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

1. The Top Minor-League Starters by kwERA
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

The Top Minor-League Starters by kwERA
Introduction
Minor-league regular seasons everywhere have come to their respective conclusions. What concerned readers want to know now — or, at least what the author is presently supposing they want to know — is which qualified minor-league pitchers have recorded the best fielding-independent numbers this year. Moreover, concerned readers are adding this caveat — namely, that they’re interested in a fielding-independent metric that accounts only for strikeout and walk rate, but not home runs, owing to how much more quickly the first two become reliable.

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

1. The Quite Very Effective Ubaldo Jimenez
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

The Quite Very Effective Ubaldo Jimenez
A Note Regarding Ubaldo Jimenez
Yesterday, by way of previewing briefly yesterday’s MLB.TV Free Game, which game featured Cleveland right-hander Danny Salazar, the author had occasion to produce the table below, which includes — or included as of yesterday, at least — the top-five starters by strikeout rate over the last month (minimum three starts).

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Episode 380
Prospect analyst Marc Hulet has recently written a series of posts previewing this year’s Arizona Fall League, which begins the second week of October. He discusses that same league in some depth on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 49 min play time.)

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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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Last week, we spent some time talking about players that may or may not receive a qualifying offer when they hit free agency this winter. The qualifying offer is an important decision, because it grants the original organization a compensation pick at the end of the first round if that player changes teams through free agency. However, it requires teams to be willing to make an offer of at least $14 million in salary for 2014, so it can’t just be handed out to every free agent in hopes of stocking up on draft picks.

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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.’

Read the rest of this entry »

There are at least three remarkable things about Carl Yastrzemski’s playing career. The first is that he played forever. Second, he hit for the American League triple crown in 1967. But third, and most importantly, nobody played the Green Monster like Yaz. I asked my father about it, as he became eligible to vote during Yaz’s rookie season, and he put it simply: “He had it all mapped out.” With the Red Sox belatedly deciding that it’s time to erect a statue in honor of Yaz (I mean, come on, Frank Thomas already has his statue at US Cellular Field) I thought we could take a look back at Yaz’s career.

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

1. Chris Carter’s Record Strikeout Rate in Context
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Chris Carter’s Record Strikeout Rate in Context
Of late, the author has encountered more than one concerned internet citizen making a comment to the effect that Houston corner-type Chris Carter has recorded, thus far, the highest strikeout rate of any qualified batter in major-league history. Indeed, as the table below indicates — of the ten highest single-season strikeout rates since 1913 (i.e. the year since which we have contiguous strikeout data) — these concerned citizens are also generally honest ones.

To wit:

What one finds here is a collection of power hitters from the past 25 years, basically, who compensated for a lack of contact with power and/or patience. What one also finds is Dave Nicholson, who seems to have produced a 1.6 WAR in 1963 as a left fielder for the Chicago White Sox — and ultimately a career WAR of 1.7 in 1661 plate appearances.

If one’s ambition, however, is to determine the place of Chris Carter’s 2013 season in all of baseball of all time, one must consider his numbers relative to the context in which they’ve been recorded. For, as a brief inspection of the leaderboards at this site reveals, the 2013 season has produced the second-highest league-wide strikeout rate of the last 101 years.

With a view to examining which players have produced the most prolific strikeout rates relative to their peers, the author has first identified the league-average strikeout rate (strikeouts per plate appearance, that is) for every season since 1913. The author has then divided every qualified player’s seasonal strikeout rate (since 1913, as well) by the relevant league-average rate for that year. The result is an index stat, K-, which measures strikeout rate relative to league average, where a higher figure represents more striking out.

Here are the results of those calculations:

Three Notes
• Old brother both to Dom and Joe, center-fielder Vince DiMaggio is responsible for the most prolific strikeout rate of the last 100 years — not only recording the highest rate relative to league, but also having produced three of the ten-highest adjusted strikeout rates over that interval. While DiMaggio’s career rate of 19.7% is precisely average in 2013, it’s more than double the overall rate of 9.1% registered league-wide between 1937 and -46.

• By this methodology, Carter’s 2013 season is only the 66th-worst so far as strikeout rate relative to league is concerned. His index figure: a 187 K-.

• It’s very possible that a more responsible way of conducting a study such as this one would be to find the z-score for every player’s strikeout rate for every season since 1913. In addition to being the more responsible method, however, this would also be the considerably more time-consuming one.

Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
Cleveland at Chicago AL | 14:10 ET
Danny Salazar (37.0 IP, 71 xFIP-, 0.6 WAR) faces Hector Santiago (138.2 IP, 113 xFIP-, 1.5 WAR). Of some relevance to this matchup is the following table, which features the top-five starters by strikeout rate over the last month (minimum three starts):

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.

Today’s Complete Schedule
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire.

Note that these NERD scores are calculated using the methodology introduced recently and designed to account for the influence of playoff odds on the watchability of games. ***Unlike in recent iterations of this table, the author has adjusted the day’s NERD Game Scores such that, combined, they average 5.0.*** This allows said table to resemble more closely the Game Scores that have appeared here over the preceding four months.

Away		SP	Tm.	Gm.	Tm.	SP		Home	Time
Danny Salazar	CLE	10	3	6	0	3	CHA	Hector Santiago	14:10
Jake Arrieta	CHN	1	0	9	10	6	PIT	Charlie Morton	19:05
Kyle Kendrick	PHI	3	0	4	0	10	WAS	St. Strasburg	19:05
Jason Hammel	BAL	2	1	2	0	5	TOR	Todd Redmond	19:07
Bruce Chen	KC	2	1	3	0	6	DET	Justin Verlander	19:08
Brad Hand*	MIA	5	0	3	0	5	NYN	Jon Niese	19:10
Hiroki Kuroda	NYA	5	4	6	0	7	BOS	John Lackey	19:10
Ian Kennedy	SD	4	0	3	0	7	ATL	David Hale*	19:30
Dan Straily	OAK	5	5	10	5	7	TEX	Derek Holland	20:05
Jason Vargas	LAA	3	0	2	0	6	HOU	Dallas Keuchel	20:10
Mat Latos	CIN	8	1	4	0	4	MIL	Kyle Lohse	20:10
Chris Archer	TB	5	7	7	0	2	MIN	Kevin Correia	20:10
Hisashi Iwakuma	SEA	7	0	10	9	9	STL	Adam Wainwright	20:15
Tyler Chatwood	COL	6	0	3	0	5	AZ	Brandon McCarthy	21:40
Madis. Bumgarner	SF	8	0	5	0	10	LAN	Clayton Kershaw	22:10

To learn how Pitcher and Team NERD Scores are calculated, click here.
To learn how Game NERD Scores are calculated, click here.
* = Fewer than 20 IP, NERD at discretion of very handsome author.

Phil Coke and Tommy Hunter know a good song when they hear it. The same can be said of song titles and how they might pertain to baseball. Neither the Detroit Tigers southpaw nor the Baltimore Orioles righty is a huge fan of the Beatles or Rolling Stones — but that didn’t deter them from interpreting “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam pick potential comeback players for next season, then discuss Bill James’ list of the ways in which teams have improved over the last 10 years.

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