Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman 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
Boston at Minnesota | 20:10 ET
Wright (74.2 IP, 105 xFIP-) vs. Duffey (47.0 IP, 86 xFIP-)
The author’s dumb NERD metric is essentially the product of an attempt to reverse engineer, and reconstruct by way of objective measures, the tastes of those who’d read a site like FanGraphs. In most cases, the dumb NERD metric works sufficiently well. On Wednesday, for example, Noah Syndergaard faced Jameson Taillon in an encounter that represented the latter’s major-league debut. That game received the highest NERD score for the day by a reasonable margin. This would appear to represent an argument on behalf of the byzantine algorithm which produces NERD.

Conceiving of a scenario, however, in which this Boston-Minnesota contest facilitates more pleasure than the sort likely to be provided by the Dodgers-Giants game later in the evening — a game which features Clayton Kershaw, for example — poses greater challenges. Fortunately for everyone involved, the consequences of such a thing are basically non-extant.

In any case, the reasons for the relative optimism concerning the Red Sox-Twins game are twofold. First, one finds in the Red Sox a club that has produced the best adjusted batting line since the 1931 Yankees. Regression is bound to temper their achievement over a full season. Still, the point remains: few clubs hit at this level as a collective group. Also of some interest is Tyler Duffey, a former fifth-rounder with below-average arm speed who’s nevertheless recorded fielding-independent numbers about 15% better than average.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Boston.

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As you’re probably aware, the first two rounds of Major League Baseball’s amateur draft took place last night. With the first 77 picks off the board, let’s take a look at what my KATOH projection system has to say about the college players from the major conferences who were taken thus far. I’ll be back with projections for the remaining players once we know where they’re going.

These projections are far from gospel. Scouting the stat line is always dangerous. It’s even more dangerous than usual at the college level, where the samples are small, the players are raw, and the quality of opposing pitching runs the gamut. Nonetheless, performance is often an overlooked component of prospect evaluation, and the players who outperform expectations in college and the minors often go on to do the same in the big leagues.

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As you’ve probably heard before, there’s not a lot of rooting in this job. Not, at least, rooting of the conventional sort, for a particular team against a particular opponent. What there’s more of is rooting for particular stories, or particular trends. That’s where I found myself earlier — rooting for the Astros bullpen against the Rangers on Thursday, because I knew I wanted to write about it. It was going well, too, until Rougned Odor went deep off of Scott Feldman in the eighth. The Astros never rallied. Still, the bullpen yielded just the one run in more than four innings of work. It did its job, which makes this a decent time to point out it’s rather consistently been doing its job.

The offseason past was the offseason of relievers, and upon its completion, people couldn’t wait to see what the Yankees had assembled in action. The Astros by no means sat the offseason out, but there hasn’t been so much talk about them, what with the disappointing start. And if you think about the Astros bullpen, you might immediately think of the early struggles from Ken Giles. You might think about Luke Gregerson losing his closing gig. Not everything has gone smoothly, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Astros bullpen has been so dominant.

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If you’d kind of forgotten about Ichiro Suzuki, I totally get it. I mean, he’s undeniably been an icon, but as far as his remaining a major-leaguer goes, he’s in his 40s, and he’s spent time on the bench for a team that doesn’t get a lot of attention. The league is awash with young, premium talent, and in the Marlins’ own outfield, Ichiro’s behind three young players of considerable ability. And, you know, there was this:

The wizardry had become less and less apparent. I assume that, once you’re a wizard, you’re always a wizard, but Ichiro had perhaps grown weary of using his magic. Or maybe it just takes him longer to recover his mana. He’s been chasing 3,000 big-league hits, and that’s a hell of a milestone, but when the Marlins elected to bring Ichiro back, many figured it was just a publicity stunt, a way to squeeze some profit out of a deteriorating player’s pursuit of history. That tells you something about how people see the Marlins, but that also tells you something about how people saw Ichiro.

I’m now going to embed the same plot as above, only with one extra line segment. Ichiro! is re-earning his exclamation point.

42 years old. The gap between Ichiro and Christian Yelich is old enough to vote.

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Starting pitchers get the job done in various ways; some excel at bat-missing and/or command. Others are more adept at managing contact on balls in play. The very best are able to clear the bar in all three areas. Sample sizes for the 2016 season have increased in size to the point that we actually should begin paying attention. Last week, we checked in with NL ERA qualifiers regarding their early-season contact-management performance; this week, it’s the AL’s turn.

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On Monday, I aimed to identify the ideal candidate for the five-man infield, inspired by the radical defensive alignment implemented by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller of the Sonoma Stompers in their new book, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work. I’ve since finished reading the book, and discovered Lindbergh and Miller also deployed the five-man infield’s cousin: the four-man outfield. A follow-up only makes sense.

The Stompers play a four-man outfield against the Pacifics’ Jake Taylor in San Rafael. (Source)

The boxes to check for our five-man infield were this: lots of ground balls, lots of ground ball hits, ground balls sprayed all over the infield, fly balls with predictable tendencies (either extreme pull or extreme oppo).

For our four-man outfield, it’s essentially the inverse. We want all of the following to be true of our batter:

1. He hits a bunch of air balls
2. He sprays those air balls all over the outfield
3. He has very predictable ground-ball tendencies

I didn’t use OPS on fly balls as a box to check because OPS on fly balls includes homers, and those can’t be defended against anyway. Remove homers, and the sample gets real noisy, and to me, it didn’t help us in our search. The hitters we’ve identified ended up being good hitters anyway.

So, the hitter that appeared at the very top of our five-man infield spreadsheet was Howie Kendrick, and he checked every box. Made plenty of sense. He was the only hitter to check every box, and I was a bit surprised there weren’t more. Spoiler alert: I’m not totally convinced by any of our four-man outfield candidates. At least not as convinced as I was about Kendrick. But it’s grounds for some interesting discussion nonetheless!

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Huston Street isn’t an expert on analytics. Nor does he claim to be. But he’s by no means a neophyte. The veteran closer is more knowledgeable about advanced stats than the average player. He also has some strong opinions.

A little over a year ago, Street shared his negative view of FIP in one of my Sunday Notes columns. This past spring, I approached him at the Angels’ spring-training facility, in Tempe, to get his thoughts on shift strategy. I ended up getting a lot more than that. A simple question segued into what might be best described as a stream-of-consciousness look at the state of analytics, in classic Street style.

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Street on defensive shifts: “I’m a big believer in match-ups when it comes to shifts. When they’re done really well, they’re based on the individual match-up and not on a general approach to shifting. Half the league throws 96 and the other half throws 93. Then there’s me, who throws 90.

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Ben, Sam and FanGraphs writer August Fagerstrom banter about the allure of Kelly Johnson and the Indians’ plan for winning without Michael Brantley, then talk about big league candidates for untried defensive alignments.

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This past Monday, against Cleveland, Seattle left-hander James Paxton recorded the highest single-game average fastball velocity of his career, at just under 99 mph. While sources differ on the matter, it was at least a mile per hour harder than his previous single-game high, which he’d established in his previous start (and season debut) at San Diego about a week earlier. Jeff Sullivan described that appearance against the Padres as “horrible and promising,” because Paxton had allowed eight runs in just 3.2 innings, but also exhibited a sort of arm speed he hadn’t previously. Monday’s start wasn’t horrible, at all. And even more promising.

There’s a mechanical explanation for why Paxton threw harder on Monday than he’d ever thrown before. But there’s also a change in pitch mix that led to one of the best starts of his life, too. And with those new mechanics and that new pitch mix also came a new mindset. It might be fair to say this is a new James Paxton.

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Tonight, the 2016 MLB draft kicks off, with the first couple of rounds being broadcast on MLB Network (and MLB.com) starting at 7 pm eastern. For the next few days, teams are going to make their best educated guesses as to what players might develop into in four or five years, and down the line, we’ll look back at these few days as a big turning point for some organization. Someone is going to hit a home run in the draft tonight, and end up with a franchise-altering class of talent that could propel them forward for years to come. Teams put a lot of resources and energy into trying to make their picks as effective as possible because the long-term impact of quality drafting can be tremendous.

But the reality is that we’re not going to know, tonight, who is hitting a home run as they’re taking their swings. The draft is an exercise in forecasting, but it’s the most difficult kind of forecasting to do; projecting long-term futures based on incomplete or unreliable information. At the very top of the draft, there’s usually enough information to provide some confidence that the players being picked are the cream of this particular crop, but beyond those first few picks, it becomes very difficult to parse the differences. This isn’t a knock on scouts or scouting; it’s just that this particular job of identifying future production so far out is just really hard.

But, interestingly, even with the tremendous uncertainty that goes along with these picks, one term has stuck in the draft and prospect lexicon that suggests that we know more than we actually do, and you’re going to hear that term a lot tonight. For almost every pick, you’re going to hear about a players “ceiling”, or upside, or some other term for the upper limit of his potential. Big guys with big fastballs are given heigh ceiling grades, and diminutive college hitters with contact skills but lacking in power will be labeled as role players or utility guys, and by and large, you’ll find a lot more high-end players in the first group than the latter one.

But when you look at the current major league leaderboard, it should become pretty clear that the idea of an actual ceiling for any player is a significant overestimation of our ability to project their skills this far out.

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