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 and blue for Community Research.
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Super two deadline season is underway, so expect to see some well-regarded prospects get the call over the next couple of weeks. The most recent player to get the call is White Sox shortstop, Tim Anderson. Anderson hit .304/.325/.409 in Triple-A this season. He has 11 steals to his name this year, but swiped an eye-popping 49 last year.
Anderson oozes tools and has put up fine minor league numbers the past couple of years, but his plate discipline could use some work. He struck out in 23% of his trips to the plate this year at Triple-A, and walked in just 3%. The strikeout and walk numbers were just as bad in the lower levels. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben and Sam talk to Baseball Prospectus draft expert Christopher Crawford about what went down on day one of the amateur draft.
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Over the first eight plus years of his major league career, from 2008 to 2016, Evan Longoria has led position players with 45.1 WAR. That WAR total is by no means definitive proof that we was truly the most valuable player for those eight plus seasons, but it’s enough to establish the concept that Longoria has been one of the very best players in the league for a substantial length of time.
Longoria is essentially neck and neck with Cabrera (by the time you read this they may have swapped places again), and Mike Trout will likely pass him in career WAR later this year or early in 2017, but we don’t need to be exact in order to appreciate what Longoria has accomplished. He’s 30 years old and is two-thirds of the way to a surefire Hall of Fame induction.
Yet with the rise of Trout, Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Kris Bryant, and the zillion other incredible young stars, Longoria has fallen from our collective consciousness. In part, this is because the Rays haven’t won many games over the last couple of years, but it’s also a reflection of a troubling power outage.
| Years | ISO | Qualified Rank |
| 2008-2013 | .238 | 16th |
| 2014-2015 | .158 | 61st |
“I’ll tell you one thing I don’t like,” Sean Doolittle said as he grabbed his glove and jogged his way out of the clubhouse for stretch. “The hitters get to talk to the umpire and I don’t.”
You see it all the time, even if many hitters don’t want to talk about their conversations with the umpire. Muttering, head-shaking, even outright questions — “where was that?”. Occasionally you’ll even see demonstrative complaints that don’t result in the hitter being tossed, but do result in some aggressive stares and good old baseball posturing.
On the mound, it seems like the stakes are higher. Pitchers might be allowed a stare or aggressive body language, but if it escalates too quickly… Is Doolittle right? Do pitchers do get less leeway before they are warned or ejected? Or get to say less? They definitely don’t get to talk in close quarters with the person determining the balls and strikes, especially in the American League.
Late Thursday afternoon, Major League Baseball announced it was suspending Yordano Ventura for nine games, and Manny Machado for four games, for their respective involvement in Tuesday night’s brawl between the Kansas City Royals and Baltimore Orioles. As is often the case in these situations, many quickly criticized the seemingly lax punishment doled out to Ventura in particular, who will effectively miss only a single start despite having similarly instigated fights on several prior occasions. Indeed, on Wednesday, FanGraphs’ own Dave Cameron had called for Ventura to be suspended for 30 games due to his status as a repeat violator.
Even if MLB wanted to throw the book at Ventura in this case, though, its hands were largely tied. As I’ve previously noted, under Article XII of MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, any disciplinary action that the league takes against a player for on-field conduct must be based on “just cause.” Not only does this standard require that the punishment fit the crime, but also — perhaps more importantly here — that the disciplinary action be consistent with prior penalties doled out by the league for similar conduct.
This presented a problem for MLB in Ventura’s case because pitchers who were previously found to have intentionally thrown at a batter have historically only faced a suspension somewhere on the order of seven to 10 games. While MLB may have been able to justify suspending Ventura a bit longer than that, given his repeat-offender status, any suspension of much more than 12 or 13 games may very well have been overturned by an arbitrator on appeal.
This means that even if MLB would like to take greater steps to crack down on beanballs, it will be hard pressed to do so without the approval of the Major League Baseball Players Association.
Here’s the quickest way to understand what’s gone on in the field for the Oakland Athletics this season: Marcus Semien has arguably been their best defensive player. Yep. That’s the one. The same Marcus Semien who committed 35 errors as Oakland’s everyday shortstop last year. That’s not being totally fair to Semien, who has legitimately improved at short, but he’s still been average (at best) at shortstop, and in the field for the Oakland A’s this year, average at best is as good as it gets.
Bartolo Colon has been a major league pitcher for longer than the high school kids being drafted this weekend have been alive. It’s likely that he has seen and done more in his major league career than any of these draftees will ever have the opportunity to see and do. He’s pitched in All-Star Games and the postseason. He’s played in 42 different major league parks – 42! He’s won a Cy Young Award and struck out 2,285 batters. He hit a home run! He’s had about as full and productive a career as one can have without being deemed Hall of Fame worthy.
Of course, there are still a few things Colon hasn’t done in his career. He’s never won a World Series or thrown a no-hitter, for instance. But plenty of illustrious careers end without those achievements being added to a resume. There is one glaring and unique empty statistical category remaining on Bartolo Colon’s career stat sheet, though: he has never drawn a walk in his career. In fact, after his two strikeout, one sac bunt performance against Brewers pitching last night, Bartolo Colon now holds the record for most career plate appearances without drawing a single walk.
| Player | PA | BB | From | To |
| Bartolo Colon | 260 | 0 | 1997 | 2016 |
| Tracy Stallard | 258 | 0 | 1960 | 1966 |
| Steve Cooke | 193 | 0 | 1992 | 1998 |
| Tex Shirley | 164 | 0 | 1941 | 1946 |
| Bob Osborn | 151 | 0 | 1925 | 1931 |
Although much of Colon’s career has occurred in the designated hitter league, he has now stepped to the plate 260 times in his career dating back to his first career plate appearance in 1997 against the Cardinals’ Andy Benes. From Terry Adams to Jordan Zimmermann, Colon has faced 131 different pitchers and not a single one has yielded ball four.
The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few 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 who (a) received a future value grade of 45 or less from Dan Farnsworth during the course of his organizational lists and who (b) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on an updated prospect list or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.
In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.
Greg Allen, CF, Cleveland (Profile)
Between last Friday (the day on which the previous edition of the Five was published) and yesterday afternoon (when the author composed the bulk of the present document), Allen produced a line that was simultaneously promising and underwhelming. Promising like this: over 17 plate appearances, Allen recorded a 3:3 walk-to-strikeout ratio while also reaching base twice by means of a hit-by-pitch. Which is to say, even before accounting for batted balls, Allen had already reached base on 29% of his plate appearances. Unfortunately, after accounting for batted balls, his numbers didn’t improve by much. One hit over 10 official at-bats led to a slash line of .100/.400/.100 for Allen. So far as outcomes are concerend, that’s not great. But outcomes at High-A are much less important than the process by which they’re produced. And Allen’s process is marked by a variety of skills, including contact and discipline and speed and defense and modest power. Whatever the process, it led to a very impressive outcome on Thursday night. Batting leadoff against the Cubs’ High-A affiliate, Allen recorded four hits — including a double and home run — in five plate appearances (box).