On Monday, the Rangers gave up a pretty hefty haul to acquire the rights to Matt Garza. With so many teams out of the race not selling, the prices that the few teams giving up talent can charge is very high, and so despite Garza’s impending free agency, the Cubs did very well in their return for a few months of a good-not-great pitcher. With Garza off the market, the teams hunting for starting pitching will likely now turn their attention to Jake Peavy.

Peavy doesn’t have quite same reputation as Garza does, and he probably won’t command the same kind of return. But if we actually stop and compare the two, it’s hard to make a case that Garza was the jewel of the summer and Peavy is simply a fallback plan for those who missed out on the big prize. In fact, the evidence actually suggests that Peavy might just be the better acquisition.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Statistical Update on 2013’s First-Round Picks
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Statistical Update on 2013’s First-Round Picks
The Purpose of This Post
The purpose of this post is to announce that the author has updated the custom leaderboard featuring every first-round pick from the most recent draft both to have signed and also played for an affiliate of the relevant drafting team.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was just a little while ago that Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore stubbornly refused to throw in the towel and concede defeat. To the media, at least. Though Moore acknowledged his team was below .500 this season, he said he thought they still had a run in them — that the team hadn’t yet settled into a groove. The Royals, he said, weren’t going to be sellers. If anything, Kansas City was going to be buyer. Based on Moore’s words, the Royals were going to keep going for it, and we criticized that here. And lots of people criticized it in lots of places.

There might be a lesson here, about judging general managers by their words instead of by their actions. Sometimes, you have to say one thing while you try to do another, to keep up appearances. And while the Royals have played fine baseball since Moore delivered his message to the press, there are reports  Moore’s position isn’t exactly what he suggested. From Wednesday: Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam talk about events from baseball’s history that would be bigger stories today, then dicuss narratives to explain the Nationals’ season.

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a fun little game for you to play. Navigate your browser to the FanGraphs player leaderboards, and then click on the shortstops button. What you see will be automatically sorted in descending order by WAR, and here’s the current top five:

• Ian Desmond
• Jean Segura
• Everth Cabrera
• Jhonny Peralta
• Yunel Escobar

Fine talents, all of them, even if none of them blow you away with name value. Name value doesn’t win championships, and all these guys have been major contributors to their teams from a premium position. But you’ll notice that when you went to this page, the readout included only “Qualified” players. Go ahead and remove that constraint. Let the page re-load. Now there’s a new top five:

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to our friends at Baseball Info Solutions, we have batted ball information dating back to 2002, which gives us data on 11 full seasons and 60% of the 2013 season. It might not be quite as catchy of a time frame as the “Dead Ball Era” or “Steroid Era”, but it’s our own little stretch of baseball that we care about. Sometimes I refer to it as the “UZR era”, since that’s one of the more common stats cited that uses batted ball data, but other stats have the same timeframe here on the site.

One of the more common batted ball stats cited around here is HR/FB ratio, as the data has shown to be not particularly predictive, yet can have a huge impact on a pitcher’s results. If he’s giving up fly balls that are staying in the yard, that can lead to very good results — hello, Matt Cain and Jered Weaver — but those results can also be kind of fickle, as 2013 Matt Cain is demonstrating with aplomb.

Read the rest of this entry »

Torii Hunter is a changed man. Remember when he was a power-hitting centerfielder in the middle of the lineup? Torii Hunter is the same man. See that smile? And that stolen home run? Hunter might actually owe his ability to change his approach late in his career to his personality, so I asked him about both things before the Tigers played the White Sox early this week.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. The Daily Note, More Like
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

The Daily Note, More Like
Owing to the conspiracy of certain Life Events against him, the author is unable to provide in this space today the sort of robust analysis and unfettered prose for which he’s become nearly famous on no fewer than one (1) continents.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »