Minor League Baseball is upon us, as the farm systems for all 30 teams kick into high gear today. We can’t offer you a 34-hour live chat like our Major League brethren, but how about a six-pack of things that make me excited to cover the minors this season at FanGraphs. Feel free to offer your own bits of excitement in the comments.

1. A new #1 overall prospect. With Jason Heyward already beating my Cubs to a pulp, and Stephen Strasburg probably 4-6 starts away from joining the Nationals, every outlet that prints a top prospect list will have a new man at the top in 12 months. Our own man Marc Hulet had four players in his top 10 that I doubt will pass the rookie threshold this season, and thus still be eligible for prospect lists a year from now: Desmond Jennings, Mike Stanton, Jesus Montero and Domonic Brown.

As far as anointing a new #1 goes, I think the obvious favorites are Stanton, Montero, and Dustin Ackley. If I had to pick one player from Hulet’s 50-100 range that I think could rise this year and enter that discussion, it would probably be Simon Castro or Lonnie Chisenhall. And, we all know that Bryce Harper will be forcing his way into the discussion as well.

2. Which brings me to another minor league season favorite: the draft, and the shortened season performance of the draftees. I owe this site a draft notebook, but in lieu of that today, I’ll tell you the guys getting the most top ten buzz behind Harper (who has established himself as the clear #1). I think Deck McGuire, a three-pitch righty from Georgia Tech, will really be in the Pirates mix with the second overall pick. We established the team needs pitchers, and fast, during our organizational rankings series.

A pair of lefties, Drew Pomeranz and Chris Sale, have both had fabulous springs thus far. Pomeranz surely has the higher ceiling, but I think Sale will coast through the minor leagues in the way that Christian Friedrich has for the Rockies. You will keep hearing a lot about the top prep arms, Jameson Taillon and A.J. Cole, who will be demanding huge dollars from whoever drafts them. The top hitting prospect behind Harper is a depressing group, with prep shortstop Manny Machado and Arkansas 3B Zack Cox leading the way. I really like Cal State Fullerton OF Gary Brown, hitting .454/.496/.689 in 27 games.

3. Stateside debuts for international prospects. Obviously, the most anticipated international signee is Aroldis Chapman, who will start his season in Triple-A. He won’t be down there more than 50 innings or so should we hope to hit the projected innings pitched total that this community projected. We will have to wait until summer to see guys like Miguel Sano and Michael Ynoa, the players that recently broke their respective organization’s bonus records. Montero is proof that spending big money on top Latin prospects pays off, as he promises to be worth a lot more than his $2 million bonus (even if he doesn’t stick as catcher).

4. The breakouts of sinkerballers Kyle Allen and Stephen Fife. Of the players I highlighted at the end of my “Staring Down the Sinkerballers” series, Allen and Fife are the two players with the best stuff. Fife will start the season in Double-A, where he will be part of a rotation that includes Red Sox top prospect Casey Kelly. Allen will also be second fiddle on his squad, the High-A St. Lucie Mets, where he’ll be pitching behind Jeurys Familia. The key for both players, however, will be the performance of their infielders.

5.On the offensive side, the breakout of Joe Benson. Yes, I probably like him a little bit because he grew up not far from me. But I think this is the season that Benson stays healthy and establishes himself as a good prospect. He is a +5-10 guy in center field, and last year, showed a ton of patience (14.1 BB%). We have been talking about his strength and raw power since he was a running back in high school, and now that he’s out of the hellish A-ball hitting environments in the Twins system, I think we start to see some. Why Benson can’t be a .275/.375/.425 hitter (+12-15), which makes him a 4 WAR guy over a full season, is beyond me. If the Twins get in a dogfight in July, teams should be looking to acquire Wilson Ramos and Benson on the cheap.

6. The development of minor league analysis at FanGraphs. I am really excited about the things we have in store for you this season. Our minor league statistical offerings will be improved ten-fold, and we’ll be looking to bring you views inside the game whenever possible. I also plan to really continue investigating the new way of analyzing prospects that has been talked about, which involves pursuing (and evaluating the utility of) things like comparables, bust rate, context-neutral statistics and more. I urge you guys to let myself and Marc Hulet know what you’re looking for, and we’ll do our best to bring it to you.

Todd Zolecki looks at the Phillies pitchers (Romero, Lidge and Blanton) on the disabled list. Each pitcher looks to be returning no sooner than the first of May. The Phillies are looking to add some help from the waiver wire.

Looks like Brian Sanches of the Marlins should be ready to go off the DL on April 10th as he has a mild hamstring strain. He will be a welcome addition when he returns.

Fire Jim Bowden points out that the Nationals start the season with half of the team out of position due to players on the DL.

The Brew Town Beat looks at the ten greatest injuries in all sports. Only two baseball players made it, Robin Ventura at #7 and Jason Kendall at #2.

Met fans didn’t forget about last year and greeted the teams training staff on opening day.

Two of the newest players with injury news are Sammy Gervacio of the Astros (link) and Felix Pie of the Orioles (link). After a big push over the weekend to get everyone on the DL, the rate has slowed down. On average it is two people going on the DL each day. Here is a list of the average number of trips to the DL from 2002 to 2008:

March 46
April 104
May 78
June 70
July 59
August 67
September 11

Two of the Tiger’s top pitching prospects, Casey Crosby and Cody Satterwhite, are hurting with Satterwhite possibly being done for his career. TINSTAAPP

Programming note: I am looking to doing a series on different injury types and treatments. Let me know if there are any topics you would like to see covered.

The first week of the season is beautiful. Garret Jones is on pace for 243 HRs. Edgar Renteria leads the league in batting at .727. Placido Polanco is on pace for 486 RBIs. With extremely small samples abound, we get to see our fair share of ridiculous statistics. Chief among them just might be Vernon Wells’s current 2010 line: 8 PAs, 5/7, 3 HR, 6 RBI, 1 BB, .714/.778/2.000.

Perhaps, the Wells that signed a 7 year, $126 million contract is back. Of course, we’d be best served by simply looking towards Wells’s projections when it comes to forecasting the rest of his 2010. Still, this hot start has happened – much like R.J. and Dave C. have each noted in the past. How will this seven PA explosion impact our projection of Wells’s final line?

For simplicity’s sake, let’s just stick with CHONE’s projection. CHONE projected Wells for the following line: 608 PAs, 149/562, 100 1B, 29 2B, 2 3B, 18 HR, 43 BB, .265/.321/.420 (.327 wOBA).
Now, scaling back to 601 PAs to account for the 7 Wells already has gives the following: 98.8 1B, 28.7 2B, 2.0 3B, 17.8 HR, 42.5 BB. Adding in his 7 banked PAs gives the following 608 PA line (with rounding): 153/562, 101 1B, 29 2B, 2 3B, 21 HR, 43 BB, .272/.322/.443 (.333 wOBA). That’s a pretty significant difference – 3-4 runs according to wRAA and 24 points of OPS.

For as much as we talk about small sample sizes, that’s a pretty significant effect on a final season line from only 7 plate appearances. There is a chance that he goes through an 0/9 stretch at some point which completely nullifies it, but we can’t assume that will happen. That’s the Gambler’s Fallacy, the entire basis of R.J. and Dave’s posts. At this point, we should simply assume that Wells will perform at his projection for the rest of the year (actually, slightly better, incorporating the information from his first 7 PAs, but not significantly better), and adjust the final outcome based on what’s happened.

Vernon Wells already has 3 homers in the bank this year. Even if the rest of year just goes as expected, it could look like a bit of a rebound for someone who looked down and out last season.

One of the questions I think FanGraphs is always asking, whether implicitly or explicitly, is “How can we make baseball writing better?” Nor is this a quality native only to the present site. Indeed, better blogs everywhere are interested in finding creative solutions to this problem. Unconstrained by considerations such as physical space or “making any money, whatsoever,” we, the blogerati, are given space to experiment. If we fail, we fail. “Big whoop,” as my grandmother would say. If we succeed, eureka!, the face of baseballing journalism is forever changed.

Those are pretty sweet terms under which to work.

A site like Deadspin, for example — however one feels about its frequent sojourns into the immodest — has distinguished itself by exploring the advantages that electronic media have over print media. (The pictures of Greg Oden freaking on hot coeds certainly haven’t hurt, either.) The internet is full of other such examples, where a group or individual, having the will/way, provides content that traditional media have neglected. (The internet is also full, it should be said, of people freaking on hot coeds.)

One of the forms native to the interweb is the live chat, and it’s this form that found its way to these electronic pages for Opening Day. The event compelled this author to ask a couple, very basic, questions about the chat form.

Here they are.

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As is probably apparent, I am routinely interested in individual pitch stats for pitchers. I’ve looked at which pitches generated the highest rates of swings and misses for instance. I am also pretty keen on ground balls rates. It’s time to combine those two into a look at which pitcher’s pitches were the best and worst at causing ground balls.

Ranking pitches (a minimum of 200 thrown) by the percentage of ground balls out of all batted balls leads to some predictable results. For one, fastballs dominate the low end of the spectrum. Pitchers ten to throw fastballs up in the zone when gunning for strikeouts so it is no shock that fastballs get ground balls about 10% less on average than your typical breaking ball.

Curveballs, changeups and two-seamers, or sinker, average around 48% ground balls once the pitch is batted. On the other hand, four-seam fastballs turn into a ground ball just 39% of the time on average. Sliders are about halfway between the two at 44% or so.

Still, Russ Springer (15%), Juan Cruz (15%), Craig Breslow (17%), Bruce Chen (17%) and Chris Narveson (18%) deserve special recognition for having the five worst pitches in all of baseball at getting a ground ball. Given that all five pitches in question are four-seam fastballs and fastballs are usually a pitcher’s most common pitch thrown, it should be no surprise to find out that all five of the listed pitchers suffer from rather low ground ball ratios overall.

It’s amazing that Springer and Cruz have managed to have significant success with such rates. Both used superb strikeout rates to offset the extreme fly ball rates. As Cruz showed last year though, that’s a volatile line to walk and when the strikeouts dip you can get yourself into trouble in a hurry.

Edgar Renteria had 115 hits last season. He recorded a little over 4% of that total in today’s game. Yup, Renteria took home the second stage of the improbable shortstop offensive outbursts by recording five hits in five at-bats. Not to be a downer and kill the impromptu parades undoubtedly taking place across streets in the Bay Area, but … have you ever looked at ow many players have recorded five hit games? It’s a nice casserole of names and abilities. Here are the last five years’ worth of April five hit games:

2009
Cristian Guzman
Ian Kinsler
Marlon Byrd
Mark Teahen
Ryan Braun
Russell Branyan

2008
Rafael Furcal

2007
Willy Taveras
Chase Utley
Scott Rolen

2006
Mike Young
Ivan Rodriguez

2005
Mark Kotsay
Mark Loretta
Alex Rodriguez
Aaron Miles

This list fascinates me because, again, the spread of talent is pretty wide. You have future Hall of Famers, all-stars, and superstars, and then … Miles and Tavares. Here’s a link to Baseball-Reference’s Play Index with a complete listing of every five hit game since the 1920s.

Now, this is not to say Renteria isn’t on his way to an improved season. There’s almost no way he posts a wOBA in the .280s again. It’s just that this game does not signify in any way that he’s back, front, or sideways. I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence and state the obvious, okay I will. Five hit games can happen to pretty much any batter. They are random and sometimes things just go that batter’s way for a night. Luck doesn’t discriminate on batting slot, defensive position, or projection.

How else do you explain Brett Gardner and Billy Butler sharing something in common besides Matt Klaassen’s heart?

Last night, Dallas Braden pitched his first game of the season, and first start after missing half of last year. It was more than encouraging as last year’s Opening Day starter struck out ten Mariners while walking just one and giving up just four hits over seven innings. Those ten strikeouts are a career best (his previous high was seven). Last year Braden was successful based on an unsustainable sub-5% HR/FB, so to be successful this year he is going to need to strike guys out like he did yesterday and in his 117 innings at Triple-A in 2007 and 2008.

Braden is an interesting pitcher; the lefty throws an 87 MPH fastball and along with it the slowest changeup in baseball. Last year, it averaged 72 mph. By comparison, Barry Zito’s was 73.6, and no other starting pitcher had one slower than 78 mph. That separation of 15 mph is also one of the greatest between a fastball and changeup. And it works, as the pitch was worth almost two runs above average per 100 in 2009 and 2008, and he throws it often — 21% of the time last year.

Last night he threw it even more often, throwing 34 changeups out of his 91 pitches, and 32 changeups out of his 71 pitches to RHBs. It did not disappoint, inducing 12 of his 16 swinging strikes. It will be interesting to see whether he continues to use the change more often this season, as it is his best pitch.

To get a feeling for just how much slower his change is I plotted the pitches in Braden’s three-pitch strikeout of Milton Bradley in the first. He started off with a two-seam fastball (blue) for a swinging strike, then a four-seam fastball (green) up-and-in fouled off, and finally the changeup (yellow) down-and-away for a swinging strike three. I put a little dot every 0.075 seconds. The horizontal and vertical axis are not to scale, with the height exaggerated relative to the length.

By the time the change reaches the plate it is almost tenth of a second behind his two fastballs.

Comparison of two players at the same position:

Player A hit .239/.340/.442 with 25 home runs for a .346 wOBA while playing +10 defense.

Player B hit .250/.342/.452 with 24 home runs for a .346 wOBA while playing +9.5 defense.

Quite similar. They walk almost equally as often (12.3% for A, 11.9% for B), neither has a good average, although that hardly matters, of course. They have similar power. If you didn’t know that they played good defense, you’d be tempted to say that they had “old player skills,” just from the three slash.

I won’t pretend this is a big surprise: both players are Mike Cameron. Player A is the 29-year-old Cameron of 2002, and Player B is the 36-year-old Mike Cameron of 2009. Mike Cameron has been good, there’s no doubt about that, so I won’t go on about it. It’s his aging — or, more precisely, his seeming lack thereof — that is so striking. A graph of Cameron’s seasonal wOBAs is representative:

That is remarkably stable since 1999. Many of his other graphs have a similar shape.

Cameron’s UZR varies more year-to-year than his offensive stats, but that’s the nature of defensive metrics in general. And his truly down years according to UZR are in his injury-shortened 2005 with the Mets and his two seasons in San Diego. It’s also worth nothing that while Cameron has often been called “injury prone,” starting in 1998 he’s played 140+ games every season except 2005 and 2008.

One might be tempted to say that “you know what you’re going to get with Mike Cameron” after all these years: low batting average, good power, good walks, many strikeouts, 20+ homers, good defense in center field, and until 2009, a decent number of steals. But we aren’t talking about a player’s 25-32 seasons; in Cameron’s case, we’re talking about a period that’s almost completely made up of his thirties, when most players are declining. Looking at Cameron’s numbers, the only real change to be seen in recent years is that he attempts fewer stolen bases, and that is a very recent development (2009).

I don’t think it really means anything, to be honest. I’m just amazed that Mike Cameron has been able to go out every year and put up four-plus win seasons, one after the other (with a few exceptions) in the part of his career when many would be slowly dropping out of baseball. Of course, players being productive in their thirties and even forties isn’t unheard of, but many of them were great players to begin with, so their decline phases could still be very great. Of course, not everyone ages the same. Some players were more productive in their thirties — Honus Wagner comes to mind. But again, while Cameron is a good player, no one would put him on Wanger’s level. Like Wagner and other productive “old” players, Cameron’s athleticism is well-renowned, and that certainly makes a difference.

But Cameron is an exception, not the rule. We shouldn’t take his singular case as a “refutation” of what we know about player aging. CHONE expects a pretty big offensive drop-off to a .317 wOBA, while ZiPS sees more of the same, projecting another .346 for Cameron in 2010. But projection systems (rightly) work off of general rules. Who knows? So far, though, Mike Cameron’s play through his thirties brings to mind the following (incredibly nerdy) lines from the first chapter of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring:

Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on Mr. Baggins. At ninety he was much the same as at fifty. At ninety-nine they began to call him well-preserved, but unchanged would have been nearer the mark.

Episode Sixteen
In which the panel passes through the looking glass.

Headlines
Fantasy Is Reality
Thinking Stupid
Getting Rauchy
… and other wild gestures!

Featuring
Matt Klaassen, Philosophizer
Eno Sarris, Fantasy Expert

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop.

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During Monday’s All-Day chat here at FanGraphs, someone asked our favorite teams and I piped up with the Colorado Rockies (I’m watching them right now) and the Tampa Bay Rays. My main reason for listing those two teams is simple: They both developed much of their own talent. As a prospect follower, that’s a pretty big positive.

So, let’s have a look at exactly where the Rays’ and Rox’ 2010 Opening Day talent comes from.

Tampa Bay Rays
James Shields: Drafted
Matt Garza: Trade
David Price: Drafted
Jeff Niemann: Drafted
Wade Davis: Drafted

Rafael Soriano: Trade
Dan Wheeler: Trade
Andy Sonnanstine: Drafted
Grant Balfour: Trade
Mike Ekstrom: Waivers
Lance Cormier: Free Agent
Randy Choate: Free Agent

Kelly Shoppach: Trade
Carlos Pena: Free Agent
Sean Rodriguez: Trade
Evan Longoria: Draft
Jason Bartlett: Trade
Pat Burrell: Free Agent
Carl Crawford: Draft
B.J. Upton: Draft
Ben Zobrist: Trade

Dioner Navarro: Trade
Reid Brignac: Draft
Willy Aybar: Trade
Gabe Kapler: Free Agent

Totals:
Drafted: 9
Amateur Draft: 0
Traded: 10
Free Agency: 5
Waived: 1

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