Triple-A is weird. It’s the second-most-skilled level in American professional baseball, but it doesn’t have a lot of “prospects.” Many of these players have played or will play in the majors, but they aren’t considered as exciting because there’s a much clearer image of what kind of players they are. Lower-level players have more projection and potential, which makes them more interesting, but they aren’t as skilled as those in Triple-A. In fact, Triple-A players are largely what they are with little projection left — and most of them are role players.

But Sean Gilmartin is not supposed to be a role player. The Braves took Gilmartin with the 28^th overall pick in 2011 out of Florida State University, and he was frequently ranked in the top five in most Braves prospects lists from this past off-season. When the Gwinnett Braves headed into Louisville this past week, I went to take a look.

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Ben and Sam discuss how deep a hole the Blue Jays have dug, then talk about whether it’s fair for people to gloat about the Diamondbacks’ decision to trade Justin Upton based on what’s happened so far this season.

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A year ago today, the Washington Nationals called Bryce Harper up to the big leagues, so he officially has one full season of Major League Baseball under his belt. One of the coolest little known features of the site is a split called “Past Calendar Year”, which allows you to see how a player has done in the last 365 days, giving you a rolling one year look at a player’s most recent performance. Here is the Major League leaderboard for the year that has included Bryce Harper:

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

1. Today’s Notable Games (With a Note on Free MLB.TV Games)
2. Potentially Useful Video: John Lackey’s Season Debut
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Today’s Notable Games (With a Note on Free MLB.TV Games)
Note: on what MLBAM is calling Free Preview Sunday, all of today’s games besides the Atlanta-Detroit ESPN Sunday Night one are available for free on MLB.TV.

Cincinnati at Washington | 13:35 ET
After an excellent performance in his first major-league start, Tony Cingrani was even better in his second one, striking out nine of 25 Cubs batters while walking none (box). Notable is this: Cingrani compiled 12 swinging-strikes among the 72 fastballs he threw, or ca. 17%. League average, meanwhile, is about 6%.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Washington Radio

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

1. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
2. Barely Helpful Footage: Ervin Santana’s Slider
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
Cleveland at Kansas City | 19:10 ET ***MLB.TV Free Game***
Dayton Moore’s somewhat mysterious confidence in Ervin Santana has been justified thus far, as the right-hander has posted an 86 xFIP- and 0.5 WAR and 0.9 RA/9 WAR (that is, WAR based not on FIP but on runs allowed) through four starts. Santana’s swinging-strike rate has been about two percentage points above his career average so far — and much of that seems due to his slider. Always his best pitch by pitch-type value, Santana’s slider has been even better than usual, worth about 3.5 runs above league average for every hundred thrown. He’s also throwing it 40% of the time, which is rather often, actually.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio

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I still don’t really know what I’m supposed to do in these introductions, and I suspect it would be unprofessional to use this section to throw out links like this. I guess for the time being I might as well just repeat myself, since I’m at a loss and nobody reads these for the introductions anyway. Hey you guys! This is the second part of the fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best, and here’s last Friday’s wild-swings article. You’re going to see the five swings from the past week at the pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, as determined by PITCHf/x and me. Only included are full swings — not checked swings — and I’m also going to make a point of excluding swings on hit-and-runs, since those aren’t really up to the hitter. Maybe they’ll earn honorable mentions. I haven’t actually encountered one of those yet.

For the purpose of this series, I don’t care about funny-looking swings where the hitter loses his balance and falls down. So don’t look for those in the body, although you’re free to post them in the comments because they’re still hilarious and embarrassing. And as I noted earlier, don’t expect to see these posts next Friday, since I’ll be out of town and, more importantly, not at a computer. I’m going to go ahead and guess I couldn’t compose a post like this from a smartphone. That sounds like the terms of a prison sentence. The Friday after, we’ll be back in business, and now on this particular Friday, we’ll proceed with the list, in the usual descending order. I think this has been enough words.

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Entering the spring, Gerardo Parra was once again a man without a home. After a starting a career-high 124 times in 2011, and doing so handily, Parra shifted back into part-time status in 2012. But with Adam Eaton and Cody Ross both suffering injuries before the season began, and Jason Kubel landing on the disabled list with a strained left quad two weeks into it, Parra has once again been seeing regular action. In the process, he has not only acquitted himself well, but also helped hold down the Dbacks offense in the early going.

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Let us begin with a few notes! First, hello, welcome to the first part of the fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best. Thank you for reading because without you I would be literally penniless unemployed. Second, this post has a lot of .gifs in it. All of the posts in this series have a lot of .gifs in them, and you have no right to complain about browser locking, because you should know what to expect by now. If your machine can’t handle .gifs, it’s not going to handle these posts, and you don’t complain about the river when you can’t float across in a measuring cup. Third, per usual, this is all PITCHf/x-derived, and we’re just examining the five pitches the furthest from the center of the strike zone. Here’s last week’s edition. Sometimes people like to ask why so-and-so’s pitch didn’t make the list. It’s because the pitch wasn’t bad enough. But to sate your curiosity, guys who just missed the top five include James McDonald, Cliff Lee, and Jaime Garcia. Over the course of a week, Cliff Lee threw baseball’s seventh-wildest pitch. All right.

And a final note: don’t look for these posts next Friday, because I’ll be away, attending none of your business. I figured it was probably for the best to give you guys a warning, and I haven’t yet decided if the Friday after that will review the previous week or the previous two weeks. I probably won’t make that decision until the morning of that Friday, because I don’t deal with things ahead of time. Now we should be all good to go, so let’s watch some really wild pitches, together. You can pretend we’re family.

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Sliders have platoon splits. The traditional slider does, at least. So opposite-handed hitters are always a struggle for the fastball/slider reliever.

That’s not really the case for Luke Gregerson. Though the throws his slider more often, percentage-wise, than anybody in baseball not named Sergio Romo, Gregerson has avoided platoon splits over his career for the most part. The right-hander has struck out 24.6% of lefties, and 25.2% of righties. He walks a few more lefties (9.6% vs 6.3%), but that’s not the profile of a guy who can only get righties out. How does he do it?

Luke Gregerson has three sliders.

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I think we’re all aware that the lefty vs. righty matchup favors the batter.  But to what extent?  And what are the implications?  Prepare to be inundated with a bunch of charts and tables.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be sticking to using wRC+, my favorite all-in-one, level-playing-field batting stat.  My sample consists of all batters from 2002-2012 who had at least 200 total PAs against lefties and at least 200 more against righties.

The charts in this article will break down the frequency distributions of wRC+ for left-, right-, and switch-hitting batters, grouped to the nearest multiple of 10.  For example, the chart below shows that 21.5% of right-handed batters (RHB) hit for over 85 but less than or equal to 95 wRC+ against right-handed pitchers (RHP).

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