In the past couple of weeks, commenters have pointed out that the Rockies have been ranked too high and the Pirates too low in the Power Rankings. This week, the readers proved ever-prescient, as the Rockies fall a Power Rankings-record seven spots, and for the first time, they landed outside of the top ten. The Pirates meanwhile, climbed out of the bottom five for the first time. That’s still likely too low for some reader’s tastes, as they were ranked 14th by ESPN this week. The Bucs have been one of the best feel-good stories of the first half, and seeing the electric atmosphere at PNC Park this weekend was a sight to behold. But outside of Andrew McCutchen, no Pirate finished the first half with a WAR higher than 1.7. Part of that is due to numerous injuries that have forced the team to look for contributions from a number of different players, but that’s certainly not all of it. None of that takes away from the fact that the Bucs are four games over .500 and have a legit shot at the playoffs, but it’s important that we temper expectations, even in July.

1. Boston: Last week – 2, WAR% – .682 (1), FAN% – .605 (1), TOTAL% – .648
At the break, three of the top seven position players in the game are Red Sox, and Kevin Youkilis isn’t far behind (tied for 22nd place). The quartet may need to keep up that pace if guys like Kyle Weiland end up being responsible for too many second-half starts.
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Beginning tomorrow, the 2011 Trade Value series will kick off here on FanGraphs, but before we go forward with this year’s version, I wanted to look back at last year’s list and see if there are lessons to be learned from some of the rankings. Obviously, things can change quite a bit in 12 months’ time, and many of the outcomes could not have been easily predicted last July, so we can’t just say “that guy got hurt, so it was a bad ranking.” However, I’m wondering if there are trends we can spot that might say something about what has transpired over the last year or perhaps some errors in logic I made that might have led to some rankings that don’t look so great in hindsight.

Before we talk about some of the things that we learned, however, it’d be helpful to revisit the list in its entirety. And so, here’s last year’s Top 50 Trade Value assets.

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With the All-Star Game coming up tomorrow — and with my already-exposed love of flipping leaderboards on their head — I figure it’s about time I put together an anti-all-star team. Baseball coverage is dominated this week by talk about the best players in the game, so why not spend some time looking at which players have been the worst in the majors this season?

There are many different ways to choose who’s been “the worst” player at each position — just like there are multiple ways of choosing the best player — but for the sake of simplicity, I used Wins Above Replacement (WAR) to compile this list. I didn’t simply choose the player with the lowest WAR at a position, though; I gave preference to players that had more playing time, and I chose to put less weight on defensive performance. I try to explain any slightly odd selections that I made, but feel free to make arguments for different players in the comments.

Without further ado, here are your 2011 starting American and National League All-Flub teams:

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Before the season, most prognosticators saw Cleveland finishing a distant fourth or perhaps even fifth in the 2011 American League Central. However, Cleveland jumped out to a big early lead, and although things have slowed down for the Tribe, at the All-Star break they are only half a game behind division-leading Detroit. Players such as Asdrubal Cabrera, Carlos Santana, Justin Masterson, Josh Tomlin, and Carlos Carrasco have led the charge. Like all teams (especially those in the AL Central), the Indians have holes, especially with Travis Hafner and Grady Sizemore taking their traditional stints to the disabled list. Such holes aren’t always easy to fill. However, during yesterday’s Cleveland-Toronto tilt, as the Blue Jays’ announce team raved about Orlando Cabrera’s status as a veteran leader and good luck charm, it struck me again that the Indians do have a obvious solution in at least one spot. According to second base prospect Jason Kipnis (who hit a home run in last night’s Futures Game), the team has his number. Why won’t they give him a call?

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Due to popular demand and to decrease general confusion, K% has been changed from K/AB to K/PA.

On average, you’ll see players’ K% drop about 2% and, at the very most (rare cases like Adam Dunn), about 6%.

This is a site-wide change and impacts stats pages, splits, leaderboards, and graphs that contain K%.

Much of the focus this past week was devoted to Derek Jeter, who homered off of David Price on Saturday to become just the 28th player in major league history to record 3,000 hits. The attention was well deserved, as this was a monumental feat worthy of celebration. When the on-field festivities subsided, however, I couldn’t help but hearken to an earlier article about milestones that buck the Hall of Fame tradition.

No, this has nothing to do with Jeter, who was a first ballot Hall of Famer even if he ended his career at 2,999 like Stan Ross, but rather a current member of the Rays who was in attendance this weekend: Johnny Damon.

Damon has 92 hits this season and is projected to finish with 155, putting him right in line with his totals over the last several seasons. Finishing with 155 hits would also push his career tally to 2,726. Assuming he falls somewhere in the vicinity of that projection, wouldn’t it seem like the 37-year old Damon is a virtual lock for 3,000 hits? He would have to decide to stick around for at least another two seasons, and find an American League team in need of a designated hitter and occasional left fielder, but neither of those caveats seems far-fetched.

Damon has averaged around 150 hits/yr since 2007. With 2,726 entering next season, he would only need to average 137 hits for two seasons, or 91 hits for three seasons. Sure, injuries could derail his pursuit, but I find it difficult to argue that he couldn’t average 90-100 hits from 2012-14, hanging up his cleats as the 30th member of the 3,000 hits club (Alex Rodriguez will get there sooner).

If he gets to that plateau, either his induction into the Hall of Fame becomes automatic, or the milestone itself is cheapened. Given that he would be the 30th person ever to achieve what is considered to be a holy grail of baseball accomplishments, the former scenario seems much more likely than the latter. Yet, Damon has never felt like a Hall of Fame player. He has barely even felt like a superstar. How is it possible that someone with a high probability of getting 3,000+ hits in his career, who won’t have played 25+ seasons like, say, Nolan Ryan or Jamie Moyer, has had such a relatively forgettable career?

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It’s not an easy time to be a legend.

I feel redundant saying this, since it’s become a common refrain among sportswriters when discussing star players, but we live in skeptical times. It’s too easy to blame it on the steroids scandal from the late 1990s and early 2000s.  The problem is more deeply rooted than that. Simply put, we live in an age of technology and information – and in such an age, it becomes more difficult to believe in something as abstract as a hero.

We live in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, where small stories become huge scandals. It’s an age where computers and social networks have come to dominate our lives. An age where stats determine whether we keep our jobs, and where a  computer algorithm promises us we can find true love. We have free and easy access to more news than our great-grandparents could have dreamed about, yet we can’t help but crave more information. We’ve truly reached the Information Age.

Yet in this age of instant information, can legends survive? It used to be that legends would grow from hearsay, from people passing around stories by word of mouth. Still, no story can survive for long in these days without being dissected, torn to shreds and stitched back together. If Babe Ruth’s Called Shot happened today, would baseball fans 80 years from now still remember it? Almost certainly not – there would be hundreds of reporters covering the story, searching for quotes and digging up new information and angles. The very mythology of the story would be sucked dry. Heroes and legends often don’t stand up to close scrutiny – they thrive best on uncertainty and myth and the power of a child’s imagination.

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Today with a single and a home run Derek Jeter got his 2999th and 3000th hits, joining a group of just 27 other players to do so. Jeter is the fourth youngest player to reach the mark, having turned 37 on June 26th. Ty Cobb did it as a 34-year old while Hank Aaron and Robin Yount as 36-year olds. Pete Rose got his 3000th hit at age 37 and 21 days, a few days older than Jeter. Inspired by Steve’s HR-pace graph — and this great New York Times career-HR pace graph — I wanted to see how Jeter’s hit pace compares to the other members of the 3000-hit club.

Below is a graph showing hits accumulated by seasonal age. The graph is interactive, so that you can hover over and click on the names at the left to compare the pace of different players. It is a canvas element so it only works in modern browsers (i.e., no IE8 or older). Here is a sample image if it doesn’t work on your browser.

The age is seasonal age not actual age. So in the graph Tris Speaker and Stan Musial get to 3000 hits faster because they did it sooner in their age-37 season even though they were older when it happened. The data come from Retrosheet. Where available it is daily, but for pre-1918 seasons it is just yearly (see Ty Cobb for an example of yearly versus daily data).

Looking at Jeter you can see he got a relatively late start, but then he accumulated hits at a very good clip. By 30 he had more hits than most of the 3000-hit club members did at that age. Since then he hasn’t slowed down as much as most, and he is way ahead of the pack for his age. Given his legend-like status and contract through the 2014 season (with the player option) — even with his talents diminished — he should get a good number more plate appearances before he retires. He should almost surely move into the top ten (by passing Eddie Collins at 3315 hits) and maybe the top five (by passing Tris Speaker at 3514 hits). Until then congratulations to a guy who has already had a great career.

Mike Trout!

This edition of One Night Only contains:

1. Six heart-stopping game previews.

2. Pitcher and Team NERD scores for every one of this weekend’s games.

3. A brief note: please excuse the tardiness of the present edition of One Night Only. Sometimes a guy is at SABR 41 in Long Beach, CA. Sometimes that same guy’s, like, “Wait? What time is it?”

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