Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.
1. Selected Wisdom of the Corey Kluber Society
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule
Selected Wisdom of the Corey Kluber Society
The Purpose of This Post
The purpose of this post is to announce a meeting — in this case, at 7:05pm ET today (Monday) — of the Corey Kluber Society.
Top prospects for both the Philadelphia Phillies and Minnesota Twins collided in a late-July series in the Double-A Eastern League. In the July 28 matchup, the Phillies Double-A affiliate, from Reading, Pa., fielded the top two talents in the system, as well as a former top pitching prospect whose career is currently is in flux.
Jesse Biddle, LHP
I recently posed a question to 12 players. It was a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Given the subjectivity involved, it doesn’t even have a right answer.
Is pitching more of an art or more of a science?
The question was phrased exactly that way. It was up to the people responding to interpret the meaning of “art or science” and to elaborate accordingly. Their responses are listed below in alphabetical order. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben and Sam discuss whether teams should pick up various 2014 options, then talk about whether teams can make unwritten rules work to their advantage.
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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.
1. Rest-of-Season Leaderboards for Hitters, Pitchers
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule
Rest-of-Season Leaderboards for Hitters, Pitchers
Introduction
While Italian people are famously always like “che sarà” this and “sarà” that, it would appear as though the baseballing public’s relationship with the future is considerably more fraught. With a view towards easing whatever such anxieties might exist among this site’s readership, the author has prepared the following — namely, hitting and pitching leaderboards for the rest of the season, created from the projections freely available at the site.
For each hitter below is included his projected rest-of-season plate appearances, wOBA, and WAR; for each pitcher, projected rest-of-season innings, ERA, and WAR. Column headings preceded by an s denote Steamer projections; z, ZiPS projections; and c, a combination of the two.
A full list of both hitter and pitcher rest-of-season projections is available as a web page here.
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.
1. On Jose Fernandez’s Last Two Starts, Briefly
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule
On Jose Fernandez’s Last Two Starts, Briefly
A Note Regarding Jose Fernandez
Following his performance on Friday against Cleveland (box), Miami right-hander Jose Fernandez has recorded 27 strikeouts and a single walk against 56 batters over two starts and 16.0 innings, posting a 0.29 xFIP and 1.2 WAR over that interval.
Hi again, you same people that I greeted earlier, and welcome to the second part of this edition of The Worst Of The Best. Right here you can check out a whole section archive, featuring posts in this series all the way back to the first one, if you like these posts and don’t really care about the timeliness. You’ll notice that this post is going up pretty late in the day, especially for a Friday. Optimally, it would go up much much earlier. But the delay isn’t my fault — it’s actually, honestly, the fault of two old people from San Diego I’d never met before. And one other old person from San Diego I have. You don’t need to know the story, because it’s perilously uninteresting, and hardly FanGraphs-appropriate. Just take my word for it that this post is late because of the California elderly. Take my word for it and forgive me.
Before, we looked at the five wildest pitches since the All-Star break, covering two weeks. Now we’re going to look at the five wildest swings, as has always followed. Next time we’ll get back to doing these on a weekly basis but for now just accept that I had to spend last Friday thinking instead about an incredibly boring trade deadline. The wildest swings are those swings at the pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, and for this post I excluded a check-swing strike by Yan Gomes, and another by Brett Pill. What’s left are five full swings, each of them humiliating. Are you ready to see them? You’re ready to see them. This requires like literally zero preparation on your part. In that regard, aren’t you lucky.
Episode 366
David Temple is a contributor to NotGraphs and proprietor of the podcast Stealing Home. He and HardballTalk’s Aaron Gleeman (for like 10 minutes) are the guests on this edition of FanGraphs Audio, live on tape from the lobby of the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown.
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 1 hr 14 min play time.)
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Hello good friends, and welcome to the first part of whichever edition of this this is. Right here, check out an archive of this whole series! The big story in baseball right now, apparently, is Alex Rodriguez, and what’s about to happen to him. That’s why there are reportedly about 150 media members on hand for his Friday rehab appearance in Trenton. Because A-Rod is finally going to open up and be honest, with the media, and every single one of those media members is going to emerge with a fresh and original take on an enjoyable and novel subject. I can’t wait to read it all! But if you’d like a break from A-Rod, who I guess must be the only thing happening, take a few minutes to watch some really terrible pitches, down below. Or do like anything else, maybe even away from an electronic screen. “It’s bad for your eyes,” I was often advised 20 years ago, before anyone understood science.
Here, we’ve got the five wildest pitches since the All-Star break. That covers two weeks, instead of the customary one week, but this series was interrupted in July due to trade coverage, and the possibility of more trade coverage. Starting now we should get back to normal, so look for these to resume every Friday. You know the deal by now. PITCHf/x, pitches far away from the center of the strike zone, and so on and so forth. Screenshots, .gifs, angry people with slow processors who didn’t know better when they clicked. Three pitches that just missed this list: David Purcey to Elliot Johnson on July 26, Hiroki Kuroda to Clayton Kershaw on July 31, and Will Harris to Jeff Francoeur on July 19. “Did Francoeur swing at the pitch?” you ask, jokingly. No, he didn’t, that would be absurd. You exaggerate how bad he is. Now let’s look at some stuff and make jokes and observations.
Cleveland crushed Chicago 6-1 yesterday, largely due to Chicago’s year-long inability to get anything going on offense and Ryan Raburn’s huge day. The domination of Chicago’s terrible hitting was not all that unusual, but Raburn’s performance was awesome. He had three hits, including two home runs, driving in four. More impressively, two of those hits (and one of those homers) came against Chris Sale. However bad the White Sox’ offense is, Sale has been the opposite of that as a starting pitcher since the beginning of last season.
One might point out that Raburn has always hit much better versus southpaws. Still, it is not as if Sale is a left-handed version of, well, Justin Masterson. Raburn was put in a position to succeed and has been used quite well this year by Terry Francona, who had enough confidence to have Raburn hit third yesterday against one of the American League’s best pitchers.
Raburn has been a great pickup for Cleveland, who right in the wildcard hunt. Inspired by Raburn’s big day and season, let’s take a closer look at him and two other part-timers, Mike Carp and Eric Chavez, who have provided very good value in part-time platoon roles.
