It’s not an easy time to be a legend.

I feel redundant saying this, since it’s become a common refrain among sportswriters when discussing star players, but we live in skeptical times. It’s too easy to blame it on the steroids scandal from the late 1990s and early 2000s.  The problem is more deeply rooted than that. Simply put, we live in an age of technology and information – and in such an age, it becomes more difficult to believe in something as abstract as a hero.

We live in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, where small stories become huge scandals. It’s an age where computers and social networks have come to dominate our lives. An age where stats determine whether we keep our jobs, and where a  computer algorithm promises us we can find true love. We have free and easy access to more news than our great-grandparents could have dreamed about, yet we can’t help but crave more information. We’ve truly reached the Information Age.

Yet in this age of instant information, can legends survive? It used to be that legends would grow from hearsay, from people passing around stories by word of mouth. Still, no story can survive for long in these days without being dissected, torn to shreds and stitched back together. If Babe Ruth’s Called Shot happened today, would baseball fans 80 years from now still remember it? Almost certainly not – there would be hundreds of reporters covering the story, searching for quotes and digging up new information and angles. The very mythology of the story would be sucked dry. Heroes and legends often don’t stand up to close scrutiny – they thrive best on uncertainty and myth and the power of a child’s imagination.

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By now, I’m sure everyone has heard the big news: top prospect Mike Trout has been promoted to the majors. He’s filling in now that center fielder Peter Bourjos has strained a hamstring and is expected to be out through the All-Star Break (and who knows for how much longer). In a season where we’ve already seen a wide range of top-rated prospects get promoted to the majors — Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Dustin Ackley, Michael Pineda, etc. — this promotion takes the cake; Trout is arguably the best prospect in baseball (only Bryce Harper can give him a run for his money), and he’s a mere 19 years old.

Most people weren’t expecting to see Trout with the Angels until 2012, but it’s tough to argue that he doesn’t belong in the majors right now. From all reports, his tools are out of this world, and he’s given the Texas League (Double-A) a thrashing this season to the tune of 9 homeruns, 28 stolen bases, and a .429 wOBA.

That doesn’t quite do Trout justice, though. If you need a bit more perspective on his awesomeness, here are some #TroutFacts:

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In light of Jason Bay’s recent hot streak — he’s hitting .307/.374/.466 over the last month — and two homerun game last night, some fans are beginning to wonder if the pre-Mets version of Jason Bay is finally beginning to show up. After all, Bay had posted above a .385 wOBA in four of the five seasons prior to signing with the Mets; his bat can’t disappear overnight, can it? Considering that Bay has now played 155 games with the Mets, take a look at how his line compares with the average for the rest of his career:

When you look at his numbers in this light, his problem becomes immediately obvious: his power has completely evaporated. He’s still walking at a similar rate (10-11%), striking out at a similar rate (25%), hitting around 90 singles per 600 PA, making contact with a similar number of pitches (75%), and having balls fall in for hits at around his career average rate (.320 BABIP). Literally the only difference between the Old Bay (mmm!) and New Bay is his utter lack of power: his homerun total has plummeted, dragging his batting average down, and he’s also hitting fewer doubles. While Bay used to be good for 30+ homerun per season, the Mets have only gotten a total of 43 extra base hits out of him so far.

This conclusion leads me to two important questions: how much is Citi Field to blame for Bay’s loss of power, and is Bay’s recent surge a sign of good things to come?

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If there were questions earlier this year whether Adrian Gonzalez was among the best hitters in baseball, consider your doubts answered. After hitting 71 home runs and posting a .288/.400/.530 line (.390 wOBA) in the past two seasons in San Diego, Gonzalez has started off his tenure in Boston on a blistering pace. He now has a .434 wOBA — second-best in the American League behind only Jose Bautista — and his .357 batting average is the highest in the majors. Can he adjust to the AL? Will he thrive in the toughest division in baseball? Gonzo laughs at your concerns.

So while Gonzalez is tearing the hide off the ball, there’s also an interesting subplot going on. Namely, how is Fenway Park affecting his hitting value? He’s hit 16 home runs so far this season and he’s on pace for 34, a small bump from last season. But it was a common assumption during the off-season that Fenway’s cozy confines would lead to an even more dramatic homer increased for Gonzalez. In fact, although Gonzalez currently has the highest Isolated Power of his career (.248 ISO), it looks as though he’s hitting with less power this season.

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Sports are biased toward success. That’s quite the obvious statement; players aren’t going out on the field and trying to lose, and fans don’t root for their favorite team to lose on a nightly basis. We all love a winner.

And yet, there’s something very satisfying in flipping the leaderboards on their head and looking at which players have been the worst in the majors. It’s a bit sadistic when you think about it — these players are people too, and we all know how much it hurts to perform poorly at your job — but the Yuniesky Betancourts and David Ecksteins of the world can get just many words written about them as star players sitting at the top of the game.

But schadenfreude be darned, I can’t help but want to know who the worst players in the majors have been over the past few years. Care to join me? Let’s take this category by category, as ranked by cumulative stats from 2010 and 2011.

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After only throwing 37 pitches through two innings, Roy Oswalt left his start last night due to back soreness. This is definitely disappointing news for the Phillies’ starter, considering he’s already had one DL stint this year as a result of back pain, but I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this sort of a quote from him after the game:

Woh! Talk about retirement? Doesn’t that seem just a leetle bit extreme?

As it turns out, possibly not.

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Check out this line from Madison Bumgarner’s start last night: 0.1 IP, 9 hits, 8 earned runs, 1 strikeout.

Holy implosions, Batman! Not only did this start cause countless fantasy owners to collapse in grief, it also solidified Bumgarner a spot in the record book; as multiple people have pointed out, Bumgarner became the first starter in the live-ball era to allow nine hits while only recording one out. And here I was, thinking that Vin Mazzaro had already used up this year’s allotment of “historically bad ineffectiveness.”

So in light of this performance, here’s the question I want to tackle: why was Bumgarner so bad last night? Overall, he’s been a great pitcher so far this year — while his ERA is a tad high now (4.00), his 2.90 FIP and 3.47 xFIP both speak to his excellent peripherals. His strikeout rate is slightly up this season and his K/BB ratio is only slightly lower, and he’s managed to generate more swinging strikes while limiting his homeruns allowed. The biggest reason that his ERA is so inflated this season appears to be his .333 BABIP — hitters are simply getting more hits off him, as we saw in dramatic fashion last night.

As Dave Cameron pointed out in a very timely post on BABIP yesterday, there are three main variables that go into influencing a pitcher’s BABIP: good or bad defense, luck, and pitching. While saberists have historically focused on “luck” as the main reason for variations in BABIP, the truth is that all three of these variables are constantly interacting with one another — and not only that, but bad pitching is to blame more than many of us normally admit.

Want a prime example of these interacting factors? Let’s take a play-by-play look at Bumgarner’s start yesterday.

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Coming into this year, things were looking up for the Baltimore Orioles. With a young pitching staff that had shown signs of maturing over the second half of the 2010 season and a lineup boosted by free agent veterans like Vladimir Guerrero and Derrek Lee, it wasn’t inconceivable that the Orioles could shoot to break .500 for the first time since 1997. While they were still stuck in the challenge AL East, the O’s made it clear this off season that they’re no longer a team to gloss over — competing for the playoffs was still a few years away, but they could still serve as spoilers and make other teams fight for the wins.

Well, things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. The Orioles entered today with a 32-37 record and a -42 run differential, sitting 2.5 games behind the fourth-place Blue Jays — who, by the way, are currently at .500. While that’s far from a horrible place to be, just about everything that could go wrong for the O’s this year has gone wrong.

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If you’ve missed my earlier Saber-Friendly Tips, you can find them here.

As I have alluded to in the not-so-distant past, I feel like sabermetric writing should not be all the same. If you’re writing a piece that’s geared for other saberists — or for a very knowledgeable audience, like this one — then obviously very different rules apply than if you’re trying to cater your analysis to a broader audience. You can toss around multiple acronyms and discuss statistical concepts without much worry, while doing the same thing in other places could have you denigrated by your audience as a know-it-all, pompous jerkface.

We all love to poke fun at television announcers — whether at ESPN, MLBN, or elsewhere during game broadcasts — but they face a very difficult task: how do you give insightful analysis while still appealing to the wide range of different viewers out there? There are plenty of announcers out there that love stats and analysis (hello, David Cone!), and it’s no easy task to try and mesh those numbers into a game broadcast without scaring off all the viewers out there who don’t like math.

These same challenges apply to us saberists. What sort of an audience are we trying to reach, and how can we best do so? Today I want to suggest another way in which people can help make saber-stats easier to digest: rounding your numbers.

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I can’t speak for the other writers here, but I can tell you one thing with certainty: I put way too much time into thinking about the FanGraphs Franchise Player Draft. Even though it was a hypothetical draft and merely a fun exercise, I found myself sweating bullets as my turn came around to pick. What’s the best strategy in this sort of draft? Should I go with upside, or with certainty? How much risk is too much risk, and how much is not enough? Gah, so many questions!

As we went through this draft, every one of us writers had to ask ourselves the exact same questions, and judging from the final results, each of us chose to answer them slightly differently. That’s one of the beautiful things in a draft like this: there’s no real “wrong” strategy (outside of selecting Chone Figgins or someone of that nature). Everyone still picked a potential franchise player — it’s just that each person’s pick can tell you a little about themselves if you look closely enough. For instance, I think Cistulli may just be one of those people that goes “All In” and then turns to his table-mate and says, “Now…what game is this again?” Go big or go home — Carson loves prospects and upside, and picking Mike Trout at #3 was living life on the wild side.

So why did I choose Carl Crawford with the #7 pick? I thought this was a potentially controversial pick at the time, but I had a very deliberate, thought-out reason for selecting Crawford. Let me explain.

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