The Hall of Fame’s Modern Era committee is scheduled to vote on Sunday, with the results announced later that day. Who among the 10 candidates will be elected into Cooperstown is anyone’s guess. Based on previous veterans’ committee decisions, it won’t be many — if any at all. The electorate consists of 16 members, and the support of at least 12 of them (75%) is needed to cross the threshold.

We conducted a poll of our own, asking a cross section of baseball writers from around the country (and Canada) which of the candidates is deserving. We requested, along with their selections, a brief explanation for each Yes vote. (As you’ll see below, “brief” is a relative term.)

Here are the responses, with final results tallied at the end.

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Mike Axisa, CBS Sports
Selections:Tommy John, Marvin Miller, Alan Trammell.

“Tommy John was a borderline Hall of Famer as a player, and I think his impact on the game through the surgery that bears his name should be considered, and that pushes him in for me. John’s overall impact on the game, both as a player and medical marvel, are Cooperstown worthy.”

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The Detroit Tigers are shedding veteran contracts and restocking what had become a depleted farm system. That’s good news for the team’s future. It’s bad news for their fans in terms of watching winning baseball. As with any rebuild, near-term pennant contention isn’t part of the plan.

Al Avila is approaching the situation with a stiff upper lip. As unpleasant of a task as it might be — no one likes to lose — Detroit’s GM accepts the fact that in order to get better, his team first has to get worse. That’s why he traded J.D. Martinez, Justin Verlander, Justin Upton, Justin Wilson, and even his own son. And he’s not done dealing.

During the General Managers’ Meetings in Orlando, Avila praised both the prospects he’s been acquiring and the young talent that has already begun contributing at the big league level. He then went on to suggest the latter group might not want to invest too heavily in Detroit-area real estate. Read the rest of this entry »

When Travis Sawchick asked you which question was most important on Shohei Ohtani’s questionnaire, you answered overwhelmingly that the team capable of keeping him healthy — or of convincing Ohtani that they’d keep him healthy — would win out. Travis went on to use a metric, Roster Resource’s “Roster Effect” rating, to get a sense of which team that might be. The Brewers, Cubs, Pirates, and Tigers performed best by that measure.

Of course, that’s just one way of answering the question. Health is a tough thing to nail down. To figure out which team is capable of keeping Ohtani the healthiest, it’s worth considering the possible implications of health in baseball. Roster Effect, for example, considers the quality of the player and seems to be asking: which rosters were affected the most by poor health? That’s one way of approaching it. Let’s try a few others and see who comes out on top.

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The worst called strike of this season was thrown in the eighth inning of a game between the Astros and the Tigers on the second-to-last day of July. I measure these things by the distance between the location of the pitch and the nearest part of the rule-book strike zone, and, here, we have a called strike on a pitch that missed the zone by 9.8 inches. It’s not a pitch that’s out there on an island — there are always a bunch of called strikes on pitches that miss by six or seven or eight inches — but 9.8 inches is a hell of a distance. I’m holding up two fingers in front of me. Are they separated by 9.8 inches? I don’t know, but they’re separated by what my eyes estimate would be about 9.8 inches. Big miss, considering the umpire is *right there*. We’ve got the season’s worst called strike identified. And maybe the most amazing thing about it: no one cared. You couldn’t even bring yourself to care today. It’s impossible. You’ll see what I mean. But first, a brief statement.

I hate SunTrust Park. I’ve never been there. It’s brand new. I’m sure a lot of thought went into its design, and I’m sure it has its perks. All the new ballparks have their perks. I don’t care about the SunTrust Park design or amenities. I care about the SunTrust Park technology. And the pitch-tracking data from SunTrust Park is garbage. It’s horribly calibrated, and it makes a project like this super annoying. I looked at dozens and dozens of potential worst called strikes. The bulk of the candidates were thrown in Atlanta, and all of them were off. By, like, several inches, in different directions. That’s been aggravating for me, today, but there are also some broader implications.

Pitch locations feed into a lot of the data we like to use. And if you can’t trust the pitch locations, you can’t trust the data. Incorrect locations would affect, say, zone rates. They’d affect chase rates. They’d affect framing metrics. I hope that people smarter than me are aware of this. I hope they’re working to fix this, if they haven’t already. There’s no excuse. In its initial year of existence, SunTrust Park was messed up. Not in a way many people would ever notice, but *I* noticed, and right now I’m the one writing.

Okay, now back to the worst called strike. We’re not going to Atlanta. We’re going to Detroit!

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The Detroit Tigers are in full rebuild mode, and Isaac Paredes projects as a big part of their future. His bat is the primary reason why. Despite an August swoon that caused his numbers to plummet, the 18-year-old shortstop finished the season with a .725 OPS. Given that he was one of the youngest players in the Midwest League, that’s not exactly chicken soup.

Paredes was acquired by the Tigers, along with Jeimer Candelario, in the trade-deadline deal that sent Alex Avila and Justin Wilson to the Cubs, and the news threw him for a loop. When I talked a him a week and a half later, the Hermosillo, Mexico native admitted to having been shocked and not particularly pleased. His initial thought was “this is something bad.”

Once his head stopped spinning, his attitude shifted to “this is a good thing.” Paredes realized he was going to an organization that would be relying heavily on players just like himself. Read the rest of this entry »

If you tune into the World Series tonight, chances are pretty good that you’ll be able to watch at least one future Hall of Famer — and likely, even, that you’ll see several.

Of the participants in this year’s Series, Clayton Kershaw is already a lock. Both Carlos Beltran and Chase Utley are in the twilight of their careers but have strong cases for inclusion without doing any more work. Among younger players, Jose Altuve is already off to a great start, and early-20-somethings Carlos Correa and Corey Seager have certainly made their mark.

Meanwhile, there’s one player expected to appear in tonight’s game who occupies an in-between category. On the one hand, he hasn’t yet established unassailable Hall of Fame credentials and is past his peak. On the other, he seems poised to compile a few more reasonably productive years. Justin Verlander has a decent case for the Hall right now, but the next few seasons will determine how persuasive his case ultimately is.

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I was recently talking to J.D. Martinez about launch angle and exit velocity and the like. Besides helping me to update my language, he also told me he didn’t really track his performance by those measures. Same thing for some other metrics I mentioned. It’s clear Martinez has some substantive thoughts on hitting, though. It would be strange if he didn’t use any of the data available to him. So I asked him… what do you track? What numbers do you look at?

“I track my swings and misses in the zone,” he said. “I can deal with swing and miss out of the zone. If I’m swinging and missing in the zone, I don’t like that. That tells me something is wrong. It tells me that something is not right with my swing, I’m fouling balls off. If the ball’s in the strike zone, I should be able to hit it. There are certain situations, take a pitch, that’s fine. But when I swing and it’s a strike — especially on a fastball and I’m not hitting it — that’s not good.”

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We’ve written about a possible sea change in baseball over the last few years here, using phrases like “point of contact” and “attack angle” to better articulate the emergence of a Fly-Ball Revolution, itself another relatively new expression. Add those phrases to all the ones we’ve been compelled to learn for the benefit of Statcast alone — terms like “launch angle,” “exit velocity,” “spin rate,” etc. — and it’s obvious that our baseball dictionaries are getting an update on the fly.

Simply because we’re using a new lexicon, however, doesn’t mean we’re using it correctly — or, at the very least, that some of our assumptions couldn’t benefit from an update, as well.

With that in mind, I decided to examine some of the most notable and commonly used terms in this new language of hitting. With the help of the players themselves, perhaps we can better see what lies beneath each of them and attempt to reach something closer to a common understanding.

Fly-Ball Revolution

“I wish you wouldn’t call it the ‘fly-ball revolution,'” Daniel Murphy told me earlier in the year. “Coaches then think we’re talking about hitting the ball straight into the air. Call it the ‘high-line-drive revolution.'”

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Detroit acquired a trio of prospects from Houston last night in exchange for Justin Verlander. Two of those prospects appeared on our updated Astros top-10 list and will likely occupy a similar place in Detroit’s improving system. Before we examine the state of the Tigers’ minor-league talent, however, let’s talk about the three young men who were just traded for one of this century’s best right-handed pitchers.

The centerpiece of this package is 19-year-old Venezuelan righty Franklin Perez. Perez began the year with three dominant starts in High-A before he was shelved for a month with knee soreness. His results have been mixed but generally positive since his late-May return. Despite a few hiccups, Perez was promoted to Double-A in July and has struggled with strike-throwing at times while missing fewer bats than he did in A-ball. But ultimately, we’re talking about a 19-year-old who, despite initially training in Venezuela as a third baseman, has already pitched his way to Double-A and who, when healthy and rested, shows an ability to locate and sequence four quality big-league offerings.

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A month ago, when the dust settled on the July 31st trade deadline, the Astros had added just left-hander Francisco Liriano, whose struggles were one of the main reasons the Blue Jays failed to contend in 2017. It was an underwhelming upgrade for a team headed for the postseason, and the fact that the team thought they had a deal for Zach Britton was little solace to disappointed fans and players who hoped for more reinforcements.

Well, it took a month, but reinforcements are here, and this particular reinforcement throws really hard.

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