The Pirates are (probably) going to the playoffs for the first time since 1992. According to the various versions of playoff odds now available at FanGraphs, Pittsburgh currently has at least a 95 percent change of making the playoffs. Their chances of winning the National League Central are much lower, so that throws them into the single-game playoff mix, but getting in is getting in.

The team is not resting on their laurels, though. Having already acquired Marlon Byrd and John Buck from the Mets, the Pirates are now rumored to be trying to get Justin Morneau from the Twins. The Pirates have mostly utilized a first base platoon with Garrett Jones and Gaby Sanchez and are still positioned to reach the postseason. So, how much of an improvement would the ghost of Morneau provide?

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In a game Sunday against the White Sox, Kevin Correia made a valiant attempt at something no Twins starter had yet accomplished in 2013: a start with eight strikeouts. Correia would last seven innings, and he recorded his seventh strikeout to lead off the bottom of the fifth, when he fanned Tyler Flowers. The Twins’ TV broadcast started talking about Correia’s season and career strikeout highs. Correia would work through 10 more plate appearances before yielding to Jared Burton. None of the 10 wound up a strikeout. Correia remained stuck at seven; Twins starters remained stuck at zero.

Except for Minnesota, every team has at least one starter with at least eight strikeouts in a game. In fact, every other team has at least four starts with eight Ks. The Tigers have 31. The Rangers have 27. The Red Sox have 25. Chad Gaudin has three. Nick Tepesch has two. Charles Leesman has one. The Twins, of course, have zero. But the Twins do have five starts with seven strikeouts. The Twins have long had a reputation for putting together pitch-to-contact starting rotations, so in that way what they’ve done in 2013 is hardly surprising. But this year, the Twins have kicked it up a notch. Or down a notch. However you want to put it, the Twins no longer are at the same notch as before. Read the rest of this entry »

The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

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Glen Perkins has, somewhat quietly, become a dominating relief pitcher. He currently sits 5th among qualified relievers in FIP (1.84), 4th in xFIP (2.21), and he has 14 shutdowns against just two meltdowns. He’s into advanced statistics and knows what FIP and xFIP are. He’s going to represent the Twins in the All-Star Game next week, the team he grew up watching as a kid in Minnesota. And he’s signed to a well below market contract, one that pays him just $2.5 million this year, $3.75 million for the following two years, and then gives the Twins a $4.5 million option on his 2016 season. Because of all these things — okay, probably not the nerd part — the Twins are reportedly not willing to trade Perkins, as their preference is to keep him while they rebuild a new core of young players around him.

The Mets might do a similar thing with Bobby Parnell. He has also been excellent (2.16 FIP, 3.16 xFIP) since moving into their closer role, and as a 28-year-old under team control via arbitration for the next two seasons, the Mets are apparently disinclined to trade him. Neither team wants to send the message that their rebuilds are going to take years, and both are showing a preference to retain their young, cost controlled assets and simply move older pieces on larger contracts instead.

Here’s the problem. Closers — relief pitchers in general, really — are simply not worth building around. Today’s asset is tomorrow’s liability, and the Twins and Mets should learn from the mistake that the Royals made with Joakim Soria.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Two Debuts of Note
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Two Debuts of Note
The Purpose of This Post
The purpose of this post is mostly to inform the readership that two pitchers are scheduled to make their major-league debuts today (Saturday) — namely, Washington right-hander Taylor Jordan (against the New York Nationals) and Minnesota right-hander Kyle Gibson (home against the Kansas Citiers).

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Zoilo is — to put it lightly — not a popular name. So when Zoilo Almonte madness happened over the weekend, it was only natural to think of the other Zoilo in major league history: Zoilo Versalles. One of just 13 shortstops to be voted the most valuable player by the Baseball Writers Association of America, Versalles didn’t have a very long career. But in 1965, he commanded the nation’s attention.

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Introduction
Over the weekend, the present author visited Fifth Third Bank Ballpark in Geneva, Illinois — home to the Cubs’ Midwest League affilliate, the Kane County Cougars — for a game between those same Cougars and Twins affiliate, the Cedar Rapids Kernels. The objective of the trip was to interview very celebrated Minnesota outfield prospect, and the second-overall pick from last year’s draft, Byron Buxton.

In just his age-19 season, Buxton, who’s nearly as fast as Cincinnati prospect Billy Hamilton, has exhibited a startlingly mature offensive approach, posting nearly equal walk and strikeout rates while also hitting seven home runs in 240 plate appearances. His defensive range and throwing arm are also regarded as elite.

Excerpts from the author’s conversation with Buxton appear below. In addition to printing those excerpts here, the author has taken the liberty of commenting upon other aspects of his experience, as well — either because those aspects are informative (like, regarding the Kane County ballpark, for example) or amusing (like, regarding the author’s incompetence, for example) or both (although probably not both, in most cases).

It is not entirely clear whether this approach has anything like merit. In any case, it has occurred to the author that it’s not the worst possible idea — the litmus test by which he (read: I) composes most of his work.

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Vance Worley just got clobbered again, this time by the Braves. There’s no set and certain point at which a start turns into an official clobbering, but looking through Worley’s 2013 game log, I’d say this was the fifth or sixth time he’s been clobbered, in ten games. That’s an ugly ratio, and to make matters worse, recall that Worley was Minnesota’s opening-day starter. The Twins’ de facto ace owns an ERA over 7, with 82 hits allowed in just under 49 innings. His strikeouts are way down and on Wednesday he was chased by a double that followed an Evan Gattis grand slam. Two seasons ago, Worley finished third in the voting for the National League Rookie of the Year.

On May 17, Worley allowed one run in a start against the Red Sox, and he credited his improvement to mechanical tweaks he’d made in recent side sessions. He finished that start with three walks and a strikeout. At the end of April, following a rough appearance, Worley said he was throwing the way he wanted to be throwing. His pitches were fine, and his movement was normal. The results just weren’t present, for him. They still aren’t, and the only consolation for Minnesota is that Ben Revere has been bad, too.

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In Sports Illustrated’s 2013 baseball preview, Tom Verducci wrote a great profile of the Tampa Bay Rays and their approach to optimizing the performance of their pitching staff.

One topic that was especially interesting to me was the apparent importance the Rays place on the 1-1 count. Verducci recounts how pitching coach Jim Hickey described the organization’s focus on getting opposing batters into 1-2 counts:

The Rays believe no pitch changes the course of that at bat more than the 1-and-1 delivery. “It’s almost a 200-point swing in on-base percentage with one ball and two strikes as opposed to two balls and one strike,” Hickey told the pitchers.

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Major League Baseball introduced interleague play in 1997, in part to boost interest in the game after the 1994 season was cut short by the players’ strike. More than 15 years after the first interleague game between the Giants and the Rangers at The Ballpark at Arlington, MLB continues to boast about attendance at interleague games. Last season, the average attendance at interleague games was 34,693, the highest since 2008, when 35,587 fans, on average, attended interleague games.

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