Hey guys, and welcome to a post to which you don’t need to be welcomed. This isn’t property or a residence — no one resides here. This is a post, weighing literally nothing, figuratively little, with no doors and no walls. I’m not inside of it, allowing you in. I’m not even greeting you, as you’re reading this — my words are, but my words are old, having been written in advance of this post being published. So, hey guys, and here’s a post. Did you know that these introductions have become the trickiest part of composing this series? Maybe you can tell. Neat thing about wild swings and wild pitches is that they provide a jumping-off point. You can look for things to write about in the video or the numbers. A completely open introduction? The hell am I supposed to say? I don’t have many strong opinions about things, and this isn’t the place to talk about potential Breaking Bad spoilers. Although that gives me an idea, so check back next week. I’m just kidding, I’m not going to do what I thought of, so you’ll never know what I thought of. Thank goodness, this paragraph is finished.

This is the part where we talk about wild swings and share many laughs because the swings were ugly and irresponsible. Our window of observation this time around goes from September 6 through September 19, and as always, I’ve elected to exclude checked swings and the nearly-always-hypothetical wild swings on hit-and-runs. Authors of excluded checked swings for this edition: Marc Krauss, Brian Bogusevic, Junior Lake, and whoever Chris Rusin is. I’ll warn you that one of the wild swings below was attempted by a pitcher. But to compensate for that, this post also features among the neatest of chance quirks, so, keep your eyes peeled for what I will make a point of bringing to your attention. Get ready for fun! Or get ready to browse the series archive. Now get ready for fun!

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Hey there everybody, and welcome to the first part of this edition of this. Here’s a link to all of the previous editions. Understand that part of me feels guilty right now. This is my full-time job — my full-time job is serving as a content creator on the Internet. It’s a pretty good job, the sort of thing a lot of people out there are currently fighting for. But there are a lot of content creators on the Internet, full-time and part-time and unpaid. The only way to remain relevant on the Internet as a creator is to keep creating. So, there’s a lot of content, and a lot of it seems like it could be interesting, and a lot of that turns out to actually be interesting. So there’s a lot to consume — too much to consume, infinite content to consume — and it’s easy to get lost. Hours can disappear and you can snap out of it and realize you’re reading an article about Super Dave Osborne. The Internet is dangerous, because information is appealing, and it’s easy to click. If you can control yourself, kudos; if you have trouble, I apologize for contributing to the Internet’s volume. Many of you are reading this instead of doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and you might not even realize it, and that makes me feel bad. Not bad enough to stop doing my job, because Greek yogurt isn’t going to buy itself, but know that I know your struggle. This weekend let’s all go to the woods.

Uh so here come some wild pitches, covering the window from September 6 through September 19. Once again, this covers two weeks instead of one, because last Friday I was out of town and FanGraphs stays where my computer is. Don’t know what happens next week. Could cover a week. Could cover the second half. Could cover the whole season. There are surprises in store. Meanwhile, this week, few surprises, except for all of the surprises to come. You know the deal: top five pitches furthest from the center of the PITCHf/x strike zone. Pitches just missing: Ivan Nova to Mike Carp on September 15, Madison Bumgarner to A.J. Pollock on September 8, and Stephen Fife to Angel Pagan on September 14. Those pitchers are fortunate to have escaped mocking commentary. They did not, however, escape mention. Now for some mocking commentary.

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On Tuesday, Starling Marte got his first start in more than a month. To no one’s surprise — at least to those who follow the Pirates — he got hit by a pitch. It was his 22nd hit-by-pitch this season, the second-most behind Cincinnati’s Shin-Soo Choo. Prior to his start this week, Marte had been absent from the Pirates lineup since Aug. 18 — a day after he was hit in the hand. While some players get hit all the time, it looks like Marte might be playing an active role. In fact, it appears he’s getting hit when he’s close to striking out. And if that’s true, the strategy looks to have cost him at least a month’s production.

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Andy Pettitte is going to announce his (second) retirement this afternoon. Much will be written (again) about Pettitte’s career and, of course, his Hall of Fame prospects. Others are better at the history and biography stuff, and, well, at pretty much all of the other stuff, too. Personally, I am not interested in predicting whether a player will get into the Hall of Fame. Analyzing players is one thing. Sociological and psychological evaluations of the Hall of Fame’s voters is another (that is not a commentary on the voters, just on my interests). When it comes to stuff like this, I prefer to focus on a player’s worthiness, that is, whether he should get into the Hall of Fame.

Much will be written regarding Pettitte’s Hall of Fame contributions now and in the off-season, just as much was written about his post-2010 retirement. I am not going to cover every angle or offer a final verdict. Rather, I want to to discuss two or three tough angles for the sabermetric evaluation of Pettitte’s case that make it an intriguing topic.

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Now it’s the pitcher’s turn. Today I’ll cover the 30, 40 and 50 WAR groups, and we’ll leave the 60 and 70+ WAR groups for the final installment. If you missed Part One and Two on hitters, you can find them here and here.

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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.’

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I got my start at FanGraphs by writing Community Research articles. As you may have noticed, community authors have been very busy this season, cranking out a lot of interesting articles. One that caught my eye the other day was triple_r’s piece on the importance of strikeouts for hitters. The piece correctly pointed out, as other studies have, that there’s basically no correlation between a hitter’s strikeout rate and his overall offensive production. Strikeouts don’t matter; case closed, right? Well, not exactly.

Let me present a hypothetical situation. Say there’s a group of players who go to an “anti-aging” clinic in Florida and pick up some anabolic steroids. Let’s say these hypothetical players are named Bryan Raun, Ralex Odriguez, Tiguel Mejada, Phonny Jeralta, Celson Nruz, and Barry Bon… nevermind. Yet, after using the steroids, it appears that the group of them, on average, has not improved. The steroids didn’t improve their performance, right? But, wait — let’s also say that while visiting Florida, some of them contracted syphilis, which spread to their brains, causing delusions and severely impacting their judgment, strike-zone and otherwise. The players whose brains aren’t syphilis-addled have actually improved quite a bit, but their gains are completely offset by the losses suffered by those whose central nervous systems are raging with syphilis. So, the fact that the steroids actually do improve performance has been completely obscured by another factor that is somewhat — but not necessarily — associated with the steroids.

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Ben and Sam discuss Hanley Ramirez’s season and future, then talk about various teams’ chances to make it to October in 2014 (and beyond).

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

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Table of Contents

Here’s the table of contents for next September 20th’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Matt Harvey: Can’t He Decide On That Surgery Already?
2. The Story of Luke Hochevar’s 63rd Save
3. Derek Jeter’s MVP Comeback Season Continues
4. The iPhone 6, and how you can not only watch the MLB.TV Free Game on it, you can also play center field.
5. Today’s Complete Schedule, except for the Dodgers and Diamondbacks, still stuck in Australia, waiting to get out since April.

Alternatively, here’s the table of contents for today’s partially crowdsourced edition of the Daily Notes.

1. An Introduction
2. Hot Bruce Chen GIF
3. Mike Trout Slash Lines
4. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
5. Today’s Complete Schedule

An Introduction

I am graph-impaired, and far more comfortable writing poems about anti-semitic urine collectors, scripts for the new NBC comedy, “Park Factors and Recreation,” and fake fantasy mailbags than actual non-fictional content about current issues on the baseball diamond.

Thus, in preparation for filling Carson’s shoes this morning, I begged the loyal NotGraphs readers to help me fill these notes. They responded by requesting hot Bruce Chen GIFs, Mike Trout’s slash line, and daily drink selections to help you cope with watching the Astros on the MLB.TV free game of the day, which is perhaps MLB’s punishment for not upgrading to a more expensive app.

I will try to fulfill these requests, and also provide you with a chart of today’s starting pitchers. Carson will be back on Monday, and all will be better.

Hot Bruce Chen GIF

Commenter Samy Dangerfield requested a hot Bruce Chen GIF. This is the best I can do.

Mike Trout Slash Lines

Commenter ettin wanted Mike Trout slash lines. According to this 2011 Baseball Prospectus piece by Emma Span, which you probably do not want to read at work, slash fiction refers to stories about people (and cartoon characters?) having, uh, very graphic extracurricular lives. Thus, I assume that ettin was asking for lines like this:

“…and then Trout gently stroked his bat…”

“…and with the final poker hand decided, Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and the Rally Monkey were the only ones with any clothes still left on….”

“…and Trout said to Josh Hamilton, ‘I know exactly how we can bust that slump….'”

Or maybe he just wanted to know that Trout’s at a ridiculous .330/.435/.570, topping last year, with an even more ridiculous second-half line of .346/.496/.581, with 53 walks in 56 games. No walks since Sunday though… Monday ended a 9-games-with-a-walk streak.

Today’s MLB.TV Free Game

Houston at Cleveland | 19:05 ET Brett Oberholtzer (60.1 IP, 107 xFIP-, 1.0 WAR) faces Zach McAllister (125 IP, 113 xFIP-, 1.5 WAR) in the day’s longest-combined-last-names-of-starting-pitchers matchup. Also, the Indians should probably try and win this thing for the sake of their wild-card hopes.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Vin Scully, three hours later, broadcasting an entirely different game.

Today’s Complete Schedule

Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with beer and non-beer pairings, courtesy of prolific and helpful NotGraphs commenter Well-Beered Englishmen, whom you can also find on Twitter. Ah, Twitter. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and a random guess as to who will be pitching for the Yankees, since, as of this writing, it’s TBD*.

*Okay, I checked again and it’s CC Sabathia. But why change a whole chart?!

I recently posed a question to 22 baseball writers from across the country. It was a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Given the subjectivity involved, it doesn’t even have a right answer.

“Who are the three best eligible players — not including Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens — not in the Hall of Fame?”

The reason for excluding Bonds and Clemens is the likelihood they would have finished one-two on the majority of ballots. Also not eligible were players who will debut next year, and those, like Pete Rose, ineligible for enshrinement.

The writers were asked to rank their selections in order and provide a brief explanation. The results were then tabulated with first choices receiving five points, second choices receiving three points, and third choices receiving one point.

Their responses are listed below in alphabetical order, followed by the final results of the voting.
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