Back after an intriguing May 30th start, I wondered if the talented enigma that is Trevor Bauer had found a road map to another level.

Entering that start — by the end of which he’d struck out a career-best 14 against the Oakland A’s — Bauer had an MLB-worst 6.30 ERA. He’d frustrated many in Cleveland with his unconventional training techniques and analytical approach. I documented earlier this year for The Athletic how Bauer is perhaps one of the more misunderstood and interesting players in the game.

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I can tell you the instant Josh Hader made me sit up and take notice. We’re going back a week and a half, to what was, for me, a lazy Friday night. I was watching the Brewers attempt to close out the Nationals, and the Brewers held a 1-0 lead in the top of the eighth. Hader took the mound, in relief of Jimmy Nelson.

Right away, Hader attacked Trea Turner and struck him out on three pitches. It was impressive, but, ehh, Turner will strike out. The next batter was Wilmer Difo, and Hader struck him out on six pitches. It was also impressive, but, ehh, Wilmer Difo. The third batter was Daniel Murphy. Murphy has developed into a power hitter without sacrificing much at all in the way of his making contact. Murphy remains one of the premier bat-to-ball hitters in either league. With two down and the bases empty, Hader went to work.

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Sunday night, the Indians pushed their winning streak to 18 games. The next-longest active winning streak in baseball is five. Since this all began, the Indians, of course, have gone 18-0, and the next-best record in the American League has been 9-7. The goal is to win the World Series, and the Indians will be disappointed if they again come up short, but at a certain point, this will just become their legacy. Somebody wins the World Series every year. The Indians have one of the longest winning streaks that baseball’s ever seen. Doing something like this is more improbable, and it’s a reflection of how well the Indians have been built, from top to bottom.

A truth about baseball is that a winning team is never as good as it looks when it’s winning, and a losing team is never as bad as it looks when it’s losing. The Indians feel like they’re bulletproof, mostly because they’ve been bulletproof for about three weeks. Their odds of winning everything haven’t meaningfully changed. It’s useful to keep the Dodgers in mind. The change in perception has been abrupt, even though it’s more or less the same active roster. Invulnerability isn’t forever, as demonstrated by the reality that everything dies.

The Indians aren’t unbeatable. The chances are still that they won’t win it all. Upon eventual reflection, the team shouldn’t be judged only by how it performed when it didn’t lose a game. One should attempt to consider the whole of the picture. Let’s do that right now. Let’s talk about the Indians’ pitching.

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When the Rockies set out on their road trip Thursday, the conventional wisdom was that the team needed to pick up at least three wins during their time away from home. Expectations are usually modest for Rockies road trips, but particularly when they’re travelling to Los Angeles, Phoenix, or San Francisco. Historically, the Rockies have fared very, very poorly in those cities. And yet, the Rockies skipped LA on Sunday night with a four-game sweep of the Dodgers in their back pocket. What? To say this was unexpected would be a severe understatement. Yes, the Dodgers haven’t looked right lately, but most honest Rockies fans would tell you that they expected LA to get right against Colorado in this series. Such a belief would be well founded.

The Rockies, simply put, haven’t ever played well against the Dodgers. Entering the series, Colorado had a .366 winning percentage in LA, one of their lowest against any competitor. But it’s even worse than that. During the team’s first seven seasons, they went 22-19 in Los Angeles, a respectable showing to be sure. In those seven years, they swept the Dodgers in LA three times, and weren’t swept once. Since 2000, it’s been quite a different story. In the 18 seasons since, up to the start of this series, Colorado had a 52-109 record in LA, good for a .323 winning percentage. Since 2000, LA has swept the Rockies 16 times in LA (including in 2017, the last time Colorado had been in town from June 23-25) and the Rockies had only swept them once. That one time was in 2007, during the magical Rocktober run.

Historical records from over a decade ago obviously don’t possess much (or even any) predictive value for the present. It’s the identities of the players on each roster — not their uniforms — which ultimately dictate the course of play. It makes the recent result no less surprising or rare, however.

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A month ago, I wrote about Matt Chapman, the A’s developing star third baseman. The emergence of Chapman as a decent bat/great glove combination has dramatically changed the team’s infield, and despite only being in the big leagues for a few months, he’s pretty clearly the team’s best player right now.

But while Chapman’s emergence is the most positive development in Oakland this year, the team has added another Matt to the infield in the last month, and Matt Olson is now doing his best to make himself part of Oakland’s infield future as well.

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12:04

Travis Sawchik: Matt Lindner @mattlindner Find you somebody who looks at you the way the @Indians Francisco Lindor looks at a meatball over the heart of the… twitter.com/i/web/status/9… 11 Sep 2017

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Slumps and downturns are inevitable. They’re a part of baseball, a part of markets, a part of life. If you create a 15-day rolling wOBA chart of any player at FanGraphs, you’ll probably find a trend line that ticks up and down like the display on a heart-rate monitor. Such charts probably have a look similar to the performance of your investment portfolio. If we could create rolling, 15-day charts documenting the fortunes of our day-to-day existences, they’d have similar fluctuations, too.

While slumps are inevitable, that doesn’t mean they’re welcome. Ideally, it would be possible to minimize the troughs while extending periods of peak performance. Naturally, this of some interest to major-league clubs. Organizations have become curious about how they can reduce the length of slumps, exploring areas like rest and nutrition.

But there’s also a personal, psychological element. What leads players into slumps? Do they sense the arrival of one like an oncoming cold? And how do they dig out of it?

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Last Tuesday, I felt obligated to write about the Dodgers’ slide. At that point, they’d lost nine of their last 10 games and were just playing some outright terrible baseball. So, I headlined the piece “The Dodgers Look Terrible Right Now.”

They haven’t won a game since that post was published. They’ve turned a four-game losing streak into a 10-game losing streak, and they’ve now dropped 15 of their last 16. During their current losing streak, they’ve scored just 24 runs, putting up no more than five in any single game. On the other hand, they’ve given up at least six runs in seven of the 10 contests and have now conceded 64 runs in total during that stretch.

Getting outscored by 42 runs in 10 games is not particularly easy. And this doesn’t even include the prior five-game losing streak that they broke when Kershaw shut down the Padres on September 1st. Dating back to August 26th, when this slide began, the Dodgers have been on their own level of awfulness. Especially on offense.

Yep, that’s a 56 wRC+, almost 20 points worse than the 29th-ranked Marlins. And it’s a wholesale offensive collapse.

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This is Mike Hattery’s second 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.

Certain players in baseball become symbols, willingly or not, for the seismic conceptual shifts of which they’re a part. Jeremy Brown and Scott Hatteberg, for example, remain emblematic of Oakland’s attempts earlier this century — the sort of attempts documented in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball — to exploit inefficiencies in the game. Ben Zobrist, meanwhile, continues to represent the ability of Tampa Bay’s front office to identify valuable, if overlooked, talent. More recently, Daniel Murphy and Josh Donaldson have become the public face of the air-ball revolution. 

For some who follow the minor leagues, catcher Eric Haase in the Cleveland system has achieved a similar level of notoriety. Despite lacking the name recognition of either Murphy or Donaldson, Haase has nevertheless transformed himself in much the same way as those two, elevating the ball more often and reaping the benefits.

Haase’s 2017 season has shifted expectations about his career. Merely a fringe prospect entering the season, he’s now regarded, at the very least, as a future major-league backup who’ll punish opposing pitchers with power from time to time. As FanGraphs’ own Eric Longenhagen noted in an edition of his Daily Prospect Notes last month:

Some scouts question his mobility and he has fringe arm strength, but Haase receives pretty well and has plus, all-fields raw power. While strikeout prone and unlikely to develop even an average hit tool, Haase’s combination of power and position make him a solid bet to play some sort of big-league role, likely as a slugging backup, though some scouts like him as a sleeper regular.

Haase’s collection of statistical indicators earned him the 47th spot on Chris Mitchell’s midseason top-100 KATOH rankings.

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