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In many respects, Rick Renteria wears multiple hats as manager of the Chicago White Sox. The AL Central team he’s leading is in full-rebuild mode, its roster populated with a plethora of inexperienced players. That makes him a good fit for the position. As Cubs skipper Joe Maddon opined at the outset of spring training, “There are managers, and there are managers who are also good coaches. Not everybody can do both. [Renteria] can coach it, and he can manage it.”

The 56-year-old former big-league infielder has 20 years of both under his belt, the majority — but not all — in the minor leagues. He was at the helm for Chicago’s NL entry in 2014 — Maddon replaced him the following year — before moving across town in 2016 to serve as Robin Ventura’s bench coach. Last season, he took over as manager, where his job is less about winning now than it is to mold young players into winners. That requires patience and an ability to instruct, and along with good leadership skills, Renteria possesses each of those attributes.

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Rick Renteria: “Coming up through the system… every organization is different in terms of their philosophy, yet they’re all the same. We all want a player to understand, fundamentally, how to go about playing the game — how to run the bases, how to have an approach at the plate, how to defend, when to throw to what base. Things of that nature.

“Until you get here, though… you can be very well taught, but there’s a different dynamic in the big leagues, and it involves emotion and your mindset. No matter how well prepared, you’re going to make a mistake or two. Of course, that could be said for guys who have been in the big leagues for years.

“When you get here from the minor leagues, you continue to understand, and get a feel for, who you are as a player — what you’re supposed to be and what you can and cannot do. That comes through experience. And again, a lot of it has to do with emotions and your mindset. The emotions can speed the game up for you and take you out of your normal element.

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It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing has gone right for the Twins since the 2018 season began. After all, they’ve won 35 games, which is more than the Orioles, Royals, or White Sox have done. They finished June with their best record of any calendar month (13-14, .481). Their big-league pitchers have avoided Tommy John surgery this year, Target Field has not burned down, and the last time we checked, none of their players has been sucked into an interdimensional vortex.

Still, yuck. This was supposed to be a much better and more interesting team, with 24-year-old center fielder Byron Buxton its centerpiece in the wake of last year’s second-half breakout (.300/.347/.546, 130 wRC+, 2.7 WAR). Buxton was a promising part of a Twins group that become the first team to rebound from a 100-loss season with a playoff berth.

The Twins were also one of the most active and intriguing clubs the winter, exploring the possibility of trading for the Rays’ Chris Archer, making free agent Yu Darvish a credible nine-figure offer, and taking advantage of the weird slowness of the market by buying bargains in bulk. They signed Lance Lynn, Logan Morrison, Michael Pineda, Addison Reed, Fernando Rodney, and Zach Duke, all without committing more than two years or $16.75 million to any of them.

While they may have avoided falling knives when it comes to Archer and Darvish, the Twins were swept by the Cubs at Wrigley Field this past weekend and fell to 10 games below .500 for the first time since the end of 2016. Their playoff odds, which stood at 28.7% at the start of the season, were down to 1.2% entering Tuesday. They’re a big reason the AL Central is on track to be the worst division since 1994 realignment; at 18-33 in games outside that division, their .353 winning percentage is right on target with the entire division’s collective .354 mark in such games.

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The Rays lost a one-run decision in Miami Monday night, and it didn’t matter. I’m sure it mattered to the Marlins, and I’m sure it mattered to the Rays, but it didn’t really matter in the standings. Not as far as the playoff race is concerned. In the hunt for the AL’s second wild card, the Rays are in fourth place, but they’re separated from the first-place Mariners by 11.5 games. The Angels are 11 games back, and the A’s are the nearest competition, at eight behind. Nothing is actually yet set in stone, but it feels like we know the AL’s five playoff teams before we even reach the Fourth of July.

In some other universe, not much is different, except for everything. In this other universe, teams have win-loss records that match their run differentials. If you arrange by Pythagorean records, the Mariners still hold the second wild card, but they’re only one up on the Angels. They’re two up on the A’s, and they’re two and a half up on the Rays.

And then there’s the universe where everything goes according to BaseRuns. The inputs are the same as they are here, but the outputs simply make more sense. If you arrange by BaseRuns records, the Rays take over the lead for the second wild card. They’re a half-game up on the Mariners, and then there’s a little more room before the A’s and the Angels. According to the only standings that matter to us, the Rays are out of it. Basically everyone behind the Mariners is out of it. According to what you’d expect would have happened, there would be a tight race. In those other universes, there’s stress. There’s a far greater degree of uncertainty.

Not so. The Mariners have found a separator. They’ve pulled well away from all of their wild-card competition, and they’ve done so by being the clutchiest bunch of clutches that ever clutched.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the joyous big-league debut and amazing minor-league history of Effectively Wild favorite and new Twins utility man Willians Astudillo, an awful Royals month, Jacob deGrom, a bobbled Raimel Tapia catch and tag-up confusion, Jon Gray‘s perplexing demotion, Marlins who may be traded, a Vince Velasquez highlight, Michael Lorenzen‘s hitting and Matt Davidson’s pitching, a Ryne Stanek fun fact, and a historic, almost-unprecedented putout by the Pirates and Joe Musgrove. Then (50:54) they talk to mutual childhood favorite (and Hall of Famer) Randy Johnson about how he harnessed his stuff, making mechanical tweaks, the fellow legends he came up with in Seattle, his incredible Houston half-season, his surgical history, starter workloads, whether he could have continued pitching as a reliever, facing Albert Pujols, Barry Bonds, and Rickey Henderson, being snakebit in October, and more (plus a remembrance of Small World Sports).

Audio intro: The Beach Boys, "Here Today"
Audio interstitial: Big Thief, "Randy"
Audio outro: Dolly Parton, "Randy"

Link to Ben’s Astudillo article
Link to Tapia tag-up play
Link to Ben’s Jon Gray article
Link to Ben’s Smith and Lorenzen interviews
Link to Velasquez play
Link to Pirates putout
Link to Jeff’s post about the peaks of Pedro and Randy
Link to Small World Sports article

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Episode 822
Even the best players in this year’s international free-agent class won’t be wholly relevant for another five years. With that in mind, much of this episode is dedicated to those IFAs who signed five years ago — a collection of players that includes Rafael Devers and Gleyber Torres among others. Also: notes from Longenhagen’s looks in the Rookie-level Arizona League and other, different notes from FanGraphs’ annual trip to Denver, Colorado.

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 55 min play time.)

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Today is July 2, the first day of the new international signing period. Both our rankings and scouting reports on the top players signing today are available by means of this ominous portal.

Brailyn Marquez, LHP, Chicago Cubs (Profile)
Level: Short Season   Age: 19   Org Rank: 14  FV: 40
Line: 6 IP, 2 H, 1 BB, 1 R, 8 K

Notes
Marquez has a 20:4 strikeout-to-walk ratio at Eugene. I saw him up to 96 last year, but he was 88-93 in extended spring training, and his body had matured and gotten somewhat soft pretty quickly. It didn’t affect his advanced fastball command, though, or his arm-side command of his breaking ball, which comprise a large chunk of Marquez’s current plan on the mound. He projects as a No. 4/5 starter with several average pitches and above-average control.

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In one sense, Jon Gray’s 2018 season has been pretty successful. He’s struck out 29% of the batters he’s faced this year, for example, which ranks 12th among 90 qualified starters. His walk rate, at 7%, sits in the top third for starters. His home-run rate of 1.1 per nine innings is right in the middle of the pack among that sample, too, as are his 92 innings.

That’s he’s done of his work at elevation in Colorado makes those numbers even more impressive. His 3.07 FIP has produced a 2.5 WAR, one of the top 15 figures in baseball. Unfortunately, the Rockies haven’t received the benefit of that good pitching. In fact, Gray’s 5.77 ERA ranks 88th out 90 starters. The massive difference between his ERA and FIP would represent the largest such disparity in baseball history, and it was of sufficient concern to the Rockies to send Gray to Triple-A.

Not too long ago, Jay Jaffe wrote a piece on Jon Lester, whose season was also busting historical norms. Lester’s ERA was significantly lower than his FIP. So far this season, Gray is Lester’s opposite. The graph below shows every pitcher’s FIP and ERA this season.

You can see Jon Lester over there on the left on his own. If you go to the right, you can see Jon Gray with nobody even close to him. It should be evident that, in the middle, most players are reasonably close when it comes to ERA and FIP. The average differential per player 0.53. Of the 88 ERA and FIP pairs in this sample, 77 are within one run. So far this season, Gray’s 2.69 ERA-FIP is roughly double the player closest to him, as the table below shows.

That isn’t just remarkable for this season. Since 1901, here are the biggest differences among qualified pitchers.

There are a few Hall of Famers on that list in Blyleven and Wynn, but nobody comes close to what Gray has done thus far. Just to get a few more familiar names, here’s the same list since 1995.

There are some good pitchers on this list, too, including Zack Greinke. The odds are against Gray maintaining such a high difference. With half a season to go, Gray’s ERA is likely to be considerably closer to his FIP moving forward. If, the rest of the way, Gray’s FIP is one run lower than his ERA like it was in 2016, his ERA will end up right around Chris Bosio’s 1.86 number from 1988. If Gray’s ERA is half a run higher than his FIP like it was last year, he’ll end up with something close to Jaime Navarro’s 1.59 from 1997 and not even crack the top-15 all-time.

As we are getting close to the All-Star Break, it might be useful to take a look at the biggest half-season differences from our splits leaderboards, which go back to 2002. Here are the biggest first-half differences for pitchers with at least 70 first-half innings.

That was quite a performance from Glendon Rusch. He would actually go on to have a couple productive seasons as a Cubs swingman, but 2003 might have soured the Brewers on his future. Scanning the list for similar performances to Gray, another Brewer, Zach Greinke, sticks out with a near-identical FIP to Gray this season. As the average indicates, we have roughly average to maybe below-average pitchers by FIP accompanied by horrendous ERAs. The next table shows how those players performed in the second half.

As we might expect, the players’ first-half FIPs line up pretty well with their second-half FIPs. What’s interesting is that the second-half ERAs also line up pretty well with the FIPs from both the first and second halves. While this is what we would expect to see, it’s nice to have it show up so neatly.

One problem the above doesn’t solve is why Gray’s FIP, specfically, is so much lower than his ERA. A portion of the responsibility goes to his home park. Pitchers routinely post higher ERAs than FIPs in Coors Field because BABIP is a lot higher in Coors Field. Balls in play are not incorporated into FIP, so larger swings, like the one we see at Coors Field, are going to drive up ERA a bit. That only explains a very small portion of Gray’s differential, though. For the rest, please see the graph below depicting BABIP and left-on-base percentages for all qualified starting pitchers.

Previous research indicates that a vast majority of the difference between FIP and ERA is due to two factors, the two stats seen in the table above: BABIP and LOB%. Gray is the worst in both, about 50 points clear in BABIP and with few peers in LOB% this season.

A really poor BABIP might be an indicator that Gray is no longer an MLB-caliber pitcher. The rest of his stats say otherwise, however. Per Baseball Savant, his expected BABIP is about 50 points lower than his actual figure. As league-wide expected BABIP is about 20 points higher than actual BABIP, even once you factor in Coors Field, Gray’s BABIP is about 50 points too high based on the quality of contact, leaving the rest to luck and defense.

As for left-on-base percentage, if it were really high, we might think that perhaps Gray has trouble pitching with runners on base and that Gray’s 1.91 FIP with bases empty compared to 4.67 with runners on — and his .274 xwOBA with bases empty compared to .334 with runners on — speaks to the same issue. However, the latter number is roughly average for the league regarding xwOBA and pretty close to average for FIP once Coors Field is factored in. Jeff Zimmerman theorized that the issue might be pitching meatballs behind in the count, but even Gray’s numbers behind in the count are similar to an average pitcher in those situations. His velocity has been down in his last few starts. Ben Lindbergh noted the absence of competitive pitches from Gray this season. However, none of those theories explains a league-worst left-on-base rate or the massively high BABIP. The Rockies would have to keep Gray in Triple-A the rest of the season to game his service time, so that is an unlikely motivation, although if he hits the disabled list in the minors he would not accrue MLB service time like he would if he were DL’d now and something more serious was discovered.

Jon Gray is performing historically so far, but not in the way he would like. Now he’s pitching in a city he’d probably prefer not to. Based on the past history of others, as well as himself, there seems to be a pretty good chance — absent injury — that his ERA is going to be headed downward soon even if the big-league Rockies won’t be seeing the benefit of that downturn at the moment.

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 the 15th installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers —Justin Anderson, Archie Bradley, and Brent Suter — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Justin Anderson (Angels) on His Spiked Slider

“Some people might think it’s a curveball, but it’s a slider. It kind of has the same plane as my fastball. That’s the idea. You want one pitch going one way, and one going the other. My thought process is to throw it as hard as I can and try to get break on it with my wrist flipping.

“It’s not a traditional slider grip by any means. It’s a grip I was always curious about. There’s a guy we’d always watch in the minor leagues — I played against him coming up — and we were like, ‘This guy has one of the best sliders ever.’ His name is Dean Deetz. I stole it from him. I finally saw his grip on a picture, on Twitter, last October or maybe in November. I was like, ‘OK, so this is how the guy throws it. I’m going to give it a go.’ That’s what I did. I ran with it.

Anderson’s spiked slider grip.

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After being traded by the Mets to the Reds on May 8, Matt Harvey more or less fell off the national radar. That tends to happen for guys with ERAs approaching 6.00. As the 29-year-old righty continued to pitch unremarkably, there was little reason for the Mets or their fans to lament the trade — or at least to regard his departure as one of the top-23 or so calamities to befall them during the first half of the 2018 season.

Lately, though, Harvey has been pitching better — if not at the same level of his dominant 2012-15 form, then certainly better than the latter-day palooka who was tagged for a 5.93 ERA and 5.01 FIP in 212.1 innings from the start of 2016 to the point of the trade. On Sunday in Cincinnati, on the heels of two increasingly promising starts, he recorded his best outing yet as a Red, taking a perfect game into the fifth inning against the Brewers and finishing with his longest scoreless appearance since August 28, 2015.

Harvey retired the first 12 batters he faced on just 41 pitches before Travis Shaw slapped a 95 mph fastball through the left side of a shifted infield. He gave up just one other hit, a sixth-inning single to Brad Miller amid a downpour that had begun at the top of the frame. After that hit, the umpires called out the tarps, and the 54-minute rain delay finished Harvey’s day. Over his 5.2 innings, he issued zero walks, a feat he hadn’t accomplished in a start of at least five innings since April 6, 2017 against the Braves. He also struck out six, matching a season high set on June 21 against the Cubs (more on which shortly). His 12 swings and misses represented the highest total he’d produced since June 10, 2016 against the Brewers. Via Brooks Baseball, his four-seam fastball averaged 95.6 mph and reached 97.2, while his slider averaged 89.6 and reached 92.0.

It wasn’t quite vintage Harvey, and it’s worth noting that the Brewers’ lineup lacked Lorenzo Cain (currently on the disabled list for a groin strain), Christian Yelich (sitting for his third straight game due to back tightness), and Jesus Aguilar, three of the team’s top four hitters this year by wRC+. (Eric Thames, the fourth of those, started for Agular.) Still, it was Harvey’s third strong outing in a row against a contender. He allowed two runs in six innings in the aforementioned June 21 outing against the Cubs, and then one run in 6.2 innings against the Braves on June 26. Over the course of those three outings and 18.1 innings, he allowed just 13 hits and three runs while striking out 14 and walking just two (and plunking three). His three outings before that were nothing to write home about (14 runs in 16.1 innings, with five homers, six walks, and 12 strikeouts against the Rockies, Padres and Cardinals), but it does seem as though he’s turned the corner after two-plus seasons of struggling amid injuries.

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