The release of Baseball America’s South Atlantic League top-20 list is essentially Christmas for me, as much of my time is spent scouting the league. This season, I had the opportunity to see 11 of the top-20 prospects featured in person, which is actually a down year for me. Fortunately, the Greenville Drive, the Boston Red Sox “Sally” affiliate was well represented, with four players in the top-20, including two of the highest ceiling prospects in the system in outfielder Brandon Jacobs and shortstop Xander Bogaerts.

As two of the best hitting prospects in the league this past season, both Jacobs and Bogaerts deserve to be ranked highly on the list, and they check in 8th and 10th respectively. However, I was pretty surprised to see Jacobs edge out his teammate for a higher position on the list.

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Episode Eighty-Seven
In which accounts and descriptions abound.

Headlines
The Story of the Rays’ Game 162 — Told by People Who Were There!

Featuring
Mike Axisa, FanGraphs and River Ave Blues
Tommy Rancel, FanGraphs and ESPN 1040 Tampa

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 30 min. play time.)

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Episode Eighty-Six
In which baseball sells itself.

Headlines
The Events of September 28th — Recapitulated!
The Saddest Story Ever — Told Briefly!
The 2011 Playoffs — Super-Previewed!

Featuring
Dave Cameron, Full-Time Employee

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 45 min. play time.)

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From Dirk Hayhurst’s Twitter:

“You know what would be really cool…”

~Baseball Gods, right before THIS all happened.

They’re calling it “Wild Wednesday,” and it was, but it was also Wild Twenty-Aught-Eleven. The Tampa Bay Rays closed the books on their 2011 campaign with one of the craziest nights in baseball history and one of the most absurd paths to the postseason ever.

At 12:03 a.m. ET this morning, Robert Andino hit a sinking line drive to left field off Jonathon Papelbon. Carl Crawford charged the ball, but it popped off his glove and Nolan Reimold dove onto home plate, giving the Orioles a 4-3 win. The first Orioles player to reach Andino chest-bumped him to the ground — maybe knocking the wind out of him — as the cameras watched the Baltimore bench fall onto his seemingly-frightened and breathless face.

At 12:05 a.m., Evan Longoria reached out — almost into the other batter’s box — to foul off a slider from New York Yankees pitcher Scott Proctor, holding the count at two balls, two strikes. Longoria exhaled deeply, puffing his cheeks like a trombone player, as Scott Proctor wound for the next pitch. It was a fastball away that got lost and asked Longo for directions.

“Two-two and line SHOT! DOWN THE LEFT FIELD LIIIIINE! THAT BALL IS GONE!!!” Rays television announcer Dewayne Staats called, presumably leaning out of the booth to watch as Longoria’s 31st homer ricocheted around behind the Crawford Cutout — a low wall added so then-Ray Carl Crawford could rob a few extra home runs.

Last night’s (and this morning’s) Rays game was beyond spectacular (for non-Red Sox fans, that is; my condolences to the northeast). It was parts Spring Training game (with the parade of Yankees pitchers), parts Little League World Series (with the Rays using nearly the entirety of their bench in key roles), and all parts unbelievable.

The 2011 Rays season has shown that though baseball is about probabilities, it is probabilities with replacement — truly any event can occur with the very next pitch, even if it happened just a few innings ago — or if it has never happened before.
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Below, you will find a graph detailing the probabilities that the Rays or the Red Sox would represent the American League as the Wild Card as the wild night of September 28th, 2011 progressed, based on Win Probability. Although we could never truly quantify whatever it was that happened yesterday, let these numbers be a handy guide as we highlight 16 of the key moments (with video links when possible) that ultimately resulted in the craziest night — and the craziest five minutes — in my baseball life and probably in baseball history.

Odds are calculated assuming a 50% win probability in a one-game playoff.

Click to embiggen as we dive into the night that was.

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I, John, take you Krista, to be my wife, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this day forward until death do us part.

The traditional Christian wedding vow has to be one of the most powerful sentences ever constructed in the English language. It’s concise, clear, and direct, and almost chillingly packed full of meaning. For better or for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. ‘Til death do us part. There’s no room left in there for ambiguity, and it’s enough to immediately make even the most love-struck individual turn somber and thoughtful. That’s a sentence that say, “This is for real, kiddo. Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

But that’s an unfair question; no matter how long and hard you think about it, you can never truly know the answer. Are you ready to spend your entire life with this person? Will you be willing and able to cope together with all the obstacles life throws at you? You can hope so, sure, but nobody out there can foresee all the difficulties they will have to deal with in life, or how they will cope in every single case. When you say that vow, you’re making a solemn pledge and a promise… but you’re also hoping like hell that you’re up to the task.

It’s so easy to judge others based on what we can see from the outside. That fact was painfully on display than this morning, when news broke that John Lackey and his wife were divorcing, a mere six months after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and went through a double mastectomy. The headline writes itself, doesn’t it? What sort of person leaves his seriously ill wife just at her time of need? For those that wanted to judge, it was all too easy to react negatively to the news and to cast Lackey as a villain.

But the underlying assumption hidden in that criticism — that serious illnesses strengthen relationships and reduce divorce rates — sounds backwards to me. Illnesses like cancer put a stress on a marriage unlike anything those people have had to deal with before; if anything, wouldn’t illness promote discord and stress, and increase the couple’s odds of divorcing? Let’s see what the stats say.

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Denizens of Red Sox Nation have been sounding the alarm for a couple of weeks now. But, even after all of the team’s success over the past decade, many such folks are apt to sound the alarm when Dustin Pedroia stubs his pinky toe or Jonathan Papelbon sneezes a little too loudly, so it’s always good to take these waves of panic with a grain (or seven) of salt. But here we are in late September, and the Red Sox have done little to stem the tide. Even Josh Beckett fell victim to the Olde Towne Team’s September malaise on Wednesday. Turns out, all the hand-wringing and theoretical (hopefully) Tobin Bridge jumping has been justified.

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Today on ESPN.com, one of the top baseball stories details Brian Cashman’s feigned interest in signing Carl Crawford over the offseason. This revelation isn’t actually new — Jack Curry of YES Network published the same news back in December — but the ESPN story does add one interesting quote to the story. Observe:

“I actually had dinner with the agent to pretend that we were actually involved and drive the price up,” Cashman said. “The outfield wasn’t an area of need, but everybody kept writing Crawford, Crawford, Crawford, Crawford. And I was like, ‘I feel like we’ve got Carl Crawford in Brett Gardner, except he costs more than $100 million less, with less experience.’

I made the claim earlier this season that Brett Gardner is an elite player, and it was met with mixed reactions. Some agree that Gardner’s decent hitting and great defense make him great; others find the claim of great defense too steeped in his great UZR. But now, courtesy of Brian Cashman, we have a suitable point of comparison from a person in a position of baseball authority. Carl Crawford was a four-time All-Star with the Rays and a gold glove winner. No sane person would argue he wasn’t an elite player with the Rays.

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Finally, awards season proper, perhaps inaugurated by last night’s Emmy Awards (more credible than the Grammys, less credible than the Gold Gloves), has begun. Perhaps the annual baseball awards would be more exciting if it somehow incorporated hours of inane red carpet banter, but instead we have to settle for seemingly endless arguments.

If you are reading this, you probably are at least somewhat aware of an added element to the arguments about baseball awards voting the last couple of seasons: the increasing popularity of Wins Above Replacement as a measure of player value. Although I personally have not experienced single-season WAR being used as a “conversation stopper” in player comparison, it seems that some people feel that happens far too often. That is unfortunate, because while WAR is a very useful tool for a getting a picture of a player’s overall contribution relative to his peers, it isn’t something that should be used to end those debates, but to recast them in a different, and hopefully better, fashion. Rather than explain WAR from the ground up (the FanGraphs Library has a good primer), or even to say who should win, today my goal is simply to show how I would use WAR in relation to the 2011 American League MVP Award in a way that probably isn’t too different from most other FanGraphs authors.

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The Red Sox are reeling. Over the last month, they’ve seen a 10-game lead over Tampa Bay shrink down to just three games. They’ve seen their rotation suffer from injuries and poor performances, and lately, even the normally reliable Daniel Bard has been blowing up at inopportune times. As hard as it would have been to believe even just a few weeks ago, the Rays could pull into a tie in the Wild Card race if they can complete the weekend sweep in Boston.

And yet, despite all the injuries, the poor performances, and the threatening kids from down south, I still don’t think the Red Sox really have all that much to worry about. Even if we presume that the Red Sox and Rays are of somewhat equal talent levels for the remainder of the season, the Sox still have a lot of advantages in this race for the final playoff spot.

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