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

1. No Fewer Than Two Caveats
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

No Fewer Than Two Caveats
Here are at least two caveats — or something not unlike caveats — regarding today’s edition of the Notes.

Caveat No. 1
While the author is typically dissatisfied until every American, each day, has both (a) read completely that morning’s edition of the Daily Notes and then (b) sent to the author a personal note of congratulations, he (i.e. that same author) understands if the readership — owing to Events Most Grievous currently unfolding in Boston, and the Haunted Appeal of those events to the public’s mind (the author’s own mind included) — is distracted.

Caveat No. 2
In decidedly less fraught news, note that the author has added — to the game odds below, with the translations to projected winning percentages — has added pitcher innings totals and xFIP- figures for the 2013 season so far.

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A while back, Jeff Zimmerman and I introduced the concept of Edge% — a metric that attempted to quantify the extent to which a pitcher worked the edges of the strike zone. Jeff initially looked at how this applied to Tim Lincecum and how his performance depended to some extent on his ability to pitch to the edges of the plate. I followed up with a high-level piece that compared the performance of pitchers at an aggregate level depending on how extreme their Edge% was in a given season.

While the findings were interesting, they were also a little inconsistent. That’s because Jeff and I independently created two distinct metrics. We decided to combine our efforts (as we have been known to do) and settle on a single, consistent formula.

And that’s the focus of this article.

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Javier Baez, SS, Chicago (NL)

Baez, 20, hit .333 at the low-A ball level in 2012 but he did it while walking just nine times in 57 games. He then finished his injury-shortened season with another 23 games in high-A ball but struggled. His plate issues have continued into 2013 with 18 strikeouts and two walks in 58 at-bats. While his aggressive nature has not helped his batting average, the Puerto Rico native is hitting with authority and eight of his 12 hits have gone for extra bases.

After opening eyes and earning a lot of hype in 17 spring training games (four homers, .298 average), Baez may be dealing with the letdown of shifting from big league camp to A-ball. The immense talent is there for him to be a star and there is no rush for Baez to reach the majors, thanks to the presence of the Cubs’ incumbent shortstop, Starlin Castro.

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Slade Heathcott and Tyler Austin have several things in common. Most notably, they’re among the top prospects in the New York Yankees organization. Both are outfielders with the potential to become elite hitters. Each has an interesting back story.

They are also different. The 21-year-old Austin swings from the right side and came into the season with a .331 average, and 23 home runs, in 593 professional at bats. A 13th-round pick in 2010, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer while in high school. Heathcott is a left-handed hitter who was taken in the first round of the 2009 draft. Hampered by injuries, he has hit .275, with 12 home runs, in 755 at bats. The 22-year-old had a difficult home life and battled alcohol issues as a teenager.

Heathcott and Austin are now teammates with the Double-A Trenton Thunder. They discussed their development as hitters during an early-season visit to Portland. Also weighing in on their development was Trenton hitting coach Justin Turner. Scouting reports on the promising duo were supplied by Al Skorupa.

——

Justin Turner on Austin and Heathcott: “Both are extremely talented. They’re natural hitters with extremely quick bat speed. They have good balance. Like any hitters, they have to get good pitches to hit in order for those things to play.

“They’ve both had success. Tyler has a lot more at bats under his belt, even though he’s a [more recent] draft pick. Slade has battled some injuries. He was drafted in 2009 but is still under 1,000 at bats for his career. Slade did really well in the Fall League, which has kind of sped up his learning curve.

“Tyler maybe has a little more advanced approach, because of those extra at bats, but Slade isn’t that far off. They’re like One-A and One-B. You’d be pulling hairs to try to figure out which one is better at this point. They’re exciting young players — the sky is the limit — but they both still need to get at bats.

“It’s tough to compare them as far swing-path types of hitters. They both have the ability to get the ball in the air. They both have power. Tyler’s has played a little more as far as home runs. Pitch selection is a reason — he does a pretty good job of getting good pitches to hit — and that’s priority number one. It’s what we talk about the most. You’re only as good as the pitches you swing at. There are constant reminders to these guys that they need to get good pitches to hit.”

——

Slade Heathcott: “There are still things I haven’t locked in exactly, as far as what I want as an approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam discuss the implications of teams’ ability to trade international bonus pool space, and whether it makes sense to enforce the rule about time between pitches.

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Episode 326
Russell Carleton, who has been known previously to the world as Pizza Cutter and is responsible for foundational work on the sample-size thresholds at which a number of stats become reliable, is the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 1 hr 3 min play time.)

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Let’s go ahead and get one thing clear up front: nobody thinks about pitcher pace, firstly. Firstly, one always thinks about pitcher performance, and then after that come the various watchability factors. What matters most is that a pitcher is good, and when a pitcher is consistently effective, nobody really cares how he gets it done, so long as he does. But pitcher pace lurks in the background, and when a guy isn’t effective, a slow tempo won’t score him any points. One tolerates a slow pitcher when the slow pitcher helps. One quickly runs out of patience when a slow pitcher hurts.

Slow and bad — it’s the worst of the four boxes to occupy. Of course, there’s some relationship, as pitchers tend to work slower with runners on base, and bad pitchers have more runners on base. There’s more to think about, more people to pay attention to, more importance behind every delivery. But when Mark Buehrle sucks, he still sucks quickly. Not everyone is Mark Buehrle, and this is how we get to talking about Mike Pelfrey.

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About two weeks ago, I got an email from a public relations representative asking me to write about a new fantasy baseball app called scoutPRO. I had never heard of it. But it seemed interesting: the company already had a fantasy football app, and so it was trying to move from football into baseball analytics. And its founder sounded interesting, too: a 50-year old UGA grad and serial entrepreneur named Diane Bloodworth who had made her prior career in information technology and consulting for the federal government.

So I spoke with her about moving between sports as a businessperson, and moving between worlds as a woman in the male-dominated industry of fantasy sports.
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Brandon Workman, a 24-year-old Texan, dominated an undermanned New Britain Rockcats lineup over six frigid innings last week. In 2010, he was selected out of the University of Texas by the Red Sox in second round of the Rule 4 Draft. In his first two full seasons he’s posted strong peripherals, striking out more than eight batters per nine innings and walking fewer than two. Early in 2013, he sits near the top of Carson Cistulli’s Eastern League SCOUT Leaderboard (see bottom of this post); but Workman’s statistics are misleading. He profiles as a reliever or as a spot-starter.

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