Archive for August, 2012

There was a time when Eric Chavez was on a hall-of-fame-level career path. Through 2006 — his age-28 season and his eighth full major league campaign — Chavez had a .271/.350/.489 batting line, 212 home runs and six well-deserved (at least most of them) Gold Gloves. Basically, if you think Scott Rolen should be a hall-of-famer, you can see Chavez traveling the same path — especially considering the pitcher-friendly confines of the Oakland Coliseum:

Source: FanGraphs — Eric Chavez, Scott Rolen

This year, Chavez is putting up a .303/.362/.547 (139 wRC+) season in 224 plate appearances with the Yankees. He’s been a more-than-able replacement for Alex Rodriguez, and he’s been a surprisingly big reason why the Yankees have been able to pull away from the pack in the AL East.

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

1. First-Round Leaderboard Update Update
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

First-Round Leaderboard Update Update
Regarding What This Is
Within the safe space that is these Daily Notes, it has become customary to publish, every so often, to publish a leaderboard of all the first-round picks from the 2012 draft (plus, because the author’s True Nature has dictated it, Astros shortstop prospect Nolan Fontana, Angels infielder Sherman Johnson, and Rangers third baseman Joey Gallo) to’ve made their professional debuts.

Regarding What This Is, Part II
What follows is an update of the first-rounders leaderboard, with five (!) players added, as follow:

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Chipper Jones announced in March that he would retire at the season’s end. He cited various reasons for ending his hall-of-fame career and admitted that he was tired of living the baseball lifestyle. Always one to answer questions honestly in an era of generalities, he said that his decision was firm; no matter what, he was done once the Braves’ season ended.

As expected, his steadfastness to that decision has been tested, and reporters frequently ask whether he’s changed his mind. Maybe there’s a point to those questions. After all, Jones has a .379 wOBA and 2.9 WAR right now. And he’s on pace for his best season in four years. He projects to finish the season with a .372 wOBA and 4 WAR, and players don’t generally retire after posting numbers like that.

So where does his final season rank among career-concluding seasons throughout history. Is he truly going out on top?

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Ben and Sam discuss the possibility that the Nationals might enter the playoffs without either Bryce Harper or Stephen Strasburg, then talk about how the White Sox have defied injuries yet again and proved the pre-season predictions wrong.

Episode 227
David Laurila, curator of FanGraphs’ Q&A Series, talks with Pirates Double-A reliever Victor Black.

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 13 min. play time.)

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As you know by now, Melky Cabrera failed a drug test and was suspended for 50 games yesterday for using synthetic testosterone during the best season of his career. Cabrera will miss the rest of the Giants’ regular season, but he’s already been worth 4.5 WAR to the Giants, and some people within the game are grumbling that a mere 50 game suspension isn’t enough of a deterrent to prevent ballplayers from taking performance-enhancing drugs. If it isn’t an effective deterrent, is it an adequate punishment?

Kirk Gibson, the manager of the Diamondbacks, was outspoken yesterday. “Obviously, there’s not a big enough deterrent if it continues,” he told the Arizona Republic. “I think it should be a minimum of a year (for a first positive) and after that it should just be banned.” So what kind of suspension would adequately deter players from using banned drugs?
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A map of the New England Collegiate Baseball League.

Other Lists
Cape Cod League
Northwoods League
Coastal Plain League

With August very much here, the nation’s collegiate summer leagues — many of which have probably hosted at least one future major leaguer — are coming to an end.

Below are the players to have performed most ably in this year’s edition of the New England Collegiate League. Offensive production (represented as the totally made-up SCOUT+, where 100 is league average and above 100 is above average) is essentially a version of wRC+, except using the three main defense-independent inputs (home-run, walk, and strikeout rate), all regressed duly*. Pitching performance (represented by the also entirely made-up SCOUT-, where 100 is league average and below 100 represents above-average run prevention) is calculated using a version of kwERA, with regressed strikeout and walk rates as the relevant inputs.

*By the method outlined here.

The idea here is not to suggest that the following players are/were the actual best prospects from the New England Collegiate League this summer. Outlets like Baseball America and Perfect Game will certainly do a much better job of that. Rather, it’s to (a) represent as accurately and responsibly as possible the best performances of the New England Collegiate League season and to (b) acquaint ourselves with those top performers.

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“Why don’t you take a look at the chart with the average against cutters in the big leagues, batting average against and then come back and tell me that that’s a great pitch,” Duquette said.

In an interview with Steve Melewski that is destined to provide content for weeks, Dan Duquette outlined the Orioles’ philosophy when it comes to the cut fastball. In essence, the pitch won’t be taught in their minor league organization. “We don’t like it as a pitch,” the Baltimore GM said.

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Major League Baseball suspended Melky Cabrera for 50 games after he tested positive for testosterone, a substance banned under the league’s Joint Drug Policy. The suspension is immediate, meaning Cabrera won’t be seen in the orange and black, patrolling left field and accumulating hits, for the rest of the season. After their loss yesterday to the Nationals, coupled with the Dodgers win over the Pirates, the Giants fell out of first place in the National League West for the first time since late June. Losing Cabrera will hurt the Giants as they battle the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks for the division title, and try to stay in the hunt for a wild card spot.

Cabrera’s has been the Giants’ second-most productive hitter, behind Buster Posey. His season line is .346/.390/.546 for a .387 wOBA and a 146 wRC+. He was a steady and effective presence as the number three hitter in the Giants’ lineup, where he whacked 25 doubles, ten triples and eleven home runs in front of Posey. It will be impossible to replicate that production. The question is how best to replace it.

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Yesterday, Felix Hernandez went 27-up, 27-down against Tampa Bay, becoming just the 23rd pitcher in baseball history to throw a perfect game. Amazingly, this was the sixth perfect game in the last four years, as Felix joins the company of Mark Buehrle, Dallas Braden, Roy Halladay, Philip Humber, and Matt Cain as the newest members of the club.

Back when Cain threw his perfect game in June — striking out 14 games in the process — I looked at where that game ranked in history, and noted that it was in the conversation with Kerry Wood’s 20 strikeout performance and no-hitters from Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax as one of the best games in history. While Game Score does a pretty good job of scaling relative performances, however, it doesn’t evaluate for context — park, league, opponent, etc… So, that’s what I set out to do today.

It’s simply more work than I have time for to go through every perfect game in history to evaluate the quality of the opponent, the park the game was played in, and the run environment of the day, but with the help of Jeff Zimmerman, I was able to look at the most recent six. Thanks to the fantastic custom leaderboard feature here on FanGraphs, it is not that difficult to compile the statistics of a specific group of players, like for instance the batters who were matched up against a guy who threw a perfect game. From there, we can look at the relative strength of the batters that each pitcher had to face.

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