On the surface, the question of whether or not Mariners prospect Nick Franklin fits in Seattle’s future given the .555 OPS of incumbent shortstop Brendan Ryan seems a bit silly. Yes, Ryan is one of the best defensive shortstops in the game, but the Mariners and their team 87 wRC+ are in desperate need of offensive help all over the diamond. Cue Nick Franklin and his .278/.347/.453 triple slash line as a 21-year old in double and Triple-A. On paper, this presents as a perfect opportunity for the Mariners organization to upgrade internally to a young, cost-controlled shortstop with pop.

However, the storybook ending is far from guaranteed given Franklin’s perceived defensive limitations. Having recently ranked the current shortstop as the best second base prospect scouted in person during the 2012 season, include me on the list of prospect writers who openly question his ability to stick. Add to this my really being impressed with Double-A shortstop Brad Miller and Franklin may find himself battling Dustin Ackley and Kyle Seager for playing time at second or third base.

Video after the jump

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If you’re reading FanGraphs, you probably like baseball. If you like baseball, you’ve probably watched an Orioles game this year. If you’ve watched an Orioles game this year, you’ve probably seen Darren O’Day pitch. Even as relievers go, he pitches a lot, as he appeared in 69 regular season games, the wild card play-in game, and has now pitched in all four games of the ALDS. And, if you’ve seen O’Day pitch this year, then you’ve probably noticed that he throws from a really low arm slot, but thanks to our friends over at SBNation, we’re going to show you O’Day striking out Alex Rodriguez last night, just so you can appreciate the funkiness in all it’s glory.

Watching that, you almost feel bad for Rodriguez. How is he supposed to hit that? What is any right-hander supposed to do with a slider from that arm angle that starts on the outer half of the plate and ends up a foot outside? And, if that was the match-up option, why not send Raul Ibanez up to pinch-hit for Rodriguez? Certainly, a lefty would have far more success against O’Day’s drop-down delivery, right?

You would think. And, with pretty much every other low slot/sidearm/submarine guy on the planet, you’d be right. Chad Bradford had insanely large platoon splits. Same deal with Mike Myers. Justin Masterson’s low arm slot is the main reason he struggles against left-handers. Guys who throw the ball from that kind of arm angle are usually brutal on same-handed hitters and ineffective against guys from the opposite side of the plate.

And yet, O’Day ran through the entire Yankees line-up last night, including six guys hitting from the left side: Nick Swisher, Curtis Granderson (okay, not much of an accomplishment right now), Raul Ibanez, Ichiro Suzuki, Mark Teixiera, and Robinson Cano. That’s a pretty decent collection of left-handed bats, and O’Day just mowed them down. And perhaps the most amazing part of the entire thing is that we probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

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Justin Verlander was pretty amazing Thursday night in his complete game shutout victory over the Athletics in game five. If you boil it down far enough, that start was the best postseason start ever. Boil it down, as in: he collected eleven strikeouts against five baserunners with no runs in a complete-game deciding win in American League playoff game. He was the first person to hit all of those benchmarks at the same time. He set the strikeout record for complete-game-shut-out winner-take-all-wins.

The crazy thing, though, is how well his game five performance stacks up even if you relax each of those determining factors.

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

1. Final SCOUT Leaderboards: Indepedent American Association
2. Mostly Relevant Video: Brian Myrow Doubling in 2008
3. Today’s Playoff Games

Final SCOUT Leaderboards: Indepedent American Association
Regarding What Happened Recently
What happened recently is the author, having noted a news story regarding the final game of the independent Atlantic League’s championship series, endeavored to publish SCOUT hitting and pitching leaderboards for that same league.

Regarding What Happened Even More Recently
A thing that happened even more recently is the author, in preparing the aforementioned SCOUT leaderboards for the Atlantic League, was reminded about how there are, like, six or whatever other indepedent leagues — information for all of which the FanGraphs readership would undoubtedly be clamoring.

Regarding What’s Happening Right Now
What’s happening right now is — for the benefit of the clamoring readership — is the author is presenting SCOUT hitting and pitching leaderboards for the independent American Association, which ended in mid-September (championship box score). Click here for a full list of teams and standings.

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Ben and Sam catch up with the latest action developments in each of the just-completed or still-in-progress playoff series, then discuss Darren O’Day in greater depth.

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To better isolate batting and base running skills, SB and CS have been removed from wOBA and given their own category wSB.

What’s Changed?

wOBA, wRAA, wRC, wRC+ – These all no longer include SB and CS. SB and CS have been removed entirely from the wOBA calculation include the weights calculation.

Batting – Batting in the Value section no longer includes SB and CS.

Base Running – Base Running in the Value section now includes SB and CS.

FanGraphs Guts! – Our Guts! section now has updated weights and the SB and CS weights for use in wOBA have been replaced with the raw run values.

What’s New?

wSB – how many runs above or below average a player is at stealing bases.

UBR – (miscellaneous baserunning / advancement) is now broken out into a separate category which is in the Advanced section. This contains all the information that was formerly just in Base Running.

At this writing, we’ve had four incredible playoff baseball games in a row, and the Yankees and Orioles have a chance to make it five. The third of them featured the Giants eliminating the Reds in a decisive Game 5 by a 6-4 final. Good starter Mat Latos started for the Reds and was mediocre, and good starter Matt Cain started for the Giants and was also mediocre. The Giants surged out ahead 6-0 and then hung on the rest of the way as the Reds frittered away too many opportunities. That’s how the Giants completed their series comeback and advanced to the NLCS.

In a game like this one, nearly every single individual pitch is important. Any given pitch could be swung on and missed, and any given pitch can be hit for a dinger. Additionally, every given pitch changes the sequencing of the pitches that follow. For example, in the top of the fifth, Latos started Brandon Crawford out with two borderline fastballs, each of which was called a ball. If either of those goes for a strike, maybe Latos doesn’t groove the third fastball, against which Crawford tripled home the first run. And then who knows how the rest plays out? Limitless possibilities, and all that.

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Episode 258
David Laurila, curator of FanGraphs’ Q&A Series, talks with former major-league left-hander and co-author (with Yahoo’s Tim Brown) of a recently released autobiography, Jim Abbott.

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 17 min. play time.)

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I defended the Nationals’ decision to shut down Stephen Strasburg before the end of the regular season and prevent him from pitching in the postseason. Few outside the team were defending the decision publicly then, and even fewer are doing it now, with the team on the brink of elimination — they could be eliminated from the playoffs this afternoon, with Ross Detwiler pitching against Kyle Lohse. On Wednesday, Ken Rosenthal quoted an unnamed Nats player as saying, “If we had ‘Stras, we’d be up 2-0.”

So there are two questions being asked. The overt question is, would the Nationals be in a better position in the playoffs if they still had Strasburg? But that assumes an affirmative answer to this question: would the Nationals be in their current position in the playoffs if they had treated Strasburg differently — either skipping his starts, pitching him every sixth day, or simply holding him in extended spring training and starting him later in the year?
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The Washington Nationals face elimination from the playoffs today at home, down 2-1 in their NLD Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. Pitching for the Cardinals is Kyle Lohse, who is a fine, if not excellent, starter. The Nationals counter with left-hander Ross Detwiler — or, as he will likely be referred to more than once by TBS broadcasters Dick Stockton and Bob Brenly, “Not Stephen Strasburg.”

The reader probably hasn’t heard about it even once, so allow me to say: Stephen Strasburg is an excellent pitcher for the Nationals. He had Tommy John surgery towards the end of the 2010 season. He rehabbed for the majority of the 2011 season. Entering 2012, the Nationals suggested that they’d enforce some manner of innings limit with Strasburg — just as they had the previous year with other, young Tommy John-survivor Jordan Zimmermann. Then both Strasburg and the Nationals were really good — like, good enough, at one point, that the playoffs became a foregone conclusion (which is weird for the Nationals). Then people were like, “Are you really going to shut down Stephen Strasburg?!?” And then the Nationals were like, “Yes.” And then they did. In September.

It’s not necessarily the case that Stephen Strasburg would be pitching this game today, but it’s also the case that the only reason Ross Detwiler is pitching this afternoon is because Stephen Strasburg was shut down. Otherwise, the Nationals would have likely deployed a playoff rotation of Strasburg, Gio Gonzalez, Zimmermann, and Edwin Jackson — with Strasburg pitching a hypothetical fifth game.

What the people are certainly wondering — and which question Stockton and Brenly will certainly ask today — is “How much is Strasburg’s absence actually worth in terms of run prevention?” Or, alternatively: “How many runs would Strasburg have saved over his replacement(s)?”

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