With today being the deadline (at midnight) to get amateur draftees to sign on the dotted line, we’ve been building up to the occasion with a look back at the big draft spenders during the past three seasons. If you’ve missed the past two articles, you can find them here: Boston and Pittsburgh. There is bound to be a lot of draft news today as Major League Baseball finally lifts the gag order on big-money contract agreements.

After the 2009 amateur draft debacle that helped send former GM J.P. Ricciardi out of town, the Jays organization took a much different – and much more aggressive – approach to the 2010 draft. Under the guidance of new GM Alex Anthopoulos and scouting director Andrew Tinnish, the club exploited its massive scouting department and focused on high-ceiling talent.

Putting faith in its scouts, the club handed out a whopping 17 contracts that met or exceeded $200,000. Of those picks, 11 were pitchers, and the hitters were mostly of the up-the-middle variety — save for corner outfielder Marcus Knecht and third baseman Kellen Sweeney (who was a shortstop in college). The results – so far – have been rather impressive, which has made Toronto into a top-three organization in terms of overall talent.

College Picks
1st – Deck McGuire, RHP
1st – Asher Wojciechowski, RHP
4th – Sam Dyson, RHP

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Episode Eighty-Two
In which the guest does not, technically, have the beat.

Headlines
Drinking at a SABR Conference — Celebrated!
Stress on the Job — Stressed Over!
Ideas, Generally — Bandied About!

Featuring
Sam Miller, OC Register

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

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 65 min play time.)

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If a tree falls in Sun Life Stadium, you can hear it in every other part of Sun Life Stadium, probably.

Featured Game
San Francisco (4) at Florida (9) | 13:10 ET
• This game does well by NERD predominantly because (a) the Marlins are young and (b) the Giants are very much in a postseason race.
• It does well otherwise because Mike Stanton (.261/.347/.525, .315 BABIP, 133 wRC+) will play in it and Brandon Belt (recalled yesterday) might also play in it.
• The other thing, though, is how the Marlins are drawing a league-worst 18,244 per game in a stadium with a capacity of around 70,000 for baseball, meaning the stadium is generally three-quarters empty.
• As Bill James has said somewhere, at some point: “Things are generally interesting to us because they’re interesting to other people.” Something like that.
• Looking at Miami’s Sun Life Stadium, it appears as though few people consider the Marlins interesting.

Audio Feed: Giants Radio. (Featuring the dulcet tones of Jon Miller.)

Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 5.7.

The following Game Scores include the new and improved playoff-odds adjustment, which you can learn about in your brain by clicking here.

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When you talk about talking people, you’re talking about these people talking.

Featured Game
Los Angeles Americans (5) at Toronto (6) | 13:07 ET
• When you’re talking about pitchers who’re third in the league in WAR, you’re talking about Jered Weaver (5.5).
• That’s provided, of course, that you’re talking about something as specific as that.
• Question: how long of a conversation would that be, though — the pitchers-who’re-third-in-the-league conversation?
• Thirty seconds?
• Or, because this is a Blue Jay game, 45 metric seconds?

Audio Feed: Blue Jays Radio.

Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 5.3.

The following Game Scores include the new and improved playoff-odds adjustment, which you can learn about in your brain by clicking here.

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A five home-run game has never happened for a hitter, but it has happened for pitchers plenty of times. It’s certainly less of a positive achievement there, but just as notable. Or more notable because it’s actually happened and I can note the times that it has. It happened another two times already tonight, as noted by Jeff Sullivan.

CC Sabathia surrendered five home runs to the Rays, all from different hitters, and Carlos Zambrano gave up five to the Braves, two coming from Dan Uggla and his now 32-game hitting streak. On their own, they are worth noting and then moving on. A pitching giving up five home runs is certainly unusual but it’s not incredibly rare. James Shields, Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey have allowed six in a game once and that’s only looking at the past decade. All in all, there have now been 34 instances of a five-homer game since 2000. For reference, over the same time period there have been a total of 39 triple plays turned. What I did notice however, is that Sabathia’s five home runs were all solo shots and that’s a much rarer event.

In the entire Retrosheet era, there are only 22 other cases of a pitcher giving up at least five solo home runs in a game. James Shields ruins a bit of the fun by having done it so recently as 7 August 2010 when five of the ultimately six home runs hit off him were solo dingers. More fascinating is that Tim Wakefield has actually done it twice. In the aforementioned six home run game in 2004, five of the home runs were solo shots in Detroit. The other was a two-run shot and Wakefield only allowed 2 non-HR hits over his five innings that game. Prior to that, in 1996 pitching at Fenway to the White Sox, Wakefield served up solo home runs to Frank Thomas (three times), Danny Tartabull and Robin Ventura. Similar to the other game, Wakefield only allowed a single hit that wasn’t a home run and completed six innings. Amazingly, the Red Sox won both those games.

Turning from the opposite of solo home runs, in case you needed another daily fun fact, the most amount of runs allowed by a pitcher via the long ball in one game is 11. Gio Gonzalez was responsible in July of 2009 by the Twins in Oakland of all places (and Oakland won despite being down 12-2 at one point) and Shawn Chacon was brutalized by the Angels in Colorado in 2001, which makes way more sense.

Without making an exhaustive list, a lot more has gone wrong for the Colorado Rockies this year than has gone right. But through it all, Troy Tulowitzki has been the team’s anchor, and he is well on his way to the best season in his still young career.

While he’s never had poor discipline, one of the reasons for the improvement in Tulowitzki’s game has been his judgment at the dish. In his four full seasons prior to this one, Tulowitzki’s strikeout percentage was 16.64%. His strikeout rate had dropped steadily from his abbreviated call-up in 2006 through 2008 before spiking in 2009. But taking this season into account, that 2009 spike stands out as an outlier, as his strikeout rates in the other three years are 13.3%, 14.7% and 10.9%. That 10.9% is this year’s mark, and it represents a career low. As a result, his walk-to-strikeout ratio is at a career-high 0.87, and it ranks 18th overall in the Majors among qualified hitters.

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If you’re a baseball fan — and if you’re not, why are you reading this? — you’ve undoubtedly been bombarded these past few days with stories about Mariano Rivera. I swear, every time I log onto Twitter, I see another five articles taking a stab at answering the same question: Is Mo declining? He’s been hit around three times this week, allowing four runs in only 1.2 innings pitched, and he’s both blown a save and lost a game. Judging from the media attention these struggles have been given, it sounds as though Mo should just hang up his spikes now and call it quits.

But of course, that’s absolute rot. In the battle between Mo and age, it looks like even Father Time can’t catch up with his cutter.

For the past five seasons, people have been overreacting to every blown save by Mariano, assuming that, this time, his struggles are signs that age is finally catching up to him. But guess what? So far, he’s still as dominant as ever. His 2.40 ERA is slightly high for him, but there are still only five closers in the majors that have a lower ERA than him this season. His strikeouts are up from last year (7.8 K/9) while his walks are down (1.0 BB/9), and he’s still allowing home runs at a rate well below league average. His 2.81 SIERA is better than he produced last season, and suggests he’s going to be just fine going forward. He may not be quite as dominant as he was in his early 30s, but hey, who is? That doesn’t mean he isn’t still great.

I’d get tired of this yearly drama regarding Mo, except it actually serves an important function: it reminds us just how amazing Mariano is. At 589 saves — only 12 behind Trevor Hoffman’s record 601 saves — he has already locked up the title of Best Closer of All-Time, and he’s still going strong. But at 41 years old, is Mariano the best old closer in history as well?

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Rates are obviously important to sabermetrics, particularly when discussing player skill. That’s why we don’t just look at a player’s raw numbers like total hits, walks, or home runs. That’s why batting average, and later, on-base percentage and slugging became popular. If we want to break things down more precisely to examine specific skills, we can look at things like walks, strikeouts and home runs per plate appearance. That works pretty well, and depending on how careful you want to be, at a certain point practicality outweighs precision. But what if you are really trying to look at a player’s skills carefully, is the good ol’ plate appearance really always the right denominator?

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Poorly conceived, poorly executed.

Featured Game
Los Angeles Americans (5) at Toronto (6) | 19:07 ET
• On the one hand, David Price (10) and CC Sabathia (10) face each other in New York tonight.
• On the other hand, that game is largely meaningless as regards playoff implications.
• Meanwhile, the Angels are just two games behind the Rangers.
• And Brandon Morrow (10, as well) is pitching excellently this season.
• Like, the type of excellent where he has the seventh-best SIERA (3.02) among qualified pitchers — i.e. better (if only slightly) than both Price and Sabathia.

Audio Feed: Blue Jays Radio.

Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 5.5.

The following Game Scores include the new and improved playoff-odds adjustment, which you can learn about in your brain by clicking here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Diamondbacks 8, Astros 5

Moving the Needle: Paul Goldschmidt’s two-run homer ties the game in the ninth, +.489 WPA. It was the kind of hit that WPA graphs were made for: bottom nine, two out, runner on first, down two, pinch hitter for the pitcher at the plate. Goldschmidt looked at the first four pitches of his AB, working the count to 2-2. He then fouled off a couple before belting a game-tying home run. In the bottom of the 10th Chris Young won the game with a homer of his own.

Notables

Jason Bourgeois: 3 for 5, 1 3B. He scored twice. He had been 0 for the series.

Ryan Roberts: 2 for 5, 1 2B. He has career highs in just about every counting stat, except singles and triples. He’s two shy on singles, one on triples.

Also in this issue: White Sox 6, Orioles 3 | Tigers 4, Indians 3 | Cubs 4, Nationals 3 | Yankees 6, Angels 5 | Reds 2, Rockies 1 | Rays 4, Royals 1 | Padres 3, Mets 2 | A’s 10, Blue Jays 3 | Cardinals 5, Brewers 2

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