Daily Notes: Top Performers of the Pac-12 This Exact Moment

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

1. Informative Preamble Regarding What the People Want
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: Pac-12 Hitters and Pitchers
3. Largely Unhelpful Video: Arizona State’s Trevor Williams

Informative Preamble Regarding What the People Want
“For what are the people clamoring?”: this is the precise question the author poses to himself each morning as he sits down at his finely crafted and foreign-made desk to compose these Notes. Only today, however, has the answer to that question revealed itself so immediately and so in red-colored Rockwell Extra Bold font, as follows:

Indeed, the thing for which the people are clamoring is truly a record of the top performers of Pac-12 baseball. Nor are the people misguided in their desires. For one thing, five Pac-12 teams — Oregon State (No. 3), UCLA (No. 11), Arizona State (No. 14), Oregon (No. 16), and Arizona (No. 20) — occupy spots in Baseball America’s most recent iteration of its top-25 college rankings. (And a sixth team, Stanford, is littered with possible first-round major-league picks.) For two, the author — along with a not insignificant portion of Team FanGraphs — is currently situated in Phoenix, Arizona, and will likely be making Arizona State’s Friday night game against Washington State his business.

In consideration of these considerations, the author has sought to abide by the wishes of the people and has provided (below) leaderboards which reveal the top performers of the Pac-12 at this exact moment.

SCOUT Leaderboards: Pac-12 Hitters and Pitchers
SCOUT Leaderboard: Pac-12 Hitters
Below is the current SCOUT batting leaderboard for the Pac-12. SCOUT+ combines regressed home-run, walk, and strikeout rates in a FIP-like equation to produce a result not unlike wRC+, where 100 is league average (in this case, for all Pac-12 hitters) and above 100 is above average. xHR%, xBB%, and xK% stand for expected home run, walk, and strikeout rate, respectively.

SCOUT Leaderboard: Pac-12 Pitchers
Below is the current SCOUT leaderboard for the Pac-12. SCOUT- combines regressed strikeout and walk rates in a kwERA-like equation to produce a number not unlike ERA-, where 100 is league average (in this case, for all Pac-12 pitchers) and below 100 is better than average. xK% and xBB% stand for expected strikeout and walk rate, respectively.

Notes
• Oregon State senior Danny Hayes had posted a 13:6 walk-to-strikeout and one home run as of Wednesday in what appears to be 56 plate appearances. Hayes, who plays mostly first base, does not appear to be anything like a top draft prospect. Regardless, he’s controlled the strike zone excellently.

• Last year’s eighth-overall draft pick (by Pittsburgh), Stanford senior right-hander Mark Appel, has surpassed his 2012 strikeout-to-walk ratio (130:30) so far through four starts so far this season, having posted a 43:6 mark in four starts during a tough non-conference schedule.

• After posting rather a modest 59 strikeouts in 109.2 innings last year (4.8 K/9), Arizona State junior Trevor Williams has had considerably more success in that area through his first four starts of 2013, recording a 26:4 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 30.0 innings (for a considerably higher 7.8 K/9). A search of the World Wide Web for Williams’ fastball velocity proved fruitless.

Largely Unhelpful Video: Arizona State’s Trevor Williams
Here’s video of Arizona State right-hander Trevor Williams’ (a) rather effortful delivery and (b) cat-like reflexes: