Marcus Stroman ended June with a bloated 5.33 ERA that was mostly deserved, so he went back to the drawing board. He’s since had an ERA two runs lower, once again deserved, since he changed things in early July.

After a good start in early July, he made general reference to some adjustments after the game, and Shi Davidi went and asked pitching coach Pete Walker for some specifics. So we know some of what Stroman did to recover. He cleaned up the delivery, he moved his hands, he changed his release point, and he altered his pitching mix. It’s the kind of stuff pitchers do to bust a slump.

The most interesting thing might be where he learned these things, though. Who knows when he picked them up from the Red Sox lefty, but these adjustments have made Stroman a bit more like David Price these days. Even if Price is struggling a bit, you have to count that as a good thing compared to where Stroman was earlier this season.

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Yesterday, I listed off my favorite win-now moves of the trade deadline. Today, we’re going to lavish some praise on some teams who also made good moves, but did so by looking to the future. These are the five moves I liked the most from the seller’s perspective.

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It’s still sort of hard to fathom how quickly the league-wide strikeout spike snuck up on us. And after a one-year plateau between 2014 and 2015, they’re back on the rise again. On the one hand, a statement like, “Present-day Robbie Ray would’ve been baseball’s strikeout leader as recently as 2010” speaks volumes toward the current state of baseball and how much has changed just in the last five years. It also speaks volumes toward Robbie Ray, because era be damned, what he’s doing is impressive, and it seems like it’s flying under the radar. Funny how quickly we’ve come to take strikeouts for granted.

Robbie Ray has struck out 28% of all the batters he’s faced this season. That’s more than Jake Arrieta last year, higher than Danny Salazar’s current total. It’s higher than almost anyone, in fact, even in our strikeout-laden era. What follows is a complete list of pitchers who, this season, have (a) as many or more innings thrown, and (b) a higher strikeout rate than Ray:

• Jose Fernandez
• Clayton Kershaw
• Max Scherzer
• Stephen Strasburg
• Noah Syndergaard

That completes the list. Just five pitchers in baseball have ran a higher strikeout rate over as many innings as Robbie Ray, and they might just be the five best. Over his last eight starts, the strikeout rate’s up to 33%. It seems time to start paying some real attention to Robbie Ray, who suddenly looks like the second-hand man to Zack Greinke in Arizona.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) received a future value grade of 45 or less from Dan Farnsworth during the course of his organizational lists and who (b) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on a midseason list or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Greg Allen, OF, Cleveland (Profile)
Two prominent members of the Five, right-handers Junior Guerra and Aaron Wilkerson, have been acquired by the Brewers since that club hired David Stearns as its general manager. Outfielder Greg Allen very nearly became the third. Widely reported to represent one part of Cleveland’s offer to Milwaukee in exchange for catcher Jonathan Lucroy, Allen ultimately remained with Cleveland after the Brewers catcher vetoed the trade.

Allen was recently promoted to Double-A Akron and appears to have adapted quickly to that level. In the 22 plate appearances since last week’s edition of this column, Allen’s recorded a 1:1 walk-to-strikeout ratio plus also a double and two home runs — while making all five of his starts in center field for Akron. He remains second on this season’s haphazardly calculated Fringe Five Scoreboard.

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Don’t feel bad if you somehow missed Joe Musgrove getting called up to the Astros this past Monday. After all, only like a billion other transactions took place that day, many of which involved established big leaguers and/or prospects more highly touted than Musgrove. But now that the deadline-related madness has come and gone, I’d like to direct your attention to Mr. Musgrove. He’ll be joining the Astros’ rotation this Sunday in place of the injured Lance McCullers, and there’s reason to think he’ll be a very good pitcher.

Two years ago, Musgrove wasn’t on anyone’s prospect radar. Though he was drafted way back in 2011, it took him until 2014 to make it out of Rookie ball — and until 2015 to make it into the full-season levels. But when finally given the opportunity to last year, he broke out in a big way. He shot from Low-A to Double-A, putting up a dazzling 1.88 ERA in just over 100 innings. Perhaps even more impressive were his strikeout and walk numbers: he struck out 99, while walking only eight, giving him rates of 25% and 2%, respectively.

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Pitcher wins are a silly statistic, for all the reasons you know, and additional reasons you don’t. So we pretty much never talk about them — there was a time, once, when the analysts would rail against wins, but that battle is over. The analysts won. Wins carry less value than they ever have, and there’s a part of me that wonders why I’m even bothering to write this post in the first place.

But I just can’t not do it. For one thing, it’s Friday. Leave me alone. It’s August, and the trade deadline just passed, so, again, leave me alone. And even though we don’t talk about them, wins do still exist. Somebody hands them out, and they remain a part of the official records. So I want to take a few minutes of your time to discuss really dumb wins. Sergio Romo just got one Thursday. It was one of the very dumbest.

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Ben talks to FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan and FiveThirtyEight writer Rob Arthur about Bryce Harper’s extended slump and their surprising (and somewhat dismaying) findings about his great 2015.

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Today, our analysis of granular team ball-in-play data continues. Last time, we examined AL West clubs. Today, we take a macro-type view of the plate appearance frequency and BIP exit speed/angle detail for NL West clubs.

About 90 games’ worth of balls in play is a fairly substantial sample size, one that enables us to make fairly educated guesses about the true talent level of each team. Let’s use this information to project true-talent team won-lost records and compare them to their actual marks at the break, examining the reasons for material variation along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper was as good as Mike Trout, until he wasn’t. It hasn’t yet been that big of a deal, with the Nationals up in first place, but Harper has been slumping, and the slump hasn’t been short. For weeks on end, he’s hit barely .200, and though the walks have still been there, Harper’s supposed to be better than this. He’s supposed to be one of the best, actually. That’s what he just looked like, at 22 years old, and instead now he’s a 23-year-old in a lineup being carried by Daniel Murphy and Wilson Ramos. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being on track for a four-win season. It’s just not how you want to follow a nine-win season.

There are plenty of indicators to point to. What happened to Harper’s numbers? His BABIP is a lousy .237. That’s guaranteed to come up. More discouragingly, he’s making more contact against pitches out of the zone. Last year, 70% of Harper’s batted balls came against pitches within the strike zone. That ranked him in the 67th percentile. This year he ranks in the 18th percentile. That partially explains why Harper’s exit velocity has dropped — and it has indeed dropped. That’s another thing. Harper so far has lost a tick or two on average.

Yet there’s still more. We all figured that Harper’s 2015 dramatically changed his own baseline. What if it shouldn’t have?

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