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FanGraphs | Craig Edwards: Of the top ten best first basemen in the first half, just one (Matt Olson) is in the American League. AL first basemen, in general, have been especially bad: only two other than Olson (Mitch Moreland and Niko Goodrum) are performing better than 2 WAR/600 PA.
Baseball Prospectus | Jonathan Judge: This is an incredibly fascinating sabermetric study. The original thought among sabermetricians is that wOBA, because of linear weights, is better than OPS, which calculates a number based on adding two other numbers with different denominators. The thing is: OPS is still pretty good. When looking at team performance, OPS is better at describing team run scores (the correlation is higher). Yet, when looking at player performance, wOBA is the way to go. It’s still interesting that in 2018 OPS has stood the test of time despite how non-intuitive it really is.
The Athletic | Eno Sarris ($): Trevor Bauer revealed that when he hits free agency, he will never sign anything longer than a one-year deal. Is that logical? It actually is, because if you consider how deals lately have been devalued for length, if he got $35-40 million for a single year, and did it a few times, he could beat would his average earnings would be had he signed a five-to-seven-year-deal with a lower AAV.