Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher on the planet.

You’re probably aware of his ability, and his hardware, which includes three Cy Young Awards, six straight top-five Cy Young finishes and an NL MVP trophy. But here’s the thing: he could be better.

Consider this fascinating nugget unearthed by Daren Willman:

Kershaw, as Willman notes, never threw a curveball when behind in the count last season. And that’s not all: as Jeff Zimmerman discovered in a December post at RotoGraphs, Kershaw has also been reluctant to employ his other breaking pitch, the slider, in hitter’s counts. A visualization made by Zimmerman of Kershaw’s pitch mix by count reveals the difference between it and the balanced approach utilized by Johnny Cueto. Cueto is willing to throw almost any pitch in any count. Kershaw, on the other hand, becomes extremely reliant on his fastball when he falls behind.

Overall, Kerhsaw threw curveballs at a 15.6% rate last season and at 13.2% rate for his career. It’s his third pitch, but it is also his greatest velocity-separation offering. He rarely throws a changeup. But while Kershaw rarely throws his slider in hitter’s count, he never throws his curveball.

And it’s not just fluky, one-year, phenomenon. Here are the total number of curveballs Kershaw has thrown in his career when facing a 1-0 count…

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So you want to win the MVP award, huh? I hope you play in the National League. There’s a bit more of an open field over there, at least. Sure, the NL feaures Kris Bryant and the only starting pitcher in the game who can seriously demand consideration for the award. But if you play in the American League, you have to deal with one Michael Nelson Trout, who is far and away the best player in the game. And, given the conditioning and training of today’s athletes relative to those from previous generations, Trout may just be the best to ever play. If you want to win the MVP in the AL, you’ll probably have to go through him.

It’s been done before. In fact, it’s happened more often than not. Trout has played five full seasons, and he’s won the MVP twice. Of course, the times he didn’t win, he finished second. It would be a surprise if he didn’t finish among the top two again this year. History dictates that Mike Trout’s default state is “MVP Contender.” The times he’s lost the award, twice to Miguel Cabrera and once to Josh Donaldson, have been close. Miggy and Donaldson never blew him away. They were tight margins. He theoretically deserves to have won the award five times.

What would it take for someone to be the absolute clear favorite over Trout? What could a player possibly do to overtake Trout and emerge as the consensus favorite? In the same vein, what would Trout have to not do?

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In the Orioles’ opening game last season, Mark Trumbo stole a base. It was his first stolen base since 2014, but anyway, as of that point in time, the Orioles had one steal, and the Brewers had zero steals. The Orioles would hold that 1-0 advantage until April 8, when Keon Broxton stole a bag. The teams remained tied until April 12, when Ryan Flaherty put the Orioles back in front 2-1. That held until April 15, when the Brewers got steals from Broxton, Jonathan Villar, and Aaron Hill. At that point, the Brewers surged ahead, and they never looked back. The gap would shortly reach double digits.

At the end of this post, I’m going to ask you a question about steals. There are no stakes, and this isn’t even all that important. While the Brewers are more athletic than the Orioles are, the Orioles are better than the Brewers are, and that’s the way the Orioles like it. So, don’t think too hard. But you’re probably going to have to think a little bit. And, given the question, even that much is ridiculous.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about nets, nicknames, and scouting directors’ comments about international prospect Luis Robert, then answer listener emails about robbing from the Cubs, a division composed of only the worst teams, pitch counts and automatic intentional walks, pitchers pitching to pitchers, trying to win in spring training, Mike Trout batting eighth, pants and the strike zone, and baseball players and beer pong.

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Episode 720
Managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses the relevance of PITCHf/x and Statcast data to understanding the probability of Mets right-hander Robert Gsellman approximating last year’s success in 2017. Also discussed: how only one out of every five professional pitchers doesn’t experience the horrors of attrition before reaching the majors.

A reminder: for the cost of a very expensive cup of coffee, readers can experience FanGraphs without ads. Click here to learn more about an Ad Free Membership.

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 36 min play time.)

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I want to like the World Baseball Classic. I want to get into, I do. Really!

Major League Baseball wants to grow the sport. An international tournament is an ideal way to do that. One needn’t look far for successful models. World Cup soccer and Olympic hockey, for instance, both draw the casual American audience to the television. There’s something engaging about a country rooting for the name on the front of a jersey in a tribal and nationalistic way. The passion and joy of the Dominican Republic team has made for compelling theater in past tournaments.

I want to really look forward to this event. I want to fill out a bracket after reviewing Craig Edwards’ WBC roster analysis, and put some money down. I want to. But I can’t. Not in its current shape and form.

I do believe Rob Manfred is right to want to continue the event despite reports of its potential demise.

I do believe baseball is wise to grow the sport, internationally, where it can. I do believe there is some growth opportunity with regard to the event, but like a worthwhile flip-for-profit project, it requires some rehabilitation.

So let’s fix this thing, shall we? I don’t think we can fix it in time for this year — the tournament begins on March 6 — but if there’s to be a tournament in 2021, it could be better.

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I’m sure you’ve noticed that a frequent theme around here has been hitters changing their approaches. An increasingly popular idea has been to generate more lift, either by making mechanical changes, or by at least changing which pitches a hitter looks to swing at. I don’t know if we’re in the early stages of a hitting revolution, but the anecdotal evidence is plentiful. We should assume that the information era, as it were, was always going to come with its consequences.

You know about a lot of the swing-changers to this point. Even some years ago, there were Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez. Ryan Zimmerman has been working with Daniel Murphy as part of his own attempt to put more batted balls in the air. Zimmerman is a case of a guy looking to capitalize on encouraging exit velocity. I’ve recently written about how Eric Hosmer could blossom, if only he could get the ball off the ground. It’s fun, especially in early March, to try to figure out which hitters might benefit from finding the air more often. But let’s not beat around the bush. Christian Yelich. Christian Yelich should be the first name on any such list.

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… 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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