Honorable Mentions
#50 to #46

We continue on with the 2013 Trade Value list, starting out with a pretty safe bet for short term value, then moving on to four high risk/high reward players who could either be franchise building blocks or reminders of the unpredictability of developing talent. At this part of the list, there are trade-offs to be made, and each of these players comes with some flaws, but enough value to demand a serious haul in order to even make their current teams consider parting ways with this kind of talent.
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I’ll grant that, maybe in Major League Baseball’s eyes, there’s nothing wrong with the Home Run Derby. Fans still turn out in droves, and the TV ratings are fantastic, so the Derby always seems to do well. Players get a kick out of attending, and I’m not exposed to the opinions of the average baseball fan. But I know I’ve never met anyone older than six who loves the entertainment the Derby’s supposed to provide. I know I don’t much care for the Derby, myself, and I actually just had to Google it to make sure it was happening tonight. I’ve live-blogged the last few, but out of obligation, not desire, and focusing on writing allowed me to not focus on the show.

I guess we can play the hypothetical game, kind of like when people write about the gameplay rule changes they would make if they were commissioner. The Home Run Derby is easily dismissed, and when the participant field is announced each year people complain about snubs. I think we can agree that long, impressive home runs are more entertaining than a handful of wall-scrapers. During the Derby, those are the home runs that draw the loudest reactions. So in an effort to boost the competition’s entertainment value, I propose a very simple adjustment. It’s an adjustment that could have sweeping effects.

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Honorable Mentions

We begin with the last five spots on the list. These guys are all excellent players, but they come with some concerns either about their contract, health, or future performance. Teams would love to have any of them, but there are reasons to think that some would hesitate or back away entirely even if these players were made available. They would have significant appeal to a few clubs, but not the broad appeal to start off a league wide bidding war. On to the list. Read the rest of this entry »

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The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

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

1. Odds for the Derby, Translated to Win Percentage
2. Unhelpful Video: Pedro Alvarez Homering Once

Odds for the Derby, Translated to Win Percentage
Introduction
With the conclusion of Sunday night’s Cubs-Cardinals game, capital-B Baseball has officially entered its All-Star Break. For those (like the present author) whose affection for the sport is tied directly to its ubiquity during the summer months, the Break is not a particularly welcome interval. For those (also like the present author) whose job it is to produce Notes on a Daily basis, the Break creates what is known as “a dearth of content.”

In any case, to divert ourselves today, Day 1 of 4, the author has produced the following — i.e. the projected winning percentages of every participant in tonight’s home-run derby based on the latest betting odds regarding same.

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Ben and Sam discuss whether we should care about pitch counts in no-hitters, then talk about the gap between Joe Blanton’s actual and estimated ERA.

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been preparing the 2013 version of my annual Trade Value list, a project I’ve been doing since 2005 after borrowing the idea from Bill Simmons. I moved the trade value list to FanGraphs in 2008, and it’s been an annual series here ever since. If you missed our retrospective on last year’s list, you can review the entire list, and the lessons we might be able to learn from those names, in this post from Friday.

Coming in a few hours, we’ll introduce the first five players — well, I guess, technically the last five, since we’re working in reverse order — and we’ll do ten players per day all week, culminating in the top five on Friday afternoon. However, before we get into the guys who made the list, I figured it would be worthwhile to do a post on the guys who just missed the cut. This was a tough list to crack, and there were a lot of high quality players who just ended up on the outside of the bubble for one reason or another.

Rather than turning all future posts into a discussion of guys who haven’t yet appeared, this post will hopefully answer some questions as to why a player won’t appear on in the rest of the series. And it isn’t because I hate your favorite team. I promise. In fact, a lot of the guys who just missed the cut are personal favorites of mine, and most of them made some previous iteration of the list before I finalized the order. But, with only 50 spots, someone had to just miss the cut. Here are the guys who didn’t quite make it.

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When you’re a speedy 5-foot-6 second baseman with a line-drive stroke, Jose Altuve comps come with the territory. When you’re drafted by the Houston Astros, they are pretty much inevitable. The player in question is Tony Kemp.

A fifth-round pick this year out of Vanderbilt, the 21-year-old Kemp is looking to forge his own identity in pro ball. He did so as a collegian. The Nashville native was the 2013 Southeastern Conference Player of the Year and a first-team selection on Baseball America’s All-America team. In his junior season with the Commodores, he hit .388/.480/.496, with 32 stolen bases. In his first month with the short-season Tri-City Valley Cats, he is hitting .314.

Kemp — who differs from Altuve in that he swings from the left side –talked about his game a week after his debut. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve updated the site with 2013 park factors, which you can see on our FanGraphs Guts! page. These will be updated daily for the rest of the season and we will have the more granular park factors for 2013 updated shortly (on a weekly basis) as well.

To explain a little more about our park factors, we use up to 5 years of data to calculate park factors using Patriot’s method. When a park makes significant changes to their layout, or it is just a brand new park, we use only data from the changed or new park.

In the case of Safeco Field and PETCO Park, which had significant fence movement, we are only using 2013 data to calculate the park factors. With just this season’s worth of data, the park factors for these parks are being heavily regressed (90% towards 100, a neutral park).

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