Yesterday, two former Braves prospects took no-hit bids into later innings. One was was Jason Marquis, a 34-year old veteran getting by largely thanks to the roomy confines of Petco Park. (Though as a reader points out, Wednesday’s game was at Dodger Stadium.) The other was 22-year old Julio Teheran, and his gem seemed to herald his arrival as the real deal. Marquis was a supplemental first rounder in 1996. (He was the 35th overall pick, 34 picks behind Kris Benson.) Teheran was the top 16-year old pitcher signed in 2007. Marquis isn’t sexy, but Julio would be happy to have his career: Marquis’ career FIP is 4.85, but he has pitched 1873 innings and won 119 games in the big leagues.

Julio has a chance to be a whole lot more than that. But it would have been understandable if many Braves fans and dynasty league owners were starting to suffer from prospect fatigue. Julio has been on the Baseball America Top 10 Braves prospect list for six straight years; they called him the Braves’ 10th best prospect after he was signed as a 16-year old, before he had thrown a pitch in the United States, they saw him as the Braves’ top pitching prospect from 2010-2013, and as the top prospect overall in 2011-2013. There was no doubting that he could destroy minor league hitters. Until last night, though, as Ben Duronio writes today, some may have doubted that he could destroy major league hitters. So what has happened over the last six years?
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You know all about xFIP, because you read FanGraphs, and it’s a distinctly FanGraphs-y statistic. You don’t quite know how you feel about it. Some pitchers demonstrate an ability to suppress runs more than one would expect. Some pitchers appear to be unusually homer-prone. Lots has been written about the handful of apparent exceptions, but xFIP isn’t trash, as some might suggest. Most generally, it does a good job of separating the good pitchers from the bad ones. Good pitchers get strikeouts, limit walks, and don’t allow homers. Most pitchers with weird-looking home-run rates will regress. One wants to argue with xFIP, but it isn’t easy, except on the margins. It contains a lot of truth.

This year, 56 American League starters have thrown at least 50 innings. Felix Hernandez leads with 90.2; we find Felix Doubront at 50, exactly. Here are the top four, by xFIP:

1. Anibal Sanchez
2. Felix Hernandez
3. Yu Darvish
4. Max Scherzer

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At this point, everyone knows the story of the Cardinals stealing Albert Pujols in the 13th round of the 1999 draft. In terms of production for the cost, it’s probably the best draft pick in Major League history. Well, apparently, the Cardinals are good at this whole 13th round draft pick thing, because exactly 10 years after they unearthed Pujols, they struck gold again.

Their 2009 13th round pick? Matt Carpenter. He was a senior sign out of Texas Christian University, a budget pick who only cost them a $1,000 signing bonus. After signing, the Cardinals had him split time between short-season and two A-ball levels. At low-A, he drew some walks but showed no power — in part because he hit flat footed with no weight transfer — and was terrible when he got promoted to high-A, hitting .219/.286/.342 in 128 plate appearances. 23-year-old non-athletes who can’t hit A-ball pitching a few months after signing for $1,000 are the definition of non-prospects.

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Zach Britton was supposed to be the Fourth Horseman. He was supposed to combine with Brian Matusz, Jake Arrieta, and Chris Tillman to form a stalwart rotation able enough to take down the AL East superpowers. TINSTAAPP rules, of course, then took effect. Matusz is now in the bullpen. Arrieta is back in Triple-A, and he may end up in the bullpen. Tillman lost his velocity and his spot in the rotation, and then, out of nowhere, he re-found his velocity and a spot in the rotation … for now. Britton’s career has been just as adventurous.

Britton debuted on April 3, 2011. He had been a Top-100 prospect for two years, and Baseball America had just named him the 28th-best prospect in baseball. That first season went fairly smoothly at the beginning. His strikeout and walk rates were below-average – 15% and 9%, respectively – but his groundball rate of 1.86 was enough to make him basically a league-average pitcher over 154 innings, netting him 2 wins of value that season. The trouble, however, started toward the middle of the season as rumors of shoulder issues began to surface.

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It’s draft day, so I thought a draft related link post was in order. Baseball America has covered the draft from every possible angle you might imagine, but since I’m a nerd and I like numerical analysis, this draft history piece by Matt Eddy is my favorite part of their draft coverage. While Eddy isn’t the first to look at a series of drafts and see where the strengths and weaknesses have been, he updates the results to cover 1989-2008, and he breaks down the results in a way that is easy to digest.

I could excerpt a ton of different parts of the story, which is why you should just go read the whole thing. Here’s one part that stands out, though:

Despite the large disparity in graduation rates for college position players and high school ones, the gap in impact rates is much narrower. About 14 in 100 college players in our study have accumulated at least 10 WAR for their careers, while nearly 11 in 100 high schoolers reached that level. In fact, the star-of-stars high school position players (Top 5) produced more wins above replacement (1,091) than their college counterparts (1,016), which is remarkable when you consider their lower graduation rate, lower impact rate and the fact that prep stars spot roughly three years of experience to college players at the time of their draft selection, a phenomenon that ought to make collegians in the later years of our sample considerably more productive.

High school position players keep track with collegians if you expand the impact threshold to 20 career WAR (34 high school, 31 college), 30 career WAR (17, 17) or 40 career WAR (11, 11).

Eddy finds something similar when he looks at pitchers as well. Basically, the idea that college players are significantly better bets than high school players simply doesn’t seem to be true anymore, if it ever was. The flameout rate of high school players is much higher, but almost the entirety of the difference is made up of college guys who get to the big leagues but never amount to much. In terms of actually finding talent who produce significant value — and it’s not like +10 WAR is a crazy high bar — high school players have done nearly as well, despite the fact that (as Eddy notes) the three year head start they have should bias the results of active players towards the college guys.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth reading, as are the rest of Eddy’s articles on the draft’s history. And, despite what might have been written about the draft 10 years ago, don’t freak out if your favorite team takes a high school kid tonight. Even if they draft a high school pitcher. It’s okay, really.

All anyone can talk about these days, some of the time, is the matter of pitch-framing. It’s a concept we’ve been vaguely aware of since childhood, or since whenever we started paying attention to baseball, but for a while it was one of those things we ignored because we didn’t know how to measure it. Then some people started to measure it, and it seemed to make a big difference sometimes, and that’s exciting, and people got excited. People remain excited, since framing is a new field and it’s fascinating to learn how some catchers can do it while other catchers struggle. It’s a very small part of the game overall, but it still has that new-stat scent, and evidence suggests at the extremes it’s pretty significant. I’m thankful for the advances in pitch-framing research.

When people talk about framing, or receiving, though, they talk mainly about the catchers. That’s fine, the catchers are most responsible. They’ll talk a little about the pitchers, and that’s fine too, because catchers need the pitchers’ help. It’s hard to frame a pitch thrown to the opposite side of the plate. But good framing has victims, and worse framing has beneficiaries. The pitchers are affected but the batters are affected too, and it stands to reason framing isn’t completely independent of the guy in the box. Batters probably have some effect, so those batters are worth investigating. Which batters end up with the most extra strikes? Which batters end up with the fewest?

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

1. Most Basic Possible Guide to the Draft
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Most Basic Possible Guide to the Draft
Introduction
Baseball’s amateur draft begins today and extends through Saturday. Below is a collection of the most basic possible information — like, totally elementary — concerning it.

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Walk around AT&T Park and ask people inside and outside of the organization what’s wrong with Matt Cain and you’ll get a different answer every time:

“He’s tipping his pitches from the stretch.”
“It’s just the Cardinals, that’s all.”
“The Cardinals got our signs from Bengie Molina.”
“It’s his command.”

It’s worth trying each pair of pants on, but there’s also one person who might have special insight on this matter. Matt Cain.

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In 1992, the Reds took Chad Mottola with the fifth-overall pick of the draft. To put it bluntly, he was a bust. The erstwhile outfielder went on to play 16 professional seasons, but nearly all of them were in the minor leagues. He appeared in just 59 games at the big-league level, the last 10 of which came in 2006 with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Mottola is now in the second phase of his career. He’s also back in Toronto, having been named the team’s hitting coach this past off-season. The assignment followed stints as the organization’s minor league hitting coordinator and Triple-A hitting coach.

Like many who have excelled in his current position, the 41-year-old Mottola understands the craft better than he executed it. A big believer in individuality and communication, he’s a self-professed “mad scientist in the cage.”

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