Happy Sunday everybody. It’s hard to believe we’re already 45 games into the 60 game season. Next week I’ll share some visualizations on how the standings have moved around so far in the season, and how the playoff picture will look heading into the final stretch.

On to the weekly recap.

News from Around The League

• MLB launched Film Room, a search engine for MLB clips going back to 1929. It has over 3 million videos. Check it out here, it’s fun to play around with.

• The Nationals are off to a slow start in 2020. They had a similarly slow start in 2019, before turning things around roughly 50 games into the season and going on to win it all. That’s not going to be possible with the pandemic season only being 60 games long. FiveThirtyEight discusses the Nationals’ 2020 hopes here, and how the shortened season could be hiding good teams with poor records here. I highly recommend the second of these articles.

• Wednesday was Roberto Clemente Day. Several Puerto Rican players wore no. 21 to honor Clemente’s legacy.

League Leaders

Season-to-date, sorted by xwOBA. Don’t recognize some of these statistics? Check out this glossary.

Top 1% of Batters for Select Stats

Season-to-date Statcast metric leaders (top 1% of the league)

Longest Hits This Week (in Ft.)

1. Sean Murphy, 464 (video)

2. Carlos Corea, 461 (video)

3. Adalberto Mondesi, 458 (video)

4. Ronald Acuna, 453 (video)

5. Marcell Ozuna, 453.0 (video)

Hardest Hits This Week (in MPH)

1. Rafael Devers, 116.5 (video)

2. Ronald Acuna, 114.8 (video)

3. Gary Sanchez, 114.8 (video)

4. Manny Machado, 114.6 (video)

5. Michael Conforto, 114.4 (video)

Best Games This Week (By Total xwOBA)

1. Adam Duvall, ATL vs. MIA 2020-09-09 (box score) *

2. José Abreu, CHW vs. DET 2020-09-12 (box score)

3. Marcell Ozuna, WAS vs. ATL 2020-09-11 (box score)

4. Ronald Acuna, ATL vs. MIA 2020-09-09 (box score) *

5. Tyrone Taylor, DET vs. MIL 2020-09-09 (box score)

*The Braves scored 29 (!) runs on the Marlins this week. This game feed is a thing of beauty or disgust depending on which side of that you fall on.

This chart uses xWOBA to account for good or bad luck based on fielding and other factors.

Great Tweets

🇨🇦 Marshall Ferguson 🏈 @TSN_Marsh

I’d like to nominate cardboard humans watching baseball in a dystopian hell scape for photo of the year, thanks.

3:16 AM ∙ Sep 10, 2020

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79,540Likes22,639Retweets

Rob