Archive for August, 2012

The author attended Wednesday night’s game — or, at least, the first eight innings of it — between the Class A Midwest League affiliates of the Minnesota Twins (the Beloit Snappers) and Chicago Cubs (the Peoria Chiefs) in Beloit, Wisconsin. Below are some notes on same.

Please note: none of what follows constitutes Official Prospect Analysis.

Regarding Miguel Sano and Jorge Soler
Miguel Sano and Jorge Soler are presently the most high-profile prospects on Beloit and Peoria, respectively, the former having been ranked 27th by Marc Hulet on his (i.e. Hulet’s) midseason top-50 prospect list and the latter having signed a nine-year, $30 million contract with the Cubs after having defected from Cuba earlier this year.

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Andruw Jones was having a brilliant career, that is, until he turned 31 years old. Since that point, he’s barely been a league-average player. He went from an all-time great player, to an iffy hall-of-fame candidate.

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In advance of the trade deadline, the Angels seemed poised to make a run, and that was before they traded for Zack Greinke. The Angels traded for Zack Greinke and at least on paper, that made their starting rotation laughably awesome. Even though the trade might’ve had more to do with the playoffs and signing Greinke long-term, the Angels still had to finish well in the regular season, and there was little reason to believe Greinke wouldn’t help them do that.

Greinke hasn’t helped them do that, at least not yet. He very easily still could — there’s a lot of season left — but so far the Angels are 1-4 in Greinke starts, and he’s averaged about a walk or a hit batter every other inning. He’s allowed 22 runs in 32 innings, and all in all he just hasn’t looked like the same Zack Greinke capable of posting comical strikeouts and walks. Greinke’s another player for whom the Angels are crossing their fingers, where the idea was that Greinke would be a player they could take for granted.

What follows isn’t intended to explain everything that has gone wrong. I think the best explanation for what’s happened with Greinke might be Baseball!, just as that’s the best explanation for how Chris Davis earned a win over Darnell McDonald. What follows might not actually explain anything, but Greinke’s struggles provided a convenient opportunity to bring this up and I’m nothing if not opportunistic. Actually that isn’t true, one could never be nothing. By definition, one is always something. I am something, and possibly opportunistic. All right, moving on.

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Pretty much every player in the Majors goes on waivers at some point in August, so the fact that Josh Beckett was placed on waivers isn’t really news. However, unlike most players in baseball, Beckett will almost certainly clear waivers, since he’s due approximately $4 million over the remainder of the 2012 season and $15.75 million in each of the next two seasons. Any team claiming Beckett would be on the hook for $36 million, and he’s clearly not worth that kind of investment at this point, so he’ll sail through waivers without any blinking.

Once he clears, the Red Sox will be able to trade him to any team that’s interested, and they can create additional interest by picking up a significant chunk of his salary in order to move him. At that point, the question becomes how much cash Boston should be willing to eat to move on from their struggling former ace.

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

1. Arbitrary Endpoint Leaderboards: August So Far
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Aribitrary Endpoint Leaderboards: August So Far
The Arbitrary Endpoint Leaderboards, What They Are
The Arbitrary Endpoint Leaderboards represent an attempt to compensate for the influence of early season narratives, which — likely owing to a cogntive bias known as the primacy effect — are often quite powerful and can obscure more recent, notable performances. (Note: this was discussed — albeit not in great depth — recently in these same pages.)

The Arbitrary Endpoint Leaderboards, What Else They Are
The Arbitrary Endpoint Leaderboards also represent an opportunity for the author to build most or all of a post around what’s little more than a regular leaderboard from the present site, rendered into the form of an internet table.

Regarding This Situation, What a Person Might Call It
It’s possible that a native English speaker might refer to what’s happening here as a “win-win” situation.

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Ben and Sam revisit the trade that sent Dan Haren to the Angels in light of Haren’s down year and Tyler Skaggs’ debut for the Diamondbacks, then talk about how Derek Jeter has remained productive at age 38 and examine whether the Yankees are in any trouble in the AL East.

Let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way now: there’s no such thing as a good time to lose a starting pitcher like Bartolo Colon. Over 24 starts with the A’s, Colon posted a 3.43 ERA and peripherals that make him look only a little less good, and Colon has been a big part of Oakland’s attempted playoff push. Now he’s done, having been found out for cheating, and at this writing Oakland is five games out of the division and just a half-game out of the wild card. If the A’s were terrible, this would be too bad, but it wouldn’t be potentially devastating. The A’s aren’t terrible. The starting rotation has lost value right when the season leverage is getting its greatest.

But while there’s never a good time to lose a Bartolo Colon, there are worse times and there are better times. In one regard, this was a profoundly bad time for the A’s given their position in the playoff race, but on the other hand, Colon was suspended a day after Brett Anderson made his 2012 season debut. Anderson was excellent against the Twins Tuesday night, and Anderson figures to be a major stretch-run contributor right when it turns out the A’s could really use one of those.

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Episode 230
New FanGraphs contributor and longtime (in Internet Years, at least) curator of Mariners SB Nation site Lookout Landing Jeff Sullivan discusses volcanoes, for which subject (i.e. volcanoes) he possesses a great deal of enthusiasm.

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 40 min. play time.)

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The Chicago White Sox organization has done an outstanding job of squeezing every ounce of value out of its prospects this season.

Back in March, four prospect analysts/publications (FanGraphs, Baseball America, Keith Law, Kevin Goldstein) all agreed – in separate rankings of the 30 organizations in baseball – that the White Sox club was indeed the weakest in all of Major League Baseball in terms of prospects.

The perceived lack of quality hasn’t stopped the club from trotting out 12 rookies this season – for a combined value of 3.1 WAR. The majority of the contributions have come from the pitching side. Only outfielder Jordan Danks and infielder Eduardo Escobar – since traded to the Minnesota Twins for Francisco Liriano – have played the field for the White Sox. Danks has managed to provide 0.2 WAR, while Escobar was in the negative prior to his departure.

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