Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.
Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Oakland at Tampa Bay | 16:10 ET
Sonny Gray (60.0 IP, 89 xFIP-, 1.1 WAR) faces Alex Cobb (19.0 IP, 98 xFIP-, 0.3 WAR). The latter makes his first start since April 12th after suffering, and then recovering from, a left oblique strain. He struck out nine of the 17 batters he faced — which is to say more than half of them — during a rehab start for the High-A Charlotte Stone Crabs (box). No substantive footage exists of the game; however, it does exist of this fisherman removing the claws from actual stone crabs.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Tampa Bay Radio.
Twitter user and probably good person Cory Little brought something to my attention the other day. The San Francisco Giants were playing a game in Colorado, and, following a somewhat ordinary looking sequence of events, from the top of the fifth inning:
Three-run inning for San Francisco. Three two-out runs. The Giants took the lead, though they’d ultimately lose on a walk-off. What’s interesting isn’t the sequence, as it’s presented. What’s interesting is the sub-sequence. Let’s zoom in on the Bumgarner strikeout. The six pitches:
Ben and Sam talk to Dodgers VP of Medical Services and Head Athletic Trainer Stan Conte about the pitcher injury epidemic.
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Justin Verlander has a 3.55 ERA. Seems a little strange to be worried about a pitcher with a 3.55 ERA. But, a few things, about that ERA:
There’s concern, and the concern is legitimate. Okay, so you go a step beyond ERA. You look at FIP. Verlander’s FIP is even lower than his ERA! ERA takes a long time to stabilize, but FIP can take a while, too, on account of how much it depends on dingers. Verlander, so far, hasn’t given up too many dingers, but let’s use a stat we just introduced on Tuesday to show why Verlander is at the root of much angst.
Baseball is a presentation. It’s a thing that is part of our lives, but isn’t our lives. It lies in the world of the else. It’s theater, it’s drama, it’s entertainment. Because of this, we tend to romanticize it some. This is a totally normal response. We pull for teams, we root for certain guys, we sometimes wish others would fail. Just like any drama, there are heroes and villains and fools and underdogs. Every story has characters and every character has an archetype.
I’ve written about labels in baseball in the past. It’s a subject that interests me. Labels are just like any other word really, they only have meaning because we say they do. The thing you are looking at isn’t really a computer screen; it’s a thing we call a computer screen because we needed to call it something, so we picked that. We couldn’t call it a dog because we already named something else a dog. Words are placeholders, they are helpers. There’s nothing intrinsic about the words computer or screen beyond the value and definitions we place on them. I’d go deeper into this, but it would probably end with me telling you that you’re just a battery fueling the system of our robot overlords. Plus, I need to start talking about baseball.
The idea of a workhorse pitcher has been around the game for some time. You perhaps have read an article or a hundred articles about the death of the workhorse pitcher — how the days of Seaver and Carlton and Feller are over, how our pitchers are now babies and/or being babied. The reasons for this phenomenon are fairly clear and aren’t something I’m terribly interested in discussing at the moment, but the basic facts are true. Pitchers are pitching less innings than they used to. Because of this shift, certain pitchers who do perform at a greater frequency are still revered.
And this isn’t without good reason. We know that the ability to pitch a good deal of innings is a valuable skill. It keeps the pressure off the bullpen, and helps teams keep the amount of pitchers they need to use during a season low. High-volume pitchers are usually good performers as well, as even a pitcher with the rubberiest arm wouldn’t go that many innings if he was always getting lit up by the fifth. There are a lot of useful skills a pitcher can have, durability is one of them. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
| 11:29 |
: Happy Wednesday. The queue is now open for your non-fantasy questions.
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| 12:03 |
Yes yes, SSS and all that, but–hypothetically speaking–if d’Arnaud and Flores don’t work out, are the Mets screwed in both the short- and long-term? |
| 12:04 |
: They’re screwed in the short-term no matter what those two do, because this team is bad. But in the long-term, no, having two prospects not pan out doesn’t ruin your future.
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| 12:04 |
What do you think the Nats do with Zimmerman when he gets back, position-wise? |
| 12:04 |
: Espinosa has stopped hitting again, so probably put him back at third and shift Rendon back to second.
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| 12:04 |
Jays just went into first on Fangraphs Playoff Odds for AL East. Thoughts? |
For years, there’s been a pretty easy answer to the common question of “Who is the most underrated player in baseball?” It’s Ben Zobrist. It was Ben Zobrist last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. It’s probably been Zobrist since his breakout year in 2008. If you want to win a bar bet — and you happen to be at a bar where the patrons know what Wins Above Replacement is — the “Ben Zobrist has a higher WAR than Robinson Cano over the last six years” factoid is a pretty good place to start.
But Ben Zobrist is still human, and humans don’t age particularly well when it comes to athletic competitions. Next week, Zobrist will celebrate his 33rd birthday. His power is already starting to wane, as just 10 of his 40 hits this season have gone for extra bases, continuing a trend towards weaker contact that began last year. He’s also slowing down and is not the dynamic baserunner he was a few years back. While he remains an excellent defender and a player who can still control the strike zone, he’s becoming more of a good player than a great one. After years of being underrated, Zobrist is finally regressing into the player that people have thought he was.
And so now, it is probably time for him to pass the torch, and to anoint a new Most Underrated Player in Major League Baseball. Interestingly, the prime candidate looks an awful lot like the incumbent.
Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Arizona at St. Louis | 20:15 ET
Brandon McCarthy (55.2 IP, 72 xFIP-, 0.5 WAR) faces Michael Wacha (54.1 IP, 78 xFIP-, 1.2 WAR). While the former has conceded almost precisely five earned runs for every nine innings recorded this season, he’s produced the fielding-independent numbers of a pitcher who’d generally allow runs at about half that rate. McCarthy’s strikeout-walk differential (18.0%) is currently twice his career average while his ground-ball rate (54.1%) is also considerably higher than previously established levels.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: St. Louis Radio.
