… and Alex Bregman, due to popular demand. Been grinding away at these hitter and pitcher contact-quality/-management reports for a good chunk of the offseason, and today we reach this series’ final chapter, with a handful of NL non-qualifiers who weren’t included in the position-by-position breakdowns of league regulars. Plus Bregman, who wasn’t included in last week’s AL non-qualifier piece.

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Jason Heyward had a pretty disappointing regular season in 2016 after signing a contract worth nearly $200 million the previous offseason. Heyward altered his swing in the spring, as he has frequently throughout his career, then hurt his wrist at the very beginning of the season. How much either or both deserves blame isn’t clear, but what we do know is the results were disastrous. In the last 100 years, there have been 4,578 outfielders to qualify for the batting title. Heyward’s 72 wRC+ ranks 4,511th among that group. In other words, we’re dealing with a pretty rare situation. To find out how rare — and what the implications of it might be — I went out searching for the most Heyward-like seasons in history.

To look for players like Heyward, we don’t have to understand his precise approach to the game, we merely have to run some stats over on our leaderboards. I started by looking at qualified outfielders from the last 100 years who’d recorded a single-season wRC+ below 80. I eliminated strike years and players with less than a full season of experience prior to the poor-hitting year. Because Jason Hyeward is a good defender, I looked only at players who were worth at least 10 runs above average on defense and whose offense wasn’t so bad as to render them worth less than a win overall. To keep things in the same ballpark age-wise, I looked at player seasons between the ages of 25 and 29. (Heyward just finished his age-26 season.)

I found five Heywards.

So these are some of the more bizarre player seasons in history. For a player to be this bad, he needs to be good enough to earn the confidence of the manager and organization. He also needs to be very poor on offense, sufficiently good defense to make up for the terrible offense, and to do it in the outfield, where the positional adjustment is either negative (like in the corners) or just slightly positive (like in center field). It’s easier to do this as a catcher or shortstop, where the positional adjustment gives you a bunch of runs right off the bat, but more difficult in the outfield.

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Last week, we ran an interview with Charlie Blackmon and Chris Denorfia on the subject of swing paths and launch angles. If you read the piece, you’ll recall that the Rockies outfielders share a similar philosophy, but come to it in different ways. One is studious in his pursuit of the science, while the other is satisfied to be aware of the launch-angle concept.

San Diego Padres teammates Carlos Asuaje and Wil Myers are much like their Colorado contemporaries. Both want to elevate the baseball, but one puts a lot of thought into the why, while the other tries to keep things as simple as possible.

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Carlos Asuaje: “It’s easy to overanalyze things, and try to focus on something that’s pretty tough to control. The angle of where the ball is going off your bat is a good example of that. But you want to hit the ball in the air. That’s the reality of it. It’s the way to get hits nowadays. There’s enough technology and science to back that up.

“It’s something I definitely focus on. Being a smaller guy doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. If you hit ground balls, you’re going to be out, especially at the major-league level. Guys don’t boot balls, they don’t throw poorly, and you’re not going to outrun the baseball. You have to play the odds, and the odds are that if you hit the ball in the air, you have a better chance to be successful.

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My regard for Mark Buehrle is growing.

We often don’t fully appreciate people or things while we still have access to them. Buehrle quietly slipped into retirement prior to last season after a remarkable career during which he struck out batters at well below league-average rates, possessed a sub-90 mph fastball for much of his career, and yet accumulated 52 WAR and a 215-160 record over 18 seasons in the majors.

His success was curious, though he was not without his gifts. He could paint corners as well as any starter in baseball. Consider his 2015 fastball location via Baseball Savant:

That’s excellent, but it pales in comparison to Buehrle’s signature skill — namely, the pace at which he worked.

With the mounting concern regarding pace of play from the commissioner’s office, with so much being made of the subject in the media, with pace itself slowing after progress made in 2015, has anyone checked in with the this century’s quickest-working pitcher to get his thoughts on pitch clocks, pace and of a pitcher’s process?

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On Tuesday, I published KATOH’s 2017 top-100 list. Naturally, a lot of good players missed the cut. But one omission seemed particularly egregious, relative to the industry consensus. KATOH’s disdain for this player has elicited a few comments in recent months.

From this week’s top-100:

From our Rockies list in November:

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It’s rare that the scouting community, projections wonks, and enthusiastic fans all possess more or less the same opinion about a player. More commonly, a player comes up and drives some kind of wedge between certain crowds. So Dan Vogelbach, guy who fans like more than scouts, isn’t necessarily rare in that regard. In Vogelbach’s case, however, the difference of opinion are more pronounced. And in Vogelbach’s case, the stakes are higher — in more ways than one.

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These are our current projected standings. Meanwhile, this will, at some point, become our updated playoff-odds page. When that second page is updated, you’ll notice some small differences when compared to the first, as the projected records on that page will take into consideration the various team schedules. That will make for a post of its own! Because it can be worthwhile to examine schedule strength. Not all baseball schedules are created the same.

What follows here is maybe a sneak preview, or maybe a shortcut. It’s at least related, because what I’ve done is figure out projected division strength. The math almost couldn’t be simpler. Up there, I linked the team projections. In the plot below, I’ve averaged them in appropriate groups. Somehow people think of me as a baseball expert. Anyway, let me say this: As of today, it looks like the AL East is baseball’s toughest division. The AL West is close behind. And the AL Central looks like relative garbage.

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