Episode 641
Rob Arthur both/either has written for Baseball Prospectus and FiveThirtyEight and/or continues to write for those same internet sites. He’s also the guest on this edition of the FanGraphs Audio.

This episode of the program is sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

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 56 min play time.)

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Ben and Sam preview the Mets’ season with Mike Vorkunov, and Jeff talks Mets prospects with Toby Hyde of BP Mets and SNY.tv (at 22:49).

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Taylor Motter isn’t a household name. But he does have a way with words, and there’s a chance he’ll break camp as Tampa Bay’s 25th man. If that happens, the Rays roster will include a jack-of-all-trades dirt-dog whose phrasing is more Yogi Berra than Bull Durham.

Motter has played every position except catcher since being drafted out of Coastal Carolina University in 2011. He’s also swung the bat. Last season, in Triple-A, the former Chanticleer hit .292/.366/.471 with 42 doubles and 14 home runs. His running game was an asset, as he swiped 26 bases.

The self-described “blue collar grinder” will take a walk — he had 57 on the year — but he’s anything but passive.

“If I get something early and hard, I’m going to attack early and hard,” Motter told me. “I don’t like to get to two strikes. If I do, that’s my time to go to battle. It’s time to put on my worker’s cap and go to work. Read the rest of this entry »

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 New York Times has completed an investigation into the NFL’s concussion research and thus, by proxy, its public statements about the connection between playing professional football and concussions. They’ve concluded, simply, that the NFL has misled both the public and the players as to the very real negative health implications of playing pro football.

Anyone who has followed the NFL over the past few seasons shouldn’t be surprised by this finding. The NFL has a vested interest in presenting pro football, their product, as safe both for the players and for the fans, a vested interest that they pursue without regard to the health and safety of anyone involved with the sport. The idea the NFL might lie about concussions and brain injuries — or seek to cover up the connection between them and playing football — likely isn’t that surprising.

As baseball fans (though I count myself as a football fan as well) we should consider ourselves lucky. Baseball as a sport does far less chewing up and spitting out of it players relative to football, something that makes watching the sport as much as I (and I suspect you) do easier to handle from a moral standpoint. That’s not to say the sport is free of the nefarious — the treatment of minor leaguers does spring to mind, for example — but rather to acknowledge that baseball is in a better place when it comes to concussions than football.

Of course, that’s like comparing a regular person favorably to an axe murderer, so there’s some room to grow if you want to be a superhero. The point is, though, that baseball is, compared to football, doing alright when it comes to the concussion front. The NY Times isn’t going to break any front-page stories about Bud Selig covering up a concussion report. But that doesn’t mean baseball is in the clear.

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Nathan Karns is currently competing with James Paxton for a spot at the back end of Seattle’s starting rotation. The 28-year-old right-hander has the potential to be more than a No. 5, however. Acquired by the Mariners from Tampa Bay in November, Karns has a big fastball, a power curveball and a much-improved changeup. In 27 games last year, he logged a 3.67 ERA and struck out 145 batters in 147 innings.

Karns has a studious approach to go with his raw stuff. That much was evident when the Texas Tech product broke down his repertoire and his pitching philosophy earlier this week.

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Karns on his approach: “I focus my pitching on the lineup I’m facing. I kind of preplan. I identify weaknesses and strengths, so that I can go in with a plan for each hitter. I’ll get their numbers. First-pitch swinging is one. Do they swing at first-pitch curveballs? I’ll keep little things like that in the back of my mind.

“The count and runners on base come into play. So does what I’m working with on a given day. For instance, if I can’t throw my curveball in the bullpen before a game, I’m not necessarily going to run away from it, but it might not be my No. 2 pitch that day. What I’m executing may cause me to adjust.

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And so we come to the end of the positional player positional power rankings (say that three times fast). If you’re not familiar with this series, please read the introduction. Designated hitters are actually a little bit more in vogue this year than last year. At this time last year, I was bemoaning the downfall of the DH. This year, it could be back with a vengeance.

OK, perhaps vengeance isn’t the right word. After all, not a lot of teams actually have good designated-hitter situations. The National League teams, who don’t appear in this PPR but do show up on the DH depth chart, pop in first at sixth place overall. This is a little tough for them to do. For starters, NL teams don’t usually use a DH, so their standing there is part-DH, part pinch-hitter, and to reflect this lighter usage At the time of the piece, only six players were projected to garner 400 or more plate appearances as a DH: Billy Butler, Nelson Cruz, Edwin Encarnacion, Kendrys Morales, Mitch Moreland and David Ortiz. This year, that list has expanded to 13, as every AL team except for the Athletics and White Sox suddenly have full-time DHs. That’s nice to see, even if it won’t last with a couple of teams.
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In my Tuesday chat this week, a commenter asked me about the Mariners bullpen, which has already endured some key injuries this spring. I responded as such:

Six of 10 worry points is more than half the worry points. I can’t say for sure even how worrisome that is, because worry points are a thing I made up at 12:27 p.m. EDT on March 22, 2016, but I can say for sure that it’s more worrisome than a team whose bullpen deserves just four out of 10 worry points.

People seemed to like the worry-points concept, and a few commenters expressed a desire for a worry-point article, with a couple even giving me ideas. I didn’t use either of those specific ideas, but the silly worry-point concept did get me thinking about team risk, and how that can influence our perception of different ballclubs before the season begins.

Like, say you’ve got two teams, each projected for 85 wins. But one of those 85-win teams has one super-elite star that comprises a bunch of their value on his own, and therefore that team is just one injury away from losing a big chunk of those projected 85 wins. And not only that, but the supporting cast around that star is littered with players over 30, guys with past injury histories, and a couple guys coming off bad seasons who are being counted on to bounce back. The other projected 85-win team, on the other hand, is pretty clean — lots of guys in their 20s, little injury history, everyone is coming off pretty standard seasons.

On pure talent, both teams are projected to be equal, but that first team has worry points through the roof. It’s easy to see where things could go wrong. The other team feels safe. This could wildly change our (sub?)conscious perceptions of these otherwise equal-looking teams.

I’m kind of thinking about the Dodgers right now, but I’m also kind of not. I’m mostly wondering what the spread is? Every team has areas of concern. Some seemingly more than others, but then at the same time, every team has guys who feel as safe as can be that will inevitably become injured or underperform this year. This game is almost impossible to predict.

This is going to be one of those posts Jeff likes to run with a bunch of polls and then a crowdsourced follow-up, because the opinions of 1,000 of you on something none of us really know about are worth more than the opinions of one of me. Who am I to assign worry points to every team in baseball? The results of this will be interesting now, and they’ll be interesting later. You’ll all put your brains together, and you’ll determine a handful of teams that seem riskier than the rest, and a handful of teams that seem safer than the rest. And at the All-Star break and at the end of the season, it will be interesting to look back and see what happened to those risks. Did the risky teams succumb and/or underperform? Did the safe teams stay clean and/or overperform? Will there even be a noticeable spread in the results of this poll? Is any one team actually riskier than another? These are all questions I can’t answer on my own, but would like to see answered. I’m thankful not only to write for an audience, but a smart and engaging audience.

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When we’ve written about the Diamondbacks this offseason, we’ve highlighted their seeming lack of depth, behind the stars. They appeared to be in position to give too much playing time to potential zeroes, potential zeroes like Yasmany Tomas. Tomas, of course, cost the Diamondbacks a fortune, and he remains plenty young and capable of turning things around, but he’s coming off a terrible season. You don’t want to guarantee anything to that kind of player. Turns out, the Diamondbacks don’t need to.

Some years ago, you easily could’ve argued Paul Goldschmidt was the most underrated player in baseball. Later on, A.J. Pollock became maybe the most underrated player in baseball, and then, David Peralta looked super underrated, and Ender Inciarte looked the same. Maybe there’s enough here to call it a pattern. And, now the team has a new candidate. He hasn’t proven anything yet, so he’s not underrated on the Peralta or Inciarte level, but it’s time to look out for Socrates Brito. All anyone cared about was the name. It’s become time to care about the player.

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