There is always a bit of a lull between the end of the minor league playoffs in September and the start of the annual top prospects lists in early November. Because of that gap, I’m breathing new life into an old feature that I wrote for the site in FanGraphs’ infancy back in 2008 and 2009.

The series ‘A Minor Review of 2013’ will look back on some of the major happenings in each MLB organization since the beginning of April as a primer for the upcoming FanGraphs Top 10+5 prospects lists. This series will run throughout September and October. I hope you enjoy the series and are eagerly anticipating the start of ‘Prospect List Season.’

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Hey guys, and welcome to a post to which you don’t need to be welcomed. This isn’t property or a residence — no one resides here. This is a post, weighing literally nothing, figuratively little, with no doors and no walls. I’m not inside of it, allowing you in. I’m not even greeting you, as you’re reading this — my words are, but my words are old, having been written in advance of this post being published. So, hey guys, and here’s a post. Did you know that these introductions have become the trickiest part of composing this series? Maybe you can tell. Neat thing about wild swings and wild pitches is that they provide a jumping-off point. You can look for things to write about in the video or the numbers. A completely open introduction? The hell am I supposed to say? I don’t have many strong opinions about things, and this isn’t the place to talk about potential Breaking Bad spoilers. Although that gives me an idea, so check back next week. I’m just kidding, I’m not going to do what I thought of, so you’ll never know what I thought of. Thank goodness, this paragraph is finished.

This is the part where we talk about wild swings and share many laughs because the swings were ugly and irresponsible. Our window of observation this time around goes from September 6 through September 19, and as always, I’ve elected to exclude checked swings and the nearly-always-hypothetical wild swings on hit-and-runs. Authors of excluded checked swings for this edition: Marc Krauss, Brian Bogusevic, Junior Lake, and whoever Chris Rusin is. I’ll warn you that one of the wild swings below was attempted by a pitcher. But to compensate for that, this post also features among the neatest of chance quirks, so, keep your eyes peeled for what I will make a point of bringing to your attention. Get ready for fun! Or get ready to browse the series archive. Now get ready for fun!

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Hey there everybody, and welcome to the first part of this edition of this. Here’s a link to all of the previous editions. Understand that part of me feels guilty right now. This is my full-time job — my full-time job is serving as a content creator on the Internet. It’s a pretty good job, the sort of thing a lot of people out there are currently fighting for. But there are a lot of content creators on the Internet, full-time and part-time and unpaid. The only way to remain relevant on the Internet as a creator is to keep creating. So, there’s a lot of content, and a lot of it seems like it could be interesting, and a lot of that turns out to actually be interesting. So there’s a lot to consume — too much to consume, infinite content to consume — and it’s easy to get lost. Hours can disappear and you can snap out of it and realize you’re reading an article about Super Dave Osborne. The Internet is dangerous, because information is appealing, and it’s easy to click. If you can control yourself, kudos; if you have trouble, I apologize for contributing to the Internet’s volume. Many of you are reading this instead of doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and you might not even realize it, and that makes me feel bad. Not bad enough to stop doing my job, because Greek yogurt isn’t going to buy itself, but know that I know your struggle. This weekend let’s all go to the woods.

Uh so here come some wild pitches, covering the window from September 6 through September 19. Once again, this covers two weeks instead of one, because last Friday I was out of town and FanGraphs stays where my computer is. Don’t know what happens next week. Could cover a week. Could cover the second half. Could cover the whole season. There are surprises in store. Meanwhile, this week, few surprises, except for all of the surprises to come. You know the deal: top five pitches furthest from the center of the PITCHf/x strike zone. Pitches just missing: Ivan Nova to Mike Carp on September 15, Madison Bumgarner to A.J. Pollock on September 8, and Stephen Fife to Angel Pagan on September 14. Those pitchers are fortunate to have escaped mocking commentary. They did not, however, escape mention. Now for some mocking commentary.

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Now it’s the pitcher’s turn. Today I’ll cover the 30, 40 and 50 WAR groups, and we’ll leave the 60 and 70+ WAR groups for the final installment. If you missed Part One and Two on hitters, you can find them here and here.

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I got my start at FanGraphs by writing Community Research articles. As you may have noticed, community authors have been very busy this season, cranking out a lot of interesting articles. One that caught my eye the other day was triple_r’s piece on the importance of strikeouts for hitters. The piece correctly pointed out, as other studies have, that there’s basically no correlation between a hitter’s strikeout rate and his overall offensive production. Strikeouts don’t matter; case closed, right? Well, not exactly.

Let me present a hypothetical situation. Say there’s a group of players who go to an “anti-aging” clinic in Florida and pick up some anabolic steroids. Let’s say these hypothetical players are named Bryan Raun, Ralex Odriguez, Tiguel Mejada, Phonny Jeralta, Celson Nruz, and Barry Bon… nevermind. Yet, after using the steroids, it appears that the group of them, on average, has not improved. The steroids didn’t improve their performance, right? But, wait — let’s also say that while visiting Florida, some of them contracted syphilis, which spread to their brains, causing delusions and severely impacting their judgment, strike-zone and otherwise. The players whose brains aren’t syphilis-addled have actually improved quite a bit, but their gains are completely offset by the losses suffered by those whose central nervous systems are raging with syphilis. So, the fact that the steroids actually do improve performance has been completely obscured by another factor that is somewhat — but not necessarily — associated with the steroids.

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I recently posed a question to 22 baseball writers from across the country. It was a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Given the subjectivity involved, it doesn’t even have a right answer.

“Who are the three best eligible players — not including Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens — not in the Hall of Fame?”

The reason for excluding Bonds and Clemens is the likelihood they would have finished one-two on the majority of ballots. Also not eligible were players who will debut next year, and those, like Pete Rose, ineligible for enshrinement.

The writers were asked to rank their selections in order and provide a brief explanation. The results were then tabulated with first choices receiving five points, second choices receiving three points, and third choices receiving one point.

Their responses are listed below in alphabetical order, followed by the final results of the voting.
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Full, immediate disclosure: it’s actually a tie. When you think unhittability, you might think batting average against, or slugging percentage against, or something. Me, I prefer contact rate, because it’s elegant and simple. Contact rate measures how often batters hit the baseball when they attempt a swing. Most simply, that’s the whole point of a swing. A pitcher who gets a lot of missed swings can rightly be said to be unhittable. Other metrics might penalize for wildness, or just take other matters into account. For pure unhittability, I like looking at the rate of contact, and among National League starters, the lowest rate of contact allowed partly belongs to Francisco Liriano, at a hair above 71%.

Liriano’s tied with somebody else, and it’s not Matt Harvey or Clayton Kershaw. I’m going to be writing about that somebody else, because Liriano’s a lot more familiar. Liriano’s long been hard to hit, and he’s had a breakthrough season for the Pirates after coming over on the cheap. Don’t get me wrong, Liriano’s been surprising, but the guy with whom he’s tied has been a bigger surprise after also joining his current team on the cheap. I’m not sure even the Padres knew what they were getting when they dealt for Tyson Ross.

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Andrelton Simmons and Andruw Jones have a few things in common: they grew up in Curacao, they came up with the Atlanta Braves, they are superlative up-the-middle defenders with good power for their position but some other offensive flaws, and their names both start with “Andr.” I think that the final similarity between the two is this: they help demonstrate just how hard it is for many fans to intuit that one win on offense is equal to one win on defense.

For Simmons, this can be shown by his relative absence in conversations about the league MVP. This year, Simmons’s preternatural play at short has inspired any number of articles exploring whether he’s having the best defensive season ever. But even so, he hasn’t come in for much MVP consideration, which is a bit intuitively bizarre — if a player were having the best offensive season ever, there would be no question of MVP buzz.
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FanGraphs has a lot of metrics, ranging from the standard counting numbers that have filled baseball cards for decades to more complicated calculations and formulas. Odds are pretty good that if there’s something you want to know about a particular Major League player, we probably have a metric for it. However, up until today, we’ve lacked one number that answered two of the most basic questions that people ask: Who has been the best offensive player in the game, and who has been the best defensive player in the game?

You could get at those questions with the numbers we had, using a combination of metrics found on the site, but there wasn’t just a single number that simply answered those two questions. And, unfortunately, the lack of an available sum of offense or defensive value led to people occasionally substituting in a number that didn’t actually answer the question they were trying to answer. This was our fault, not theirs, but as of an hour ago, this has been rectified with the introduction of two new numbers here on FanGraphs.

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Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria was in the news this week and, as usual, there was a decidedly unctuous odor to it. Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported on Monday night of a power struggle between Loria and Larry Beinfest, the team’s president of baseball operations. Lining up with Loria is Dan Jennings, the vice president of player personnel. Lining up with Beinfest is Mike Hill, the general manager. David Samson, Marlin’s president and Loria’s stepson, is nowhere to be found.

In essence, Loria reportedly has pushed aside or overruled Beinfest on a series of baseball decisions, for less than rational baseball reasons. Although the feud between the two dates back many years — Beinfest has been with the Marlins for 13 years — it escalated recently in the wake of allegations that hitting coach Tito Martinez had verbally abused several players. Beinfest conducted an investigation and promised the players confidentiality. Loria was furious when Martinez resigned because he had hand-selected Martinez in the first place. Loria took that anger out on the players who complained: Beinfest was preparing to promote Chris Valaika from Triple-A but Loria interceded because Valaika had been one of the complainants against Martinez. Valaika lost the opportunity he’d earned for a major-league paycheck.

Beinfest wants to know where he stands. Loria refuses to tell him, perhaps preferring to let Beinfest twist in the wind long enough to get fed up and resign. Beinfest is under contract until 2015. If Loria fires him, Beinfest gets paid for two more years. If he resigns, he doesn’t. Given his history, it’s no surprise that Loria would choose the less costly route — to him.

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