In 2015, A.J. Pollock posted the sixth-best WAR in baseball. The Arizona Diamondbacks center fielder put up 6.8 WAR — a total that trailed only Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, Josh Donaldson, Joey Votto, and Paul Goldschmidt. The 27-year-old hit 20 homers, stole 39 bases in 46 tries, rarely struck out, and complemented all that with good defense for a great season.

A fractured right elbow right at the start of the 2016 season robbed Pollock of a chance at a repeat, and last year he turned in a diminished version of his 2015 season while missing time due to a groin strain. Last year might have put to rest any ideas that the Pollock of old would return. The 2015 Pollock hasn’t returned this season, either. Rather, we’ve seen a new-and-improved Pollock who could be better than the burgeoning star we thought we had three years ago.

Through 33 games, Pollock already has 10 home runs, three triples, and nine doubles, his 22 extra-base hits tied with Mike Trout and behind only Mookie Betts and Ozzie Albies. Pollock’s .306/.362/.669 line produces a 173 wRC+ that ranks fifth in the sport, with his 2.1 WAR coming in behind only Trout, Betts, and Didi Gregorius. He’s on his way to a great year, and through the first 33 games of the season, he’s hit better than he ever has. The graph below shows Pollock’s 33-game rolling average of his wRC+ over his career.

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One of the bigger stories of the early part of the season has been the ace-level emergence of Gerrit Cole. Freed from the Pirates, Cole has moved on to the Astros and seemingly threatened to throw a no-hitter every start. Cole’s strikeout rate has taken off, and one has been left to wonder why this pitcher didn’t show up consistently in Pittsburgh. On the Pirates’ side, Colin Moran and Michael Feliz have been fine. The club has also overachieved, winning more games than it’s lost. But if anything, the Pirates’ early success makes the loss of Cole more painful. No one likes to see a player improve somewhere else.

Something about going to Houston has allowed Cole to tap into his inner potential. There’s been much conversation about why the Pirates couldn’t pull this talent out. As some consolation, however, the Pirates have sort of done a similar thing to the Rays. Near the end of February, the Pirates picked up Corey Dickerson for a song. The Rays, I’m sure, are content with the early performance by C.J. Cron. But the Dickerson of the present doesn’t look like the Dickerson of yesterday. Cole left Pittsburgh and found a new level. Dickerson arrived in Pittsburgh and found a new level. It doesn’t make up for trading an ace, yet there are reasons why the Pirates are firmly in contention.

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Most of the general public, perhaps even many hardcore baseball enthusiasts, were unacquainted with Domingo German until Sunday. German has never been a top-100 prospect. He is 25 years old and has been a professional for nearly a decade, yet he remained largely unknown. He was, for example, still available in most fantasy baseball leagues as of Sunday afternoon.

But on Sunday afternoon, German went out to the middle of the infield at Yankee Stadium and no-hit the Indians for six innings, striking out nine against two walks. He was taken out of the game by Aaron Boone due only to pitch-count concerns. It was his first major-league start, and he dominated.

Maybe the Yankees, already enjoying a rare collection of young talent, an uber bullpen, a cast of superstar sluggers, and an incredible amount of purchasing power for next offseason, have unearthed yet more wealth.

With Jordan Montgomery leaving his last start because of an elbow strain, this is a chance for German — labeled as something of a ‘tweener — to compete for a rotation gig.

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Episode 812
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the spiritual invertebrate on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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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Last week, Trevor Bauer neither confirmed nor denied having made a point about how foreign substances can increase spin rate.

Bauer wants the sport either to enforce rules against pine tar and other illegal, tacky materials used by pitchers (that’s about impossible, as Bauer acknowledges) or make grip-enhancing legal. While employment of a foreign substance resides outside the rules, there is little enforcement of those rules unless they are openly defied.

Spin is thought to be largely an innate skill, difficult to increase dramatically. Generally, the more velocity a pitcher has, the more spin a pitcher is capable of producing. There is a relationship between spin and velocity, so if a pitcher can increase his velocity, he can reasonably expect to increase his spin rate.

There’s certainly incentive to increase spin rate, as there’s a correlation between spin and whiffs. A 300-rpm improvement is equivalent to a couple percentage points of swinging-strike rate. Bauer has said he can increase his spin rate by about 300 rpms by adding a tacky substance to the throwing hand. It’s conceivable that he did something similar to prove a point during the first inning of his start last Monday:

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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 the seventh installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Jakob Junis, Kyle Ryan, and Chase Whitley — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Jakob Junis (Royals) on His Slider

“It’s technically a slider, although sometimes it has more of a curveball break because of the way I release it. I’ve always looked at it as a slider, because I also throw a curveball — a traditional type of curveball — with a different grip. The grip I came up with for my slider is fairly new.

“I started throwing a slider in Double-A, and it really wasn’t a very good one. It was with a standard, trying-to-learn grip. That offseason I went home and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ I knew that I needed a new grip to get more shape and to throw it a little firmer.

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This offseason, I was tasked with preparing a writeup of right fielders in the game of major-league baseball. That was quite a difficult exercise, for it requires one to predict the future, and soothsayers are, at least to my knowledge, mythical. Still, I was quite confident when I wrote this:

There are those people who believe that Nick Markakis will make a run at 3,000 hits and the Hall of Fame. I am not among those people. Granted, Markakis has compiled 2,052 hits in his big-league career. That’s good! But Markakis, now at 34, is not good. Not at all. In fact, he really hasn’t been good since 2010. Since then, Markakis’s WAR has gone 1.4, 1.6, -0.2, 2.5, 1.5, 1.1, 0.9. In other words, of Markakis’ 25.3 career WAR, almost 17 were accrued in the first five years of his career.

Markakis hasn’t been even a league-average hitter since 2015, and that year he hit three (3) home runs. He hasn’t been even an average defensive outfielder since 2008. He hasn’t added value on the basepaths since 2009. In 2017, Markakis was below average against righties (97 wRC+) as well as lefties (91 wRC+), and his only remaining plus tool is his plate discipline and ability to draw walks. That’s all that separates Markakis from being a replacement-level player, and the projections aren’t optimistic about that, either. Markakis isn’t going to the Hall of Fame because he probably won’t get a big-league deal this offseason.

Welp.

Nick Markakis must have read that, because he has looked like a Hall of Famer so far this year. Entering Sunday, Markakis, who is 34, was slashing .344/.428/.550 (all career bests) with a 169 (career-best) wRC+. He also appears to have turned around his play afield, too, posting positive defensive numbers (that is, UZR and positional adjustment combined) for the first time since the Bush administration (2008). Nick Markakis, in 2018, has been worth roughly as many wins as his 2016 and 2017 combined.

What the hell has gotten into Nick Markakis?

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Sunday afternoon, Shohei Ohtani returned to the mound for the first time in nearly two weeks. He was very good against the Mariners until the bottom of the seventh, when he failed to retire any of three batters. Still, that partial inning couldn’t spoil the appearance, and Ohtani’s ankle seemed like it must’ve been perfectly fine. To fast-forward here, I’ll note that Ohtani made very quick work of Mitch Haniger in the bottom of the second. Let’s watch that.

The first pitch, a called strike:

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On today’s edition of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh and I had the opportunity to talk with Steven Brault. Brault is interesting, first of all, because he’s a major-league pitcher. In the grand scheme of things, there are not that many major-league pitchers, and surviving at the level requires one to be an expert at his craft. Aside from pitching, Brault is also a musician, and he co-hosts a podcast with teammate Trevor Williams. As an individual, Brault has a lot going on, but the reason we sought him out in the first place is because of his hitting. Brault has batted a total of 32 times in the bigs. He’s recorded seven hits, sure. But he also has yet to strike out.

Presumably, you know enough to know that’s atypical. You already understood that strikeouts are on the rise, and that, on balance, pitcher-hitters are terrible. Brault is finding himself on the same list as names like Dizzy Dean, Heinie Meine, and Sloppy Thurston. It’s not that Brault is a hitter in the way that Madison Bumgarner is a hitter. Bumgarner stands out because of his power. Brault stands out because of his contact. Among active players with zero strikeouts, Brault is first in plate appearances, with 32. Carlos Rivero is standing in a distant second, with eight.

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