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Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Washington Nationals, which concluded his “Evaluating the Prospects” series. Previously, Baseball America published their top 100 prospects list, as did Baseball Prospectus (top 101), Keith Law, MLB.com and newcomer 2080 Baseball (top 125). Additionally, I put out KATOH’s top-100 list back in January. All of these works attempt to accomplish the very same goal: identifying and ranking baseball’s best prospects. But KATOH goes about it in a very different way than the others. While most others rely heavily on scouting, KATOH relies exclusively on statistical performance.

On the whole, there’s a good deal of agreement between KATOH and the more traditional rankings. Many of KATOH’s favorite prospects have also received praise from real, live human beings who’ve watched them play. JP Crawford, Corey Seager, Orlando Arcia and Julio Urias all fall within this group. However, there are other KATOH favorites who’ve received very little attention from prospect evaluators. The purpose of this article is to give these prospects a little bit of attention.

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Let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with, here. This is a simple plot of AL West division playoff odds over time, beginning with the start of the season, through, I don’t know, right now? About an hour ago, I guess.

The calendar on my wall tells me it’s still April, and the much smaller calendar on my computer agrees, so this early you don’t expect many big huge shifts in playoff probabilities. Long ways to go, and all that. Looking at the image above, you see teams kind of holding steady. The Rangers are close to where they started. The Angels are down a little bit. The A’s are up a little bit. The Mariners are up even more. All of those teams are bunched together — they’re separated by just 1.5 games. But then you have the Astros. Based on our own math, the Astros opened as overwhelming division favorites. They’ve already coughed that up, and then some. Odds are based on projections, and projections are imperfect. I get that. So here’s a fact: At 6-15, the Astros presently have the worst record in the American League. It doesn’t mean they’re a bad team, but it does mean they’re a team in real trouble.

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As I begin writing this post, the three most-searched names in the FanGraphs search bar are Jake Arrieta, Rich Hill, and Clayton Kershaw, or, the three greatest pitchers in baseball.

I kid. Mostly. Hill faced a righty-heavy Tigers lineup in Detroit last night and threw seven shutout innings while striking out eight, walking none, and allowing just four hits. It’s the kind of start that’s become commonplace for him since September of last year, and it’s the kind of start that, if commonplace, makes you one of the best pitchers in baseball. I don’t know if Rich Hill is actually one of the best pitchers in baseball. I don’t think he is, but that’s kind of what this is all about — Rich Hill is making us think now.

Last year, we saw the four starts, and they were amazing, and we reconsidered everything we knew about baseball, and then the playoffs happened, and the offseason happened, and six months went by, and it seemed like more than enough time for 36-year-old, injury-riddled, never-done-anything-remotely-like-this-before Rich Hill to lose everything he gained during those four starts in Boston. That’s the fear with any player who ends a season on a hot stretch, that whatever that hot player had in September will have worn off by next April. That fear felt especially appropriate in this particular scenario, given Hill’s history.

And then Spring Training happened, and Hill was awful. And then he was forced into an emergency Opening Day start when Sonny Gray fell ill, and Hill only lasted 2.2 innings. At that point, it was over. Hill was cooked. Whatever happened at the end of 2015 was a total fluke, a gift from above, and Rich Hill was back to being Rich Hill.

And then he rattled off another four-start stretch that rivaled 2015’s. Back to Rich Hill. Thirty-four strikeouts in in 23 innings, eight walks, five earned runs. Over Clayton Kershaw’s last nine starts, he has a 1.85 FIP, and over Hill’s nine starts during that same time period, Hill has the better strikeout rate, the better home-run rate, the better ground-ball rate, and the better ERA.

So I wanted to play a little game. Hill has been Kershaw’s equal since September of last year, but it’s not exactly a fair comparison, because Hill is (probably) pitching at the absolute peak of his career, and we’ve just compared him to a less-than-peak (but still amazing) Kershaw. To make a truly fair comparison, we need to go peak against peak. In the interest of full disclosure, I originally thought this might work with Kershaw, but then I looked at Kershaw’s best nine-starts stretches and realized how foolish I am. Kershaw isn’t a human. But Max Scherzer is a human! And also one of the best, I don’t know, five pitchers in baseball? Based on those two statements alone, he became our new subject. Let’s play a guessing game, pitting Scherzer’s career-best nine-start runs in particular statistical categories vs. Hill’s last nine starts. Click the .gif below each question to reveal the answer.
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They say you can’t predict baseball, but that’s nonsense. You can’t predict all of baseball, but you can definitely predict some of baseball. One of those predictions that any one of us could’ve made: There was no way Trevor Story was going to keep that up. It was so obvious that even saying it would’ve been empty. Pointless. The prediction was essentially implied by the statistics, because the statistics were so absurd everybody recognized it.

Let’s talk about this. Hot starts like Story’s regress. We know that to be true, and regression takes place for a few reasons. Luck just evening out is one of them. Hot streaks are typically accompanied by good luck, and cold slumps are typically accompanied by bad luck. And then there are the adjustments. Adjustments! Our favorite genre. When you’re a hot hitter, you don’t keep getting the same at-bats over and over and over again. Opponents learn about you, and they put that information to use. Strengths are apparent, and so are anti-strengths, and that gets folded in to how a guy gets pitched. It’s a tale as old as baseball, even if it’s told a little differently these days.

Hot starts regress. Opponents adjust. Trevor Story had a hot start. Opponents adjusted. Welcome to the big leagues.

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Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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The purpose of this post is to announce the availability — literally starting this exact minute — of tickets to a sabermetrics-themed event to be hosted by the Staten Island Yankees on June 19. The event will feature a number of your favorite baseball writers and also Dave Cameron.

From the club’s expertly composed press release:
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The negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) will feature considerable back-and-forth between the players’ union and the league’s various ownership groups. This is only natural: those are the two parties which must ultimately agree upon the terms of a new deal. But it’s also not an entirely aimless point to make, because those negotiations won’t be the only ones taking place. The owners themselves could have some fairly contentious discussions in deciding their own strategy, particularly when it comes to sharing revenue among the teams. Big-market teams have long gained an advantage on revenues at the gate, but increasingly, the advantage has come from television revenue from local cable networks. Teams continue to sign billion-dollar deals that include an ownership stake, and determining how to divide that money could prove difficult.

Over the last few years, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Philadelphia Phillies, and St. Louis Cardinals have all agreed to new long-term local television deals with Regional Sports Networks (RSNs). It has been a few years at FanGraphs since Wendy Thurm documented the local cable television deals for all MLB teams, and this post aims to provide an update. The work she did helped inform this post as well as a few others to provide a base for research.

When we hear about television deals, we often think of them in terms of the average annual value they provide. That’s a familiar term in baseball, as most player contracts are structured to be paid evenly over the course of the contract. That practice is less common under other circumstances, however, with deals often paying a smaller sum at the beginning of a contract and increasing over time. Television contracts are often structured in this second way. To account for that practice, I have estimated 2016 television money by assuming a yearly 4% increase in money paid to teams in order to find a (hopefully) realistic estimate for how much teams are receiving this year. For example, the Phillies currently possess a 25-year, $2.5 billion dollar deal that begins this year. Instead of assuming they will receive $100 million every year, I am assuming they will receive around $60 million this year with 4% yearly increases over the course of the contract.

There is a full chart below with all the relevant information, but let’s focus on 2016 money first in the graph below.

I did my best to include only contracted revenue — i.e. to omit revenue generated from an ownership stake in a network. However, due to the lack of publicly available information, it’s best to regard these numbers as estimates. Note that, particularly with respect to the Chicago teams, as well as the Los Angeles Angels and Boston Red Sox, that the revenue estimates actually might include money from network ownership. It was difficult to parse those figures.

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About eight years ago, Tanner Roark was pitching in the independent Frontier League after his college team released him. He had an ERA greater than 20.00 in three games. Then the Rangers drafted him, traded him to the Nationals, and he switched to throwing only two-seamers as his main fastball. A few years later, he put up a three-win, 198-inning season, and now — after largely unsuccessful work out of the bullpen in 2015 — he’s a few days removed from a 15-strikeout game. The career arc was pretty tumultuous and incredible before Saturday’s game, and now it’s the sort of thing about which someone writes a book a decade afterwards.

Let’s start with a table to reinforce this day of strangeness. Below is a list of all of the 15-plus strikeout games in the past five years. There are 21 of them, from Jered Weaver’s (!) 15-K game in April of 2011 all the way up to Roark’s gem this past Saturday. Average fastball velocity displayed is for that particular 15-plus strikeout game:

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Brandon Guyer was hit by a pitch three times on Thursday, twice by David Price and once by Noe Ramirez. The Tampa Bay outfielder also had a pair of singles, reaching base a personal best five times as the Rays bested Boston 12-8.

The triple HBP feat tied a MLB record. It had happened 22 times previously, and Guyer was no stranger to the list. Last October, he hobbled to first base courtesy of three Mark Buehrle inside offerings. On the season, he was hit 24 times, the most of any American League player.

Following Thursday’s game, I asked the University of Virginia product about his proclivity to get plunked. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s possible that more has been made of defensive positioning over the last five years than the prior hundred before it. Infield shifts are something we actually track now, and if the early season is any indication, the usage of those infield shifts is on the rise for a fifth consecutive season. Players and managers discuss them openly, television broadcasts take note — some going so far as to display the position of every fielder on the screen — and we see the benefits (and occasional drawbacks) of the shift on a daily basis.

But nearly all the attention we’ve paid to defensive positioning has gone to the infield. There’re more holes in the infield, less margin for error when the shift doesn’t work, and baseball is slow enough to adapt to any sort of change that it should come as no surprise we had to take this one step at a time. But now, slowly but surely, teams have begun shifting more in the outfield, and before long, the outfield shift, just like the infield shift, will become accepted as standard practice, rather than something that demands attention when it happens.

But shifts aren’t confined to lateral movement, the way we most often see. Players are free to move in and out, too, and thanks to new Statcast data, this is the kind of thing we’re starting to see measured and quantified.

Enter Dexter Fowler. Fowler was the center fielder behind Jake Arrieta for Arrieta’s no-hitter last night. Fowler’s been arguably the best player in baseball this year, owing to positive marks in the batter’s box, on the bases, and in the field. Fowler’s long been an above-average hitter, and he’s long been a plus base-runner, but the defensive marks haven’t been so kind. You could make the case the defensive marks are the thing that’s prevented Fowler’s reputation from exceeding “nice little player” to “borderline star.” An above-average hitter who runs the bases well with a reputation as a plus center fielder is a borderline star. But Fowler hasn’t had the reputation as a plus center fielder, because the tools we use to evaluate defense in this day and age have considered Fowler one of the worst defensive outfielders in baseball since he entered the league.

Since 2009, Fowler’s first full season, 28 players have registered at least 3,000 innings in center field — the kind of sample we prefer to have before working with defensive metrics. To contextualize Fowler’s place among his defensive peers, I took that pool of 28, weighted Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating equally, and prorated the figures to roughly a year’s worth of playing time. The worst three regular center fielders over the last seven years, by the numbers, are as follows:

1. Matt Kemp, -11 runs saved per 1,000 innings
2. Dexter Fowler, -9
3. Angel Pagan, -4

Fowler stands 6-foot-5, 195, has good speed, and overall looks like an elite athlete, so his consistently league-worst defensive metrics have always been puzzling, the kind of guy the eye-test crowd uses as an example against the metrics by pointing at him and going, “Just look at him!” Which, I can’t blame them. Fowler looks like he should be fine defensively. It’s always puzzled me, too.

Which is why I was immediately captivated by this tweet from Mike Petriello last month:

Fun with #statcast data: There’s a 28 foot difference in raw avg positioning from deepest CF (Kiermaier) to shallowest (Jones/Fowler).

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) March 23, 2016

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