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Just like any reasonable person would’ve expected, the Los Angeles Dodgers currently have sole possession of first place in the National League West. And just like any reasonable person would’ve expected, right now the Dodgers’ team leader in wRC+ among regulars and semi-regulars is Dee Gordon, at 174. As a neat bit of ephemeral trivia, Gordon’s wRC+ is 43 points higher than his 2012 wRC+ and his 2013 wRC+ combined. And by combined, I don’t mean averaged out. I mean added together. Through two weeks, the Dodgers’ biggest weakness has been one of their biggest strengths, and this is an example of why the playoffs don’t crown the best team in baseball. Sometimes, over little samples, Dee Gordon out-hits Hanley Ramirez.

Some more neat ephemeral trivia: Before the season started, Steamer projected Gordon for 0.3 WAR. Meanwhile, ZiPS projected Gordon for 0.7 WAR. Already, Gordon’s been worth 0.6 WAR, so he can be replacement-level from this point forward and the Dodgers won’t be worse off than they were expected to be. Following about a season’s worth of games of being terrible, Gordon’s gone from busted prospect to contributor, and he even went so far as to hit a legitimate home run off Max Scherzer. Sunday, he did something more his own speed.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Rafael Montero, RHP, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 23   Top-15: 5th   Top-100: 94th
Line: 11.0 IP, 11.45 K/9, 0.82 BB/9, 0.0 HR/9, 0.93 FIP

Summary
The Mets’ diminutive right-hander has torched the Pacific Coast League (PCL) thus far, but the organization may need to get creative if its to best utilize his services.

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This year, in an attempt to clarify the difference between a catch and a transfer on plays around the base base bag, MLB informed teams that a clean transfer from glove to hand was now going to be a required element in making a legal catch. No longer could a player argue that the ball was dropped on the exchange between glove and hand in order to retire the lead runner in a double play attempt. To be credited with the first out, the player has to move the ball from his glove to his hand without losing possession of the ball. As an example, this play occurred last week.

Last year and for pretty much every year before it, that play is ruled an out at second base, as Zobrist received the ball into his glove before the runner got to the bag, and only dropped it when attempting to throw to first base for the second out. This year, that is not an out, and even after the Rays challenged the decision on the field, they were denied on appeal. The next day, MLB issued an official statement in the wake of the play:

“Umpires and/or replay officials must consider whether the fielder had secured possession of the ball but dropped it during the act of the catch. An example of a catch that would not count is if a fielder loses possession of the ball during the transfer before the ball was secured by his throwing hand.”

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Maybe the most fun you can have with the Danny Salazar start is by just going over the fun facts. Salazar faced the White Sox Thursday, and he’d go up against 18 batters. Six of them hit the ball fair, and six of them ended up with hits. Two batters walked, meaning ten batters struck out, in just 3.2 innings. The following facts are also true: Salazar recorded zero non-strikeout outs, and the White Sox hit to a 1.000 BABIP. So how do you explain the one extra out? Adam Eaton was gunned down at second trying to turn a single into a double. In that way, Eaton was the spoiler.

It was a conspicuously ridiculous start. You don’t need anybody to tell you nothing like that had ever happened before — you can tell that immediately by looking at the numbers. Salazar finished with a 12.27 ERA and a 0.51 xFIP. In fairness, a year ago, Joe Blanton had a start with a 13.50 ERA and a 1.51 xFIP. Roy Halladay had a start with a 13.50 ERA and a 1.58 xFIP. Over the long run, you care more about the xFIP. In the shorter run, though, how does something like this happen? How did Danny Salazar steal from what I can only assume was the Rich Harden personal notebook?

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Last October, Shelby Miller became something of a mystery. After spending the year in the Cardinals rotation and developing into one of the league’s best young hurlers, Miller became nothing more than an active roster cheerleader in the postseaosn. He pitched one inning in the Cardinals five game NLDS victory over the Pirates, then didn’t enter a game in either the NLCS or the World Series. All told, St. Louis pitchers threw 152 innings in October, but even with that workload, the Cardinals managed to give 151 of them to pitchers not named Shelby Miller.

He insisted he wasn’t hurt. If he was injured, the Cardinals could have simply replaced him on the playoff roster with someone else, someone they would use. The fact that they carried him for all three postseason series suggests that it wasn’t a predetermined plan to not use him and supports Miller’s assertion that he could have pitched. Mike Matheny didn’t just trust him in any kind of meaningful situation, and the Cardinals didn’t play many low leverage innings in October.

The Cardinals didn’t say much publicly about their decision, but it was reported over the winter that Miller was dealing with some shoulder fatigue in September, so despite Miller’s claims that he felt good, there might have been a physical reason for his absence. However, with an off-season of rest, the Cardinals have put Miller right back into their plans, and were presumably hoping that a little rest would allow Miller to go back to what he was during the regular season last year.

Well, apparently, an off-season of rest hasn’t fixed anything, because the Shelby Miller that has taken the mound for two starts in April mostly looks like the September version who the Cardinals decided wasn’t up to pitching meaningful innings in October.

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Circumstances were different when Paul Goldschmidt faced Tim Lincecum the first time. In early August of 2011, Goldschmidt was playing in his second-ever major-league game, a young first baseman who’d never been a Baseball America top-100 prospect, and who’d never been a Baseball America top-10 Diamondbacks prospect. Lincecum was a staff ace having a Cy Young-caliber season, his fourth in a row, and he was one of the major pieces around which the Giants were built. Against Lincecum, Goldschmidt popped out on the seventh pitch of the first plate appearance. On the fourth pitch of the second plate appearance, Goldschmidt went yard.

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One of the big conversations taking place in baseball right now concerns whether or not Billy Hamilton is going to hit enough to stick as an actual long-term regular. It’s a justifiable worry, because Hamilton didn’t exactly tear up the minors, and he hasn’t looked fantastic in his limited exposure to the majors. We won’t know for a while whether Hamilton can do enough at the plate, but it’s good to have the occasional reminder of why he’s being held to a lower baseline than others. Wednesday’s fifth inning of a game between the Reds and Cardinals provided such a reminder.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Hamilton made a run happen entirely on his own. He required assistance from the pitcher, his teammates, and the rest of the opposition. But with no other player in baseball would a run have been scored, given the sequence you’re about to observe, in .gif form.

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When writing about Jonathan Papelbon in the year 2014, there’s a few things that we can stipulate as fact, if only because you all already know about them and there’s not really much point in spending time rehashing them.

We know that his velocity has been dropping steadily for years. We know that the four-year, $50 million contract he signed prior to the 2012 season looked bad at the time and looks even worse now, both hampering the Philadelphia budget and helping to usher in a world where closers don’t get big money on the market any longer. (No closer has earned as much since, and with Craig Kimbrel extended, it’s possible no one will for years.) We know that he’s not exactly considered the best teammate in the world. We know, we think, that the Phillies badly wanted to be rid of him and couldn’t, for all of these reasons.

Even still: 2014 has provided some additional information, and it’s not exactly encouraging. Read the rest of this entry »

Intermittently, over the past month or so, the present author — leaning heavily on historical data from Baseball America — has examined the ways in which prospects distinguished for possessing certain tools as minor-leaguers have ultimately fared at the major-league level. The goal: ideally, to develop a better sense of what does and doesn’t correlate to future success, with a view towards better assessing contemporary prospects.

The first of these posts considered the 2005 “class,” as it were, of best-tool prospects and their respective major-league futures; the second post, that collection of prospects from 2005 to -09 who had been recognized both for their hit tool and plate discipline simultaneously; and the third, that subset of the best-hitting, most-disciplined prospects who had also been recognized for their defensive acumen.

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Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball, and by definition, that makes him also the best pitcher in the National League. In the American League, though, things are not quite as clear. The AL is home to a handful of truly excellent pitchers, and differentiating between them is the ultimate in picking nits. The last four Cy Young Awards have been won by Max Scherzer (still awesome), David Price (him too), Justin Verlander (yep), and Felix Hernandez (ditto), and they’re all still — for now, at least — in the American League. Yu Darvish hasn’t won a Cy Young Award yet, but he was the consensus favorite among the FanGraphs staff in our preseason picks. That’s a pretty fantastic starting five, and I’d have no qualms with anyone making an argument on behalf of any one of those as the AL’s premier starting pitcher.

But the more I watch him pitch, the more I think I might just pick Chris Sale.

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