The results weren’t pretty for Andrew Suarez, who battled himself as much as he did the North Carolina Tar Heels in Chapel Hill last Saturday.

Pulled after throwing 60 pitches in just three innings (4 H, 1 ER, 4 BB, 2 SO), the Miami lefthander repeatedly missed with a fastball that didn’t reach higher than 91 mph and was altogether a much different version from the one selected by the Nationals in the second round last year (subsequently becoming the highest-drafted college player to not sign). Granted, a late-February oblique strain caused him to forego his next two starts – missed development time that can explain the lower velocity from last year. But the control struggles were entirely new, as he walked just one batter in the two starts leading up to Saturday.

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Last week, we rolled out some minor tweaks to WAR, one of which was the addition of wGDP. If you haven’t read the primer, wGDP is a measure of double play runs above average and captures how many runs you save your team by staying out of double plays.

In general, it’s a minor piece of the overall puzzle with the best and worst players separated by less than a win of value over the course of a full season. Staying out of double plays helps your team, but even the best players don’t stay out of a large enough number to swing their value in a big way. Introducing wGDP makes WAR a better reflection of reality and that’s a good thing, but it also allows us to better measure the GIDP column we’ve all seen for years because it puts double plays in the context of double play opportunities.

Dave and August have already looked at some surprising and obvious players who are great at staying out of double plays, but I wanted to consider this new statistic from another angle. For the most part, it seems like staying out of double plays should be a base running issue, as you have to be fast enough to get to first before the infield twists it.

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This week’s nuttiest pitches might even have a point. But let’s just start with the GIFs. Because it’s fun to watch crazy pitches do crazy things.

Let’s do the uncle charlies, the yakkers, the yellow hammers — curveballs are on the menu today. As usual, we’re looking at the last three years because that’s what MLB.tv allows us, and we’re sorting PITCHF/x to find the pitches with the most extreme horizontal and vertical movement, as well as velocities.

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The owners of several rooftop businesses overlooking Wrigley Field are down to their last strike in a lawsuit challenging the Chicago Cubs’ on-going renovation of the 100-year-old stadium. As previously detailed here and here, the rooftop owners filed suit in January asking a federal court to block the Cubs from constructing two new proposed scoreboards, structures that the rooftops claim were intended to block their views into the stadium.

Last month, Judge Virginia Kendall denied the rooftop owners’ request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing the Cubs from erecting the scoreboards. As I explained at the time, although the judge was unwilling to issue a TRO – an emergency order that would have blocked the Cubs from building the scoreboards for only a few weeks – she left open the possibility of granting the rooftops a preliminary injunction in the case (a more permanent order that would have forbid construction of the video boards throughout the entire course of the litigation).

The rooftop owners’ hopes were dashed once again on Thursday, however, when Judge Kendall refused to preliminarily enjoin the Cubs from constructing the scoreboards. Kendall’s opinion (available here) was a resounding victory for the team, with the judge concluding that the Cubs were likely to prevail on both the rooftops’ antitrust and breach of contract claims. As a result, the Wrigley renovations will be permitted to continue unabated.

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Ben and Sam update the results of their ongoing contests, bemoan the predictions process, and discuss the storylines they’re looking forward to this season.

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Hello, friends. After what would feel like an eternity of work to an ordinary fruit fly, we’ve arrived at the end of this year’s edition of the FanGraphs Positional Power Rankings. If you’re looking to have access to every post in one convenient place, here you go — that’s a link to the post category page. Browse, if you’ve missed anything. Browse, even if you haven’t missed anything. Maybe there’s a note you forgot about. Maybe you just want to further submit things to memory! The important thing is to click on our pages as many times as possible. Have you tried refreshing this post? I’ll wait.

This post is a simple wrap-up of the other posts. By now, you know what this series is about. You shouldn’t need any explanation. What’s going to follow are all of the numbers, in one convenient if slightly overwhelming sortable table. Note that these numbers might differ slightly from what shows up in earlier PPR posts — baseball is nothing if not a constant stream of transactions and injuries, and shown here is the latest data, as far as updates to the depth charts are concerned. Get ready to click feverishly on column headers!

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What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances of the college season.

As in other editions of this same thing, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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One year ago, Jon Singleton was a consensus Top-100 prospect. Eleven months ago, he was making around $8,000 per month in Triple-A. Ten months ago, he was was promoted to the majors where the Major League Baseball minimum salary would have paid him a little over $300,000 for the rest of the season. Just yesterday, he was sent back down to the minors where he again would have been making around $40,000 for the season. He is not making $40,000, however, because Singleton signed a controversial contract last year guaranteeing him $10 million before he reached the majors. He’ll make $2 million this season, and every month he spends in the minors he will make 50 times as much money as he would have without his contract.

Nothing is going to change the fact that the Astros likely got a bargain when they signed Singleton. They lowered his potential arbitration salaries and received an option for a free agent year while only guaranteeing $10 million. Even if Singleton does not become a successful major league player, guaranteeing him less than what the team is paying Scott Feldman this year was an easy choice. For Singleton, the choice was not likely so easy.

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What do we have here? For an explanation of this series, please read this introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data below is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems, with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.

Yes, we know WAR is imperfect and there is more to player value than is wrapped up in that single projection, but for the purposes of talking about a team’s strengths and weaknesses, it is a useful tool. Also, the author writing this post did not move your team down ten spots in order to make you angry. We don’t hate your team. I promise.

Look, I understand full well this is probably the least-anticipated part of the series. This is a look at only half of the teams, and it’s looking just at relievers, who pale in perceived importance relative to starters. Also contributing to this is the idea that relievers, and therefore bullpens, are almost hopelessly capricious and unpredictable. I’ll grant you that to a certain extent, but it’s also exaggerated — we have a decent idea of reliever and bullpen talent. Relievers don’t get injured a million times more often than starters. The biggest thing is that, because of the limited single-season reliever sample sizes, there’s just room for more variation around true talent. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have good forecasts. This is a worthwhile endeavor, and sometimes a strong or weak bullpen can make all the difference to a team’s postseason chances. Come with me on a journey! It is a journey with numbers and words, where we discuss the best of the projected bullpens.

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