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The Mets are about to get all six of their best starters healthy again, as Steven Matz just had his second rehab start yesterday in his return from a strained muscle in his side. It looks like they’ll return to the six-man rotation. They should. The circumstances on this particular team make the six-man rotation a perfect match.

Yes, Matt Harvey made some waves when he complained that he didn’t know what to do with his extra day off after the Mets went to the six-man rotation. Turns out, he’s not alone. And yet, his rotation mates have a lot to teach him about maintaining a schedule with an extra day of rest.

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The Los Angeles Dodgers made another move after a very active trading deadline, trading for life-long Philadelphia Phillies’ player and icon Chase Utley. The Dodgers, attempting to hold off the San Francisco Giants for a division title are currently two games ahead of the Giants, but are also one game behind the Chicago Cubs in the wild-card standings, making the division title potentially the only real avenue to make the playoffs. The Phillies will reportedly pay $4 million of the $6 million that Utley is owed for the rest of the season and in return receive minor leaguers Darnell Sweeney and right-hander John Richy. While the players the Phillies receive are not non-prospects — each appeared in Kiley McDaniel’s Dodgers write-up this past spring — for this season, the trade is centered on Utley’s potential contribution to the Dodgers.

For the Phillies, this trade is another in a series of transactions which represents a move away from their World Series’ runs at the end of last decade and toward rebuilding. For the Dodgers, in a tight playoff race where any additional help could mean the difference between the playoffs and going home despite a $300+ million outlay in salaries, the move for Chase Utley is no guarantee of success, but the possibility, especially when Utley had been rumored to go to the Giants, likely makes the move worth the effort. Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Crawford’s big power breakout has been a big part of the Giants’ good work so far this season despite an iffy rotation. Jeff Sullivan did a great job pointing out the changes he saw in Crawford’s swing, and the player agreed with most of his analysis. But Sullivan also pointed out that pitchers were in the middle of adjusting to the player, and it’s been Crawford’s adjustment(s) back to their adjustment that has helped him sustain the power into the late months.

One was mechanical, the other had to do with approach. Taking the two together really makes Crawford’s new power level seem sustainable, though.

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Kiley McDaniel put out his 2015 In-Season Prospect Update on Wednesday, which got everyone up to speed on the game’s most noteworthy prospects. Among other things, Kiley included an ordered list of the top-26 prospects in baseball. To follow suit, I put together an updated top-100 list, according to my KATOH system. Additionally, I produced KATOH forecasts for Kiley’s top 26, the 18 players on his “Minor-League Pop-Up Guys List.”

I know you probably know this, but I’d like to reiterate that you shouldn’t think of this as “Chris Mitchell’s Top 100 List,” and certainly not “FanGraphs’ Top 100 List.” This is simply the output from a flawed statistical model that fails to take into account many of the factors that go into evaluating a prospect. In particular, it ignores a player’s physical tools. As always, you should never choose between beer and tacos if you don’t have to.

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Since I made you wait a little longer than I intended for a mid-season/trade-deadline prospect rankings update, I decided to expand upon the form with four lists instead of just one. Each of these lists uses tiers like my other lists, but each list is also ordered by preference within each tier. I’ve also started using Present Value (PV) in addition to the normal Future Value (FV) as a better way to show how close a prospect is to reaching his ceiling, or being ready for a call-up. See this article for more about FV and the 20-80 scouting scale in general.

The first list is the standard top-prospect list with the standard 130 at-bat/50 innings pitched qualifications, so prospects in the big leagues are eligible for the list. That said, a few players like Kyle Schwarber and Daniel Norris are about a week from losing their prospect eligibility and are in the big leagues, so I moved them to another of the lists below in anticipation.

The second list features players who were eligible for the Top 200 Prospect List last year that didn’t make it, but would do so comfortably now. Think of this as the minor-league version of “pop-up guys” that you’ll hear referred to more often in the draft: players that improved greatly in a short period of time. The standard for being listed is 50 FV, which was the 80th through 143rd prospects on the preseason list, but, for reasons I’ll explain below, should be even higher this year.

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Major League Baseball’s arcane – and many would say horribly outdated – television blackout policy has long been a source of frustration for baseball fans. As most readers are by now well aware, under MLB’s existing rules, fans residing within each team’s designated “local” broadcasting territory are currently unable to view that team’s games over the Internet via the MLB.tv streaming service. Instead, fans must subscribe to whichever regional sports network (RSN) owns the rights to the team’s games in order to watch their local team play.

These restrictions impact fans in a variety of ways. For starters, the existing rules prevent fans from watching their local team play on mobile devices, instead only allowing fans to view their local team’s games on a traditional television set. So anyone hoping to watch their local team’s broadcast via cell phone, for instance, is out of luck under the league’s existing rules.

Perhaps more frustrating, though, is the impact that MLB’s blackout policy has on fans who are either currently unable – or simply unwilling – to subscribe to whichever RSN owns the rights to their designated local team’s games. Under MLB’s policy, even if these fans shell out $110-130 per year to subscribe to MLB.tv, they will still be blacked out from watching any game involving their local team, even if they cannot watch the game on their local cable system.

So when news broke on Monday that MLB and Fox are nearing a deal to allow in-market streaming for 15 teams’ games, some fans were undoubtedly excited to learn that baseball was apparently, at long last, fully embracing the new digital age.

Unfortunately, in reality, the MLB-Fox agreement will do little to solve the most frequent criticisms of MLB’s blackout policy, as the scope of the new deal appears to be much more modest than some initial headlines suggested.

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It’s difficult to figure out where to start with Jackie Bradley Jr. You could start with his incredible defense, and actually that’s probably the right place to begin. You could look at this play, or this play, or this play, or if you have four minutes and 31 seconds you can watch some defensive highlights from 2014. Or just use Google. I’m sure you’ll come up with something good. That’s because Bradley is an exceptional outfielder. Someone with his defensive skills shouldn’t have to hit much to play regularly. “Not much” is still more than “none,” though, and it’s the difference between these two that has held Bradley back.

Bradley was called up four times in 2013, including at the beginning of the season to serve as the club’s starting left fielder. He hit .097/.263/.129 and was sent down as soon as the team got healthy enough to do so. He was called up three other times with varying degrees of failure, but the end result was a .617 OPS on the season. Even so, Bradley had hit at every level of the minors, including posting an .842 OPS for Triple-A Pawtucket in 2013 in between trips to Boston. The team decided he would be their starting center fielder in 2014. And he was. And his defense was close to perfect. His hitting was also perfect — though only on opposite day. Now, though, he’s hitting on all the regular kinds of days, too.

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A month ago, as baseball was just finishing up the All-Star break, the Nationals looked to be in a pretty good position. They were 48-39, sitting atop the NL East, and were expecting a host of quality reinforcements from the disabled list. The team hadn’t quite lived up to pre-season expectations, but a lot of that could be chalked up to health issues, and even their somewhat disappointing first half had them in first place; with some of their best players rejoining the club, the second half looked promising.

At that point, our projections gave the Nationals an 85% chance of winning the division. In the first 30 games of the second half, however, well, just take a look for yourself.

Since the break, they’re just 10-20, and they now find themselves 4 1/2 games behind the Mets in the NL East; their chances of making the postseason are down to 31%. They’ve lost six straight on their current west coast road trip, and now sitting at a game under .500, questions are starting to get raised about whether Matt Williams even makes it to the end of the season as the team’s manager.

So, how has this second half, and potentially the entire season, gone so wrong?

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Before anybody snarks about the quality of Trevor Bauer’s pitching, and whether or not he’s good enough for us to value his thoughts on pitching, know that he’s fully aware of his limits, and was even before conceding six runs to the Yankees last night.

“I don’t throw hard enough. My pitches aren’t strikes often enough. My pitches aren’t consistent enough. I’d almost rather not be a pitcher than be a mediocre pitcher,” he admitted to me. (I had to tell him he was decidedly above-average when it came to whiffs and strikeouts, at least.)

But this is exactly what makes him well qualified to study the art of pitching. He isn’t blessed with a Felix Hernandez changeup, or Clayton Kershaw‘s command, or even teammate Corey Kluber’s breaking ball. He knows that.

And so what brings him satisfaction? Studying pitching. Working hard to figure things out. Getting better, with the help of our best tools.

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This article was originally developed as an oral presentation given by the author to the Society for American Baseball Research at their SABR 45 Convention in Chicago on June 27, 2015. The presentation, which featured the innovative use of video, audio and transitional animation embedded within a PowerPoint deck, was awarded the annual Doug Pappas Research Award as the best of the 32 oral presentations made during the convention that weekend.

This article has been repurposed from that deck. Since the Retrosheet play-by-play data on which this study was predicated were updated just days before the original presentation, all the data provided during the oral presentation have been updated for this article.

In the first installment of this Little League Home Runs series, we first reviewed the proposed definition of the Little League home run and found both the earliest recorded incidence of the event itself and of the earliest use of the term. In the second installment, we contemplated some of the statistics and oddities attended to the history of the Little League home run, including a link to a file listing all 258 Little League home runs that have occurred in big league history.

In this installment, we will boldly call the entire premise of the first post into question by reviewing that original proposed definition and discuss — and I mean with you, not just in my head — whether that definition is the right one, or whether we should adjust it based on available facts on the ground.

We initially selected the two-criterion definition of (1) two or more errors on the play and (2) batter scores on the play because of its simplicity. As we said before, simple works really well: you simply go into Retrosheet’s play by play files, simply plug these two parameters into their proprietary BEVENT tool, and all the plays that match them come right up. Couldn’t be much simpler.

But despite that the Little League home run can be defined in this simple manner, the $64,000 question is: should it? Not all two-error/batter-scoring plays look alike, and they encompass a wide range of plays occupying the spectrum between hilarious gaffe-filled boners (which sounds like an uncomfortable physical condition, doesn’t it?) and mild defensive glitches on good long hits.

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