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

1. A Note on the Title, Its Decided Ambiguity
2. Every Game Previewed Amazingly
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

A Note on the Title, Its Decided Ambiguity
The reader will note that the title of this post is phrased ambiguously. On the one hand, one might suppose that, within the confines of this post, he will find all of today’s games, previewed in a way — owing to an impressive combination of logic and rhetoric, perhaps — that will amaze readers. One might suppose, alternatively, that the mere fact that every game has been previewed is, itself, the amazing thing.

While it’s true that much of writing is a purposeful struggle against ambiguity — and that the strategic insertion of a comma might make the author’s intentions perfectly clear — I’m prepared to submit that present case represents an instance of pleasant ambiguity.

Every Game Previewed Amazingly
These are all of today’s games today.

Detroit at Boston | 19:10 ET ***MLB.TV Free Game***
Of the 158 pitchers who’ve thrown more than 20 innings as a starter, right-hander Max Scherzer, who goes tonight for Detroit, is one of only ten with a perfect NERD score. (See below for more on NERD.) Owing to a .394 BABIP and 16.7% HR/FB, Scherzer’s ERA is 5.67, but there are indications that he’s pitched much better than that. For example, here’s what two defense-independent ERA estimators say: 2.78 SIERA, 3.16 xFIP (76 xFIP-). Also for example, consider how only Jeff Samardzija (12.9%) and Cole Hamels (12.8%) possess a batter swinging-strike rate better than Scherzer’s (12.5%) — a figure better than even his teammate Justin Verlander’s (12.2%).

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Red Sox Radio.

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Mike Trout is off to a great start. In just 129 plate appearances this season, the 20-year-old outfielder is hitting .304/.364/.522. Combine that with his spectacular defense, and it looks like Trout is well on his way to becoming one of the best players in baseball. Although Trout has been great this season, Bryce Harper has overshadowed his performance. And while Dave Cameron recently told us that Harper could be on his way to a historic season, Mike Trout isn’t that far behind.

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Max Scherzer is having a Jekyll-and-Hyde-type season. The Detroit Tigers right-hander has the highest strikeout rate (12.0) of any American League starter, but he also has the highest BABIP (.394) and has a 5.67 ERA. According to a major-league scout who has seen him multiple times this season, the numbers aren’t misleading: “He has either been striking guys out or giving up hard-hit balls.”

Scherzer is stat-savvy enough to know that his BABIP should regress to the mean, but he also isn’t in denial about the hard-hit balls. He addressed the subject, as well as the increased velocity of his slider and his changeup, prior to Wednesday’s game at Fenway Park.

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Scherzer on his high BABIP: “My stuff, right now, is where I want it to be. I’m able to attack the zone with my fastball, and [throw] my slider and changeup in the zone and out of the zone. That’s how I’m generating swings and misses. But throughout my outings, I’m constantly making a few mistakes and I’m getting punished for it. You can’t put a number on that. It’s how my outings have been going and I have to minimize those mistakes.

“I’m aware of the luck in [BABIP], but at the same time, you can’t directly influence it. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 189
During Dayn Perry’s most recent appearance on FanGraphs Audio, both host and guest spent a not insignificant portion of the show googling the internet in search of information about professional wrestling. This week, the internet is googled even more vigorously — and with shocking results!

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 42 min. play time.)

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A couple of weeks ago, I waxed idly on the degree to which April numbers — and the narratives they create — seem capable of occupying an inordinately large space in the baseball fan’s mind, even as the season progresses. Reader Mike noted in the comment thread of that post — nor do I have any interest in contradicting him — that this is due to what is called the Primacy Effect. The Primacy Effect is, according to Wikipedia, “a cognitive bias that results in a subject recalling primary information presented better than information presented later on.”

While the author has no intention of speaking for the reader, I don’t think I’m being particularly controversial by suggesting that the Primacy Effect does seem to play a part in the way we remember and reflect on a season, whether in progress or after the fact.

As a means to pushing back against this bias, I’ve presented below two leaderboards for May hitters — one a simple WAR leaderboard, the other an Expected wRC+ leaderboard — with notes on same. Insofar as basically all endpoints are arbitrary — a point noted by my colleague Eno Sarris last August — these May numbers aren’t necessarily more “important” than either their April or full-season counterparts. Still, they do reveal what has happened over the most recent stretch of meaningful baseball games, which has some value in itself.

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This week officially has a theme – after Ted Lilly (strained shoulder), Roy Halladay (strained lat) and Jered Weaver (strained back) landed on the disabled list over the last two days, Ken Rosenthal is reporting that Doug Fister (strained side) has now joined the party, and is heading back to the DL with the same injury that caused him to miss most of April. There’s been a lot of straining going on as of late.

Fister was deactivated after his first start of the year with a costochondral strain, and the hope was that a few weeks of rest would cause the issue to resolve itself. He was able to make five starts – and pitch well in those five starts, posting 3.47 xFIP during May – but the issue has returned, and now Fister is back on the DL for another period of rest.

Losing Fister for a few weeks isn’t the end of the world, but the injury’s recurrence has to concern the Tigers beyond just the time he’ll spend on the sidelines. Muscle strains have a history of lingering, and if Fister has to pitch through the injury all season, it could be a continuous issue. It does not appear to be serious enough that it prevents him from being effective when he is able to take the mound, but his ability to remain in the rotation on a consistent basis for the next four months has to be a question at this point.

To make his start on Friday, the Tigers have called up Casey Crosby from Triple-A, whom Marc Hulet rated as the Tigers fourth best prospect before the season began. Crosby is the anti-Fister, throwing good stuff from the left side with well below average control, and hoping he can get enough strikeouts to offset all the walks. His last two starts have been two of his best, as he’s run up 16 strikeouts against just one walk in 15 innings pitched, but he’d walked 15 batters in his three previous starts, so consistency is probably going to be an issue.

It’s certainly worth the Tigers time to give the kid a look and see if his stuff can translate to the big league level even with spotty command, but with Fister’s status up in the air, you can probably add the Tigers to the list of teams that may very well be hunting for a big league starter at the trade deadline. That list has gotten very crowded in the last few days.

The word is out that former Tigers and White Sox outfielder Magglio Ordonez will officially retire this weekend. Many tributes will probably be written to Ordonez, who had a lengthy and productive career. Except for his monster career year in 2007, Ordonez was not really ever the superstar some thought he was (nice job, Scott Boras), but he was a good hitter who got a lot of mileage out of a combination of good power and great contact skills. David Laurila has a great interview with Ordonez that was published earlier, in which the retiree mentions his biggest moment, his walk-off home run in the 2006 ALCS that put the Tigers into the World Series. All things considered, that was probably the right choice — it does not get much bigger than that (without being in the World Series itself). Win Probability Added (WPA) sees that as Ordonez’s biggest playoff hit at .387:

That was a great moment for the Tigers and their fans, but just considered on a individual game basis, Ordonez had many more dramatic hits in the regular seasons. As a farewell to a guy I kind of thought had already retired, let’s look at the three biggest according to WPA.

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If you’ve been reading my posts over the last eight months, you know I enjoy writing about quirky players, quirky stats and quirky stories. If you enjoy those too, read on. If not, read on anyway. You might find this one interesting.

Monday afternoon, Matthew Leach, a terrific national baseball writer for MLB.com, tweeted: “Starlin Castro: more CS than BB. Guessing not many guys have kept that up over a full season.” Good guess. Not many have.

Let’s look first at Castro’s numbers.

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Injuries have run rampant throughout Major League Baseball this season, and one of the teams most decimated by injuries has been the Milwaukee Brewers. The club has six players on the disabled list, including pitchers Chris Narveson and Marco Estrada, which forced the organization to dip into the minor league system for a spot starter on Tuesday evening against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

That spot starter was right-hander Michael Fiers.

The 27-year-old Fiers earned Pitcher of the Year honors in the Brewers’ farm system in 2011, compiling a 1.86 ERA between Double-A Huntsville and Triple-A Nashville. He struck out more than a batter per inning over 126 innings of work and displayed an ability to throw four pitches — fastball, cutter, curveball, changeup — for strikes in any count. He eventually pushed his way into top prospect lists, with our own Marc Hulet ranking him as the 15th-best prospect in the Brewers’ system coming into the season.

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