It feels like the Rangers have been playing out the string since somewhere around the fourth inning of Opening Day, even before injuries knocked Elvis Andrus, Adrian Beltre, Delino DeShields Jr., and Rougned Odor out of the lineup. But just because they’re already nine games below .500 (15-24) and no threat to contend for a playoff spot doesn’t mean they don’t mandate some attention. Beltre, who’s back in the lineup, is an all-time great, Joey Gallo is a fascinating player, Bartolo Colon is the eighth wonder of the world, and if you don’t want to see what Jurickson Profar can do with regular playing time after so many setbacks, you must be some kind of monster. Right now, though, the Ranger to watch is Nomar Mazara.

The 23-year-old Mazara has been on some kind of tear lately. Over his past nine games, he’s hit seven homers, including two against the Tigers on Wednesday. In the seventh inning, he tied the game with a solo homer off Daniel Stumpf, and in the 10th inning, he won it with a walk-off shot off of Warwick Saupold. Get outta here:

That second shot, a scorcher down the right-field line, had an exit velocity of 117.1 mph. Coming into Wednesday, there had been just five homers of 117.0 or more, two by Giancarlo Stanton and one apiece by Marcell Ozuna, Hanley Ramirez, and Kyle Schwarber. Hours after Mazara joined the club, so did Aaron Judge — the owner of seven such shots last year, including a season-high 121.1-mph homer on June 10 — via a laser into Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park. Anyway, it’s a cool group to be part of.

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The Toronto Blue Jays managed the singular feat Tuesday of being no-hit and having that no-hitter register as only the second-worst news of the day. Whenever that happens, you know you’re having a very bad day.

Per ESPN:

All-Star closer Roberto Osuna of the Toronto Blue Jays was charged with assault Tuesday and put on administrative leave by Major League Baseball, preventing him from playing for at least a week.

Osuna assaulted a woman, according to Toronto police.

Now, obviously there’s a lot to unpack here, and we don’t have all of the facts. In fact, at this point all we know is that Osuna was arrested for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, then released. Multiple sources have confirmed that the incident in question was indeed one of domestic violence. But the Blue Jays had what might be considered an interesting response to the allegations.

“We are taking the matter extremely seriously, as the type of conduct associated with this incident is not reflective of our values as an organisation,” the team said.

Osuna has been placed on administrative leave per Article II of the Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy in the CBA, a move the team says it “fully supports.”

Let’s start with the Blue Jays’ statement. As a lawyer, among the first things one learns is that words matter, and what struck me about that statement is what was missing from it. Nowhere in that statement is there any qualification, like the words “allegedly” or “if true.”

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The other day, I wrote about Corey Dickerson, and how, since he’s joined the Pirates, he’s all but stopped striking out. I went through and tried to identify changes he’s made. This has become a fairly routine writing process, looking at changes in the numbers and then going to the video. I realize I write more about players who are becoming good, or who are becoming bad, than I do about players who are still good, or who are still bad. Players who stay the same are old news. I’m biased to look for players doing something different, and in that regard I’m not alone.

Players who change are interesting. Players who don’t change are interesting, too, but those players are just out there, acknowledged and understood. When players start making adjustments, or when opponents start making adjustments to them, it’s like you’ve got a mystery box, and you just want to know what’s in it. What is the new player going to be? Has he become truly better, or truly worse? Players become moving targets, and if nothing else, we can stand to learn from whatever happens.

I guess I don’t need to justify this. I think many of us are in the same boat. We want to know who’s changing, and how. I’ve run some math. This post will have a big table in it.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter (and answer listener emails) about podcast personas, Dylan Bundy’s bad day, players’ favorite stats and a Joc Pederson conundrum, James Paxton and the recent rash of near-no-hitters, how scoring has bounced back from its slow start, the Reds’ and Mets’ Matt Harvey trade, the Robinson Cano contract so far, and things about baseball that are harder than they look, plus a Stat Blast about switch hitters. Then they talk to 33-year-old Rays reliever Jonny Venters (46:10) about his incredible comeback from repeated Tommy John surgeries, how the game changed while he was rehabbing, his heavy workloads, his record groundball rate, the mental toll of trying to return, why he stuck with Tampa Bay, and more.

Audio intro: The Band, "Knockin’ Lost John"
Audio interstitial: John Lennon, "Dear John"
Audio outro: Men at Work, "Be Good Johnny"

Link to Anthony Castrovince’s stats article
Link to Tim Lincecum glove video
Link to Ben’s near-no-hitters article
Link to Jeff’s Shohei Ohtani pitching post
Link to Jay Jaffe’s post on the three-time Tommy John club

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In the annals of modern baseball history, we’ve seen some pretty bad teams win division titles, with the 1973 Mets and 2005 Padres claiming flags with just 82 wins apiece. If there was a silver lining to the 1994 strike, it’s that it spared us the possibility of a sub-.500 team making the playoffs, as the 52-62 Rangers were the best of the AL Worst, er, West. Which brings us to today’s AL Central. With the Indians (17-18) having lost four in a row and eight out of 11, the division lacks a single team playing .500 ball. Cleveland nonetheless leads the pack, and the division as a whole has a collective 68-102 record and a .400 winning percentage, the worst in the majors.

To be fair, the AL Central did project to be the majors’ worst. Via our preseason Playoff Odds page, here are the aggregated projected standings for the six divisions:

And here’s how the divisions sat as of Wednesday morning:

The AL Central has become MLB’s black hole, sucking losses into its gravitational field. Currently, it’s the only division collectively below .500 (the NL Central has rallied over the past few days), and there’s now a 103-point difference in winning percentage separating them from the worst of the other five divisions. Coincidentally, their collective run differential is 103 runs worse than any other division’s as well.

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Many of us have jobs. All of us have lives. And one thing that’s true about any job, or about any life, is that sometimes you wake up in the morning and you just don’t have it. Maybe you’re groggy, maybe you’re irritable, maybe you’ve got brain fog, maybe you have a headache. For whatever reason, there are simply bad days, and they can happen at random. They can come right after normal days, and they can come right after great ones. It’s all part of the experience of existence. You learn not to let the bad days define you.

Many of us have jobs, and all of us have lives, but few of us are performers. The average employee, when necessary, can hide herself or put forth a reduced effort. You can make yourself scarce, or even call in sick. If you’re just having a regular weekend day in the dumps, you can choose to stay in, to not engage with the world. Everyone has the right to bad days, and most people have the flexibility to more or less live their bad days in private. Other people don’t have to know when you’re off.

Performers, entertainers, have no such luxury. The responsibility is to perform for an audience, an audience that will quickly realize if something’s not right. The pressure to do well is ever-present, because, one way or another, you’re going to have to do something, and the people will judge you if what you do isn’t good. The stakes can be frightening, even paralyzing, because there’s no option to hide when you’re a performer. A performer like Dylan Bundy.

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