It’s draft day, so I thought a draft related link post was in order. Baseball America has covered the draft from every possible angle you might imagine, but since I’m a nerd and I like numerical analysis, this draft history piece by Matt Eddy is my favorite part of their draft coverage. While Eddy isn’t the first to look at a series of drafts and see where the strengths and weaknesses have been, he updates the results to cover 1989-2008, and he breaks down the results in a way that is easy to digest.

I could excerpt a ton of different parts of the story, which is why you should just go read the whole thing. Here’s one part that stands out, though:

Despite the large disparity in graduation rates for college position players and high school ones, the gap in impact rates is much narrower. About 14 in 100 college players in our study have accumulated at least 10 WAR for their careers, while nearly 11 in 100 high schoolers reached that level. In fact, the star-of-stars high school position players (Top 5) produced more wins above replacement (1,091) than their college counterparts (1,016), which is remarkable when you consider their lower graduation rate, lower impact rate and the fact that prep stars spot roughly three years of experience to college players at the time of their draft selection, a phenomenon that ought to make collegians in the later years of our sample considerably more productive.

High school position players keep track with collegians if you expand the impact threshold to 20 career WAR (34 high school, 31 college), 30 career WAR (17, 17) or 40 career WAR (11, 11).

Eddy finds something similar when he looks at pitchers as well. Basically, the idea that college players are significantly better bets than high school players simply doesn’t seem to be true anymore, if it ever was. The flameout rate of high school players is much higher, but almost the entirety of the difference is made up of college guys who get to the big leagues but never amount to much. In terms of actually finding talent who produce significant value — and it’s not like +10 WAR is a crazy high bar — high school players have done nearly as well, despite the fact that (as Eddy notes) the three year head start they have should bias the results of active players towards the college guys.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth reading, as are the rest of Eddy’s articles on the draft’s history. And, despite what might have been written about the draft 10 years ago, don’t freak out if your favorite team takes a high school kid tonight. Even if they draft a high school pitcher. It’s okay, really.

All anyone can talk about these days, some of the time, is the matter of pitch-framing. It’s a concept we’ve been vaguely aware of since childhood, or since whenever we started paying attention to baseball, but for a while it was one of those things we ignored because we didn’t know how to measure it. Then some people started to measure it, and it seemed to make a big difference sometimes, and that’s exciting, and people got excited. People remain excited, since framing is a new field and it’s fascinating to learn how some catchers can do it while other catchers struggle. It’s a very small part of the game overall, but it still has that new-stat scent, and evidence suggests at the extremes it’s pretty significant. I’m thankful for the advances in pitch-framing research.

When people talk about framing, or receiving, though, they talk mainly about the catchers. That’s fine, the catchers are most responsible. They’ll talk a little about the pitchers, and that’s fine too, because catchers need the pitchers’ help. It’s hard to frame a pitch thrown to the opposite side of the plate. But good framing has victims, and worse framing has beneficiaries. The pitchers are affected but the batters are affected too, and it stands to reason framing isn’t completely independent of the guy in the box. Batters probably have some effect, so those batters are worth investigating. Which batters end up with the most extra strikes? Which batters end up with the fewest?

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Walk around AT&T Park and ask people inside and outside of the organization what’s wrong with Matt Cain and you’ll get a different answer every time:

“He’s tipping his pitches from the stretch.”
“It’s just the Cardinals, that’s all.”
“The Cardinals got our signs from Bengie Molina.”
“It’s his command.”

It’s worth trying each pair of pants on, but there’s also one person who might have special insight on this matter. Matt Cain.

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In 1992, the Reds took Chad Mottola with the fifth-overall pick of the draft. To put it bluntly, he was a bust. The erstwhile outfielder went on to play 16 professional seasons, but nearly all of them were in the minor leagues. He appeared in just 59 games at the big-league level, the last 10 of which came in 2006 with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Mottola is now in the second phase of his career. He’s also back in Toronto, having been named the team’s hitting coach this past off-season. The assignment followed stints as the organization’s minor league hitting coordinator and Triple-A hitting coach.

Like many who have excelled in his current position, the 41-year-old Mottola understands the craft better than he executed it. A big believer in individuality and communication, he’s a self-professed “mad scientist in the cage.”

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Fairly ordinary business on Wednesday. The Yankees beat the Indians, in New York. Makes sense. CC Sabathia beat Corey Kluber. You’d expect that to happen. Sabathia went the distance. Sure, all right, his decline is overstated. Travis Hafner clubbed a two-run dinger. Sounds like ol’ Pronk! Brett Gardner mashed a three-run dinger of his own. Well, not unheard of. It was Gardner’s sixth dinger of the season. Okay, stop right there.

Pretty much every day, I scan pretty much every box score. It’s a way to compensate for not being able to watch all of the actual action. Box scores can help generate ideas, and failing that, they can at least keep one updated. Seldom am I surprised when I look at a box score, because I think I have a pretty good awareness of the state of the numbers. But somehow this escaped me. I only learned today that Gardner’s more than halfway to double-digit dingers. Granted, he’s only more than halfway as of today, but you know what I mean. This isn’t the Brett Gardner I’ve been aware of.

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Matt Moore was a tippy-top pitching prospect, and like all tippy-top pitching prospects, he was supposed to become an ace. Based on his current sub-3 ERA and number of strikeouts, he’s arrived at a young age. Based on the rest of the picture, Moore remains at least partially unfinished, as he continues to struggle with command consistency. But that’s “unfinished,” relative to perceived ceiling. And players, of course, don’t always reach their ceilings. Most of them fall well short. Just how “finished” is Matt Moore?

Command has been a problem for Moore in the past. Here’s a thing from this past spring:

With Opening Day now a week away, Moore said he isn’t too concerned about his command issues.

“I’m pretty competitive,” he said. “It’s not so much that I can turn it on, but when the time comes around and I’m battling in those moments, when I have runners in scoring position, it’s better (when it’s the regular season).”

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Last night, ESPN reported that Major League Baseball was preparing to suspend 20 players associated with the BioGenesis clinic after convincing Anthony Bosch to cooperate with their investigation. In the report, they included a list of players that are potentially on the to-be-suspended list. That list of names:

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The Angels won 89 games last year despite starting Mike Trout in the minors. After they promoted at the end of April, they played .580 baseball the rest of the way. Over the winter, they added Josh Hamilton, but more importantly, they added the Houston Astros to the AL West. 19 games against the Astros was supposed to give the western contenders a significant advantage, as they could pencil in 12 or 13 easy wins against a team that wasn’t even trying to compete.

Whoops. The Astros just swept the Angels — in Anaheim — and have now beaten LA’s other expensive disappointment in seven of their first 10 match-ups. In fact, the Astros may end up being the primary reason that the Angels miss the playoffs.

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Welcome to the second edition of The Fortnight. Read here for our initial post, and here for the explanation of our depth charts and standings pages, which fuel The Fortnight in its utmost.

This week, I thought we’d take a look at the teams whose projected full-season run differential has changed the most since we last left off. Stats for this edition run from May 21 through the games on June 2.

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Chris Davis has had power for as long as he’s been a professional, and probably longer. His first year, in Low-A, he slugged .534. The next year he slugged .598. In Triple-A he slugged over .600. The power is what got Davis to the majors. But Davis now is taking things to new levels. It wouldn’t be right to say Davis has been hitting everything, because he’s missed quite a lot. But he’s hit more things than he used to, and that’s why he’s currently leading the majors in home runs, with 20. His isolated slugging percentage is more than double Adrian Beltre‘s career number. It’s more than double Robinson Cano‘s. It’s got 50 points on Babe Ruth’s. If baseballs had snot in them, there would be a lot of snot on Chris Davis’ uniform.

Davis possesses what you might call “easy power.” Several people have characterized it as “effortless.” According to FanGraphs commenter farrpar, “He has the most effortless power in baseball, no doubt about it.” According to this guy, “Wow! Chris Davis! Effortless Grand-slam!!! Go O’s.” According to David Miller, “The thing about Davis is that his swing looks so effortless on homerun balls like the one he hit on Sunday.” According to OsLuvrInKy, “Gotta love it. His swings just look so effortless.” Last season, in fact, Davis hit a home run on a broken bat. Because Davis is all the some of the rage right now, I’ve decided to prepare a top-five list of his most effortless home-run swings of the 2013 season so far. One way to measure effortlessness would be biomechanical examination. Another way would be guessing.

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