This past weekend’s four-game series in San Francisco between the Giants and Washington Nationals may be remembered as an important point in the playoff race for the teams fighting for the NL East crown. By getting swept for their sixth consecutive loss, the Nationals now find themselves reeling, four and a half games behind the Mets. Victims of their own sweep at the hands of the Pirates, New York can now look forward to better times, as they play no other NL teams with a winning percentage over .500 for the remainder of the season.

The Mets currently have an almost 70% chance of winning the division per our playoff odds; we predicted them to have a 7% chance at the beginning of the year. Crazy things happen during baseball seasons, and projections are made with the information on hand at the time — teams over or underperform; players get traded; young stars get called up early. The Mets now find themselves in a position that was viewed as extremely unlikely at the beginning of the race, and for the first time in what seems like a long time, they’re now favorites.

Adding to the unlikeliness is the fact that New York’s offense has been powered in large part by a resurgent former 40 home run threat who now finds himself toward the later stages of his career. Quite simply, Curtis Granderson is having a great season, and he’s turning back the clock in some rare ways by doing so.

We know who Granderson was during his prime: an elite power-hitting outfielder with great speed on the base paths. An injury-marred 2013 season with the Yankees seemed to mark a steep downturn, as he was able to perform just 7% better than league average on offense during his first season with the Mets in 2014. Though passable, it probably wasn’t the kind of production New York had in mind when they agreed to terms on his four-year, $60 million deal in the winter of 2013.

This year, however, we’re seeing glimmers of the Granderson of old. Already matching his 20 home run output from last year, the left-hander’s overall offensive performance is at its highest level since 2011: he’s now performed 22% better than the league average offensive player, good for the 17th-best offensive outfielder in the major leagues as measured by wRC+.

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Hitting a home run in Major League Baseball requires a considerable amount strength. It’s probably fair to presume, however that, having previously hit 53 of them in a single season, Chris Davis is in the upper reaches of physical strength among MLB players. Of Davis’ 190 career home runs, likely none has displayed that strength more clearly than the one he hit this weekend to beat Oakland — even though that homer failed to travel even 400 feet. 

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth on Saturday, Chris Davis came to the plate with no runners on against switch-pitching Pat Venditte. A 69 mph slider headed to the plate low and away out of the strike zone. Chris Davis did not appear to get a good swing on the ball:

Yet, somehow, the ball ended up here:

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet 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 Baltimore | 19:05 ET
deGrom (146.2 IP, 78 xFIP-) vs. Gausman (60.1 IP, 103 xFIP-)
Were the velocity aging curve for pitchers not merely a line on a graph but rather the topographic profile of a road in your local municipality, public-works officials would erect a sign at the beginning of it alerting motorists to the steep grade which lay ahead. Indeed, science reveals that pitchers lose, on average, about 0.3 mph per year of fastball velocity. What Mets right-hander Jacob deGrom has done instead, however, is to steadily gain fastball velocity since his major-league debut last May. After sitting at roughly 93.0 mph over his first handful of starts in 2014, deGrom has now produced an average fastball velocity of 95.0 mph or greater in 11 of his most recent 14 appearances. This open disregard for the natural limits of human anatomy is the precise sort of behavior which, were deGrom not a Dutch-American person but rather a character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, would provoke the considerable anger of the Olympic gods — and the sort of robust vengeance of which those same gods are capable.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

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Major League Baseball’s arcane – and many would say horribly outdated – television blackout policy has long been a source of frustration for baseball fans. As most readers are by now well aware, under MLB’s existing rules, fans residing within each team’s designated “local” broadcasting territory are currently unable to view that team’s games over the Internet via the MLB.tv streaming service. Instead, fans must subscribe to whichever regional sports network (RSN) owns the rights to the team’s games in order to watch their local team play.

These restrictions impact fans in a variety of ways. For starters, the existing rules prevent fans from watching their local team play on mobile devices, instead only allowing fans to view their local team’s games on a traditional television set. So anyone hoping to watch their local team’s broadcast via cell phone, for instance, is out of luck under the league’s existing rules.

Perhaps more frustrating, though, is the impact that MLB’s blackout policy has on fans who are either currently unable – or simply unwilling – to subscribe to whichever RSN owns the rights to their designated local team’s games. Under MLB’s policy, even if these fans shell out $110-130 per year to subscribe to MLB.tv, they will still be blacked out from watching any game involving their local team, even if they cannot watch the game on their local cable system.

So when news broke on Monday that MLB and Fox are nearing a deal to allow in-market streaming for 15 teams’ games, some fans were undoubtedly excited to learn that baseball was apparently, at long last, fully embracing the new digital age.

Unfortunately, in reality, the MLB-Fox agreement will do little to solve the most frequent criticisms of MLB’s blackout policy, as the scope of the new deal appears to be much more modest than some initial headlines suggested.

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Episode 587
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses some recently promoted prospects (Gregory Bird, John Lamb, Luis Severino), a curiously successful one (Zachary Godley), and the implications of prep-showcase season on the 2016 draft.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

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 1 hr 17 min play time.)

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Milwaukee Brewers prospect David Denson made history yesterday when he revealed he is gay. With his announcement, Denson became the first active, openly gay player in the history of affiliated baseball.

Given his significance to the game, there’s unlikely to be any shortage of coverage regarding Denson in either the near- or long-term. As some of the authors of that coverage have already noted, attempting to become a major leaguer is difficult enough without having to contend with questions of personal identity and concerns about acceptance at the same time. Denson himself has stated that he’s relieved that he can divert more of his energy now to baseball itself.

What I’d like to do here is set aside for a moment the implications of David Denson, gay ballplayer, and to utilize my KATOH projection system to consider briefly Denson’s prospects for reaching the majors.

Just 19 now, Denson was drafted by the Brewers in the 15th round in 2013, and has split the 2015 season between Low-A Wisconsin and Rookie League Helena, where he currently plays. In 268 trips to the plate this year, the first baseman has hit just .229/.313/.360, due in no small part to his elevated 26% strikeout rate. Denson opened the year in Low-A, where he also spent the second half of the 2014 season. But the Brewers reassigned him to extended spring training in May when he was hitting .195/.264/.305. He’s put up a more respectable .247/.339/.390 line since joining the Brewers Rookie League affiliate in June. Based on his 2015 numbers,  forecasts Denson for just 0.2 WAR through age 28, with a meager 6% chance of cracking the big leagues.

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Ben, Sam, and Erik Malinowski banter about Madison Bumgarner the batter, then discuss Astros rookie Carlos Correa’s early achievements.

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It’s difficult to figure out where to start with Jackie Bradley Jr. You could start with his incredible defense, and actually that’s probably the right place to begin. You could look at this play, or this play, or this play, or if you have four minutes and 31 seconds you can watch some defensive highlights from 2014. Or just use Google. I’m sure you’ll come up with something good. That’s because Bradley is an exceptional outfielder. Someone with his defensive skills shouldn’t have to hit much to play regularly. “Not much” is still more than “none,” though, and it’s the difference between these two that has held Bradley back.

Bradley was called up four times in 2013, including at the beginning of the season to serve as the club’s starting left fielder. He hit .097/.263/.129 and was sent down as soon as the team got healthy enough to do so. He was called up three other times with varying degrees of failure, but the end result was a .617 OPS on the season. Even so, Bradley had hit at every level of the minors, including posting an .842 OPS for Triple-A Pawtucket in 2013 in between trips to Boston. The team decided he would be their starting center fielder in 2014. And he was. And his defense was close to perfect. His hitting was also perfect — though only on opposite day. Now, though, he’s hitting on all the regular kinds of days, too.

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A month ago, as baseball was just finishing up the All-Star break, the Nationals looked to be in a pretty good position. They were 48-39, sitting atop the NL East, and were expecting a host of quality reinforcements from the disabled list. The team hadn’t quite lived up to pre-season expectations, but a lot of that could be chalked up to health issues, and even their somewhat disappointing first half had them in first place; with some of their best players rejoining the club, the second half looked promising.

At that point, our projections gave the Nationals an 85% chance of winning the division. In the first 30 games of the second half, however, well, just take a look for yourself.

Since the break, they’re just 10-20, and they now find themselves 4 1/2 games behind the Mets in the NL East; their chances of making the postseason are down to 31%. They’ve lost six straight on their current west coast road trip, and now sitting at a game under .500, questions are starting to get raised about whether Matt Williams even makes it to the end of the season as the team’s manager.

So, how has this second half, and potentially the entire season, gone so wrong?

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