Episode 317
The FanGraphs staff ottoneu league — including both RotoGraphs editor Eno Sarris and the host of this very podcast — recently conducted its auction live and in-person in Phoenix, Arizona. That auction and its implications serve as the substance for the bulk of the present conversation.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 46 min play time.)

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. A Note Regarding the Data in This Post
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: Spring Training
3. Notable Spring Performance: Cincinnati’s J.J. Hoover

A Note Regarding the Data in This Post
While, until now, the author has been painstakingly copy-and-pasting the raw data for these conspicuously absurd spring-training posts from ca. 50 pages’ worth of leaderboards at MLB.com, he has (read: I have) since found that Baseball Reference offers almost precisely the same data by means of just two such pages — that is, an entire one for hitters and also one for pitchers.

While Rainer Maria Rilke advises — in his important Letters to a Young Poet, which the author has totally read — while Rilke advises in that text to do a thing because it is difficult, it’s very likely that he (i.e. Rilke) was not accounting for pre-existing medical conditions such as Ulnar Claw or Terrifying and Painful Ulnar Claw while so doing. As such, the author has taken the liberty of utilizing BR’s data for the purposes of this post. (Note: a second liberty the author has taken is to compose the present document while drinking from a magnum of Marcus James’ Malbec — i.e. the sexiest of the Malbecs.)

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Top Performances of the WBC, Conclusively
2. Final SCOUT Leaderboards: World Baseball Classic
3. Video: Puerto Rico and Boston’s Jose De La Torre

Top Performances of the WBC, Conclusively
The 2013 edition of the WBC has ended, and the Dominican Republic — by way of a 3-0 victory over Puerto Rico (box) — are now World Champions of the World until 2017.

What follows is a totally infallible record of the WBC’s top performances, according to SCOUT (a metric explained below, but which, briefly stated, uses regressed inputs to help make sense of small samples).

Best Hitter: Hanley Ramirez
Dominican infielder Hanley Ramirez was forced to leave the WBC championship game in the sixth inning after injuring his thumb earlier in the contest while attempting to field a sharply hit ground ball between himself and shortstop Jose Reyes. Before that play, however, Ramirez established himself as the most proficient batter of the tournament, posting a 7:2 walk-to-strikeout ratio while also hitting two home runs in fewer than 30 plate appearances.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Entirely Relevant Preamble
2. Julio Teheran’s Spring Opposition, Examined
3. Mostly Unhelpful Video: Julio Teheran, Succeeding

Entirely Relevant Preamble
Among the entire surfeit of spring numbers considered in yesterday’s edition of the Notes, one such number suggested the possibility that Atlanta right-handed prospect Julio Teheran has produced the best performance of spring training so far. The data revealed that Teheran had struck out 25 (or ca. 32%) of the estimated 73 batters he’d faced during his five spring starts — a rate which, when regressed against spring averages, is the highest among all pitchers. While further inspection reveals that Teheran has, in fact, faced 74 batters (i.e. one more than originally suggested), the point still remains: relative to the amount of innings he’s thrown, Teheran has probably been the most effective of the spring’s pitchers.

What one wonders is this: “How is it that nearly everyone owns a car despite the enormous expense of buying one — not to mention the associated costs, like insurance, fuel, and maintenance?” After that, though, one wonders a second, more relevant thing — namely, “How strong has Teheran’s competition been this spring?”

To address that latter question in full is impossible. Insofar as some batters use spring training to experiment with mechanical adjustments or plate discipline, the “true talent” of those same batters in the moment during which they’re facing Teheran might diverge wildly from previously recorded levels.

That said, with the projections available here at the site, we do have some sense of the talent level of any player Teheran would be likely to face. It’s with that thought in mind that the author had the idea of documenting every batter Teheran had faced this spring, with a view to assaying the strength of those batters relative to major-league average — again, with all possible caveats regarding spring training and how hitters use their time there.

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Episode 316
Managing editor Dave Cameron has returned from Phoenix to his home in the American South and has also returned to form on this edition of FanGraphs Audio, during the course of which he analyzes precisely 100% of baseball — with a great deal of emphasis on the positional power rankings currently being released at the site.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 40 min play time.)

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Three Brief Introductory Notes
2. Table: Updated Spring Run-Environment Numbers
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Spring Training (Overall)
4. SCOUT Leaderboards: Spring Training (Rookies)
5. Mostly Unhelpful Video: Christian Yelich, Homering

Three Brief Introductory Notes
Here are three introductory notes:

1. It’s entirely possible that a reader might say regarding what follows — owing to the panoply of stats therein — might say that there is a surfeit of spring numbers to be found here. Whether the author himself would do so is doubtful — largely, that is, because he finds the alliteration between surfeit and spring unappealing. However, that is manifestly an expression of his own personal bias and is certainly not the case for everyone.

2. Of note regarding the SCOUT leaderboards to follow is this: the author has included in those leaderboards — besides the expected rates for hitters and pitchers — he has also included the raw totals for walks, strikeouts, and (where applicable) home runs. Why he (i.e. the author) has neglected to do so before now is absolutely not a mystery: the author lacks sense, is the reason.

3. The author recently made a loathsome semantic point regarding spring stats — and, specifically, to what degree it makes sense to call them “meaningless.” Said point applies to the following.

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Table of Contents
Today’s edition of the Daily Notes has no table of contents, it appears.

World Baseball Classic, Maximum Update
With their 3-1 victory over Japan on Sunday night, Puerto Rico has advanced to the World Baseball Classic final. On Monday, the competition’s other semifinal game — between the Dominican Republic and Netherlands — takes place at 9pm ET.

What follows is a record of the 2013 World Baseball Classic to date — with, like, two or three prose flourishes by the author, or one prose flourish by the author.

Complete WBC Bracket, With an Ad for Subway in It
Here’s the complete bracket for the 2013 World Baseball Classic — including an advertisement for American restaurant franchise Subway, it appears — copy-and-pasted from the official WBC site, but then cropped and colored differently to suggest nothing of the sort. (Click on bracket to embiggen.)

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Table of Contents
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1. Informative Preamble Regarding What the People Want
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: Pac-12 Hitters and Pitchers
3. Largely Unhelpful Video: Arizona State’s Trevor Williams

Informative Preamble Regarding What the People Want
“For what are the people clamoring?”: this is the precise question the author poses to himself each morning as he sits down at his finely crafted and foreign-made desk to compose these Notes. Only today, however, has the answer to that question revealed itself so immediately and so in red-colored Rockwell Extra Bold font, as follows:

Indeed, the thing for which the people are clamoring is truly a record of the top performers of Pac-12 baseball. Nor are the people misguided in their desires. For one thing, five Pac-12 teams — Oregon State (No. 3), UCLA (No. 11), Arizona State (No. 14), Oregon (No. 16), and Arizona (No. 20) — occupy spots in Baseball America’s most recent iteration of its top-25 college rankings. (And a sixth team, Stanford, is littered with possible first-round major-league picks.) For two, the author — along with a not insignificant portion of Team FanGraphs — is currently situated in Phoenix, Arizona, and will likely be making Arizona State’s Friday night game against Washington State his business.

In consideration of these considerations, the author has sought to abide by the wishes of the people and has provided (below) leaderboards which reveal the top performers of the Pac-12 at this exact moment.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Informative Preamble to the Observations
2. Multiple Observations from an Arizona State Game
3. Barely Useful Video: New Mexico’s Josh Walker

Informative Preamble to the Observations
For the fourth consecutive March, a not insubstantial portion of Team FanGraphs descends upon Phoenix, Arizona, this weekend with a view towards (a) attending spring-training baseball games, (b) forging camaraderie nonpareil, and (c) tippling nonpareil.

The present author arrived in Phoenix yesterday (Wednesday) and immmediately set about doing the sorts of things an incompetent person typically does while traveling — i.e. wait impatiently beside the wrong baggage carousel for longer than is decent, misunderstand the procedure for utilizing his hotel’s shuttle service, and arrive at the rental car office a full day before the reservation actually begins.

Another thing the author did was to attend Wednesday’s Arizona State game against New Mexico with important SABR award-winner Jeff Zimmerman and frequently competent Jeff Sullivan.

What follows is a series of observations from the game in question.

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Table of Contents
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A WBC Status Update of Reasonable Quality
By the end of this past weekend, the first round of this year’s World Baseball Classic had produced eight qualifiers: Cuba, Japan, the Netherlands, and Taipei from Pools A and B, and the Dominican Republic, Italy, Puerto Rico, and the United States (from Pools C and D).

Second-round play among the first set four qualifiers (called Pool 1, in this case) has now already produced two teams for the four-team final: Japan and the Netherlands. Pool 2 (composed of the second set of four qualifiers) began on Tuesday afternoon.

What follows is more — perhaps even possibly sufficient — information on theme of the 2013 World Baseball Classic.

Standings
In the first round, each team plays the other three teams in its pool once. The two teams with the highest winning percentages — or, in case of a three-way tie, the two teams that qualify via this set of tie-breaking rules — advance to Round Two.

The eight qualifiers from the first round progress to Round Two. Pool 1 features the four qualifiers from first-round Pools A and B; Pool 2, from Pools C and D. Both Pool 1 and 2 are played as a four-team double-elimination tournament. The top two teams in each qualify for the four-team final round.

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