When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades.   -Kiley

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Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

As I was learning to evaluate, I was overwhelmed by this challenge of grading the hit tool. I wasn’t advanced enough to notice when hitters seemed uncomfortable as fast as I wanted to notice it and I hadn’t been on the beat long enough to have multiple years of history with players to know how to put what I was seeing in context of their whole careers. The easier part, however, was noticing the raw hitting tools. By the time an evaluator gets good at noticing and grading these, the other stuff tends to follow.

I break hitting into three components, but you could easily break it down further into many more. I saw three basic groupings and put every observation into one, then graded each group on the 20-80 scale, then use those to get to a hit tool grade in a more objective way. Scouts all have different ways that they do it and I’ve tinkered with different methods, but this one works for me and also gives me a guide for what to ask scouts about with hitters I haven’t seen recently.

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The introduction of sabermetrics into general baseball discussion over the past generation has brought the concepts of random chance and, dare I say, “luck” into the daily discourse surrounding the game. Hardcore opponents of analytics tend to deride the entire notion of luck, while analysts may too quickly ascribe variations in performance to random chance. The more factors we are able to quantify, the more easily we can decide what is random variation, and what isn’t.

Into this esoteric debate steps Royals’ lefthander Danny Duffy, who has posted a subpar 8-11 won-lost record – and a glittering 2.42 ERA, through his abbreviated one-pitch outing (due to shoulder soreness) on Saturday. And then that ERA is way out of whack with his fairly ordinary 3.68 FIP. Has he been as unlucky as his record tells us, or as lucky as his ERA might indicate? Let’s see what we can measure about both Duffy and the context surrounding him, to get a better feel for his true talent and the role random chance has played in his odd 2014 season. Read the rest of this entry »

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Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

It’s the mysterious hit tool because everyone seems to agree it’s the most important tool in an evaluation, for a hitter or a position player, and it’s also the hardest to project, with the most components of any other tool.

If a scout could project pitcher health and the hit tool perfectly, he would be shockingly close to perfect in his evaluations. Since no one is solving pitcher health any time soon, I’m going to focus on the hit tool: we actually have all the information we need in most cases, it’s just hard to weight the factors correctly. Click here for the introduction to this series explaining how to scout.

Collecting The Information

When scouting major and minor league players, scouts normally are assigned a team and given 5 or 6 games to watch every player on that team. It works out that you should see all the pitchers in this span but also, once you scout a hitter for 4 or 5 games (with an off-day mixed in) you get the amount of information you need.

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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
Kansas City at Detroit | 19:18 ET
Jason Vargas (169.0 IP, 105 xFIP-, 2.8 WAR) faces Max Scherzer (193.2 IP, 80 xFIP-, 5.0 WAR). Following Detroit’s win over Kansas City yesterday (box), the latter simultaneously trails the former by a game in the standings but now also leads by about three percentage points in the playoff odds. One notes that the aforementioned figures do not include the curiously suspended game between Cleveland and KC, which the latter is likely to lose. Pitching for the Tigers is Max Scherzer, whom some would argue is a candidate for the Cy Young award, while others would argue he’s not, while still others would prefer to stab themselves in the genitals than engage in that particular conversation.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Detroit Radio.

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One of the more fascinating stories of last winter was the Cincinnati Reds’ intention to replace the departing center fielder Shin-Soo Choo with the completely unproven Billy Hamilton. While it obviously made sense that Cincinnati had no intention of paying Choo anything like what he got from Texas — a move that looks great right now — they were also subtracting Choo’s .423 OBP from a lineup that had been merely middle-of-the-pack even with him. It’s not entirely a stretch to say Choo’s presence was the biggest part of why Brandon Phillips had suddenly looked so good last year. Phillips declined in nearly every way between 2012 and 2013 then saw his RBI total jump from 77 to 103 in large part because he was hitting behind Choo’s .423 OBP, rather than the out-making ways of Zack Cozart and Drew Stubbs.

That being the case — and because Cincinnati’s main offseason acquisition was the inexplicable decision to give Skip Schumaker two guaranteed years — most of the discussion around Hamilton centered om whether he could get on base enough to take advantage of his fantastic speed. He wasn’t going to match Choo’s OBP, of course, but could he even get on base enough to stay in the big leagues, or to avoid being a one-man out machine out of the leadoff spot? To his credit, after a tough start, he has been more part of the solution than the problem — especially if you can forget he took the worst swing in the history of baseball.

His OBP is at least around .300, which isn’t good, but isn’t the .250 that some of us —  myself included — feared it might be. He’s shown a little bit of power, with six homers. While being caught 21 times on the bases is unacceptable for a player with his speed, that’s the kind of thing that can be eliminated with experience, and he’s still added a considerable amount of value on the bases. He’s a below-average hitter, but that can be tolerated as long as he’s not a complete disaster of a hitter. And he hasn’t been. He’s probably the best candidate in a weak National League Rookie of the Year class.

But while we were spending so much time talking about whether Hamilton would hit, and how many bases he could steal, it was easy to forget he was about to become a major league center fielder. For the first four years of his career, he was a middle infielder. He first played center in 2012 during his stint in the Arizona Fall League. Now that we’ve seen him in center for nearly an entire season… hey, this might just work out. Read the rest of this entry »

Doug Fister is fresh off seven scoreless innings Monday night against the Braves. Quality starts are pretty much old hat to the Nationals by now, who’re successfully running away with the NL East, but it might be a little bit surprising that Stephen Strasburg hasn’t functioned as the rotation ace. Really, that statement just speaks to the silly amount of awesome depth the Nationals possess, but with his latest outing, Fister ranks eighth in baseball in ERA among starters with 100+ innings. He’s basically even with Jon Lester. He’s slightly ahead of Cole Hamels and Garrett Richards. When Fister has pitched, the Nationals haven’t surrendered many runs, and, isn’t that the whole point?

So, people loved the Fister trade from the Nationals’ end, and clearly it’s worked out very well for them to this point. But there’s another thing that’s a little bit surprising: 2014 Doug Fister hasn’t been 2013 Doug Fister. Usually, when people have thought about the Nationals and pitching to contact, it’s been with regard to Strasburg’s electric right arm. But, Stephen Strasburg’s strikeout rate is as healthy as ever. It’s Doug Fister who’s been pitching to contact, even despite a trade to the league where the pitchers have to hit.

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Episode 480
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 addresses a question posed most notably by a Vietnam War-era soul hit.

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 37 min play time.)

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As always happens around this time of year, we’re arguing the utility and accuracy of WAR as a player-evaluation statistic and model. Every year, the argument gets a little smarter on both sides, but every year, there’s the same struggle over acceptance. I’m sure we’re not done talking about this, not with Dave Cameron included as a BBWAA voter for the Most Valuable Player award, but you might recall that, a few months ago, the argument then was about the utility of projections. More specifically, it was about projections and identifying breakouts and collapses. Again, it wasn’t a new argument, but sometimes it’s the repeating arguments that manage to push us all forward.

Around that time, in the middle of June, I published a post with 20 players and 20 polls. There were five offensive over-achievers, five offensive under-achievers, five pitching over-achievers, and five pitching under-achievers. In each poll, I asked the audience to select how they felt about the player’s projection going forward. Which possible collapses or breakouts were people buying? Which were they dismissing? I know the season’s not over yet, but I thought this could be a fine time to look back on the post and on what has happened since.

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