This presents almost no problem for Washington debutant Tim Milone.

Featured Games
New York Nationals (4) at Washington (5) | 19:05 ET
• Watch as left-hander Tom Milone, 24, makes his major-league debut for Washington.
• That is, the Tom Milone who did this at Triple-A Syracuse this year: 148.1 IP, 9.40 K/9, 0.97 BB/9, 0.55 HR/9, 2.24 FIP.
• And, coincidentally, the Tom Milone who throws in the high-80s.
• Miles per Hour, that is.
• Why, what were you thinking?

MLB.TV Audio Feed: Mets Television.

Arizona (9) at San Francisco (3) | 21:05 ET
• This mostly isn’t a playoff race anymore, what with the D-backs up by five games.
• On the other hand, Tim Lincecum will be pitching his changepiece a whole bunch of times.
• And they’re playing each other, too.
• Which is different than playing with each other, I’ll submit.
• Which is to say, prepositions are important.

MLB.TV Audio Feed: Giants Radio.

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This past offseason, the Milwaukee Brewers took a risk that has paid conspicuously excellent dividends for the 2011 season, trading away the young and (generally) talented Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escobar, Jeremy Jeffress, Brett Lawrie, and Jake Odorizzi for the slightly older and more reliably talented Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum.

Greinke and Marcum, worth about six wins between them thus far in 2011, have been essential contributors to a Brewers team that, as of publication, is 7.5 games up in the NL Central and has something better than a 95% chance of making the postseason. It’s an extraordinary turnaround for a team that finished below .500 in 2010 and featured one of the NL’s worst starting-pitching staffs.

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Recently it was brought to my attention that Roger Maris had a career BABIP of 0.254. This value seems low for him or any player with an extended major league career. In the video I have seen of him, he looks like a line drive hitter. With your help, I would like to find out what kind of batted ball profile Maris had over his career.

Maris’ BABIP was always low throughout his career. In his first MVP season of 1960, it was 0.255. In 1961, the season when he hit 61 home runs, it was 0.209. It averaged anywhere from 0.209 to 0.287 over his career.

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A fair amount of Most Valuable Player and Cy Young discussion has been going around lately, and while it seems a bit early with a month left in the season, I suppose it is understandable. There has been less discussion of Rookie of the Year. I don’t blame anyone for that. I really don’t get that worked up about the individual year-end awards. (I’m not quite brave enough to say that I don’t care, maybe if Greinke hadn’t won in 2009 the story would have been different.) And if I’m not that pumped about the MVP or Cy Young races, why should I be excited about Rookie of the Year?

Still, a number of rookies have been impressive this season, so it is worth discussing. Brett Lawrie, for example, has hit so well in only 26 major league games that he’s already at two WAR for the season, right of there with the best of the American League rookie hitters. What if he (or Desmond Jennings, or whatever player you want to pick) keeps this up? What if they put up more value than any other rookie in less than half of a season? Would you vote for them for Rookie of the Year?

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Since its inception in May of 2010, the Community Blog has (a) provided a space for some excellent work by the FanGraphs readership but also (b) occasionally fallen through the editorial cracks (and not in the gross way that you’re imagining).

After some serious-type conversations and more than one fistfight, however, we believe that we’ve established a sustainable way of reviewing submissions in a timely and efficient manner. Today, for example, we’ve published James Lewis’s article proposing a totally creative and equally unlikely solution to the Cardinals’ shortstop hole (again, not disgusting).

Please acquaint yourself with the guidelines for submission if you’re interested. Ready to submit a post? You can do that here with your FanGraphs user name (register here, if you don’t have one yet). Already published an article somewhere? Feel free to cross-post.

We’re looking forward to your submissions.

Mike Easler was known as “The Hit Man” for a reason. In a career that spanned from 1973-1987, Easler displayed a sweet left-handed stroke that produced a slash line of .293/.349/.454. His best years came with the Pirates and Red Sox — he also played with the Angels, Astros, Phillies and Yankees — and along the way he shared a clubhouse with some of the game‘s most-accomplished hitters. Easler — currently the hitting coach for the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons — talks about several of his notable teammates in this interview.

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David Laurila: Who is the best hitter you played with?

Mike Easler: Overall, the best hitter I played with was Don Mattingly. I played two years with him and I’ve never seen a guy that could hit for power and hit for average like [he did]. He was a clutch hitter. He could get a single when you needed one, and he could turn on one and burn on one, in Yankee Stadium, and go deep when he had to. He could hit lefties, he could hit righties. He was the best hitter that I played with.

DL: From a hitting coach‘s perspective, why was Mattingly so good?

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What’s the over/under on the chance that this statement’s accurate?

Featured Game
Chicago Americans (2) at Detroit (2) | 19:05 ET
• After the AL West, the AL Central is actually the closest real playoff race, with 5.5 games separating division-leading Detroit and Chicago.
• Here’s another thing that separates Detroit and Chicago: socioeconomic indicators.
• Which, that’s a joke.
• But also, it’s not a joke.
• Just like all jokes, really.

MLB.TV Audio Feed: White Sox Television, on the loudest possible volume.

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.

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Earlier this week, I spent some time explaining an alternative way of evaluating power: Weighted Extra Bases (wXB). It’s not a statistic you’ll find in the FanGraphs pages as I made it up — although I am not the first to do so — but I like to think it does a better job at capturing the value a player creates through power than Isolated Power or Slugging Percentage.

That’s not to say that wXB is better than ISO or SLG — simply that it’s answering a different question. While ISO and SLG concern themselves with a player’s extra bases and total bases, wXB focuses specifically on the value a player adds through their extra base hits. The formula uses the coefficients for each hit from wOBA, so doubles are given slightly more weight than in ISO, and home runs slightly less.

Using this stat, we’re able to see which players are over- or undervalued by ISO, compared with how much value they have actually contributed through their extra base hits. There are a few notable names on both sides of the coin, so let’s check them out.

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Finishing one out short of his sixth shutout of the season Wednesday night, Cliff Lee capped off a magnificent August by holding the Reds scoreless over 8 2/3 innings. He turned in the following numbers for the penultimate month of the regular season: 39 2/3 innings, 23 hits, 2 earned runs, 8 walks, 39 strikeouts.

He kept 48 percent of balls put in play on the ground and kept runners off base to the tune of a 0.78 WHIP. All told, his gaudy 0.45 on the month produced a 12 ERA-, meaning it was 88 percent better than the league.

And yet, Lee’s August paled in comparison to his June this season, when he posted a 0.21 ERA that, when normalized for season and league, actually represents the best mark for that month in the Retrosheet era. The Phillies broadcast displayed a graphic the other night showing that only three pitchers have won five or more games without losing, and with a sub-1.00 ERA in two different months: Walter Johnson, Bob Gibson and Lee. Even if the win-loss record qualifier was removed Lee would still find himself in limited company in this regard.

Overall, Lee has performed up to high expectations this year with the Phillies. Roy Halladay garners much of the attention in that dynamic rotation, but Lee has been fantastic. He has thrown 194 2/3 innings over 27 starts, with a 9.2 K/9, 1.8 BB/9, 46 percent groundball rate and a 2.59 ERA supported by his 2.75 xFIP and 2.68 SIERA. His elite level numbers invite the question of why Clayton Kershaw, who has similar numbers, is getting plenty of award consideration, while Lee is consistently overlooked.

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On Wednesday, a story appeared that a Dutch delegation is getting ready to make its final bid to host a Major League Baseball game in 2014, centered around a new stadium capable of seating 30,000 to be built in Hoofddorp, a small city outside Amsterdam. (Significantly, the story indicates that American baseball people have assisted them with the text, which indicates that there is a high chance the bid will be accepted.) Bert Blyleven’s homeland made a surprising run in the 2009 World Baseball Classic — the Dutch team stunned Dominican Republic twice and finished seventh out of 16 teams — but most American baseball fans still don’t have much sense of the baseball past, present, or future in Netherlands.

Then again, neither do many of the Dutch. As Rogier van Zon, editor of the main Dutch baseball site honkbalsite.com, explained in a 2009 interview with Patrick Newman:

Maybe it is hard to believe, but when the Dutch beat the Dominicans and advanced to the second round, there was hardly any newspapers or tv stations in the Netherlands that brought the news. The only media attention was a small article on one of the last pages of the sports section. Except baseball fans, probably the most people in the Netherlands didn’t even know what the Dutch team had done. Baseball isn’t a popular sport in the Netherlands.

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