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

1. A Brief Note on SCOUT, Like What It Is
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: The Season’s First Week
3. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
4. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

A Brief Note on SCOUT, Like What It Is
Below, in this edition of the Notes, are the first SCOUT leaderboards of the 2013 regular season.

“What is a SCOUT leaderboard?” a reasonable person might ask. The author is plagiarizing himself at length when he says that, for hitters (for whom it’s denoted as SCOUT+), it’s this: a metric that combines regressed home-run, walk, and strikeout rates in a FIP-like equation to produce a result not unlike wRC+, where 100 is league average (in this case, for all MLB hitters so far) and above 100 is above average. xHR%, xBB%, and xK% stand for expected home run, walk, and strikeout rate, respectively.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. An Invitation to Curse the Author
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

An Invitation to Curse the Author
As the reader will note while inspecting the table below of Sunday’s scheduled games and probable pitchers, today offers what can only be called — or can only be called, at least, by someone affecting the airs of a 19th century flaneur — a “panoply of delights.”

The delights are so ubiquitous, in fact, that the task (for the author) of selecting merely two or three so-called “notable” games has proven quite a chore. A very reasonable person could make a very reasonable case that the author’s choices are the work of a lunatic — or, at the very least, the work of someone typing with one hand while preparing and busily consuming mimosas with the other. I make no apologies, of course*: my biases (for starting pitchers making a debut or something close to a debut) are clear.

*With regard to the present exercise, that is. I make apologies for a number of other things. Most other things, really.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Featured Game: Cleveland at Tampa Bay, 19:10 ET
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Featured Game: Cleveland at Tampa Bay, 19:10 ET
On Who’s Starting This Game
One of the players starting this game is right-hander Trevor Bauer for Cleveland, who (a) was traded from the Diamondbacks to the Indians this offseason in a three-team deal and (b) is known for having idiosyncratic thoughts on pitching mechanics and (c) is known for having idiosyncratic other thoughts, as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Pitching Stats with Live and Yesterday Splits
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Pitching Stats with Live and Yesterday Splits
With the addition recently of both the Live and Yesterday splits to the site’s leaderboards, it’s possible now to get a sense of how players are performing in real time by certain advanced metrics in a way that wasn’t before.

What the author has found himself wondering, though, is how best to adjudge the day’s Champions of Hitting and Pitching using the metrics available at the site. As is the case even with larger samples, there are actually multiple ways of doing so — it’s a matter always, as Dave Cameron suggests, of the particular question one is attempting to answer.

Yesterday, I considered the usefulness of some batting metrics on a single-game basis. Below are three pitching metrics and their relevance to our new Live and Yesterday splits.

xFIP
Yesterday, we established that wOBA is probably the best metric for assessing a player’s batting production per plate appearance. Expected Fielding Independent Pitching, or xFIP, is the closest antecedent for pitchers — except on a per-inning (as opposed to per-plate-appearance) basis. Pitchers who are able to accrue strikeouts while also avoiding walks and fly balls tend to prevent runs more effectively than pitchers who don’t do that. If there’s a drawback to xFIP, it’s that relief pitchers who’ve pitcher 0.1 innings mostly occupy the top of the single-game leaderboards.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Batting Stats with Live and Yesterday Splits
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Batting Stats with Live and Yesterday Splits
With the addition recently of both the Live and Yesterday splits to the site’s leaderboards, it’s possible now to get a sense of how players are performing in real time by certain advanced metrics in a way that wasn’t before.

What the author has found himself wondering, though, is how best to adjudge the day’s Champions of Hitting and Pitching using the metrics available at the site. As is the case even with larger samples, there are actually multiple ways of doing so — it’s a matter always, as Dave Cameron suggests, of the particular question one is attempting to answer.

Below are four metrics, all of which answer slightly different questions about a player’s single-game batting performance. I’ll looking at some pitching metrics tomorrow.

wOBA
Weighted On-Base Average, or wOBA, is a record of a hitter’s batting production for the day scaled to on-base percentage. As such, it’s the best way to determine offensive output per plate appearance. That’s its strength. It’s less useful for reporting cumulative production, however. So, a batter with one home run in a single plate appearance will have a higher single-game wOBA than another hitter who’s hit three home runs in four plate appearances — even though we might say that the latter has been “more productive.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. An Idle Thought on Imperfection
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

An Idle Thought on Imperfection
Inspecting Tuesday’s single-game xFIP leaderboard (among starting pitchers only) — a thing which is now possible after FanGraphs CEO and star of every nightmare David Appelman added a “Yesterday” split to the leaderboards here at the site — one is not surprised, in the wake of his 14-strikeout effort against Houston, to find Yu Darvish’s name at the top.

One is also compelled to note in how many ways Darvish’s game was imperfect — an imperfection that is amplified, undoubtedly, for its proximity to perfection.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Monday’s Top Performances, By Several Measures
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Monday’s Top Performances, By Several Measures
In case the reader was unaware, allow me to inform him or her that last night, under cover of darkness, FanGraphs CEO and probably your real father David Appelman added a “Yesterday” split to both the site’s batting and pitching leaderboards. As a result of that deft programming maneuver, it is now possible for readers to examine the previous day’s top performers in a single glance — and, more importantly, it’s now possible for the present author to copy-and-paste the contents of those same leaderboards into these Daily Notes pieces, thus giving readers the impression that he is “doing something.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. How Ought FanGraphs Writers Use Their Access?
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

How Ought FanGraphs Writers Use Their Access?
This offseason, both the present author and Eno Sarris joined Davids Cameron and Laurila among the ranks of FanGraphs authors with membership in the Baseball Writers Association of America. While the BBWAA will certainly have been a source of consternation for some readers for its conduct in award- and Hall of Fame-voting, it also plays an important role in allowing baseball writers to go about their jobs unencumbered.

Laurila’s ongoing Q&A series and, for example, Sarris’s recent discussion with uberhitter Joey Votto regarding the latter’s swing represent cases in which FanGraphs writers have been able to integrate the observations of actual players and coaches into the analytical work being done constantly at the site. (The present author’s own recent conversation with Brewers closer John Axford, on the other hand, represents a different sort of case — one in which, for example, a FanGraphs writer abuses his access to talk about Canada and mustaches.)

What I’d like to ask now, however — with the idea very much of appealing to the collective wisdom of the crowd — is to ask how FanGraphs writers might best use the access having been granted by the BBWAA. Between the PITCHf/x data, assorted DIPS-type metrics, plate-discipline stats, etc., available here at the site, there are a number of objective measures that could be enriched by the personal narratives of actual major-league players. Apart from stats, there are many other questions to be asked of major-league players which might appeal to our readership, but which remain unasked in other publications and at other sites.

Readers are invited, then, to make suggestions in the comments section below as to how this access might best be utilized. Will all these same suggestions be embraced? Oh, absolutely not. (Generally speaking, you people are bananas.) Rather, the idea here is to get a sense of what’s possible, and to let those possibilities serve as the outer bounds of what might be reasonable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Table of Contents
Today’s edition of the Daily Notes has no table of contents, it appears.

Live from Cardinals Camp in Jupiter
The author spent part of Thursday afternoon on the backfields at Jupiter, Florida’s Roger Dean Stadium, spring home both to the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals. It was a camp day for the Cardinals, and the observations which follow are from a game between that club’s Double- and Triple-A rosters.

While reading them (i.e. the following observations), the reader would do well to remember that the author is an amateur in every respect.

On Jorge Rondon and His Fastball
Right-hander Jorge Rondon pitched only an inning today, but definitely threw harder than any of the five or seven or whatever other pitchers who appeared in the game. All told, he threw maybe six total pitches in that one inning — all of them, so far as I could tell, fastballs at ca. 96 mph — and induced three ground-ball outs. There’s not a lot to be deduced from his appearance — except this, of course: Jorge Rondon throws at 96 mph. Matt Eddy reported a similar velocity in a minor-league transactions piece back in October (when St. Louis added Rondon to the 40-man roster), adding that the 24-year-old reliever also has “a nice mid-80s slider.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Maurer, Rondon Among Spring’s Leading Rookies
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: Spring Training (Overall)
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Spring Training (Rookies)

Maurer, Rondon Among Spring’s Leading Rookies
We have established in the Notes this week both that (a) there are questions to be asked with regard to the author’s competence in most every endeavor, and also that (b) the pitchers who finished among the top 10 on last spring’s SCOUT leaderboard had much better regular seasons than those who finished among the bottom-10.

This being the case, then, it would not be surprising to see Julio Teheran, Stephen Strasburg, and Matt Harvey (Nos. 1-3 on the SCOUT pitching leaderboard below) outperform Tim Hudson, Kevin Correia, Joe Kelly (the ultimate, penultimate, antepenultimate pitchers by SCOUT) in the season to come.

Of note, then, is what we might learn about certain rookie-eligible pitchers who’ve performed particularly well by SCOUT this spring. We’ve considered Julio Teheran, J.J. Hoover, and Michael Wacha earlier this spring. Among the top-five spring rookie pitchers below, however, there are two new addition: Seattle starter Brandon Maurer and Detroit reliever Bruce Rondon.

Read the rest of this entry »