The All-Star game rosters were announced Sunday, which of course means chaos ensued when the selections were revealed. Player X shouldn’t have gotten in while Stats-Stud Y should have been a lock. Since many of the selections were pretty predictable, those snubbed from the festivities, as usual, garnered a tremendous amount of attention.

Of those who were not selected, perhaps nobody was more egregiously snubbed than Andrew McCutchen of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The 24-year-old center fielder ranks eighth among National League hitters with a .395 wOBA. His 6.9 fielding runs derived from solid play at the toughest outfield position ranks third in the league behind Shane Victorino (also snubbed, but on the final vote, unlike McCutchen), and Troy Tulowitzki.

All told, his 4.6 wins above replacement ranks him ahead of everyone except the two Joses: Bautista and Reyes. Any list of first-half MVP contenders would be incomplete without his name, and yet fans, players and the coaching staff of the National League team somehow found a way to select other less-qualified players. That he isn’t even included on the final ballot for fan voting — the list includes Victorino, Todd Helton, Ian Kennedy, Michael Morse and Andre Ethier — further perpetuates the madness. McCutchen is one of the top players in the sport right now, better than Jay Bruce, Carlos Beltran, Chipper Jones, Morse and Ethier. Yet the first three members of that group were voted in by the players, and the latter two still have a fighting chance of making the team.

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Episode Eighty
In which the guest is a real-live Harvard Man.

Headlines
The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective — Learned About!
The New York Times, Its Quality — Hotly Debated!
Crested Blazers — Hella worn!

Featuring
David Roher, Co-President, Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective

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

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 45 min play time.)

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Last week, I took a look at bunting in the World Series. Unsurprisingly, the college game contains many, many more bunts than the professional game. I surmised that college teams were bunting too often, and I made the (obvious) claim that bunts would make a large impact on the final games of the Series. Let’s take a look at what actually happened.

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Actual Rich Harden tattoo.

This edition of One Night Only contains:

1. Expanded previews for six of the weekend’s bumpinest games.

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

3. The superlative adjective bumpinest, apparently.

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The end appears close for Mike Cameron. The 38-year-old, hobbled by injuries over the past two seasons, was designated for assignment by the Red Sox on Thursday. Cameron could well end up on another club’s bench if he is released and only costs the pro-rated portion of the major league minimum, but his immediate future isn’t the purpose of this post. Rather, I want to celebrate the career of one of the least-appreciated stars of the late 1990s and the new millennium.

Take a look at the Wins Above Replacement Leaderboard for position players since 1997, the year when Cameron became an everyday player for the White Sox:
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If there were questions earlier this year whether Adrian Gonzalez was among the best hitters in baseball, consider your doubts answered. After hitting 71 home runs and posting a .288/.400/.530 line (.390 wOBA) in the past two seasons in San Diego, Gonzalez has started off his tenure in Boston on a blistering pace. He now has a .434 wOBA — second-best in the American League behind only Jose Bautista — and his .357 batting average is the highest in the majors. Can he adjust to the AL? Will he thrive in the toughest division in baseball? Gonzo laughs at your concerns.

So while Gonzalez is tearing the hide off the ball, there’s also an interesting subplot going on. Namely, how is Fenway Park affecting his hitting value? He’s hit 16 home runs so far this season and he’s on pace for 34, a small bump from last season. But it was a common assumption during the off-season that Fenway’s cozy confines would lead to an even more dramatic homer increased for Gonzalez. In fact, although Gonzalez currently has the highest Isolated Power of his career (.248 ISO), it looks as though he’s hitting with less power this season.

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You can embed videos from MLB.com, sure, but apparently that means all of the ones except, you know, the awesome ones.

Cubs 5, Giants 2

Moving the Needle: Aramis Ramirez homers to tie it in the bottom of the ninth, +.465 WPA. The Giants held a 1-0 lead from the second through the eighth, and handed the ball to Brian Wilsin with just three outs to record. He got the first one easily enough, but on a 3-1 pitch he served Ramirez a succulent cookie. Ramirez obliged by bashing it over the left field wall, tying the game. Three extra frames passed without a run, though the Giants did load up the bases with one out in the 12th. In the 13th they finally re-took the lead with a Pablo Sandoval homer, and then got the first two batters out in the bottom half. But a Jeff Baker double and Darwin Barney single re-tied it, and following an intentional walk Geovany Soto capped the comeback with a three-run shot.

Notables

Marcos Mateo: 5 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 6 K. That’s some heavy lifting in relief of Carlos Zambrano, who left the game with lower back problems in the second.

Matt Cain: 7 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 6 K. He’s gone at least seven and allowed zero or one run in four of his last five starts. It’s always a shame when the bullpen can’t hold a game like this.

Also in this issue: Cardinals 9, Orioles 6 | Tigers 5, Mets 2 | White Sox 6, Rockies 4 | Yankees 5, Brewers 0 | Astros 7, Rangers 0 | Marlins 5, A’s 4 | Red Sox 5, Phillies 2 | Pirates 6, Blue Jays 5

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Pitchers whose ERAs and estimators disagree are extremely interesting to analyze. On one hand, their signature run prevention mark might appear toward the top of leaderboards while the underlying numbers aren’t as fruitful. On the other side of the spectrum are pitchers like Zack Greinke, who, as Chris Cwik pointed out yesterday, has a vast disconnect between his ERA and FIP. In fact, it’s been that way since the first week of May when he came off of the disabled list.

His 2.63 FIP and 2.12 xFIP suggest that the newly-minted Brewers starter has been one of the best in the league. But Greinke’s actual 5.63 ERA is closer to the bottom than the top, and is three runs higher than his adjusted marks. One of the more popular stats here is E-F, a sortable number that measures the gap between ERA and FIP. Pitchers with a large separation are expected to regress in some fashion, because it is incredibly rare for anyone to finish with a huge disagreement between those two data points.

I thought about taking that concept a bit further and calculating the difference between ERA and xFIP, since the latter metric is a better predictor of future earned run average than its predecessor. This makeshift ‘E-X’ number would be measurable from 2002-now, and it piqued my curiosity to see which pitchers had the largest such gaps in that span.

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