I want to thank everyone who applied for the positions with FanGraphs for your patience. I was expecting to have more time to contact people while in the hospital last week, but the second round of chemotherapy was a little rougher on my energy level than I had hoped. I’m back home now, though, and will be contacting applicants to setup interviews this week.

Don’t lose heart if you applied and haven’t heard anything back yet. We’re really excited about the pool of people who are interested in contributing, and just want to make sure we get the right folks on board. Your patience has been greatly appreciated, and your support during this time has been overwhelming as well. This is truly one of the best communities of people to be found on the internet.

For most of his career, Doug Fister has been baseball’s version of Rodney Dangerfield. Coming up through the minor leagues, Fister was simply one of a legion of strike-throwing no-stuff guys, and his lack of velocity or anything resembling an out pitch made him more of an afterthought than a prospect. He made it to the majors in the second half of the 2009 season, but his combination of 88 MPH fastballs and a home run problem did nothing to tear down the image of a guy who just threw too many hittable strikes.

But if you look beyond the high-ish HR/FB rate he posted in his rookie year, Fister was actually pretty decent in his first go-around in the Major Leagues. Despite topping out at 90 with his fastball, he got enough leverage on the pitch to generate a decent amount of ground balls. He also threw a well-above average changeup that helped him keep left-handed hitters at bay and generate some swinging strikes, giving him a solid 2.4 K/BB ratio despite pedestrian stuff. It all added up to a 4.43 xFIP, a league average mark for a 2009 AL pitcher.

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After months of hype, discussion, and lobbying, Jesus Montero has finally joined the New York Yankees. With rosters expanding for September, the Yankees have called their top prospect up to join the big club, and the rumblings are that he’ll be in the line-up tonight, serving as the DH against Jon Lester in Boston. That might seem like quite a way to make a debut, but Montero is viewed as quite a talent – as one team official told Joel Sherman, “By the playoffs, he will be our best DH option.”

Certainly, Montero is a talented kid. He’s been ranked as one of the sport’s 50 best prospects by Baseball America for each of the last three years, rising from #38 in 2009 to #4 in 2010 to #3 before this season began. He’s climbed the minor league ladder quickly – he’s already accumulated almost 1,000 plate appearances in Triple-A – despite the fact that he won’t turn 22 until November, and his career minor league line of .301/.366/.501 shows a hitter with significant promise.

However, despite the hype and the hope for the future, I’d suggest that Yankees fans be realistic in their expectations of what Montero can bring to the team this year – he’s probably not going to be the savior they’ve been looking for.

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Adam Dunn is having a terrible season, and now, even the White Sox are giving up on waiting for him to regress back to the mean – he’s been told that he’ll spend the rest of the year as a part-time player. With limited opportunities to dig an even larger hole, it seems likely that Dunn will end the year with a line not too far from his current one – a .163/.289/.290 mark that adds up to a dreadful .268 wOBA. For a DH, that kind of anti-production is nearly unheard of.

I wanted to put Dunn’s season in context, though, so I thought I’d look through history and see just how often some useful Major League player has just fallen down on the job. We’ve all seen guys fall off the cliff before, so I figured this probably wasn’t all that unusual historically. Using the nifty little “split season” filter on the leaderboards here on FanGraphs, you can choose to see the best and worst individual seasons at different types of things over a specified time period, so I filtered by the worst seasons of the last 50 years.

At -2.5 WAR, Dunn checks in tied for ninth on the list in terms of net negative performance over a full season. Ninth in 50 years doesn’t sound so bad, after all, and would confirm my initial suspicion that this kind of thing isn’t all that uncommon. But when you start to look at the context of the guys ahead of him, the story begins to change.

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After announcing on Friday that we’re hiring, you guys responded with some significant enthusiasm. We received hundreds of applications over the weekend, and they continue to come in at a pretty steady rate. Applications will continue to be accepted this week, though we may reach a point in the not too distant future where we’ll have to cut it off just to keep the workload of going through them all somewhat manageable. We want to give each application a legitimate review, and given how many we’ve received, that’s going to take some time.

We’ll attempt to make the process as efficient as possible, but it will likely take us a week or two to get through all of the applications. You almost certainly won’t hear anything in the next few days, but don’t take that as bad news – we’ll be getting in touch with those we’re interested in following up with once we’ve gone through the whole stack.

If you haven’t applied yet (and are planning to), I’d encourage you to do so sooner than later.

We’re pleased to announce today that FanGraphs is now hiring, and we’re looking for talented writers with interesting things to say about the sport. While this is FanGraphs and an analytical bent will certainly be of good use here, we also employ Carson Cistulli – writers of all shades are welcome to apply.

If you’re a writer looking for a paid, part-time position and a chance to show the world what you’ve got, drop us a line at wanted@fangraphs.com with the subject line “FanGraphs Writer Application – 2011” (note – this is very helpful to us. Please do this.) Resumes and/or samples of your prior writings are strongly encouraged. Applications will be accepted for positions with FanGraphs, RotoGraphs, and NotGraphs, though Carson suggests that NotGraphs applicants should “have a working knowledge both of the WAR leaderboards and the collected works of PG Wodehouse.”

Strong applicants will be able to write in a clear and concise manner, provoke interesting discussion with original thoughts, and work within a regular schedule to produce content on a consistent basis. A solid understanding of how to work with the data here on the site is also going to be necessary. If that describes you, feel free to drop us a line, and we’ll review your application and see if you’d be a good fit to join the site.