The nation will remember Stephen Strasburg’s major-league debut. Strasburg started his first game on June 8, 2010. That’s not the part people will remember. People will remember the overwhelming dominance, the standing ovations, the 14 strikeouts in seven innings with not one single walk. Gerrit Cole, as Strasburg was, is a top flame-throwing pitching prospect, and Cole just made his own major-league debut in the month of June. Cole’s not as hyped, and his outing didn’t match up to Strasburg’s, in terms of baseball-y sex appeal. But Cole needed just 81 pitches to pitch to 27 batters, and the Giants had only one run on the board when Cole walked off the mound to an ovation of his own. With the lofty expectations placed on top prospects, it’s easy for them to disappoint, but one start in, Gerrit Cole hasn’t disappointed.

I thought we might take a quick look at Cole’s Tuesday night command. Or, at his command over a selection of pitches, like I’ve done with Mariano Rivera and with Carlos Marmol in the past. This isn’t for any diagnostic purposes; this is just for fun, and so we can look at Cole in a way that maybe you didn’t, yesterday, if you were watching. As a prospect, Cole had a few question marks, those being his command and his secondary stuff behind the impressive heater. In Triple-A he threw 63% strikes, pretty much right on the league average. Tuesday, he threw 59 strikes out of 81 pitches, with 19 first-pitch strikes to 27 batters. In that regard it was a surprising outing. In that Cole was effective, it was not.

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Wil Myers was the prize in the James Shields–Wade Davis trade. Ranked 10^th overall in 2011, 28^th in 2012, and 4^th in 2013 by Baseball America, Myers has been a top prospect for a long time, and a huge 2012 with 37 home runs between Double-A and Triple-A solidified Myers’ place among the very best prospects. When this season began, Myers, however, found himself back in Triple-A a few months removed from having hit .304/.378/.554 in the Pacific Coast League the past season.

Talent probably wasn’t the reason. Myers has shown the statistical production one would expect from a top prospect, and I headed to the park this past weekend to see if the scouting report matched the spreadsheet. The first thing you notice about Myers is his frame – six-feet-three-inches of lean muscle. He looks good in a uniform, and he stands out among his peers.

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

1. Minutes of the Corey Kluber Society Meeting — 11 June 2013
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Minutes of the Corey Kluber Society Meeting — 11 June 2013
Called to Order
Meeting called to order in Arlington, Texas, at approximately 8:05pm ET by umpire Mark Wegner.

Members Present
Not entirely clear. Members scattered throughout nation (and world), in front of televisions or other connective devices.

Members Not Present
Steve, probably.

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I’m going to come right out and say this is another FanGraphs article about batter pace. That is, the average amount of seconds between each pitch thrown to the batter, as determined by PITCHf/x time stamps. I haven’t gone to this well in a while, and I know it doesn’t appeal to everyone, since pace doesn’t mean much when it comes to determining future or present performance. Pace is a peripheral detail, and while I personally occasionally find it fascinating, you’re free to leave now. I’m not misleading you about what’s to follow.

Go to the batter leaderboards and sort them by pace, in descending order. Or don’t, and let me tell you what you’ll find anyway. You’ll find Carlos Pena at No. 1, which isn’t unusual, because Pena has always taken forever. Then you’ll find Troy Tulowitzki, then Kelly Shoppach, then Robinson Cano, then Travis Hafner. These are some pretty different players, and it’s hard to know on the surface what to make of this. But one of these things is unusual. Historically, these have been four slower-than-average hitters. Also, there’s Tulowitzki.

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“Riddle me this,” wrote editor Dave Cameron to me some time ago, “what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?”  OK, that’s not exactly how it went down.  What he actually did was to present me with the challenge of research, with the goal being to develop a model that would forecast the expected odds of an outcome of each match-up between a specific batter and a specific pitcher. Rather than talking about how players have done in small samples, can we use our understanding of player skillsets to develop an expected outcome matrix for each at-bat?

For example, such a tool might tell you that Adam Dunn has a 40% chance of striking out against Stephen Strasburg, a 10% chance of drawing a walk, a 5% chance of hitting a ground ball, etc… Forget I said those particular numbers — I completely made them up in my head just now.  You may be thinking “well, why should I care about that?  Rather than just being inundated with match-up data that is little more than randomness, such a tool might give you some idea of how much of a gain in expected strikeout rate a team would get by switching relief pitchers with a man on third base and less than two out. Or what the probability of getting a ground ball is in a double play situation, which might influence the decision of whether or not to bunt. Knowing the odds of potential outcomes could be quite beneficial in understanding the risks and rewards of various in-game decisions.

This project has been — and will continue to be — a major undertaking, as you can imagine.  This isn’t the kind of thing that can just be thrown together, but I really think the results could be great. Today, I’ll be sharing with you the findings of my research into perhaps the most important aspect of these matchups — K%, or strikeouts per plate appearance.  This will introduce the sort of process that will be involved in figuring out all of the other elements of the matchup tool. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fringe Five is a weekly exercise (introduced in April) wherein the author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to this exercise, of course, is a working definition of fringe. Currently, for the purposes of this column, it’s any prospect who was absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists. (A slightly more robust meditation on the idea of fringe can be found here.)

Three players retain their place this week among the Five: young Philadelphia third-base prospect Maikel Franco, Cardinals Double-A outfielder Mike O’Neill, and promising Washington left-hander Robbie Ray.

Departing from the Five proper are left-handed Miami prospect Brian Flynn (for mostly no reason other than the author’s own vagaries) and luminous mystery/San Diego right-hander Burch Smith (because he spent the majority of the week in the majors). Replacing the pair are Mets right-hander Rafael Montero (who’s appeared among the Five previously) and also, making his first appearance, Cubs shortstop prospect Arismendy Alcantara.

All those points having been made, here are this week’s Fringe Five.

Arismendy Alcantara, SS, Chicago NL (Profile)
Both White Sox middle-infield prospect Marcus Semien and also Cubs second-base prospect Ronald Torreyes have made multiple appearances within this weekly feature — either among the Fringe Five proper, or at least the Next Five (found below). All three play at Double-A, but Alcantara is a year younger than the former and more likely to play a premium position (shortstop, as opposed to second base) than the latter. As just a 21-year-old in the Southern League, he’s recorded nine home runs and a 26:53 walk-to-strikeout ratio in 261 plate appearances, while also stealing 15 bases on 17 attempts.

Here, for the benefit of the readership, is mostly helpful footage of Alcantara hitting a home run earlier this season just inside the Buffalo Wild Wings foul pole:

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If you interrogate some of the career-best numbers Adam Lind is putting up this year, you get a complicated answer full of maybes and what abouts: he’s swinging less, making more contact, and has a more even batted ball mix. If you interrogate Adam Lind about the numbers he is putting up this year, you get belly laughs and a more intuitive blend of changes in approach and mechanics. The two don’t necessarily blend perfectly, but they do combine to paint the picture of a slugger coming into his own.

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For Chris Davis and David Murphy, “in the zone” doesn’t extend to the mound. Each has a successful pitching performance on his resume, but in neither case was there a feeling of being in command. Their scoreless outings — in distinctly different situations — were more “lucked out” than “locked in.”

Murphy made his pitching debut last week, at Fenway Park. With his team trailing 17-5 in the eighth inning, the Rangers outfielder retired three of the four Red Sox batters he faced. After allowing a double to Daniel Nava — on a nine-pitch at bat — he struck out Mike Carp and got Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz to fly out.

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