Last week, Jeff Sullivan wrote about Atlanta Braves third baseman Chris Johnson. The article addressed the 28-year-old’s surprisingly stellar season, which has him leading the National League in hitting with a .338 average. More notable is the fact Johnson has the fourth-highest BABIP [.364] in history among players with at least 1,500 plate appearances.

What does Johnson think about his BABIP notoriety? I asked him that question when the Braves visited Philadelphia this past weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam discuss Mike Trout’s chances of becoming the best player ever, then talk about how the Phillies’ Chase Utley extension will work out.

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In the beginning, there was Jose Molina. For real though, he’s really old. Molina hung around, and then baseball was invented, and then people figured out how to measure catcher pitch-framing, and then, initially, Molina really shined. Molina’s numbers blew everyone else’s out of the water, and so Molina became something of a cult favorite, and so on and so forth. You know how this story has gone. You know how Molina has become sort of popular, and you know how Molina is playing a lot for a contending team. Molina’s still really great at framing. It’s probably what he’s most great at.

Over time, I myself started to champion Jonathan Lucroy. Not because I thought Lucroy was better than Molina, but because I thought the two were roughly equivalent, and Lucroy didn’t get enough attention or respect. It seems to me Lucroy is one of baseball’s more underrated all-around players, and even still this year, Lucroy has been helping the Brewers’ pitching staff suck just a little less than it might otherwise. Lucroy’s still good, of course. Molina’s still good, of course. One doesn’t simply forget how to frame. But I was surprised when I took a peek at the 2013 pitch-framing leaderboards.

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Episode 369
In April, Diamondbacks beat reporter Nick Piecoro appeared on an edition of FanGraphs Audio taped in the press-box cafeteria of Milwaukee’s Miller Park. About two months later, he appeared on another edition of FanGraphs Audio, taped in the press-box cafeteria of Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Presently, he’s the guest on a third edition of FanGraphs Audio — in this case, from within the press-box cafeteria of Boston’s Fenway Park.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 29 min play time.)

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This post is analysis free. It’s just a list followed by amazement. Here are the best hitters (by wRC+) through their age-21 season, all time.

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When it comes to thinking about the best pitchers in the American League this year, the names that jump out to most might be along these lines: Felix Hernandez (always awesome and having one of his better seasons), Max Scherzer and Anibal Sanchez (two non-Verlander Tigers having big years), Yu Darvish (strikeout machine), Chris Sale (great pitcher on a bad team), and Derek Holland (finally living up to his stuff in a hitter’s park). One pitcher that would probably come up less frequently is Hiroki Kuroda. He probably would not be totally ignored (especially by Yankees fans), but he has flown somewhat under the radar (has never made an All-Star game) for whatever reasons, some having to do the nature of his performance, some not.

External factors aside, an examination of Kuroda’s 2013 performance shows why he might not get as much attention for the year-end awards, but a deeper look also reveals his worthiness.

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

1. A Sober Dispatch from the Corey Kluber Society
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

A Sober Dispatch from the Corey Kluber Society
Adherent always to noted French poet and inventor of the frown Charles Baudelaire’s pronouncement that “Il faut être toujours ivre,”* it’s without joy that the Corey Kluber Society announces quite soberly that Corey Kluber himself has been placed on the disabled list for an indefinite period of time with a sprain of the right middle finger.

*Roughly translated: “One must always be drunk.”

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Every couple of months, I like to write a post highlighting some data from the Past Calendar Year split on our leaderboards. It’s one of my favorite tools on FanGraphs, giving us a look at how a player has done over a rolling full-season window. It’s a better way to look at recent performance than just season to date, and gives us a larger sample while still focusing mostly on what a player has done in his last ~162 games or so.

So, here are some random statistical tidbits from data accumulated from August 6th, 2012 to August 5th, 2013, with the minimum number of plate appearances set to 400 to include some interesting guys who have missed time due to injuries, as well as expand the number of starting catchers in the pool.

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So much of what we do is try to separate the signal from the noise. That is, a lot of what we do is investigate whether what we’re looking at, statistically, is real. We’re always chasing evaluations of a player’s true talent because we want to know what that player’s going to do. We want to know how his team is going to do because we think we want to know the future. As a group, we’re not horrible, but we’re not very good. There are biases that we have, there are things we don’t know and there’s the matter of players being humans and humans being all change-y. So often, we end up having to throw up our hands and say, “Welp.” Firm conclusions are hard to come by because firm conclusions are almost impossible to reach.

The greatest problem and the greatest solution is sample size. The rule of thumb is the smaller the sample of data, the greater the error bars around the actual signal. It follows, then, that the greater the sample of data, the smaller the error, assuming the players aren’t changing too much. If you observe one characteristic in one year, then that’s meaningful. If you observe it in three or four or five years, then that’s a lot more meaningful.  You’ve got signal that drowns out the noise. Which  brings us to Mark Buehrle and the Blue Jays.

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