There is always a bit of a lull between the end of the minor league playoffs in September and the start of the annual top prospects lists in early November. Because of that gap, I’m breathing new life into an old feature that I wrote for the site in FanGraphs’ infancy back in 2008 and 2009.

The series ‘A Minor Review of 2013’ will look back on some of the major happenings in each MLB organization since the beginning of April as a primer for the upcoming FanGraphs Top 10+5 prospects lists. This series will run throughout September and October. I hope you enjoy the series and are eagerly anticipating the start of ‘Prospect List Season.’

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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.

If you have to win one game, who do you want on the mound?

Players could not choose a teammate and only active pitchers were eligible. Their responses are listed below in alphabetical order. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday features three games of particular note — each of those games featuring one of the three clubs presently contending for the American League’s two wild-card spots.

An excerpt from our wild-card playoff odds page allows one to examine the present state of affairs.

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On Monday, we’ll have a more thorough write-up of Hunter Pence’s new $90 million contract with the Giants. For now, though, I figured this comparison was kind of fun: Here’s Nick Swisher in the three years leading up to the free-agent contract he signed last winter, compared with Pence’s performance during the past three seasons.

Swisher got 4/56. Pence got 5/90. Pence is a hitting free agency a year younger and is coming off a significantly better walk year season, so it’s not a surprise that Pence got more than Swisher. Plus, with baseball’s economic strength, salaries should be expected to inflate every year for the foreseeable future. This is still a pretty big gap though.

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

1. Saturday’s Notable Games of Note
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game(s)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Saturday’s Notable Games of Note
Introductory Note
As the table below indicates, stolen entirely from the playoff odds located elsewhere on this site, three American League teams enter play on Saturday each with a reasonable opportunity of qualifying for the league’s two wild-card spots.

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The Pirates have done us the favor of getting better gradually. Four years ago, they were absolutely dreadful. The next year, they were fine through July. The next year, they were fine through August. Now they’ve been good through September. We’ve been able to see the Pirates coming, to some extent, and so this 2013 success hasn’t taken us by complete surprise. We were prepared for this, and we can make sense of this, and we’re not fighting whiplash as a consequence of watching the Pirates blow by. The Pirates are evidence that a good plan takes time, and that time can bear fruit.

But it’s still weird seeing the Pirates in the neighborhood of baseball’s best record. They’re still, technically, in contention for the National League Central entering the last weekend, and they’re in line to play at home in next week’s one-game NL wild-card playoff. And you notice something, in the standings: the Cardinals have a +172 run differential. The Reds are at +119. The Pirates are at +47. We know that run differential isn’t everything, and we’ve been over this so many times, but it’s still worth quickly examining one thing the Pirates have been doing in particular to allow them to amass all these wins. In one category, the Pirates have been blowing baseball away.

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With one weekend left in the regular season, there are some important things still at stake. In the American League wild-card race, for example, the Rangers are still alive, one back of the Indians and two back of the Rays. The Pirates and the Reds will go head-to-head, basically to decide who gets home field in next week’s likely one-game playoff. And the Braves and Cardinals will figure out who finishes with the National League’s best record. They’re not about to play one another, but they’re each about to play three games, and the team with the best record will face the not-Dodgers in the NLDS.

And that would be nice, since the Dodgers have gone 61-26 since they started 30-42. Right now, the Braves and the Cardinals have the same record. The Braves, also, hold the tiebreaker, having won the season series against St. Louis, so at this point we’re looking at Braves vs. wild card and Cardinals vs. Dodgers. But it’s not set in stone, so, clearly, the teams have something left to play for as they prepare for October. No team would ever admit it’s afraid of another team, but the Dodgers don’t look like a favorable draw.

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When I worked for the Rockies, we spent a lot of time talking about Todd Helton’s hall of fame candidacy. When Helton recovered from a hairy intestinal issue in 2006 to post the seventh four-win (or better) campaign of his career in 2007, the going thought was that if he was able to just to do that a few more times, he would be a shoo-in for the Hall. He stood at 51.1 WAR through the end of his age-33 season, and had plenty of other accolades on his resume — five-time All-Star, three-time Gold Glove winner, four-time Silver Slugger, one of just 10 players to play in the Integrated Era to be a career .300/.400/.500 hitter, 10th all-time in on-base percentage, etc. Honestly, some of the debate was which statistical markers were the most impressive. And with the Rocktober run in the books, Helton was no longer the longest tenured player to not have played in the postseason.

But then age caught up to Helton in a big way. In the past six years, he has been able to add just 5.1 WAR to his ledger, and now after a poor swan song he stands in the gray area from a hall perspective. However, it hasn’t all been doom and gloom these past few years. So rather than wallow in what-ifs, I thought today we could look at five of the best moments from the final five seasons of Helton’s career.

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Episode 382
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books, now — one of them serviceable and one of them, against all odds, something more than serviceable. He’s also the guest on this wholly American edition of FanGraphs Audio, live from America.

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 54 min play time.)

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There is always a bit of a lull between the end of the minor league playoffs in September and the start of the annual top prospects lists in early November. Because of that gap, I’m breathing new life into an old feature that I wrote for the site in FanGraphs’ infancy back in 2008 and 2009.

The series ‘A Minor Review of 2013’ will look back on some of the major happenings in each MLB organization since the beginning of April as a primer for the upcoming FanGraphs Top 10+5 prospects lists. This series will run throughout September and October. I hope you enjoy the series and are eagerly anticipating the start of ‘Prospect List Season.’

The player listed in the sleeper section was featured in a pre-season series that looked at one fringe prospect in each organization that was expected to take a big step forward during 2013, chosen by myself, a scout or a front office talent evaluator.

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