After throwing his curveball at 16.6% and 17.4% rates in each of the previous two years, Seth Lugo threw his curveball 32% of the time on Sunday night, nearly in line with his 31.2% rate on the season. It worked. While it’s not Hill-level usage, a 100% increase in pitch usage is notable. In his second start of the year against the vaunted Yankee lineup, Lugo allowed just two hits over six shutout innings striking out eight and allowing no walks.

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Eric Thames was activated from the disabled list yesterday, which makes this a good time to unearth a conversation I had with the Milwaukee Brewers slugger in spring training. It was originally going to run a handful of weeks into the season, but then Thames went down with a thumb injury. Consequently, the interview was shelved, as well.

Prior to landing on the DL — he was hurt diving for a ground ball on April 24 — the 31-year-old first baseman sported a .976 OPS and had gone deep seven times. The start was reminiscent of last season, when he’d been even better in the early going. Back from a four-year stint in South Korea, Thames had 11 bombs and a 1.276 OPS when the 2017 calendar flipped to May.

His summer wasn’t nearly as sunny. Thames scuffled more often than not, and by the time September rolled around his slash line was down to .235/.349/.510. Then came a late-season surge. With the Brewers battling for a playoff berth — they ultimately fell a game short — Thames reached base 12 times in his final 23 plate appearances. After closing August on a 2-for-27 skid, he logged a 1.004 OPS in September.

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Thames on his up-and-down 2017 season: “After my hot start, Ryan Braun went down [from May 25-June 27] and I had no protection in the lineup. Guys started pitching around me a little bit and I responded by being more aggressive. I wanted to hit a home run every time — I tried to do too much — and that doesn’t work too well. I became my own enemy, right then and there.”

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The Mets started out hot in 2018, needing just 12 games to record 11 wins. It would take the club another 30 games to get their next 11 wins, however. Even then, at 22-19, the team’s prospects for contending seemed decent. Twenty-one games and just six wins later, a once-promising season looks much less so. The graph below shows the team’s playoff odds since the start of the season.

Even heading into May, the playoffs looked like a 50/50 proposition. A week later, it was one-in-four, and now the Mets’ odds of making the playoffs are basically 1-in-10. In what figures to be a very competitive National League playoff race, the Mets’ record is better than only the Marlins’ and Reds’. To make the playoffs, they will have to pass eight teams. Unless the club turns things around quickly, they might find themselves as sellers in a month. The question, though — if indeed the Mets do becomes sellers — is “Who precisely do they sell?” The two best players on the team are ace-level starting pitchers controlled beyond this season in Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard. Buster Olney recently argued the team should at least gauge their trade value.

So deGrom is everything that the New York Mets really need right now, in their worst of times, in his dominance and his leadership. But given the current challenges of the organization — the gray-beard age at the major league level, the lack of depth at the top of their farm system — they owe it to themselves to welcome offers from other clubs for deGrom and Noah Syndergaard, to at least understand what’s possible.

If the Mets were to start a rebuilding process, deGrom and Syndergaard would be the first to go. With deGrom in arbitration through 2020 and Syndergaard controlled through 2021, the duo would fetch a huge prospect haul. For sake of comparison, after the 2016 season, the White Sox traded Chris Sale for Yoan Moncada, Michael Kopech, Luis Basabe, and Victor Diaz, and then traded Jose Quintana last year for Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease, Matt Rose, and Bryant Flete. If the Mets were to trade both deGrom and Syndergaard, they would probably come pretty close to that kind of haul.

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One of my favorite baseball games of the decade was played in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 6th, 2017, between the Cincinnati Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s the day that Ryan Joseph Gennett hit the 39th, 40th, 41st, and 42nd home runs of his then-five-year-old career, and in so doing became just the 17th player in baseball history to hit four home runs in a single game. Nothing else of any real import happened that night; my delight in its existence is driven entirely by the improbability of Gennett’s accomplishment.

As our own Jay Jaffe noted for Sports Illustrated that week, Gennett was at the time — with the possible exception of Mark Whiten — the most unlikely four-homer player in the long history of the game, and his remarkable power surge appeared then to be one of those strange, miraculous occurrences that baseball occasionally throws at us as further evidence of its unpredictability, like Bartolo Colón throwing 38 consecutive strikes against the Angels, or going deep that one time against the Padres. Nothing, I thought, could be stranger than Scooter Gennett hitting four home runs in one game.

I was wrong. It turns out that hitting for power is kind of Scooter Gennett’s thing these days. In fact, since June 7th, 2017 — the day after his four-homer game — just 27 of the 67 players with as many plate appearances as Gennett’s 635 have a higher isolated slugging percentage than his .220. Since June 7th, 2017, Gennett has a higher ISO than Kris Bryant. Throw in his four-homer day — it did, after all, really happen — and only 16 players top his .239 mark. Gennett’s four-homer game was surprising a year ago. It would be far less surprising now. Scooter Gennett currently has the 10th-highest slugging percentage in baseball (to be fair, his ISO, which strips out the effect of his extremely high BABIP, is significantly lower). One way or another, he should probably be an All-Star. But why? What’s changed?

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With their 7-2 loss to the Cubs in 11 innings at Miller Park on Monday night, the Brewers fell out of first place in the NL Central for the first time since May 12, while Chicago — which has gone an NL-best 21-10 since May 6 — claimed its first share of the lead since May 1. While it’s not quite as extreme as what’s going on atop the AL West, this battle for first place is another one where differing success in one-run games has helped one team keep pace despite a significantly inferior run differential:

The Brewers have the majors’ fourth-best winning percentage in one-run games, and the second-highest win total behind only the Mariners’ 21. The Cubs, meanwhile, have the majors’ ninth-lowest winning percentage in one-run games, and are tied with the Astros and White Sox for the fifth-lowest win total in that category. (Remarkably, there were no one-run games in the majors on Monday night, so this table is a rerun save for my virtual highlighter.)

So how have the Brewers managed to stay so close to the Cubs? As noted in Monday’s Mariners piece, success in one-run games has a lot to do with sequencing, random variance, and luck. Extreme records in one-run games are prone to regression, though in recent years the 2016 Rangers (36-11, .766) and 2012 Orioles (29-9, .763) have posted the two highest winning percentages in such games since 1901. Bullpen performance has an outsized effect on a team’s record in such games, because managers have more control on when to deploy their best relievers in high-leverage spots than they do with regards to their best hitters because of the way that batting order works. Via FiveThirtyEight’s Rob Arthur, there’s a significant correlation (r = .28) between bullpen WAR and winning percentage in one-run games, and it just so happens that the Brewers own the NL lead in that category (3.5 WAR), though the Cubs rank third (2.6) — and, now that you mention it, the teams ranked second through sixth in bullpen WAR through Sunday (the Padres, Nationals, Giants and Diamondbacks being the others) were a combined 41-45 in one-run games.

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PITTSBURGH — Corey Dickerson had a weird offseason.

After being named an All-Star last year and finishing with an 115 wRC+, 27-homer, three-win campaign, Dickerson was designated for assignment by Tampa Bay in February. You don’t see that every day. The always cost-conscious Rays did not want to be on the hook for $5.9 million. The Pirates acquired him for Daniel Hudson, minor-league infielder Tristan Gray, and cash considerations. Perhaps the Rays were also concerned about Dickerson’s issues against the fastball.

Last season, no batter swung and missed at elevated fastballs more often than Dickerson. In an age when spin and “rise” are better understood than ever, perhaps the Rays thought Dickerson would be vulnerable to a general trend, to say nothing of specific scouting reports. Maybe the Rays felt this was an uncorrectable flaw. The club eventually acquired C.J. Cron, who offered roughly similar production at a cheaper price — without the same kind of weaknesses against the fastball.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Masahiro Tanaka‘s double hamstring strain, Joey Gallo‘s bunt against the shift, and Nationals reliever Justin Miller‘s amazing stats this season. Then they discuss the short- and long-term effects of Shohei Ohtani’s elbow injury, critique several baseball-fixing proposals by Nick Elam, inventor of basketball’s “Elam Ending,” and wrap up with an update about the endangered Nick Markakis fun fact.

Audio intro: First Aid Kit (with Jack White), "It Hurts Me Too"
Audio outro: The Zombies, "Don’t Go Away"

Link to Masahiro Tanaka scoring on a sac fly
Link to Joey Gallo’s bunt against the shift
Link to Ben’s article about moving the mound back
Link to Jeff Passan article about Nick Elam’s ideas

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