This just in — George Springer is really good. Like Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, Yasiel Puig, and seemingly a bevy of other players the past few years, Springer is making it look super easy. But it really doesn’t always happen this way. Prospects frequently struggle when they reach the majors, even if they go on to long and productive careers. To demonstrate, I thought I would run through the list of rookie position players from the Wild Card era (minimum 350 plate appearances) and cross reference it with the Baseball America top 100 prospects database to give us a few examples of players who didn’t leap to immediate stardom in their inaugural campaigns.

Really, Really Bad: Ray Durham, 1995 (ranked 28th by Baseball America)
One of the more underrated players of the late 90’s-early 2000’s, for seven straight seasons, and in eight of nine seasons, Durham was worth at least 2.7 WAR. He was an above-average hitter, which is generally not in large supply at the keystone, and while he wasn’t the slickest of fielders, he eventually got good enough to not be a total disaster. His -81.4 Fld mark for his career is a little misleading. In his first five seasons in the majors, he tallied a -75 Fld, but his total across the remaining nine seasons of his career was -6.3. He essentially was below average in one season and then above average in the next.

But, oh, that rookie season. He graduated on April 26 of his age-23 season, and actually did hit pretty well in his initial weeks. From his debut to the end of May, he posted a 111 wRC+. But from June 1 to the season’s end, he posted just a 73 wRC+. Tack in a woeful -22 showing on defense, and you have yourself a -1.4 WAR campaign. Durham would go on to have a pretty nice career for himself — his 30.1 WAR ranks 59th among second basemen all-time (30th since 1947) — but things didn’t look so hot at the end of his rookie campaign.

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For years, the baseball world has been waiting for Commissioner Bud Selig to say something definitive about a new home for the Oakland Athletics. On Wednesday, he finally did. The reaction was anything but definitive.

The A’s have been negotiating a lease extension with the Oakland-Alameda County Joint Powers Authority, the entity that operates the Oakland Coliseum complex. The current lease expires at the end of this next season. Despite all the problems at O.co Coliseum — the sewage, the water leaks, the outdated scoreboard — the A’s need a lease extension because they have no where else to play for the foreseeable future.

Lew Wolff and Gap Inc. heir John Fischer led an investor group that bought the A’s in 2005. Wolff is the managing partner and the public face on the team’s efforts to locate, finance and build a new ballpark — efforts which so far have been unsuccessful. .

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On Wednesday, for the second time in a year, Tim Lincecum threw a no-hitter. For the second time in a year, it was against the San Diego Padres. As Rob Neyer wrote yesterday, one pitcher throwing two no-hitters against the same team in a year is a pretty unlikely outcome, especially considering the fact that Tim Lincecum stopped being TIM LINCECUM a few years ago. If you were going to list off pitchers who would throw multiple no-hitters, you probably wouldn’t go with the guy with the seventh-worst ERA among qualified starters since the start of the 2012 season.

But there’s something a little bit unique about the recent vintage of Tim Lincecum. Something that makes these no-hitters maybe a little bit more understandable.

Below, I’ve charted Lincecum’s seasonal batting average allowed based on whether or not the bases are empty or if there were runners on. The blue line represents the situations in which Linecum would be able to pitch from the wind-up, while the Red line represents — not perfectly, but well enough — situations where Lincecum would have to work from the stretch.

Read the rest on FoxSports.com.

Jason McLeod’s official title with the Chicago Cubs is Senior Vice President, Player Development and Amateur Scouting. Prior to assuming his current position in November 2011, he worked in the same capacity for the San Diego Padres. Before that he was the scouting director for the Boston Red Sox.

McLeod’s track record – particularly on the amateur scouting side – is impressive. Players drafted under his watch include several big-league all-stars. More recent picks populate top-prospect lists.

The 42-year-old McLeod is slated to interview for the recently-vacated general manager position in San Diego. This interview was conducted prior to Josh Byrnes being fired and McLeod being reported as a possible replacement.

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McLeod on scouting, player development and collaboration: “When you look at teams that have historically done well — the Cardinals are an easy example — from an outsider’s perspective you try to glean as much information as you can on how they’ve gone about things. Certainly, you want to model yourself after the organizations that have been most successful in scouting and player development.

“There’s been this adage of scouts versus player development guys, but in my experience I’ve never seen a clear case of we-do-what-we-do and you-do-what-you-do. At least not to any extreme. I’m not sure exactly how many organizations have one guy overseeing both departments, but I’d guess it’s 8-10. I’ve been in that role for a few years now, and I think it‘s obvious that communication is big. Read the rest of this entry »

For all of the natural ebbs and flows of individual player performance, the game’s ruling class — the elite of the elite — is a fairly closed society that remains fairly static from year to year. Any given season might have its Yasiel Puig breaking through, or its Albert Pujols conceding his seat. But the core membership is fairly predictable. What might happen in any given year, though, is one of these elite players taking a temporary step up in class‚ reaching an even more rarified air than before. Over the past two weeks, we’ve taken a deeper look at the 2014 performances of some of the game’s elite and determined whether they have taken things to the next level. Today: Jose Bautista.

Jose Bautista’s path to greatness has been far from traditional. Any list of the game’s greats will turn up players who were once selected in the Rule 5 draft, purchased for cash, claimed on waivers, or traded multiple times, often for non-entities. Each and every one of these scenarios, believe it or not, apply to Bautista. A 20th round draft and follow selection in 2000 by the Pirates, Bautista was selected by the Orioles in the Rule 5 draft at the 2003 winter meetings. Less than six months later, Tampa Bay claimed him on waivers from the Orioles, only to sell him to the Royals less than a month later. He was then traded twice on the same day a month later, just before the 2004 trading deadline, winding up in Pittsburgh.

He was given every chance to succeed over three and a half seasons in the Pirates’ organization, before being moved along one last time, to the Blue Jays in exchange for catching prospect Robinzon Diaz. Yes, Bautista had showed a lot of promise with the bat, especially in the minor leagues, but no, absolutely no one saw what was coming next at the major league level with the Blue Jays.

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Cliff Lee. David Price. Jordan Zimmerman. Tanner Roark. They share consecutive spots on an important leaderboard, but maybe more importantly for Tanner Roark is that he’s even in the same paragraph to begin with. Since he was released by his college team in 2007, a few signature moments have taught him the tools (and grips) to survive (and thrive) in the big leagues.

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San Diego right-hander Jesse Hahn, absent from probably every preseason top-100 prospect list everywhere, has produced four starts of considerably high quality in June — the first four starts, one notes, of Hahn’s entire major-league career. What follows is an interview conducted by the author (a noted dummy) with his own equally dumb self, for some reason, regarding the state of things with Jesse Hahn.

Managing editor of FanGraphs, Dave Cameron, encouraged you to write about Hahn today, suggesting something to the effect that he’s “your type of guy.” With the understanding that no one reading this really cares about you, specifically, explain what Cameron probably meant by that comment.

I believe what he was referring to is how I generally exhibit undue enthusiasm for the exploits of fringe-type prospects. Hahn, as one who was absent from the usual top-100 lists but who has produced results, matches that profile.

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Void of any analysis, this post is!

Full of fun GIFs, also, this post is!

Because baseball is still just a game. Despite all the number-crunching, data-mining, spreadsheet-making, question-asking, answer-seeking, conclusion-drawing and soul-sucking we do here at FanGraphs, it’s important every once in a while to just sit back and soak up what it is that keeps us coming back and makes baseball so fun and interesting: Weird things happening all the time. And dingers. One must always remember to appreciate the dingers.

We’re about halfway through the 2014 season now (!), so it’s time for everyone to start doing best first-half this’ and worst first-half thats. Or, in this case, the most extreme first-half homers.
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Over the first couple of months of the season, I’ve done a couple of end-of-the-month posts on Expected Run Differentials. While pythagorean expected record — the number of wins and losses a team would be expected to have based on their runs scored and allowed — has become nearly a mainstream concept, I’ve never been a huge fan of using runs to determine how well a team has played thus far.

After all, the entire point of looking at run differential instead of actual wins and losses is because we’re acknowledging that wins and losses are affected by the timing of when runs are scored or allowed, and history has shown that run sequencing is mostly just randomness. So, developing an expected win-loss metric that removes the affects of sequencing is a good idea, but pythagorean record only goes halfway to that goal. It removes the timing aspects of converting runs into wins, but ignores the timing aspects of converting baserunners into runs. Evaluating a team by its run differential removes some of the sequencing effects of wins and losses, but leaves plenty of other parts, with no real reason why we should arbitrarily include some sequencing while taking other parts out.

That’s why I’ve always preferred to look at a team’s performance based on expected runs scored and allowed, rather than actual runs scored and allowed; this gives us the most context-neutral evaluation of team performance to date. In the two preceding posts, I walked through the creation of expected runs scored and allowed totals based on each team’s wOBA and wOBA allowed, adjusted for baserunning and fielding values. As a linear weights based metric, wOBA is a very good context-neutral evaluator of individual events.

However, as Jesse Wolfersberger eloquently illustrated at The Hardball Times last week, run scoring at the team level isn’t really linear.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.