It wasn’t so long ago that building things was a pretty dangerous pastime. The most extreme example of this is probably the Panama Canal; over 5,000 people died in its construction. Five people died erecting the Empire State Building. It’s safer now to construct great buildings; such fatalities are significantly rarer than they used to be. But as we learned last week, the risk inherent to the construction and maintenance of any structure, especially large venues like stadia, will never be zero.

Enter SunTrust Park, the brand new, state-of-the-art venue for the first-place Atlanta Braves. The Braves’ surprising season took a tragic turn on June 26, when workers found a dead body inside a beer cooler at SunTrust. The body was later confirmed to be that of Todd Keeling, a 48-year-old inventor most famous for designing and patenting a technology which dispensed beer at several times the conventional rate. Keeling had already installed his technology in Guaranteed Rate Field and Target Field. Ben Brasch of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described the technology, called “Draftwell taps,” this way:

The Braves said Monday that the new Draftwell taps installed throughout the ballpark cut down pour times from a 14-second average to five seconds.

Delaware North Sportservice, which manages food and beverage service at SunTrust Park, said the new boozy tech will also keep the beer colder and fresher with more “brewery-intended flavor.”

Target Field in Minneapolis, home of the Twins, installed Draftwell taps and increased its keg yield from 87 to 94 percent, said Delaware North spokesman Marc Heintzman.

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

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 among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels, and (most importantly) FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel* and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing Longenhagen and McDaniel’s most recent update have also been excluded from consideration.

*Note: I’ve excluded Baseball America’s list this year not due to any complaints with their coverage, but simply because said list is now behind a paywall.

For those interested in learning how Fringe Five players have fared at the major-league level, this somewhat recent post offers that kind of information. The short answer: better than a reasonable person would have have expected. In the final analysis, though, the basic idea here is to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Jake Hager, SS, Milwaukee (Profile)
Last week, the author of this post included Hager among the Fringe Five for the first time. Just this morning, meanwhile, Travis Sawchik dedicated some internet words to Minnesota infielder/outfielder/little potato Willians Astudillo. The relevance of those two events? Like Astudillo, Hager appears to be experimenting with a zero-true-outcomes approach. Since last Friday, the Brewers prospect and brief resident of the independent American Association, has compiled 19 plate appearances without recording a walk or strikeout or home run. With a couple doubles and a triple, though, he still managed to produce an isolated-power mark above .200. At a very basic level, players are most successful when they are making meaningful contact. Hager, who continued to make the vast majority of his defensive starts at shortstop, has done that.

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Willians Astudillo has captured baseball’s collective imagination — and for good reason.

In an age when the march toward three true outcomes seems inevitable and indomitable, Astudillo arrives as an outlier of outliers, an offensive peformer who never walks or strikeouts, whose batting line would make much more sense if it were produced by a 19th century hitter.

When the Twins called up Astudillo late last month, Jeff Sullivan examined his curious numbers at every professional stop. It is believed Astudillo first appeared in these Web pages as Carson’s “guy” way back in 2016.

Fittingly, Astudillo has not struck out or walked through his first 14 major-league plate appearances.

Said Astudillo of his approach to the Star-Tribune:

“Coaches try to change my approach,” he said. “It’s just who I am. I’m a free swinger.”

Said Twins baseball operations chief Derek Falvey to the Star Tribune:

“I don’t think he gets to [strike] three very often. He’s an aggressive guy. It’s not a secret. I’m not revealing anything the advance work won’t show. He attacks the ball and makes good contact. Sometimes that profile plays well off the bench when you think about different types of guys to bring in the sixth, seventh, eighth inning.”

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In an AL West where the Astros and Mariners appear playoff bound, the A’s are resurgent, and the Angels have generated their share of interest thanks to the play of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, the Rangers’ season hasn’t been a whole lot of fun. A slew of early-season injuries quickly buried them, and it wasn’t until June that they posted their first month above .500 (14-11, and now 39-49 overall).

Even so, they’ve offered reasons to watch, and one lately has been the play of Shin-Soo Choo. On Wednesday, the 35-year-old outfielder/designated hitter homered off the Astros’ Gerrit Cole, extending his streak of consecutive games reaching base to 44; he later singled off Cole, as well. Alas, Choo sat on Thursday night, forestalling his chance to tie Odubel Herrera for the longest on-base streak in the majors over the past two seasons. He’s been nursing a mild right quad strain for at least a week, sitting out two games while Adrian Beltre DH-ed.

On-base streaks don’t get the same kind of love as hitting streaks, in part because of the historic primacy of batting average and the romanticization of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak from 1941, which might be one of the sport’s unbreakable records. As it happens, the record for consecutive games reaching base via a hit, walk, or hit-by-pitch (not an error or a dropped third strike) is held by DiMaggio’s rival, Ted Williams, who reached base 84 straight times in 1949. But guess who’s tied at No. 2, at least going back to 1908, the period covered by the Baseball-Reference Play Index:

On May 14, 1941, the day before he began his 56-game hitting streak, DiMaggio went 0-for-3 with a walk against the Indians’ Mel Harder. And while he was held hitless by Harder’s teammates Al Smith and Jim Bagby on July 17, ending that streak, he did walk in his second plate appearance that day, keeping the on-base streak alive. He then collected hits in each of the next 16 games before going 0-for-4 without a time on base in the opener of an August 3 doubleheader against the St. Louis Browns.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the third-place Nationals and Wade LeBlanc’s extension, then answer listener emails about trading Bryce Harper, signing Bryce Harper, throwing super-slow pitches, a DH as the best player ever, hitting flares on purpose, losing games to set up a specific playoff matchup, John Olerud and the Hall of Fame, when to tell fans to “make some noise,” the players with the most RBI against one team, forcing opponents to play out of position, an MLB re-entry rule, drafting based on publicly available info, the worst playoff teams and best non-playoff teams, a mysterious masked player, and more, plus a real-time reaction to the Nats’ incredible comeback and Stat Blasts about the best hitters after 0-2, the Rockies being better on the road, and the low leaguewide home-field advantage.

Audio intro: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Makin’ Some Noise"
Audio outro: Buzzcocks, "Noise Annoys"

Link to Travis’s post about the Nationals
Link to info on the batted-ball “donut hole”
Link playoff teams with worst winning percentages
Link to non-playoff teams with best winning percentages

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Rays using backup catcher Jesus Sucre as a pitcher to protect a lead, the return of Shohei Ohtani, Javier Baez’s exciting and silly steal of home, and what life would be like with deferred payments. Then (29:58) they bring on Phillies international scouting director Sal Agostinelli to discuss his Willians Astudillo-esque career, discovering, signing, and developing Astudillo, the July 2 signing period, scouting teenaged players, amateur scouting vs. international scouting, the importance of makeup, how to judge international-scouting success, signing players despite being saddled with a small bonus pool, the difficulty of focusing on baseball in Venezuela, expanding into new international markets, and more.

Audio intro: Talib Kweli (Feat. Nigel Hall), "Mr. International"
Audio interstitial: Nat King Cole, "Calico Sal"
Audio outro: Stackridge, "The Road to Venezuela"

Link to Jeff’s post about position-player pitchers
Link to list of deferred payments
Link to Javier Baez’s steal of home
Link to Philadelphia Inquirer feature on Sal Agostinelli
Link to 2018 team WAR from international amateur signees
Link to feature on Phillies’ international scouting
Link to Sal’s baseball-training site

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No one ever wants to play 16 innings. Pretty much no one ever wants to watch 16 innings, but, certainly, no one ever wants to play them. Even Ernie Banks would want those 16 innings spread over two games, instead of just one. At a certain point, baseball breaks down. The rosters get warped and everyone’s tired, and while you could say it becomes more of a psychological battle than a physical one, the baseball at the end of a marathon resembles only slightly the baseball at the start. There’s a reason Rob Manfred has talked about changing the rules in extra innings, and it’s not because he hates baseball. It’s because, when a game goes too long, the players hate baseball. And based on how few people remain in the stadium, many of the fans do, too.

The Rays and Marlins played 16 innings on Tuesday. The Marlins are out of it, and the Rays might as well be, but there’s no giving up, not in the regular season. Definitely not in early July. The game took place in the NL ballpark, and things inevitably got weird. The Rays, of course, don’t have a conventional pitching staff, so they quickly ran low on pitchers. Meanwhile, over the past three years, no one with at least 150 plate appearances has a lower wRC+ than Dan Straily, but the Marlins were forced into using him as a pinch-hitter. A game that goes 10 feels like it’ll end after 11. A game that goes 15 feels like it’ll end after the heat death of the universe. At any moment, a team might score a run. But after it’s been long enough, scoring feels impossible.

At last, in the 16th, things broke the Rays’ way. The game had been tied at four since the fifth. Then the Rays put up a five-spot. The rally featured an RBI single by long reliever Vidal Nuno, and the hit was his second in as many innings. As Nuno batted in the 16th, he’d thrown only 26 pitches. It looked as if Nuno would be fine to close the game out. Then he ran down the line after contact.

Vidal Nuno strained his hamstring. He was replaced. Though the Rays wound up ahead 9-4, they’d need someone to record three outs. They didn’t turn to their bullpen. They turned to their bench.

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The Washington Nationals have a problem. The Braves and Phillies have arrived ahead of schedule, as we know. The Nationals enter play Thursday in third place behind those two clubs, seven games behind the Braves and five-and-a-half games behind the Phillies.

While the Nationals have trailed in the NL East for much of the season, their FanGraphs playoff odds have dipped below 60% (59.4% as of Thursday afternoon) for the first time this season.

While the Super Teams are taking care of business in the American League, the NL field remains more open. And at the moment, the Nationals are the only preseason division favorite, the only so-called preseason Super Team, with playoff odds below 89.9% and division odds less than 50% (43.5%). With their loss to Red Sox on Wednesday, the Nationals fell below .500 (42-43).

While teams often go through struggles and sluggish periods in the marathon that is a 162-game season, we’re now more than halfway into this season and the Nationals have never gotten on track. It appeared that Washington might be getting right about a month ago as they moved back into first place and held a half-game lead in the division on June 10. But they fell out of first place on June 12 and haven’t been back, losing 16 of their last 21 games. Read the rest of this entry »

Albert Almora Jr., Theo Epstein’s first draft pick as Grand Poobah of the Cubs organization, is having himself a nice little season this year at the age of 24. His on-base percentage of .370 is 32 points up on last year’s career high. His .462 slugging percentage is also a career high, though buttressed not so much by increased home-run power as by an increase in the rate at which he hits doubles (one in every 14 plate appearances this year compared to 1-in-18 last year). His 1.8 WAR, of course, is already at a career high, and he plays stellar defense in center field. Oh, and if the season ended today, his .329 average would put him neck-and-neck with Scooter Gennett for the NL’s batting title.

“Batting title”: that’s the funny term we give the hitter who finishes the season with at least 502 plate appearances and the highest batting average in the league. It sounds really good! A reasonable person might conclude, in fact, that someone who wins the batting title is necessarily one of the best batters in the league. But, of course, they’re not — at least not all of the time. Last year, for example, one of the very best hitters in the National League was Giancarlo Stanton, and he “hit” — see how the language works against our understanding? — just .281. Aaron Judge was among the very best in the Junior Circuit, and he hit .284. And this year, the Year of our Lord Mike Trout 8 and of the Common Era 2018, Albert Almora Jr. is currently ranked 52nd in wRC+ among qualified hitters, and he’s in strong contention for the batting title. He just might win it.

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