Episode 462
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he meditates on the relative trade values of Paris versus Berlin, for example.

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

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 43 min play time.)

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It is now a True Fact of History that the Futures Game — which annual contest features the most notable prospects within all of baseball — took place yesterday (Sunday) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There are a likely number of ways in which one could speak about the game intelligently. The author is prepared to utilize close to zero of them.

No, what I’ve done instead is to hide within that safest of spaces — i.e. the spreadsheets facilitated by my personal edition of Microsoft Excel.

On a recent edition of FanGraphs Audio, managing editor Dave Cameron and I briefly revisited a post written for these pages by Tom Tango in 2011 on the topic of pitching game scores and which version (of the four he introduces) might best represent a pitcher’s single-game performance.

I have no intention of weighing in, specifically, on which of the four really does best represent a player’s performance in a game. As a means to further acquainting ourselves with certain prospects, however, I’ve calculated game scores for every pitchers and hitter who appeared in yesterday’s contest.

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Welcome to the time of year where it’s all about fractions. If the regular season were a game, we’d be at the start of the sixth inning, and the leverage is beginning to climb, making everything more important. Your team’s in the race and you want it to make a trade. Maybe the deal projects to add half a WAR over the course of the remainder. What’s the value of a win on the free-agent market, $7 million? And wins are more valuable in high-leverage positions on the win curve, right? A half-WAR improvement might be worth five or ten million dollars. That’s a lot of dollars! For many of the teams in baseball now, runs are more important than they would’ve been in April.

People care now about every last little detail. You never know which detail might end up determining which teams do and don’t make the playoffs. Among the details to care about: strength of schedule. Schedules, as everyone knows, are unbalanced. So some teams might have easier schedules than others. Now that we’re at the All-Star break, who’s looking at a schedule advantage, and who’s looking at a schedule disadvantage? Not a single race has been decided, so opponent identity will be some kind of factor in how the rest of the season plays out.

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Cleveland Indians manager Terry Francona had this to say before Wednesday’s home game against the New York Yankees:

“Early in the year, there’s always some inconsistencies that take a while to kind of play themselves out. That’s just the way a year is. It happens with every team. Then, once guys get settled in and get on a roll, then you see how good you can be. For whatever reason, sometimes it takes a while.”

Carlos Santana started this game at first base for the Indians. Lonnie Chisenhall played third. Nick Swisher served as the designated hitter.

There’s a reason I’ve presented those three facts to you immediately following that quote. The reason is because the “inconsistencies” Francona spoke of relate to an experiment the Indians underwent to begin the season, concerning those three players and those three positions.

Well, the experiment really had just one subject, Santana, but it ended up effecting all three players. The experiment was a big deal when it was first announced. Quietly, nearly two months ago, the experiment came to an end without an official announcement or much fanfare.
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Welcome to the kick-off of this year’s Trade Value series. If you haven’t already, read the intro and get yourself acquainted with what question this is trying to answer, as well as an incomplete list of guys who missed the cut for one reason or another.

There will be a couple of formatting changes this year. Instead of doing two posts per day, with five players in each post, I’m consolidating those posts into one longer list per day. Additionally, instead of having a player listed and then some paragraphs about his ranking, I’m going to list all ten players in a table at the top of the post, and then write about all ten in more of an article style than a selection of blurbs. Having all of the names available in a single table makes for easier comparison of some relevant facts, and in past years, the player capsules started to feel pretty repetitive by the end. Hopefully, this cuts down on some of the redundant text. We’ll find out, I guess.

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It’s a good time to be a talented (and cost-effective) young professional baseball prospect.

We’ve seen quite a few members of the pre-season Top 100 Prospects list graduate to the Majors. Clubs appear to be accelerating the development of top prospects and leaning heavily on them right out of the chute; freshman and sophomore players can be found playing key roles on the top teams in each division.

Some of the players still eligible for the list will become ineligible for the offseason Top 100 list when, in the second half, the front office comes calling. Prospects that could get the call include: Francisco Lindor (Indians), Taijuan Walker (Mariners), Archie Bradley (Diamondbacks), Aaron Sanchez (Blue Jays), Noah Syndergaard (Mets), Joc Pederson (Dodgers), and even Dylan Bundy (Baltimore).

So who sits atop the heap at the midpoint of the 2014 season? Let’s have a look….

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It’s time for the FanGraphs annual All-Star break tradition: distract ourselves from a lack of baseball by arguing about a subjective list of speculative value. Yes, it’s Trade Value time again. This is actually the 10th year I’ve done this list, as my first one came back in 2005, and it included immortals like Daniel Cabrera, Felipe Lopez, and Bobby Crosby. I moved the list to FanGraphs back in 2008, so this will be the seventh edition here on this site.

As always, I’d like to acknowledge that this project has been borrowed from Bill Simmons, who does his own NBA Trade Value series at Grantland. It’s a fun project, and one I’m glad he popularized.

As a quick overview for those who might be new to the series, he’s the basic concept: which players would bring the most return in trade if they were made available by their current clubs? To answer this question as best as we can, we not only look at a player’s performance — both now and in the future — but also the amount of years a team would be acquiring a player for, and how much that player would earn in salary before he could become a free agent. The most valuable assets in the game aren’t just great players, but they’re great players who offer significant value for multiple seasons at salaries below what comparable players earn on the open market.

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Ben and Sam talk to Zachary Levine about ways that Major League Baseball could make All-Star week better.

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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
Toronto at Tampa Bay | 13:40 ET
R.A. Dickey (119.0 IP, 109 xFIP-, 0.9 WAR) faces David Price (139.2 IP, 69 xFIP-, 2.8 WAR). The former has recorded the second-fastest working pace among 95 qualified pitchers; the latter, the absolute slowest. To suggest that this observation constitutes grounds for a “stirring narrative,” however, would probably represent an instance of overstatement.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

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