A couple of weeks ago, James Shields gave up 10 runs in a start against the Mariners, prompting the Padres owner to call the team’s performance embarrassing. He even cited Shields by name, saying that the pitcher — 18 months into a four year, $75 million contract — should be embarrassed by his outing. It would be the last start Shields would make as a Padre, as a few days later, San Diego shipped him to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for a replacement level arm and a 17 year old who is a long way off from the big leagues. In order to facilitate the deal, the Padres agreed to pick up $31 million of the remaining $58 million on Shields’ deal, giving the White Sox an innings eater at an innings eater price.

At least, that was the thought. In both of his first two starts in Chicago, Shields has been a disaster, giving up 14 runs and lasting only seven innings combined between the two outings. Combined with his final start in San Diego, Shields has now allowed 24 runs in his last three starts, and it’s not like it was just bad luck; he has a 13.48/8.46 FIP/xFIP over those outings as well. It’s likely that Shields will turn things around, as he’s not the worst pitcher baseball has ever seen, but you have to think the White Sox are already wondering if the Padres sold them a lemon.

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a perfectly reasonable sounding plan — a contender taking on part of an albatross contract in order to get a fairly priced veteran without surrendering much value in return — went sour. In fact, if you look at the recent history of deals made in the same vein as the Shields trade, they’ve almost all been disasters for the acquiring team.

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Now that the draft has passed it’s time to get caught up on the weekend’s most significant call-up, that of White Sox top prospect Tim Anderson. Anderson was hitting .304/.325/.409 at Triple-A Charlotte before his promotion.

First, let’s appreciate how incredible it is that Anderson has come this far in such a short amount of time. He didn’t begin playing baseball seriously until his junior year of high school and received no Division I offers despite playing just under eight miles from the University of Alabama and for a school that has produced big-league talent in the past in former reliever Brandon Medders. Instead, Anderson’s chief athletic accomplishment in high school came in basketball, where he helped Hillcrest High School capture an Alabama state title in 2011 (video here, Anderson is #12). Jalen Brown, who clearly looks like the best scorer on that team, ended up averaging just over 10 points per game at Shelton State College, another local school that whiffed on Anderson.

After he began focusing on baseball, Anderson ended up at East Central Community College in Decatur, Mississippi, and slashed .306/.425/.500 with 30 steals in 30 attempts (per Baseball Cube) as a freshman in 2012 but somehow went undrafted. He was finally unearthed during a small college summer league later that year, then blew up at an autumn JUCO showcase and was selected in the first round the following June.

Anderson has prodigious physical skill. He has plus bat speed, clunky-yet-effective bat control and an ability to drive the ball to various parts of the field despite footwork that’s usually indicative of pull-only hitters. In fact, three of Anderson’s four home runs this season have been to right field. Despite special bat speed, Anderson doesn’t yet have a feel for striking the baseball in a way that generates consistent lift, especially to his pull side, and most of his contact is hard but into the ground. It’s a unique contact profile and one that’s tough to grade, but generally scouts think Anderson will end up a 50 or 55 hitter.

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Yesterday morning, I published a post on the main site detailing Jose Altuve’s base-running woes of the past two seasons. Within that post, I noted that Altuve is a good base-stealer, citing his success rate on stolen-base attempts this season. “Among the 71 players with at least five steal attempts this year, Altuve’s success rate ranks third,” I said. The stat would’ve been cooler if I could’ve said he was first, but I couldn’t say that, because there were two Red Sox players in front of him.

Most efficient base-stealers, 2016 (min. five steal attempts)

1. Mookie Betts, 100% (11-for-11)
2. Jackie Bradley, Jr., 100% (5-for-5)
3. Jose Altuve, 95% (18-for-19)

Two Red Sox at the top! Bradley and Betts are a combined 16-for-16 on steal attempts this year. Interesting! Bradley has still never been thrown out on a steal attempt in his major-league career, about which fact I wrote in the offseason. He’s now eight successful steals away from tying the all-time record of consecutive successes to begin a career. And then Betts might just be the best all-around base-runner in the game.

So, those two have been perfect at stealing bases, but as I scrolled down the list of base stealing efficiency, something caught my eye. In 11th place is Hanley Ramirez — Hanley Ramirez! — who’s 5-for-6. Xander Bogaerts is four spots behind him, at 9-for-11. Two spots behind Bogaerts is Dustin Pedroia, 4-for-5.

It’s the whole team! But is it really the whole team? I made a new spreadsheet of team base-stealing efficiency. I think this plot is pretty fun:

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Dillon Gee isn’t a Met anymore. Nor is he a starter (at least not as his primary role). The 30-year-old right-hander is working out of the bullpen in his first season with the Royals. No longer needed in New York, he inked a free-agent deal with Kansas City over the winter.

Gee was a solid, albeit unremarkable, starter for the Mets from 2011 to -14. Then the deGroms, Harveys and Syndergaards burst onto the scene (the ageless Bartolo, too). That made it time to move on, and Gee is now a long reliever making spot starts for a new team. He’s adapting well. In 12 appearances for the defending World Series champs, he has a 3.98 ERA and a career-best 8.2 K/9.

Gee talked about his transition earlier in the season.

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Gee on transitioning to the Royals and a relief role: “I’m probably a better pitcher now than I was in my earlier years. This is just the role I have now. I kind of got phased out in New York. They obviously had some young studs coming up, and I lost my spot there. I had a few opportunities to remain a starter with other teams, but I chose to come here and contribute out of the bullpen for a winning team.

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The draft happened recently. I’m not a draft expert, which is why I seldom write about it, but one of my favorite and least-favorite things about the draft are the player comps. I like them for the color, but I dislike them for the hype. The draft does have to do something to sell itself, and the casual public wouldn’t benefit if drafted players kept getting compared to guys who never made it out of Double-A, but too many drafted players draw comps to elites, like, say, Roger Clemens, or Clayton Kershaw, or Cal Ripken. It’s like the amateurs are set up to disappoint from the get-go. Comparing amateurs to Hall-of-Famers sets expectations impossibly high, and does little to inform the viewers of the reality that most draft picks go nowhere. Tough sport.

We all remember players who were hyped as something they never became. We all remember players who fell short of their big-league comps. It’s almost impossible for a high pick to turn out as good as his comp, given that comps have mostly had long and successful major-league careers. There are some success stories. Obviously, there’s that Mike Trout fellow. And there’s Manny Machado. Even before he was drafted, Machado was compared to Alex Rodriguez. There were, in fairness, a lot of similarities. In unfairness, Rodriguez is one of the best players in the history of the game. The pressure was on from the beginning. And, say, would you look at that, but Machado is actually starting to resemble the very player who seemed to set too high a bar.

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I don’t know you, but I know you didn’t spend last night watching the Marlins and the Padres. Tom Koehler won. Jeff Mathis hit a grand slam. The most interesting player who appeared for the Padres allowed Jeff Mathis to hit a grand slam. The Marlins aren’t bad, and I know even the worst team in the majors is a team of elites, but, look, there’s compelling baseball and there’s less compelling baseball, and the game didn’t have much of a draw. The Padres did try to rally a bit in the seventh, but they wasted a runner on third with nobody out.

That runner reached by drawing a walk. He was stranded in large part because the two following batters struck out. The Marlins reliever in charge of the inning was one Kyle Barraclough. For the fifth consecutive appearance, he struck out multiple hitters. For the 13th consecutive appearance, he struck out at least one hitter. For the 16th time in his last 18 appearances, he walked at least one hitter. Don’t worry if you didn’t know anything about Barraclough before. You’re about to learn. Really, you already have.

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Last week, I published KATOH projections for the players who were drafted out of college in this year’s amateur draft*. As much as I love my projections, they only can only tell you so much about a player. Knowing a player’s projected WAR over a specified period is interesting, but it’s only one number. It simply tells you where a player falls on a spectrum of “good” and “bad.” It tells you nothing about how that player might accumulate those wins, or what he might look like doing it.

*Day one here, day two here, and day three here.

To put some faces to some of the hitters drafted in the first round, I generated some statistical comps using weighted Mahalanobis Distance calculations to college players since 2002. This analysis considers offensive statistics only, so the comps have not been filtered at all by position. The WAR columns refer to that player’s WAR through age 27.

You may notice that Mariners first-round pick Kyle Lewis isn’t included here. Lewis played in a non-elite conference, which has produced very few big leaguers historically. This made generating a KATOH-style projection for him less than straightforward.

*****

2. Nick Senzel, IF, Cincinnati

Proj. WAR thru age-27: 2.0

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Like any baseball stat, Wins Above Replacement provides the answer to a question. The question, in this case? Something like this: accounting for all the main ways (hitting, running, defense, etc.) in which a player can produce value for his team, how many wins has this particular player been worth?

There are, of course, criticisms of WAR. Some valid, others less so. One prominent criticism is how defensive value is handled in WAR. Some don’t understand how it’s calculated. Others understand but also question how well it represents a player’s defensive contributions. These criticisms shouldn’t be dismissed. As with all baseball statistics, though, it’s necessary to consider WAR in the context in which it’s presented — that is, to remember the question a metric is intended to answer and the method by which it attempts to answer that question.

On Monday, I completed one such reminder in a discussion of players whose WAR totals this year are probably low based on what we know about their defense. Today, I’ll make another attempt — this time, by examining players whose WAR totals are probably inflated by defensive numbers unlikely to be sustained over the course of a season.

In the comments of Monday’s post, one reader, Ernie Camacho, noted:

[T]here is a weird tension in this article between quantifying and estimating what has already happened, on the one hand, and evaluating player talent, on the other. I’m not sure we should be blending the two.

This is a good point. That tension most definitely exists, and it’s possible that some of that tension is what causes people to discount defensive metrics — and WAR as a whole. I agree that, in terms of calculating WAR, we should not be blending what has already happened with what we think will probably happen. Over time, in an ideal world, WAR captures both. In smaller samples, however, this is more difficult to do. In fact, there’s actually something that does capture the blending when we have smaller samples: projections. If we want to capture a player’s talent level at any given moment, projections do that very well.

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We often treat knuckleball pitchers as if they were members of some long-forgotten sect, practicing their secret ninjutsu on the rest of the league with a pitch that defies gravity and cannot be classified. That’s fine, the knuckler is the rarest pitch in baseball, and it has its iconic moments. Let’s not begrudge anyone a little fun.

But once you peal back the layers on the pitch, you start to see that each truism about the knuckler isn’t necessarily true. In fact, there are probably more ways in which the art of throwing a knuckleball is similar to the art of throwing other pitches than it is different. At least, that is, in terms of strategy and outcomes. Mechanics are obviously a different story.

Let’s unpack some of the things we might hear about knuckleballs, and then us the data and the words of R.A. Dickey and Steven Wright to guide our analysis.

Velocity doesn’t matter.

Maybe this isn’t a thing that’s said a ton, but nobody breathlessly reports knuckleball velocity readings the way they do fastball readings, so at least implicitly we’ve decided that speed doesn’t matter as much with the floating butterfly.

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Jose Altuve has 18 steals in 19 attempts this season. No, that’s not the bizarre stat. That’s just an impressive stat. Jose Altuve is an excellent base-stealer! Among the 71 players with at least five steal attempts this year, Altuve’s success rate ranks third. Since he began receiving regular playing time in 2012, no one’s stolen more bases. He’s fast, he steals plenty of bases, and he steals them well. Which is what makes the bizarre stat so bizarre, and here it comes: despite being fast, stealing plenty of bases, and stealing those bases well, Jose Altuve has been a terribly costly base-runner.

It’s easy to assume that good base-stealers are also good base-runners. The best base-stealers, typically, are the fastest guys on the field, and the best base-runners, typically, are those same fastest guys on the field. But if you think about it, aside from simply being fast (which isn’t necessarily a requirement for proficiency in either skill), base-stealing and base-running really aren’t as similar as they might appear. Base-stealing is more about pattern recognition, acceleration, and timing. Base-running has more to do with risk/reward decision-making, fluidity, and instincts. A base-stealer runs in a straight line with a defined endpoint. A base-runner runs in angles. Speed and athleticism is all that really ties these skills together.

Altuve has the speed and athleticism. That’s for sure. But when it comes to his base-running company, he’s the only one:

Look at that list of names. Look at it! It’s literally a list of nine old dudes whom way too many baseball fans believe they could beat in a footrace, and then Jose Altuve, one of the best base-stealers in the world.

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