Even after a win Tuesday, the Padres stand at a flat 20-20, and there’s talk that manager Bud Black might be on the hot seat given ownership expectations. Curiously, the Padres aren’t letting minor-league coach Pat Murphy talk to the Brewers, and while there’s any number of potential explanations, one could be that the team sees Murphy as a Black replacement. Managers get fired by disappointing baseball teams. The Padres haven’t quite lived up to their preseason hype.

When you get to thinking about why, it’s only natural to consider the team defense. It always looked like it was going to be a potential issue, and the numbers indicate the defense has indeed been a weakness, mostly in the outfield. By Defensive Runs Saved, the Padres have been the fourth-worst defensive team in the league. By UZR, they’re second-worst. Right there, it seems like you can explain the team’s bottom-six ERA. But as it turns out, there’s something else going on. Something that’s hurt the Padres even more than their defense.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition 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 the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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I wrote yesterday about the how the shelf life of draft rankings affects the finished product, using my “guy” from this year’s draft, Vanderbilt righty Carson Fulmer, as an example of a guy typically under-appreciated by this process. My history of scouting Fulmer goes back four years to his high school days, but my history of zeroing in on this type of pitcher goes back eight years.

Taking a Page from Wall Street

Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan came out in 2007 and I read it toward the end of that year. Taleb made a lot of money during the stock market crash in 1987 and again during the financial crisis that started in 2007, a crisis he predicted in The Black Swan. The way he made his money is the underpinning of the book: better understanding how very rare events happen.

The human brain simplifies complex situations, which can often help us and conserve energy, but also makes us vulnerable when a seemingly unimportant piece of information is smoothed over by many individuals. Taleb names the unlikely event that few see coming a Black Swan, referring to the collective surprise exhibited when a black version of the (presumed exclusively) white bird was found in another part of the world.

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After another loss on Tuesday night, the A’s stand 14-27, the worst mark of any team in baseball. That record comes in spite of the fact that they’re 5th in the majors in runs scored (184), and have “only” allowed 190 runs to their opponents; being outscored by six runs over 41 games generally does not lead to a disastrous win-loss record, but that’s where the A’s find themselves after the first quarter of the season. And as is often the case when a team’s record doesn’t match their run differential, the blame can be laid almost entirely at the feet of the A’s relievers.

At the most basic level, you could just look at their 4.99 bullpen ERA — 29th in the majors — and conclude that they’ve struggled, but ERA is not a great tool to evaluate pitcher performances, and it’s especially poor at evaluating relief pitcher performance, because often their job is to come in and squash a rally; if they fail, the starting pitcher’s ERA is the one that goes up, so ERA won’t reflect bullpen performances in those situations.

And, of course, not all runs are created equal, especially late in the game. If you’re up 10-3 in the eighth inning and your bullpen gives up a few runs, it’s not a particularly big deal, as you’re extremely likely to win the game anyway. So when discussing a bullpen’s impact on a team’s record, we care not just about the number of runs they allow — whether ERA blames them for it or not — but also the distribution of when they allow those runs, and whether more of them happen to be coming in situations where giving up even a single run can have a dramatic outcome on the game.

Evan Scribner is a fantastic example of how different a reliever’s performance can be from their traditional numbers. If you just look at his overall line, it appears that he’s having an excellent season; 23 innings, 17 hits, 2 walks, 27 strikeouts, and a 2.38 ERA. Even newer-fangled pitching numbers like FIP (2.30) and xFIP (2.20), that are designed to better isolate a pitcher’s performance, think very highly of Scribner. From a context-free standpoint, Scribner has been terrific, but once you look at the distribution of his performances, you find a somewhat different story.

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This spring, the Arizona rotation was a fascinating mix of imported and home-grown youth, and Josh Collmenter and Jeremy Hellickson. Each of the youngsters gave us a point of emphasis this spring, and now that they’ve each had a few chances to show their work, we could give out some first semester grades. And maybe figure out how who’s at the head of the class.

Chase Anderson might have the best argument for valedictorian. He’s had the best ERA and peripherals, and that’s not too surprising, since he was the guy that had the most experience. And if Rubby de la Rosa has a plus changeup, you could say that Anderson has two.

So Anderson spent the spring working on his two-seamer, he said. If you look at PITCHf/x and his homer and grounder rates, you’d think he has succeeded in that effort. By that measure, he’s upped his usage of the sinker from 18% to 27%. His ground-ball rate has gone up from 40% to 43%. It’s a tempting narrative, especially since it fits into what the pitcher himself said earlier this year.

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The San Francisco Giants’ offense should be better than we have seen thus far. On the other hand, the Giants’ offense should be a lot worse than we’ve seen thus far. But then again, maybe the Giants’ offense is about what we expected it to be. Below is an attempt to determine how much water is currently in the San Francisco Giants’ glass.

The Optimist’s View

The Giants have been unlucky and they are bound to turn things around. Since the beginning of the season, the Giants’ offense has been one of the best in the league, but has failed to score runs. The defending World Series champions carry a solid .268/.332/.398 line after 39 games. Their .319 wOBA ranks eighth in Major League Baseball and their wRC+ of 105 is sixth. Removing pitcher statistics makes their numbers even better, as the wRC+ of 113 is fourth in all of baseball and just one point away from second place (if also a mile behind the 134 wRC+ of the Dodgers). Despite their solid hitting numbers, the Giants have scored just 3.8 runs per game, ahead of only the Chicago White Sox, Los Angeles Angels, and the woeful Philadelphia Phillies, who have scored just 3.2 runs per game this season.

There is a disconnect between the Giants’ hitting performance and their runs scored. Here’s a graph depicting MLB teams’ runs scored versus wOBA so far this season, with the Giants denoted as the orange dot.

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Yesterday, the Washington Nationals promoted infield prospect Wilmer Difo to the major leagues to fill the roster spot vacated by the injured Jayson Werth. As Dave Cameron pointed out yesterday, this move was something of a head-scratcher. Although Difo’s a fairly well-regarded prospect, he wasn’t exactly pushing for a call-up. He had all of 14 games above A-Ball to his name, and only 25 more above Low-A. Even stranger is that there isn’t a ton of playing time to be had in the Nationals infield. Ian Desmond, Danny Espinosa and Yunel Escobar seem to have shortstop, second base and third base covered until Anthony Rendon’s ready to return from injury.

Although he’s spent the entirety of his professional career in the low minors, Difo’s done nothing but hit the last couple of years. He spent all of 2014 in Low-A Hagerstown, where he hit a strong .315/.360/.470 with 49 steals. This year, he split time between High-A and Double-A, and hit an even better .315/.367/.520. Before you get too excited about those numbers, though, I’ll point out that Difo is already 23 years old. Most prospects worth their salt are at least a year or two removed from A-Ball by their 23rd birthdays. This isn’t to say that Difo is doomed as a prospect. Plenty of late-blooming prospects have gone on to have long and productive careers; but in the world of A-Ball prospects, you’d much rather a guy be 19 than 22 or 23.

Although he didn’t reach full-season ball until last year, Difo’s been around for a while. The Nationals signed him as an 18-year-old out of the Dominican back in 2010. However, despite strong offensive showings, they moved him very slowly through the system. The Nats kept him in the Dominican Summer League until July of his age-19 season, and didn’t move him out of American Rookie-ball until he was 21. This set him up to play his first full year in full-season ball last year at age-22.

Difo’s loudest tool is his speed, which grades out as a 70 according to Kiley McDaniel, and enabled him to steal 57 bases in 68 attempts between this year and last. There’s more to Difo than just his speed, however. He also showed an intriguing combination of power and contact in his minor-league stay. Difo racked up 52 extra-base hits last year, including 14 homers. This year, he logged 19 extra-base knocks in 33 minor-league games before his call up. Difo complemented this modest power by striking out a mere 12% of the time. Through this blend of contact and power, Difo put up a 139 wRC+ in spite of his 6% walk rate.

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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
St. Louis at New York NL | 18:10 ET
Martinez (51.1 IP, 88 xFIP-) vs. Colon (40.0 IP, 90 xFIP-)
Here, in lieu of a thousand words, is a chart depicting the number of batters Bartolo Colon has faced and the number of those same batters (colored red) that he’s walked (click to enlarge, naturally):

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

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The Miami Marlins have been in the news this week, because they did something that’s at worst kind of stupid, and at best pretty confusing. But the Marlins only did something newsworthy in the first place because the team, overall, has been an early disappointment, and disappointing baseball teams tend to leave a few people jobless. But there’s something else true about even the most disappointing teams: not everything is going wrong. It’s kind of the key to keeping yourself interested — even bad teams have bright spots, promising spots. With this in mind, let’s watch Dee Gordon make a throwing error.

This is from Tuesday’s game. It’s a weird play, but it’s ultimately a play that didn’t go in the Marlins’ favor.

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