Three years ago, Derek Norris was a highly-regarded catcher in the Washington Nationals system. Known more for his bat than for his glove, he was battling injuries and scuffling at the plate in the High-A Carolina League.

Norris was subsequently traded to Oakland and broke into the big leagues with the A’s last summer, where he appeared in 60 games. This season the right-handed hitter is splitting time behind the plate with left-handed-hitting John Jaso.

Norris remains an unfinished product. The raw power is there — as are improved plate discipline and defensive skills. What’s eluded him so far are consistent performances. His home run jumpstarted the A’s to a win on Tuesday night, but overall he is hitting just .216/.340/.336 in 141 plate appearances.

Norris talked about his development when the A’s visited Fenway Park earlier this season.

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Ben and Sam discuss the Royals’ power outage and the comments made by their hitting coach, then talk about surprising physical signs that scouts study.

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Episode 342
Chris St. John is the author of two of the most interesting baseball-related pieces from the past year-plus: first, a post at Beyond the Boxscore (a continuation of a series, in fact) in which he endeavors to detect objectively the biases of different notable prospect lists and, second, a piece at The Platoon Advantage in which he studies the significance of minor-league walk and strikeout rates among top-100 prospects. St. John is also 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 49 min play time.)

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BeerGraphs — a website devoted to the analytics of beer — is now alive. Very soon it will have sortable leaderboards and everything. And it’s been too long since we had a FanGraphs meetup anyway, so let’s do another one. Where better to have a top-flight beer and watch some good baseball than the Public House attached to AT&T Park in San Francisco? Please come and talk baseball (or beer) with our merry band:

June 7, four until ?, Public House at AT&T Park, San Francisco

Eno Sarris (FanGraphs, BeerGraphs)
Howard Bender (FanGraphs)
Wendy Thurm (FanGraphs)
Steve Berman (Bay Area Sports Guy)
Grant Brisbee (SBN)
King Kaufman (Bleacher Report)
Patrick Newman (NPBTracker)
Ian Miller (Productive Outs)
Adam Cacioppo (BeerGraphs)
Aram Cretan (Freewheel Brewing)
Rob Conticello (Clandestine Brewing)
Adrian Kalaveshi (Clandestine Brewing)

Sometimes it’s the things you don’t write that make you look smarter. A few weeks ago, I nearly wrote something celebrating Michael Saunders‘ improved plate discipline. I wasn’t quite feeling it, though, so I went and did something else, and then Saunders embarked on a miserable slump. That’s not the first time something like that has happened. Additionally, there were a few times I wanted to re-visit the Rick Porcello narrative, pointing out that his spring-training strikeouts didn’t lead to regular-season strikeouts. I never wrote anything to that effect, and now Porcello is striking guys out. Again, I look smarter by not looking like an idiot. Over the last 30 days, Porcello’s posted baseball’s third-lowest xFIP. Here’s a selection of strikeout rates over the same span:

• Stephen Strasburg, 27.0%
• Matt Harvey, 26.6%
• Shelby Miller, 26.2%
• Rick Porcello, 26.0%
• Tim Lincecum, 23.9%
• James Shields, 23.7%
• Clayton Kershaw, 20.4%

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Passive Hitter“, which examined the change in the rate of swings in Major League Baseball over the last 25 years. While a host of writers have written about the rise of Moneyball philosophies as a reason for why strikeout numbers are on the rise, I noted that the data shows that hitters are actually swinging at basically the same rate now as they did two decades ago. The evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that hitters have become significantly more passive at the plate.

However, as several readers pointed out, the point being posed most repeatedly by Tom Verducci isn’t that hitters are not swinging often enough, it’s that they’re not swinging often enough in the right situations. As a follow-up to his original post, he wrote this last week:

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When baseball fans think of players who get hit by pitches, they probably think of Craig Biggio, Don Baylor, or, in more recent times, Carlos Quentin, and rightly so. Those players did (and do) get hit often. But how much does their career offensive production rely on the hit by pitch? That is a different matter — some players who get hit a lot do a lot of other things well, and are thus less reliant on pain for offensive profit. Using our old friend linear weights for measuring offense, here are five modern players who have the great proportion of their offensive production from getting hit.

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One of the most important doctors in baseball history, Lewis Yocum, died of liver cancer yesterday at the age of 65. Yocum was an intern in Frank Jobe’s clinic when Jobe pioneered UCL replacement surgery in 1974 — Tommy John surgery is now ubiquitous in baseball, and Yocum was one of its greatest living practitioners. Numerous players tweeted that he had saved their careers; scroll to the bottom to see a few of them.

Though he was the Angels’ team doctor, taking that position over from Jobe, he treated players across the league, both position players and pitchers. In 2010, Will Carroll wrote that Yocum and James Andrews were both so mutually prominent across baseball that “one former GM jokingly said that he thought Yocum and Andrews had negotiated some sort of territorial agreement. “This side of the Mississippi is Andrews,” he laughed. “That side is Yocum.”” After Yocum died, Carroll compiled a long list of players whom Yocum was known to have personally treated. (The list is incomplete and skewed toward recent players, but it gives some sense of Yocum’s breadth of impact.)

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

1. Brief Review: Rick Porcello’s Tuesday Start
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Brief Review: Rick Porcello’s Tuesday Start
Introduction
Detroit right-hander Rick Porcello, known typically for his power sinker and attendant ground-ball rate, recorded numerous career bests against Pittsburgh on Tuesday night with 11 strikeouts, a 1.04 single-game xFIP, and a 4.03 RE24 (which metric measures runs added relative to the 24 base/out states and is useful for measuring single-game performances by hitters or pitchers). What follows is a brief review of that second start.

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