It was almost cute when it started — there were the Astros, playing really competitive baseball, a year or two ahead of schedule. They stormed out of the gate and people everywhere wrote about the possibility of the Astros making the playoffs without really believing it would happen. And to this point the Astros still haven’t clinched a berth in the playoffs, but with every passing day, they’ve been taken a little more seriously. They’ll be in first place at the halfway mark, leaving only another half left to go, and the prospect promotion is well underway. It’s not so cute these days. It’s like the Astros have skipped a step.

Look over what they’ve accomplished and you can understand why the Astros are a legitimate threat to make a playoff run. Hitting-wise, they’ve collectively been above-average. The rotation might not have a classic ace, but it’s been above-average as a group. The bullpen, too, has been above-average, and the team’s been good about running the bases, and on top of all that, the Astros have avoided ugly black holes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a problem spot, which is a feature of a winning club. But what might you call the Astros’ strength? Some might suggest hitting for power, which, yeah, they’re good at that. But they’re even better at dealing with groundballs.

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Ben and Sam talk to Anthony Rescan about his statistical work with the Sydney Blue Sox of the Australian Baseball League.

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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 composnents of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
New York AL at Houston | 14:10 ET
Pineda (84.2 IP, 70 xFIP-) vs. McHugh (93.2 IP, 102 xFIP-)
As noted below, this afternoon represents the debut of left-handed Mets prospect Steven Matz. As a spectacle in itself, that’s noteworthy. That said, Matz is likely to record only about a third of the game’s pitches, and the other two-thirds — per the definitely flawed methodology utilized by the author — would appear to offer distinctly less in the way of aesthetic possibility. More likely to facilitate constant pleasure is this Yankees-Astros contest, which features two of the majors’ top-five most productive offenses, including Houston’s flawed and beautiful bande à part.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Houston Radio.

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More than 700 baseball purists gathered in downtown Chicago over the past four days for the national SABR convention. Snapshots of presentations I attended comprise much of this week’s column.

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Among the notable presentations at SABR 45 was David Smith’s “Home Team Scoring Advantage in the First Inning Largely Due to Time and Travel.” According to Smith, home teams win approximately 54% of the time, and 58% of that advantage comes in first inning scoring. Historically, more runs are scored in the bottom of the first inning than are scored by either team in any other inning.

The longer the visiting team hits in the top of first, the more scoring there is in the bottom of the first. The primary determinant is time. Unlike the home team’s starter, the visiting team’s starter doesn’t know exactly when he will begin pitching. Based on Smith’s research, the longer the visiting starter waits to throw his first pitch, the bigger his statistical disadvantage. 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
Texas at Toronto | 13:07 ET
Gallardo (87.2 IP, 95 xFIP-) vs. Boyd (N/A)
The author has exercised his world-famous discretion this morning and assessed to left-handed Toronto prospect Matt Boyd a NERD score of 14 — with a view, that maneuver, to giving this Rangers-Blue Jays contest the highest game score of the day. With regard to Boyd, one finds his name currently third among all prospects on the Fringe Five Scoreboard, which fact reveals simultaneously that (a) Boyd was omitted from Kiley McDaniel’s preseason top-200 prospect list (as well as all other similar lists), but (b) has exhibited some combination of performance and talent worthy of recognition. Indeed, concerning that performance, a brief inspection of the leaderboards reveals that Boyd has produced one of the top strikeout- and walk-rate differentials among all starters in the high minors. And concerning that talent, the author himself has observed Boyd sitting at 92-93 mph while periodically touch 95. A formula, that, for achieving what the Germans likely refer to as not-failure.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Texas 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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The Toronto Blue Jays are contenders. They are currently four games above .500, two games out of first place, and their positive run differential of 81 is first in the American League by nearly 30 runs. The FanGraphs playoff odds give the Jays a roughly one-in-two chance to qualify for the playoffs. The Jays offense has been the key, scoring close to five-and-a-half runs per game. The Blue Jays are 60 runs above average on offense, first in major-league baseball, and their 115 wRC+ for non-pitchers is second to only the Dodgers — and those two teams have a 25-run gap on the bases. Their Base Runs record is four games better than their actual record, indicating the team easily could have better results than their current record indicates. The problem for the Blue Jays has been the pitching staff, both in the rotation and in the bullpen. The easy answer is to trade for outside help, but deploying internal solutions in different roles could prove helpful as well.

Before moving to the pitching, a final note on the offense. The offense has carried the team thus far, but it is unlikely to continue to be as great over the course of the rest of the season. The graph below shows every team’s actual runs per game so far this season compared with their Base Runs, which should be a better representation of how a team’s offense has performed.

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Depending on whom you ask, a really fun or terrible thing is happening this season: Alex Rodriguez has been better than anyone expected. Perhaps he’s been way better than anyone expected. Thirty-nine-year-olds in the post-PED era aren’t supposed to have these kinds of seasons. Also of note, however: Alex Rodriguez is getting paid a lot of money: $22 million in 2015, to be exact. So, in this very surprising year that 39-year-old A-Rod is having, the question now becomes: has he been worth that much money so far? And, in the bigger picture: which players have been the best value so far in 2015, and which have been the worst?

The conventional wisdom with the sort of contract that Rodriguez has — the savagely long, payroll-sucking kind — is that they are sort of a wash at the end. A team pays for the production up front, back ends the deal, and secretly hopes they can offload the aging slugger or pitcher to another team at some point toward the end, eating a little of the annual contract when doing so.

It happens all the time: Boston is still paying Manny Ramirez; the Mets are still paying Bobby Bonilla (I thought I was crazy, but yeah, they still are, and will be forever). Obviously, that makes it really hard for the players to live up to their end of the deal in the final years, even though they aren’t complaining. We’ll get to A-Rod a little later, but for now, let’s look at the rest of the league.

For ease during this exercise, we’ll use the standard offseason free-agent value of a win — about $7.5 million. We can debate this figure, but it’s what we have, and we’re going to roll with it. Dave did great work in the past on the very issue of how much a win costs. We’ll then use that figure to discern how many wins a team is paying the player for at this point in the season (salary wins), and compare that to how many wins they’ve actually produced (WAR), to get surplus wins. We’ll use both Average Annual Valuation and 2015 salaries to see the differences.

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Joey Votto is a passive hitter. Over the last five seasons, he’s swung at around 40% of the pitches that have been thrown in his general direction. During that same span, the average hitter swung at 45-46% of pitches he faced. Over 2,500 pitches, that’s a difference of about 125 swings, or something like 0.77 swings per game. Despite the fact that Votto is one of the most conservative swingers in the league, one fewer swing than an average hitter per game makes the difference appear small.

Commentators and fans have frequently criticized Votto’s approach. He’s paid more than $22 million per year and many people equate that kind of money with power hitters who collect RBI. The criticism of Votto is that if he were less concerned about his own statistics (read: walks) and was more willing to put the ball in play, his team would score more runs. Votto’s an on-base machine because he has an excellent eye and derives a good portion of his value from reaching via the walk. This isn’t new information and the criticism has been ongoing for at least a few seasons.

The advanced stat community has defended Votto because he’s an excellent offensive player and there isn’t a lot of evidence that his club would be better off if he were more aggressive — and Votto himself has voiced similar opinions. Votto argues that if he was more aggressive, his overall value to the team would decline even if his home run or RBI totals went up. Based on the evidence we’ve compiled over the last couple of decades, it seems like he’s right. The funny thing is, in 2015, Votto is actually walking less and his results have been terrific. Did Votto listen to the critics?

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At a time not very long ago — actually, just a single month and a few days ago — viscount of the internet Rob Neyer wrote at Just A Bit Outside about how the Houston Astros, then as now a first-place team, had been winning games with negligible contribution from any players drafted by General Manager Jeff Luhnow. Quoth Neyer:

The 2012 draft has, so far, produced two major leaguers: pitcher Lance McCullers and hitter Preston Tucker. McCullers and Tucker have combined for zero wins and one home run (granted, the homer was a big one Thursday). The 2013 and 2014 drafts haven’t produced any major leaguers.

The final sentence of Neyer’s paragraph remains, as of this writing, true. But, in a testament to how rapidly things are changing down in Houston, the first two sentences of Neyer’s paragraph have already become dramatically obsolete. Please recall that Neyer’s post is barely one month old.

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