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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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There’s a lot going on with the Cleveland Indians right now. They’re not playing to expectations, but the expectations remain. The team has the highest projected rest-of-season win percentage, and our playoff odds have them just a hair underneath the Kansas City Royals, who have played far better than Cleveland this year.

The Indians haven’t really played that poorly, though. On a component level, they’re doing a lot of things correctly. Their offense and baserunning are top notch, as is their starting rotation. For all the fits Cody Allen gave the team at the season’s start, their reliever FIP- is middle of the pack. Their defense has been a problem, though. By Def, they rank 28th; they are 26th by UZR/150 and 25th by DRS. As it is pondered how to fix the Indians’ defense, attention obviously turns to the farm system, where top prospect Francisco Lindor currently resides. As one with flashy leather tools on his tool belt, it would seem natural that Lindor would be summoned to help the cause — especially when the incumbent shortstop Jose Ramirez isn’t hitting all that well. Is that fair? Are the Indians being too conservative with Lindor?

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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The All-Star Game ballot is no longer available in paper form. This comes to the chagrin of many, but probably didn’t really bother the vast majority of the baseball watching population. The paper ballot certainly had its limitations, and space was chief among them. There simply isn’t much room on the paper ballot, and often you had to squint to read the names, which is all the more difficult on a sunny day when you’re consuming some frosty beverages. Now that baseball has done away with the paper ballot though, it raises the following question:

Hey, since All-Star voting is no longer constrained by the size of a paper ballot, isn't it time fans were able to vote for pitchers, too?

— Joe Sheehan (@joe_sheehan) May 27, 2015

Joe often comes up with good questions around MLB’s big events, and this was no exception. Given that there is no limit to how long the ballot can be online, and given how slick MLB’s online ballot actually is, there really doesn’t seem like much reason to keep pitchers off the ballot. For one thing, you’d be doing the managers a big favor, as the fans would be doing a lot of the work for them. There will still inevitably be pitchers who start on the Sunday before the game and are thus removed from the proceedings (side note: this bugs me when teams do this, though there really isn’t a good fix for it), not to mention normal injuires, so the managers won’t have their voting power completely stripped away. Still, this would alleviate some of their burden. There’s a chance that it could simply focus their pain on one or two decisions when crappy teams are involved and you need to pick an All-Star, any All-Star from said crappy team, but that seems like a risk worth taking to give fans more of a say.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Much of (baseball) history comes down to who you believe. Let’s take Gaylord Perry, for example. Here’s an excerpt from his Society of American Baseball Research bio:

Following the season, the rules committee finally outlawed the practice of a pitcher putting his hand to his mouth anywhere on the pitcher’s mound, instructing the umpire to call a ball upon each infraction. According to Perry’s later confession, spitballers had to learn to use foreign substances like Vaseline or hair tonic, rather than saliva. In Perry’s words, “That rule virtually eliminated the pure spitball in baseball. I had the whole winter and spring to work out an adjustment. It wasn’t easy.” Prior to the rule change, Perry would touch his cap and mouth, and fake a wipe of his fingers. Now he had to get his moisture somewhere else on his person, and also learn a new series of elaborate decoy moves. He spent the winter practicing in front of the mirror. After a rocky spring training, he managed just fine.

Seems pretty bad. And at the end of his long, illustrious/infamous career, Perry would actually be ejected for having a ball covered in vasoline. But then, consider his Hall of Fame plaque. Its second sentence reads:

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