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Yesterday, Bryce Harper returned from the disabled list. This is good news for the Nationals, since Bryce Harper is good at baseball. Having more good baseball players is not a bad thing for a team trying to win, so a returning Harper is a net positive for the organization. However, Harper’s return is not entirely without controversy.

As Wendy Thurm noted after her conversation with Ryan Zimmerman a few weeks ago, Zimmerman enjoyed playing the outfield more than he enjoyed playing third base. His shoulder issues, and the mental pressure that came with making the throw across the diamond, were not a factor in the outfield, allowing him to enjoy the game in a way that he wasn’t at third base. However, Harper’s return means that there is not an outfield spot for Zimmerman any longer, and on Monday night, he went back to third base.

Before the game, Bryce Harper publicly disagreed with the decision. Read the rest of this entry »

So, this is something you don’t see everyday. The Astros database, nicknamed Ground Control, includes archived notes on past trade discussions. While written in shorthand, the notes are pretty detailed, and are definitely not something the Astros ever expected to become public. But that’s exactly what has happened, as someone anonymously uploaded a couple of files to a data warehouse called Anonbin.

Here, you can find all the notes on discussions from last summer.

Here are the winter discussions.

Among the notes found in the leak:

The Astros asked for Dylan Bundy or Kevin Gasuman in return for Bud Norris. Which sounds hilarious, until you notice that they included Xander Bogaerts on the list of possible players they would want from the Red Sox. Bud Norris was eventually traded to Baltimore for L.J. Hoes and Josh Hader, plus a draft pick.

Maybe even more hilarious: the Astros asked for Lucas Giolito in exchange for Lucas Harrell. Lucas Harrell was eventually designated for assignment in April.

The Marlins apparently noted that acquiring Giancarlo Stanton would require George Springer and Carlos Correa; the Astros countered with Jarred Cosart and Delino Deshields. I wonder which side thought the other’s offer was more ridiculous.

A friend in the game has independently confirmed that these leaks are legitimate, and noted that every team in baseball keeps similar notes just like this. This isn’t necessarily an indictment on the Astros for having these kinds of notes, but it’s certainly an embarrassment to their organization that they were not able to secure them well enough to keep them from getting out. I would imagine there are a lot of teams that are quite unhappy with the Astros right about now.

Anyway, enjoy the leaks, because I bet it will be a long time before we ever see anything like this get out in the public realm again.

Over the weekend, the Red Sox summoned Mookie Betts from Triple-A; he made his big league debut last night, going 1-3 with a walk. While no single game will ever reveal much about a player’s skillset, the process by which he approached the game seems to fit with his minor league profile:

He didn’t chase pitches; he swung at only two of 11 out-of-zone-pitches.

He makes contact; he put the bat on the ball on all eight in-zone swings.

According to MinorLeagueCentral, Betts only swung at 34% of the pitches he was thrown in Pawtucket, and he made contact on 88% of his swings. Minor league data isn’t as reliable as major league data, but in general, swing and contact rates are pretty easy things to track and should at least be in the ballpark. While Betts will almost certainly see more in-zone pitches and be forced to swing more often in the big leagues, he has shown a pretty disciplined eye at the plate, and we shouldn’t expect him to expand the strike zone even against big league pitching.

And swing/contact rates do tend to carry over from the minors to a decent degree. For instance, if we look at the other prospects of note who have been promoted from the International League this year, we see that their swing and contact rates in the big leagues were in the same general range as their were in Triple-A.

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On Wednesday, for the second time in a year, Tim Lincecum threw a no-hitter. For the second time in a year, it was against the San Diego Padres. As Rob Neyer wrote yesterday, one pitcher throwing two no-hitters against the same team in a year is a pretty unlikely outcome, especially considering the fact that Tim Lincecum stopped being TIM LINCECUM a few years ago. If you were going to list off pitchers who would throw multiple no-hitters, you probably wouldn’t go with the guy with the seventh-worst ERA among qualified starters since the start of the 2012 season.

But there’s something a little bit unique about the recent vintage of Tim Lincecum. Something that makes these no-hitters maybe a little bit more understandable.

Below, I’ve charted Lincecum’s seasonal batting average allowed based on whether or not the bases are empty or if there were runners on. The blue line represents the situations in which Linecum would be able to pitch from the wind-up, while the Red line represents — not perfectly, but well enough — situations where Lincecum would have to work from the stretch.

Read the rest on FoxSports.com.

Over the first couple of months of the season, I’ve done a couple of end-of-the-month posts on Expected Run Differentials. While pythagorean expected record — the number of wins and losses a team would be expected to have based on their runs scored and allowed — has become nearly a mainstream concept, I’ve never been a huge fan of using runs to determine how well a team has played thus far.

After all, the entire point of looking at run differential instead of actual wins and losses is because we’re acknowledging that wins and losses are affected by the timing of when runs are scored or allowed, and history has shown that run sequencing is mostly just randomness. So, developing an expected win-loss metric that removes the affects of sequencing is a good idea, but pythagorean record only goes halfway to that goal. It removes the timing aspects of converting runs into wins, but ignores the timing aspects of converting baserunners into runs. Evaluating a team by its run differential removes some of the sequencing effects of wins and losses, but leaves plenty of other parts, with no real reason why we should arbitrarily include some sequencing while taking other parts out.

That’s why I’ve always preferred to look at a team’s performance based on expected runs scored and allowed, rather than actual runs scored and allowed; this gives us the most context-neutral evaluation of team performance to date. In the two preceding posts, I walked through the creation of expected runs scored and allowed totals based on each team’s wOBA and wOBA allowed, adjusted for baserunning and fielding values. As a linear weights based metric, wOBA is a very good context-neutral evaluator of individual events.

However, as Jesse Wolfersberger eloquently illustrated at The Hardball Times last week, run scoring at the team level isn’t really linear.

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One of my favorite tools here at FanGraphs is our Custom Leaderboard section, as it allows anyone to create a page to keep track of the performance of any player or group of players, whether it’s just guys on your fantasy team, upcoming free agents, or some random collection of players that you happen to care about. It’s a super helpful resource, and I have a handful of saved reports that I reference all the time.

And for the next six weeks or so, I’ll be adding another one to the list, because now that we’re just a few days away from the start of July, MLB’s trade season is upon us, and I wanted an easy way to keep track of who might be available at each position. So, I made a 2014 Trade Chip custom leaderboard. That links goes directly to the list of position players, but you can just click pitching up at the top to see the available arms as well. And the positional tabs up top will let you view players at various spots around the field.

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Last week, I wrote that the best suitors for David Price were primarily lower revenue clubs who might not be able to afford his 2015 arbitration raise, leading to the possibility that Price could be traded both this summer and again this winter. Then, on Sunday, the Cardinals made that column obsolete. On the same day, they placed both Michael Wacha and Jaime Garcia on the disabled list, with Wacha’s injury having a pretty open-ended timeline and raising the question of whether or not St. Louis can count on him returning this year.

Suddenly, the team with the most buying power of any team in baseball now has a glaring and immediate need for an impact starting pitcher. And David Price ending up in St. Louis almost feels inevitable.

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