Before this season, everybody knew that the Yankees wouldn’t exactly be in contention this year.  But nobody could have predicted the extent to which their performance would dip — especially in hitting.  They have gotten an amazing performance from Carlos Beltran (wRC+ of 132), but that’s about it.  Oh, and Beltran has been a complete flop at fielding, managing to accumulate a -10 DRS only halfway into the season.  To offset his defensive issues, the Yankees can’t move him to first base, because he’s blocked there by Mark Teixeira, who’s earning $22.5 million a year.  And it’s not as if Mark Teixeira is earning his fat paycheck, either.  As of of the All-Star break, he has a -1.1 WAR.  So with Teixeira’s $22.5 million paycheck this year and less-than-desirable performance, trading him to make room for Beltran at first base is not an option.

So what about moving Beltran to DH?  Or moving Teixeira to DH and having Beltran play first?  A bit of a problem there.  See, Alex Rodriguez is right now occupying the DH spot.  And he’s earning $20 million this year while hitting .220 with a -0.7 WAR.  And while, theoretically, the Yanks could move Alex over to the hot corner to make room for Beltran, there’s the small problem of Chase Headley, who’s earning $13 million a year.  And while, yes, the Yankees could trade Chase Headley, who holds enough value to be desired by some clubs, nobody in the Yankees front office wants to even think, much less see, this scenario:  Almost 41-year-old Alex Rodriguez bumbling around the hot corner, feebly trying (and failing) to convert routine ground balls into outs.

So Beltran will be staying in right field until the inevitable happens:  one of the many 30-year-olds on the Yankees gets injured.  Some of those those 30-year-olds — Beltran, Texeira, and Rodriguez — combine to have a -0.3 WAR.  That is well below league-average.  Their earnings on the other hand…$57.5 million combined for 2016 alone.  Paying $57.5 million for -0.3 WAR.  However way you look at it, that’s a bad deal.  A really bad deal.  And that’s only three of the 25 people on the Yankees roster.  And you can be sure that the other 23 aren’t a general manager’s dream.  Quite the contrary.  Let’s go position by position and see exactly how horrible the Yankees’ hitters are when compared to their salaries.

So the Yankees’ payroll for hitters alone is $139 million for 2016.  Although that is a big sum — a gigantic sum — it wouldn’t have been noteworthy if the big names had performed and driven the Yanks to a playoff run.  Instead, though, those big names have performed terribly (except for Beltran) and the Yankees have almost no chance of making the postseason.

Right now the MLB is averaging six million dollars per 1 WAR.  That may sound like a lot, but compared to the Yankees it is nothing.  Since it is halfway through the season, their 4.8 combined WAR is 9.6 on a full-season scale.  139 million divided by 9.6 is 14.5.  That means that the Yankees are paying $14.5 million per 1 WAR.  That is more than two times league average.  Although they are overpaying for many players, the big blows come from five players only:  Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, Carlos Beltran, Brian McCann, and Jacoby Ellsbury.  All these players signed their mega deals after one of, if not the best season in their careers.  Except for Beltran, who got a three-year deal, all these players signed deals for five or more seasons.  Here is the rundown on their salaries.

Alex Rodriguez:  Alex’s deal is probably the stupidest of all other Yankees deals in history.  He was signed to a 10-year deal with the Rangers in 2001, and was traded to the Yankees in 2004.  His contract would then expire after the 2010 season, when he would be 35 years old.  But the Yankees, for some reason, decided to renew his contract two years before it expired, in 2008.  If the Yankees had signed him to a new five-year deal, that would not have been too bad.  But instead, the Yankees signed him to another 10-year deal worth 275 million dollars, $25 million more than his former deal.  So now he is signed through the 2017 season, when he will be 43 years old.  If the Yankees would have only agreed to let A-Rod go after the 2010 season, they would have avoided all the bad/OK years of his career, which, incidentally, started in 2011.

Mark Teixeira:  In 2009, the Yankees signed Mark Teixeira, who was coming off of a 6.9 WAR season, to an eight-year, 180-million-dollar deal.  To be fair, it was not a bad signing for the Yanks.  Teixeira was 29 in his first year as a Yankee, and got a 142 WRC+ while accumulating a 5.1 WAR.  Then the next year he dipped to a still-respectable 3.4 WAR.  But he was on a downwards path.  After one final good year in 2011, he slowly declined into what he is now: an expensive waste of a perfectly good roster spot.  But don’t condemn the Yankees for that.  Yes, they probably slightly overpaid for a .250 average/30 HR first baseman, but it wasn’t a horrible signing.  What was bad about it was the deal itself.  Not the money involved or the years.  The reason.  Why did the Yankees need a first baseman?  The year before the deal, 2008, Jason Giambi hit 32 homers and had a 131 wRC+ at first.  Yes, his deal was up after the season, but the Yankees could have easily re-signed Giambi without having to pay him $180 million.  So the Yankees didn’t need Teixeira.  They just wanted him.  And that is the same trap they’ve fallen into ever since the dawn of free agency.

Carlos Beltran:  The Yankees signed Beltran to a three-year deal worth $45 million in 2014.  At the time, he was 36 and coming off a good season with the Cardinals.  In fact, it was a great season — hitting-wise.  At defense, there is no way around it.  He was simply terrible.  He made almost all of the plays he got to, but he didn’t get to many.  He couldn’t run fast if you pointed a gun at him.  And somehow, for some reason, the Yankees expected him to play outfield for three more seasons — until he was 39.  And guess what?  It hasn’t worked out too well.  His hitting has been very good, but that hitting value has been stripped from him by his terrible fielding.

Brian McCann:  In 2014, the Yankees signed Brian McCann to a five-year deal worth $85 million.  At the time, it seemed like a good deal; a catcher who could hit well, signed for only $17 million a year.  In any other circumstance, that would be considered a good deal.  A great deal even.  But there was one problem.  It was a 30-year-old catcher they signed for five years.  A 30-year-old catcher who most likely wouldn’t survive two more years crouching behind the plate every inning for 140 games a year.  So for two years, they Yankees got a good deal.  But this year is the third year of the deal.  And surprise, surprise, your 32 1/2-year-old catcher is not performing too well behind the plate.  -6 DRS there.  And, frankly, his hitting is just not good enough to compensate the bad fielding behind the plate.

Jacoby Ellsbury:  In 2014 the Yankees gave Jacoby Ellsbury a 153-million-dollar, seven-year deal.  Ellsbury, who was 30 years old in 2014 and had a history of getting injured, was coming off of a 5.0 WAR season.  But that was mostly due to his well above-average speed.  He used it to his advantage on the basepaths and in the outfield.  All that is fine and good, but there is one problem:  Speed is the first tool to disappear from a player’s repertoire because of age.  And the Yankees’ deal with Ellsbury started when he was 30.  And after a 39-steal year for the first year of the deal, Ellsbury unsurprisingly swiped only 20 bags in the second year.  He used to consistently have 10 DRS every season; now, with the loss of his speed, that 10 has turned into zero.  And aside from steals and defense, Ellsbury doesn’t hold much value.  He hits about five homers a season, and is good for a .280 average.  And five homers, a .280 average and 20 steals is not worth 21 million dollars a year.

So where do the Yankees go from here?  Beltran, Teixeira, and Rodriguez’s contracts will all end this year or the next.  Then they are stuck with only Ellsbury’s and McCann’s.  McCann’s expires in 2018, and, realistically, the Yankees can deal with $17 million a year for two more years.  And with the way Ellsbury’s been playing this year, the Yankees can easily trade him for a small prospect and pay half of his remaining contract.  So if they trade Ellsbury the Yankees will be left with an (almost) clean slate at the end of this year.  How do they fill it?  Here are some suggestions on what and what not to do.

1.  Stay away from pricey free agents ages 31+.

2. Make sure not to sign any player who will be 37+ at any point during the deal.

3. Pay attention to the draft.  For the next few years, the Yankees won’t be very good, so they should make use of their high draft picks and start developing prospects, rather than just buying overpriced free agents.

4.  Only buy value-high, salary-low free agents, i.e. Ben Zobrist.

5.  Stay away from deals spanning eight years or longer.

Let’s get more in-depth with these five bullet points.  Oh, yeah, there’s a sixth:

6.  Get a new G.M.

So let’s get more in-depth with these six bullet points.  1. Stay away from pricey free agents ages 31+:  This rule should be one the Yankees know well by now.  After breaking this rule many times with no good results, this rule should be a relatively easy one for the Yanks to swallow.  Remember, the rule states “pricey free agents,” so that doesn’t include older players (35-36; as you will see in the next bullet, signing Jamie Moyer is forbidden) who still retain some value and can be signed for cheap.

2.  Make sure not to sign any player who will be 37+ at any point during the deal:  It doesn’t matter if this deal is for three years or for 11.  The message is clear:  older players are at higher risk of either sharply declining or getting injured.

3.  Pay attention to the draft:  For most of their history, the Yankees lived in an era of no free agents, so they were able to rip the poor teams of their great prospects with the promise of good money.  Now, when almost every team has enough money, and those who don’t (Rays, Astros, Marlins, Pirates) are smart enough so that they won’t give away their prospects, this strategy is much harder.  So the Yankees switched their focus to high-priced free agents.  This new “strategy” has had its ups and downs.  Most of the ups came earlier, when teams didn’t try to retain their stars after the six years of cost-control.  Now, with many stars (Stanton, Strasburg) being offered luxurious extensions by their teams, most of the talent never hits the free-agent market until much later, when it is not worth much.  So, with extreme reluctance, the Yankees must turn their attention to the draft, an event they have somewhat ignored over the past years.  Although they do make an effort to sign players and do draft players with good potential, they have not made a real effort to dig deep and find hidden gems.  Remember, Mike Piazza was drafted in the 62nd round.  And furthermore, they must not be tempted to trade away these hidden gems they worked so hard to get in return for a major-league player with not half the talent as the prospect.

4.  Only buy high-value, low-salary free-agents:  In years past, this strategy would have worked wonders for the worst team in the league who has a small budget.  Imagine:  who would sign a .272 hitter with 10 homers to a 56-million-dollar contract 10 years ago?  Almost nobody.  But just this year, Ben Zobrist received that contract.  And according to WAR, he should have received more.  Here is a list of smart free agents for after the 2016 season:

Catcher:  There are three good catchers eligible for free agency after the 2016 season:  Jonathan Lucroy, Wilson Ramos, and Matt Wieters.  Out of the three, Jonathan Lucroy and Matt Wieters will most likely be the most wanted.  So that leaves Wilson Ramos.  He is 29 and a solid backstop with hitting potential.  Smart buy:  Wilson Ramos

First Base:  There are actually no standout smart buys at first base.  Justin Smoak, Carlos Santana, and Sean Rodriguez are all options.  The one who has the most value when compared the the estimated price, though, is Sean Rodriguez.  He is also one of the youngest first baseman of all free agents.  Smart buy:  Sean Rodriguez.

Second Base:  Most of the second base free agents next year are way above our target age.  The few that are in our age range are Gordon Beckham, Chris Coghlan, Daniel Descalso, and Neil Walker.  We can safely say that Gordon Beckham and Daniel Descalso are off the list, simply because they don’t provide the value to be a smart buy.  Neil Walker’s price will have shot way up after the amazing campaign he is having this year, so that leaves us with Chris Coghlan.  Chris, who is 32, holds loads of value as he can play second base as well as corner outfield positions.  He is also having one of the worst seasons of his career as of now, so he will be really cheap come the season’s end.  Smart buy:  Chris Coghlan.

Third Base:  At third there are only a few free agents in the Yankees’ age range.  They are Luis Valbuena, Justin Turner, and Martin Prado.  Luis Valbuena is eliminated, because he is too big and awkward to stick at third base.  Somewhere in his near future he will be transitioned to first base.  So that leaves us with Justin Turner and Martin Prado.  These are both good value picks, but Justin Turner must be eliminated.  He will be way too expensive, two years removed from the best season of his life (so far) and part of a playoff contending team.  Martin Prado is our smart buy for third base.  He has been amazingly consistent his whole career, and coming from the Marlins, his price tag will be relatively low.  Smart buy:  Martin Prado.

Shortstop:  There are only four shortstops available after the season ends, and three of them fit the basic criteria:  Alcides Escobar, Erick Aybar, and Ruben Tejada.  Ruben Tejada is the first elimination, as he does not have enough experience in the big leagues to validate his performance.  Alcides Escobar also must go, because he is most likely going to be re-signed by KC.  And even if he is not, his price will be driven up by their bids.  That leaves Erick Aybar.  He is consistent, and hardly ever injured.  He is also mired in a huge slump right now, which will significantly drive down his price.  Smart buy:  Erick Aybar.

Right Field:  There is simply no other competition for smart buy.  Josh Reddick has amazing defense in right, can hit very well, and is only 30 years old.  He is also playing for the obscure Athletics right now, which will drive down his price.  Smart buy:  Josh Reddick.

Left Field:  There are so many standout left fielders going into the 2016-2017 free agency that they will all drive down the price of each other.  That will allow the smart buy to be a big player.  The big left field names are Michael Saunders, Matt Holliday, Ian Desmond, and Yoenis Cespedes.  Matt Holliday is too old, so he’s out.  Yoenis Cespedes is too fluky, and can be injury-prone, so he’s also out.  That leaves us with Ian Desmond and Michael Saunders.  Both of these players are having breakout seasons so far.  Ian Desmond offers more flexibility in the field, as he can play shortstop, second base, and all the outfield positions, including center.  Michael Saunders might be a little cheaper, but it is hard to tell.  It was close but Ian Desmond is our smart buy for left field.  Smart buy:  Ian Desmond.

Center Field:  There are three very good possibilities:  Carlos Gomez, Dexter Fowler, and Austin Jackson.  Dexter Fowler would be a very good pick almost any other season, but he is having a breakout year so far for the Cubs, so he’s out.  Austin Jackson, on the other hand, is having one of his worst seasons ever.  The problem with him is that he doesn’t seem capable of ever making a return to the player he used to be.  He is coming off three straight seasons in which he failed to hit higher than .270.  So Carlos Gomez it is.  He has struggled mightily with the Astros, but that is probably just the effect of playing in a huge ballpark rather than in hitter-friendly Milwaukee.  Smart buy:  Carlos Gomez.

DH:  With many players to choose from, the only player that really catches the smart buyer’s eye is Pedro Alvarez.  He hasn’t found much playing time with power-packed Baltimore, so that will bring down his value significantly.  Smart buy:  Pedro Alvarez.

Starting Pitchers:  With so many choose from, there will be five smart buys for starting pitchers.  There are many soon-to-be free agent starting pitchers ages 28-31.  Smart buy #1 (note:  smart buy number does not imply any greater value for pitcher):  Brett Anderson.  Coming off an injury but with many years of experience with him, Brett Anderson is a great pick for any team.  Smart buy #2:  Jaime Garcia.  So far he has been OK this season, but very consistent.  A very good pick for any team looking for a cheap starting pitcher with a high ceiling.  Smart buy #3:  Jeremy Hellickson.  Hellickson has never had a horrible year in his career.  Although he did have one 5.00 E.R.A. year, he still had a positive WAR.  And aside from that season, he has been pretty good, but not good enough to warrant a big contract.  Smart buy #4:  Matt Moore.  Moore is a dependable, extremely young left-hander.  In fact, he is one of the youngest starting pitchers on the market for next year.  Smart Buy #5:  Ivan Nova.  Although he’s had a rough year so far, you have to love the potential!  He is only 30 years old, and best of all, he’s on the Yankees right now, so they have easy access to him.

Those are all the smart buys.  I am not suggesting that the Yankees sign every single one of those players, but three of four of them wouldn’t hurt.  In fact, they would most likely help the Yankees turn their club around quickly — much quicker than anyone projected them to.

5.  Stay away from deals spanning eight years or longer:  This rule will help prevent the Mark Teixeira deals, the Alex Rodriguez deals, and the Jacoby Ellsbury deals.  This way, if a player is signed for five years, and only performs well for three years of the deal, the Yankees only have to deal with two bad years.

6.  Get a new G.M:  Brian Cashman simply hasn’t gotten it done.  He was given a good team with an unlimited budget and has turned it into one of the worst clubs in baseball.

Hopefully, the Yankees will use their bad experiences to their advantage and become one of the smarter teams in baseball, a la the Astros, Rays, and Pirates.  With the help of these rules and suggestions, they can become the most dangerous team in the MLB, with money and smarts.

On June 30, Mets manager Terry Collins sent left-hander Steven Matz to the mound to face the Chicago Cubs. Matz turned in a modest performance, striking out six in 5 1/3 innings while surrendering two homers. Not a terrible outing, but a club as offensively challenged as the Mets can only afford so many starts like this. What made the outing of more than the usual interest was that this was Matz’ first appearance after the world learned he had a bone spur in his left elbow.

Bone spurs are not generally in and of themselves debilitating, but they can inflict significant pain. And since pain is your body’s way of saying “don’t do that again, you stupid git,” the pain a bone spur causes may in turn cause other changes to the pitcher’s usage patterns and delivery. Those changes might end well, or they might not. A cascade of other injuries and mechanical problems can follow.

So a bone spur presents player and team with a choice: the player can pitch through the injury, at reduced and perhaps increasingly decaying effectiveness, or opt for surgery, which resolves the problem but sidelines the player for several months. In Matz’ case, surgery could doom his season.

If Matz were an entirely independent actor, surgery would seem the rational choice. Like all players, Matz’ overriding goal is to get The Contract: the multiyear 7-8 figure deal that will provide financial independence for Matz and his family for as long they subsist on this benighted orb. (Matz will tell you his overriding goal is to win a World Series, but that’s probably number two on his list.) By skipping the rest of this season and coming back healthy next year, Matz probably boosts the odds of making it to The Contract before critical elements of his body begin to rebel.

But Matz is not truly independent: the Mets organization, his teammates, and Baseball Tradition all exert substantial influence. Peer pressure may play a significant role here. Even John Smoltz, one of the most intelligent minds in baseball broadcasting today, discussed Matz’ bone spur (and Noah Syndergaard’s apparently smaller one) in a recent Fox broadcast with the quit-whining-and-rub-some-dirt-on-it machismo that would hardly have been out of place a century ago.

Smoltz said the pitchers can deal with bone spurs by changing their pitch selection, and there is some evidence Matz is doing just that. He used his slider at a 15% clip in April and May; in June he abandoned it. His velocity, however, is essentially unchanged, and he’s using his other pitches more or less as he always has.

So maybe Matz is reacting to the pain, maybe not. But he would certainly pay a price if he seemed to be reacting in a highly visible way. For all the analytical advancements of the past quarter-century, players are still expected to suffer in silence. Those who don’t may “lose the manager’s trust,” and have fewer opportunities to establish that they merit The Contract. I’m no fan of conformity, but it is sometimes the economically rational decision.

Mets’ GM Sandy Alderson views the Matz dilemma through a substantially different risk-assessment prism. As long as the Mets have a good shot at the playoffs, Alderson has little incentive to see Matz hit The List for any significant length of time, at least unless and until his performance seriously deteriorates. The supposedly pitching-rich Mets have nothing behind their current top five starters. No, not even Rafael Montero, who is putting up a 6+ ERA in Las Vegas this year. What stinks in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Further concentrating Alderson’s mind are the Mets’ playoff odds. This is a borderline playoff team; FanGraphs says the Mets have a 56% chance of making the playoffs, but most of that 56% just puts the Mets in the wild card. Still, that’s a five-point jump from last Wednesday, before the Mets ripped off a four-game sweep of the 1927 Yan– er — I mean, the Cubs. But sadly for the Mets, the division-leading Nationals have also been swatting aside opponents with cavalier disregard — most of the Mets’ playoff gain came at the expense of the Fighting Lorians.

Like Matz, Alderson faces a tough decision: how to balance the future against the now. The Mets are neither clearly bad enough to play for next year, nor clearly good enough to play for this one. Their roster is largely set for the near future; of their significant contributors only Neil Walker will walk at the end of the season, likely to be replaced by Dilson Herrera. The Mets are ninth in attendance, 14th in local television revenue, and 16th in payroll. They are also first in BMI (Bernie Madoff Influenza). This isn’t a team that can likely add a lot of payroll, particularly if they intend eventually to fork over some major bitcoin for at least some of the current starting rotation.

The Mets have three prospects in MLB’s top 100, but just one (Dominic Smith) in the top 50, and Smith barely clears that hurdle at #45. Although showing some increased power this year, Smith threatens to develop into the next James Loney, a threat so grave that Alderson fended it off (momentarily at least) by bringing in the current edition to fill in for the wounded Lucas Duda at first. Young shortstop Gavin Cecchini is raking at AAA to the tune of an .871 OPS, but he only recently found the rake in the back of his garage behind the broken foosball table; his career minor-league OPS is a pedestrian .745. Alderson is showing his faith in Cecchini by filling the Mets’ yawning chasm at third with an incipient public relations disaster.

Alderson has a little time. Playoff chances can swing wildly during the season, as he discovered last year. In three weeks he’ll have a better idea of where the Mets stand, and can then make a decision regarding Matz. If the Mets collapse, then the incentives for both team and pitcher come into alignment, and Matz will likely have surgery. If the Mets surge (they did, after all, finally find Nimmo), then he’ll ask Matz to shut the hell up and rub some dirt on it. Unlike some of his co-rotationists, Matz isn’t a superhero. He’ll do what he’s told, while watching with trepidation as The Contract recedes into the future.

There are good systems, there are poor systems, then there’s 50 pounds of effluence, and then there’s the Marlins. Add another 50 pounds, and you’ve finally reached the Angels.

– Baseball Prospectus, 2016

Disclaimer: The side effects of reading through the entire Angels Top 30 may include drowsiness and an upset stomach.

– Baseball America Prospect Handbook, 2016

I’ve been doing these rankings for eight years now, and this is by far the worst system I’ve ever seen.

– Keith Law, 2016

The practice of farming is prohibited. All right or claim of a major league club to a player shall cease when such player becomes a member of a minor league club, and no arrangement between clubs for the loan or return of a player shall be binding between the parties to it or recognized by other clubs.

– National Agreement, Article VI, Section 4 (1903)

Sometimes the most important things are the things that aren’t there. Those words from the 1903 National Agreement, the peace treaty ending the brief but intense war between the National and American Leagues, were omitted from the revised agreement in 1921. And into that omission rushed Branch Rickey, who did not invent the practice of “farming” minor league players, but who perfected it with a ruthless efficiency that real farmers would only achieve much later with he generous application of pesticides. Rickey purchased not players, but teams, and in some cases entire leagues.

The 1903 farming ban codified, albeit temporarily, the American League’s declaration of independence from the National League, first issued in 1901. The farming ban was Ban Johnson’s announcement to the world that no one was going to treat his league’s players as farmhands. The ban also helped secure the loyalty of the Players’ Protective Association, an incipient union opposed to the practice (see pdf p.2), and was one factor encouraging star players to jump to the new league.

Major league owners routinely eluded the farming ban, however, and by 1920, baseball’s next crisis year, the ban was on the ropes. Wracked by gambling scandals, poor wartime attendance, and the ghastly death of Ray Chapman, organized baseball forged a new National Agreement in 1921. The new agreement omitted the farming ban, perhaps because the AL, having by that time firmly achieved major league status, lost interest in the cause of player liberty. Although Commissioner Landis despised the concept of farm systems, he was largely unable to prevent their development.

Landis failed because the economic logic of farm systems is unassailable: By owning most (though certainly not all) aspects of the production process, major league teams could greatly reduce the transaction costs inherent in developing major league-caliber players. Farm systems also limit the competition among teams for minor league player’s services. After the draft, the player is essentially under team ownership for several years, unable to work for any other team without the owning franchise’s consent.

Every major league team eventually developed a farm system, though (as Bill James has noted) laggards like the Cubs and Pirates paid a heavy price, suffering through years of mediocrity beginning in the 1940s. It is now impossible to imagine a major league team without a farm system. Or at least it was until this year. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim today stand on the threshold of an alternate future, a future in which Judge Landis won. Alone among MLB franchises, the Angels today entirely fail to benefit from the major league owners’ long twilight struggle to reduce minor league players to peonage.

I want players. Lots and lots of players.

– Billy Eppler, 2016

The Angels’ recently minted general manager, Billy Eppler, will lead the team through the next phase of its dystopian journey. To be fair, it’s not exactly true that the Angels have no farm system at all — they have minor league affiliates in thrall to the major league club, just like other major league clubs do. And those affiliates may even win a few games (so far, just a few). But the system is bereft of impact talent at any level. A handful of these guys will turn out much better than now perceived, but the vast majority won’t. The next pennant winning Angels lineup and rotation is invisible without experimental pharmacological assistance.

One way to get “lots and lots of players,” or at least a relatively large haul of good players, would be to trade Mike Trout. The idea has been debated on these pages and elsewhere, and I don’t propose to rehash the details here. One thing Eppler might want to consider, however, if he contemplates such a drastic move is that nothing of the kind has ever happened in baseball history. Nothing even close.

Trout had a 9.4 bWAR last year; no player with that high a WAR has ever been traded in the following season. Connie Mack infamously sold Eddie Collins and his 9.1 bWAR to the White Sox after the 1914 season. The woeful Boston Braves traded Rogers Hornsby (8.8 bWAR) to the Cubs after the 1928 season for a clown car of substandard players and $200,000 in a classic salary dump.

Mike Piazza was traded twice in one year after his 8.7 bWAR in 1997. First, the Dodgers shipped him to the Marlins in exchange for a pile of good but expensive players; in this odd case the salary-dumping team received a superstar, although it also unloaded a superstar in Gary Sheffield. The Marlins then Marlined it up real good just one week after Piazza put on the teal, sending him to the Mets for Geoff Goetz, Preston Wilson, and Ed Yarnall. Centuries from now the Marlins will be viewed as we view the giant Moai of Easter Island: with a mixture of awe at the achievement and amazement that the people responsible failed to put their limited resources to better use.

And that’s about it for the top 200 player-seasons. So Eppler would be piloting the S.S. Anaheim into uncharted seas if he traded Trout; there is no comparable trade out there by which one could even vaguely assess his value.  That doesn’t mean Eppler shouldn’t try, but he shouldn’t try too hard. Trout is still just 24, and it is conceivable that the next pennant winning Angels lineup could still have him in it. No other GM in baseball history has seen fit to trade a player of Trout’s caliber; Eppler should be wary of being the first.

There is another way, pioneered by a team just a few hours north on the 5. In 2002 the San Francisco Baseball Giants made it to the World Series with a team that GM Brian Sabean had built around Barry Bonds. Bonds, for you youngsters out there, was the Oughties’ Mike Trout, though I suspect that both men would bristle at the comparison. Drug-fueled or not, Bonds dominated the game like few ever have, yet Sabean labored mightily to get Bonds into the World Series. Ultimately, Sabean achieved this not by tending crops in the blazing fields from dawn to dusk, interrupted only by a cholesterol-laced dinner at noon. Your 2002 Giants had exactly one (1) player with a bWAR over 1.o who had come up through the Giants farm system. That was Russ Ortiz, a pitcher many may remember as a failure because the red crystal in his palm began glowing right after his age 30 season, but up to that point he was a reliable innings eater with roughly a league average ERA.

So here’s the point:

Giants total 2002 bWAR: 50.6

Giants 2002 bWAR from home-grown players:  5.3

Yeesh. Tony Torcato. Damon Minor. Trey Lunsford. Yep, they’re in the 5.3, and they’ll be gleefully wielding flaming pitchforks in Scouting Hell. The news wasn’t all awful — Joe Nathan is in that 5.3, as is the aforementioned Ortiz. But it’s safe to say that the 2002 Giants are a team that Judge Landis might have liked. Well, you know, except the PED part.

So how did Sabean do it? If you haven’t guessed the answer, you probably should consider taking some of those self-paced training courses you’ve been blowing off. He signed him a passel o’ free agents (including Bonds himself, of course, as well as Reggie Sanders (3.5 bWAR in 2002) and Benito Santiago (2.6)). And he traded. Oh, did he trade. Jeff Kent was the most critical acquisition, amassing a 7.0 bWAR in 2002, which, as the alert reader will quickly grasp, exceeded the entire Giants farm produce by a wide margin. Here are the other significant guys Sabean dealt for:

David Bell (3.2)

Kirk Rueter (3.0)

Robb Nen (2.5)

Jason Schmidt (2.3)

Tsuyoshi Shinjo (1.9)

Kenny Lofton (1.7)

Tim Worrell (1.5)

That’s 15.9 bWAR for those of you keeping score at home, and adding in Kent brings the total to 22.9, or just under half of the Giants’ 2002 total. The best players traded away for those guys, by far, were Matt Williams (cumulative 12.5 bWAR after being traded for Kent) and Bill Mueller (11.8 cumulative bWAR after being traded for Worrell). Given that Williams brought Jeff Kent, the only clear mistake in hindsight was Mueller, an outstanding but aging and fragile player who put together some memorable late career seasons after being traded for Tim Worrell.  That trade may not have worked as Sabean would have hoped, but it was defensible at the time.

So the Chapter 7 condition of the Angels’ farm system doesn’t necessarily prevent Eppler from remaking his roster. But it does severely constrain his efforts; the players Sabean traded away for the most part didn’t pan out, but he was able to convince other baseball executives that they would, executives who get paid good coin to see through exactly this kind of B.S. (those are Sabean’s initials — it’s probably a coincidence). Eppler doesn’t even have enough talent on the farm to fake it.

But the current Angels major league roster has some useful bits in addition to Trout. Kole Calhoun, Andrelton Simmons, and Garret Richards (albeit currently with a UCL subject to manufacturer recall) aren’t exactly a “core,” but they’re not a bad franchise starter kit. Nick Tropeano and Andrew Heaney (albeit currently with a UCL subject to manufacturer recall) offer some hope that young Angels fans might see a quality start before they have their first legal beer. And Josh Hamilton’s $26 million of dead weight exits the ledger after this year. The Angels will be paying Albert Pujols until humans colonize the Alpha Centauri system, but other than that, their contracts aren’t awful.

So one plan might include trading some (though certainly not all) of the above-named players, especially Calhoun, who is developing into an advanced hitter at a somewhat advanced age. It will also include signing free agents in bunches, more than Sabean did. Harder to do now than in the past, given that teams seem to be locking up their top-tier young players with greater frequency, but this is why scouts get paid (or should get paid) the big dollars. Some franchise (do I smell fish?) will undervalue its own talent, and Eppler must be there to pick up the pieces.

Or he can trade Trout.

I’m glad I’m not Billy Eppler.

Last year the once lowly Cubs won 97 games, and the also once lowly Astros won 86. Because both clubs had been as bad as Trump’s rug for years, many attributed these successes to the practice of tanking — intentionally losing games to acquire high draft picks with which to rebuild. This year, the Astros have gone a bit backward in the early going, thanks mainly to an incendiary pitching staff (if you had this guy second among Houston pitchers in WAR by mid-May, stop reading this right now and go fix world hunger). The Cubs have continued to roll, and as you know are currently on a pace to win 3.4 billion games this year. Those tanks seem unstoppable.

The interwebs were aflame with tanking debates during the offseason, with some saying it’s destroying Our Way of Life, and others saying well, no, it isn’t. This seems like a question susceptible to analysis using a new statistic with a vaguely humorous name. But before we get to that, we need to define the “tank” — I consider it to be the bottom six teams in the majors in any year. I arrived at six by rigorously counting the number of divisions in major-league baseball, and assuming that in most years the bottom six teams will be in their respective divisional cellars. This won’t always be true, but it will seldom be egregiously false.

So a team in the tank gets one of the top six draft picks in the following June draft. The new statistic, TankWAR, is simply the WAR attributable to each player the team drafted with a top-six pick, or to players obtained by trading one of those top-six players.

The Cubs and Astros each had four tank picks in the last ten drafts, twice the random expectation. The italicized players have reached the majors.

Cubs Tank Picks 2006-2015

Albert Almora (6) 2012

Kris Bryant (2) 2013

Warbird (4) 2014

Astros Tank Picks 2006-2015

Carlos Correa (1) 2012

Mark Appel (1) 2013

Brady Aiken (1) 2014

Alex Bregman (2) 2015

Last year the Cubs accumulated 50.2 WAR. Bryant contributed 6.5 of that, while Kyle Schwarber added another 1.9. So the Cubs’ TankWAR last year was 8.4, or 16.7% of the team total. On the one hand, the Cubs probably would have come close to 90 wins without these guys. On the other hand, wins 90-97 are among the most valuable in baseball. On the third hand, last year it wouldn’t have made a difference. At 89 wins or 97 the Cubs were the second wild card. On the fourth hand, that’s probably pretty rare.

Also note that of the Cubs’ starting 13 (eight position players plus five starting pitchers) only Bryant and Schwarber were Cubs draftees. The team acquired the other 11 through trades and free-agent (including international) signings. To put it another way, 42 of the Cubs 50 WAR came from players that every other GM had access to regardless of the previous year’s record.

This year, the Cubs’ TankWAR is just 1.4 (with Bryant contributing 1.5 and Schwarber subtracting 0.1 before suffering his season ending injury). That’s just under 10% of the Cubs’ total WAR of 15.6. So however important tanking was to the Cubs last year, this year it’s mattered less thus far.

For the Astros, Carlos Correa put up a 3.3 TankWAR in 2015, just over 7% of the Astros total of 44.6. Those three wins put the Astros in the playoffs — without them, The Fightin’ (and I do mean fightin’) Scioscias would have been in. To no one’s great surprise, in the current season Correa has just about doubled his contribution to the team — his 0.8 TankWAR is 14% of the team’s 5.6 total. (In theory, Ken Giles‘ -0.3 WAR could also be considered TankWAR since Mark Appel was one of the Ryder-load of prospects Houston traded for him, but Appel seemed to be an afterthought in that deal.)

The Astros were a more draft-dependent team than the Cubs in 2015, with six of their 14 regulars (including the DH) being Houston draftees. George Springer was by far the highest pick of the lot, costing Houston the 11th overall pick, thanks to the Astros bad-but-not-especially-tankly 76-86 finish in 2010 (good for fourth of six in the then-bloated NL Central). Most of the Houston draftees were guys that the other 29 GMs had passed over, and over, and sometimes even over again.

Both teams still have solid farm systems, if somewhat less spectacular than in recent years thanks to graduations and in the Astros’ case, that ill-advised Giles trade. The tank picks currently in their respective systems could help their teams relatively soon. But these teams are already very good. The remaining tank draftees won’t be turning their teams around so much as extending their respective windows of success, either by joining the big club or anchoring key trades.

So the evidence that tanking works is mixed. Both teams have benefited from their tank picks, but it is a significant exaggeration to say the Cubs’ and Astros’ recent successes are solely or even primarily because of tanking. However, Bryant and Correa in particular are players that can move their teams from good to great. These are the kinds of players that will typically be available only to the very worst teams under the current draft system. Thus, the worrywarts aren’t entirely … wartless — there will always be some incentive under some circumstances to get one of those top picks.

That said, the case for making major rules changes in response to tanking remains thin. While it’s clear that in recent years the Cubs and Astros lacked quality major-league talent, it isn’t at all clear that they were deliberately trying to sabotage their rosters (the case of Kris Bryant’s AAA hostage drama is a different problem). And, as noted above, most of the Cubs’ and Astros’ WAR during their recent resurgence has come from players who they could have obtained whether they had tanked or not. Indeed, one of the most tank-dependent teams of all time, your 2008 World Series Rays, obtained less than a quarter of its WAR from tank picks.

Another thing to bear in mind is that every team is different. For some teams, attendance is highly correlated with winning percentage, and for others, not so much. Tanking will probably cost the highly correlated teams more revenue, making it harder for those teams to finance the other rebuilding components. The low correlation teams have more patient fans and thus may have the room to explore more radical roster revision approaches.

Thus, a patient fan base is an asset. Changing the rules to prevent death-and-resurrection rebuilds isn’t a neutral solution — it would directly favor the teams whose fans desert them in the lean years (these are discussed in detail in the preceding link), and disfavor the teams with patient fans (like the Cubs and the Astros). The case hasn’t been made that the patient fan problem is so egregious that it needs to be legislated out of existence; indeed, it isn’t clear there’s a problem here at all. Each franchise (well, maybe except this one) tries to win by maximizing the advantages it has over its competitors while minimizing the impact of its relative weaknesses.

That doesn’t sound very nefarious. In fact, it sounds a lot like baseball.

I am a Braves optimist. I believe that the Braves are just a typically bad team on their way to a typically bad season.

I am a Braves pessimist. I believe that 60 wins would be a miracle for this travesty of a team. I think they would be no better than average in the International League.

You’re overreacting. Yeah, an 8-24 record is nothing to brag about, but that isn’t an historically awful month. I mean, just least year, the Phillies had a 3-19 stretch in May and June, and they didn’t even lose 100 games that season. Or even better, look at the Twins, they’ve only won one none more games than the Braves. No one is talking about them as a historically bad team. I mean, the 2014 Giants, who won the World Series, had a 7-21 stretch in June. Calm down, it’s only May.

This isn’t simply a matter of the Braves having a poor stretch. The Braves simply don’t have good players. Freddie Freeman is good, Ender Inciarte is probably all right, and Nick Markakis is average. And that’s it. Their top two pitchers are Julio Teheran, who won’t be a Brave in two months, and Jhoulys Chacin, who hasn’t pitched 100 innings since 2013, and who has also now been traded so nevermind. The Braves have a severe lack of talent, and the little talent they have is going to be traded away.

Yeah the team doesn’t have very many established quality players, but help is on the way. Mallex Smith is already up and Dansby Swanson is on the way. Aaron Blair. Maybe they can get something out of Hector Olivera. The kids on the way will help boost the offense once Markakis and Aybar get traded away midseason.

What offense is there to boost? The Braves’ team wRC+ is 57. The 1920 Athletics, the worst hitting team of all time, had a wRC+ of 67. The team has hit seven home runs. Trevor Story did that in about a week. Ryan Howard’s rotting corpse has hit about as many home runs as this entire team. And it isn’t like they have been unlucky. The team’s BABIP is .289, which is just about league average. By BaseRuns the Braves have won exactly as many games as the ought to have. In fact, BaseRuns calculates that the Braves should be averaging 2.6 runs per game.

The Braves’ BaseRuns are bad, but the Brewers and Reds haven’t exactly been much better. Besides, the Braves are still projected to win 60 games if you look at the depth charts. Even if you think that’s too optimistic, its probably not 15 wins too optimistic, which is what it would have to be for the Braves to be historically bad.

The 1962 Mets were better through 28 games than the 2016 Braves have been. They lost 120 games. The Braves are on pace to lose 124.

Wait a second, you aren’t even responding to my points, you’re just saying scary things.

The Braves’ run differential is -63. Extrapolate that out to 162 games and that’s -340. The 119-loss 2003 Tigers had a run differential of -337.

I GET IT! The Braves have been truly awful so far. But they’ve had a ridiculous schedule too. The worst two teams they have faced so far are the Marlins and the Diamondbacks, and they went 3-3 against them. Once the Braves get some games against the Phillies, Reds, and Brewers, their record will improve.

The Braves are 2-16 at home.

But they’re 6-8 on the road! That’s actually not terrible!

Ryan Weber is sixth on the team in offensive value among players with plate appearances. He is a reliever. He grounded out in his one at bat.

But…. but..

Also, Jeff Francoeur.

Oh

Embrace the darkness, my child.

The first week of April in Pittsburgh felt like a National League Division Series in the midst of October with tons of energy and excitement. Francisco Liriano threw six shutout innings with 10 strikeouts and led the Pirates to a game 1 win. In game 2, the Pirates revived some late-inning magic from 2015 and walked off in the 11th on a Jordy Mercer single down the first base line. In game 3, Juan Nicasio showed many that his spring training stats were not a fluke and led the Pirates to a 5-1 win. The Pirates started 2016 with a three-game sweep of the division rival St. Louis Cardinals and “yinzers” were ecstatic. FanGraphs’ very own Jeff Sullivan wrote a piece examining the changes in playoff odds after just one week of play. His chart had the Pirates’ odds increasing by seven percentage points, while the Cardinals’ odds decreased by almost five percentage points. While it was only the first series of the season between the two teams, it still meant something. However, since that series, the Pirates have faced many ups and downs. Let me elaborate.

Before entering the 2016 season, one major concern of a Pirates’ fan could have been the rotation that they decided to bring north, which consisted of Francisco Lirano, Gerrit Cole, Jon Niese, Juan Nicasio, and Jeff Locke. You will not mistake this rotation with the Mets’ fab four or the Indians’ top three anytime soon. The other night, Jeff Locke surrendered 11 hits and eight earned runs in just three innings against a Padres offense who struggled to score a run in their opening series of the season. On Tuesday night, Liriano returned from a “hamstring injury” by giving up two homers and walking five. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel with former number-two overall pick Jameson Taillon and top prospect Tyler Glasnow nearing their debuts. Believe it or not, pitching may not be the Pirates’ primary concern at the moment.

In the past three years, as an avid fan of the Pirates, I have noticed an ongoing inability to move runners and take advantage of any sort of small-ball approach. Therefore, I decided to take a look at the numbers. Through the first 15 games of 2016, the Pirates are last in the league with 9.33 runners left on base per game. Minnesota comes in a distant second with 7.93 runners left on base per game. Now, I am very well aware of the small sample size. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by early-season statistics, such as Gerrit Cole starting with an 0-2 record and a 4.22 ERA, but we are only 15 games into a 162-game season and there are many more important statistics than ERA. While the Pirates are leaving the most runners on base per game, they are also sporting the highest team OBP (.380) in the league. Coming in second is the St. Louis Cardinals with a .348 team OBP. Due to the small sample size, I decided to take a look at the past two seasons where I have also noticed their inability to move runners.

In 2015, the Pirates came in dead last in all of baseball with 7.22 runners left on base per game. However, they sported a top-10 OBP of .323, which was not far behind the league’s best OBP of .340 by the Toronto Blue Jays. Lets take another step back. In 2014, the Pirates finished 29th in the league with 7.35 runners left on base per game. The only team to leave more runners on base that year was the Tampa Bay Rays (7.36). Surprisingly, the Pirates finished third in team OBP (.330) trailing only the Detroit Tigers (.331) and the Los Angeles Dodgers (.333).

Interpret this however you may like, but it is apparent that the Pirates lack a very important skillset of moving runners, or executing successful situational baseball. In the past three years, the Pirates have finished in the top 10 in stolen bases. While this statistic is by no means the only measure of team speed, it is very clear that the Pirates have some speed and athleticism in their lineup among guys like Andrew McCutchen, Starling Marte, Gregory Polanco, Josh Harrison, and Jordy Mercer. These are not guys that should be taken lightly on the base paths. According to Moneyball, Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s went after undervalued position players who had a knack for getting on base, thus, scoring more runs. So far, the Pirates are getting on base more than anybody this year. With better pitching performances from their rotation and moving runners more efficiently, whether that’s through more smallball or just better situational hitting, the Pirates could easily be one of the better teams in the league this year. Don’t lose hope too early, Pittsburgh.

Recently the New York Mets took the lead in the top of the first inning for the fifth straight game, setting the tone early in their 11-1 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies.  The Mets hitters looked extremely comfortable in the batter’s box, taking aggressive swings at good pitches all game.  The result was 11 runs all scoring through six home runs.  After hitting only two home runs in the first eight games of this season, the Mets have hit 17 home runs over their last five.

Every good team hits home runs, especially timely home runs.  However, great teams don’t need a lot of home runs.  Great teams live by the old adage, get on, get over and get in, meaning, get on base, advance on the base paths and score.

Since the wild card playoff system began in 1995, only two of 21 World Series championship teams finished in the top four in home runs during the regular season (2008 Phillies, 2009 New York Yankees).  However, during the same span of time, eight of 21 World Series championship teams finished in the top four in on-base percentage during the regular season, including 13 champions finishing in the top 10.

Home runs are an exciting, quick confidence boost for a batting lineup.  The only problem for a home-run-reliant team is home runs come in bunches.  Between facing MLB pitching every night and the natural difficulty in hitting a home run, sustaining home runs every game and the corresponding confidence is extremely difficult.

Conversely, a lineup with high on-base percentage forces the pitcher to uncomfortably pitch from the stretch more often and drives up pitch count which helps get the opposing starting pitcher out of the game earlier and into the opposing team’s weaker bullpen pitchers.

Currently, the Mets rank sixth in Major League Baseball with 19 home runs, two behind the third-ranked teams.  However, the Mets rank 21st in MLB in on-base percentage, 20th in batting average and have scored 56.6% of their total runs through home runs (30 of 53 runs).

Comparatively, the St. Louis Cardinals rank third in MLB with 21 home runs.  However, the Cardinals are second in MLB in on-base percentage, fifth in batting average and have scored 44.2% of their total runs through home runs (38 of 86 runs).

Additionally, the Mets are 24th in contact rate (percent of swings on which contact was made) and 29th on O-Contact rate (percent on which contact was made on swings outside the strike zone) according to FanGraphs.  What does that even mean?

A low contact percentage creates fewer balls in play resulting in a lower opportunity for the Mets to get hits and a greater challenge advancing runners along the bases.  The O-Contact rate shows the Mets aren’t hitting bad pitches, particularly two-strike pitches, well, a staple of many great teams (see 2015 Royals, recent Cardinals and Giants teams).  Making high contact percentages with pitches outside the strike zone lowers strikeout rates, forcing opposing pitchers to throw more pitches and puts additional pressure on the fielders to complete more defensive outs.

Additionally, in the nine games the Mets hit one home run or none, they averaged 2.9 runs per game.  In the other four games hitting two or more home runs, the Mets averaged 6.8 runs per game.  Obviously, runs per game will be higher when two or more home runs are hit but the disparity shouldn’t be as high as almost four runs or 2.3 times as high.

I’m not suggesting Mets hitters can’t manufacture runs through singles, extra-base hits and taking extra bases (not only by steals but going first to third on singles).  I’m not suggesting it’s time to panic.  I’m suggesting it’s something to pay attention to as the season progresses.

It’s like Rob Deer and Gorman Thomas don’t even know this franchise anymore.  What happened to our free-swinging Brewers, the same ones that just two seasons ago had Carlos Gomez remarking, “It has to be, like, wayyy a ball for us to not swing…everybody here has the green light?”

Well, for one, a small sample size.

But, through mid-April in 2016, the Brewers have swung less than any other team in baseball.  This, after swinging the second-most in each of the past two seasons.  They’re swinging less at pitches out of the zone, and they’re swinging less at pitches in the zone, leading to sequences like this from Monday:

And then Domingo Santana also struck out looking to lead off the sixth!

So, to recap: we’re less than two weeks into the season and not even at the point where swing rate has stabilized.  But it sure looks like the Brewers are making a concerted effort to swing less, given the drastic fluctuations in their swing rates from the past couple of years:

Part of that must be the overhaul the organization has gone through in the past year.  Jean Segura and Carlos Gomez both swung at over half the pitches they saw in 2015, and their O-Swing% was north of the team average.  Adam Lind and Gerardo Parra also chased and drove the team’s O-Swing% up.  So it’s partially a function of a new team with a new front office that may place a higher premium for on-base guys.

But the holdover hitters from last year have also seen their swing rates decrease both outside the zone and overall.  Ryan Braun, Scooter Gennett, and Domingo Santana have thus far decreased their O-Swing% from last year’s totals by 10% or more in the early going.  Brewers beat reporter Tom Haurdicourt reported Manager Craig Counsell saying, “It’s an everyday message (to the hitters) and it’s really about swinging at good pitches.  It’s discipline. (Hitting coach) Darnell (Coles) is preaching that every day.”

This mix of the front office acquiring more on-base players and the on-field management working with the players on adjustments seems to be making an impact.  The Brewers are fifth in walk rate, after finishing in the bottom third each of the previous three seasons.

Whether this is an organizational philosophy change, or more a function of the players on the current roster remains to be seen.  Or, given the small sample size, this could look completely different in May, with the Brewers back to their free-swinging ways and me wondering why I didn’t use this time instead to plant those jalapenos I’ve been meaning to get around to, but now it’s too late and the harvest won’t come until at least September.

In the meantime this is something to watch for a young team with more organizational talent than Milwaukee has seen in a while, and that is sure to go through rough stretches in a rebuilding year.  The new and veteran Brewers are watching pitches, and we’ll watch with them, watching pitches.

Steven Matz’s season debut quickly went south, with him giving up seven earned runs in the second inning en route to a 10-3 New York Mets loss against the Miami Marlins.  Matz exhibited one mechanic flaw leading to his lack of command, particularly in two-strike counts, resulting in the Marlins’ second-inning carousel around the bases.

Steven Matz (L, 0-1) 1.2 IP, 7 R, 6 H, 1 SO, 2 BB

Arrows were pointing up after watching a 1-2-3 first inning with fastball velocity at 95 mph, culminating in striking out one of Major League Baseball’s best power hitters, Giancarlo Stanton.

Unfortunately, Matz started the second inning breaking one of the cardinal rules of pitching: walking leadoff man Martin Prado.  When a leadoff hitter makes it to first base, he scores approximately 35% of the time.  Making matters worse, Matz walked the following batter, Chris Johnson.  Five of the next seven batters ground out hits, including a Giancarlo Stanton man-bomb home run to left field, knocking Matz out of the game.

The frustrating aspect for Matz and Mets fans alike was during all three Marlins RBI single at-bats, Matz was ahead in the count 1-2 or 2-2.  Matz proceeded throwing hanging curveball after hanging curveball.  Even in Marcell Ozuna’s pop-out, both two-strike pitches were hanging curveballs which thankfully Ozuna missed (Side note: Ozuna can’t hit an outside pitch….at all).  Obviously, Matz’s objective was not to hang curveballs or throw hittable two-strike pitches.  The reason lies in Matz’s release point.

Simply, Matz’s throwing arm lagged behind his body forcing his release point to be late, rushed and higher than normal as opposed to his normal release point out in front of his body.  This results in an inability for Matz’s throwing fingers to stay on top of the baseball.

Matz, and every other Major League pitcher, needs his fingers on top of the baseball at release, allowing his fingers to stay on top of the seams on the baseball.  This allows his fingers to manipulate the spin of the baseball at release, whether ripping down on the seams for a four-seam fastball or getting over the top of the baseball throwing a curveball.

Consequently, Matz’s fingers come around the seams of the baseball instead of over the seams of the baseball when throwing his curveball, resulting in a weak spin rate and a floating or hanging curveball.  Additionally, fastballs tend to sail high and towards the throwing arm side (up and to the left for Matz) out of the strike zone as seen in four straight fastballs during Prado’s leadoff walk.

Why Matz’s arm lagged is a separate question I couldn’t unveil through the TV broadcast.  Originally, Matz appeared throwing across his body, meaning his stride/planting leg lands too far left towards first base, blocking off his arm from releasing the baseball out in front of his body.  But this was not the case as Matz was landing with good alignment towards home plate.  Other reasons could include rushing his motion or opening his front shoulder and glove hand too soon but I didn’t see those either.

Whatever the reason, pitching on ten days’ rest is very difficult, especially for a starting pitcher in a rhythm and routine created during spring training.  Do not put too much stress in the results of this start.

I’ve been wondering to myself lately: “Self, what would it take for another Rockies player to win an MVP?” and yeah I know that whole winning thing goes a long way but I’m fairly unfamiliar with that as a Rockies fan. This has been in my mind all offseason long after the Rockies’ Nolan Arenado could barely break the top 10 after hitting 42 HR (22 on the road) and knocking in 130 runs and hitting .287. Oh yeah — and getting a Gold Glove as the hard-to-argue best defensive third baseman in the NL if not all of MLB. To try and figure this out I decided to see what makes an MVP using stats since I can’t quantify the minds of the writers that vote.

Since I wanted to see the Coors Field stigma that is placed on players statistically I chose wRC+ because it’s one of the best park-adjusted stats to see how much better than the rest of the league a player was. Then I tallied the wRC+ and WAR for the top five players in each league from 2009 – 2015. I stopped at 2009 because it became apparent before 2009 that these stats would not somewhat closely represent the best players vs the vote-getters. For the years in which pitchers won/made the top five I used FIP-.

At this point I’ve got all my players and their respective stats. To even things out a bit between wRC+ and FIP- I subtracted 100 from wRC+ and inverted FIP- and subtracted 100 so it became a points system essentially with 0 being average and seeing just how far from average players were. I then averaged out the points and WAR needed for 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place and so on and here is what I found.

So I now had my “baseline,” per se, of what to look for in past Rockies seasons to see what a season would look like that is good enough for the stigma to break and a player have a chance to win the MVP. First-place vote-getters in the NL average right at a 170 wRC+ (170-100=70 points in this article), 2nd place averaged 160 wRC+. By the way if we take away Bryce Harper’s insane season in 2015 with his wRC+ of 197 it drops to 165 wRC+ average; his season was 17 points higher than the next-highest in the NL in the past seven years. We will look into that later but for now I need to look for Rockies players with a 170 wRC+. Well that was easy, there is only one, and it’s the only Rockies MVP ever.

In 1997 Larry Walker won the Rockies’ only MVP award ever with a wRC+ of 177, so what were his stats that year? He had a line of .366/.452/.720  with a 1.172 OPS. He had 49 homers and 130 RBI along with a Gold Glove in right field (which helps me wonder what a guy like Arenado would need to do). So what are the odds of reaching those types of numbers? Since 2009 let’s see how many players have hit those numbers at all let alone together. Minimum 500 PA

.366 Average = None (Joe Mauer hit .365 in 2009)

.452 OBP = Two, Bryce Harper (.460) and Joey Votto (.459) both in 2015

.720 SLG = None (highest is Albert Pujols in 2009 with .658)

1.172 OPS = None (highest is Bryce Harper in 2015 with 1.109)

49 HR = Two, Jose Bautista (54 in 2010) and Chris Davis (53 in 2013)

130 RBI = Seven (highest is 141 both Prince Fielder and Ryan Howard in 2009)

So…wow, that seems pretty unlikely to reach those levels. I did however mention what happens if we remove Harper’s 2015 season — the average wRC+ drops to 165. In the Rockies’ history they have four seasons within two points of 165 (excluding Walker’s 1997). Those seasons:

1999 Larry Walker = 167 wRC+ – .379/.458/.710,  1.168 OPS, 37 HR  115 RBI  –   Finished 10th in NL voting for MVP

2004 Todd Helton (Post-humidor!) = 166 wRC+ –  .347/.469/.620, 1.088 OPS, 32 HR 94 RBI  –   Finished 16th in NL voting for MVP

2001 Larry Walker = 163 wRC+ – .350/.449/.662,  1.111 OPS, 38 HR  123 RBI –   Tied for 24th in NL voting for MVP

2003 Todd Helton (Post-humidor also) = 163 wRC+ – .358/.458/.630,  1.088 OPS, 33 HR 117 RBI  –   Finished 7th in NL voting for MVP

So those number are a tad more reasonable. So is it possible for a Rockies player to ever win the MVP again? Absolutely, but this was written to show not whether or not the Rockies can have another MVP someday but more what numbers it may take to get the votes and erase the Coors Field stigma in voting, if for just one season. Which I think may never happen again without one of the best seasons we’ve ever seen.