In an attempt to better quantify the meaningfulness of college baseball stats, I recently applied my KATOH methodology to college baseball players. You can read about the details of my methodology, my findings and some of my projections over at The Hardball Times. My piece on college hitters went up on Friday, while I dropped my analysis of college pitchers on Monday.

Now, using the KATOH models I developed, let’s take a closer look at the 13 college players who were selected in the first round of yesterday’s draft. I stopped short of including the players taken in the compensation or competitive balance rounds, but I’ll address many of these players — along with those taken in the next few rounds — in the next week or so.

Please note that my KATOH forecasts for hitters tend to run a bit higher than the ones for pitchers. For this reason, I recommend you compare hitters’ projections to only hitters, and pitchers’ projections to only pitchers.

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Monday, I wrote a post, building off of another post. Now this is a post, building off of Monday’s post. To review, this is said post, wherein I examined the relationship between early-season team performance and rest-of-season team performance. How much might the current standings tell you? Going back 10 years, and choosing an appropriate date:

Right, this has already been published. As has the following plot:

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In the last couple of weeks, we’ve discussed many of the various aspects of the emerging granular batted-ball velocity/exit angle data that is becoming more pervasive in the game today. We’ve already covered both the overall hitting and pitching contact-quality leaders and laggards in both leagues, and are now ready to dig deeper into some of the nuances that make it less than advisable to simply accept raw contact-authority at face value. Let’s investigate the impact of pulling the ball on the ground at an excessive rate; today’s we’ll look at the 2014 AL extreme ground ball pullers, and next week, we’ll check out the NL.

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Last week, writing for JABO, I examined a huge difference between the American League and the National League. The NL, for the most part, has played out about as expected, to this point. There aren’t many tremendous surprises. In the AL, though, things have gone insane, with a strongly inverse relationship between team performance and preseason projected team performance. You could say the AL is somewhat upside-down, given what we thought it would be, and that’s fun! That’s weird! Who doesn’t like weird baseball?

Toward the bottom, I embedded the following plot of information from 2014:

For one season of data, that’s team winning percentage over the first two months, and then team winning percentage over the remaining four months. A year ago, there was hardly any relationship, but I wanted to look at more. That’s what this is about. Here, we’ll examine 10 years, instead of just one.

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We all know, entering the season, that the WAR leaderboards in the early part of the year reveal less about the players contained within them than those same WAR leaderboards at the end of the year. That knowledge doesn’t stop me, personally, from compulsively looking at the leaderboards just as soon as the season begins. Remember Freddy Galvis? He was tied for the National League lead among shortstops with 0.9 WAR — and “on pace” for a great season at the end of April. A month of replacement-level production has placed him considerably lower among major-league shortstops. What about Devon Travis? At the end of April, his 1.4 WAR was sixth in all of baseball. Unfortunately, an injury slowed him down and he has been unable to add to his impressive April totals.

Now that we have reached the second week of June, the leaderboards begin to look a little more familiar. Mike Trout, Josh Donaldson, and Paul Goldschmidt have continued great runs of production. Bryce Harper has emerged and Jason Kipnis has returned to form after a poor 2014 season. There are still surprises at this point, though. The production of Harper and Kipnis was not expected to reach these levels, Joc Pederson has been far more impressive than anyone could have expected, and Dee Gordon is still slapping and running his way into the top ten. We will see more changes as the season wears on, providing a more accurate depiction of player value as more games are played. However, since we are all looking at the leaderboards now, it might be worthwhile to point out a few anomalies in WAR totals due to the small sample sizes we have with defensive statistics.

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The A’s and Red Sox are both last-place teams so perhaps you weren’t riveted to your screen Friday night when the two met for the first of a three-game set in Boston. If not, you missed the major-league debut of a 29-year-old relief pitcher. Your life is undoubtedly sadder now. But have no fear because you’ve stumbled upon this here article which will fill you in on said 29-year-old relief pitcher. Settle in for some fun!

We’re not in the habit here at FanGraphs (or, really, anywhere else) of cataloguing the debuts of old relievers, but this one is odd enough to be special. Pat Venditte threw his first major-league pitch Friday night left-handed. It was to Brock Holt the first batter he faced. Then, after Holt grounded out to first base, he threw the first pitch to Hanley Ramirez, the second batter he faced, right-handed. That’s because Pat Venditte is a switch pitcher.

We can start off with this:

That’s the last switch-pitcher, Greg Harris. So, you know, this stuff isn’t easy. Unlike Harris, Venditte has been switch-pitching his whole life so he can actually throw it to the catcher with both arms! But actually, he’s even better than that.

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As most baseball fans are by now aware, a fan at Friday night’s game between the Oakland A’s and Boston Red Sox was seriously injured after being struck in the head when a fragment of a broken bat flew into the stands. Although initial reports suggested the woman had suffered “life-threatening” injuries, it fortunately now appears that she is expected to survive the incident.

Nevertheless, the severity of Friday’s accident has brought renewed calls for Major League Baseball to take greater steps to help protect fans from similar injuries in the future. Although broken bats and foul balls at MLB games have only resulted in one documented fan fatality in history, a recent study estimated that approximately 1,750 fans are injured by foul balls alone each year.

As a result, various observers are calling on MLB to require that teams install more extensive netting to protect fans sitting close to the field from flying objects. At the same time, others have urged a more cautious approach, suggesting that additional netting will detract from the fan experience, and that ticket buyers can rationally weigh the pros and cons of sitting in exposed seats.

While there are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of the issue, all too often these debates overlook an important legal reason that helps explain why MLB hasn’t done more to protect its fans from these sorts of injuries. Under what is known as the “Baseball Rule,” courts have historically held that professional baseball teams are not legally liable for any injuries fans that may sustain after being hit by a foul ball or broken bat.

Until this rule changes, there will be little financial motive for MLB to install additional netting to protect fans sitting in the closest proximity to the field.

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The bar is fairly low for an offensive catcher — the position has been 11% below league average since Brian McCann entered the league — and so even when the Yankee backstop hasn’t been at his best with his bat, he’s been good. Still, last year wasn’t his best year, and he noticed something he didn’t like, so he “got with Kevin Long” as he told me. Now McCann is back at career production levels, thanks to eliminating something he’s done his whole career: popping it up.

Maybe it’s unfair to call it a problem, but McCann has popped the ball up fairly regularly over the course of his career. Of the 533 qualified batters that have played since 2006, McCann has the 186th-worst pop-up rate (4.1%), which is a bit worse than the league average over that time period (3.5%).

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Health concerns haunted Tanner Scheppers early in his career. Teams feared the Fresno State product couldn’t shoulder the load, which caused him to fall in consecutive drafts, with an indie-ball stint sandwiched in between. The Rangers ultimately inked him to a contract in 2009, and while there have been maladies here and there, he’s yet to go under the knife for an arm woe. An out-of-the-box-for-most-professional-athletes approach is a reason why.

“I really believe in integrative medicine — the combination of what doctors prescribe, and a holistic approach,” explained Scheppers. “I’ve limited the surgeries and have been able to overcome things with alternative medicine. That’s a testament to the training staff here, and to the other people I work with. The combination of both worlds has helped me overcome a lot.” Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball might be incredibly healthy in terms of attendance, television ratings, and finances, but the league has a perception problem that will not go away anytime soon. Baseball’s biggest challenge is, and always likely will be, creating new fans. This is not a challenge unique to baseball or sports in general. All sports continue efforts to draw in new fans just like Coke and Pepsi use marketing campaigns to lure in a new generation of soda drinkers. Rob Manfred has made one of his goals to increase childhood participation in baseball as he believes that children who play baseball turn into baseball fans as adults, continuing the generational chain that has allowed baseball to thrive for more than a century.

While getting more youths to participate in baseball is hardly the only initiative MLB will undertake to grow the sport, getting new fans to attend games is very important for baseball’s future. The Angels’ most recent public-relations mistake, discouraging fans from lower socioeconomic levels from attending because they do not spend as much as other fans once they get to games, is a shortsighted strategy that could hurt baseball in the long run.

In his story for the OC Register, Pedro Moura discussed the Angels’ declining attendance with Robert Alvarado, a Vice President with the team. Alvarado dismissed targeting fans looking to pay for lower-priced seats because they do not make as many purchases once they are inside the stadium. This somewhat callous disregard for “discount buyers,” as Alvarado calls them, might work for short-term revenue, but the team has seen one of the bigger drops in attendance in MLB and the plan is a questionable one long-term.

Since we looked at attendance last month, there have not been too many big changes at the top or bottom of attendance rankings. The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees are still the highest-drawing teams, and the Cleveland Indians, rebounding on the field and in attendance, passed the Tampa Bay Rays in seasonal attendance over the past month. The Angels do boast decent numbers compared to all teams. (All attendance numbers below from Baseball Reference.)

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