To be an umpire is to be something of a bad time. Umpires embody the same spirit that leads our mothers to force a helmet on us at the roller rink. They’re your friend Wanda, who just wants to remind you, because you did complain last time, that strong beers give you heartburn, so even though it’s your birthday and you just want to have some fun, you might want to lay off. Wanda isn’t wrong — your body doesn’t do well with all sorts of things anymore — but she could also be described as “harshing the vibe.”

Umpires stomp on our good time and get in the way of our boys and their wins, so we yell and squawk their way, but we’d be lost without them. They’re a very necessary bummer and they normally perform their bummering quite ably. You can tell, because we have baseball at all. They aren’t perfect, and they have their foul-ups and biases, but if umpires were much worse at their very hard jobs, even just some medium amount worse, we couldn’t have the sport. It would offend us; it would get us down. The action on the field would grind to a halt. We’d say baseball was stupid.

The calls, especially at home plate, have to be mostly very good mostly all the time, or the whole thing comes tumbling down. And so umpires do their very hard jobs mostly very well with very little thanks and a not small amount of jeering. And what’s more, they’re calm while they do it. That mellow is important. The job well done keeps us moving; the calm lets us believe it’s fair. The calm lets us trust it. And so they’re calm. Not perfectly so; not when the yelling and the squawking really pick up. But usually? Quite calm.

Case in point: on Wednesday evening, a bug flew into second base umpire Bruce Dreckman’s ear during the ninth inning of the Yankees-White Sox game. Here is Dreckman, running in from the infield as Jonathan Holder prepared to pitch to Nicky Delmonico. He calls for a trainer, looking vaguely stricken, but only vaguely. Greg Bird appears confused. What’s going on here? Well jeez, Greg, he has a moth in his ear.

Dreckman grasps the shoulders of Steve Donohue, head athletic trainer for the Yankees. It’s moving around in there, Steve. Oh god, it tickles.

Bruce and Steve descend into the dugout, with Bruce giving his ear the little dig-and-flick of a man who has just gotten out of the pool and is unable to shake that last. little. bit. of. water. Except it is not water. It is a bug.

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I love pitching. Perfection on the hill is an amalgamation of ability, strength, stamina, philosophy, execution, and tactics, where every pitcher is uniquely assembled in a sea of talent. Some have blistering heat, some a variety of breaking pitches, and others are masters of approach and execution. We often find similarities in their numbers, but the means by which they arrive at those numbers can vary wildly. An understanding of how a pitcher attempts to prevent runs is essential to better understanding the what of his results — and that can most easily be grasped by simply watching him hurl a baseball.

Exactly how one observes a pitching performance can determine a lot about the sort of conclusions one can reach. I’m in the camp that believes there’s a significant choice to be made between watching a game on TV or at the stadium. If the purpose of the evening is to share an emotional experience with thousands of others, then obviously the ballpark is the only real way to facilitate that. If I’m trying to grasp a game’s flow, observe generals manipulating their troops on the fly, and truly grasp how each player is performing on a given night, however, I need the live broadcast. There is no substitute.

With the latter, there is the understated advantage of sitting down and respecting the craft of your team’s daily slinger: the presentation of the game itself. If I want to marvel at the horizontal ride of Aaron Nola’s changeup, I’m hoping he’s playing at a stadium that gets right behind the ball at release. Or maybe I’m curious how much depth Miles Mikolas gets on his curveball. If he’s in Oakland, well, it just isn’t my night.

So today, we’re going to talk about camera angles. Carson Cistulli put together a fantastic ranking back in 2015, showcasing which stadiums were best to watch a pitcher do his thing. Which broadcasts allowed us to see the movement on pitches, their true locations, and exhibit the game for the best eye test possible.

I’ve made thousands and thousands of pitching GIFs in my day (it’s what happens when you run PitcherList.com) and I’m honored to present my personal ranking of camera angles to update Carson’s former piece. I’ve grouped broadcasts into five tiers, showcasing which camera angles are best to observe a pitcher’s arsenal and illuminate what is truly happening on the field.

There is one major issue when making this list that I need to address. These ranks — well, they aren’t exactly consistent across all pitchers in the majors. Not only does the throwing arm of the pitcher matter, but also where he stands on the rubber greatly affects the presentation of a pitch. Let me give you an example. Here is the Milwaukee Brewers’ broadcast:

This looks incredible, right? Straight on camera, not too elevated, but not so low that fastballs look like breaking balls. Now let’s look at three different pitchers:

I think you can see the problem. With the first two, the Brewers create one of the best experiences out there. You can see the subtle ride on Anibal’s heater with clarity and the fade on Brent Suter‘s changeup enough to nod your head in approval. However, I’m sorry to say that Corey Knebel’s fastball does not have six feet of cutting action. It’s an illusion.

Keep this in mind as we go through these tiers. Some of these angles are the perfect balance for all arms. Some of these angles are better than others for certain pitchers. And some are flat out horrible and need to burn in a fire.

I wanted to create as best of a control group as possible when jumping between each stadium’s angle, which led me to choose four different relievers to showcase each broadcast. Our heroes are as follows:

• Archie Bradley
• Blake Treinen
• Edwin Diaz
• Jeremy Jeffress
• Gerrit Cole (Just for Houston. Don’t ask.)

I elected to mostly feature the same pitch with each, save for a few exceptions, to help give you an idea of how each broadcast displays the same pitch. Edwin Diaz has a slightly different windup and rubber location than the rest, which I wanted to include for the sake of showcasing how some camera angles can be better for different arms.

That’s enough of an introduction, let’s get to it.

Tier 1: The Models of Excellence

Whenever I want to enjoy a pitcher — really enjoy him — I try to find a game at one of these stadiums. They have the right amount of zoom, are slightly positioned off center to the right, preventing the pitcher from blocking part of the view, while also preventing the cataclysmic “horizontal illusion” that I previously described with regard to Knebel’s fastball. If only all stadiums had the capacity to place their cameras in the same locations.

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The 2018 season is looking like another one in which the Giants’ even-year magic has deserted them. Amid a barrage of bad news about Brandon Belt, Johnny Cueto, and Pablo Sandoval — not to mention unsettling signs regarding Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey — they were inactive at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline and now look ill-suited to leapfrog nearly half the league in order to get to October. After a crushing 3-1 loss to the Astros on Monday night via Marwin Gonzalez’s three-run homer off Will Smith with two out in the ninth inning, they’re 57-57, six games out of first place in the NL West and six back in the Wild Card hunt. Their playoff odds (2.8%) suggest they’re fated to play out the string.

Mind you, coming off a 64-98 season, the Giants never appeared to be a juggernaut. Offseason trades for Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen did fill a couple of obvious holes, albeit with players whose best years are probably behind them, but the team’s preseason odds (23.9%) still suggested more than a puncher’s chance at relevance. Yet the Giants haven’t been in first place in the NL West since March 31, and have spent just five days in second since I last checked in on them on June 7, two days after Bumgarner made his belated season debut. Then as now, they were a .500-ish team — 30-30 before Bum’s return, and 27-27 since — but as time has run off the clock, the hits have kept coming. Not the good kind, either.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

These daily notes are going to be different/sporadic this week, as I’ll be in Southern California for the Area Code Games in Long Beach and then PG All American in San Diego over the weekend. In today’s edition, I’ve got notes on some of the players I saw in Arizona over the weekend, and a reflection on a few specific aspects of our process as it relates to pitcher injuries.

First, a look at Dodgers lefty Julio Urias, who is rehabbing from surgery to repair a tear of his left shoulder’s anterior caspule. Urias threw 1.2 innings against the White Sox’ AZL team on Saturday in his second rehab appearance of the summer. He allowed just one hit and struck out four. His fastball sat 88-91 and topped out at 92, well below the velocity band he has displayed throughout his career, which was typically in the 92-95 range. A scout who was in attendance at Urias’s first rehab outing earlier in the week told me they also had Urias topping out at 92, which conflicts with what was reported just after that outing. Urias’s fastball command was much better in this brief look than it was in his often frustrating big-league appearances, and it has flat, bat-missing plane up in the zone. Overall. though, it’s a 45 fastball right now.

Urias’s secondaries were a bit less crisp than pre-surgery. I saw one slider and several curveballs (flashed plus, mostly average) which were also thrown with less velocity (71-74 mph) than Urias exhibited before injury (75-80). The pitch has good depth and tight snap when it’s down, perhaps not playing within the strike zone quite as well. Urias threw a few average changeups (including a first pitch cambio that Luis Robert foul-tipped) in the 80-83 mph range, but he lacked feel for keeping the pitch down and hung several of them in the top of the strike zone or above it.

Obviously, Urias is returning from a serious shoulder injury, and it’s possible his stuff will tick up with continued work. The Dodgers expect him to contribute to the bullpen in September and he need only wield a competent breaking ball remain left-handed for the next eight weeks to do that. Long term, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen here. Urias was once 6 fastball, 6 breaking ball, above-average changeup, plus command projection. Right now he’s a bunch of 45s and 50s.

Some Thoughts on Process

Before I start discussing some process-oriented stuff on our end, I want to give newer readers a crash course on how we assign FV grades to players and what they mean. A more detailed explanation can be found here.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the twentieth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Zach Duke, Kyle Gibson, and Trevor Hildenberger — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Zach Duke (Mariners) on His Two-Seamer

“I didn’t start throwing a two-seam fastball until I got to Triple-A. My pitching coach there was a guy named Darold Knowles, an old-time lefty who could manipulate a baseball as well as anyone I’ve met. He said, ‘You know, Zach, have you ever thought about throwing a two-seamer?’ I said, ‘Well yeah; I throw one.’ He goes, ‘No, a real two-seamer.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’

“He told me to move my thumb up a little bit on the ball, and put a little pressure sideways. He said, ‘Throw it. You’ll see.’ Sure enough, I throw it and the bottom drops out of the ball. All of sudden I had a true sinker. I thought to myself, ‘How did I get this far without knowing something like that?’ Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.

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There’s always this moment of reflective depression for me, after July’s non-waiver trade deadline passes and all the autopsies are done, when I wistfully look over the players not traded and sigh at the possibilities that never came to pass. Trades are fun after all, and let’s be honest, they’re also raw meat for loudmouth internet commentators like myself.

August isn’t a completely dead month, however, and trades can be made, especially when there’s a large contract in the mix. Woe be unto the teams that recklessly make a claim on a player with a contract they do not wish to have. And with many of the currently contending, large-payroll teams being run in a manner that demonstrates their cognizance of MLB’s soft salary cap — let’s call things what they are — there’s an opportunity to sneak smaller contracts through in addition to some of the more expensive ones for players that can help a team while not necessarily being worth their contracts.

In 2017 alone, you had Justin Verlander, Justin Upton, Yonder Alonso, Curtis Granderson, and Mike Leake, among others, all notable players that were able to be moved due at least in part to contractual reasons. It’s weird looking at it now, but Verlander completely cleared waivers and the Tigers ate some of his contract to get better prospects than they would have otherwise.

As in most years, there are a number of players who are extreme risks to claim on waivers, as their current teams likely will just say “Done. Thanks!”

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In recent years, Major League Baseball has taken steps to make its product available by means of multiple platforms. A daily broadcast, for example, is offered both on ESPN+ and MLB.TV. A weekly one is carried by Facebook. MLB Network is accessible as part of basic packages available through streaming providers like DirecTVNow, Playstation Vue, and YoutubeTV, while the league broadcasts national games on its own network, at ESPN, FOX, FS1, and TBS. The game is out there for consumers who are interested.

That said, there is still a transition to be made before baseball can fully introduce itself to a younger generation of fans. The presence of Regional Sports Networks (RSNs), however, remains an impediment to evolution. RSNs generate massive revenues for MLB teams, either through contracts or ownership, but also require exclusivity. The reason for that arrangement is pretty clear when examining the viewership numbers and ratings (recently published at Forbes) for all teams except the Blue Jays. The graph below shows the average household numbers (HH) per team.

The numbers look how you might except, with New York, Boston, and Chicago (Cubs) drawing the most viewers, while smaller markets and bad teams occupy the lower ranks. The Dodgers’ audience should hypothetically be a lot larger, but the club still hasn’t been able to reach an agreement to get on DirecTV in Los Angeles. Despite that, more than two million people are watching baseball on an almost daily basis for six months out of the year. That’s incredibly valuable.

For networks, those loyal customers help RSNs secure large carriage deals with cable providers and to appear among standard cable packages, charging several dollars per subscriber. Advertising is nice, but RSNs make a vast majority of their money from per-subscriber fees. In turn, the networks dole out large guarantees to teams. The continued high ratings tend to justify these deals. The graph below shows the ratings, which are based on viewers within a market, as opposed to the total household figures.

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I think of the Pirates and Rays as being similar to one another. The A’s belong to the same small group. There are differences, obviously, and the organizations each have their own specific approaches, but these are smaller-budget operations that adhere to similar roster-building philosophies. They try not to ever completely tear down, accumulating years of team control while aiming for something close to .500. Constant churn is an unavoidable reality. It’s almost a feature instead of a bug. In a case like this year’s A’s, a club can get hot, but I’m used to seeing these teams in similar positions. So I wouldn’t expect them to swing major trades with one another.

Less than a month ago, the Rays were 11 games back of the second wild-card slot. In the other league, the Pirates were 10 games back of the second wild-card slot. Both of the teams were expected to sell, because competing down the stretch was unrealistic. Since then, the Rays have won nine times and lost nine times. The Pirates, however, have gone 15-4. The Rays are still very much out of the hunt, but the Pirates are within 3.5 games of the playoffs. That imbalance in the short-term outlooks has led us to a blockbuster. This is the time of year when a very small sample can dramatically change a team’s course. Because they caught fire at just the right time, the Pirates have decided to go for it.

Pirates get:

• Chris Archer

Rays get:

• Austin Meadows
• Tyler Glasnow
• (some player to be named later)

Both the Rays and Pirates already thought they could be close in the future. The Pirates’ last 19 games have made all the difference. They’ve opened up a shot in 2018, which was enough to tip all the necessary scales.

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After arriving in the majors back in 2012 as a relatively unheralded prospect, Twins second baseman Brian Dozier entered the 2018 campaign having produced five consecutive above-average seasons. The All-Star middle infielder’s 2016-17 performance (11.2 WAR) places him second among qualified second basemen during that time, behind none other than Jose Altuve. Even accounting for his 2018 struggles — a relative term, since he is still tracking for league-average performance — Dozier ranks third among all second basemen over the last three calendar years, trailing Altuve by a sizable margin and Robinson Cano by a half-win.

Roughly two-thirds of the way through a season in which the Twins expected to contend — having acquired Lance Lynn, Logan Morrison, Addison Reed (among others) all at market value or less — the Twins haven’t succeeded on that front, having struggled in a very weak AL Central. They find themselves seven games under .500 and trail the Indians by eight full games; as you might expect, they are expected to be less productive than the Indians for the remainder of the season, too.

With that serving as background, the club dealt one of their central pieces today. A combination of ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick and NBC LA’s Michael Duarte reported the deal, as follows.

Dodgers get:

• 2B Brian Dozier

Twins get:

• INF Logan Forsythe
• 1B Luke Raley
• LHP Devin Smeltzer

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