Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

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Two stories for you, one shorter than the other: Not long ago, much of the FanGraphs staff was down in Arizona, and on one particular Friday night a lot of us went over to Peoria to watch the Mariners play an exhibition game against the Kingdom of the Netherlands. There was absolutely nothing at stake, although I suppose you could argue Jon Garland was sort of pitching for a job. Anyhow, it was a friendly, but somewhere in the early innings the Dutch dugout started to chirp about a questionable call. The first-base umpire basically paused the game so that he could shout at the dugout and tell them to shut up. This was a quiet exhibition and the ballpark was otherwise pretty silent, so, yeah, that was weird and audible. Tempers flared in a nothing baseball game.

Wednesday afternoon, the Mariners played a Cactus League game against I don’t remember who. It doesn’t matter. What matters, for our purposes, is that Eric Wedge got ejected. The Mariners’ manager was ejected from a pointless competition. Maybe the umpire was a little too hasty or aggressive, but there was some sort of provocation. Again, tempers flared in a nothing baseball game.

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

1. Maurer, Rondon Among Spring’s Leading Rookies
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: Spring Training (Overall)
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Spring Training (Rookies)

Maurer, Rondon Among Spring’s Leading Rookies
We have established in the Notes this week both that (a) there are questions to be asked with regard to the author’s competence in most every endeavor, and also that (b) the pitchers who finished among the top 10 on last spring’s SCOUT leaderboard had much better regular seasons than those who finished among the bottom-10.

This being the case, then, it would not be surprising to see Julio Teheran, Stephen Strasburg, and Matt Harvey (Nos. 1-3 on the SCOUT pitching leaderboard below) outperform Tim Hudson, Kevin Correia, Joe Kelly (the ultimate, penultimate, antepenultimate pitchers by SCOUT) in the season to come.

Of note, then, is what we might learn about certain rookie-eligible pitchers who’ve performed particularly well by SCOUT this spring. We’ve considered Julio Teheran, J.J. Hoover, and Michael Wacha earlier this spring. Among the top-five spring rookie pitchers below, however, there are two new addition: Seattle starter Brandon Maurer and Detroit reliever Bruce Rondon.

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On Christmas Eve of 2008, David Appelman gave the world a present – “win values” on the pages of FanGraphs. It wasn’t labeled WAR for a little while longer, though it was an implementation of the model Tom Tango laid out at The Book Blog a few months prior. Over these last four years, the model has become quite popular, and even those who are not fans of analytics know what WAR stands for. Over time, the model grew in popularity, and in 2010, Baseball Reference added it to their collection of statistics. Because WAR is essentially a model of player value, there are decisions that have to be made about the way it is constructed that don’t have an obviously correct answer. In places where we had made one decision, Sean Forman (and Sean Smith, who assisted with their original implementation) made some other decisions, and the calculations differ in some significant ways.

We know that this is a source of frustration for some folks, having two sites both publicly display different calculations for a statistic of the same name. Often, the differences between the two have been used to discredit the entire model. For instance, Jim Caple wrote this on ESPN.com a few months back:

Actually, we know it isn’t always accurate because depending on your source — FanGraphs or Baseball-reference.com — you can get wildly different WAR scores… For example:

Does (Jack) Morris, in fact, belong in the Hall of Fame? No, he doesn’t, according to baseball-reference.com, which gives him a WAR score of 39.3, tied for 145th all time among pitchers. Maybe he does, according to FanGraphs, which gives him a 56.9 WAR, 75th all time.

When Caple wrote it, I wasn’t exactly sure why Morris’ value differed so much, but since we measure pitching in very different ways, I assumed that the 17.6 win gap was due to some differences between Morris’ FIP and his runs allowed. But, then, I looked it up, and Morris’ career ERA (3.90) was almost an exact match for his FIP (3.94). Adjusted for park, Morris’ career FIP- was 97, while his ratio of RA9 to league average on Baseball-Reference is 96. Even with very different inputs, both models came to the same conclusion about Morris – he was a slightly above average pitcher who had a very long career. So, why did we give him credit for an additional 17.6 wins?

The answer, quite simply, lies with replacement level. Our model used a lower baseline than Baseball-Reference did, so the same performance would result in a higher WAR in our model than in theirs. Over very long careers — like Morris’, for instance, or many of the old time pitchers who threw forever — this could really begin to add up, and give the appearance of large disagreements when the two systems didn’t actually see things all that differently. In the case of guys with substantial careers, many of the large discrepancies were simply driven by the fact that the two sites had a different definition of replacement level.

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A few weeks ago, you may have seen this tweet:

In today’s Crazy Big Nerd News, FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference.com have agreed to standardize Replacement Level. #SABRanalytics

— robneyer (@robneyer) March 8, 2013

Today, we’ve rolled out those changes, and some other ones!

Here are the details:

– Replacement level is now set at an even 1,000 WAR per 2,430 game season. Batters are given 57% of all total WAR with pitchers receiving the remaining 43%. This will cause players to drop in WAR by about 0.3 WAR per recent season.

– The leagues for batters are now zeroed out in terms of runs above average. Most of this adjustment is done in Batting, while the final league adjustment is done behind the scenes. We will soon have a “League Adjustment” stat which shows exactly what the league adjustment is for each player. On a seasonal level, AL position players will see about a 0.2 decrease, with NL position players receiving about a 0.4 decrease in WAR.

– Infield fly balls are now part of our pitcher WAR calculation. They are counted the same as a strikeout in the FIP calculation (though generic FIP on the site has not changed). You can see Dave Cameron’s original post to find out more about this change.

– UZR has been given a minor update. There was a small issue with calculating the foul line and this has now been corrected. Also, the 2012 park factors were updated. Players may have had their UZR values changed by a run or two at most.

Dave Cameron will have another post up in about 15 minutes going into more detail on the replacement level changes.

Ben and Sam talk about Tim McCarver’s impending retirement and share their thoughts on broadcasting, then discuss whether changes in players’ routines have reduced the importance of clubhouse chemistry.

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On an individual-player basis, I think we can all agree that spring-training statistics suck. If you’re a reader of FanGraphs, or if you’ve even just heard of FanGraphs, you probably understand that these numbers aren’t predictive. Oh, we’ll always allow ourselves to trick ourselves. Giants fans will allow themselves to believe in Brandon Belt, and Mariners fans will allow themselves to believe in Justin Smoak. We can always trick ourselves to believe in the positive while dismissing the negative. But, guns to our heads, we’d all say “Ahh! Put that gun down!” And then we’d acknowledge that, truthfully, even the positive numbers probably don’t mean much.

But now consider spring-training statistics as a group, as a whole. What is spring training but a whole bunch of baseball games between high-level professionals? What are the numbers but reflections of what took place on the field during ordinary baseball games? Just because the numbers probably won’t tell you much about what will happen doesn’t mean they don’t tell you what has happened. That is precisely what they do. And for our purposes here, we can make use of overall, league-wide spring-training statistics.

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Would it be too hack-tastic to use the experience of the spring season as a figure for the annual rebirth of baseball in Spring Training? Yes. So I won’t. Indeed, I suspect at this point Spring Training feels for others like it does for me: not an exciting time of newness, but as a never-ending sea of pointlessness that makes one ashamed for ever having enjoyed it at all. (I would make a joke about Harry Potter here, but after the Cougar Town outrage, I am steering clear of controversy.) At this point during Spring Training final roster decisions are being made. There is not much else to write about, so one can hardly blame people for latching on to last-minute stuff like this, even if the alleged contests are pretty much set from the beginning.

Case in point: the (alleged?) battle for Royals back-up catcher between George Kottaras and Brett Hayes.

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Some of you may recall that before being promoted from a FanGraphs Community Research writer to an actual FanGraphs writer, my primary focus was on the relationship between batted ball types (infield fly balls, in particular) and BABIP for pitchers.  At the time, I’d been leaving park factors out of the equation in a [vain] attempt to keep things simple, but now I want to give them a bit of attention.

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