Former Mets pitcher Anthony Young died Tuesday after a fight with cancer, an inoperable brain tumor, at 51.

Teammates say he was known for his dignity and grace, characteristics he demonstrated through what his career is remembered for: losing 27 consecutive decisions between the 1992 and 1993 seasons, the longest streak in major-league history.

He died on the anniversary of his 24th consecutive loss on June 27, 1993, which set the major-league record.

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Give this to the Brewers — as much as everyone still expects them to fade, they haven’t faded yet. They’ve played at least .500 baseball in April, May, and June, and they’ve held at least a share of first place in the National League Central for more than a month. Sure, the Cubs remain the favorites. Sure, the Cubs are the more talented ballclub. But the Brewers have effectively cut the season in half, which does wonders for both the odds and morale. The first-half Brewers have been a great story.

A team doesn’t overachieve without players doing the same, and we’ve dedicated posts to several of Milwaukee’s pleasant surprises. We spent the whole first month writing about Eric Thames, and we’ve also addressed Jimmy Nelson, Corey Knebel, and so on. There’s another player I’ve been intending to write about, too. The Brewers rank eighth in baseball in starting-rotation WAR, and Nelson’s the leader of the group. And yet he is only barely holding off Chase Anderson.

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Coming into the season, Michael Conforto saw opportunity with the Mets despite a crowded outfield. He seized his chance early in the year and was among the majors’ best players in April and May. Then the league made an adjustment, one with which he’s struggling to adjust back. You could call that regression. You could also just call it baseball — as the player himself did recently with a shrug — but that ebb and flow is important. He needs to figure out this latest puzzle to get back on track.

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*Update: Miguel Montero will be designated for assignment, according to Jesse Rogers of ESPN Chicago.

The Cubs had a rough evening in Washington on Tuesday.

Yes, Trea Turner can really run, as verified by the latest Statcast tool — Sprint Speed — available to the masses. (Turner is the right-most purple dot in the chart below.)

But the Cubs lost complete control of the running game last night, allowing a total of seven stolen bases (including four to Turner alone) in a 6-1 loss to Washington.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric forefather Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game.

How are they calculated? Haphazardly, is how. An explanation of the components and formulae which produce these NERD scores is available here. All objections to the numbers here are probably justified, on account of how this entire endeavor is absurd.

Most Highly Rated Game
Milwaukee at Cincinnati | 19:10 ET
Anderson (89.1 IP, 100 xFIP-) vs. Castillo (5.0 IP, 120 xFIP-)
The author’s haphazardly constructed algorithm has identified today’s Brewers-Reds game as the day’s most promising — in no small part due to the presence of young right-hander Luis Castillo. Castillo hasn’t pitched a sufficient quantity of innings to receive a proper NERD score. At my discretion, however, he’s received a nearly perfect mark due to his debut performance, during which he recorded an average fastball velocity of 98.3 mph, a figure that would place him first among all qualifiers by that measure. He would appear to have some capacity either for thrilling or delighting or both thrilling and delighting.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Milwaukee Radio.

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Over at Baseball Savant, another Statcast leaderboard has been rolled out. This one relates to speed. They are calling it Sprint Speed, and the definition is as follows:

Sprint Speed is Statcast’s foot speed metric, defined as “feet per second in a player’s fastest one-second window.” The Major League average on a “max effort” play is 27 ft/sec, and the max effort range is roughly from 23 ft/sec (poor) to 30 ft/sec (elite). A player must have at least 10 max effort runs to qualify for this leaderboard.

While Sprint Speed has been used for a while, we didn’t have leaderboards until now. Mike Petriello over at MLB.com has a full article on the rollout which I would recommend. Among the highlights: Sprint Speed correlates well from year to year; it doesn’t require a large sample to become reflective of true talent (Petriello compares speed to fastball velocity); and it might be useful when attempting to identify injuries that could be slowing players down.

So, we know that the metric can tell us who is fast and who is not. That’s helpful. I wondered if it might also be able tell us anything about any other statistics.

Before trying to predict the future or look at past years, I thought it might be useful to compare speed to the stats we have and see how they compare. While the leaderboard over at Statcast features nearly 350 names (every player who’s produced 10 or more max-speed data points), those sample sizes might be a bit too small when looking at other statistics. As a result, I narrowed the sample for this study down to the 166 players who were qualified at the end of Monday’s games.

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Maybe the Astros are the best team in baseball, and maybe they’re not. There are lots of good teams, and the differences are all fairly slim. At least, we can say the Astros have the best record out of anyone in baseball, and they deserve to stand where they’re standing. They’re easily clear of the rest of their own division, and while they’ve experienced a handful of significant or semi-significant injuries, they’ve chugged right along. The Astros were supposed to be good. So far, the Astros have been great. Projections can miss in one of two directions.

One of the things we knew was that the Astros were going to hit. During the winter, they were lauded for their offensive depth, and the Astros have an easy MLB lead in wRC+. But now I have a fun fact for you. It’s even more telling than that one. The Astros, as a team, lead baseball in home runs. They also have baseball’s lowest team strikeout rate. In the 19 full seasons since baseball moved to a 30-team landscape, no offense has led in both categories. The Astros are trying to be the first, which is downright impressive.

Read that again. Home runs? Sure. Everyone hits home runs. Marwin Gonzalez hits home runs. The Astros might as well be leading. But, strikeouts? Yeah. It’s not that there was zero warning. Reality is just following what could’ve reasonably been expected.

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Episode 752
Managing editor Dave Cameron recently underwent surgery to repair his ACL. In this episode, the host of FanGraphs Audio uses Cameron’s personal misfortune as an entree into a conversation about baseball’s actual disabled list. This offseason, the 15-day DL was replaced by the 10-day variety. Certain clubs (the Dodgers) have used the rule change to their advantage. Others (the Mets) haven’t. Also, were Cameron to create a DL system from whole cloth, how would he do it? The guest holds forth on that and much, much, much, much, much more.

A reminder: FanGraphs’ Ad Free Membership exists. Click here to learn more about it and share some of your disposable income with FanGraphs.

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 43 min play time.)

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