Major League Baseball handed down suspensions as a result of the Dodgers-Diamondbacks brawl on Tuesday night, and Ian Kennedy got the headline penalty, as he’ll be unable to pitch for 10 days after he decides to strategically drop his appeal. And, looking at the Diamondbacks schedule, that will almost certainly happen on Monday, and Kennedy will become the latest starting pitcher to be suspended by MLB without actually being punished in any real way.

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In last episode’s thrilling cliffhanger, I left you with a formula that I brashly proclaimed “does a great job of explaining the trends” in strikeout rates for meetings between specific groups of batters and pitchers.  Coming up with a formula to explain what was going on wasn’t pure nerdiness — making formulas to predict these results is the point of this research project.  You see, the goal of my FanGraphs masters is to come up with a system by which we can look at a batter and a pitcher, and tell you, our loyal followers, some educated guesses of the chances of pretty much every conceivable outcome that could result from these two facing off against each other.  Getting a sense of the expected strikeout rate is merely the first step in what will likely be a long process of continuous improvement.

The idea of this matchup system is to not only give you estimates that are more free from the whims of randomness than “Batter A is 8-for-20 with 5 Ks and 1 HR in his career against Pitcher B,” but also to provide some evidence-based projections for matchups that have never even happened.  How do we propose this can be done?  By looking at the overall trends and seeing how players fit within them.  Can it really be done?  It definitely looks that way to me.  Today’s installment will be about attempting to convince you of that.

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I’m stealing this link from Tom Tango, who pointed out Phil Birnbaum’s latest post over at his own blog. However, despite being a recycle for the folks who read both FanGraphs and TangoTiger.com, this one is worth putting here too, since I know there’s a decent amount of you who will read this and wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.

For those who aren’t familiar with Phil Birnbaum, he’s the editor of “By the Numbers”, the newsletter put out by SABR’s Statistical Analysis Committee. He writes about sabermetric stuff at his own blog and has a lot of interesting things to say. Including in his latest post, which is what we’re linking to here. A sample:

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

1. Reckless Power (RECK) Leaderboards
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Reckless Power (RECK) Leaderboards
On Reckless Power, or RECK
Last year in these Notes, the author submitted for the readership’s consideration a stat that doesn’t actually exist, but is nevertheless called Reckless Power — or RECK, for short. It’s calculated by dividing Isolated Power by Isolated Patience — or, stated differently, (SLG – AVG) / (OBP – AVG). Essentially, it’s designed to identify players whose power far outstrips their patience. The results appear to approximate the Richter Scale, such that less than 2.0 is barely felt, 5.0 is moderate, and 9.0-and-up happens less than every 10 years and is totally destructive.

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Highly-touted prospect Gerrit Cole made his major-league debut for the Pirates on Tuesday night.  The 22-year-old right handed pitcher was the first overall pick in the 2011 amateur draft. Heading into this season, Baseball America ranked Cole as No. 7 on the list of top 100 prospects. Even with the Pirates in contention in the National League Central — or perhaps because of it — Cole’s arrival in Pittsburgh was much anticipated.

Less than 30 minutes before first pitch, Pittsburgh sports columnist Dejan Kovacevic sent this tweet:
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While the Braves’ farm system doesn’t rank highly among evaluators, there are certain patches of talent scattered throughout the organization. One cluster resides in Rome. 2012 first-round pick Lucas Sims, Jose Peraza, Carlos Franco, and a few other interesting prospects make up a team that is currently 36-29. They headed to Lexington for a three-game series, so I headed to Lexington to watch Rome and take another look at the Legends.

Prospects to Watch

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Ben and Sam discuss the evolution and future of on-field celebrations, then pick the players they’d most want to appear in the Home Run Derby.

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Episode 348
Patrick Newman has written about Japanese baseball for FanGraphs and is the proprietor of NPB Tracker. He’s also the very pleasant guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 48 min play time.)

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I don’t usually write posts that are just straight up promotion of things here on FanGraphs, but last night, I saw the following note on Twitter.

Wish @fangraphs had a feature that allows you to compare multiple players using a panel of custom stats.

— Andrew Martinez (@andtinez) June 13, 2013

I responded and told Andrew that we do have exactly that feature, which he just hadn’t found yet. And, since our audience has grown a lot in the last year or so, it’s probably fair to guess that he’s not the only one who isn’t aware of this feature. So, without shame, the entire point of this post is to make you aware of our Custom Leaderboards.

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