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

1. Finding: Baseball’s Movingest Curve
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Finding: Baseball’s Movingest Curve
A Question a Sad Person Might Ask
Tyler Chatwood starts tonight for Colorado, which, for most reasonable people, is rightly regarded as “Neither here nor there” so far as life events are concerned. Of note, however, is that Chatwood’s curveball is inducing grounders at a rate of 73.3% in a smallish sample — considerably higher than the league average of ca. 50% on that same pitch. “Why is Chatwood’s curve inducing so many grounders?” is a question that at least one person — one sad and lonely and sad person — might ask himself, alone at a computer, drinking a magnum of chablis all by himself on (hypothetically speaking) a Thursday night in August.

Not the Answer to That Question
The answer to the above-asked question is not “Because Tyler Chatwood’s curveball has more movement on it than every other pitcher’s.” However, in trying to answer that question, a sad and lonely and sad person will find himself answering another question — namely, “Which pitcher’s curveball does have the most movement on it?”

The Answer to That Second Question
The answer to that second question is “Brett Myers’s.”*

*Or, actually, as commenter Josh notes below, maybe it’s “Kyle Weiland.”

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

1. Rousing Facts About No. 9 Hitters
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Rousing Facts About No. 9 Hitters
Regarding Dan Straily’s Wednesday Start, One Thing About It
The attentive reader will likely be aware by now that Oakland right-hander and emitter of soft, warm light Dan Straily’s Wednesday start was not — neither in the strictest sense of the phrase, nor even in the more liberal sense of it — was not what one’d call a “rousing success.” While he (i.e. Straily) managed to post a 5:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio for the game, he also only induced two grounders of the 16 batted-balls he conceded (box). That he allowed four home runs is likely the product of unusually bad luck/bad pitches, but none of the home runs was decidedly cheap, either.

Regarding Dan Straily’s Wednesday Start, Another Thing
The other thing about Dan Straily’s Wednesday start is that there will be no further discussion of it in this edition of the Notes — except insofar as to how it relates to the home run he (i.e. Straily) conceded to Chris Iannetta.

Regarding Chris Iannetta’s Home Run
After Chris Iannetta’s second-inning home run, the Oakland television broadcast team suggested something to the effect that conceding a homer to the No. 9 hitter is an unfortunate thing to have happen. While likely true, it’s also the case that Chris Iannetta is not a very typical No. 9 hitter. Indeed, he’s posted a career 100 OPS+ (and a 101 wRC+), while the average No. 9 hitter in the American League has posted a 76 OPS+ this season, for example — and posted the exact same figure last year.

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

1. Expected wRC+ for the Cape Cod League
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Expected wRC+ for the Cape Cod League
Regarding What This Is
What follows is a so-called Expected wRC+ Leaderboard for the very prestigious Cape Cod Baseball League of Cape Cod, a summer wood-bat league that, generally speaking, features the country’s best college prospects.

Regarding Expected wRC+, What That Could Possibly Be
One assumes that Expected wRC+ could be any number of things. In this particular case, however, it’s an attempt to represent in one number — a number a lot like wRC+, that is — something close to the “true talent” production of a player.

Regarding Expected wRC+, How the Author Calculated It
To calculate Expected wRC+, I found the home-run, walk, and strikeout rates for all the batters in the very prestigious Cape Cod League. After that, I attempted to find “expected” versions of those three rates by weighting each of them against league average until they reached their sample threshold for reliability.

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

1. The Briefest of Announcements
2. Featured Game: Toronto at Oakland, 22:05 ET ET
3. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
4. Today’s Complete Schedule

The Briefest of Announcements
The author will be attending the wedding of a good friend in Cambridge this weekend and then eating delicious seafood in Cape Cod after that. The mostly able Patrick Dubuque and Robert J. Baumann, both of NotGraphs, will cover the Notes on Saturday and Sunday (Dubuque) and then Tuesday and Wednesday (Baumann). Please treat them just as poorly as you would treat me.

Featured Game: Toronto at Oakland, 22:05 ET
Regarding This Game, What’s Notable About It
What’s notable about this game is how 23-year-old right-hander Daniel Straily is making his debut in it for Oakland.

Regarding Daniel Straily, Who That Is
Daniel Straily is a pitcher who posted a line very similar to this one at Double-A Midland this year: 85.1 IP, 11.39 K/9, 2.43 BB/9, 0.63 HR/9, 2.57 FIP. And a line almost precisely like this one at Triple-A Sacramento (also this year): 53.0 IP, 11.38 K/9, 2.38 BB/9, 0.51 HR/9, 2.20 FIP.

A Thing the Reader Might Enjoy About Daniel Straily
One thing the reader might enjoy about Daniel Straily is that, while he’s not particularly big (he’s listed at 6-foot-2), his heart is actually 10-feet tall.

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Episode 224
David Laurila, curator of FanGraphs’ Q&A Series, talks with Cubs right-hander Jeff Samardzija.

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 13 min. play time.)

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

1. Custom Leaderboard Event: Recently Traded Players
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Custom Leaderboard Event: Recently Traded Players
Regarding What This Is
The attentive reader — and, really, even the mostly impaired reader — will know that baseball’s trade deadline has recently passed. What follows, for the benefit of both types of readers — both the attentive kind and also the mostly impaired kind, too — is a custom leaderboard of all the players both (a) who were involved in a deadline trade this year* who also (b) have some sort of previous major-league experience.

*Wherein “deadline trade” is defined as any trade to have occurred between July 24th and 31st.

Hyperlink to the Leaderboard in Question
Click this hyperlinked text to navigate your web browser to the leaderboard in question.

Screenshot of Said Leaderboard
Here’s a screenshot of the hitters part of the aforementioned leaderboard (sorted by season WAR, entirely embiggenable via clicking):

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Episode 223
Dayn Perry, contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and author of two books (one of them serviceable), inserts himself into the host’s celebration of his own marriage to a real-live human woman.

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 50 min. play time.)

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With the trades Tuesday of Hunter Pence and Shane Victorino to the Giants and Dodgers, respectively, two-thirds of the Phillies’ opening-day outfield is now plying its trade in California. For a team that found itself in last place at the deadline, the move wasn’t a particularly surprising one. However, the Phillies aren’t a typical sort of last-place team. They entered the season with the majors’ second-highest payroll, at about $175 million. Moreover, they’ll enter 2013 with a little under $130 million committed to just seven players: Cliff Lee ($25 million), Cole Hamels ($24 million), Roy Halladay ($20 million), Ryan Howard ($20 million), Chase Utley ($15 million), Jonathan Papelbon ($13 million), and Jimmy Rollins ($11 million).

With the absence of Pence and Victorino, manager Charlie Manuel was compelled on Tuesday night to deploy a lineup against the Nationals that included Juan Pierre (in left), John Mayberry (in center), and Laynce Nix (in right) — with Domonic Brown making an appearance as a pinch-hitter. The arrangement worked this once, with the aforementioned triumvirate going 6-for-14 with a walk (in a game started by Stephen Strasburg, no less) and the Phillies beating the East-leading Washingtonians by a score of 8-0 (box). That said, none from Pierre or Mayberry or Nix is likely the answer over the course of a full season — especially if the question is, “Who are some starting outfielders on your World Series-winning club?”

And yet, a World Series-winning club is still what it appears as though the Phillies intend to be in 2013. With the exception of the aforementioned deadline trades of Pence and Victorino, the moves made by general manager Ruben Amaro over the last couple years have been decidedly of the “win now” variety. The retention of Cliff Lee (whose name was invoked in trade rumors) at the deadline and the decision to sign Cole Hamels to a six-year, $144 million contract extension both suggest that Amaro has not abandoned the idea of a playoff-contending Phillies squad in 2013.

Because I’m curious (and because that maybe means at least one other person on the internet is, too), I’d like to consider here, in a very basic way, if the Phillies are in a position to contend for the playoffs in 2013 — and, if they’re not at the moment, how they might put themselves in such a position.

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

1. Expected wOBA Leaderboards: Almost All July
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Expected wOBA Leaderboards: Almost All July
A Brief Explanation of What This Is
In the not very distant past, I presented something in the Notes called “Expected wOBA,” itself essentially a version of Bradley Woodrum’s Fielding Independent wOBA but with regressed (as opposed to raw) home-run, walk, and strikeout rates — and a (somewhat haphazardly) regressed version of Woodrum’s updated xBABIP formula, as well — as the inputs.

The idea behind Expected wOBA is to estimate something like a player’s true talent over the course of X plate appearances, where X equals a relatively low number.

Expected wOBA Leaders: Almost All July
Here are the leaders in Expected wOBA (xWOBA, in this case) among all batters over almost all July — which is to say, all of July except for July 31st, on account of that’s when I ran the data. Note that anything beginning with an -x- has been regressed. Note also that, in the absence of actual research having been done on it, I’ve opted to regress stolen-base percentage to 100 plate appearances (as, unregressed, it gives undue credit to players who’ve stolen one base in, for example, just four plate appearances).

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Episode 222
Matt Sussman has distinguished himself for his excellent Twitter feed (@suss2hyphens), but who is Matt Sussman really? That’s merely one of the questions left unanswered — left unasked, really — on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 43 min. play time.)

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