Colorado doesn’t have a deep system but it has a few intriguing arms and some promising up-the-middle talents. There are a number of prospects that could be poised for big 2013 seasons.

#1 Nolan Arenado (3B)

Arenado’s season didn’t go quite as hoped and he had a very inconsistent year. Questions have been raised about his maturity level but most young men his age (21) have questionable behavior at times, so he probably deserves a mulligan and an opportunity to prove he can learn from his mistakes. The California native held his own in 2012 at double-A. He hits for average because he makes solid contact and uses the whole field. Arenado also has solid power thanks to plus bat speed, and his swing could generate 15-20 homers in his prime. He absolutely creamed left-handed pitching to the tune of a 1.043 OPS. When I saw him play in 2012 he was struggling against off-speed pitches.

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Ben and Sam preview the Marlins’ season with Daniel Rathman, and Pete talks to Sun-Sentinel Marlins beat writer Juan C. Rodriguez (at 16:59).

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Episode 309
Guest Patrick Dubuque is like Greek philosopher Heraclitus insofar as both possess (or possessed, as the case may be) a melancholy temperament. One way they differ is that Heraclitus contracted dropsy, covered himself in manure, and then died like that — pastimes with which Dubuque is barely even on nodding terms.

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 59 min play time.)

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On February 6, Todd Helton was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. A week and a half later, he publicly apologized. His manager, Walt Weiss, who is also his former teammate, stood behind him all the way. “We have all needed a little grace from time to time. He stepped up and faced the music,” Weiss said at a news conference with Helton. “Now it’s time to play ball.” Helton received no further punishment from the league or from his team. Weiss picked a curious metaphor to announce that Helton will miss the first couple of games of spring training to conserve his strength, but would then play as normal. “For a guy like Todd,” Weiss said, “there’s no reason to put your foot on the pedal right out of the gate.”

Helton was not the only one to be quickly forgiven by his team. Mark Grace was arrested outside Phoenix last August, his second DUI arrest in 15 months. The Diamondbacks fired him as an announcer, but this spring, they rehired him as a special instructor. In the wake of Helton and Grace’s arrests, a number of people have been writing articles about the curious disconnect between the way we think about performance-enhancing drugs and the way we think about drunk driving. But is it a fair comparison? After all, PEDs affect baseball on the field. DUIs are off-field offenses, and they are handled by the courts. Should baseball subject its players to additional punishment?
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Here on FanGraphs, we host several different projection systems, most of which are algorithms that take a player’s performance history and then mix in things like regression and aging curves to develop a forecast for 2013 production. But, we have one set of projections that is very different from the rest – the Fans Projections.

Instead of being based on any kind of mathematical model, these are simply crowdsourced from our readers, with you guys creating the projections with your various opinions about player performances for next year. While there are certainly some imperfections with any kind of crowdsourcing project, the widsom of the crowds has also shown to do pretty well in situations like this, and over the years we’ve done the Fans Projections, we’ve seen that the system actually holds its own when stacked up against the algorithms, though it does require one manual adjustments in order to make the system work properly: deflation.

Put simply, you guys are just too darn optimistic — I guess that’s why you’re called fans — and annually overproject total WAR by something like 20%. So, if you look at the data from the Fans Projections next to something like ZIPS or Steamer, you’ll see some huge discrepancies, but a lot of those simply have to do with the scale, and once the Fans Projections are deflated to create a more accurate overall total, many of the variances go away.

Not all of them, though. There’s one clear type of player where the Fans and the algorithms disagree, and it’s probably a telling area, given what we know about the fine line between hope irrational exuberance. That type of player? Prospects.

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After the Braves acquired Justin Upton, uniting him and brother B.J. Upton on the same team, our very own Jeff Sullivan got curious about brothers playing together, and presented some salient information on the brother effect. Or more to the point, the lack thereof. I became curious about it much after that (I’m slow), and while Jeff already did the pertinent research, nobody has ever accused me of doing pertinent research, so I thought today we could look at the best seasons put together by brothers on the same team.

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In my first article, I wrote about the limitations of the linear weights system that wOBA is based on when it comes to the context of unusual team offenses. In my second, I explained how Tom Tango, wOBA’s creator, also came up with a way of addressing some of these limitations by deriving a new set of linear weights for different run environments, thanks to BaseRuns. Today, I will tell you about the next step in the evolution of run estimators — the Markov model. Tom Tango created such a model that can be accessed through his website, and I’ve turned that model into a spreadsheet that I’ll share with you here.

I’ve told you that the problem with the standard run estimator formulas is that they make assumptions about what a hit is going to be worth, run-wise, based on what it was worth to an average team. That means it’s not going to apply very well to an unusual team. What’s so great about the Markov is that it makes no such assumptions — it figures all of that out itself, specific to each team. And when I say it figures it out, I mean it basically calculates out a typical game for that team, given the proportion of singles, walks, home runs, etc. the team gets in its plate appearances. It therefore estimates the run-scoring of typical teams better than just about anything, but it also theoretically should apply much, much better to very unusual or even made-up teams.
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Note: it has come to the author’s attention that Georgia Tech right-hander Buck Farmer’s start on Friday at 4pm ET will be available via Watch ESPN. The senior recorded 14 strikeouts in 8.0 innings during his season debut last weekend against Akron.

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

1. Three Notable College Weekend Series
2. Action Footage: Virginia Tech Junior Devin Burke’s Changeup

Three Notable Weekend College Series
The college baseball season began last weekend and continues with games through this next one. While some — like the author’s jerky editor Dave Cameron — are impervious to the charms of the collegiate game, it’s demonstrably a fact that the best NCAA players of 2013 will become relevant major leaguers in the not very distant future. Furthermore, in the absence of actual professional baseball, the college game is a reasonably entertaining substitute.

With that in mind — and as he did last week — the author has provided below a collection of series this weekend that both (a) are likely to feature actual amateur prospects and (b) are available for consumption, via streaming video, through CBS Sports’ ULive service.

The author has benefited considerably from Aaron Fitt’s top-25 college preview at Baseball America in the composition of these previews. Also, his own impressive prose skills is another thing from which the author has benefited.

As noted, all games are available streaming on ULive. All times are Eastern.

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Don Baylor was equally adept at hitting baseballs and getting hit by baseballs. The erstwhile slugger was plunked 267 times, ranking him fourth all-time, and he banged out 2,135 hits, including 338 home runs. In 1979, as a member of the California Angels, he led the American League with 139 RBIs and captured the MVP award.

Baylor is also adept at teaching hitting. Currently in his third season as the hitting coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks, he previously served in that capacity for the Brewers, Cardinals, Braves, Mariners and Rockies. He managed the Rockies from 1993 to 1998 and the Cubs from 2000 to 2002.

Baylor shared his hitting philosophies — including what he learned from Frank Robinson and Tony Perez — in a spring training conversation last week.

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David Laurila: What was your hitting philosophy when you played?

Dan Baylor: Going all the way back to when I was in high school, I didn’t strike out a lot. What I swung at, I usually hit. I popped up, grounded out or hit a line-drive somewhere. “Bat, meet ball,” was my philosophy.

When you play in the minor leagues, you kind of get an idea of who you are, and by the time you get to the big leagues they have expectations for you. When I was coming up with the Orioles, Frank Robinson was in right field. He was well into his 30s by then and I was kind of picked, along with Merv Rettenmund, to take his place. As a young guy, all of a sudden you have that pressure of 30 home runs and 100 RBIs. That’s kind of how the baseball world evolved for me.

DL: Was Robinson a mentor to you?

DB: Frank was a great mentor for me. He was for a lot of young players — and for veterans, as well. He taught you what to do in certain situations. He was a clutch player, there’s no doubt about it. With the game on the line, he wanted to be the guy. I kind of grew into that. Come the seventh, eighth, ninth innings, I wanted to be the guy to decide the ballgame.

DL: Tony Perez has said that with a runner on third base, all he cared about was the RBI. It didn’t matter if he made an out in the process. Is that a good approach? Read the rest of this entry »