Hello friends, and welcome to the first part of the second edition of The Worst Of The Best. Here is a link to the first part of the first edition, in case you don’t know what this is. So, read that, or just read on because it dawned on me I don’t know how I’m supposed to introduce these things each week. I don’t feel right just launching into the images and the commentary, but I also don’t know how I’m regularly supposed to start with something original and fresh. This sort of meta-commentary right here isn’t going to fly every time so I’m all but out of ideas. It’s April 12.

The idea: highlight the bad. The deeper idea: acknowledge the greatness by highlighting the bad. Everything is PITCHf/x derived, so I’m limited by PITCHf/x completeness and accuracy, but that sounds worse than it is because PITCHf/x is pretty damn complete and accurate. Every time I do something like this, someone leaves a comment to the effect of “I can’t believe [X] didn’t make it.” Believe it. Maybe, just maybe, PITCHf/x got things wrong. More probably, the example you’re thinking of just didn’t meet the qualifications. This is a top-five list. It can only have five things. Let’s look at and talk about those five things, now.

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This post is going to be short and sweet, but given what transpired last night and David Temple’s plea to Quentin on Tuesday, I got curious about where the pitch locations of Carlos Quentin’s HBPs actually have been. We all know he hangs over the plate, and that he gets hit by a lot of pitches, so I asked Jeff Zimmerman to query out PITCHF/x data and create a plot of where Quentin has been hit since 2008.

During that span, Quentin has been hit by 95 pitches. Here is where those pitches were located.

There are four pitches that were plotted against the upper corner of the strike zone, to the point where we wouldn’t have been surprised if they had been called strikes had they not hit Quentin.

This is going to be harder to see from the plot, but there are 25 HBPs represented there that were between -1.0 — the inside corner to an RHB — and -1.5 on the horizontal axis. The labels on the x axis are in feet, so you could otherwise say that Quentin was hit by 25 pitches that were recorded to be no further than six inches off the inner part of the plate.

I asked Zimmerman about the frequency of HBPs in that area. According to Jeff, 0.02% of all pitches thrown by Major League hurlers in the -1.0 to -1.5 range result in a hit by pitch, or 2 HBPs per 10,000 pitches thrown in that area. For Quentin, 0.4% of all piches in that range result in an HBP, or 40 per 10,000 pitches.

Quentin’s rate of being hit by pitches within six inches of the inside corner is 20 times higher than the Major League average. It is, at the minimum, a little hard to have sympathy for the guy.

For the record, last night’s pitch from Greinke was plotted at -1.504, so it is just barely outside of that sample area. It was certainly inside and off the plate, but most batters would not have been hit by that pitch.

You’ve almost certainly heard the news by now – last night, Zack Greinke hit Carlos Quentin with a pitch, Quentin charged the mound, and in the course of the scuffle, Greinke suffered a broken collarbone. While a timetable hasn’t been released yet, he’s headed for the disabled list, and the question is how many months of the season he’ll miss due to the injury.

In the wake of the news, Dodgers manager Don Mattingly offered up the following sentiment:

“That’s just stupid is what it is,” Mattingly said. “He should not play a game until Greinke can pitch. If he plays before Greinke pitches, something’s wrong. He caused the whole thing. Nothing happens if he goes to first base.”

Mattingly isn’t the first to suggest that the suspension for a player who injures another player should be equal in length to that player’s injury, as the notion passes our internal sense of fairness. Why should a guy who puts another player’s health in jeopardy get to keep playing while the guy who he injured has to sit on the sidelines? That’s not fair.

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Late Thursday night, the New York Times reported that Major League Baseball purchased documents from a former employee of Biogenesis, the Miami anti-aging clinic at the center of MLB’s investigation into performance-enhancing drugs. The Times also reported that a player linked to the clinic by recent news stories had also purchased documents from a former — but perhaps different — Biogenesis employee. The player allegedly bought the documents with the intent to destroy them.

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

1. SCOUT Leaderboards for the Eastern League
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

SCOUT Leaderboards for the Eastern League
Considered recently: International League (April 10) / Pacific Coast League (April 11).

On Monday, in the Notes, we considered the earliest statistical returns from the majors, according to SCOUT. What follows is a very similar thing to that, except for the Double-A Eastern League.

“What actually is SCOUT?” a reasonable person might ask — to which question the author has provided a (hopefully) reasonable answer here. In brief, however, it’s this: an attempt to use our knowledge of certain metrics, and at what sample sizes they become reliable, to measure run production/prevention in instances where small samples are all that’s available.

Below are those same leaderboards, as I say, for the Double-A Eastern League, followed by some brief comments. (Note: doesn’t include games from Thursday, for reasons that have everything to do with the author’s love affair with sleep.)

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Ben and Sam discuss the brawl between the Dodgers and Padres, then talk about Ben’s latest catcher framing research.

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The biggest baseball event of Thursday night came outside of game action. In the top of the sixth inning of the Dodgers-Padres game in San Diego, Zack Greinke hit Carlos Quentin with a fastball on the wrist on a 3-2 count. After one step towards the mound, Quentin bull-rushed Greinke. As Quentin charged, Greinke threw his shoulder into Quentin’s body, and the result was a broken collarbone for the Dodgers’ starter. There is no timetable for Greinke to return to the mound; he will be examined by doctor Neal El Attrache on Friday.

Although we occasionally see this kind of aggressiveness from players without any prior provocation, it usually indicates some sort of history, either between player and team. A look into the pair’s past suggests there was already tension brewing, and said tension came entirely from Quentin’s end.

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On Wednesday, we took a look at the top farm systems in baseball. Today, we’ll take a look at how the top prospects stack up against each other. We’re essentially looking at the same principles that we were looking at in the farm systems. How do the prospects rank after the lists are averaged together? Where are the true gaps/tiers in prospects? And how good is the prospect class overall? Let’s take a look.

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Sometimes, a little comment can send you down a wormhole. Brandon Crawford is a glovely young man, and we talked about platoon splits — he doesn’t remember having trouble with lefties in the minors — and a few other topics, but it was one thing he said about his defense that popped.

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