Chris Getz hit his first home run in 1,144 plate appearances against Atlanta last night. It was rather overshadowed when the Braves smacked three home runs off of Kelvin Herrera in the eighth inning as if they had a whole lineup full of Chris Getzes. Getz does not have much power, but he does make up for it with other skills. Yeah, right. Getz is off to a pretty hot start (for him, certainly) this year, but he is a pretty terrible hitter. Over 1351 career plate appearances, he has a .258/.314/.323 (.286 wOBA) line. His utter lack of power is only part of the problem.

There have been hitters who have excelled without much power, of course. Even before Getz’s shot off of Kris Medlen, I had been thinking about looking at hitters who managed big numbers without much power. Baseball fans like benchmarks: 500 home runs, .300 batting average, 100 runs batted in, 20 wins. Some of them may be more telling regarding a player’s actual value than others, but we understandably like those standard numbers. So I decided to look at .400 hitters — well, .400 wOBA hitters. I think of a .400 on-base percentage as an “awesomeness benchmark,” and since wOBA is scaled on on-base percentage, it works well enough.

For the sake of historical curiosity, here are some of the .400 wOBA seasons with the fewest home runs.

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The title of this piece is too obvious. Brandon Nimmo, a 2011 first round draft pick taken ahead of Marlins phenom Jose Fernandez should stand out. No? But the outfielder from Wyoming’s development path has been slow. At a development stage when most top prospects are assigned to full season squads, Nimmo was returned to extended spring training and assigned to Brooklyn of the New York-Penn League in 2012. At 19, he produced 35% better than league average in 2012. However, it’s difficult to avoid focusing on a triple slash line of .248/.372/.406.

Video after the jump Read the rest of this entry »

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Before we get started, I find appropriate two words of warning. One, this post contains .gifs, like many of my posts on FanGraphs. If your browser locks up from too many .gifs, I think the bigger story is that you’re visiting the present-day Internet from 1997, but it’s at least right of me to give you a notice. Two, this is maybe the dumbest and most pointless thing I’ve ever put together. And it wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a post about bunt doubles. In terms of determining wins and losses, you aren’t about to learn anything the least bit meaningful. On the standards of significance, this post sucks.

All right. This is a post about intentional walks, and, more specifically, intentional balls. People don’t really notice intentional balls because they don’t matter. The outcome is pre-determined, and throwing and receiving intentional balls isn’t a skill. Nobody is thought to be “good” at it or “bad” at it because it’s just a simple game of catch that maybe shouldn’t even be necessary in order to advance a hitter to first base. Once every several years or so, a hitter will swing at an intentional ball, just to take the other side by surprise. Once every year or month or something, an intentional ball will be thrown too wildly, and bad things will happen. This is when intentional balls are noticed, but those events are infrequent.

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

1. Three Notable Texas League Peformances
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: Double-A Texas League
3. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
4. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Three Notable Texas League Peformances
The leaderboards for the Double-A Texas League are below. Here are brief notes on three players from those leaderboards — like who they are mostly, for example.

• Outfielder Randal Grichuk is most commonly known as the player who was selected immediately before Mike Trout. While he’s developed more slowly, (a) so has every other player and (b) hitting well at Double-A as a 21-year-old is a decidedly encouraging sign.

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So the Legends had to play someone, right? Of course they did. While I was there, I caught two other teams, and the first I’ll talk about is the Asheville Tourists. On to the prospecty goodness.
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Kyle Farnsworth is intimidating. The Tampa Bay Rays right-hander throws hard and isn’t afraid to come inside. He is also a sculpted 6-foot-4, 240 pounds with a background in martial arts. Charging the mound against him has never been a good idea.

That tough-guy image has overshadowed a long and mostly successful career. Farnsworth has never been a star, but he has appeared in 814 regular season games and 15 post-season games. In 941 innings he has fanned 934 batters. He has backed down to none of them.

——

David Laurila: How different a pitcher are you now compared to when you broke into the big leagues?

Kyle Farnsworth: Not too much different. I obviously don’t throw as hard as I did back then. That’s going to happen over the years and this is my 15th season. You just have to continue to make adjustments as hitters make adjustments to you.

DL: How hard did you throw in those early years?

KF: I think I topped out at 103, but I was mostly high-90s. You can get away with a lot more mistakes when you’re throwing that hard, as opposed to being 90 or something like that. It’s a good luxury to have.

DL: Did you reach a point in your career where velocity wasn’t as important?

KF: Not really, although I realized that maybe movement was a little more important than velocity. Eventually hitters are going to catch up to straight 98, as opposed to movement and 94. That’s a lot harder to hit and the type of thing you figure out the longer you are into your career. You’d like to figure them out a whole earlier, but you figure them out when you figure them out.

DL: Have you ever done anything to improve the movement on your fastball? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the future of the DH role, whether teams rest starters in games they expect to lose, whether it makes sense to bat Giancarlo Stanton leadoff, and more.

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For more or less the entirety of his tenure at FanGraphs, the present author has made a habit of entwining his own wellbeing with the fate of this or that fringe player. There was, initially, a season-long love affair with Rangers right-hander Colby Lewis — not a prospect at the time, Lewis, but just returning to the United States (where he’d been unsuccessful) from Japan (where he’d been very successful).

Following that, certain bold claims (never to be regretted by the author!) were made about Charlie Blackmon and his future as a major leaguer. Is it possible that a short play was written about Tommy Milone? No: it’s a certainty! More recently, loving panegyrics have been crafted in honor of Chase Anderson‘s changeup (link) and Phil Irwin’s curveball (link and link and link), while a scouting video of Tony Cingrani set to the comedy jokes of Anthony Jeselnik was also definitely made this winter, for some reason.

This is not an affectation, I assure you. For whatever reason, I’m drawn in my deepest heart to those players who (a) exhibit success of one sort or another but also (b) lack those qualities that would earn them Highest Praise from (conspicuously able) prospect analysts.

In light of this preoccupation, I’ve made a decision to produce a weekly piece for the site, appearing each Tuesday, that focuses on a small cadre of less-than-top prospects. The column, called The Fringe Five, will be a means of monitoring the status of those players upon whom I’ve set my figurative sights, and to formalize somewhat the process by which I affix my attention on such players.

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