Archive for Featured

Just as a recap, here’s some things at which the Cubs have proven to be among the best this year. They’ve been among the best at getting fans to the stadium. They’ve been the best at not pitching to Bryce Harper. They’ve been the best at drawing walks (perhaps that we’ve ever seen), and they’ve been the best base-running team. Basically, they’ve looked like the perfect baseball team. Maybe this seems like overkill, all the Cubs posts already and another one here right now. Or maybe they’re just deserving of all these posts, on account of how dominant and unique they’ve been thus far. I’d argue the latter, but I know that’s not a unanimous opinion.

Either way, here comes another Cubs post! There’s another record they’re pursuing, but it’s not a particularly sexy record, nor is it one that necessarily indicates skill and skill only. Definitely some skill involved, but it’s the kind of record where you’re not too sure how to feel about it, or what, exactly, it means. Even right now, the Cubs are doing this thing, and I’m not totally sure what to make of it. That’s what this post is for!

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On Friday, I published a post projecting the players taken on day one of the draft. On Saturday, I did the same for the players taken on day two. And yesterday, I did the same for those players selected on day three. Over 1,200 players were drafted across 40 rounds in this year’s draft. But KATOH still managed to find a few mildly interesting players who weren’t selected. Below, you’ll find the seven draft-eligible but undrafted players with the best projections. As a reminder, this analysis covers the following conferences: AAC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big West, Pac 12 and SEC. I expect a few of these guys will sign as undrafted free agents in the coming weeks.

*****

Anthony Papio, RSr., OF, Maryland

Proj. WAR thru age-27: 1.0

Papio had a solid season as a redshirt senior. I should note that his projection is partly due to a quirk with my model. The Big 10 model includes a variable that makes it slightly less harsh on older players. But since Papio’s the rare 23-year-old college player, it perhaps credits him a bit more than it should. Still, an .800 OPS with some speed in the Big 10 ain’t bad.

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It was the tale of two cities in Pittsburgh this weekend. On Sunday, the local hockey team won the Stanley Cup, reaching the highest heights an NHL team can manage, adding another championship to the cities storied legacy. But at the same time the Penguins were setting in motion plans for a parade, the Pirates were getting swept by their division-rival from St. Louis. At home, no less. And that wasn’t even the worst part of the weekend.

During Friday’s contest with the Cardinals, team-ace Gerrit Cole had to be lifted after two innings on the mound, leaving with what has only been called “triceps tightness” to this point, but is likely to force Cole to miss at least one start, if not land on the disabled list. Catcher Francisco Cervelli then left the game in the fourth inning after suffering a broken hamate bone; he’s out at least a month, and hamate injuries are known to sap power from hitters even after they return to the field. These were blows the team couldn’t really afford to suffer, especially given how the rest of the weekend went.

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To begin with a gross oversimplification of a maddeningly complex sport, there are two ways to win a baseball game: score runs and prevent runs. Those two acts inform the predictive significance of run differentials and Pythagorean record and represent the reason I enjoy perusing leaderboards to see which teams are currently the best at run generation and prevention. We’re at the point in the season where the tops of the leaderboards aren’t terribly surprising – the Red Sox score frequently, the Mets don’t allow many runs, the Cubs are ridiculously great in both categories – but one team I’m still getting accustomed to finding near the top of the runs-scored leaderboard is the Mariners.

After years of battling mediocrity and a frustrating relegation to relative baseball obscurity, the Mariners have scored more runs than any American League team not named the Red Sox. With 315 runs scored through 63 games played, the Seattle is now averaging five runs scored per game — a rate they haven’t sustained over a full season since averaging 5.02 runs per game in 2002… you know, back when they had a designated hitter named Edgar Martinez, a second baseman named Bret Boone and a catcher named Dan Wilson. As offense has declined around the league during the last decade and a half, the Mariners’ offense has more than followed suit. In all but one season from 2004 to 2015, the Mariners finished anywhere from 11th to 14th in the AL in R/G. (Recall that, for a majority of that stretch, the American League consisted of only 14 teams.)

But now they’re scoring five runs a game – and are on a pace equivalent to 810 runs over a full 162-game schedule. Only five teams in the past five seasons have scored 810 runs and, of those five, all but the 2011 Red Sox made the postseason. And you might remember that the 2011 Red Sox team had to work darn hard to not make the playoffs. What the Mariners are doing right now is an undeniably good thing, and one that’s very much conducive to winning. And a little further digging reveals something endearingly quirky about the way the Mariners are scoring all of their runs.

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On Friday, I published a post projecting the players taken on day one of the draft. On Saturday, I did the same for the players taken on day two. Let’s see what my math says about the college players taken on day three of draft, which covered rounds 11-40. The vast majority of these players will flame out in the minor leagues over the next couple of years, and you’ll never hear from them again. But at least a few of them will go on to play in the big leagues.

As a reminder, I only have projections for college players who logged at least 100 plate appearances or batters faced in select major NCAA conferences this year, including the: AAC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big West, Pac 12 and SEC. I do not have projections for high-school players.

Below, you’ll find thoughts on some players of note from rounds 11-40, followed by a giant, sortable table with projections for all drafted players for whom I have projections. The cumulative WAR projections will probably feel a bit low to you. They feel low to me too. For this reason, I recommend you don’t take the projections themselves literally, but instead use them to compare draftees to other draftees.

*****

337. Chad Donato, RHP, Houston

Proj. WAR thru age-27: 2.1

Donato pitched excellently in West Virginia’s rotation. His strikeout- and walk-rate differential was among the best for starters in major conferences. The Astros have several KATOH darlings in this group. Houston’s front office has either hacked my computer or is doing something similar to what I’m doing.

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Casey Meisner is having a fairly decent season. The 21-year-old Oakland A’s prospect has allowed three or fewer earned runs in nine of his 12 starts. That’s even more impressive when you consider that he’s pitching in the hitter-friendly California League.

His W-L record is 0-10.

Fortunately for his sanity, the righty understands that wins and losses are largely out of a pitcher’s control.

“It’s obviously really bad to be (0-10), but I can’t do anything about that,” said Meisner, who has been taking the mound for the Stockton Ports. “I’ve deserved a few of the losses, but we’ve scored more than two runs in only two of my starts. As a team, we’re not having a very good season.”

Meisner projects to have a good career. A third-round pick by the Mets in 2013, he came to Oakland two years later in exchange for Tyler Clippard. Six-foot-seven with a fastball-changeup-curveball mix, he went 13-5 with a 2.45 ERA last season between two levels.

The Cypress, Texas product is satisfied with the quality of his pitches — “Everything is good on that end” — but he’s not pleased with his 4.9 walk rate. He attributes the free passes to two things, only one of which he can control. Read the rest of this entry »

Bartolo Colon has been a major league pitcher for longer than the high school kids being drafted this weekend have been alive. It’s likely that he has seen and done more in his major league career than any of these draftees will ever have the opportunity to see and do. He’s pitched in All-Star Games and the postseason. He’s played in 42 different major league parks – 42! He’s won a Cy Young Award and struck out 2,285 batters. He hit a home run! He’s had about as full and productive a career as one can have without being deemed Hall of Fame worthy.

Of course, there are still a few things Colon hasn’t done in his career. He’s never won a World Series or thrown a no-hitter, for instance. But plenty of illustrious careers end without those achievements being added to a resume. There is one glaring and unique empty statistical category remaining on Bartolo Colon’s career stat sheet, though: he has never drawn a walk in his career. In fact, after his two strikeout, one sac bunt performance against Brewers pitching last night, Bartolo Colon now holds the record for most career plate appearances without drawing a single walk.

Although much of Colon’s career has occurred in the designated hitter league, he has now stepped to the plate 260 times in his career dating back to his first career plate appearance in 1997 against the Cardinals’ Andy Benes. From Terry Adams to Jordan Zimmermann, Colon has faced 131 different pitchers and not a single one has yielded ball four.

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On Monday, I aimed to identify the ideal candidate for the five-man infield, inspired by the radical defensive alignment implemented by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller of the Sonoma Stompers in their new book, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work. I’ve since finished reading the book, and discovered Lindbergh and Miller also deployed the five-man infield’s cousin: the four-man outfield. A follow-up only makes sense.

The Stompers play a four-man outfield against the Pacifics’ Jake Taylor in San Rafael. (Source)

The boxes to check for our five-man infield were this: lots of ground balls, lots of ground ball hits, ground balls sprayed all over the infield, fly balls with predictable tendencies (either extreme pull or extreme oppo).

For our four-man outfield, it’s essentially the inverse. We want all of the following to be true of our batter:

1. He hits a bunch of air balls
2. He sprays those air balls all over the outfield
3. He has very predictable ground-ball tendencies

I didn’t use OPS on fly balls as a box to check because OPS on fly balls includes homers, and those can’t be defended against anyway. Remove homers, and the sample gets real noisy, and to me, it didn’t help us in our search. The hitters we’ve identified ended up being good hitters anyway.

So, the hitter that appeared at the very top of our five-man infield spreadsheet was Howie Kendrick, and he checked every box. Made plenty of sense. He was the only hitter to check every box, and I was a bit surprised there weren’t more. Spoiler alert: I’m not totally convinced by any of our four-man outfield candidates. At least not as convinced as I was about Kendrick. But it’s grounds for some interesting discussion nonetheless!

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Nos. #30 – #21
Nos. #20 – #11

Roughly four years ago now, the present author facilitated a crowdsourcing project designed to place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams. The results weren’t intended to represent the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather to provide a clue as to which broadcast teams are likely to appeal most (or least) to the readers of this site.

The results of that original exercise have been useful as a complement to the dumb NERD scores published by the author in these pages. Four years later, however, they’ve become much less useful. In the meantime, a number of the broadcast teams cited in that original effort have changed personnel. It’s possible that the tastes of this site’s readers have changed, also.

Recently, the author published an updated version of the television rankings according to the site’s readership. This week: the results of that same exercise, but for radio broadcasts.

Below are the 10th- through 1st-ranked radio-broadcast teams, per the FanGraphs readership.

But first, three notes:

• Teams are ranked in ascending order of Overall rating. Overall ratings are not merely averages of Charisma and Analysis.
• The author has attempted to choose reader comments that are either (a) illustrative of the team’s place in the rankings or (b) conspicuously amusing.
• A complete table of ratings will appear in these pages on Friday, unless they don’t appear then.

10. Oakland Athletics
Main Broadcasters: Ken Korach and Vince Cotroneo
Ratings (Charisma/Analysis/Overall): 3.8, 3.7, 4.1

Representative Reader Comment
“Ken Korach has a beautiful radio voice and a great meal [sic] for conveying the emotion of a big moment.”

Notes
There isn’t much in the way of specific praise among readers for Korach and Cotroneo — not the sort, at least, which clearly separates them from the teams which appear either a few places above or below this one. Generally, respondents cite Korach’s voice and cadence as the main attraction. Which, this is sufficient to render a broadcast enjoyable, certainly.

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Today, MLB Advanced Media is making a pretty exciting announcement, as they’ve brought in Tom Tango — who created many of the metrics we use here on FanGraphs, and is probably the closest thing this generation has had to Bill James in terms of advancing the understanding of the game — to serve as their Senior Database Architect of Stats. In other words, he’ll help facilitate the development and deployment of Statcast data.

While the league has previously been somewhat reserved in discussions about which direction they would take this technology, the fact that MLB has brought in one of the game’s most respected public analysts, and is putting him in a position to develop tools for the public, seems like a great sign for the future of the data.

To help put some context behind this announcement, I conducted a Q&A with Tango via email last week, and I think his answers were quite encouraging. Our conversation is below, and if you’re interested in hearing more, Tango also recorded an episode of the Statcast Podcast with Mike Petriello, which will be up shortly. On to the Q&A.

DC: First off, congratulations on the new gig.

TT: Thank you, I’ve been waiting for this day to officially arrive.

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