Baseball schedules aren’t totally balanced. They get most of the way, but they’re well short of perfect, part by accident, and part by design. At this point, every team in baseball has something like 70 games left before the start of the playoffs. Among the remaining team schedules, it looks like the Pirates have the easiest one. The Yankees, meanwhile, would appear to have the hardest one. Good for the Pirates. Bad for the Yankees.

You can leave now if you want. You’ve already got two pieces of information, and I’m not one to mess around with you. Imagine all the time you could save! But maybe you want to see the rest of the landscape. Maybe you want a bit of an explanation. It’s your call — I’m writing this now no matter what. I’m also now moving to the next paragraph.

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Last week, when the Red Sox jumped the starting pitching market — surrendering Anderson Espinoza, their best pitching prospect in the deal — to acquire Drew Pomeranz from San Diego, the general consensus was that the team overpaid, like they did in acquiring Craig Kimbrel some months earlier, as the team tries to take advantage of David Ortiz’s last year in baseball. After all, Pomeranz was traded for Yonder Alonso a few months earlier, and despite a great start to the year with the Padres, no one really knows how well he’ll hold up down the stretch, given that this size of workload isn’t something he’s handled before. And just days before the trade, Baseball America had rated Espinoza as the #15 prospect in baseball, 24 spots ahead of Manuel Margot, the primary chip the Padres acquired from the Red Sox in exchange for their closer over the winter.

Giving up a top-15 prospect for a guy with as many question marks as Pomeranz comes with is certainly a gamble, as the deal will look disastrous if Pomeranz can’t hold up through October and Espinoza reaches his upside. But I can’t help but wonder if this deal is perhaps an example of how public prospect ratings and a player’s current market value can diverge pretty significantly.

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Matt Shoemaker dominated the White Sox this past Saturday. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim right-hander threw a complete-game, six-hit shutout while walking no one and striking out a season high 13. Per Brooks Baseball, 58 of the 114 pitches Shoemaker threw were splitters, 49 were either two- or four-seam fastballs, and seven were sliders.

The splitter usage jumps out even more than the pitching line. Shoemaker throws his signature offering 35% of the time — the most of any starter — but Saturday’s 50%-plus ratio was akin to that of relievers like Koji Uehara, Hector Neris and Zach Putnam. A heavy diet of splitters for nine innings is highly atypical.

Just last month, Jeff Sullivan wrote about Shoemaker’s increased reliance on the pitch, and how it has helped him to elevate his game. Intrigued by the article, and having recently written about Putnam, a longtime friend of Shoemaker’s, I went directly to the source for further information. It turns out that the splitter is only part of the reason he’s been pitching as well as he has.

Shoemaker, who has a 2.37 ERA over his last 11 starts, shared his thoughts on the subject in early July.

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Shoemaker on upping his mental game: “The biggest thing for me has been a mental adjustment. There are small mechanical things I’ve worked on in bullpens, like trying to keep my weight back, but it’s more of a mental thing. Every time I go out there, I need to have good intent with every pitch. Every one needs to have a purpose. When you focus that way, you’re more aggressive and there’s more behind the ball. There’s no fussing around.

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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.

Most Highly Rated Game
New York NL at Chicago NL | 19:05 ET
Syndergaard (105.2 IP, 59 xFIP-) vs. Arrieta (114.1 IP, 82 xFIP-)
Typically, the author would abuse his role as custodian of this daily exercise and assign a sufficiently high discretionary NERD score to a top pitching prospect making his debut — such as Washington’s Reynaldo Lopez is expected to make tonight — so as to render the corresponding game score the day’s highest. Why I haven’t today is on account of two reasons. One, because the success that Lopez experienced at the Double-A level this year didn’t translate to his first (and only) couple starts at Triple-A. Whatever Lopez’s physical virtues, his inability to record significantly more strikeouts than walks in the International League doesn’t bode particularly well for his major-league debut tonight. And for two, because the prospect of a Syndergaard-Arrieta rencontre is a compelling one, for reasons that likely needn’t be catalogued for the benefit of one who’s somehow made his or her way to the end of a paragraph riddled with obscurities.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

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Nearly a month ago to the day, Dave Cameron wrote an article for this very site praising the Washington Nationals for their patience regarding Trea Turner’s place as the club’s shortstop of the future, in deference to veteran Danny Espinosa. Espinosa had hit well up to that point, and has long graded not only as a plus defender at a premium position, but as a plus base-runner as well. In other words, Espinosa’s play at short was as good or better than what could’ve been reasonably expected from the rookie Turner, validating the team’s decision to hold Turner down in the minors for further development and/or for service time reasons.

Since that post was published, Espinosa’s been on fire. He’s essentially had the best 20-game offensive stretch of his career, putting up a 144 wRC+ over 79 plate appearances, and if it wasn’t clear already that Turner wouldn’t be taking over shortstop anytime soon, it is now. Espinosa is in no position to lose his job. Neither is Daniel Murphy, the club’s second baseman (the only other position at which Turner had played at the time of Cameron’s article), who’s arguably been the National League’s best hitter.

Turner couldn’t appear more blocked, which is why, even though he was recalled from the minors two weeks ago when Ryan Zimmerman hit the disabled list, manager Dusty Baker offered the following quote:

“Right now, there’s no real place for Trea to take.”

Except, something else has happened since the publication of Cameron’s article. Turner began to learn the outfield. He made his center-field debut in Triple-A on June 27, and started six games in center before his recall to the majors. He worked with minor-league outfield coordinator Gary Thurman on deep routes, playing balls off the wall and reading spin. He went errorless in his six games and recorded an outfield assist to third base following an overthrown caught stealing attempt at second.

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Episode 669
Dave Cameron is the managing editor of FanGraphs. During this edition of FanGraphs Audio, he examines yet another trade involving the Red Sox and yet another trade in which Dave Dombrowski has exchanged a young player for a less young player; reflects on the nature of (the recently dismissed) Terry Ryan’s long tenure(s) as general manager in Minnesota; and rains invective on the host.

This episode of the program either is or isn’t sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

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 50 min play time.)

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Less than a month ago, the Washington Nationals called up top prospect Lucas Giolito, with the hopes that he’d fill a hole in their rotation. However, as often happens with promising young pitchers, Giolito looked a bit overmatched in his first taste of the big leagues. He recorded more walks than strikeouts in his two starts with Washington, and was subsequently sent back to the minors to further refine his breaking stuff. Giolito will surely be back sooner rather than later, and still appears to have a bright future ahead of him. For now, though, the Nationals are turning to another electric young arm: hard-throwing 22-year-old Reynaldo Lopez debuts tonight against the Dodgers.

Lopez was signed out of the Dominican back in 2012, and his stuff has landed him on top-100 prospect lists for a couple of years now. But up until this season, he his minor-league performance hadn’t quite matched up with his stuff for any extended period. He spent the 2015 season in the High-A Carolina League, where he posted a mediocre 4.09 ERA. His peripherals suggest he pitched much better than that, but his 23% strikeout rate still underwhelmed.

He opened 2016 at the Double-A level, and soon began missing bats at a rate commensurate with his stuff. His 30% strikeout rate is tops among qualified Double-A pitchers this year. He also managed to keep his walk rate under 8%. Though he wasn’t super sharp in his two most recent starts at the Triple-A level, the body of Lopez’s 2016 campaign bodes well for his future in the bigs.

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Every baseball player has bad days — it’s an inevitability in a sport so deeply tied to failure. For the most part, these failures are quickly dismissed and/or forgotten. A rough seven-run outing for a pitcher is a day when he just didn’t have “it” or batted balls had eyes. An 0-for-4 game at the plate is barely a hiccup in the span of a 162-game season. But, on occasion, there are days so bad that they elicit sympathy from even the most hardened baseball fans. You know the ones I’m talking about, the games that make you cringe when you check a box score. The games like the one Andrew McCutchen had on Sunday.

It wasn’t all McCutchen’s fault. Eighteen-inning games are freaks of nature which result from a convergence of a great many (un)lucky coincidences. If Mark Melancon had thrown a different pitch to Daniel Murphy in the ninth inning, McCutchen’s day may have ended up much differently. If any hitter for either the Pirates or Nationals had executed just one more quality swing earlier in the game, McCutchen could have been spared. But none of those things happened and, instead, McCutchen stepped to the plate eight times on Sunday and failed to reach base even once.

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