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Hey there everybody, and welcome to the first part of this edition of this. Here’s a link to all of the previous editions. Understand that part of me feels guilty right now. This is my full-time job — my full-time job is serving as a content creator on the Internet. It’s a pretty good job, the sort of thing a lot of people out there are currently fighting for. But there are a lot of content creators on the Internet, full-time and part-time and unpaid. The only way to remain relevant on the Internet as a creator is to keep creating. So, there’s a lot of content, and a lot of it seems like it could be interesting, and a lot of that turns out to actually be interesting. So there’s a lot to consume — too much to consume, infinite content to consume — and it’s easy to get lost. Hours can disappear and you can snap out of it and realize you’re reading an article about Super Dave Osborne. The Internet is dangerous, because information is appealing, and it’s easy to click. If you can control yourself, kudos; if you have trouble, I apologize for contributing to the Internet’s volume. Many of you are reading this instead of doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and you might not even realize it, and that makes me feel bad. Not bad enough to stop doing my job, because Greek yogurt isn’t going to buy itself, but know that I know your struggle. This weekend let’s all go to the woods.

Uh so here come some wild pitches, covering the window from September 6 through September 19. Once again, this covers two weeks instead of one, because last Friday I was out of town and FanGraphs stays where my computer is. Don’t know what happens next week. Could cover a week. Could cover the second half. Could cover the whole season. There are surprises in store. Meanwhile, this week, few surprises, except for all of the surprises to come. You know the deal: top five pitches furthest from the center of the PITCHf/x strike zone. Pitches just missing: Ivan Nova to Mike Carp on September 15, Madison Bumgarner to A.J. Pollock on September 8, and Stephen Fife to Angel Pagan on September 14. Those pitchers are fortunate to have escaped mocking commentary. They did not, however, escape mention. Now for some mocking commentary.

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I recently posed a question to 22 baseball writers from across the country. It was a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Given the subjectivity involved, it doesn’t even have a right answer.

“Who are the three best eligible players — not including Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens — not in the Hall of Fame?”

The reason for excluding Bonds and Clemens is the likelihood they would have finished one-two on the majority of ballots. Also not eligible were players who will debut next year, and those, like Pete Rose, ineligible for enshrinement.

The writers were asked to rank their selections in order and provide a brief explanation. The results were then tabulated with first choices receiving five points, second choices receiving three points, and third choices receiving one point.

Their responses are listed below in alphabetical order, followed by the final results of the voting.
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FanGraphs has a lot of metrics, ranging from the standard counting numbers that have filled baseball cards for decades to more complicated calculations and formulas. Odds are pretty good that if there’s something you want to know about a particular Major League player, we probably have a metric for it. However, up until today, we’ve lacked one number that answered two of the most basic questions that people ask: Who has been the best offensive player in the game, and who has been the best defensive player in the game?

You could get at those questions with the numbers we had, using a combination of metrics found on the site, but there wasn’t just a single number that simply answered those two questions. And, unfortunately, the lack of an available sum of offense or defensive value led to people occasionally substituting in a number that didn’t actually answer the question they were trying to answer. This was our fault, not theirs, but as of an hour ago, this has been rectified with the introduction of two new numbers here on FanGraphs.

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I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about the other sports, so I can’t speak to situations more messed up than what we’ve got in baseball. But in baseball — little details aside — we’ve got the A’s, and we’ve got the Marlins.

The A’s consistently try really hard to win, despite the odds being stacked against them. Oakland has a brilliant front office, and they play in a ballpark plagued by sewage leaks in the clubhouse and in the dugout. The Marlins are crooks. Money-hungry crooks. They play in a brand-new ballpark they didn’t pay for — a ballpark they’ve made no effort to fill after a disappointing debut season. The Marlins did what the Marlins do: They got some people excited, then they undid the goodwill and more.

Some baseball teams have reputations. The Yankees are the big spenders. The Dodgers are the other big spenders. The Twins are lovable throwbacks. The Braves are slightly less-lovable throwbacks. The Royals are run by people who shouldn’t be running the Royals. And so on. The Marlins’ reputation is that they’re run by criminals who deceive with every word. Two offseasons ago, it looked like they were trying hard to turn the page, to create a new identity. Two offseasons ago, the Marlins tried to spend to build a powerhouse. But their identity is still their identity. You know how it went. The Marlins are as the Marlins have been.

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You won’t get Mike Trout to say he should win the Most Valuable Player award this year because his Wins Above Replacement total is higher than another player’s. But if you listen closely to him describing his game, you will hear the basic constructs for the argument that can be made in his favor. It’s a simple one.

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Earlier this summer, former St. Louis Cardinals right-hander Bob Tewksbury took us through his outings in 1992 against the Chicago Cubs and the Atlanta Braves. He did so with the help of his old notebook, which includes scouting reports, results of individual at bats and more.

In the third installment of Tewksbury’s Notebook, the focus isn’t on specific teams. Instead, the veteran of 13 big-league seasons discussed how he approached pitching to 10 of the best hitters of his era. Read the rest of this entry »

Back at the turn of the century, the 2000/2001 Oakland A’s were remarkably successful, and that success led Michael Lewis to write a little book called Moneyball, which you’ve probably heard of. I think everything that could possibly be said about that book and those teams has probably been said, written, and re-hashed 100 times, so don’t worry, I’m not writing this post to kick that dead horse anymore. I just want to point out that, 12 years later, the A’s have basically done the exact same thing that got the book written in the first place.

Those A’s teams won 193 out of the 323 games they played, the second best winning percentage in the game, despite the fact that they were spending a fraction of what their high revenue competitors were throwing at players. The A’s teams of last year and this year have won 182 of the 312 games they’ve played, the second best winning percentage in the game, despite the fact that they were spending a fraction of what their high revenue competitors were throwing at players. For more context, a table.

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The Rangers are sliding again. Perhaps you’ve noticed. The last time they won was September 8, and even that was just their second win in seven games. Since then they have zero wins in seven games, losing on Monday to the Rays, who are direct wild-card competition. To make matters worse, the Rangers haven’t even had a single lead in this seven-game cold streak. Or maybe that doesn’t make matters worse. Maybe it’d be worse to have blown leads. Maybe the sequences don’t matter, provided the end result is still a loss. Who cares how you get there? Losing is losing, and mid-September is the wrong time to be losing.

Used to be, the Rangers felt like postseason shoo-ins. Now they’re clinging to a half-game lead for a wild-card slot, their division hopes entirely dashed. There are four teams on the Rangers’ heels, the Indians tied in the win column. Our playoff odds report puts the Rangers’ chances of getting beyond the regular season at 47%. It is now, basically, a coin flip, where it used to be a flip of a very biased coin. Though hope is far from lost, the Rangers need to get to work, because now they can’t back into the playoffs — they’ve already done the backing up. The Rangers need to score and not let the other guys score.

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Though it’s not yet set in stone, Clayton Kershaw is probably going to win the ERA title, and he’s probably going to win the National League Cy Young Award, because Cy Young Awards frequently go to the guys with the ERA titles. Yet Kershaw isn’t the only starter with an ERA under 2, after you lower the minimums a little bit. There are actually three of them, one of whom is Kershaw, who is demonstrably and understandably amazing. One of them is Jarred Cosart, whose ERA is a hell of a lot more promising than the rest of his numbers. And the third is Clay Buchholz. Kershaw stands out because his adjusted ERA is nearly half the league average. Buchholz stands out because his adjusted ERA is two-thirds Kershaw’s. And Buchholz, now, is back from injury.

Any ERA that low, for a starter, is unsustainable, especially for a starter in the American League and Fenway Park, but Buchholz’s xFIP- is way improved. His FIP- is way improved. Something that’s helped him prevent runs is that he hasn’t surrendered many dingers, as dingers count for runs automatically. But more interesting than that is Buchholz’s strikeout increase. Used to be that Buchholz’s strikeout rates didn’t quite match the quality of his stuff, or at least that was the perception. This year he’s taken a leap forward, striking out a quarter of the batters he’s faced. Changes in strikeout rate capture an analyst’s attention, and in Buchholz’s case, there’s something in particular that’s been driving this.

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Last week, we spent some time talking about players that may or may not receive a qualifying offer when they hit free agency this winter. The qualifying offer is an important decision, because it grants the original organization a compensation pick at the end of the first round if that player changes teams through free agency. However, it requires teams to be willing to make an offer of at least $14 million in salary for 2014, so it can’t just be handed out to every free agent in hopes of stocking up on draft picks.

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