Seeing prospects in person is my passion. In 2012, I was fortunate enough to visit parks in five different leagues — collecting information and video on 200 legitimate prospects or more. The lists released over the next few weeks will highlight the best prospects I’ve seen in person at each position during the 2012 season. The rankings will be adjusted based on projected position at the major league level, not present position. Additionally, I’ll do my best to rank based on notes/video from the park and avoid adjusting for statistics after the fact. Keep this in mind when working through the lists and understand this is not meant to be a complete list of the best prospects at each position across all of Minor League Baseball, but the best of what I’ve seen.

In 2012, the ability to travel more afforded me the opportunity to see more legitimate catching prospects than ever before. And while I haven’t been able to list 10 prospects of note in previous years, finding complete young catchers is as difficult as ever.

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I recall that Tangotiger likes to think of pitchers as batters as a control group. Here we have a bunch of non-hitters put into hitting situations, and so their statistics in such situations are worthy of investigation. The best control group might be American League pitchers, pitchers who’ve never been in the National League before — NL pitchers, obviously, get more than a little batting practice — but even NL pitchers get only a fraction of the batting practice that position players get, because they are pitchers and they all need to work on their pitching. All of them. So they work as an effective control group anyway.

Within that control group, though, there exists a variety of batting approaches. Not every pitcher as a batter is alike, nor would we expect them to be. There’s Yovani Gallardo, who bats like a power hitter. There’s Barry Zito, who tries his damnedest to get his bat on everything and who doesn’t at all concern himself with the quality of actual contact. There’s Tommy Hanson, who sucks. Every pitcher as a batter is at least just a little bit different from all the others, and this all brings us to Ian Kennedy. Today you’re going to learn something about Ian Kennedy that you presumably didn’t know, and that you presumably didn’t think you would ever bother to know.

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Over the last few weeks, several players who have had pretty lousy years have gotten hot at the same time. For instance, here are the September lines for some various players:

Ichiro Suzuki: .424/.452/.593, 207 wRC+
Carlos Pena: .293/.473/.512, 172 wRC+
Gaby Sanchez: .311/.436/.556, 170 wRC+
Justin Smoak: .345/.419/.527, 165 wRC+
Justin Upton: .312/.365/.558, 147 wRC+
Russell Martin: .246/.358/.491, 136 wRC+

Ichiro was essentially give away by the Mariners at the trade deadline (at his request), a sign of just how far he’d fallen from his time as the franchise icon. Pena, Sanchez, and Smoak all played themselves out of jobs earlier this year. Upton struggled to the point that Arizona made him available for trade talks, and is widely expected to move him this winter. And, while Martin has shown decent power for a catcher, his average has hovered around the Mendoza Line all season.

When you mention that these kinds have had a good run the last few weeks, there are generally two responses:

A. Small Sample Size, which, well, yes, of course it is.

B. September hot streaks should be discounted because of roster expansion, as inferior non-MLB pitchers are taking the hill and skewing offensive numbers around the sport.

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For Manny Machado, it’s all about adjustments. The Baltimore Orioles infielder has a lot of them to make. Just 20 years old, he is acclimating to the big leagues — in the middle of a pennant race, no less — after being promoted from Double-A in early August. He is doing so at the hot corner, a position he played just twice in 208 minor-league games.

The third-overall pick in the 2010 draft, Machado was rated the ninth-best prospect in the game by Baseball America in their mid-season Top 50. Since joining the Orioles, he has hit .266/.278.424, with 4 home runs, in 163 plate appearances. He talked about his adjustments prior to Saturday’s game at Fenway Park.

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

1. Various Stolen-Base Leaderboards
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Various Stolen-Base Leaderboards
A Thing That’s Possible
It’s entirely within the realm of the possible that one — a curious reader, for example — that such a one might ask himself, “Who’s the best base-stealer in the majors?”

A Thing That’s a Fact
It’s entirely a fact that there are at least three criteria by which one might determine the league’s best base-stealer — specifically, by identifying either (a) the league’s leader by stolen-base runs or (b) the league’s leader by stolen-base frequency (i.e. attempts per opportunity) or (c) the league’s leader as measured by stolen-base runs per opportunity (or X number of opportunities, as the case may be).

Another Thing That’s a Fact
Another thing that’s a fact is how the author has compiled three leaderboards (below) corresponding to the three criteria mentioned above. To say that he (i.e. the author) found data from Baseball Reference helpful in so doing would be the very picture of accuracy. To say that all numbers are current through Saturday would be equally precise.

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If the Red Sox have been one of the most disappointing teams in baseball this year, then waiver trade import James Loney has been one of its most disappointing and frustrating players. The 28-year-old first baseman entered his contract year with high hopes. He tallied 2.4 WAR last year in the best season of his career, and while his numbers weren’t all that impressive when placed in the context of first basemen and not the overall league, Loney had shown signs of improving on both sides of the ball.

His production has completely cratered this season, and with free agency on the horizon it’s becoming tough to tell who will have interest in, and who will guarantee millions of dollars over at least a couple of seasons to, a light-hitting first baseman playing at the replacement level.

Loney has become the posterchild for both incorporating the appropriate context into statistical evaluations and understanding the true value of the alliterative small sample size seasonal splits. The once-touted prospect simply hasn’t delivered at the major league level, and his confounding floundering this season has set him up for a very interested free agent case study. Loney simply isn’t a good major league player relative to his position and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for teams to justify giving him a shot as anything other than a one-year stopgap if even a mediocre prospect is waiting in the wings.

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Ben and Sam size up this winter’s free-agent first basemen and estimate how much money James Loney will make, then talk about whether the Dodgers’ pursuit of a playoff spot is leading to dangerous decisions.

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

1. Idle Experiment: Normalized NERD
2. Other Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Idle Experiment: Normalized NERD
What the Reader Might Have Noticed
It’s possible the reader will have noticed that, more often than not, the averages for the day’s NERD games scores — NERD itself being the infallible watchability metric conceived by the author — that the averages for them of late have been below the overall average NERD score of 5.

Why That Is
The reason for why the averages of the daily NERD games scores are lower than 5 likely has everything to do with the poorly conceived playoff-odds adjustment. Said playoff-odds adjustment adds a bonus of up to 2 points for a game featuring teams with uncertain playoff fates, subtracts up to 2 points from a game involving teams which are closer either to a 0% or 100% chance of making the postseason.

Why That Is, Part II
Because playoff odds for the majority of teams are known with some certainty in September, it follows that there would be more penalties than bonuses added to the various game scores. It also follows that the daily average NERD game scores would be less than 5 (just as it is frequently above 5 in May, for example).

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

1. Featured Game: Milwaukee at Washington, 13:05 ET
2. Other Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Featured Game: Milwaukee at Washington, 13:05 ET
Regarding the Original Miller’s Tale
In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a miller tells a story about a carpenter with a beautiful young wife. The wife has an affair with a clerk. The clerk, following a series of events too complex to recount here, receives a hot poker “amidde the ers” — which, the reader will know, is one of the worst places to receive a hot poker.

Regarding a Second Miller’s Tale
A second Miller’s Tale concerns the present iteration of the Milwaukee Brewers. In it, the team loses its second-best player during the offseason. Then, after more than half a season of mediocrity, they trade away their other second-best player. Then, they become more or less the best team in the entire league.

Regarding the Two Millers’ Tales, A Similarity
The thing that’s similar about about both Millers’ Tales is the championship-level narratives present in both.

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