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
Houston at Toronto | 13:07 ET
McHugh (70.2 IP, 92 xFIP-) vs. Dickey (70.0 IP, 119 xFIP-)
When the author first introduced pitcher NERD scores and the algorithm used to calculate them, there was near consensus among the wide readership that knuckleballers ought to receive a bonus of some sort, owing to the appeal of that same pitch. The solution at that time: an addition of (5 * KN%), where KN% denotes knuckleball rate, to every pitcher’s score. At no point in the meantime has there been any great uproar suggesting that the knuckle bonus was poorly conceived. That said, R.A. Dickey has produced so far in 2015 both (a) the worst fielding-independent numbers and also (b) the worst run-prevention numbers since before he was a Met or even a Twin. And yet, he currently possesses an 8 NERD, placing him at roughly the 85th percentile among all starters. Bearing in mind that the entire endeavor is futile, the reader is encouraged nonetheless to meditate upon whether Dickey’s NERD score is representative of the pleasure one continues to derive from his craft.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

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Health concerns haunted Tanner Scheppers early in his career. Teams feared the Fresno State product couldn’t shoulder the load, which caused him to fall in consecutive drafts, with an indie-ball stint sandwiched in between. The Rangers ultimately inked him to a contract in 2009, and while there have been maladies here and there, he’s yet to go under the knife for an arm woe. An out-of-the-box-for-most-professional-athletes approach is a reason why.

“I really believe in integrative medicine — the combination of what doctors prescribe, and a holistic approach,” explained Scheppers. “I’ve limited the surgeries and have been able to overcome things with alternative medicine. That’s a testament to the training staff here, and to the other people I work with. The combination of both worlds has helped me overcome a lot.” 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
Houston at Toronto | 13:07 ET
Oberholtzer (8.1 IP, 96 xFIP-) vs. Hutchison (63.1 IP, 94 xFIP-)
Among the mostly haphazard adjustments made by the author last year to the certainly flawed method for calculating NERD’s game scores, one of them was to weight pitcher scores more heavily at the beginning of the season (by a factor of 3:1) and then team scores, with postseason-odds adjustments, more heavily at the end of the season (by a factor of 3:1, as well). The exact weights are tied to the percentage of games played across the league, meaning that, at the season’s exact midpoint, pitcher and team scores are weighted precisely the same. The justification for all this futile arithmetic: that team-related conditions (such as postseason implications, for example) tend to influence the appeal of a game more strongly as the season progresses. And the reason any of this is relevant right now: Houston and Toronto possess two of the highest team scores among the league’s 30 clubs — the former largely because of its combination of power and youth; the latter, owing primarily to its all-around batting production and baserunning.

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, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Episode 569
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses draft boards of both the virtual and also all-too-real variety.

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 57 min play time.)

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Episode 568
Jim Callis is both (a) a writer for MLB.com and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which he discusses Monday’s MLB Draft with guest host Kiley McDaniel and his bag of infuriating audio tricks.

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 54 min play time.)

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Major League Baseball might be incredibly healthy in terms of attendance, television ratings, and finances, but the league has a perception problem that will not go away anytime soon. Baseball’s biggest challenge is, and always likely will be, creating new fans. This is not a challenge unique to baseball or sports in general. All sports continue efforts to draw in new fans just like Coke and Pepsi use marketing campaigns to lure in a new generation of soda drinkers. Rob Manfred has made one of his goals to increase childhood participation in baseball as he believes that children who play baseball turn into baseball fans as adults, continuing the generational chain that has allowed baseball to thrive for more than a century.

While getting more youths to participate in baseball is hardly the only initiative MLB will undertake to grow the sport, getting new fans to attend games is very important for baseball’s future. The Angels’ most recent public-relations mistake, discouraging fans from lower socioeconomic levels from attending because they do not spend as much as other fans once they get to games, is a shortsighted strategy that could hurt baseball in the long run.

In his story for the OC Register, Pedro Moura discussed the Angels’ declining attendance with Robert Alvarado, a Vice President with the team. Alvarado dismissed targeting fans looking to pay for lower-priced seats because they do not make as many purchases once they are inside the stadium. This somewhat callous disregard for “discount buyers,” as Alvarado calls them, might work for short-term revenue, but the team has seen one of the bigger drops in attendance in MLB and the plan is a questionable one long-term.

Since we looked at attendance last month, there have not been too many big changes at the top or bottom of attendance rankings. The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees are still the highest-drawing teams, and the Cleveland Indians, rebounding on the field and in attendance, passed the Tampa Bay Rays in seasonal attendance over the past month. The Angels do boast decent numbers compared to all teams. (All attendance numbers below from Baseball Reference.)

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I haven’t been one to do too many mock drafts if the information doesn’t support it. I won’t just brazenly move around names with little justification in a bid for clicks every few days. I have enough info to change enough picks now for a worthwhile read, but I’m going to do a full mock draft on Monday with the supplemental rounds and the back half of the first round, as things will be much easier to project then (although still not easy).

Clubs have told me they aren’t even discussing medical and signability info openly in their rooms until later today or this weekend and some teams in the back half of the first round haven’t even started stacking the board for their first-round pick yet, instead focusing on lower picks and positional rankings. I’ll have a much better feel for the picks beyond the top dozen on Monday, so it would be foolish to throw darts for those picks now only to reorder everything in a few days. If you’re desperate for what I think about those picks now, combine the notes below with my previous mock draft and the sortable draft board, that I updated just moments ago with the information below.

Since teams aren’t talking medical and signability info and the consensus is that the reasonably predictable part of the draft is the top 10-12 picks, that means some certainty about the injured pitchers could help shed some light on those later picks.

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I don’t believe in soul mates. I don’t think that there is one perfect match out there for everyone or that most of life is just a quest to find them. But just because there isn’t a perfect fit doesn’t mean there isn’t a best fit. You can’t win every hand of blackjack, but you can still play a strategy that’s better than any other strategy. This is a baseball website, so when we put this in the context of baseball players, we find the Pittsburgh Pirates and A.J. Burnett. While the Pirates and Burnett aren’t soul mates, they’re as pretty close to an optimal fit as you’ll find in the game today.

This isn’t a new discovery. There was plenty of attention paid to Burnett’s career rejuvenation in the Steel City as it occurred, and Dave was kind enough to remind us of that fact when he reviewed the Pirates one-year contract with the pitcher this last December. Dave’s thesis, unsurprisingly, was that this reunion made sense because of how well the player matches the team, but also that Burnett was another year older and would probably not be the pitcher they remembered from 2012 and 2013.

Dave was half right, at least so far. Burnett and the Pirates are helping each other in 2015, but instead of easing into retirement, Burnett is having arguably his best season as a professional. Certainly, it’s wise to factor in some regression to his 2014 numbers, but even if you do that, he’s right on track to finish 2015 at a very similar level as his previous two seasons with the Bucs.

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During a season, it can be hard to take a step back. You get so involved in what certain teams are doing, it’s tricky to be able to see the big picture. Just think about some recent events, though. The Astros have maintained a several-game lead in the AL West. The Twins beat the Red Sox in Boston on Thursday, aided by a ninth-inning error on a bunt, and it fit with a couple team patterns. And the Mariners traded for Mark Trumbo because they’re trying to energize an offense and an overall ballclub that hasn’t met expectations. You have a sense of what’s going on in the American League. But unless you really think about it, the significance might not hit you. You might not realize how insane the AL has been.

I’m sorry for this, but I have to use the word “projections.” I know that can be a major turnoff, but then, I’m not really sure why — projections are just forecasts, based on historical statistics. We make our own mental projections all the time. We all look at a talented young player and figure he could improve. We all look at an aging slugger and figure he’ll decline. If we see a pitcher whose ERA doesn’t match his other numbers, we’ll assume some better luck. And so on. Projections shouldn’t be that controversial, individually, and a team projection is just a combination of individual forecasts. This is no form of attempted sorcery.

So anyway, team projections have existed in some form for quite a while. Right here, some while back, I compared 10 years of performance against 10 years of Opening Day team projections. Obviously, the relationship isn’t perfectly linear — there are things that just can’t be predicted — but overall, the projections have done pretty well. Generally speaking, projected good teams have played like good teams, and projected bad teams have played like bad teams. There have been many exceptions. Enough to keep the sport interesting.

In that post, I compared projected full-season performance to actual full-season performance. Now, as far as 2015 is concerned, we don’t have an actual full-season performance. We have actual two-month performance. But that’s precisely what I want to examine. We know how teams have actually done. At FanGraphs, we projected how the teams were expected to do, based on their Opening Day depth charts. How are the numbers comparing at the moment?

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