On April 17, David Laurila posted the transcript of an excellent Q&A with Tampa Bay Rays first baseman Logan Morrison. At that point, the season was exactly two weeks old, and Morrison, then sporting a 136 wRC+ and .302/.348/.535 slash line, had been a pleasant surprise for the Rays. Prior to 2017, most thought of Morrison as a talented but inconsistent hitter; strong 2010 and 2011 campaigns were followed up by a number of uninspiring and injury-plagued seasons, and while Morrison was bound for an occasional hot streak (May 2016 jumps to mind most quickly), he’d been unable to establish himself as much more than a replacement-level first baseman. His rolling wOBA reflects this inconsistency, as the following chart demonstrates some significant oscillation over the last few years:

For that reason, it’s been an even more pleasant surprise for the Rays that their first baseman has been able to sustain his success so thoroughly over the first three months of 2017. In fact, he’s been one of the best power hitters in the league, and unexpectedly so; The Ringer’s Michael Baumann recently ranked him as the third-most shocking name on the home run leaderboards, trailing only Yonder Alonso and Justin Smoak. Through June 24, Morrison’s 22 home runs and .332 ISO are bested only by MVP frontrunner Aaron Judge, and he currently sports the third-highest WAR among all first basemen in the majors. Morrison’s also been barreling up the ball at a far higher rate in 2017; even with over a hundred fewer plate appearances this year than in 2016, LoMo’s already had seven more barrels than last year, and his barrel percentage per batted-ball event has more than doubled, from 7.5% to 15.1%.

Interestingly, Morrison’s average exit velocity has actually seen a moderate decline, from 90.3 to 89.2 miles per hour, but his raised launch angle is enough to warrant a significant increase in expected wOBA, which has risen to .382 from .340. Morrison discussed this aspect of his game with Laurila, saying that he’s benefited from valuing “launch angle and all that stuff,” and that his new approach, at its core, consists of trying to hit fly balls “up the middle.”

He’s stuck to that approach pretty rigidly during the first few months of 2017; as shown below, he’s been able to eliminate almost all of his batted balls with launch angles of below 10°, instead shifting the majority of his contact to somewhere between 15° and 40°:Further, look at how much his spray chart has shifted towards the middle of the field:

Overall, Morrison’s average launch angle has increased from 12° to nearly 17° — placing him in the same neighborhood as Miguel Sano and Justin Upton — and his fly-ball rate has skyrocketed. Morrison’s fly-ball rate of 48.1% is miles above last year’s 34.7%, and is just two percent behind that of fellow fly-ball devotee (and reigning Most Shocking Home Run Leader) Yonder Alonso.

So, we know that Morrison’s been living by at least one of the concepts he discussed with Laurila, but I believe we can also attribute LoMo’s 2017 success to another item he mentioned. In Morrison’s words, “A lot of [hitting] is just getting the best pitch you can to hit … If [the pitcher] is a guy who can do everything, I’m just trying to get a fastball middle until two strikes.”

Through June, Morrison’s done an exceptional job of putting these words into action. Compare his swing heat maps over the past two years’:

Last season, Morrison’s swings were concentrated around two zones – one in the middle-in section of the strike zone, and one on the outside corner. This year, though, he’s been splitting the difference, looking instead for pitches almost exactly between his two favorite areas of 2016. We can see that so far, Morrison’s avoided chasing pitches on that outside corner, thus sticking to his philosophy of focusing solely on the best pitches to hit. And when we dilute the sample to swings in non-two strike counts, we can see a similarly stark contrast:

Just as Morrison said back in April, he’s been swinging almost exclusively at pitches in the middle of the zone with less than two strikes. From the above heatmap, it’s pretty evident that this wasn’t the case in 2016, as his swings comprised a far greater area of the strike zone, and even a section outside of it. According to FanGraphs, Morrison’s O-Swing% has fallen 29.3% to 25.9%, reflecting his increased patience. I should note that PitchFX, on the other hand, actually marks his O-Swing% as slightly higher this season. In conjunction, though, I’m interpreting these contradictory statistics as an indicator that Morrison’s laid off of the borderline pitches, presumably on the outside corner, about which the two pitch trackers disagree.

This approach, combined with his increase in launch angle, has notably improved the first baseman’s quality of contact early in the count. In pre-two strike situations, Morrison’s xwOBA has risen from .396 last year to .498 in 2017, which, to provide context, is roughly equal to Alonso (.499), Justin Bour (.498), Edwin Encarnacion (.498), and Carlos Correa (.495).

With such an inconsistent track record, we shouldn’t necessarily expect Morrison to continue hitting at such a high clip. However, while Morrison’s never run a particularly high average on balls in play — his BABIP hasn’t exceeded .290 since 2010 — in this case, it’d be fair to expect some positive regression on his .248 BABIP, especially considering Morrison’s altered batted-ball profile. And true, his 25.3% HR/FB rate is much higher than it’s been for any full season in his career, but it’s not unreasonably high for a top power hitter, especially one with a newly-increased launch angle. It’s not like his 22 home runs have been flukes, either — among all 104 batters with at least ten home runs, the average distance of Morrison’s shots has been an estimated 403 feet, which ranks almost exactly in the middle of the pack. Plotted against a backdrop of Tropicana Field, Morrison’s home park (and whose park factor for left-handed home runs was recently scored as perfectly average), it’s evident that the vast majority of Morrison’s four-baggers have cleared the fence by a comfortable margin.

By actualizing on the topics he discussed with David Laurila, LoMo’s been able to emerge as one of the season’s most unexpected members of the league leaderboards, and has been instrumental in keeping the 40-37 Rays in the AL Wild Card picture. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to sustain this performance through 2017 and beyond, but if Morrison can continue with the adjustments that have made the first half of the season such a success, there are genuine reasons to believe that his spot on the leaderboards might last longer than most saw coming. If the second half of Morrison’s 2017 is as productive as the first, he’ll be finding himself much closer to #20 than #1 on next year’s edition of the Most Shocking Home Run Hitters list.

Considering that you’re reading an amateur post on a website dedicated to in-depth baseball analysis, I probably need not remind you that the Brewers are exceeding expectations this year. Thanks to offensive contributions from Erics Thames and Sogard, as well as improved pitching from the likes of Jimmy Nelson, Chase Anderson, and Corey Knebel, Milwaukee is riding a modest +6 run differential to an even more modest half-game lead over the second place Cubs in the NL Central. One Brewer that seems to be slightly less talked-about than those listed above is third baseman Travis Shaw.

Shaw joined the Brewers last offseason as the main piece in a trade that sent reliever Tyler Thornburg to the Red Sox, and through 66 games this year he is outpacing his career 162-game WAR average by almost a win and a half (3.7 WAR/162 vs. 2.3), due mostly to increases in all three slash stats (.288/.343/.535 vs. a career .250/.313/.441), and a subsequent rise in wRC+. Now, those numbers aren’t exactly eye-popping, and Shaw has shown that he can be productive over 60ish-game spans in the past, but as someone interested in marginal-to-average players, I wanted to believe that he was making some sort of leap offensively. Unfortunately, when taking a closer look at his plate-discipline stats, I noticed something that might hint at a coming regression.

View post on imgur.com

Shaw’s F-Strike%, or First Pitch Strike Percentage currently sits at 47.7% (league average is 60.3%), which is good for the lowest rate among all qualified hitters and about two percentage points below second-lowest. This could be the result of luck, facing particularly wild pitchers, or the reputation he carries as the Mayor of Ding Dong City. Two things that certainly help keep his rate in check are career lows in both O-Swing% (percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone) and Swing% (percentage of swings on all pitches), shown below.

View post on imgur.com

Regardless of the cause, it is of course beneficial to start at-bats 1-0 rather than 0-1 (although apparently not as crucial as what happens after 1-1 counts). What’s interesting about Shaw in this case is that he’s hitting like Aaron Judge (.463 wOBA) through 1-0 counts and like JJ Hardy (.245 wOBA) through 0-1 counts. Also of note, his walk rate after receiving a first-pitch strike plummets from a below-average 7.4% down to 0.8%, which is the 6th-worst rate among 131 hitters. These splits are based on relatively small samples (148 PA and 118 PA for 1-0 and 0-1, respectively), but I think the difference is stark enough to warrant some doubt for him sustaining his current output. Below is a table showing the league leaders in differential between Through-1-0-Count wOBA and Through-0-1-Count wOBA.

View post on imgur.com

Shaw ranks sixth. This to me indicates that pitchers have a lot to gain from attacking him early; but that’s obvious. In the vast majority of cases, pitchers have no desire to start at-bats 1-0. What I’m saying is that once Shaw’s F-Strike% starts to creep towards league average and his JJ Hardy-ish at bats become more common, we might start seeing results that resemble his career averages. In other words, the Mayor of Ding Dong City’s third term has gotten off to a promising start, but a dip in approval ratings may be in his future

The sabermetric revolution has brought us baseball nerds a lot of great information. More than anything, though, it has brought us a plethora of defensive statistics that help us understand a side of the ball that was previously mainly just measured by… (gulp) fielding percentage. Executives now pay top dollar for outfielders who take great routes to the ball, even if they make don’t have the strongest arm. Or an infielder who can get to a ton of balls, even though he makes more errors than the guy with no range.

Thinking about some of the top players in the league, they may not be as highly thought of as they are if we could not accurately quantify their defensive excellence. Francisco Lindor does not just look smooth at everything he does, but the numbers back him up. Conversely, Khris Davis at first glance looks like one of the best players in baseball, hitting countless long balls in Oakland. But Davis rates as one of the worst defensive outfielders in baseball and is not much more than a league-average player because of it. This led to me to thinking about, are the Davises of the world better than the Andrelton Simmonses of the world, who can field like Ozzie Smith, but hit like Mario Mendoza. I have created a list of nine players that are studs defensively but struggle hitting, and nine who work wonders with a bat but not with the glove. The teams will be compared at the end to see which one would come out on top if they were to actually play.

Defense

C –  Salvador Perez – If you know anything about Salvy, as he is affectionately called, you know he is as durable as they come behind the plate. That, paired with his defense behind the plate makes him quite the valuable backstop. Salvador Perez has nine more Defensive Runs Saved since 2014 than the second place Yadier Molina, in a similar amount of innings. But offensively, Perez is not as strong. He has not had a wRC+ above 91 since 2013, excluding this year which is not halfway over. The guy just does not walk, as he has not had a BB% over four percent in any full season.

1B – Joe Mauer – Albeit a shell of his former self that used to strike fear into pitchers into the Metrodome, Mauer can still pick it at first. He is among the top at his position over the past few years at DRS, ErrR and UZR/150. Mauer does not have the power he used to, with isolated power hovering around .100 for the past few years. He walks a pretty solid amount, usually at around 10 percent.

2B – Yolmer Sanchez – A name not known to many, Yolmer Sanchez is a somewhat promising young player in Chi-town. Sanchez is not that experienced, but has shown positive defensive traits thus far. He is above average in turning double plays, not making errors and range. Despite that defensive success, Sanchez has not resembled any sort of an offensive threat. While improving this year, his OBP is usually well under .300, and his SLG% is also under .400.

3B – Darwin Barney – To have a 75 wRC+ and still finish with 2.4 WAR in a year says a lot about a player. That is was Barney accomplished in 2012. Talk about a journeyman utility guy; Barney has had some decent playing time in his career, notably with the Cubs, but for the most part, he has been an extra infielder with a slick glove at whatever position he is playing. At third, he has been solid in a limited amount of innings. He has a UZR/150 of 6 since 2014. Offensively though, he does not hit for power, does not walk and has been a below average baserunner the past few years.

SS – Jose Iglesias – The Tigers’ shortstop makes some of the smoothest plays in baseball. He is a treat to watch in the field, but no so at the plate. Iglesias has 12 career home runs, a walk rate under five percent and is a below average baserunner. He is in the top few among shortstops in defense as a whole, but is arguably the best at not committing errors.

LF – Colby Rasmus – When Rasmus is thought of by a normal fan, they probably think of towering home runs and excessive strikeouts. That is very understandable, but did a little deeper and you’ll find a very above-average defensive outfielder. Rasmus has the most Defensive Runs Saved of any left fielder, and he has fewer innings that almost anyone at the top of the leaderboard. Colby Rasmus has an insane arm in left, leading to an incredible UZR/150 of 30.3 over the past year and a half. Now he is by no means a bad hitter, but he is on the list because he is rather mediocre offensively, and stellar defensively. The only thing consistent about Rasmus is his astronomical strikeout rate. He is powerful, but has not gotten substantial playing time a lot because other parts of his game have been sub-par.

CF – Kevin Pillar – This is what Pillar is known for. He covers ground like few others can, while sacrificing his body for unbelievable diving grabs on a regular basis. Pillar’s RngR is the best in baseball over the past few years, and has saved nearly 40 runs since 2015. He is a well above-average baserunner, but his walk rate is under five, and his career OBP is right around .300.

RF – Jason Heyward – His $184-million contract with the Northsiders is also well worth it after that alleged speech he gave during the fateful rain delay in Game 7 of the World Series. But hey, it does not hurt that he is one of the best defenders in the game. Heyward’s UZR/150 since 2015 is over twice as high as the next qualifier. He has unbelievable range and a very good arm. Heyward has had offensive success in the past, but seems to have lost that magic with the Cubs. He has hit just 13 long balls since the start of 2016. The Cubs’ outfielder has his two lowest outputs of Hard% over the past two years.

Offense

C – J.T. Realmuto – Realmuto has burst on the scene to an extent with his above-average offensive output in the past year and a half. In 2016 and in the start of 2017, his wOBA has been above .330, very solid for a catcher. He is also an above-average baserunner, and can even swipe you a few bags, as he did 12 times last season. Framing is not one of Realmuto’s strong suits, though. In his two seasons with the most playing time, 2015 and 2016, he combined for -27.2 Framing runs, per Baseball Prospectus. He has -10 DRS since 2016.

1B – Miguel Cabrera – The best right-handed hitter I have ever seen is not that great at defense. For context, Miggy’s RZR has been worse than Ryan Howard since the start of 2016. He is just jaw-dropping with a bat in his hands, though. The utter consistency of his sheer dominance of whatever is thrown at him is generational. He has had an OPS of .900 or higher in every year but two since 2005; three of the years, his OPS was well over 1.0. And in those two years he did not get there, he was very close, with an OPS in the very high .800s.

2B – Daniel Murphy – The spokesman of the launch-angle revolution has otherworldly numbers at the plate since the start of 2016. He batted .347 last year with just a .348 BABIP, implying his success was legitimate. His wOBA last year and this year thus far have been over .400. With all that though, he has been, without much question, the worst defensive second basemen in baseball since the start of last year. Murphy’s range what you would assume a player that looks to Pablo Sandoval to have. He also commits more errors than average.

3B – Jake Lamb – One of the biggest reasons the Diamondbacks are having the season they are is because of their third baseman. Lamb is walking a lot and hitting with a lot of power, a recipe for success. He is not that great at the hot corner though, as he has been below average at making errors and turning double plays while managing to have limited range.

SS – Xander Bogaerts – The Aruba native has not replicated the success he had for most of last year during this year, but is still clearly an above-average offensive shortstop. He has had an OBP of over .350 for three straight years now and has cut his SwStr% down severely, all the while being an incredible baserunner. The questions about his glove, though, have turned out to be legitimate. He makes very few plays out of his zone because of his lack of range.

LF – Matt Kemp – Remember when Matt Kemp was arguably the best player in baseball? He is a far cry from that, plus a few pounds. He is still hitting well over .300 with power. His Soft% is very low, as it has been for years. According to FanGraphs, he has a lifetime defensive WAR of -143.3. There are a lot of bad defensive left fielders in baseball currently, notably Robbie Grossman, Yasmany Tomas and anyone in Baltimore, but Kemp may be the worst.

CF – Tyler Naquin – Oh boy. I saw Naquin’s downfall coming before it happened, but he was still overall a productive player offensively last year, if you look at the season as a whole. His wRC+ was 135, albeit clearly unsustainable. Naquin’s BABIP was .411, and he really struggled in the second half. He was a disaster in center field, taking some of the worse routes I have ever seen. He did have a pretty solid arm, but he used it too much because of how many extra-base hits he allowed.

RF – J.D. Martinez – This is what bursting on the scene actually looks like. Martinez has put up jaw-dropping numbers over the past few years, relative to what he had in years past. Martinez’s OPS has been .879 or higher every year since 2013, including in 2017, where he is currently at 1.065. Statistically though, Martinez does not really do anything well in right field. He has been way worse than Jose Bautista since 2016 in fewer innings.

To me, the most evident difference between these two hypothetical squads  is the name recognition. Nearly every player on the offensive-heavy team is a household name, or has some form a popularity. The other team, though, has one, arguably two names that the average fan would know. Name power, though, does not translate to wins. These two teams playing would make for some interesting baseball. The defensive squad would be a treat to watch play together, but it would be tough for them to field the rockets hit at them by Miggy and co. I decided to calculate how the WARs of these players stack up. I calculated the average of their WAR last year (expanded to 150 games) and their WAR this year (again, expanded to 150 games) of those that are playing.

Now what does this tell us? Not a whole lot. Not only is WAR not a perfect stat, but a lot of these are skewed, like Tyler Naquin. I would project Naquin to almost have a negative WAR in 2017, but because he had a lucky 2016, and has not really played in 2017, he has a 3.2 WAR. Conversely, there is someone like Kevin Pillar who is off to not a great start in 2017, but should turn it around, and is punished because his WAR is not that high yet.

I would project the offensive team to win, though. Again, that does not tell us a much. I just picked players who I saw as bad at one part of the game and good at another. Someone else doing this could have picked other players and gotten a much closer result. This defensive team I chose would have a very hard time scoring runs, and while the offensive squad may struggle in the field, notably with range, they have so much firepower that they could be not be slowed down. I would love to see these teams battle, as it would make for some long home runs and exciting plays in the field, but I think these guys are doing just fine on their own teams.

The Mets are the talk of the town…for all the wrong reasons. They currently sit at a 31-41 record and are 12 games behind the Washington Nationals in the NL East, which as of now seems to be theirs for the taking. The Mets boast one of the worst bullpens in the majors and have been plagued by injuries as well as underperformance from the bulk of their lineup. With the results of this season, many are beginning to wonder if it’s time to turn the page on this current pack of Mets players, many of whom were on the 2015 team that lost to the feisty Kansas City Royals in the World Series. I will attempt to go group by group in an effort to determine whether or not the Mets should begin a new rebuilding process, the most dreaded phrase in sports.

Starting with the outfield, Yoenis Cespedes is locked in for three more years in his current contract. It’s understandable why the Mets were looking to sign him in the offseason based on his performance in 2015 and 2016. However, injuries and poor performance have contributed to the current record that the Mets have. Cespedes still won’t lose his spot in left. Curtis Granderson, due to his age, will most likely not be re-signed, as well as Jay Bruce who, if he is not traded before the deadline, will most certainly test free agency. Juan Lagares has been injury-prone the last couple years but the one piece of good news is that Michael Conforto has seen a resurgence since coming back from Triple-A Las Vegas. Also, one of their top prospects, Brandon Nimmo, should receive regular playing time in the outfield, if not this season, then definitely in 2018.

Next, we have the infield, which has been decimated by injuries. Neil Walker and Asdrubal Cabrera have struggled through injuries (and who knows if/when David Wright will ever step on a baseball field again). Jose Reyes and Lucas Duda have mightily underperformed. The good news for the Mets is that Cabrera, Walker, and Reyes will be gone after the season, which means that the infield can get much younger. Top prospects Dominic Smith and Amed Rosario will be September call-ups and, if all goes well, can be regulars in the lineup next year. T.J. Rivera and Wilmer Flores have proven to be reliable pieces in the lineup. Despite some injuries from Flores, he has made up for it with his versatility in both the field and in the lineup, giving manager Terry Collins options to choose from. While Flores and Rivera may not be long-term solutions, they are the best options that the Mets have at the moment. As far as catching is concerned, Travis d’Arnaud is probably the Mets’ best option right now, although he has severely underperformed since being traded to them. The Mets should try to get another catcher in free agency.

Finally, the best pitching staff is a huge question mark, but also a big concern among scouts. Matt Harvey clearly no longer has any interest in remaining with the team and Noah Syndergaard, Zack Wheeler, and Steven Matz are just injuries waiting to happen. Even Jacob deGrom, who has been I believe the best starter this season, has a history of arm injuries that makes Mets front-office personnel nervous. Even Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo are recovering from injuries sustained during this season. The bullpen has been just as bad. The bullpen so far has logged 257 innings to the tune of a 4.97 ERA. Not to mention they have not had a reliable closer since Jeurys Familia has been both suspended and injured this season, and the rest of the bullpen outside of Addison Reed and Jerry Blevins has been downright horrendous.

Overall, the Mets need to begin the next phase of the rebuilding process. With aging veterans and current players underperforming, it’s clear that the time for a championship has come and gone for this group. The Mets need to get younger and it starts with the old addition-by-subtraction technique. By dumping aging veterans with big contracts, the Mets will be able to allocate their resources and maybe pick up some pieces in free agency while simultaneously giving their top prospects playing time and allowing them to develop. As the great Cosmo Kramer once said on Seinfeld, “I think it’s time that we shut down and re-tool.”

Home runs are up across the league and everyone is searching for reasons. One assumption that would make sense is that with the feedback system of Statcast, the league gets closer together in launch angle since we know that the best hitters have an average LA of around 12-15 degrees and players that are way off that would be incentivized to correct that or else be replaced by other hitters who can do it.

First, let me say that I used at-bat cutoffs since that is what Statcast allows for. I used 250 for 2015 and 2016 and 100 for 2017 to date. That probably changes the values a little. Specifically my average LAs look higher than the usually-cited league averages, probably because bench players who hit weakly are excluded.

Looking at the average LA, the chosen group of hitters went up from 11.7% in 2015 to 15.9% in 2016 (+4.2) to 16.6% (plus another 0.7).

So what did definitely happen was an increase of the launch angles across the board. However, when looking at the standard deviations, the league did not get closer together. SD was 3.6 in 2015, 3.8 in 2016 and 4.2 in 2017. It seems like not everyone is adjusting at the same pace.

So let’s look at different subsets here.

The average of the top 20 went way up from 17.8 in 2015 to 25.1 in 2017 (+7.3). The average of the bottom 20 also went up, from 4.2 to 8.0 (+3.8) degrees. The Q25 went up from 9.4 to 13.9 (+4.5) and the Q75 from 14.3 to 19.2 (+4.9) degrees.

So LA definitely went up across the board in all groups, but if anything it accelerated more at the top than on average or at the bottom. The league is increasing LA but so far it is not getting closer together.

Shy Lonnie – Speak Up

I submitted my last article on Brad Peacock literally 10 hours before Jeff Sullivan published an amazing article on exactly the same topic (using exactly the same GIF of Adrian Beltre looking ridiculous). So just to prove I’m not copying anybody, I decided to write about someone whose shocking appearance on the Statcast leaderboards made me confident this wouldn’t happen again.

In the month of June, Lonnie Chisenhall’s hitting .385 with 4 HR and 15 RBI. By any account, this is a monster three weeks (especially for somebody not named “Cody Bellinger”). Last year, his .328 BABIP (26 points above his career average) cast doubt over his success, however his .374 wOBA and .360 xwOBA (a stat that uses exit velocity and launch angle to predict what “should be” a hit) prove that his success this year is no fluke. There’s something different about this guy that means this inflated BABIP may just be signal and not noise.

Baseball analysts used to believe that BABIP for most hitters regressed to the mean (after you put the ball in play, the rest is just luck) until people started tracking year-to-year differences for players like…Mike Trout, whose BABIPs are high and correlate strongly across years. Now we know that batted-ball data (exit velocity, launch angle, launch spin rate, etc.) hugely influences the results of balls when they get put into play, which means projections have been undervaluing players who consistently make hard contact (Nick Castellanos, Miguel Sano, etc.). Barreling balls isn’t just a fluke; it’s a skill.

Barrels on Barrels on Barrels

The first thing that immediately jumped out at me was how much hard contact this guy makes. Among the league leaders are max effort home-run-or-die-trying type hitters (Khris Davis, Matt Davidson, Joey Gallo), freaks of nature (Aaron Judge and Mike Trout), headline-capturing breakouts (Justin Smoak, Miguel Sano) and…Lonnie Chisenhall. I know FanGraphs readers love player comps, so here y’all go:

Chisenhall closely resembles the batted-ball profile of a Ryan Zimmerman or Giancarlo Stanton when he puts the ball in play. The reason both he and Zimmerman have very similar results in the third column (Barrels/PA) as well is that they have roughly the same batted-ball events per plate appearance (17% K-Rate vs 18% respectively). The major reason for a divergence in the third column with Stanton is his absurd strikeout rate (16.7% K-Rate in 2016 to 25.4% in 2017). The reason I included him is just to give you an idea of the absurd power this guy has. He’s ahead of Paul Goldschmidt, Joey Votto, and Miguel Cabrera in terms of Barrels/PA, mostly because they get walked way more.

What’s more, he’s trending in the right direction. Below is Chisenhall’s distribution of exit velocity over the past two years (red is 2017).

As you can see, his soft contact is slightly more concentrated at about the 70 mph range, with much more hard contact this year in the 95-105 range. Chisenhall has made an adjustment…it’s just a question of what.

The Line Drive Revolution

We’ve already read a million articles on the “air-ball revolution” detailing how hitters are attempting to elevate the ball — even at the expense of overall contact rates — to produce more home runs in total and thus more offensive production.

While it’s lazy analysis too easy to simply say the words “air-ball revolution” and call it a day — although with Daniel Murphy and Yonder Alonso, it might just be the decisive factor — changes in swing plane can drastically affect batted-ball data.

Two things are incredibly important in this debate that most people misunderstand.

First, it’s the “air-ball” revolution, not the fly-ball revolution. Mike Petriello, Statcast analyst at MLB Network, defines an “air-ball” as any ball hit above 10 degrees of launch angle. Fly balls are good, line drives are good, ground balls are less good. Strikeouts are bad.

Second, putting the ball in the air only works in tandem with exit velocity. There’s no sense in Eric Young Jr. trying to elevate everything, which would result in lazy fly balls, mitigating the benefit of his blazing speed. But, in aggregate, hard-hit balls are more productive when hit above 10-degrees launch angle rather than below. We’ve already established that he’s mashing this year. Now lets take a look at where they’re going.

As you can see from the above chart, a good amount of Chisenhall’s batted balls were directly at the 10-to-30 degree mark, while his hits were almost all at the 10-degree mark. Those were solid line drives, but leave very little room for error. Low-EV balls at the 10-degree mark likely result in ground balls or soft line-outs to infielders. Also, there is a decent amounts of batted-ball events directly below that. If your mean launch angle is 10 degrees, it’s very likely that small misses yield more ground balls than you intend.

This year, the vast majority of his batted-ball events are directly at the 20-degree mark. It seems like not only is he hitting more “air balls,” but they’re solid line drives that afford him more room for error. Even when he doesn’t hit frozen ropes, they still have a shot at becoming base hits. Also, there’s a much more apparent difference between air balls and ground balls, with many more hard-hit balls at 30 and 40 degrees.

The graph above confirms this. Especially on breaking balls, more and more are finding the air.

Patience is Key

A lot was written about the importance of plate discipline during the meteoric rise of Eric Thames at the beginning of the year. Petriello details the dramatic difference between swinging at strikes and balls.

“From 2015-16, Major League Baseball hit .292 with an average exit velocity of 89.3 mph on pitches in the zone, and only .168 with an 81.4-mph exit velocity on contact made outside it. Nearly 91 percent of all homers over the past two seasons are on pitches in the strike zone. These are massive differences. Learning plate discipline may be the hardest thing for a batter to do, but it’s also potentially the best thing he can do.”

You might think this is obvious but for major-league hitters geared up to hit a 98mph fastball, laying off of a dirty breaking ball that sweeps through the zone is one of the toughest things to do.

For Chisenhall, this has been one of the more drastic changes in his profile over the past few years. Below is a chart of the change in K-rate over the last six years. The league average has been trending up, starting at 18.5% to about 21.5% at a relatively stable rate (some speculate this increase in K-rate is a result of the move of major-league hitters to elevate more).

As made pretty clear by the above graph, Chisenhall’s strikeout rates have been moving pretty steadily in the opposite direction. A hitter with negatively trending K-rates without sacrificing power is rare. This was the precursor to the Justin Smoak breakout this year.

His walk rate skyrocketed to 9% this year from 5.5%. What’s the culprit?

His O-Swing% is down 10% this year, and his Z-Swing% is down a bit, but nothing crazy. He’s clearly seeing the ball better this year.

Making Adjustments

Here’s a clip of 2016 Chisenhall on a changeup outside. Pay attention to 1) bat plane and 2) where his front foot lands in relation to the edge of the batters box.

In terms of bat plane, he does go down to get this pitch a little bit, but finishes below his shoulder with one hand on the bat. Just a note about letting go of the bat: it’s fine and the majority of major-league hitters do it, but you have to make sure you’re not cutting your swing short as a result.

As for foot placement, it looks like he’s close to square with the pitcher, maybe a little bit closed, and about two feet from the edge of the plate. On this swing, he produces a fly ball at 88mph that ends in the stands.

This is a heatmap for where pitchers located the ball against him in 2016. Notice a pattern?

It seems like pitchers realized that mistakes inside are what make him the vast majority of his money (as will be shown in a zone map slightly later).

Now take a look at this video detailing a swing on a nearly identical (albeit overhanded) pitch from 2017.

This time, he finishes his swing with both hands on the bat above the shoulder, with the bat traveling on a slightly higher angle (though nothing like the transformation we’ve seen from some of the more absurd poster boys of the elevate-and-celebrate craze mentioned above).

I think the most interesting change for this swing, however, is that he strides fairly substantially closed and his foot lands about a foot from the plate. Instead of a lazy fly ball to the stands next to the left-field line, this produces a 103mph line drive to right-center.

In a recent FanGraphs article by Eno Sarris about the importance of changing where the hitter stands in the batters box, Anthony Rendon (one of my personal heroes who I grew up watching at Rice University) says,

“If a righty dives, we sell ourselves short inside, so if I’m getting crowded, and I’m hitting the ball late and deep, let me scoot back, and so on the same swing, instead of hitting here [on the handle] and fouling it off, I’m hitting it closer to the barrel and hitting into right field.”

It looks like Chisenhall’s position in the back of the box with a slight move toward the plate is designed to correct that issue. His hands are so fast that he can consistently make contact with the inside pitch. His best hitting in 2016 happened on pitches off the plate inside. However, it doesn’t matter how good you are at driving inside pitches if no pitcher is ever willing to give you one. Making an adjustment to put solid swings on pitches on the outer third is the right call in this situation.

I would be a little bit worried about this change from the perspective of hitting the inside pitch, but it looks like a concrete adjustment in response to the outside pitch was warranted from the previous season’s heat map. It seems that pitchers have picked up on this adjustment as well. Below is the distribution of pitches for 2017. Pitchers have made a dedicated effort to react to Chisenhall’s changed hitting style and adjust accordingly.

So? Is this adjustment working? Here’s the map of Chisenhall’s batting average in 2016 broken down by zone provided once again by the lovely Brooks Baseball website.

Anything strange? Um…he’s hitting over .900 on low to middle pitches off the plate inside and .160 on pitches middle-middle and middle-up. What?? He was hitting balls outside of the strike zone way better than meatballs down the middle of the plate. I think this is a big reason for the spike in walk rate we’ve been seeing this year. The videos we saw above show that he’s scooted up to the plate a bit more than he used to, meaning the alarming shade of red (indicating that he’s getting hits with regularity) shifted over the plate and now he can simply take those pitches for balls (and eventually, walks).

Yup! That’s exactly what happened. He’s also getting to pitches off the plate outside a bit more to protect the plate in two-strike counts. This could also help limit strikeout rate. Overall, a better approach toward outside pitches combined with adjusting placement within the batters box have served him well.

Final Thoughts

So, lets recap what we’ve seen here. First, Chisenhall hits the ball…hard. Second, walk rate is up, strikeout rate is down. Third, more and more balls are being hit in the air (without overly focusing on hitting fly balls). Lastly, all of these changes seem less like a product of batted-ball luck and more like the result of intentional change in approach at the plate. We can expect this success to continue at a current or similar rate.

Some red flags could signal and end to this dominance, however. First, I would keep my eye out for a change in walk rate. While he stopped swinging so much on inside fastballs off the plate, he’s still aggressively swinging off of the low-outside corner. This shouldn’t be a problem as long as he keeps mashing those pitches (as a result of the new approach), but the further he reaches, the less likely he is to make solid contact. Second, I’m incredibly interested to see how he responds to this shift to the inside corner. His 2016 results seem to suggest that his quick hands are capable of getting to these without getting jammed. However, on a pitch with high velocity and cut, we could see much more weak contact.

You’re going to hear a lot of people simply point to his BABIP numbers and say that’s unsustainable, he’s just getting lucky, and that he will inevitably regress. That’s lazy analysis and untrue. Until we see any of the above physical adjustments, just sit back and enjoy the Lonnie Chisenhall show. It’s going to be a good one.

Baseball players have been known to have a fondness for golfing. After all, it’s just like baseball, except nobody’s trying to throw the ball past you. Famous baseball golfers include Yoenis Cespedes, John Smoltz, and, as we now know as of last Thursday, Charlie Blackmon.

I’ll be honest — I’ve never seen Charlie Blackmon step foot on a golf course before. His current facial-hair situation is also in violation of most country club dress codes. But after seeing what he did in his first AB against Zack Godley on Thursday, I’m convinced that Blackmon is already preparing to win the US Open after he retires from baseball.

Charlie Blackmon managed to hit a no-doubter off of a shoelace-scraper. It’s like a Statcast glitch in real life. I looked it up on Brooks Baseball to see where this pitch really was, and, well –

If you’re having trouble seeing the pitch, it’s because Godley threw the exact same pitch to Blackmon earlier in the AB (the #2 is covering the #7). The result the first time around was a swinging strike, as Blackmon went over top of it — as one would with a curveball in the dirt. Blackmon saw the exact same pitch later in the AB, and rather than take it, Blackmon decided to lift it over the outfield fence. Somehow, Blackmon managed to get under a pitch in the dirt. This pitch was .81 feet off the ground, via Trackman — if it was any more down, Blackmon would need a shovel to dig it out.

It’s no secret that players can golf pitches for home runs. Jonathan Hale of the Hardball Times showed that home runs significantly spiked on pitches that were thrown at a height of about one foot above the plate.

But there’s a very steep fall-off below that sweet-spot, mostly because baseball bats aren’t long enough to make contact below that point.

In order to make contact on this pitch, Blackmon needed to bend down on his back knee while keeping his front leg straight. Essentially, he needed to invent a new form of Yoga to drive this out.

This is an amazing feat from one of baseball’s hottest hitters. And it’s possibly one of the lowest pitches EVER hit for a home run.

Baseball Savant keeps track of almost every data-point anyone could ever want on every pitch of the past 10 years, including vertical height, and only eight batters have ever hit home runs off of pitches that were less than a foot off the ground (there’s a fun glitch where this Chris Coghlan home run appears as the lowest pitch off the ground at -4.8 feet — evidently someone placed a negative sign in front of a 4.8 foot figure).

Coincidentally, Coghlan actually was present for the lowest pitch ever hit out, according to Baseball Savant. Brad Hawpe took a low pitch from Rick VandenHurk and put it way over Coghlan’s head, plating himself and Troy Tulowitzki.

According to Baseball Savant, that pitch was hit when it was only ~5 inches off the ground, which makes it the lowest pitch ever hit out of the Pitchf/x era. But something’s a little fishy (and it’s not the Marlins) — at the moment of contact, the ball is clearly more than 5 inches off the ground. It’s certainly a low pitch, but it’s not quite at Hawpe’s ankles, unlike Blackmon’s pitch. Perhaps it’s a glitch from the early days of Pitchf/x.

In fact, the same can be said of the second-lowest HR according to Baseball Savant — a pitch to Jonny Gomes at his knees is recorded as being 6 inches off the ground. It’s a reality of technology in that it’s not perfect every time.

The main takeaway, however, is that Blackmon might just have a legitimate claim to lowest-hit dinger of the past 10 seasons.

The biggest legitimate rival to Blackmon’s claim is probably Freddy Galvis‘ ankle breaker from 2013 against Jon Niese. Galvis adopts a similar approach to Blackmon in hitting this pitch, knocking one out at a height of only .81 feet off the ground. Pitchf/x appears to have this one right on the money — and it just so happens that it’s also the exact same height as Blackmon’s pitch was.

So, according to Pitchf/x, Blackmon hit the lowest pitch out since Galvis. What’s really impressive is that Blackmon is about 5 inches taller than Galvis, so Blackmon needed to screw himself into the ground about 5 inches more than Galvis.

It’s a testament to Blackmon’s new-found power (or the generous park factors at Coors Field) that Blackmon managed to turn on such a terrible pitch and turn it into a home run. The anomalous dinger gods have visited Blackmon, and we should be thankful that they’ve graced us with the gift of this home run — we might not see another like it for a few years.

Brad… What?

Welcome to the Astros rotation, Brad Peacock. In his first six starts (plus 16.1 innings of relief work), he has a 2.82 ERA with a 1.19 WHIP. Wait, I forgot to mention the 66 strikeouts in 44.2 innings. If you’ve ever seen this guy pitch, you’ve no doubt observed his strangely overpowering repertoire and wondered how All-Star hitters can look so ridiculous on a 93mph fastball. For a former top-100 prospect who has spent 10 years playing professional baseball, one might wonder if there was a fundamental change in stuff, if this is just batted-ball luck, destined to disappear as soon as you pick him up on your fantasy team (#thanksJasonVargas), or if the only missing factor was opportunity. Either way, everybody who has seen this Astros team play knows that something special is happening in H-Town. While many believed that the Astros needed at least one new arm to even compete for a playoff spot, the return of Cy-Young, immaculately-bearded Dallas Keuchel and breakout Lance McCullers mean that there was just one missing piece to seriously contend for the World Series. That piece is Brad Peacock.

Devastating Repertoire

Sometimes it’s important to subject pitchers to the eye test, which this guy passes with flying colors (unlike a peacock which, while colorful, cannot fly). For this section, I’ll show you a pitch and then a table showing the league leaders for that pitch type. Because of the problems with pitch values (which I’ll dive into in a bit) it’s important to couple that with other methods of assessing pitch effectiveness, including simply watching the pitcher.

While some of you will no doubt roll your eyes at the next section, I think it’s important to talk about what matters when using film study. The important things to look for when watching a pitcher include:

1. Location (duh). I trust the Astros’ game plan to get the job done on most days. More often than not, the relevant question is if the pitcher can execute that plan.

2. Bite. Is there late movement on the pitch? Arm side tail or cut? This can serve to induce weak contact even on meatballs and serve as a helpful backup in case of missed location.

3. Hitter’s balance. While we now have metrics that calculate the likelihood of each batted ball becoming a hit based off of exit velocity and launch angle, those stats can be misleading as well. Sometimes, a hitter can be completely fooled on a pitch and still get the barrel on the ball. This could change the expected outcome for that batted ball, but not for the same pitch in a slightly different context.

4. Situational pitching. How do they fare in high-pressure situations (3-2, runner on third, battling back from 3-0, etc.)?

OK, sorry for the kiddie stuff. Back to Peacock. Here’s a straight 3-2 fastball that generates a strikeout.

This pitch is indicative of a few things. First, it catches a bit more of the plate than you would like to see, although in a 3-2 count with bases empty and 2 outs, it is more acceptable to challenge the hitter than to give up a two-out walk (as long as it’s not flat and down the middle). Second, note the late arm-side tail. This could be a major factor in his ability to generate swing and misses (as will be explored later).

Before I show you the leaderboards, there’s a major caveat. As with a lot of advanced metrics, pitch-type linear weights are more descriptive than predictive. There’s extremely high variance from year-to-year. On top of that, several variables go into each pitch and it’s extremely hard to differentiate the signal from the noise. The results of certain pitches are not independent from one another, but heavily influenced by the hitter it’s thrown against, the situation it’s thrown in, the pitch it’s following, etc. This all is amplified by the fact that his start of the season in the bullpen has limited his innings total and a good chunk of the results we are seeing are against an Oakland A’s lineup that swings and misses…a LOT.

That being said, if we continue to see major run savings from Peacock as his innings total climbs, the continuation of the trend as more and more context changes, the more we can be confident that this is more a product of skill than anything else.

Here’s how that pitch has fared against the league writ large. Below is a table of the league leaders in weighted pitch value for fastballs. Feel free to peruse the familiar names of his company on the leaderboard.

You might be asking yourselves why I chose to write about Peacock and not Jaime, Walker, Nova, etc. Aside from the amazing name, it’s because this guy has not one, but two All-Star offerings.

Next, his slider (brace yourselves):

Did you see where that pitch starts versus where it ends?? Is he throwing a wiffle ball? The look of frustration on Beltre’s face is not unique to this at bat. That slider has been doing that to hitters all year. Below is the table of weighted pitch value leaders for sliders in the MLB this year.

There’s a good chance that in high-leverage situations, this pitch can generate a swing and miss like it has so many times this season. There’s a reason (which you probably picked up from watching the above gif).

There are five sliders in the entire majors with more break than this pitch.

Overall, while there are problems with looking at pitch values in isolation, we can be slightly more confident that this is the product of solid game plans from the Astros coaching staff, Peacock’s ability to carry it out, and simply a dirty slider.

This Peacock Can Fly

OK, so we know his pitch mix is fairly strong. What does this mean for his results? When I examined the batted-ball data, three things immediately jumped out:

1. When hitters swing at strikes, they miss.

This much is clear from the section above. This guy truly has overpowering stuff without lighting up the radar gun. Z-Contact is cool because for pitchers with low velocity, it serves as a kind of proxy for movement, sequencing (thanks to the coaching staff for that one), and locating pitches on the corners.

If anyone takes issue with Danny Salazar’s inclusion on this list, it’s important to keep in mind what gave him so many problems was not nastiness of pitch mix; it was mostly a combination of walks and bloated HR/FB ratio. He actually inspires confidence in Peacock, as you can think of him as a Salazar without the walks who keeps the ball in the ballpark (as you’ll see… right now).

2. When they do make contact, it’s soft.

Dickey’s appearance on this list should not be a surprise. Because of the low overall velocity of his pitches, the batter must generate the majority of the exit velocity. While Keuchel isn’t a knuckle-baller, his average fastball velocity of 88.7 mph means the same logic applies, although not to the same extent. Peacock’s appearance on this list is particularly impressive because of his average fastball velocity of 92.3. This means that although he is providing more force than the aforementioned players, he is still inducing roughly as much soft contact.

3. Even with hard contact, the ball stays in the park.

This last table is, I think, what makes Peacock a candidate for greatness.

First, generating swing and misses is one thing, because it intrinsically decreases the likelihood of home runs, RBI, etc. But if you tell me this guy limits the pool of potential home runs AND the likelihood of each individual batted-ball event in that pool turning into a home run, we’ve stumbled on something special.

Second (and most important), he’s in danger of being undervalued. It used to be thought that BABIP (batting average on balls in play) was essentially random for every hitter, so the ones with higher batting averages simply put the ball in play more often. Later, sabermetricians discovered that, in fact, some players just had higher BABIPs. Mike Trout hits the ball harder than Replacement-Level Joe, so Mike Trout is more likely to get base hits when he puts the ball in play. The latest version of this logic is playing out in the debate over HR/FB rates. Baseball analysts for years have been developing models that regress the HR/FB rate in the direction of the league mean. The thinking goes: if someone hits a hard fly ball, several factors have a large sway in determining if it leaves the park (park factors, weather patterns, time of day, etc.) outside of the hitter’s control. These days, however, several pitchers are sustaining remarkably high HR/FB ratios (Gerrit Cole – 18.2%, Lance Lynn – 18.8%). If it turns out that this ratio actually has more to do with the pitcher, then these players are being systemically overvalued in projections. The flip side remains true. Projections tend to undervalue players with low HR/FB rates, because it ignores the skill involved in limiting the amount of hard contact that leaves the yard.

What’s Next?

What’s next for this Peacock? We can see clear trends in his pitch usage that suggest this dominance will continue. The below chart from our friends at Brooks Baseball shows what I believe to be the root of his recent success.

Two things to note:

1. He’s throwing the slider much more often as the season progresses. It’s his best pitch and the contact rate hasn’t changed as hitters are seeing it more and more.

2. A sinker is in the works! Several analysts note that to be a major-league starter, you need three effective pitches to keep hitters off balance and be effective the third time through the order. While there are some problems with these studies (because of the preordained conclusion, there are very few two-pitch pitchers in the majors, resulting in self-fulfilling prophecy), it is at the very least comforting to see another pitch in the mix. While Peacock’s curveball generates a high number of whiffs, he has trouble commanding it late in the game relative to his slider, so its usage is limited.

Lastly, for Peacock to be a truly effective starter, he’s going to need to go deeper into games. Strikeout pitchers generally bloat their pitch counts in an attempt to generate swings and misses early on. Since transitioning to a starter, he’s averaging 4 2/3 innings per start. Part of this will be resolved with experience as a starter, but in the meantime this new sinker could mean more ground balls, saving his swing-and-miss stuff for later.

For now, at least, it looks like the sinker is doing just that. In his last start, Oakland slugged .200 against it. With low whiff rate, high ground-ball rate, and low slugging percentage, this could be the tool to get Peacock deeper into games where the curve and hammer of a slider can take the wheel from there. While we’re finally seeing what makes this guy so special, he’s already making the adjustments needed to become an elite starter. This peacock is finally showing his tail feathers, and we haven’t seen anything yet.

In the boom-or-bust era of plate appearances, baserunning value has become less important than it’s been in quite some time, but it’s a fascinating part of the game in which you can literally steal a win here and there. Given that this fourth pillar of the game is a pillar nonetheless, here’s a list of the top six baserunners this year by BsR, with their stolen base and caught stealing totals as well (as of 06/18/2017):

Some of the guys on this list are the burners you would expect to see, and Xander Bogaerts is a pretty athletic, fast guy. Paul Goldschmidt is a freak and has been far and away the best at baserunning among 1B by BsR since 1950 (relative to the smaller number of games he’s played), which is a highly underestimated part of his game.

Other than Goldschmidt, who you should already know is fantastic at everything in baseball, the name that really sticks out is Joey Gallo, the barrel-chested guy with an 80 power rating as a prospect who thumped homers at every level of the minors. He’s also hit some big ones in the majors; we’d be talking about his homers a lot more if Aaron Judge wasn’t doing his own thing in the Bronx. If you Google “Joey Gallo home run” and go to videos, words like “mammoth,” “crushes,” and “monster” pepper the results. Gallo is 6’5” and 235 lbs. In short, he’s not the guy you expect to be atop the BsR leaderboard, earning his team nearly half a win this year with his legs, especially given his low SB total.

So how has Gallo achieved this high level of baserunning despite clearly not passing the baserunning eye test? He is generally athletic, which he recently discussed. The obvious first take is that Gallo strikes out a lot, so he doesn’t have the opportunity to ground into double plays and negatively affect his BsR. This is true, to a certain extent, but doesn’t tell the whole story. Of the three components of BsR (UBR, wSB, and wGDP), UBR is the primary source of value for Gallo. This can generally be perceived as a measure of baserunning skill, as it looks at how often the baserunner takes extra bases in the same situations. This metric may be a little team-dependent, but Gallo ranks seventh in baseball at 3.1 runs added. The value from this metric is derived from both taking extra bases on hits as well as while already on base. However, Gallo only has 24 non-home run hits this year, only 11 of which went for extra bases, leaving him without much room to boost his UBR rating. Therefore, a lot of this value likely comes from his time running the bases while already on them. Gallo has been on the bases 59 times this year (including non-home run hits, walks, HBP, and reaching on an error or fielder’s choice), giving him many more opportunities to make plays on the bases.

Gallo’s overall assessment by BsR as a good baserunner is a result of the other metrics as well. Couple that high UBR rating with a tenth-place ranking in wGDP (1.0 run), the metric that favors Gallo because such a high percentage of his plate appearances result in either strikeouts (37.2%) or medium/hard contact (81.7% of his batted balls). Both of these outcomes reduce the number of double plays he grounds into, leading to a slightly positive contribution to his BsR. In fact, Gallo has only hit into one double play this whole season over 247 PA. Gallo’s wSB (0.7 runs) is respectable as well, if only because he has yet to be caught stealing.

It’s possible that Gallo isn’t on the bases enough to have his BsR statistic stabilize and he’ll regress quite a bit as the season wears on, but that remains to be seen. What we do know is that Gallo is a good baserunner this year because he does a pretty good job taking extra bases, hasn’t been caught stealing, and strikes out/crushes the ball enough to rarely hit into double plays. Does that add up to being an actually good baserunner? Gallo has still been an effective baserunner this season compared to his peers, albeit not by the usual definition of the term, especially considering (and likely assisted by) his profile as a high-strikeout, high-power hitter. That value is derived from a variety of factors, so don’t expect to see him go 30-30 (or even 20-20) anytime soon, but keep an eye out for him when he is on base.

Player contracts can be fascinating because of how we tend to examine them. We can do it through a micro lens, figuring how each one impacts the shape of the team and its ability to compete; or we can look at them with a macro perspective and see how they do or don’t impact the overall business of a franchise. As fans and analysts, we usually go the micro route.

Part of going the micro route in examining player contracts is questioning whether a player just became overpaid or underpaid upon signing his new deal. Dave Cameron did just that when considering Jean Segura’s recent extension, expanding on how Segura may well have left money on the table when he inked his five-year, $70-million extension earlier this month:

Perhaps Segura just really likes Seattle, likes the ballpark, likes the organization, and isn’t as concerned about whether he’s on a sustained winner. But 18 months from free agency, it seems like he might have had a chance to earn more money on a team with a more certain future, so him taking an extension now is certainly a risk on his part, as he could end up as an underpaid asset on a team without enough around him to win consistently. That’s not what you generally want.

This is  a fair thought. Players rarely — if ever — have the chance to influence what the market will pay them, and where. Signing a deal that potentially pays anything less than maximum value, then, could certainly be regarded as shortsighted and a risk.

It’s at this moment in evaluating new contracts that it becomes worthwhile to ask: on whose behalf might the player be leaving money on the table, and for whom is it a risk? Them, or players down the line?

Players should absolutely push for every dollar the market is willing to pay them. This idea becomes emphasized when we remember how disparate the split in revenue is between players and owners. It doesn’t matter that the dollar amounts on both sides are absurd to most people. Players gain zero benefit by taking less pay.

But if we consider recent economic research, we might see why Segura didn’t necessarily push for every single dollar. Doctor George Simon comments on a study from Christian Bayer at the University of Bonn and Falko Juessen at Dortmund University that details how money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness but that levels of financial certainty do impact our general well-being. And the bottom line is Segura’s new deal still comfortably puts him in a mental place where he is “gaining steadily in [his] overall sense of security.” He can put in the same exact work as he did before signing this contract and feel much more at ease.

The real risk in deals like Segura’s, then, may be for other players in the future. The micro approach for him — the part of his signing that considers only the needs of Jean Segura and his family — is something he clearly finds satisfying. Otherwise, he probably doesn’t sign. But the macro perspective, or the one that would consider how his new contract could be used as a benchmark for others in the future, is probably left wanting.