Carlos Marmol doesn’t have the highest career walk rate in baseball history. That honor belongs to Mitch Williams, who walked one of every six guys he faced. But Marmol isn’t far behind, and he’s the leader among actives. Marmol has a higher career walk rate than Jason Giambi. He has a higher career walk rate than Brian Giles and Mike Schmidt and Jeff Bagwell. Walks are just part of the package, and Marmol isn’t some kid anymore, so it’s not like they’re about to go away with a mechanical tweak. This is in part due to the fact that Marmol is hard to hit, so he ends up in a lot of deep counts. This is more in part due to the fact that Marmol has had really lousy command.

Control is said to be the ability to throw strikes. Command is said to be the ability to hit spots. We don’t have a measure of command, but we can assume that a guy with Marmol’s walk rate doesn’t list it as a strength on his hypothetical English-language pitcher resume. The walks are part of the reason the Cubs see Marmol as expendable. They’re part of the reason he doesn’t have much of a market, and they’re part of the reason he’s no longer closing. Everybody knows command is a Carlos Marmol weakness. And now we have fun with a quick project.

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Three years ago, Derek Norris was a highly-regarded catcher in the Washington Nationals system. Known more for his bat than for his glove, he was battling injuries and scuffling at the plate in the High-A Carolina League.

Norris was subsequently traded to Oakland and broke into the big leagues with the A’s last summer, where he appeared in 60 games. This season the right-handed hitter is splitting time behind the plate with left-handed-hitting John Jaso.

Norris remains an unfinished product. The raw power is there — as are improved plate discipline and defensive skills. What’s eluded him so far are consistent performances. His home run jumpstarted the A’s to a win on Tuesday night, but overall he is hitting just .216/.340/.336 in 141 plate appearances.

Norris talked about his development when the A’s visited Fenway Park earlier this season.

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BeerGraphs — a website devoted to the analytics of beer — is now alive. Very soon it will have sortable leaderboards and everything. And it’s been too long since we had a FanGraphs meetup anyway, so let’s do another one. Where better to have a top-flight beer and watch some good baseball than the Public House attached to AT&T Park in San Francisco? Please come and talk baseball (or beer) with our merry band:

June 7, four until ?, Public House at AT&T Park, San Francisco

Eno Sarris (FanGraphs, BeerGraphs)
Howard Bender (FanGraphs)
Wendy Thurm (FanGraphs)
Steve Berman (Bay Area Sports Guy)
Grant Brisbee (SBN)
King Kaufman (Bleacher Report)
Patrick Newman (NPBTracker)
Ian Miller (Productive Outs)
Adam Cacioppo (BeerGraphs)
Aram Cretan (Freewheel Brewing)
Rob Conticello (Clandestine Brewing)
Adrian Kalaveshi (Clandestine Brewing)

Sometimes it’s the things you don’t write that make you look smarter. A few weeks ago, I nearly wrote something celebrating Michael Saunders‘ improved plate discipline. I wasn’t quite feeling it, though, so I went and did something else, and then Saunders embarked on a miserable slump. That’s not the first time something like that has happened. Additionally, there were a few times I wanted to re-visit the Rick Porcello narrative, pointing out that his spring-training strikeouts didn’t lead to regular-season strikeouts. I never wrote anything to that effect, and now Porcello is striking guys out. Again, I look smarter by not looking like an idiot. Over the last 30 days, Porcello’s posted baseball’s third-lowest xFIP. Here’s a selection of strikeout rates over the same span:

• Stephen Strasburg, 27.0%
• Matt Harvey, 26.6%
• Shelby Miller, 26.2%
• Rick Porcello, 26.0%
• Tim Lincecum, 23.9%
• James Shields, 23.7%
• Clayton Kershaw, 20.4%

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Passive Hitter“, which examined the change in the rate of swings in Major League Baseball over the last 25 years. While a host of writers have written about the rise of Moneyball philosophies as a reason for why strikeout numbers are on the rise, I noted that the data shows that hitters are actually swinging at basically the same rate now as they did two decades ago. The evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that hitters have become significantly more passive at the plate.

However, as several readers pointed out, the point being posed most repeatedly by Tom Verducci isn’t that hitters are not swinging often enough, it’s that they’re not swinging often enough in the right situations. As a follow-up to his original post, he wrote this last week:

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When baseball fans think of players who get hit by pitches, they probably think of Craig Biggio, Don Baylor, or, in more recent times, Carlos Quentin, and rightly so. Those players did (and do) get hit often. But how much does their career offensive production rely on the hit by pitch? That is a different matter — some players who get hit a lot do a lot of other things well, and are thus less reliant on pain for offensive profit. Using our old friend linear weights for measuring offense, here are five modern players who have the great proportion of their offensive production from getting hit.

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One of the most important doctors in baseball history, Lewis Yocum, died of liver cancer yesterday at the age of 65. Yocum was an intern in Frank Jobe’s clinic when Jobe pioneered UCL replacement surgery in 1974 — Tommy John surgery is now ubiquitous in baseball, and Yocum was one of its greatest living practitioners. Numerous players tweeted that he had saved their careers; scroll to the bottom to see a few of them.

Though he was the Angels’ team doctor, taking that position over from Jobe, he treated players across the league, both position players and pitchers. In 2010, Will Carroll wrote that Yocum and James Andrews were both so mutually prominent across baseball that “one former GM jokingly said that he thought Yocum and Andrews had negotiated some sort of territorial agreement. “This side of the Mississippi is Andrews,” he laughed. “That side is Yocum.”” After Yocum died, Carroll compiled a long list of players whom Yocum was known to have personally treated. (The list is incomplete and skewed toward recent players, but it gives some sense of Yocum’s breadth of impact.)

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Major League Baseball will kick off its amateur draft on Thursday, June 6. MLB Network and MLB.com will cover the draft live starting at 7:00 p.m. EDT. The pick-by-pick coverage will include the First Round, Competitive Balance Round A, Second Round, and Competitive Balance Round B — 73 picks in total.  The remainder of the draft will take place on June 7 and 8.

We will get you ready for the amateur draft — also known as the Rule-4 draft — with two posts. Today in Part 1, we’ll provide a refresher on the new rules put in place in the most recent MLB-MLBPA collective bargaining agreement. We’ll then show how those rules were applied in coming up with this year’s draft selection order.

In Part 2, we’ll explain the bonus slots for each selection, the total bonus pools for each team, and look back at bit at how spending has changed in the last five years.

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One of the most interesting fields of study in baseball over the last few years has been that of pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving, or pitch-stealing, or whatever you want to call it. This is the stuff that’s made Jose Molina nerd-famous, and it’s drawing more attention with every passing month. Framing has been discussed on ESPN. It’s been discussed on MLB Network. It’s been the subject of countless player interviews, and what’s been revealed is that a great amount of thought and technique goes into how a catcher catches a pitch. Catchers don’t just catch the baseball. They catch the baseball with a purpose.

Research has uncovered a few outliers, like Molina and Jonathan Lucroy and, say, Jesus Montero and Ryan Doumit in the other direction. It’s interesting these guys can be given such different strike zones, since the strike zone is supposed to be consistent for everybody. And it’s interesting that, as much as people come up with run values in the dozens, it’s hard to identify the actual effect. For example, Rays pitchers this year have allowed a higher OPS throwing to Molina than when throwing to Jose Lobaton, the other guy. Last year, Molina again had the worst numbers. It reminds me too much of Catcher ERA for my tastes, but you’d think you’d see something. Instead, you see little. Where is the value going?

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Last offseason, the Diamondbacks participated in a three-way trade that brought them shortstop Didi Gregorius, and that cost them Trevor Bauer. Other pieces were involved, but we’re not going to talk about them here. Arizona drew some criticism, as people weren’t sure Gregorius would stick as a regular shortstop, but general manager Kevin Towers saw to it to compare Gregorius to a young Derek Jeter:

“When I saw him, he reminded me of a young Derek Jeter,” Towers said.

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