Royals' arrival, Machado's resurgence among top storylines

There’s always something fascinating going on in the world of baseball – and there’s always something new. Every Friday morning throughout the season, heading into the weekend, inspired by Zack Lowe’s terrific “10 Things I Like” NBA column for ESPN, we present the Five Fascinations, five fun things going on in the baseball world. Also, we’d like to shout out the always excellent Ben Clemens at FanGraphs, another progenitor of a similar format. Submit your personal fascinations to will.leitch@mlb.com, or just yell at me about mine.

1) Is this just who the Royals are now, moving forward?
The Royals’ loss to the Guardians on Wednesday cost them an opportunity at a four-game sweep in Cleveland and sole possession of first place in the AL Central, a pretty amazing clause to write about a team that lost 106 games last year. The Royals just missed a chance to dislodge the Guardians from a spot they’d held since April, but still: It’s now just a one-game lead, out of nowhere. Much of the discussion of this stunning development has focused on the Guardians’ August collapse, which misses the primary point: How the heck are the Royals doing this?

They’ve outscored their opponents by more than 100 runs, one of only five teams in baseball to have done that; there’s nothing flukish about this team. The great baseball writer Joe Sheehan, who pens an excellent newsletter, posited two persuasive arguments for why the Royals might be pulling off the biggest one-season turnaround in MLB history: Their ability to stay healthy – which is a skill in some ways and luck in others – and, as he put it, “sequencing,” their ability to squeeze more runs out of their fundamentals than they might be expected to. (They’re kinda clutch, to put it more plainly.) They also had a stealthily great Trade Deadline, bringing in Lucas Erceg (who instantly became their best reliever), starter Michael Lorenzen (recently injured) and journeyman infielder Paul DeJong, who has been terrific upon arrival. And of course there is that whole Bobby Witt Jr. business.

The key question: Is this a one-year thing, or are the Royals an AL Central favorite moving forward? (This was supposed to be the thing the Tigers were gearing up to be by now.) On one hand, they do have Witt, an inner-tier superstar, along with other young-ish players like Vinnie Pasquantino, MJ Melendez and Cole Ragans. On the other, they don’t have that much MLB-ready talent on the farm; they’re 25th in the most recent Pipeline rankings. Other teams in the division do look like they’ve got more system-wide talent than the Royals. Is it possible this is the best chance they’ll have in this division for a while, a season in which everything is landing just right? Or is this a culture that is laying down the groundwork for years to come? It’s tough to tell: The Royals turned their franchise around so fast, it’s difficult to get your bearings. But just in case, while they’re here … they should probably just keep doing what they’re doing.

2) Who is the best team in baseball, anyway?
Those of you who regularly read our MLB.com Power Rankings – written by a particularly homely member of our staff – might notice that there have been four clear teams atop our rankings for several weeks now: The Yankees, Dodgers, Orioles and Phillies. It’s always those four. But their order keeps shifting around: One team will drop, another will rise and then they’ll swap the next week. Which speaks to the larger issue: There’s no real clear Best Team In Baseball this year.

Last year it was clearly the Braves; the year before, the Dodgers; the year before, the Giants and Dodgers were head and shoulders above everyone else. But this year, all four of those top teams are within about a game of each other, and none of them is on pace for 100 wins, which would be the first full season there wasn’t at least one such club since 2014. These teams are all going to coast into the postseason, so it’s not like they’re sweating all that much, but each of them has issues that have kept them from rising above the pack. It might make for some less compelling pennant chases. But when it comes playoff time, there will be no obvious favorite … which will make every game that much more compelling and unpredictable. Which team’s the best? I guess we’ll have to make them all play each other to find out.

3) Manny Machado looks like Manny Machado again
As noted by The Athletic’s Dennis Lin, Manny Machado said back in April that he didn’t expect to be fully healthy until 2025, and for the first half of 2024, you could tell. The perpetual MVP candidate had only a .422 slugging percentage before the break and just didn’t really look like himself. The Padres found guys – Jurickson Profar, Jackson Merrill – to pick up the slack, but of late, well, it looks like Machado may have underrated his healing ability.

In the last month, Machado is hitting .324 with nine homers and 26 RBIs, and he (along with Merrill and Blake Snell and company) have the Padres as the hottest team in the sport, putting up a 20-8 record in that stretch. Machado keeps looking better at the plate – he hit an absolute moonshot of a homer against the Cardinals on Tuesday – and is rounding into MVP form exactly when the Padres most need him to. It’s great to see, not just because Machado is so fun to watch, but also because he’s at the pivot point in his career when he needs to start locking in his Hall of Fame numbers. Our Mike Petriello, in his annual “how many Hall of Famers are currently playing?” piece, put Machado on his “has some, but not a lot, work left to do” tier, and you worried, with his first half, that he might be falling behind. He looks like himself again now … and sure looks like he’s going to do some October damage.

4) Justin Verlander is going to hit the market
When the Mets signed Justin Verlander to a two-year, $86.6 million contract before the 2023 season – he ended up throwing a total of 94 1/3 innings for the Mets – they added in a vesting clause: If he threw 140 innings in 2024, he’d make $35 million in 2025; if he didn’t, he’d hit free agency.

He’s not gonna make it. Verlander is at 67 innings with a month of the season left, which means he has that month plus the postseason to make his case for any team that wants to sign him this offseason. It’s clear he wants to come back, not just next year but for more years to come – he has said he wants to reach 300 wins, and he’s still 40 away. One of the biggest stories of the offseason revolved around which team will be willing to pay him, and how much, to chase that 300 number and stand atop their rotation. Verlander hasn’t really been Verlander so far this year – he currently has his highest ERA since 2014 – but he’s still Justin Verlander and all that comes with that.

More to the point: He’s going to have a chance, in this last month, to work his way back into being Vintage Verlander, and he’s still the guy nobody wants to face in the postseason. Verlander is used to people watching him. But most of baseball will be staring at him for the next 45-60 days, seeing if they can squeeze out another year (or two! Or three!) of the old Verlander.

5) Ah, Rich Hill
When I was a younger, more spritely version of a human being than I am now, I used to (lightly) mock sportswriters’ obsession with Jamie Moyer. It wasn’t that Moyer wasn’t a good pitcher, or a great story; he certainly was both. It was that so many sportswriters seemed to have their own identity wrapped up in Moyer’s success, that as long as he was around and still pitching in the Majors – and he was 49 1/2 years old when he threw his final game – they somehow felt a little less old. I wanted to tell them, because I was so young (or at least thought I was): Jamie Moyer is still pitching, but that doesn’t mean you’re not still old.

Now that I am older, and Rich Hill has returned to the Majors, I’ll confess: I kinda get it now. I’m older than Hill by four years, but that we could have theoretically gone to high school together does make me feel a little better, it’s true. Hill is back on the Red Sox roster, which is perfect, of course: He’s from nearby Milton, Mass., he has pitched in their organization three separate times already and he just has the whole Baah-stahn thing down: This is where he should finish his career. The Red Sox are still in the playoff chase, which leads at least to the theoretical possibility that Hill could, maybe, (we can dream!) pitch in the postseason. Heck, maybe he could finally win a World Series: He appeared in two for the Dodgers, both of which were losses. (He also pitched for the Cubs in the NLDS back in 2007.) C’mon, Red Sox: Get Rich Hill a World Series ring! It’ll make me feel less old!

Fun Series of the Weekend: Dodgers-Diamondbacks
Oh, it’s going to be loud in Phoenix this weekend. The Diamondbacks have been one of the hottest teams in baseball for a month, and now they get a chance to make a run at the Dodgers for the NL West lead not by watching the scoreboard, but by going right at them. This is a four-game series, with the final game taking place on Labor Day, which means the D-backs could catch the Dodgers if they stay hot (and the Dodgers stay as wobbly as they’ve looked for a while). Of course, since this is the last series between the two teams (Arizona leads the season series, 5-4), the Dodgers could use this weekend as an opportunity to put the Diamondbacks in their rearview mirror for good. And hey: This could end up being an NLCS preview anyway.