CLEVELAND — Jason Benetti is notable in many ways. He’s one of the youngest television play-by-play men in the game at 34. Only Dodgers’ voice Joe Davis (30) is younger. Benetti is one of the few broadcasters to have a law degree (Wake Forest, 2011). He is one of the few (perhaps the only?) play-by-play broadcaster who has MC’d the Saber Seminar in Boston. His credentials suggest he’s open-minded to FanGraphs-style analysis. His age, meanwhile, suggests he might represent the next wave of baseball broadcaster — one, in this case, who is more comfortable with advanced analytics and who sees the game from a new perspective. While Benetti has an appreciation and understanding of new-age numbers, he still considers himself a storyteller first and believes including “humanity” in a broadcast is as important as any metric.

His duties have gradually expanded as he replaces long-time broadcaster Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, who broadcasts only select games, and who will retire at the end of the season. Benetti, a Chicago native and lifelong Sox fan, will tell you he has his dream job, towards which he worked while spending 10 years broadcasting in the minor leagues from independent ball, to Salem, Va. (2007-08), to the Nationals’ Triple-A Syracuse affiliate (2009-14).

For a long time, Benetti balanced law studies with broadcasting in the spring and summer. He intended to have a law career. But the game kept coming back to him, he told me — including his big break when he was hired by the White Sox in 2016. He will tell you, as he told The Chicago Tribune, cerebral palsy is only a small part of who is.

I found Benetti in the White Sox road clubhouse Tuesday, where one can almost always find him before games talking to players, gathering information. In a way, he’s part reporter and part data analyst. He agreed to speak to me about what he feels his responsibility is as a broadcaster, how he prepares, how he balances calling a season for a team in transition, and how he sees the broadcast industry evolving and adapting to modern challenges:

FanGraphs: A reader might spend five or 10 minutes with a piece at FanGraphs or another media outlet (and that’s if they become engaged with it). But if a viewer watches the entirety of a game, you have their ear for three hours. I’d argue there’s no greater influential platform in a local media. Do you see it that way? Do you feel a sense of responsibility?

Jason Benetti: The level of responsibility comes in both fairness and accuracy. We need to be honest about what we are seeing and know what we are seeing is anomalous or not. So I think the tendency is to see a play that happens and is poor and immediately reach for, ‘Oh, you gotta make that play.’ And that’s what fans do and that’s what I did when I was a kid. But I also think there’s a part of it where you have to understand that baseball is such a long year that there are going to be outliers. Michael Jordan missed shots. I’m not saying that Michael Jordan is on the current White Sox. But I am saying that I think responsibility lies in knowing what people’s tendencies are, knowing when they are breaking them, and being as well informed as we possibly can as to what we are seeing fits what we know about that person — or it breaks the mold enough that we need to rethink the person overall.

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Adam Haseley was drafted eighth overall last year, so his potential goes without saying. That doesn’t mean there aren’t question marks in his profile. When Eric Longenhagen blurbed the 21-year-old University of Virginia product in our Philadelphia Phillies Top Prospects list, he cautioned that “Some scouts have concerns about his bat path.”

I asked the left-handed-hitting Haseley why that might be.

“My interpretation would be that I was wanting be more direct to the ball,” responded Haseley, who put up a .761 OPS last year between short-season and low-A. “Something I’d started doing at UVA was trying to create more launch angle — I wanted to hit balls in the air with true backspin — but coming into pro ball there was more velocity than I’d ever seen in college. I had to adjust to that, and my way of adjusting was to get more direct, which resulted in a flatter angle. Now I’m trying to find that happy medium between the two.”

His quest for middle ground remains a work in progress. Two months into his first full professional season, Haseley has a 48.4 GB% and just three home runs in 217 plate appearances with high-A Clearwater. Compare that to his final collegiate campaign, where as a Cavalier he went deep 14 times in a comparable number of chances. Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend, the San Diego Padres completed a trade, sending Janigson Villalobos to the Minnesota Twins in exchange for Phil Hughes.

The precise players involved aren’t of particular significance. The Padres’ prospect list contained 75 names and Villalobos was not among them. As for Hughes, he had recently been designated for assignment after pitching poorly over the last three seasons. Much of that subpar performance was due to injury and included thoracic outlet surgery. As Jay Jaffe recently chronicled, few pitchers return to prominence after TOS.

By designating Hughes for assignment, the Twins appeared willing to eat the roughly $22 million remaining on his contract through next season. The Padres are taking on some of that obligation in exchange for a competitive balance draft pick, so the functional part of the trade looks like this.

Padres get:

• 74th pick in 2018 draft and $812,200 in bonus pool money that goes with it.

Twins get:

• $7.6 million, with $7.25 million paid next season, per Jon Heyman.

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Max Scherzer has already won three Cy Young awards, and if he’s keeping them on his mantel, he might need to do some remodeling, as he’s threatening to add a fourth. The 33-year-old righty is having, by some measures, the most dominant season of his career — and one of the most dominant of all time.

After carving apart the admittedly hapless Orioles on Wednesday night (eight innings, two hits, one walk, no runs, 12 strikeouts), Scherzer leads the NL in a host of statistical categories both traditional and advanced: wins (nine), innings (79.2), strikeouts (120), strikeout rate in two flavors (13.6 per nine and 38.7% of all batters faced), K-BB% (32.6), hits per nine (5.5), FIP (1.95), and WAR (3.2). Meanwhile, his 1.92 ERA ranks second behind Jacob deGrom, who right now looks like the only other NL Cy candidate with more than a puncher’s chance, which is to say that it will take somebody else going on an an unforeseen roll — perhaps Clayton Kershaw, whose 2016 and -17 injuries already factored into Scherzer’s hardware tally — to justify a place in the discussion.

In terms of ERA and FIP, our heterochromic hero has enjoyed strong stretches such as this at various points in his career — more or less annually since 2013:

However, Scherzer has never put together a full season this strong, which is to say Kershaw-esque. Where the Dodgers’ lefty ace has banked two seasons with both his ERA and FIP below 2.00 (2014 and ’16), Scherzer’s lowest full-season ERA was last year’s 2.51, while his lowest FIP was his 2.77 in 2015. Even in his award-winning seasons, he’s never led the league in either category, whereas Kershaw has five ERA titles (tied for third all-time with Walter Johnson, Sandy Koufax, Pedro Martinez and Christy Mathewson, trailing only Roger Clemens with seven and Lefty Grove with nine) and two FIP titles.

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In James Paxton’s final start in the month of May, he didn’t have it. Or at least, he didn’t have it like he’d had it before. Nevertheless, over five innings, he allowed just two runs, while striking out five and throwing two-thirds of his 89 pitches for strikes. Paxton has graduated to the point where even his mediocre outings are kind of all right. The four walks in five frames tell a misleading story; Paxton wasn’t wild. Paxton wasn’t wild because Paxton isn’t wild.

Paxton’s month began with 16 strikeouts against Oakland. That game was followed by a no-hitter in Toronto, and then, the next three times out, Paxton issued only one total walk while whiffing 23. Over six starts in May, Paxton went 43 innings and allowed eight runs, with opponents batting .143 and slugging .240. It’s quite possible this wasn’t even the best month of May for any pitcher — Justin Verlander also started six times, and he allowed five runs, to go with a .195 wOBA. But Paxton shook off a roller-coaster April, and established himself as one of the top starters in either league. If, that is, he wasn’t yet established.

Under the hood, as Paxton wrested greater control of his at-bats, he made some changes to his game plan. The month of May saw Paxton throwing a different fastball. And, as well, the month of May saw Paxton throwing a different curve. He does have a third pitch that’s in between the two, but it was the heater and the curveball that drove the bulk of Paxton’s success.

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Even though the Diamondbacks lost on Wednesday, they did still win the series against the Reds. Now, granted, many teams have won series against the Reds, but for Arizona, this was a much-needed step forward. You might remember that the Diamondbacks opened the season on a tear; they didn’t lose their first series until the middle of this month. Through play on May 1, no team in either league had a better record. Critically, nine games in the standings separated the Diamondbacks from the Dodgers. That particular gap is now down to two games, as Arizona fell on hard times. Since play on May 2, no team in either league has a worse record. After winning 21 of 29, the club has dropped 19 of 26. It’s not a lethal collapse, but all the early gains have been erased.

Here’s the Diamondbacks’ season, in visual form:

Since getting to 21-8, the Diamondbacks’ playoff odds have dropped by 50 percentage points. That’s easily the biggest drop over the span of time — the Blue Jays are down 36 points, and the Mets are down 27. There remains plenty of time to turn this around. The injury bug has been especially hungry. But it’s worth reflecting on exactly what’s happened. In certain ways, Arizona’s May has been historic.

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Replacing a broadcasting legend isn’t easy. In Ben Wagner’s case, he’s following in the proverbial footsteps of Jerry Howarth, who retired this spring after 36 years as the radio voice of the Toronto Blue Jays. Originally alongside the equally-celebrated Tom Cheek, Howarth was immensely popular not just in the province of Ontario, but throughout Canada.

By all accounts, Wagner is more than holding his own. Primarily paired with Mike Wilner in the Jays’ radio booth, the 37-year-old Indiana native is making a smooth transition from the minors to the majors. After beginning his broadcast career with the Low-A Lakewood Blue Claws, in 2004, Wagner spent the past 11 seasons calling games for the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons.

Wagner talked about the challenges and rewards of his new job, and the incorporation of analytics into a broadcast, when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park over the weekend.

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Wagner on replacing Howarth: “First and foremost, it starts with Jerry. Jerry was incredibly supportive of me, even before this process started when he announced that he was going to retire. He’s somebody I’ve looked up to as a mentor — and now as a pseudo-colleague, you might say. I’ve valued his constructive criticism over the years. That’s the foundation of our relationship, and because of that, he felt comfortable knowing I had a shot to win the job. It makes it a much easier transition for me, knowing that he’s in my corner. What Jerry has said publicly is very humbling.

“Is there pressure in replacing him in the booth? Heck yeah, there’s pressure. For somebody like me, not having a major-league track record, it’s a massive job. Not only am I with a franchise that puts a lot of care into their broadcasts, the reach isn’t just to a specific fan base, it’s to an entire country. And with modern technology, I’m broadcasting around the world. So there’s no doubt a lot of pressure comes with it, but we hit the ground running and we continue to grow.”

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CLEVELAND — Major-league pitchers threw Matt Davidson 1,855 pitches last season. Of those, 1,014 were thrown outside the confines of the strike zone, according to pitching-tracking data. Davidson swung at 343 of those out-of-zone pitches.

When he went home to his native Southern California this past winter, Davidson didn’t try to forget about baseball or an unimpressive 2017 campaign that included a .220/.260/.452 slash line and 83 wRC+. Rather, he relived his entire season.

Like every major-league player, Davidson has access to an incredible trove of video. On his iPad he could watch every pitch from his 2017 season and he did. Over the course of several days last October, he watched every pitch from his 2017 season — the video edited to erase the dead time between tosses. He was particularly interested in those 1,014 pitches thrown out of the zone against him and how he reacted.

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The 2018 Draft is unusual. Not in terms of talent, mind you. No, the 2018 Draft is unusual because we have a genuinely unprecedented situation: a potential high-round draft pick with perhaps the most serious baggage a person can possibly have. From THE BOARD, courtesy of Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel:

**Luke Heimlich

Heimlich is a Level 1 sex offender in Oregon… Heimlich was projected to go in round two last year, when he was a junior. Shortly before the draft, The Oregonian reported court documents that showed Heimlich plead guilty to sexually assaulting his niece. Court records showed the victim reported multiple incidents of molestation between 2009 and 2011, when Heimlich was 14-15 years old and the victim was 4-6. He plead guilty to one count which included a handwritten admission and the other count was dismissed as part of a plea bargain.

After this information surface[d], Heimlich spent the rest of the spring of 2017 away from Oregon State and went undrafted. He returned for his senior season and has pitched well while, amid intermediate media attention, he and his family (except for the immediate family of the victim) denied he committed the crime and say Heimlich plead guilty so the legal proceedings would end more quickly. This situation is abnormal, there’s no precedent for it and it’s unclear why/how a team would go about clearing Heimlich for employment, though ownership would certainly have to be involved.

Let’s take a look at what this means.

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It’s been overshadowed by the controversy surrounding his overly aggressive slide into home plate against the Pirates on Monday — a slide ruled legal by the umpires and replay officials at the time but later deemed interference by Major League Baseball, and dissected here by Craig Edwards — but Anthony Rizzo has turned the corner. Following a frigid March and April, he’s put together one of the majors’ hottest performances in May. In fact, he’s made one of the most drastic month-to-month turnarounds of any hitter thus far this year. His performance is worth a closer look.

Before we go there, though… to these eyes, Rizzo was in the wrong on the aforementioned slide into catcher Elias Diaz, just as he was last year, when he slid into Austin Hedges. I don’t have anything substantial to add to Edwards’ detailed breakdown of both plays, except to say that the three-time All-Star is going to wear the black hat for a spell as one of baseball’s villains. Perhaps he’s unpopular at the moment, but one play shouldn’t prevent us from noticing the other 99.9% of his season.

Though he homered off the Marlins’ Jose Urena in his second plate appearance on Opening Day, Rizzo went just 3-for-28 with a walk in the season’s first six games. After a bout of lower back tightness forced him to the bench for three straight games, the 28-year-old first baseman was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his career. He took an 0-fer in his return on April 17 against the Cardinals, and while he collected three hits in his second game back, the slump persisted. He finished April hitting a ghastly .149/.259/.189 for an NL-low 32 wRC+ in 85 plate appearances. The homer off Urena was his only extra-base hit for the March/April period (which I’ll hereafter refer to just as “April”), and he walked just four times (4.7%) while striking out 15 times (17.5%) — that from a player who walked more than he struck out last year (13.2% to 13.0%).

Inserted into the leadoff spot by manager Joe Maddon in an attempt to jump-start a flagging offense that had scored just 13 runs in its previous six games, Rizzo flipped the calendar to May in dramatic fashion, homering on the first pitch he saw from the Rockies’ Jon Gray on May 1. He homered again versus the Rockies the next day, and added another, against the Cardinals, on May 5. After an 0-for-5 on May 6, he entered Wednesday having reached base safely in 18 of his last 19 games, with four more homers and an active 11-game hitting streak.

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