Austin Sodders is building a groundswell of support among prospect followers. Ranking among the leaders in multiple Midwest League pitching categories has a way of doing that. In 10 starts for the West Michigan Whitecaps, the 22-year-old southpaw in the Detroit Tigers organization has a 1.39 ERA, a 0.98 WHIP, and is striking out a batter per inning. And while W-L records are to be taken with a large grain of salt, there’s certainly nothing wrong with being a perfect 6-0.

Sodders was selected in the seventh round of last year’s draft, so it’s fair to say that he’s exceeding expectations. At the same time, it’s not as though he came out of nowhere. The UC Riverside product passed up a chance to sign with the Pirates out of a junior college in 2015, and he comes from a baseball family. His father, Mike Sodders, is a former first-round pick by the Twins, and his older brother, Mike, Jr., had a stint in the Angels system.

Sodders wasn’t certain where he’d end up when last June’s draft rolled around. He knew the Tigers were among the teams interested in him, but they hadn’t — nor had anyone else — supplied him with any concrete expectations. They have, however, helped him build a more solid foundation since bringing him into the fold.

A retooled breaking ball has been a boon to his development. When I mentioned that the Baseball America Prospect Handbook says his slider will “morph into a small cutter at times,” he knew exactly what they meant. For that reason, the pitch is now in his rear-view.

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The draft is right around the corner, and KATOH’s here with some content. Today, I give you projections for the top-250 draft-eligible college players. This list considers all Division 1 players who logged at least 100 plate appearances or batters faced this season. These projections don’t just incorporate this year’s data, but also consider performances from 2016, 2015, and last summer’s Cape Cod League. I consider this to be a vast improvement over the work on amateur prospects I’ve done in the past.

I derived these projections using a methodology similar to the one I use for minor leaguers. I ran a series of probit regression analyses on historical data to determine the likelihood that a player will reach a variety of WAR thresholds (Playing in MLB, >0.5 WAR, >1 WAR, >2 WAR, etc.) through age 28. The resulting probabilities were used to generate a point estimate for each player’s WAR through age 28. The projections take into account performance, conference, age and height. They also account for defensive position for hitters and batters faced per game for pitchers. All of these factors are weighted accordingly based on the major-league careers of historical college players.

There are thousands of Division 1 baseball players, and the data is often unruly and prone to inaccuracies. Furthermore, determining who’s draft-eligible is often tricky, as birthdays and high-school graduation years are sometimes hard to track down. A bunch of front offices didn’t realize T.J. Friedl was eligible for the draft last year, so this isn’t just a me problem. All of this is to say that I can’t be 100% sure nobody was left off erroneously, so feel free to ask if your favorite college prospect isn’t listed.

I will provide further analysis on many of these players once we know where they end up, so check back next week. One quick observation: there’s been much debate over whether Louisville’s Brendan McKay should be selected as a pitcher or a hitter. KATOH sides strongly with Team Pitcher, as it ranks him No. 1 among college players as a pitcher and No. 191 as a first baseman. However, since he’s primarily focused on pitching to date, I suppose one could argue he has more development left than your typical 21-year-old hitter with his numbers.

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As you may have noticed when you clicked on this post, the FanGraphs homepage has received a makeover. The previous front page worked well enough for a number of years. The way we all use the web has changed, however, so it was time for some adjustments, intended to help you find more of what you want in an easier-to-use manner. The new layout features a number of improvements, and while change is never enjoyable, we hope you’ll find these tweaks will help you get to the content you’re looking for more quickly, as well as highlight content that you might have missed previously.

The biggest change is that the new design is responsive, meaning it will work well on mobile devices, not just desktops and laptops. We’ve also designed the new front page to highlight our daily written content, the outstanding prospect work being put together by Eric Longenhagen and Chris Mitchell, and provide access to the tools that let you utilize all the great data here on the site.

More specifically, we have:

• included the daily Hardball Times article in the featured section, highlighting one of the best-kept secrets on FanGraphs; the daily THT piece isn’t to be missed. We also changed the featured-article area to better highlight popular content, including pieces from RotoGraphs, as well as identify the most recent and most read posts of the day.
• merged InstaGraphs into the FanGraphs article flow. InstaGraphs posts are still shorter, quicker articles, but they won’t be off in the corner any longer. They will be noted by an InstaGraphs tag, so you’ll still know to expect something a bit shorter than the usual FanGraphs post.
• included our standard chat schedule and a chat-alert banner for when they are happening.
• improved the Top Prospects box, so all 30 teams are accessible instead of just the last five articles Eric Longenhagen has written.
• improved our “Essential” section to include evergreen articles and site news, and to highlight some of our data tools.

The new layout will be more dynamic, including more features as the season progresses and as certain content becomes more topical, such as during the draft or the trade deadline. We hope that these improvements will let you navigate the numerous articles we publish each day, as well as better find reference pieces that you’ll want to go back and read multiple times.

Note that not every page on the site has been made mobile-friendly yet. As we become accustomed to the new design, please don’t hesitate to let us know about any questions, comments, or further improvements that you’d like to see integrated into the new homepage.

Thanks for being loyal readers and supporting FanGraphs through the years. We hope this new front page makes your visits even more enjoyable.

This year’s A’s have been something of a mystery to me. No matter how you break them down, they don’t ever look very good, but they’ve felt like a statistical underachiever. Let me explain. You know our BaseRuns standings? The A’s have an actual run differential of -59, which is one of the worst in the game. However, they have an estimated BaseRuns run differential of -2, which is perfectly ordinary. That means the A’s have a difference of 57 runs, where no other team has a difference greater than 35. And while the lineup is a part of it, the run prevention has been worse than the estimate by 0.79 runs per game. No other team has been worse by more than 0.36.

Something has caused the A’s to allow more runs than they arguably should have. Now, in reality, a variety of things have contributed. There’s seldom ever one explanation. Yet the major factor here is the one described in the headline, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who’s watched the A’s on a regular basis. We’re a third of the way into the season, and the Oakland defense has sucked.

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Earlier this week, we took a look at the AL hitters producing the most on balls put in play. Today, it’s the NL hitters’ turn. Bear in mind that this top-10 list is based on games played through Saturday, explaining the absence of the greatest hitter of all time, Scooter Gennett. (In all seriousness, nice job, Scoots.)

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There are a handful of reasons why Edinson Volquez’s no-hitter didn’t get a ton of attention. It happened on a weekend day in one of baseball’s least engaged markets (Miami). The pitcher involved was a journeyman in the midst of another just okay season. And as for making history and grabbing headlines, this particular Saturday wasn’t ideal, as one the greatest players of all time, Albert Pujols, was busy hitting a grand slam to record his 600th homer. So, yes, there were a lot of factors working against extensive coverage of this particular no-hitter. But it’s also possible that the no-hitter itself has lost a little bit of its cachet.

Some have lamented that Pujols’s 600th homer didn’t net the attention it should have garnered, given the rarity of such an event. It has actually been a while since a modern player — whether Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, or Jim Thome — hit their 600th home runs, and we might not see another player get there for quite some time. The home-run barrage of the 90s and early 2000s might have dampened the enthusiasm for career accomplishments like a 500th or 600th homer. As for a no-hitter, it’s more of a single-game oddity and, in terms of rarity, comes nowhere close to a big career home-run threshold. But Scooter Gennett’s four-homer game received a lot of attention, and that’s a single-game exploit, as well. (Although, in fairness, it’s probably closer to a perfect game in terms of frequency.) Whatever the case, it appears as though interest in the no-hitter has decreased and it’s quite possible that the volume of them over the last half-decade is the reason why.

From 2012 to -15, there were 20 no-hitters, an average of five per year and the greatest number over any four-year stretch in the last century. Here are the number of no-hitters by season over the past 50 years.

The past decade has produced four of the top 10 individual seasons for no hitters out of the last 50 years, and every single year of the past decade has seen at least three no-nos. In looking at things another way, let’s go back even further, and look at the period of time it took to get to the 20 no-hitters that we saw from 2012 to -15.

We get sort of close to the present rate in 1968 — a season literally known as the Year of the Pitcher — but otherwise the present is unrivaled by this standard. Perhaps that’s why most of us didn’t even notice we were going through the longest no-hitter drought in more than a decade when it was two seasons between Randy Johnson and Anibal Sanchez no-nos between 2004 and 2006. To find another drought longer, you have to go back to 1988 to 1990, when Randy Johnson ended a drought begun by Tom Browning.

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There are a couple good stories beginning to emerge in the American League. Just last night, the Mariners crawled their way all the way back to .500, despite suffering through a rash of significant early-season injuries. And, similarly, although the Blue Jays aren’t quite also at .500, they’re close, despite encountering a similar problem. There’s been talk of whether the Mariners and Blue Jays ought to sell. With their play much improved, each team is firmly back in the race, vying to contend for the wild card.

With any team in such a position, success is dependent upon there being some surprises. And when you look at the Jays, there may be no bigger surprise than the offensive performance of Justin Smoak. Before the year, there were 14 Jays projected to play at least semi-regularly, and Smoak stood as the eighth-best hitter. At this writing, there have been 14 Jays who have played at least semi-regularly, and Smoak has been the second-best hitter. By wRC+, he’s above Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, Daniel Murphy, and Kris Bryant. Smoak has a career WAR of 1.8. This season alone, he’s been worth 1.5.

As you know, Smoak is a former top prospect. Plenty of hype, for plenty of years. He’s also 30 years old, and until now, he looked like a replacement-level hitter. When the Jays signed him to a modest extension a year ago, it was met with mockery and disappointment. Welp. There was no putting off this post any longer.

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As usual, Mike Trout is at the top of our WAR leaderboard. That will only be true for a little while longer, however, as Trout’s lead is down to just one tenth of one win, and he’s unfortunately on the shelf for the next couple of months. Based on the current trajectory, at some point in the next week or so, Zack Cozart will usurp Trout at the top of that list. For all the great performances we’ve seen in the first half of 2017, it’s the Reds 31 year old shortstop who is currently stealing the show.

While the Reds are currently fringe Wild Card contenders, sitting at 28-30, the reality remains that they are very likely to be sellers instead of buyers over the next two months. The team is clearly prioritizing the future over the present, and with a league-worst pitching staff, it is unlikely that the Reds will manage to stay close enough to the win-now teams in the NL to incentivize the front office to dramatically shift course in an effort to take advantage of a stronger-than-expected first half. And as a team looking towards the future, the most obvious trade chips are impending free agents, which is a class Cozart also falls into. When you’re a rebuilding team with a player headed towards free agency who is nearly leading everyone in WAR, a trade seems inevitable.

So as the Reds and the rest of baseball head towards the July 31st trade deadline, perhaps no question will loom larger than this one: how good is Zack Cozart now?

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Jeremy Barfield pitched on the final day of May. He did so effectively, but only out of necessity. The 28-year-old outfielder’s current club, the Double-A Portland Sea Dogs, had run out of available pitchers in the second game of a doubleheader. Moving from right field to the mound for innings 11, 12, and 13, Barfield allowed just two hits — one of them a home run — and logged three strikeouts.

It wasn’t his first time toeing the rubber. In 2014 — his seventh professional season — Barfield made 25 mostly reluctant relief appearances in the Oakland organization. The following year, he threw two innings for Colorado’s Triple-A affiliate.

Barfield doesn’t like pitching. What he likes is hitting, which he’s done with mixed results since the A’s took him in the eighth round of the 2008 draft out of San Jacinto Junior College. But while questions about his bat led to a temporary position switch a few years ago, the son of former All-Star outfielder Jesse Barfield is now on the upswing. Last year he logged a .916 OPS and swatted 27 home runs with the Sugarland Skeeters of the independent Atlantic League. Since signing a minor-league deal with the Red Sox few weeks ago, he’s slashed .318/.333/.636 and gone yard four times in 45 Double-A plate appearances.

Barfield talked about his journey, which includes a tenuous relationship with pitching, prior to a recent game.

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Barfield on his self-identity and his temporary conversion: “I hit, man. That’s what I do. The A’s experimented with me on the mound, but that wasn’t my choice. The situation I was in… there was just no opportunity for me to get regular at-bats in Triple-A. I got buried on the depth chart and basically got forced into pitching. I didn’t want to do it. I still don’t want to. It’s something I’m capable of doing, but it’s not what I’m meant to do.

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We’ve talked (a lot, maybe) about lifting the ball more here, and so far the discussion has revolved around hands, legs, and intent — the mechanics of the swing, more or less. There’s another way to lift the ball better, though, one that hasn’t been addressed here: swinging at better pitches. That’s what Kevin Pillar has focused on, and his story offers another look into the effort to hit the ball over the shift.

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