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.

Dalton Pompey, CF, Toronto Blue Jays (Profile)
Level: A+/AA   Age: 21   Top-15: 13th   Top-100: N/A
Line: .312/.393/.461, 6 HR, 29 SB, 36-58 BB-K

Summary
Pompey is one of the fastest-rising prospects not only in the Jays system but minor-league baseball, in general. He’s also likely to be a hot commodity during trade talks at the July deadline approaches.

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Ben and Sam talk about three things that could inspire new unwritten rules (as if there weren’t enough unwritten rules already).

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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
Boston at New York AL | 20:05 ET
John Lackey (107.0 IP, 82 xFIP-, 2.6 WAR) faces Chase Whitley (42.0 IP, 105 xFIP-, 1.0 WAR). The attraction of this particular contest owes less to the identities of the probable starting pitchers (although neither Lackey nor Whitley are wholly without merit) and more to how it’s likely to represent the major-league debut of Boston prospect Mookie Betts. The 21-year-old has recorded not only impressive slash stats, but also equally impressive fielding-independent numbers, over ca. 250 plate appearances between Double- and Triple-A. A second baseman by trade, Betts is likely to play right field tonight — a position, that, at which he appears to have been deployed about twice ever in his professional career.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Boston Radio.

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The Cleveland Indians had two first-round picks in last month’s amateur draft. They used them to select University of San Francisco outfielder Bradley Zimmer 21st overall and prep lefthander Justus Sheffield 31st overall. The former is beginning his professional career with the Mahoning Valley Scrappers in the short-season New York-Penn League. The latter will begin his in the rookie-level Arizona League.

According to scouting director Brad Grant, the club narrowed its top pick to Zimmer and an unnamed second player approximately six hours before the start of the draft. Using the information at their disposal, they determined the brother of Royals pitching prospect Kyle Zimmer would likely be available when picked at 21.

“As we got closer to the draft we had an inclination – especially day of – he’d be there,” said Grant. “We weren’t sure, so we had a Plan B in place, but we thought there was a pretty good chance.”

I asked Grant what made the Indians believe Zimmer and their Plan B would still be on the board. Read the rest of this entry »

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
Chicago AL at Toronto | 13:07 ET
Chris Sale (71.1 IP, 71 xFIP-, 2.3 WAR) faces Marcus Stroman (36.0 IP, 93 xFIP-, 0.5 WAR). With regard to the former, Jeff Sullivan recently noted within these pages that, in an attempt to decease the risk of injury, that Sale has made an effort to throw his changeup more often, his slider less. Indeed, one finds that, over the three starts Sale has recorded since Sullivan’s piece, that the left-hander has thrown his changeup almost precisely a third of the time. By way of comparison, his changeup usage in 2013 was over 10 percentage points less than that. His slider usage over those three starts, meanwhile, is much lower than in 2013: 13% vs. 29%.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio?

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, purple for NotGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community.
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Episode 457
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the guest on this regrettable 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 1 hr 11 min play time.)

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This just in — George Springer is really good. Like Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, Yasiel Puig, and seemingly a bevy of other players the past few years, Springer is making it look super easy. But it really doesn’t always happen this way. Prospects frequently struggle when they reach the majors, even if they go on to long and productive careers. To demonstrate, I thought I would run through the list of rookie position players from the Wild Card era (minimum 350 plate appearances) and cross reference it with the Baseball America top 100 prospects database to give us a few examples of players who didn’t leap to immediate stardom in their inaugural campaigns.

Really, Really Bad: Ray Durham, 1995 (ranked 28th by Baseball America)
One of the more underrated players of the late 90’s-early 2000’s, for seven straight seasons, and in eight of nine seasons, Durham was worth at least 2.7 WAR. He was an above-average hitter, which is generally not in large supply at the keystone, and while he wasn’t the slickest of fielders, he eventually got good enough to not be a total disaster. His -81.4 Fld mark for his career is a little misleading. In his first five seasons in the majors, he tallied a -75 Fld, but his total across the remaining nine seasons of his career was -6.3. He essentially was below average in one season and then above average in the next.

But, oh, that rookie season. He graduated on April 26 of his age-23 season, and actually did hit pretty well in his initial weeks. From his debut to the end of May, he posted a 111 wRC+. But from June 1 to the season’s end, he posted just a 73 wRC+. Tack in a woeful -22 showing on defense, and you have yourself a -1.4 WAR campaign. Durham would go on to have a pretty nice career for himself — his 30.1 WAR ranks 59th among second basemen all-time (30th since 1947) — but things didn’t look so hot at the end of his rookie campaign.

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For years, the baseball world has been waiting for Commissioner Bud Selig to say something definitive about a new home for the Oakland Athletics. On Wednesday, he finally did. The reaction was anything but definitive.

The A’s have been negotiating a lease extension with the Oakland-Alameda County Joint Powers Authority, the entity that operates the Oakland Coliseum complex. The current lease expires at the end of this next season. Despite all the problems at O.co Coliseum — the sewage, the water leaks, the outdated scoreboard — the A’s need a lease extension because they have no where else to play for the foreseeable future.

Lew Wolff and Gap Inc. heir John Fischer led an investor group that bought the A’s in 2005. Wolff is the managing partner and the public face on the team’s efforts to locate, finance and build a new ballpark — efforts which so far have been unsuccessful. .

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On Wednesday, for the second time in a year, Tim Lincecum threw a no-hitter. For the second time in a year, it was against the San Diego Padres. As Rob Neyer wrote yesterday, one pitcher throwing two no-hitters against the same team in a year is a pretty unlikely outcome, especially considering the fact that Tim Lincecum stopped being TIM LINCECUM a few years ago. If you were going to list off pitchers who would throw multiple no-hitters, you probably wouldn’t go with the guy with the seventh-worst ERA among qualified starters since the start of the 2012 season.

But there’s something a little bit unique about the recent vintage of Tim Lincecum. Something that makes these no-hitters maybe a little bit more understandable.

Below, I’ve charted Lincecum’s seasonal batting average allowed based on whether or not the bases are empty or if there were runners on. The blue line represents the situations in which Linecum would be able to pitch from the wind-up, while the Red line represents — not perfectly, but well enough — situations where Lincecum would have to work from the stretch.

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