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If the New York Mets finish the 2016 season as world champions, they’ll have done it with a drastically different approach than the one with which they began the year. See, the Mets are something like a bat-first team now. Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, and now Steven Matz won’t pitch again until 2017, and while they’ve still got Noah Syndergaard and a suddenly impressive bullpen, it’s the offense that’s really carried their second-half resurgence. Since the All-Star break, the Mets have baseball’s seventh-best wRC+, among non-pitchers. Over the last month, they’ve had baseball’s third-best offense by that same measure.

And so, barring some unforeseen heroics from the likes of Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo, it seems that the World Series aspirations in New York that began with the starting rotation now fall heavily on the starting lineup. If the Mets want to win this thing, they might have to slug their way there, the way Daniel Murphy nearly did for them last postseason. The Mets probably don’t love the fact that they opted not to go the extra year on Murphy in free agency and saw him not only go to a division rival in Washington, but go on to build off last postseason’s success and become potentially the best hitter in the National League. But even though the super-charged Murphy will now play for the Nationals in the postseason, the Mets suddenly have a super-charged middle infielder of their own in Asdrubal Cabrera.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman 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. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Attempting to represent numerically the probable appeal of baseball games, already an absurd enterprise, becomes even more absurd at the end of the season. It stands to reason that a spectator would prefer, all things being equal, to watch a game that offers postseason implcations to one that doesn’t offer them. After that, though, there are questions of preference that are likely too subtle to account for and then express in a single number.

Like, for example, what’s more compelling: a game that features two clubs, each with a very low (but still extant) probability of reaching the playoffs, or a game that features one club that’s been eliminated already against another that possesses exactly a 50% chance of reaching the postseason — and therefore resides at the crossroads of great uncertainty? Or, here’s another question: is a game featuring two clubs that have been eliminated entirely meaningless? Or, another one: is the “average” watchability of a game in April (when hope is ubiquitous) the same as one September (when most clubs have already become resigned to merely seeing the season out, like a marriage that exists only for the kids)?

While there’s probably something worthwhile to say about any of those questions, this post is designed only to address only the last one — which is to say, the matter of an April game versus a September one. By the typical methodology for calculating NERD team scores, all those same scores are adjusted to produce a leaguewide average of 5.0 exactly. For most of the year, the effects of that calculation are largely invisible. But as postseason odds begin to represent a larger portion of the team NERD score (which they do, slowly, as the season progresses), most clubs also begin to feature postseason odds either of zero or one. At that point, a plurality of teams are playing games of little consequence. This becomes “average.”

The result is that clubs all cluster together at around 5.0. Here’s an example of how today’s NERD scores would look calculated by the typical methodology:

Basically, every club is a 5. Detroit and San Francisco and two or three other clubs receive a bonus for their still living postseason aspirations. But that’s it. All the other teams have either clinched and been eliminated. As a a result, this is “normal.” And because a majority of the clubs have nothing for which they’re a playing, they all receive basically an average score of 5.

For today, however, I’ve also employed an alternative methodology. One that doesn’t take for granted this average of 5.0. One that, as a result, implies that certain games in September are a bit hopeless — especially as compared to April, when every club features basically the same generic odds of reaching the World Series. For this method, what I did was merely to take each club’s chances of reaching the postseason and find the absolute value of that figured substracted from 50%. Then I’ve subtracted that figure from 50% and multiplied the result by 20. By this method, a club with a 50% chance of making the playoffs reaceives a 10.

Here’s how it works, with the Tigers as an example. The Tigers currently possess a 0.0% probability of winning the division and 29.0% probability of reaching the wild-card game, so a 29.0% chance overall. Here’s the calculation that follows:

• |0.50 – 0.29| = 0.21
• 0.50 – 0.21 = 0.29
• 0.29 * 20 = 5.8

By this method, Detroit receives a NERD score of 5.8, rounded to 6.

Here’s that same thing applied to all today’s games:

In this case, there are mostly 0s where there were 5s before — because the average team’s postseason future is already settled. The top game by this methodology is the one between two still-contending teams in Baltimore and Toronto. The readers preferred broadcast is Baltimore television.

Don’t ask Justin Verlander if his new harder slider is a cutter, apparently. “Verlander is steadfast on this — he’s not throwing a cutter. It’s a slider,” is how Chris McCosky characterized the ace’s opinion on the changing pitch.

The difference between a cutter and a slider is difficult to really nail down — and is most easily represented as existing on a spectrum. First, there’s the cut fastball, thrown with a slightly offset grip but still a fastball release. That pitch usually goes about a mile or two slower than the four-seam with only a couple inches of drop beyond the four-seam. Mariano Rivera threw that thing better than anyone, but Adam Ottavino modeled it for us.

Then there’s the baby slider, a cutter grip thrown with a little more supination before release, and those go 4-plus mph slower and have a few inches more drop. Those are the pitches you see from Madison Bumgarner, Cole Hamels, Jon Lester, James Shields, and Adam Wainwright. Most of those pitchers refer to that pitch as a cutter, but most of those pitches also drop more than the overall average for the cutter.

To make matters worse, there’s a brand of slider thrown by the Mets which might fit between the “baby slider” cutter and the slider-slider. We’ve dubbed that pitch the Warthen Slider. And it might be the answer to why Verlander is throwing a harder slider that looks like a cutter, but one to which he still refers as a slider. And it might be part of the answer to why tonight’s starter Daniel Norris has seen such an improvement in his walk rate.

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Yesterday, with the help of a much smarter friend, I dug a little bit into the home-run surge that we’ve all observed. There was room for some more examination, though, so this is to be considered a brief follow-up. Toward the end of that post, I engaged in some speculation. Based on evidence below, I believe I was wrong!

To re-cover some territory real quick, we do have this fact, established in the original post: Home runs are being bunched unusually tightly. The distribution of home-run rates around the game is closer to being even than ever before in at least the game’s modern version. That’s interesting! More and more hitters are getting into the dinger spirit, such that the landscape isn’t so dominated by a handful of elites. That now being given, let’s move on.

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Ben and Sam banter about Rich Hill, Clayton Kershaw, and Shohei Otani, then answer listener emails about Mike Trout, playoff formats, inflated homer totals, their introductions to baseball, and more.

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The first weird thing about the home-run surge is that there’s been a home-run surge. No one expected this, yes? It’s worked out conveniently, given how many conversations were taking place about the diminished levels of offense. At the very least, those have been put on pause.

Now, since we’re given the reality of a home-run surge, we can poke around within it. I’ll show you what Dave showed me yesterday:

Jean Segura (@Dbacks): 104th player to hit 20 HR this season, setting all-time record (breaking tie at 103 with 1999)

— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) September 27, 2016

Last year, Jean Segura slugged .336. The year before, he slugged .326. This year, he’s slugging .496. His is one of the many faces of the homer explosion. Yet just where has this been taking place? Are homers up across the board, or has there been a change in distribution? I’ll give you a hint: There’s been a change in distribution. We’re seeing more home runs from what you might label as the lower classes.

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For the last few years, as the season comes to a close, I’ve basically written a version of the same article, advocating for the extreme use of relief pitchers in the Wild Card games. I think the first one I wrote was back in 2012, when I titled the piece “Play-In Game Strategy: Skip the Starter”. And while teams have started to move more towards aggressive reliever usage, teams haven’t really adopted the full-on bullpen game as a planned outing as of yet.

I think this year, that changes.

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“Different day, different arm,” is one of those things you’ll hear a pitcher say. You get up on the mound on a given day, and you try to figure out which pitches are working, what parts of your body are barking, where you can actually intentionally throw your pitches. It’s understandable, given the complicated mechanics required to throw the ball so hard, with so much movement — but it has implications for those who would attempt to place a number on their true-talent ability.

We know about this difficulty when it comes to pitching. Projections try to put a number on the true ability of a player, but pitching projections lag behind hitting projections. Even when a stat — like exit velocity — becomes meaningful in similar samples for hitters and pitchers, it behaves strangely for pitchers. It becomes meaningful quickly but isn’t quite predictive, either — maybe because pitchers add pitches, change the script, and become different more quickly than hitters. Maybe because their true talent shifts often.

Maybe true talent for hitters shifts more than we think, though. At least when it comes to their actual ability to express that true talent due to health reasons.

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With the exception of an eight-game stretch in April where he went 13-for-26, with seven extra-base hits, Jeremy Hazelbaker has had a fairly unremarkable rookie season. The St. Louis Cardinals outfielder is slashing .239/.300/.487, with a dozen home runs in 221 plate appearances. He spent parts of June and July in Triple-A.

For a time, it looked like he might be a minor-league lifer. Drafted in the fourth round out of Ball State University by the Red Sox in 2009, Hazelbaker was dealt to the Dodgers following the 2013 season. Eighteen months later he was released. St. Louis signed him last May and assigned him to Double-A Springfield. He finished the year in Triple-A.

Hazelbaker was 28 years old when he reported to spring training — he turned 29 last month — and the odds were against him earning a spot on the Cardinals roster. He beat those odds.

I’d followed Hazelbaker’s career. I’d interviewed and written about him a handful of times as he was coming up through the Red Sox system. I’d seen the tools, but I hadn’t seen those tools translate into consistent performance. I was skeptical that I ever would.

When I caught up to Hazelbaker in early August, I admitted as much. Being perhaps a little too honest, I began the interview by saying: “I didn’t think you’d make it. Why was I wrong?” Here was his response.

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Hazelbaker on proving me wrong: “Everybody has their opinion on guys coming up. There are things people don’t really get. Looking in from the outside, you don’t see how hard of a worker a guy is, or how much drive and determination he has. Do you want to call me an underdog story? You can if you want. Whatever you want to call it, I know there have been people skeptical of me — my path, my journey, my abilities along the way.

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