Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Select Televised Games
2. SCOUT Leaderboard: Spring Training Batters
3. Superfluous Video: Freddy Galvis Gets Three Hits

Select Televised Games
Today’s notable games available on MLB.TV.

Miami at Washington | 18:05 ET
Nationals shortstop Ian Desmond has a .304 career on-base percentage, has produced one of the worst offensive performahnces of the spring (see batting laggardboards below), and yet has batted in the leadoff spot for at least each of the Nationals’ last seven games — and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Does batting Desmond leadoff ultimately have a profound negative effect on run production? Probably not. But it appears to be symptomatic of a sort of devotion to baseball orthodoxy (in this case, the Baseball Law that the leadoff spot should be reserved for a fast, light-ish-hitting batter) that one imagines can’t help a team.

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FanGraphs+ (formerly The Second Opinion) is now available for just $4.99!

Here’s what you get:

Player Profiles – Over 1100 player profiles written by the FanGraphs and RotoGraphs contributors you’re already familiar with. Available on either the player pages or in blog format.

Articles – 11 in-depth articles to help you win your league:

-Keeper League Prospect & Rookie Strategies
-How to Use PITCHf/x in Your Fantasy League
-Keepr Conundrum: Bryce Harper or Mike Trout
-Improve Your Control and Break Out
-The Difficulty in Predicting Saves
-Valuing Upside Graphically
-Ottoneu Strategies for Every Setting
-Projections and Playing Through Pain
-Mining for Under (and Over) Performers: Strikeouts
-Prospects with Pedigree: Eno’s Rookie Lineup
-The 2nd Annual Cistulli-Sarris Prospect Face-Off Challenge

Quick Opinions – Short one to two sentence profile that give you the bottom line about a player. These are also integrated into our various projection pages so you can quickly get more information about a player.

FanGraphs+ Year Round Content – FanGraphs has partnerned with ESPN Insider again this season and everything we write for ESPN will be available. (2 – 3 articles weekly)

FanGraphs+ Archives – Our previous two year’s worth of FanGraphs+ content will also be available to you.

For those of you wondering, there is no PDF (again) this year. I know we released one sometime in mid-March last year, but I just don’t feel comfortable promising a half-hearted PDF.

The idea of FanGraphs+ is to enhance your FanGraphs online experience and I think for $4.99, it’s really an amazing bargain.

I don’t mean to #humblebrag, but I was there in person for Yoenis Cespedes’s first home run in a major league uniform. It was just the luck of circumstance: I was there with a lot of my Fangraphs colleagues for spring training, and the first spring training game of my life just happened to feature the moment where Jeff Francis tried to sneak an 82-mile an hour fastball past Cuba’s best outfielder. Mike Newman was there as well, and he captured the moment. But now that Yoenis has homered in his second continent and third major land mass, I thought I’d take a look at the recent history of Cuba’s best players to come to America, to whose number Cespedes now belongs.
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As spring training winds down, the Texas Rangers bullpen is still in flux. In particular, Robbie Ross is chasing a left-handed reliever role that current Toronto Blue Jay — and one of the game’s better relievers — Darren Oliver once had. At present, Ross is competing with Michael Kirkman for the job, which is of interest because Texas might employ only one lefty in its bullpen.  While neither Ross nor Kirkman can be expected to be as consistent Oliver, it’s Ross who has the command and the arsenal to adjust quickly to the major leagues.

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I’m currently in Jupiter, Florida, as a guest both of (a) my 91-year-old grandfather and (a) the Miami Marlins of Florida. Today was the third and final day on the backfields here, and what follows represents the third and final installment of mediocre analysis on same. (Read Day 1 and Day 2.)

Today, I watched mostly the Double-A game between the Cardinals and Marlins — or, alternately, the Springfield Cardinals and Jacksonville Suns of the Texas and Southern Leagues, respectively.

On Michael Blazek
Right-hander Michael Blazek, 23, pitched for the Cardinals, and is probably the most polished pitcher of any that I saw this week — if not always in terms of command, then at least in his ability to repeat the same shape and velocity on all his pitches. Blazek doesn’t have what you’d call “pedigree”: he appears neither on our Marc Hulet’s top-15 prospect list for the Cardinals, nor on Baseball America’s top-30 list (from their Handbook), nor on John Sickels’ top-20 list, nor on Kevin Goldstein’s top-20 list. There are probably a number of reasons for why his (i.e. Blazek’s) name is omitted from so many lists. The easiest one to which we can point is velocity: at no point did Blazek hit as high as even 92 mph on the radar gun. And it’s a fact that there’s a real correlation between fastball velocity and run prevention.

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Dave Cameron laid out the methodology behind the rankings last Friday. Remember that the grading scale for each category is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.

2012 Organizational Rankings

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago AL
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland
#20 – New York NL

Los Angeles’ 2011 Organizational Ranking – #23 

2012 Outlook: 45 (19th)

While Magic Johnson and Stan Kasten and their team agreed to buy the Dodgers from Frank McCourt for more than $2 billion yesterday, these rankings were compiled before that became public, and the ratings reflect knowledge that the team would be sold but not to whom or for how much. There’s still much we don’t know about the Dodgers new ownership group and how their investment will impact the future of the team, but it’s probably fair to say that if we re-did the rankings today, the Dodgers would grade out a bit higher. After all, there are already rumors about the new owners upgrading via mid-season trades if they get approved in time and the team is contending. But for now, we evaluate the Dodgers outlook in 2012 based on the current roster.

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Dave Cameron laid out the methodology behind the rankings last Friday. Remember that the grading scale for each category is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.

2012 Organizational Rankings

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago White Sox
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland

New York Mets’ 2011 Ranking: #21

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Dave Cameron laid out the methodology behind the rankings last Friday. Remember that the grading scale for each category is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.

2012 Organizational Rankings

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago White Sox
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City

Cleveland’s 2011 Ranking: #26

2012 Outlook: 47 (18th)
Once upon a time, in the mid-2000s, the Indians were brimming with young talent and very valuable major league pieces in C.C. Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Victor Martinez, Grady Sizemore and Travis Hafner. They peaked in 2007, with a 96-66 record, and an AL Central crown. Since then, a combination of untimely injuries, poor drafting, and a lack of acquired talent — especially through trading Sabathia and Lee — has kept the Indians below the .500 mark.

While the Indians may win more than 81 games in 2012, the oddly constructed roster is unlikely to contend for a playoff berth. Scoring a 47 on the 20-80 scale is appropriate, as they are a middle of the pack team that would need a lot to break right to challenge for one of the Wild Card spots. Crazier things have happened, but when Shelley Duncan projects to log 400+ PAs for your team, the odds aren’t ever in your favor.

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Carson Cistulli is still rubbing elbows with Bill Parcells, Celine Dion, Bryant Gumbel and all the other beautiful people who populate Jupiter, Fla., but he will return tomorrow with observations about the human condition as it relates to baseball that are both insightful and humorous in nature. Today, you are stuck with me, and I will provide neither. Sorry about that.

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Select Televised Games
2. Things You Can Buy With 2.15 Billion Dollars
3. Crowdsourcing Broadcasters: Oakland Radio

Select Televised Games
Notable games available on MLB.TV.

2012 National High School Invitational | 13:05 ET, 16:35 ET
Yesterday, the first-ever National High School Invitational kicked off at USA Baseball’s National Training Complex in Cary, NC. If you’re unfamiliar with Cary, it is located just outside of Raleigh, and is one of the primary towns in North Carolina’s fabled “Research Triangle.” This week, 16 of the country’s top high school programs have descended upon Cary to take part in a single-elimination tournament, and the winner gets bragging rights as the top high school team in the land. But while the tourney is single elimination, all teams will get four chances to play, which is just information overload for the scouting community. Several top prospects are scheduled to participate in the tourney, and you can watch two of today’s games live on MLB.com. Today’s games will be quarterfinal games, with the semis being broadcast live on Friday and the Gold medal game being live at noon ET on Saturday. Usually, we get nothing more than snippets of video from amateur players, so don’t miss out on the chance to watch several players that could go in the first two rounds this June. Check here for more details.

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