One of the big conversations taking place in baseball right now concerns whether or not Billy Hamilton is going to hit enough to stick as an actual long-term regular. It’s a justifiable worry, because Hamilton didn’t exactly tear up the minors, and he hasn’t looked fantastic in his limited exposure to the majors. We won’t know for a while whether Hamilton can do enough at the plate, but it’s good to have the occasional reminder of why he’s being held to a lower baseline than others. Wednesday’s fifth inning of a game between the Reds and Cardinals provided such a reminder.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Hamilton made a run happen entirely on his own. He required assistance from the pitcher, his teammates, and the rest of the opposition. But with no other player in baseball would a run have been scored, given the sequence you’re about to observe, in .gif form.

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All we want are numbers that matter, beyond the numbers that matter. Wins and losses are already in the books, and in certain cases teams have already significantly changed their own playoff odds, but we’re all waiting for the point at which we can do some meaningful analysis. The sample sizes thus far are incredibly small, and this is a big reason why people are paying so much attention to pitcher fastball velocities — that’s one of the only things that stabilizes almost immediately. Velocity is entirely up to the one guy. The numbers that stabilize fastest tend to be the numbers relying on the fewest players.

But you can also look at numbers that build sample sizes quickly. Like, say, pitch-by-pitch numbers, since there are hundreds of pitches in each game. What that suggests is that it’s not entirely too early to look at 2014 pitch-framing statistics, and there’s evidence to believe this carries over well even over small samples. And in the early, early going, Yankees pitchers have worked with the most favorable strike zone, while Cubs pitchers have done the very opposite of that. I hope you like framing content, because this summer we’re probably going to beat it to death. So, actually, I hope you don’t like framing content? Whatever, here comes data.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced last April by the present author, wherein that same ridiculous author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists* and also (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on the midseason prospect lists produced by those same notable sources or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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We are pleased to announce that, beginning today, FanGraphs is going to be contributing regular original content to FoxSports.com. My first piece for Fox is up now:

When the Detroit Tigers announced that they had signed Miguel Cabrera to an eight-year contract extension that didn’t even begin for another two years, the deal was immediately met with skepticism. The Tigers tacked on an additional $248 million in guaranteed money to lock up Cabrera’s age-33 to age-40 seasons, and the history of aging, super-sized, bat-only players is littered with disappointments. Exhibit A: Albert Pujols, who has been a severe disappointment since joining the Angels and would be my choice as the owner of the worst contract in baseball right now. The Pujols disaster is why so many of us — myself included — believe the Tigers might end up regretting the Cabrera extension.

But, at the same time, we should also acknowledge that the Pujols disaster is one of the most inexplicable anomalies in baseball history. There have been hitters as good as Albert Pujols before, but they generally haven’t declined nearly to the same degree that Pujols has since joining the Angels.

Read the rest at FoxSports.com.

We’ll be contributing several pieces per week to the FoxSports site, with writers like Jeff Sullivan and Eno Sarris also on tap to bring their unique perspectives. The content you find there will be similar to the content we’ve provided here over the years, and we’ll be sure to make sure to point you to the pieces we do over there so you don’t miss one of Eno’s great interviews or Jeff’s array of GIFs.

We’re excited to partner with Fox, but don’t worry, FanGraphs itself isn’t going to be changing. We’re not going anywhere; this will simply put some of our content in front of a different audience. This is just an addition to what we already have been doing, and it won’t affect what we do here.

We look forward to working with Fox going forward, and hope you’ll enjoy this new partnership as much as we will. So check out our first piece over there and get ready for a bunch more.

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When writing about Jonathan Papelbon in the year 2014, there’s a few things that we can stipulate as fact, if only because you all already know about them and there’s not really much point in spending time rehashing them.

We know that his velocity has been dropping steadily for years. We know that the four-year, $50 million contract he signed prior to the 2012 season looked bad at the time and looks even worse now, both hampering the Philadelphia budget and helping to usher in a world where closers don’t get big money on the market any longer. (No closer has earned as much since, and with Craig Kimbrel extended, it’s possible no one will for years.) We know that he’s not exactly considered the best teammate in the world. We know, we think, that the Phillies badly wanted to be rid of him and couldn’t, for all of these reasons.

Even still: 2014 has provided some additional information, and it’s not exactly encouraging. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot went wrong for the Mets a season ago, but they did manage to come out of nowhere to be the best baserunning team in baseball. I say that because, the season before, the team overall was below average. They took it upon themselves to be much more aggressive with their feet, and it paid off — even if, in the end, it didn’t pay off. A huge reason the Mets were so good was because of Eric Young, who is fast. Another huge reason the Mets were so good was Daniel Murphy, who is not fast. A month ago I wrote about Murphy and the curious case of a base-stealing threat without base-stealing legs. Murphy was also good at the other baserunning aspects, and he stands as a clear example of how baserunning is more than pure footspeed.

The opposite of a slow runner who’s better than expected on the basepaths is a fast runner who’s worse than expected on the basepaths. That player type exists, and I remember that last year Gerardo Parra went 10-for-20 stealing bases even though he was a plus-UZR outfielder. Watching a game Tuesday afternoon, Parra was thrown out trying for second by almost a literal mile. I’ll grant that it appeared to be a busted hit-and-run, but that doesn’t fully excuse Parra for being so far away from the base when the baseball arrived.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Barry Bonds vs. Mike Trout, Billy Hamilton, teams taking the long view, and more.

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Intermittently, over the past month or so, the present author — leaning heavily on historical data from Baseball America — has examined the ways in which prospects distinguished for possessing certain tools as minor-leaguers have ultimately fared at the major-league level. The goal: ideally, to develop a better sense of what does and doesn’t correlate to future success, with a view towards better assessing contemporary prospects.

The first of these posts considered the 2005 “class,” as it were, of best-tool prospects and their respective major-league futures; the second post, that collection of prospects from 2005 to -09 who had been recognized both for their hit tool and plate discipline simultaneously; and the third, that subset of the best-hitting, most-disciplined prospects who had also been recognized for their defensive acumen.

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