Prince Fielder ranks 12th among active players in hit-by-pitches, and you can spare us all the fat jokes because Reed Johnson ranks fifth. There are guys for whom getting hit is basically a skill, and this seems to be the case for Fielder, as he’s happy to find another way to reach base. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the back. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the butt. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the elbow. Bringing us to a Prince Fielder HBP on Tuesday.

Fielder led off the bottom of the second inning against Dan Straily, and after falling behind 0-and-2, he got drilled by a fastball that ran up and in. The next guy struck out and the guy after that hit into a double play, so what happened to Fielder hardly mattered in the end, but this nevertheless seems like an excellent opportunity to gauge reader opinion on something.

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I’m just going to leave this here, sans commentary. Except I’ll note that the Diamondbacks hit opposing batters 60 times this year, and were hit by their opponents 43 times. Okay, proceed.

Arizona Diamondbacks general manager Kevin Towers has not shied away from venting frustration about his team’s lack of fight.
Towers has pointed to many instances where his pitchers did not hit a member of the other team after a perceived slight or beaning of a D-back.

Toward the end of the season, the L.A. Dodgers clubbed six home runs in an 8-1 drubbing of the D-backs, which was a game that saw the eventual NL West champs look a little too comfortable in the dugout.

“I was sitting behind home plate that game and when it showed up on the Diamondvision of stuffing bananas down their throats, I felt like we were a punching bag,” Towers told Arizona Sports 620’s Burns and Gambo Tuesday. “Literally, if I would have had a carton of baseballs I would have fired them into the dugout from where I was sitting behind home plate.

“That’s not who we are as Diamondbacks, that’s not how — I mean, it’s a reflection on Gibby, on myself, on our entire organization. They slapped us around and we took it.”

Towers said that has to stop, and following the game he had “a few choice words for the (coaching) staff.”

Nothing changed.

“You’d think the GM comes down and makes it a point to talk to the staff about it that at we need to start protecting our own and doing things differently,” he said. “Probably a week later Goldy gets dinged, and no retaliation. It’s like ‘wait a minute.’

“Not that I don’t take any of our guys from a lesser standpoint, but if Goldy’s getting hit, it’s an eye for an eye, somebody’s going down or somebody’s going to get jackknifed.”

Read the whole thing. You can bet the commissioner’s office is going to.

It is “factually” “true” both that (a) the Arizona Fall League only just commenced yesterday and also that (b) AFL performances, even after having been regressed and adjusted for environment, are of questionable utility so far as evaluating prospects is concerned. (See, for example, Mike Trout’s performance there in 2011.)

That said, for those of us not currently present in the Greater Phoenix area — a state of affairs that might most appropriately be called “the best of times and the worst of times” — one of the few ways to participate in that very compelling league is by dwelling for too long on very small statistical samples.

Which, that’s the impetus for this post.

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2013-14 free-agent market.

Note that, this year, in addition to asking readers to estimate the years/dollars each free agent is likely to receive, FanGraphs is also requesting that readers make note of how much they’d pay each free agent were they, themselves, actual GMs.

In this edition: Kendrys Morales.

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A week ago, Clint Hurdle chose A.J. Burnett over Gerrit Cole to start Game 1 of the NLDS. This was a perfectly reasonable choice, as Burnett has been excellent for the Pirates this year, and is a 37 year old veteran, while Cole is a 23 year old rookie who had just over 100 innings in his big league career. Cole has been very good since the Pirates called him up, but by pretty much any measure, Burnett had been as good or better, and he’s got a longer track record of pitching at this level.

Burnett, of course, imploded. He allowed as many hits (6) as he got outs, and he walked four batters as well, including the opposing pitcher. Seven runs scored and the Cardinals rolled to an easy victory. The next day, Cole shut down the very same line-up, allowing just two hits and one run over six innings, allowing the Pirates to tie the series. And now, with both Burnett and Cole on full rest for Game 5, Hurdle is going with the kid.

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I’m going to let you in on a little bit of a secret; writing about baseball for a living, in October, can be kind of difficult. Not because topics are hard to find — the playoffs hand us ideas on a silver platter — or because the samples are too small for us to be able to really forecast anything with certainty, but because the rise of the internet has empowered multiple websites to employ very talented writers, and we’re all watching the same thing at the same time.

In the regular season, there’s always a large diversity of events happening, so we can find our own little niche and write about something that hasn’t been widely covered. In the postseason, though, there’s usually only a couple of games going on on any given day, and those games often have specific moments that work really well for in depth analysis. And because there are so many good baseball writers watching those same moments, it can become a bit of a race to see who can produce a quality take that basically erases the need to read any other take on that event.

Last night’s event was Max Scherzer loading the bases with no one out, and then getting out of it, protecting a one run lead in the process. It’s the kind of moment that basically demands to be written about. Except, you know, Grant Brisbee at Baseball Nation basically cornered the market on analyzing that inning:

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Ben and Sam discuss the narratives that are dominating the discussion this October.

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2013-14 free-agent market.

Note that, this year, in addition to asking readers to estimate the years/dollars each free agent is likely to receive, FanGraphs is also requesting that readers make note of how much they’d pay each free agent were they, themselves, actual GMs.

In this edition: David Murphy.

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There is always a bit of a lull between the end of the minor league playoffs in September and the start of the annual top prospects lists in early November. Because of that gap, I’m breathing new life into an old feature that I wrote for the site in FanGraphs’ infancy back in 2008 and 2009.

The series ‘A Minor Review of 2013’ will look back on some of the major happenings in each MLB organization since the beginning of April as a primer for the upcoming FanGraphs Top 10+5 prospects lists. This series will run throughout September and October. I hope you enjoy the series and are eagerly anticipating the start of ‘Prospect List Season.’

The player listed in the sleeper section was featured in a pre-season series that looked at one fringe prospect in each organization that was expected to take a big step forward during 2013, chosen by myself, a scout or a front office talent evaluator.

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