Full, immediate disclosure: it’s actually a tie. When you think unhittability, you might think batting average against, or slugging percentage against, or something. Me, I prefer contact rate, because it’s elegant and simple. Contact rate measures how often batters hit the baseball when they attempt a swing. Most simply, that’s the whole point of a swing. A pitcher who gets a lot of missed swings can rightly be said to be unhittable. Other metrics might penalize for wildness, or just take other matters into account. For pure unhittability, I like looking at the rate of contact, and among National League starters, the lowest rate of contact allowed partly belongs to Francisco Liriano, at a hair above 71%.

Liriano’s tied with somebody else, and it’s not Matt Harvey or Clayton Kershaw. I’m going to be writing about that somebody else, because Liriano’s a lot more familiar. Liriano’s long been hard to hit, and he’s had a breakthrough season for the Pirates after coming over on the cheap. Don’t get me wrong, Liriano’s been surprising, but the guy with whom he’s tied has been a bigger surprise after also joining his current team on the cheap. I’m not sure even the Padres knew what they were getting when they dealt for Tyson Ross.

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Andrelton Simmons and Andruw Jones have a few things in common: they grew up in Curacao, they came up with the Atlanta Braves, they are superlative up-the-middle defenders with good power for their position but some other offensive flaws, and their names both start with “Andr.” I think that the final similarity between the two is this: they help demonstrate just how hard it is for many fans to intuit that one win on offense is equal to one win on defense.

For Simmons, this can be shown by his relative absence in conversations about the league MVP. This year, Simmons’s preternatural play at short has inspired any number of articles exploring whether he’s having the best defensive season ever. But even so, he hasn’t come in for much MVP consideration, which is a bit intuitively bizarre — if a player were having the best offensive season ever, there would be no question of MVP buzz.
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FanGraphs has a lot of metrics, ranging from the standard counting numbers that have filled baseball cards for decades to more complicated calculations and formulas. Odds are pretty good that if there’s something you want to know about a particular Major League player, we probably have a metric for it. However, up until today, we’ve lacked one number that answered two of the most basic questions that people ask: Who has been the best offensive player in the game, and who has been the best defensive player in the game?

You could get at those questions with the numbers we had, using a combination of metrics found on the site, but there wasn’t just a single number that simply answered those two questions. And, unfortunately, the lack of an available sum of offense or defensive value led to people occasionally substituting in a number that didn’t actually answer the question they were trying to answer. This was our fault, not theirs, but as of an hour ago, this has been rectified with the introduction of two new numbers here on FanGraphs.

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I wrote up the Billy Hamilton factoid this morning because I wanted to write about him, but I didn’t have a fully formed post yet, so I used that as a tide-me-over until that post materialized. Well, now, I might just have to come up with a new idea, because J.J. Cooper wrote about Billy Hamilton at Baseball America today, and I don’t think I can do any better than this.

On the three of Hamilton’s four steal attempts last night where the broadcast showed his steal from first move to sliding into second, Hamilton was consistently taking roughly 3.1 seconds from first move to tagging the bag. If you want a fuller explanation of how each steal was timed, please see the note at the bottom of this story.

If a base stealer can get from first to second in right at or under 3.1 seconds, the math of throwing him out becomes very, very difficult. With a slide-step, a pitcher can often cut his time to home to 1.1-1.2 seconds. Without the slide step, a 1.3 second time home is pretty reasonable. For any pitcher taking more than 1.3 seconds to throw home, it’s probably not worth even considering a pitchout.

The post even includes GIFs of Hamilton’s steals last night, with the Astros being basically helpless to stop him from running even when everyone knew he was going. I heartily endorse this piece, and will now go try and find a new subject to write about, since J.J. Cooper aced this one.

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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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Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria was in the news this week and, as usual, there was a decidedly unctuous odor to it. Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported on Monday night of a power struggle between Loria and Larry Beinfest, the team’s president of baseball operations. Lining up with Loria is Dan Jennings, the vice president of player personnel. Lining up with Beinfest is Mike Hill, the general manager. David Samson, Marlin’s president and Loria’s stepson, is nowhere to be found.

In essence, Loria reportedly has pushed aside or overruled Beinfest on a series of baseball decisions, for less than rational baseball reasons. Although the feud between the two dates back many years — Beinfest has been with the Marlins for 13 years — it escalated recently in the wake of allegations that hitting coach Tito Martinez had verbally abused several players. Beinfest conducted an investigation and promised the players confidentiality. Loria was furious when Martinez resigned because he had hand-selected Martinez in the first place. Loria took that anger out on the players who complained: Beinfest was preparing to promote Chris Valaika from Triple-A but Loria interceded because Valaika had been one of the complainants against Martinez. Valaika lost the opportunity he’d earned for a major-league paycheck.

Beinfest wants to know where he stands. Loria refuses to tell him, perhaps preferring to let Beinfest twist in the wind long enough to get fed up and resign. Beinfest is under contract until 2015. If Loria fires him, Beinfest gets paid for two more years. If he resigns, he doesn’t. Given his history, it’s no surprise that Loria would choose the less costly route — to him.

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Today, the 19th of September, finds our proud site in a state of desolation. With the Chief Daily Noter still unaccountably absent — detained, as rumor has it, at some maison mal famée in the heart of Gaul — the Notes have fallen into the calloused barbarian hands of the Notgraphs staff. Like coarse-bearded Vandals they mutter and slouch amid the moldering ruins: the alabaster colonnades of Cistulli’s sortable tables, now cracked and leaning; the exquisite mosaics of his NERD scores, now reduced to a many-hued rubble; the pearlescent gleam of his Corey Kluber metaphors, strewn about like offal and soiled by brutish feet. By sundown tomorrow even these — along with what little else remains of Western civilization — will have been mangled beyond recognition, and the heathens will run orgiastic riot over what once was a temple of sober reason.

Actually now there is an editor informing me that Cistulli will be back on Monday, and that you all, being no-nonsense, numbers-driven sorts of people, would really prefer that I just shut my cake hole, and so without further ado I give you the

Table of Contents

1. Body-Switching Maniacs in Miami! Or, One Possible Reason to Continue Watching the Marlins
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Body-Switching Maniacs in Miami! Or, One Possible Reason to Continue Watching the Marlins

Scanning today’s National League schedule in your usual desultory manner, you might find it wanting in intrigue. You would be wrong. It has intrigue in spades, most of it located in the city of Washington, and most of it due to the fact that the man impersonating Henderson Alvarez is on the verge of being unmasked.

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Here’s a fun little game. Go to the top of the page and click on leaderboards, then use the league drop down box to isolate just NL players. Now, click on the advanced tab so that you can get to the two components of our baserunning metric, wSB (stolen base runs) and UBR (baserunning runs besides SB/CS). You’ll see them on the right hand side of the page, between BABIP and wRC.

Now, before you sort by wSB, go to the min PA drop down. Instead of picking a minimum, you need to set this to zero, because the hero of our story doesn’t yet meet the lowest playing time threshold on the drop down box. Now, once you’ve done that, you’ll have a leaderboard consisting of 543 names, because the lack of a minimum playing time requirement means that our net is huge and catches everyone who has appeared as a hitter or runner for an NL team this season.

Now that you’ve done that, click on wSB to make it sort in descending order. You are now looking at the NL leaders in runs added through base stealing. For those who didn’t play along with the instructions, I’ll create the table for you, just without all the other things on the advanced tab:

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I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about the other sports, so I can’t speak to situations more messed up than what we’ve got in baseball. But in baseball — little details aside — we’ve got the A’s, and we’ve got the Marlins.

The A’s consistently try really hard to win, despite the odds being stacked against them. Oakland has a brilliant front office, and they play in a ballpark plagued by sewage leaks in the clubhouse and in the dugout. The Marlins are crooks. Money-hungry crooks. They play in a brand-new ballpark they didn’t pay for — a ballpark they’ve made no effort to fill after a disappointing debut season. The Marlins did what the Marlins do: They got some people excited, then they undid the goodwill and more.

Some baseball teams have reputations. The Yankees are the big spenders. The Dodgers are the other big spenders. The Twins are lovable throwbacks. The Braves are slightly less-lovable throwbacks. The Royals are run by people who shouldn’t be running the Royals. And so on. The Marlins’ reputation is that they’re run by criminals who deceive with every word. Two offseasons ago, it looked like they were trying hard to turn the page, to create a new identity. Two offseasons ago, the Marlins tried to spend to build a powerhouse. But their identity is still their identity. You know how it went. The Marlins are as the Marlins have been.

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