Allen Craig’s a really good player, mostly because he’s a really good hitter. He just ranked No. 40 in Dave’s Trade Value series. Allen Craig has a lot of good things going on, and here’s one of them: he’s been the league’s best hitter with runners in scoring position. According to Baseball-Reference, 334 active players have at least 250 career plate appearances with runners in scoring position. By batting average in the split, Joe Mauer is third, at .338. Joey Votto is second, at .347. Allen Craig is first, at .396. Not only is Craig in first; to drop into a tie with Votto, he’d have to go hitless in his next 43 such at-bats. I’m not claiming that Craig is unusually clutch, but so far, he’s hit at the right times, and his category lead is remarkable.

So we have to acknowledge that Craig is good. We have to do this, before discussing a way in which he’s been bad. A way in which he’s been worse than everyone else. Allen Craig is a league leader in multiple categories, and the one explored below isn’t something Craig is going to want to hear about.

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Honorable Mentions
#50 to #46
#45 to #41
#40 to #36
#35 to #31
#30 to #26
#25 to #21

And now there’s a run on pitchers. Because of their inherent risks, this is getting close to the upper limit for hurlers, even though each pitcher at this point is an excellent performer and an excellent value. Oh, and there’s some hitter you might have heard something about this year too.

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Honorable Mentions
#50 to #46
#45 to #41
#40 to #36
#35 to #31
#30 to #26

As we move to the top half of the list, we begin to enter the land of guys who just aren’t getting traded. It’s basically impossible to imagine a scenario where a team agrees to move any of these players. This is where we start finding franchise players on friendly contracts. They would have a lot of trade value if they were put on the market, but they’re all too valuable to their own franchises to actually be used as trade chips.

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Chris Davis, with 37 home runs so far this season, has been generating a lot of buzz lately — both on the field and more recently with some comments he made during the All-Star break. When he was asked about the all-time home run record, Davis said:

“In my opinion, 61 is the record, and I think most fans agree with me on that.”

I have no idea if most fans agree with him, but it probably shouldn’t be  surprising that a guy within spitting distance of a 61 home run season would view that as the mark to beat — rather than 73 home runs, which is essentially out of range. So, just for fun, let’s figure out what Davis’ chances are of reaching Roger Maris.

At Tom Tango’s website, there was a discussion that tried to put a number on Davis’ chances of reaching that mark. Tango performed a “quick back-of-envelope calculation” to do so, but today, I’ll be providing you with an interactive tool that might make it easy for you to perform a more sophisticated calculation for situations like this (and many other types of situations).

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

1. SCOUT Leaderboards for the Northwoods League
2. Illustrative GIFs: Aaron Rhodes of Florida and Waterloo

SCOUT Leaderboards for the Northwoods League
Introduction
In yesterday’s edition of the Notes, the author published a pair of leaderboards for, and produced some superfiecial notes regarding, the Cape Cod League — i.e. the nation’s most prestigious collegiate wood-bat summer league. The present edition of the Notes represents a very similar exercise — except, in this case, for what is generally regarded as the second-most prestigious/competitive wood-bat summer league, the Northwoods League.

Based in the Upper Midwest, the Northwoods League often features the next summer’s Cape League participants. By way of illustration, one finds that two of the top hitters in the Cape League by the author’s likely flawed methodology — Wichita State’s Casey Gillaspie and Virginia’s Derek Fisher — played last season in the Northwoods League. Other graduates of the League include: Brandon Crawford (2005), Curtis Granderson (2001), Chris Sale (2008), Max Scherzer (2004), and Jordan Zimmermann (2006).

Below are the SCOUT leaderboards for the Northwoods League’s top hitters and pitchers a little more than a month into this summer’s edition of the league. (All data courtesy Pointstreak.)

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Yes. We will do more of these. Because they are fun. On July 18th, we won’t have baseball to watch, and that will make this a support group meetup of sorts. Come talk to us about the first half of real baseball, or fantasy baseball, or about brewing, or about beer, or about life.

Thanks to all of these great writers that have agreed to come for this informal Q&A session. Ask for the FanGraphs event, as we’ll have our own space. Sorry youngsters, this is a 21 and over event.

July 18, 4pm — 8+pm, Fizz, Chicago

Eno Sarris (BeerGraphs, FanGraphs)
Michael Bates (NotGraphs, SBNation)
Carson Cistulli (FanGraphs)
Dayn Perry (FanGraphs, CBS Sports)
David Wiers (FanGraphs)
Bradley Woodrum (FanGraphs)
Cee Angi (SBNation)
T.K. Gore (CSNChicago/NBCSports)
Dan Hayes (CSNChicago)
Kevin Holden (CBS Milwaukee)
Harry Pavlidis (BrooksBaseball)
Sahadev Sharma (ESPNChicago)
Scott Skillings (STATS)
JJ Stankevitz (CSNChicago)
Matt Dennewitz (BeerGraphs, Pitchfork)
Greg Sasso (BeerGraphs)
J.R. Shirt (BeerGraphs)
Jeff Gross (Hardball Times, SaBEERmetrics)

If this were any other stat, it wouldn’t be worth a post. If this were instead “All-Star Break Home-Run Update,” it’d be a waste of your time, because you could simply just look up the stat on the FanGraphs leaderboards. They’re right up there! But, at the moment, FanGraphs doesn’t house and update any pitch-framing statistics, and while that could change in time, that’s the way things are today, meaning this post could have some substance. Most people can’t look this stuff up on their own, so I’m here to provide for you while crossing something off my weekly quota. Everybody wins.

FanGraphs is pretty selective for the intellectually curious. And, of course, baseball fans, and intellectually curious baseball fans have generally been interested in pitch-framing research. It’s just another thing that players can be good or bad at, so fans want to know where their catchers rank. Right now, we have a little break in regular-season action, so it seemed like a good time to post the latest numbers, through the middle of July. It was either this or a .gif post about Yasiel Puig and no there weren’t any other options. I’ll give a quick explanation, before the data.

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On EW’s one-year anniversary, Ben and Sam chat with Jason Wojciechowski about baseball and copyright law, then answer other listener emails.

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Good day, whoever you are, and welcome to the second part of The Worst Of The Best’s first ~half in review. Right here is a link to the section with all of the posts in this series, starting from the first, naturally. This is the day after the All-Star Game, meaning it’s a day without major-league baseball. Thursday, too, will be another day without major-league baseball, and a common complaint is that the break is too long and there just aren’t any sports to watch. For one thing, the players themselves probably don’t think the break is too long. Players with things like “families” and “desires for a little downtime before facing the hellish, unforgiving grind that is the season’s home stretch.” Also, just because there’s no live major-league baseball doesn’t mean you can’t watch some new major-league baseball. That’s what the MLB.tv archives are for! That’s not actually what the MLB.tv archives are for, but, if you feel like it, go back to some date and watch a game you didn’t pay attention to. As long as you don’t see the final score, the game’ll be full of surprises. It’ll be new baseball to you, just like how a lot of the .gifs below are probably new baseball to you. A day without baseball doesn’t have to be a day you don’t learn something about baseball.

Earlier, we checked out terrible pitches. Now it’s time to check out terrible swings, by which I mean full swings — not attempted checked swings — that didn’t take place in hit-and-run situations. I don’t think a batter should be laughed at so much if he almost thinks better of swinging. I don’t think a batter should be laughed at so much if the swing decision is taken out of his hands. The swings you’re going to see? These batters should be laughed at, albeit probably from a distance, without their knowledge. Coming up: five swings at the pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, as determined by PITCHf/x and me. We’re covering the whole season to date. Get ready to think about Vladimir Guerrero.

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