Next year’s free-agent class is going to be weak. It was going to be weak before Stephen Strasburg opted out of it. It was going to be weak before Adrian Beltre opted out of it. It might have been strong if Madison Bumgarner, Freddie Freeman, Buster Posey, Chris Sale, and Giancarlo Stanton hadn’t opted out of the class much earlier, but we’ve known for a while now that this year’s free-agent class was not going to be strong. Without Strasburg, the pitching class will be one of the weakest we have seen in recent history.

The position-player side of this year’ free-agent class won’t be strong, but between Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, Carlos Gomez, and Josh Reddick — along with Yoenis Cespedes and a resurgent Dexter Fowler opting in to next year’s class — there will be handful of above-average players available for teams looking to add an extra bat. On the pitching side, that will not be the case.

After Cespedes signed his three-year contract with the New York Mets, I took a look at the free-agent class Cespedes was entering. With Strasburg gone, Cespedes is likely the top free agent and the only one projected for more than four wins this season. The pitching side looked even worse, as I wrote in January:

Next year is a good year if you want to get a closer on the free-agent market, but if you want an a pitcher approaching an ace level, it is Stephen Strasburg or bust. James Shields would need to opt out of his contract. The same holds true for Scott Kazmir, who got $48 million in the current market. Brett Anderson accepted the qualifying offer this year. The top of next year’s class looks a lot more like the middle of this year’s, and the middle next year looks a lot like the lower-tier options from this offseason.

Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen will be free agents, but when it comes to starters, there’s not much to go around. Last year’s class was topped by Zack Greinke and David Price, but Johnny Cueto and Jordan Zimmerman weren’t terrible fallback options. Zimmerman put up three wins above replacement last season and he received the fourth-largest contract of the past offseason. Unless a pitcher dramatically exceeds his current projections there won’t be any pitchers who put up even a three-win season this year. The only pitcher currently projected to produce more than 2.1 WAR this season is a 36-year-old pitcher who recorded no major-league starts for a period of six years between August 2009 and September 2015.

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Nothing about Josh Donaldson being great is surprising anymore. There was the late-career breakout in 2012, and then confirmation that the breakout was real in 2013-14. And then, of course, he won the Most Valuable Player award in 2015. We love stories about unexpected rises to prominence more than anything else, and that’s true within baseball and outside of it. Once a player reaches the elite and stays there, the story of the rise fades away, and consistent excellence has a strange way of becoming almost routine — whether it deserves it or not. (Note: it does not.) The really fun part comes, however, when great players do things to try and make themselves more great, pushing themselves past the already absurdly high plateau. From what we’ve seen so far this season, Donaldson appears to be embarking on that hallowed and honorable mission.

First, a little background to what we’re talking about. Donaldson based his breakout on better patience, all-fields power, and a few aggressive mechanical changes. Those mechanical changes were based on the leg kick and bat tipping of Jose Bautista, so it was a nice coincidence when the two were united on the Blue Jays last season. Here’s a couple GIFs that visually explain some of those changes, from a 2014 interview with Jerry Brewer:

2013 swing — smaller leg kick, controlled bat tipping:

2014 swing — bigger leg kick, aggressive bat tipping:

The latter swing is more of the hitter we know today — the guy who consistently murderizes baseballs — and we can see the quite obvious visual similarities to Bautista’s swing. It’s also the swing that, along with his great defense, vaulted him into the top of the WAR leaderboards over the past few years. Since he joined the Jays, however, Donaldson’s batted-ball tendencies have trended more toward his other power-laden teammate, Edwin Encarnacion. There’s certainly potentially something to gain from him moving more toward Encarnacion’s approach, as it has mimicked the sort of trajectory a number of players follow during single-season power surges. Here, allow us to consider how.

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When you’ve got a problem with command, your options seem obvious. You can clean up your mechanics, which is easier said then done. You can focus on throwing strike one. You can move on the rubber in order to move your heat map to a better spot. You can tinker with your fastball selection in case you have better command or outcomes with one of them. You can limit throwing a secondary pitch you don’t command that well. You can throw in the zone more and risk home runs if you miss more middle-middle.

It looks like Seattle’s Taijuan Walker is fighting poor command with a new weapon: throwing a secondary pitch in the zone more often. The best part is that, if it’s the right secondary pitch, command of that pitch is not super important. Tai’s fighting with a new approach to his curveball.

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The nice thing about being a baseball writer — specifically, one who analyzes the sport — in the year 2016 is that sometimes players just come right out and start talking about their launch angle. Free topic! A player coming out and talking about his launch angle is the same thing as a player calling my direct line and telling me to please write a post about him. Kris Bryant called my direct line the other day and told me to please write a post about him. Not really. But he did come out and start talking about his launch angle, and I took the hint.

Kris Bryant was fantastic last year. He was fantastic for any type of player, but he was especially fantastic for a rookie. For that, he won an award. He can’t win that same award anymore, on account of no longer being a rookie, but he presumably wants to win more awards and so he’d like to get even better. Bryant was great, but he was great in this weird way, in that he succeeded while making contact on barely two-thirds of his swings. He wasn’t the first to do it, but the company he kept wasn’t particularly inspiring. Look for qualified seasons and sort by contact rate and you’ll find Bryant’s name around the likes of Jack Cust, Pedro Alvarez, Russell Branyan, Dan Uggla, and Ryan Howard. Bryant figured he could succeed and keep better company, so he entered this season with a new plan in mind.

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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
Tampa Bay at Seattle | 15:40 ET
Archer (38.1 IP, 76 xFIP-) vs. Walker (32.0 IP, 74 xFIP-)
During 2014, the season in which debuted, Seattle right-hander Taijuan Walker walked more than 11% of the batters he faced over 38.0 innings. Had he recorded the requisite number of innings that year, Walker would have produced the second-highest walk rate among the league’s roughly 90 qualifiers. This season, over six starts and 32.0 innings, Walker has recorded a walk rate lower than every qualifier’s walk rate except for Clayton Kershaw’s walk rate. Is it evidence that people really can change? Or perhaps merely the product of variance, and the world remains cold and indifferent. This game will provide a single data point in support of one argument or the other.

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Believe it or not, I actually agonized over how to title this post. Ultimately, I couldn’t come up with anything better, not if I didn’t want to outright deceive. Because this is a post about Hector Neris, and about Brad Brach, and there’s no way around that. You should be aware of that from the start. Now the only people in here are people who might give a damn, and that’s better than me feeling like I tricked you.

Neris is someone who’s been on my radar for a few weeks. Before that, he was absolutely not on my radar, even though he pitched in the majors in each of the previous two years. I became aware of him after a Phillies person told me to become aware of him, and Neris is in the early stages of a breakthrough major-league campaign. It’s been quiet, because he’s not a closer, and because he’s not a starter. Non-closing relievers take a while to command attention. But Neris has allowed four runs in 20 innings. More impressively, he’s increased his strikeout rate by more than fifty percent.

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Ben and Sam banter about Bartolo Colon’s likeability, then answer listener emails about Colon, Randy Johnson, the Cubs, prescient managers and more.

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