The baseball season is long. How long is the baseball season? For the last little while, I’ve been following the Brewers and thinking about them as the underdog in the wild-card race. Yet the team they’re pursuing — the Rockies — is also an underdog in the wild-card race. It’s all about how you narrow your field of vision. If you’re concerned only with the right now, the Brewers as a wild-card team would be a surprise. If you step back and consider all of 2017, the Rockies as a wild-card team are no less surprising. Their success shouldn’t be taken for granted, or assumed simply because they’ve been successful from the beginning.

The NL wild-card teams are likely to be the Diamondbacks and the Rockies. That’s how it’s looked for a while. But, if you remember, the NL wild-card teams were supposed to be the Mets and the Giants. Maybe the Cardinals. If the division winners are what we thought, the wild-card situation is more surprising, or even refreshing. We’ve got no shortage of underdogs, and some of them required that the Mets and Giants move out of the way. The Mets this year have been a letdown. The Giants have been even worse.

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CLEVELAND — Last week, this author wrote about how Byron Buxton’s glove had improved from good to great in part thanks to Statcast. The post was inspired by a Jared Diamond piece for the Wall Street Journal.

Buxton told Diamond it was player-tracking data that had led him to focus on improving his first step this offseason. Quite possibly as a result, Buxton has transformed from merely a speedy outfielder to the best outfield defender in the game, according to Outs Above Average (24). He’s the top center fielder in the game, according to Defensive Runs Saved (26).

Pretty explosive first step, eh?

I was curious to learn more about how Buxton’s attempt to improve his first-step quickness and initial track to balls. Moreover, some readers had doubts after reading last week’s post about whether a defender could improve elements of his defensive play like first-step quickness. Thankfully, the Twins are in Cleveland this week hoping to whittle their magic number down to zero. So before a Twins hitters’ meeting Tuesday at Progressive Field, Buxton granted me an audience before his locker in the visiting clubhouse.

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The 2017 season has seen offensive levels rise to a height unmatched in major-league baseball for quite some time. Overall this year, teams are averaging 4.65 runs per game, the highest mark since 2007 — though not quite the five runs per game teams averaged in 1999 and 2000. Most of the offensive increase can be traced to a juiced ball. There’s also been a lot of talk about the role of a fly-ball revolution of some sort or another in the establishment of a new league-wide seasonal home-run record.

An increase in PED use has now been raised as an issue, as well. MLB has administered both PED testing and PED-related suspensions since 2004; both have existed in the minors since 2001. Even with those measures in place, however, power continues to be associated with steroid use, and unfounded rumors have hounded the authors of every breakout season over the last decade. With the rise of power in recent years, the whole league is under suspicion. But how similar is this version of the league to the one now known as the “steroid era”? Let’s take a look at what the latter actually looked like and how it compares to now.

Our split tools are very expansive going back to 2002. This is convenient because 2002 was the last season that lacked PED testing of any kind. It might not have been quite the height of that period now regarded as the “steroid era” — that was probably 1999 and 2000 — but the league looked quite different before testing and suspensions were permitted.

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There was, I’m sure, a certain amount of message-sending last night, when the Twins went into Cleveland and knocked off the Indians. The Twins right now are trying to make a statement, ensuring that opponents take them seriously. More important than any of that, though, the win moved the Twins to the verge of sealing up a playoff spot. All they need now is one more win, or one more Angels loss. Say what you will about the odds, but the Twins would love to just make things official. You could see that in Brian Dozier’s expression, as he rounded the bases following his lead-changing, eighth-inning, three-run homer. The Twins were likely to make the playoffs with or without the home run, yet Dozier was elated by the prospect of moving one step closer.

There’s nothing so unusual about Brian Dozier going deep. He’s one of the better power hitters in his division. But I’d like to show you a screenshot of his homer in flight.

Brian Dozier’s right-handed. He homered the other way.

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You have to look past the raw runs-allowed numbers. If you do, though, you’ll quickly realize that a large part of the Rockies’ success this year has been their bullpen. Second in the National League in Wins Above Replacement, second in the entire league in Win Probability Added, third in Shutdowns, third from the bottom in Meltdowns, and first overall in Clutch: this is a strong unit. Talk to a some of Colorado’s relievers about what they’ve discovered this year and a trend emerges. There’s a bit of a secret, maybe, to building a good bullpen when you’re up a mile high.

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Some MVP ballots might have already been submitted, which is a real shame because there’s still a few games to be played and perhaps a few persuasive blog posts to be authored.

On Tuesday, this author examined some other factors that BBWAA members ought to consider when voting, particularly in a close race where voters might need to go beyond the convenience of one catch-all metric like wins above replacement.

The face of this argument is Aaron Judge, who’s had a remarkable rookie season and who leads Jose Altuve in WAR by a thin margin entering play Wednesday: 7.7 to 7.4. Judge also has 50 home runs — a nice, round, loud number that figures to sway some voters on the fence.

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This is Mike Hattery’s fourth piece as part of his September residency at FanGraphs. Hattery writes for the Cleveland-based site Waiting for Next Year. He can also be found on Twitter. Read the work of all our residents here.

As Francisco Lindor launched his 33rd home run of the season on a peaceful afternoon this past Saturday in Seattle, his future in Cleveland seemed to be weighing on the minds of many, as tweets featuring the phrase #Lifetimecontract flooded my timeline. While I’ll leave the precise terms of a potential Lindor extension to others, Lindor’s evolving profile remains a matter of interest as it relates to the arbitration process.

As Travis Sawchik recently documented, Lindor’s past two seasons have been quite different. Very good, but different nonetheless. In 2016, Lindor rode an impressive defensive performance to a six-win campaign. This year, he’s on pace to record roughly the same WAR total but has arrived at that point by different means, more than doubling the career-high home-run total (15) he produced last season.

On the open market, Lindor’s 2016 and -17 seasons would likely be treated fairly similarly in terms of average annual value. While imperfections certainly exist in the defensive data, the marketplace appears to pay players accordingly, whether the runs are added with the bat or saved with the glove. Major League Baseball’s arbitration structure, on the other hand, is far more archaic.

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The 2017 campaign has been an unprecedented one for the home run. Both by overall totals and by rate, no other season rivals the present one by that measure.

The causes are manifold: a juiced ball, smaller stadia, a greater effort among hitters to hit the ball in the air, etc. A number of questions have been and will be asked about the implications of this season. The present dispatch concerns only one of them, though — namely, who (if anyone) will serve as the lasting face of this year’s record home-run campaign?

Allow me to begin by saying: I don’t care. Or, more precisely: I don’t care about the answer, per se. If it’s important to someone that Giancarlo Stanton forever remain the lasting image of 2017, then that’s fine. The prospect of formulating and presenting an argument to the contrary is nauseating.

Of some interest, however — as a means to exercising the critical faculties, if nothing else — is the variety of criteria one might establish to arrive at a reasonable answer. For those who are concerned with certainty, perhaps this smacks of relativism and sounds awful. For those among us who are resigned to the fact that reality is a myth and truth a moving target, then it’s probably acceptable.

Below, I’ve attempted to summarize the various criteria one might employ to determine the face of this record home-run season. First, however, I’d like to present a list of four players who merit the distinction for one reason or another. Depending on one’s preferences, any of these four is the correct answer.

They are (in alphabetical order):

• Yonder Alonso
• Matt Olson
• Jose Ramirez
• Giancarlo Stanton

Those are the results, basically. The process by which on might arrive at those results is detailed below.

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