Defensive errors have been a part of baseball history forever, but we seldom ever talk about them now. We’ve come to better understand the importance of range, and so we look beyond errors for our defensive evaluations. A guy might make an extra error or two simply because he’s covering a lot more ground than a peer. There’s also the matter of errors being subjective, some being obvious calls and some being coin flips. As for hitters, errors are mistakes by the other team. When a hitter smacks a ball in play and the defense makes an error, we tend to think of the hitter as lucky, because that shouldn’t have happened. So hitters don’t get a lot of credit.

But errors do happen, and they’re factored into some wOBA formulas, and there’s a line of thinking that faster runners can force more defensive errors, giving them a mostly unseen advantage. There’s the idea, then, that there’s indirectly some skill involved, which might mean a few extra runs. I, personally, have seen Ichiro reach a bunch of times on misplays, which might’ve had to do with his speed. The more a defender has to hurry, the more prone he might be to screwing up, which could be a thing worth talking about. We’re about to focus on Norichika Aoki.

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This story has been updated to reflect some information provided by a source about the Norberto case after publication. We apologize for any mistakes in the original post.

We’ve focused a great deal of attention lately on MLB’s power to suspend players involved with Biogenesis and the grievance procedure available to those players who are suspended for violation of the Joint Drug Program. But the collective bargaining agreement provides for a separate and distinct grievance process for all sorts of non-disciplinary matters — namely, disputes between between a player and his club. That grievance procedure isn’t often in the news, but it is this week, and therefore, worth discussing.

Relief pitcher Jordan Norberto filed a grievance late last week against the Oakland A’s. Norberto told Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle that the A’s shouldn’t have released because he was injured at the time.

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Since I write most everyday here at FanGraphs, I keep a running list of things to do that serves as a queue for future post topics. One of the things on my to-do list has been to build a custom leaderboard of all the potential trade targets as we head towards the July 31st deadline, so that you guys could easily compare and sort various players who might fit needs for the teams you root (or work) for.

Well, in a pretty happy coincidence, that was apparently also on Tim Dierkes’ to-do list, and he’s more motivated than I, so he beat me to the punch. Not that I’m complaining, as now I get to write about the custom leaderboard he made without having to do any of the work.

Note that this list is just position players, and as Dierkes noted, it is a highly subjective list of who might be available. There are probably players listed who aren’t as available as they might seem from the outside, and players not listed who will end up getting moved over the summer. Dierkes, though, definitely knows the pulse of the rumor mill, given that he runs MLB Trade Rumors, the baseball news behemoth of the internet.

For the purposes of this post, I’ve reproduced the list of top 30 players by past 365 day WAR, but you should click through to the entire leaderboard to look at the 63 names he came up with. From there, you can sort them however you’d like, including using multiple years of data, isolating positions, splits versus pitcher types, and all the other goodies you can find on the leaderboards here on FanGraphs.

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You know who sucks at hitting? Pitchers. Boy, they just really suck. Pretty much always have, probably always will. Sure, every so often, a random pitcher will run into one and blast a dinger out of nowhere. But the same could be said of Munenori Kawasaki (now), and while pitchers aren’t automatic outs, they’re as close as you’re going to get to automatic outs in a regular major-league baseball game. Maybe this calls for a reminder that pitchers only suck relative to big-league position players. They’re better at hitting than us. But their numbers are always deplorable, and we don’t always have to be all fair-like. When a pitcher bats in a rally, you assume that the rally is over.

The designated hitter became a thing in 1973, following various proposals. From that point on, pitchers stopped hitting in the American League, while they continued hitting in the National League. In the previous sentence I have explained the most basic of rules. Thus, NL pitchers faced a lot of pitchers, while AL pitchers didn’t, even after the advent of interleague play. Unsurprisingly, then, since the DH came into existence, NL pitchers have posted a higher strikeout rate than AL pitchers. They’ve posted a higher strikeout rate every single season.

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Last Thursday, on his 37th birthday, Carlos Lee announced his retirement. Reportedly, Mariano Rivera and Bruce Chen’s fellow Panamanian wanted to keep playing if he could get a two-year deal, but no such contract was forthcoming. That was hardly surprising given Lee’s recent offensive production; .261/.321/.410 (99 wRC+) was just not all that exciting for a first baseman, especially one in his late 30s.

While in recent years Lee may have stood out as a prime example of a bad contract for a team that should have been more serious about rebuilding at the time, Lee was a good player. I doubt anyone is going to be nominating him for the Hall of Very Good, and his defense, especially in his later years, was, shall we say, not great. But Lee was a productive hitter for most of the 2000s. He was a three-time All-Star, and, as Aaron Gleeman pointed out, despite being an consistently good power hitter in his prime, he never struck out all that much, and in the first half of his career stole a surprising number of bases. Lee also stood out from among most of his contemporaries by having a legitimately cool nickname.

Lee’s career numbers are easy enough to look up, so as we often do, let’s remember him by taking a look at his three biggest hits according to Win Probability Added (WPA).

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The Tigers bullpen has been a running punchline for a while now, and if you were to identify a flaw on their team — besides corner infield defense, anyway — you’d point out their shaky ninth inning options when being asked to hold a lead. Bruce Rondon showed he wasn’t ready for the gig, then Jose Valverde tried and failed once more, so now it’s Joaquin Benoit’s chance to hold down the closer role.

However, the modern singular focus on the closer as representative of a team’s bullpen strength can be misleading, and Detroit is a prime example of why the guy getting the save doesn’t have to be your best relief pitcher. The Tigers might not have a closer, but in Drew Smyly, they have something even better: an old school relief ace.

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I don’t know what the top story in baseball actually is, because we don’t have a measurement for that. I guess it could be anything. What it should be, though, is the fact that the Toronto Blue Jays have won 11 consecutive games. If this were a simple 11-game winning streak, it’d be newsworthy, just because of the odds. But adding to the richness here is the identity of the team, and everything it’s been through. A team that was supposed to be good then was not good, then suddenly became impossibly good, climbing all the way back into the race. Just when people were ready to start officially writing the Blue Jays off as a bust, they picked themselves up in the fastest way possible.

The standings, now, are incredibly tight. In the American League East, five games separate first from fifth, which is also fourth. The Jays are three back in the wild card, and while there’s a point at which the gap is too large to fancy yourself a contender, the point’s a hell of a lot bigger than three. This is a team that’s been banged up, and this is a team that’s about to have the return of Jose Reyes. Unless things quickly reverse course, the Jays won’t soon be selling any pieces. They’ve erased much of their disadvantage.

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I recently posed a question to seven players and three coaches. It was a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Given the subjectivity involved, it may not even have a right answer.

Who was better, Barry Bonds or Babe Ruth?

The question was phrased exactly that way. It was up to the people responding to interpret the meaning of “better” and to elaborate accordingly. They were asked face-to-face, with no opportunity to reference statistical data on their phones or on their laptops. Their responses — listed below in alphabetical order — were both interesting and varied. Read the rest of this entry »

Table of Contents Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Cistulli-less Daily Notes.

1. Leaderboards of Yesterday
2. An Very Watchable International League Matchup
3. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
4. Today’s Complete Schedule, Featuring Entirely Discretionary Watchability Scores

 
Leaderboards of Yesterday

If you’re like me, you’re nostalgic for yesterday. If you’re exactly like me, you were hot-tubbing with several friends yesterday in a reasonably priced rental home in Salt Lake City, enjoying perfect weather, having just attended the most beautiful, perfectly-planned wedding you’ve ever attended, a wedding for two dear and generously talented people. Which means, of course, that you have little idea what went on in the world of Major League Baseball. In which case you’ll want to catch up quickly by viewing the following leaderboards of yesterday:

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In his Major League debut for the Mets, 23-year-old Zack Wheeler struck out seven hitters in his six innings of work. Of those seven strikeouts, six came on fastballs — and of those six, four came on whiffs induced by fastballs.

This got me wondering, what pitchers this year have generated the largest percentage of their strikeouts off of their fastball? And how many generated those strike outs on swings and misses on fastballs*?

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