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If last night’s Home Run Derby was any indication of the interest and excitement that will be on display tonight, there should be a lot of electricity in Cincinnati for the All-Star Game. The disparity of talent between the American League and National League has been an ongoing debate for some tonight, and the result of a single-game exhibition is not going to tell us a lot about the superiority of any league. Looking at the entire talent level of a league is a much better indicator of the league’s as a whole, but tonight we have a snippet of that talent, and for the most part, we have a large portion of the talent at the top.

The All-Star Game never has all of the best players in each league matched up face-to-face. Layers of fan voting, peer selections along with injuries and pitchers starting on Sunday tend to thin the rosters a little. That being said, most of the best players in Major League Baseball are represented on the roster and taking a look at their performance this season, their preseason projections, as well as rest of the season projections can provide a decent indicator of the talent level at the top of the respective leagues.

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Ben and Sam banter about former Pirates executive Merrill Hess and then discuss stories about former Dodgers GM Ned Colletti from Molly Knight’s new book.

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Following last month’s horrific incident at Fenway Park – when a woman suffered life-threatening injuries after being struck in the head by a fragment of a broken bat – it was probably only a matter of time until someone challenged Major League Baseball’s fan safety rules in court. A new class action lawsuit filed in California federal court on Monday does just that, accusing MLB of failing to take sufficient precautions to protect its fans from foul balls and broken bats.

The suit – filed on behalf of Gail Payne, an Oakland A’s season ticket holder – focuses in particular on fans sitting in unprotected seats along the first and third baselines, an area the complaint dubs the “Danger Zone.” According to the lawsuit, although MLB has known for years that fans seated in these sections face a heightened risk of serious injury, the league has failed to take any steps to protect them. The new suit hopes to force MLB to act, asking the court to order the league to mandate that all 30 teams install foul-pole-to-foul-pole netting by the start of next season.

Ultimately, however, Monday’s lawsuit appears unlikely to achieve its ambitious goal, as the case faces several legal hurdles that may prove quite difficult to overcome.

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If you look at the MLB’s gigantic 162-game gauntlet from a certain perspective, the landscape of every division is dictated by intra-divisional match-ups. For instance, in the spread-out NL Central, the Chicago Cubs (47-40 and eight games back of the St. Louis Cardinals) are serious contenders for a playoff spot, while the Cincinnati Reds (39-47, 15.5 games back) have been presumed for the whole season to be trade deadline sellers, with a close-to-hopeless chance of making the playoffs.

The shape of the NL Central looks very different if the season series between the Cubs and the Reds wasn’t played. The Cubs lead 7-2, with ten more games scheduled after the All-Star Break. Take this one match-up out of the two teams’ records and the Cubs are 40-38, and the Reds are 37-40, suddenly a weekend series away from matching each other in the standings. Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction
Players #50 to #41

We covered the last 10 guys on the list yesterday, so today is the next group up. In many cases, these guys are similar performers to yesterday’s group, just with better contracts or more years of team control remaining. In one particular case, there’s an exceptional performer with a somewhat larger contract, but we’ll get to those specifics in the write-ups.

As a reminder, in addition to the player’s biographical information, I’ve added a summary of his contract situation, and as a new feature this year, Dan Szymborski has provided me with five year ZIPS forecasts for all of the players on the list, which I’ve listed along with their 2016 projection. Of course, not every player listed is under control for the next five years — some are locked up well beyond that time frame — but this should offer you a pretty decent view of what a player is expected to do both in the short-term and the longer-term, according to Dan’s forecasting system.

For the contract details, I’m only displaying future obligations beginning with their 2016 salary. I’ve tried to ensure that these are as accurate as can be, but they were also collected manually, so there probably will be some mistakes; there are plenty of weird clauses and options that make aggregating all this information particularly annoying. Also, we’re not including things like All-Star bonuses or incentive escalators, as this is intended to give more of a big picture view than be a precise accounting of the exact cost of a future player. A few hundred thousand here and there won’t change the rankings.

Also, keep in mind that some players have contracts that give them a guaranteed minimum, but they are also able to opt-into arbitration when they are eligible. This is pretty common now with prominent international signings, and so some of these guys will probably earn more than their contracts currently call for, but I’ve still just included the guaranteed minimum in the future salary commitment because we don’t know for sure that they’re going to opt into arbitration yet.

Finally, we’ve also included a nifty little graphic at the bottom that visualizes a lot of the information contained below, so if you want to see the projections and contract status for everyone together, you can get a summary of that at the bottom. The chart goes out five years, so some players have additional value beyond what’s displayed, but it should give you a good overview of what each player offers going forward.

Alright, on to the list.

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Just because of the sheer number of taken pitches in a season, hitters will frequently disagree on a call with the judge standing behind them. A certain number of disagreements are to be expected, but from the sounds of things, Dexter Fowler feels like he’s been disagreeing more than usual. Fowler doesn’t think his approach is worse, but his numbers are worse, so he identifies some iffy calls as a factor. This is what Fowler looks like after an iffy strike call:

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Twelve months ago, Eno Sarris wrote a great piece on how Dallas Keuchel grips each of his pitches. Today, hours before the Houston Astros ace starts for the American League in the All-Star game, we’ll take a look at his approach. We’ll do so with Keuchel’s own words, as well as those of his pitching coach, Brent Strom.

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Keuchel on setting up hitters: “When I go into a start, I’ll definitely look at the scouting report. I’ll watch video and make assessments of each hitter. But it’s also important to have a feel for what you’re doing and to command the ball to both sides of the plate. If I’m confident about a pitch that differs from the scouting report, I’ll try to execute that pitch to the best of my ability.

“You’ll see some of the smarter pitchers set-up guys, even though I don’t like the term “set-up.” If you can command your pitches away, say a fastball and a changeup away, then you can set hitters up for a fastball inside that they’ll take for a punch out. You can get feels for that during the course of a game. Read the rest of this entry »

A lesson you learn as you grow older is that everything is somewhere on a spectrum. Though we yearn for blacks and whites, for certainties and absolutes, the world is more complicated than that, littered with partials and mitigations. Seldom does everything point in one direction. Seldom do we even know about everything pointing. There is always much we can’t or don’t figure out. There is a neat thing, though, about spectra — each one has two extremes. So when we know enough, we might be able to identify points near an extreme. The least-talented running back. The most challenging summit. The worst called ball by an umpire.

Strikes and balls are most definitely on a spectrum. The strike zone might be precisely defined, but it’s impossible for humans to call it that way, given our own limitations, which means any given pitch has a certain likelihood of being called a strike, and a certain likelihood of being called a ball. Most controversial calls take place around the boundaries. That area where taken pitches end up as coin flips. But sometimes there are bad calls beyond the boundaries, within or without. These head toward our extremes. Armed with PITCHf/x, it’s possible to find the worst called ball, by looking for balls on pitches down the middle. They’re uncommon, but they happen. What’s been the worst called ball of the 2015 first half? The following pitch was called a ball, though it was 3.0 inches from the center of the strike zone:

The worst called ball is worse than this.

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