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We’ve seen a lot of premium free agents negotiate opt-outs into their contracts in recent years. Teams like the fact that they can use opt-outs to decrease the total amount they have to guarantee the player in order to sign him, and players like the flexibility of hitting the market again if they play well and increase their value. But by and large, most of these end up not getting used, as free agents are almost always older players by design, and older players usually don’t get better as they age.

Johnny Cueto has an opt-out for this winter that he almost certainly won’t use, as his poor 2017 season — and now an extended DL stint — would force him to take a pay cut this winter. Masahiro Tanaka probably won’t use his opt-out this winter either, since he’s developed a home run problem this year. Wei-Yin Chen definitely isn’t opting out. Neither is Ian Kennedy. Looking ahead to the future, it’s hard to imagine either Jason Heyward or David Price walking away from the remainder of their guaranteed years at this point.

A year ago, Justin Upton fit into that category. In the first year of his six year, $132 million contract, he hit .246/.310/.465, posting a career-low (as an everyday player) +1.4 WAR. He joined a host of other albatross contracts in Detroit, and all the money owed to aging, unproductive players was part of the reason the Tigers decided to start rebuilding this year, moving veterans for younger, cheaper talents when they could.

But this year, Upton has gone right back to being the Justin Upton the Tigers hoped they were signing. He’s currently at .282/.366/.546 and +4.1 WAR; his 140 wRC+ would be the second-best of his career, behind just the 141 mark he put up in 2011. He won’t match the +6.3 WAR he put up that year, but if he finishes strong over the next six weeks, he’ll crack +5 WAR for just the second time in his career. Regardless of how he finishes, this will likely go down as one of Upton’s best seasons.

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For some time, it seemed like the battle between analytics and scouts had died out.

The divide first surfaced in the public consciousness following the publication of Moneyball 14 years ago. Michael Lewis recounts in his book how some in the A’s front office contemplated a future in which scouts were redundant and no longer necessary — at least not in such numbers. It was an extreme view.

In the meantime, however, a sort of peace appeared to have been brokered. It was generally accepted that the best clubs, the model organizations — like the St. Louis Cardinals for much of the 2000s — successfully integrated both camps.

And then in 2015 something happened: Statcast was installed in every major-league stadium.

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This is Ashley MacLennan’s third piece as part of her August residency at FanGraphs. Ashley is a staff writer for Bless You Boys, the SB Nation blog dedicated to the Detroit Tigers, and runs her own site at 90 Feet From Home. She can also be found on Twitter. She’ll be contributing regularly here over the next month. Read the work of all our residents here.

Umpires are a necessary part of any baseball game. They’re nearly as integral to the sport as the ball itself. But just as the ball has been the object of considerable interest over the last couple years, so too has the role of the umpire become a topic for re-examination.

Baseball is currently in a state of flux, commissioner Rob Manfred having dedicated himself broadly to the “improvement” of the game. His intent? To make it more efficient, streamlined, and watchable in order to compete in an increasingly demanding media landscape. His ambiguous mandate has led to a number of proposals (some of which have become reality): the elimination of pitches for intentional walks, the possibility of flat bases at first, and the ever-popular prospect of robot umpires. Regarding that last point, there would appear to be some interest from the players, as well. Just recently, for example, Ben Zobrist of the Chicago Cubs was so infuriated by a call that he publicly stated his approval of replacing umpires with electronic zone readers.

Before we get carried away, though, a few things need to be noted, the first (and most important) being that Rob Manfred himself has said he has no intention of getting rid of human umpires any time soon. At the quarterly owners’ meeting he said, “It would be a pretty fundamental change in the game, to take away a function that has been performed by our umpiring staff, really with phenomenal accuracy. The fact of the matter is they get them right well over 90% of the time.”

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It’s almost always a cliche when a player says he’s out there to help his team win. When Whit Merrifield utters the phrase, the meaning is more nuanced. The 28-year-old Kansas City Royals outfielder attributes much of his late-bloomer success to an approach that didn’t seem plausible when he was a prospect.

After six-plus seasons in the minors, Merrifield is flowering in the big leagues because… he’s in the big leagues.

“Honestly, it’s just being up here and playing to win,” Merrifield told me when I asked about his breakout campaign. “Every day there’s a motivation to come to the field. There’s an excitement that you don’t really have in the minor leagues. Down there, you’re not playing to win every game so much as you’re playing to move up. Here, it’s a different attitude, and I’m at my best when I don’t focus on my numbers.”

His numbers have been a pleasant surprise. Playing in his first full MLB season — he split last year between Kansas City and Triple-A Omaha — Merrifield is slashing (despite his current 0 for 19 skid) a solid .281/.319/.461. Not only that, he’s left the yard 14 times, and his career home-run high on the farm was 11.

“I’m just in a little groove this year,” Merrifield responded when asked about his uptick in the power department. “I’ve always been more of a gap-to-gap, doubles hitter, but I can drive the ball. When I catch it right and get it a little more elevated, it will go out.”

The University of South Carolina product went into the 2015 offseason with a revitalized work ethic that arguably has as much to do with his success as his team-first attitude. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 759
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 husk of a guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 1 hr 3 min play time.)

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Ben’s broken mic and common cold, an almost-record day for home-run hitting (and a juiced-ball update), Arthur “Doc” Irwin and the Irwin Glove, Joey Votto’s Hall of Fame case, the increasing difficulty of projecting players, the AL wild card race and the odds (and potential ramifications) of a five-way tiebreaker, the Marlins sale and the future of Giancarlo Stanton, the Dodgers’ Curtis Granderson trade, and more.

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Marcus Stroman is one of the very best pitchers in baseball. Since the beginning of last season, his 6.7 WAR is 13th in the league, right behind Jon Lester, Stephen Strasburg, and Jose Quintana — and just ahead of Jacob deGrom, Madison Bumgarner, and Zack Greinke. If you’re a believer in ERA, you probably didn’t think much of his 4.37 mark last year but are much more impressed by this season’s 2.99 figure. His FIP has remained steady, right around 3.70.

Despite a listed height of 5-foot-8, Stroman has recorded one of the league’s higher average fastball velocities. While there’s typically a relationship between velocity and strikeouts, that’s never been integral to Stroman’s success. His game is about inducing ground balls. It works well for him, but it does also leave room for some to regard him as something less than an ace.

As far as the ground-balling goes, Stroman’s elite. His 60.1% ground-ball rate topped all pitchers last season. He’s actually improved upon that figure this year, recording a 62.6% rate so far. The right-hander’s 61.2% ground-ball rate in 2016 and 2017 is the second-highest over a two-year period (min. 300 innings pitched) this decade behind Dallas Keuchel’s 62.6% mark in 2014 and 2015. Tim Hudson is the only other pitcher to exceed 60% grounders over a two-year period since 2010.

Inducing a lot of ground balls is a good thing, largely because ground balls can’t become homers. Stroman’s 0.87 HR/9 over the last two years is indicative of that; it places second among qualified starters only to Michael Fulmer’s 0.80 mark. Even after dropping the inning requirement to 250, Stroman sits behind only Fulmer, Clayton Kershaw and Kyle Hendricks. Stroman’s ability to limit homers helps make him one of the league’s better pitchers, even without an abundance of swings and misses.

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Yoenis Cespedes has had a roller-coaster year. Hamstring, quad, hip, and heel injuries have cut weeks off his season. On the field, his overall performance isn’t inspiring; his walk rate is down, his exit velocity is diminished, and his wRC+ has dropped by 16 points. The outfielder’s hitting has fluctuated between dominant and poor, with his worst month coming in July: in 89 plate appearances, Cespedes launched just a single home run and recorded an isolated-power figure that was 43 points below league average.

Small windows of playing time can bring big performance swings, but Cespedes’ power drought wasn’t a product just of bad luck in a limited sample. Consider the chart below, which uses the LOESS method to smooth through Cespedes’ launch angle over the course of the season. Batted balls are ordered from the first (his first BIP on Opening Day) through the most recent (his last BIP yesterday). Horizontal bars are included to show his average launch angle in each of the four calendar months that make up the slugger’s season.

Cespedes’ average launch angle of 24.6 degrees in April was among the steepest in baseball. After sitting out May to recover from injuries, Cespedes returned for the next month and averaged a similarly high angle. He ended June with a .929 OPS, so his overall production didn’t signal anything out of the ordinary. But the real story is told by the smoothing curve, which shows how Cespedes was changing as a hitter. In June, his launch angle began a drop that accelerated into a plunge. By the latter part of July, he bottomed out at 12 degrees, a mark more fitting for a line-drive hitter than a slugger. His angle has climbed a bit higher in August, but it remains far below April’s range.

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