Are you a baseball fan? Do you have access to the internet? I bet you do, because it’d be weird for you to be reading this post otherwise. Well, baseball fan who has access to the internet, it’s your lucky day, because Tom Tango’s Fans Scouting Report is back, and you can go participate in it!

By Tango’s own admission, this is his favorite project. He (and us here at FanGraphs, since we house the results on our both our player pages and leaderboards) are always looking for your help. Last year, Mike Trout only got eight votes. Hopefully he’ll get more this season!

This season, there is an added incentive, for the nerdiest among us. I’ll let Tango tell you all about it:

This year more than any, it comes at a perfect time, thanks to Statcast. Over the coming months, I should be able to come up with a Statcast-based version of a Fielding Scouting Report that mirrors this project. And we’ll be in a great position to compare the results of what the fan sees to what the radar/camera sees.

Well that’s just all sorts of awesome. So go vote and help give the 14th year of Fans Scouting Report its most robust data set ever!

Adam Jones created a bit of a stir when he told Bob Nightengale of USA Today that “baseball is a white man’s sport.” That’s understandable. Race can be a hot-button issue at the best of times, and given the current climate — Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, the presidential race — these are volatile times.

Jones addressed his controversial comment with a group of reporters prior to tonight’s game at Fenway Park. The Baltimore Orioles outfielder spoke at length, and he did so thoughtfully and honestly. Here are a few excerpts:

“At the end of the day, I’m one of the most known black players in baseball. There are 58 or 59 of us…Baseball is numbers. It’s eight percent black. I didn’t make that up. In football and basketball the numbers are in the 60s and 70s. These aren’t made up numbers. It just is what it is. I’m part of the eight percent.

“If you can’t handle the truth… I backed it up with stats. We’re a numbers game right now… Everybody wants to talk analytical. I gave numbers. I gave facts. I’m still getting the anguish and hate and disgust, but at the end of the day I know I have the respect of my peers.

“Here is my biggest thing with it. Society doesn’t mind us helping out the hood and the inner cities, but they have a problem when we speak about the hood and the inner cities. I don’t understand that part.”

A few weeks ago we added a custom splits tool to our player pages. This weekend, we added the ability to select a specific date range. To do this, we added the “Time Frame” control bar, which now contains all date-related splits and controls.

The “Filter” menu is the old “Time Frame” splits menu. This gives you the option to view plate appearances occurring in a month or season half, and the day or night time-of-day split. These are different from a custom date range. Choosing the “May” split in the filter menu will display plate appearances from every May. This would be used for getting career stats in May.

To look at splits from a specific date, there’s a drop-down calendar with which you can select the start date and end date. This will limit the splits to those specific days. This can be useful if you want to look at splits after a player returns from an injury, a trade or an adjustment. We’ve also included preset ranges like the last 30 days or the past calendar year.

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The Houston Astros have summoned David Paulino from the minor leagues to make his big-league debut against the Indians today. Paulino was utterly dominant in the minors this year. Splitting time between Double-A and Triple-A, the 6-foot-7 righty whiffed 29% of batters faced on his way to a 2.00 ERA and 2.24 FIP. Somewhat quietly, Paulino put together one of the best seasons in the minors in 2016.

Paulino had shown flashes of excellence in the past, but his triumphs in the low minors have been regularly interrupted by injury. He put up a 2.63 FIP across three levels of A-ball last year, and was missing bats in rookie ball as far back as 2011. But his 2016 campaign marks the first time he’s logged anything resembling a full season, and the first time he’s had the opportunity to prove himself against advanced hitters.

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Back at the trade deadline, the Milwaukee Brewers dealt Jonathan Lucroy and Jeremy Jeffress to the Texas Rangers in exchange for prospects Lewis Brinson and Luis Ortiz, along with a player-to-be-named-later. That player now has a name, and it’s Ryan Cordell. Cordell spent all of 2016 playing at the Double-A level, where he slashed a solid .264/.319/.484 with 19 homers and 12 steals. He produced a similar batting line last year, though it was split up between a dominant performance at High-A and an underwhelming showing at Double-A.

Cordell doesn’t have any one skill to separate him from the crowd offensively, but he doesn’t have any massive weaknesses either. He hits for decent power, doesn’t strikeout terribly often and provides some value on the bases. Defensively, he grades out as well above average in the outfield, with the plurality of his games coming in center. Altogether, that makes for a promising young player.

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The purpose of this very brief post is merely to document the first changeup — a plus-plus pitch according to lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen — of Oakland right-hander Jharel Cotton’s major-league career. It’s also to note that all representations and depictions of Cotton’s blessèd changeup must employ the grave accent over the -e-, in the same manner that has been both represented and depicted here.

Byron Buxton played a major league game for the Minnesota Twins last night, the first since his most recent demotion to Triple-A Rochester last month. Also, in that game, Byron Buxton hit a big dinger:

It’d be great to see Buxton succeed. You hate to see any individual fail, let alone one with the type of promise which Buxton possesses. He’s still just 22 — this thing’s far from over — but thus far, Buxton’s done little to deliver on that promise. So we look for developments.

Upon his demotion in early August, I detailed, with the help of hitting instructor Ryan Parker, the numerous changes we’ve already seen in Buxton’s swing. So of course, I was interesting in seeing what that swing looked like this go-around. Particularly so when that swing led to a dinger in Buxton’s first game back.

Buxton had a leg kick in high school, which the Twins muted upon their drafting of him in favor of the organization’s go-to “front foot down early” hitting approach. That’s what we saw in 2015. That’s what we saw in the beginning of 2016, too, though after his first demotion to Triple-A in April, he returned a month later with a leg kick. Given the lack of success Buxton experienced in that stint, it was worth wondering whether Buxton and the Twins would stick with the leg kick, or revert to the original plan.

The leg kick’s still there, and maybe the most important note to be gleaned from this at-bat is that Buxton stuck with the leg kick throughout the count, even after it got to two strikes, something he wasn’t always doing his last time in the bigs. Where Buxton used to shorten up by going back to the toe-tap with two strikes, we’re now seeing Buxton commit to the leg kick more than ever, though it comes with the same caveat Parker provided in my analysis of Buxton last month: the foot’s still coming down before the upper-half of the swing begins, negating much the timing and power the leg kick is intended to provide.

As a counter, watch the .gif above again and pay close attention to where in the swing Buxton’s front foot plants on the ground, and then do the same for this Josh Donaldson swing:

Of course, comparing any hitter to Donaldson is unfair, but if you want to see what an effective leg kick looks like, look no further than Donaldson.

It’s just another something to monitor with Buxton. They could’ve abandoned the leg kick altogether, and they didn’t. To me, that’s a positive sign. The kick itself could still probably use some ironing out, but the committal with two strikes seems to indicate that the plan is to stick with this approach for the time being. The strikeouts never went away, but Buxton homered in four consecutive Triple-A games last week, and he’s already got the first of this go-around in the bigs under his belt. Byron Buxton isn’t going away any time soon, and neither is his intrigue.

Yoan Moncada has absolutely beasted in the minors this year. In 61 High-A games, he hit .307/.427/.496. In 44 Double-A games, he slashed .285/.388/.547. Not to mention his 45 stolen bases. Moncada in an excellent prospect. Very few players can hit like he does while also providing value in the field and on the bases. That’s why he was a fixture at the top of mid-season prospect lists this summer. Baseball America ranked him No. 1 overall,  while Baseball Prospectus and Keith Law both put him in the top five.

But for all his strengths, Moncada has some weaknesses that we shouldn’t overlook. Most notably, he strikes out a bunch. Moncada’s struck out in over 25% of his trips to the plate this year, including a 31% clip since he was promoted to Double-A. Though it’s somewhat hidden by Moncada’s high batting averages, Moncada has had a lot of trouble making contact against Double-A pitchers. This suggests he’ll have even more trouble doing so in Boston.

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Position: Washington Nationals Baseball Research & Development Analyst

Location: Washington DC

Description:
The Washington Nationals are seeking a data analyst to join the organization’s Baseball Research and Development team. This role will focus on using data science to support Baseball Operations in player evaluation, roster construction and in-game tactics. This includes using machine learning techniques and predictive modeling to draw insights from our in-house baseball datasets. The analyst will work closely with the existing R&D team, including other analysts and developers, to design and build decision-support systems and tools for use throughout the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Statistical modeling of baseball data.
• Build automated solutions to import, clean, and prepare baseball datasets for downstream analyses.
• Create informative visualizations of our baseball datasets.
• Assist in the maintenance of our data warehouse.
• Build information systems to support Baseball Operation’s efforts to improve player health and performance.
• Review of public research in both baseball and data science.

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Someone submitted something to my chat last Friday:

CapnZippers: Seth Lugo’s curveball averaged 3300 RPM last night. That spin rate is almost 10% higher than the next guy. Holy Moly! Mets maybe found a gem?

The same day, Mike Petriello sent out a relevant tweet:

Seth Lugo has a 2.51 ERA for the @Mets. He’s also wayyy ahead of everyone on the #statcast era curve spin list: pic.twitter.com/5CPs40o3EK

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) August 26, 2016

I made a note to do some digging. To be honest, I don’t have a lot to add. As has been measured, Seth Lugo has thrown an outstanding curveball, in terms of its spin rate. It’s outstanding not because it’s amazing; it’s outstanding because it stands out. The average spin rate is way higher than anyone else’s. As a different way to demonstrate that, I pulled up all the individual games with the highest-spin curveballs, from Baseball Savant. Lugo, in the majors, has appeared in 10 games in which he’s thrown at least one curve. A leaderboard:

Lugo dominates the spin charts in the way that Aroldis Chapman dominates the velocity charts. This isn’t a one-off fluke — Lugo has an exceptional breaking ball. The question is whether Lugo himself will become a quality pitcher, but this should at least get you to raise your eyebrows.

It’s really too soon to say how much this means. It’s not an easy thing to analyze an individual pitch, and Lugo won’t go anywhere if his other pitches don’t play well, too. Everything works together. There is some evidence that high spin is correlated to reduced slugging. And there’s evidence that high spin is correlated to increased whiffing. The evidence isn’t strong, but it makes sense intuitively, and again, this is all complex. It’s fair to say that Lugo’s curveball is interesting, without going any further. I don’t know how interesting this should make Lugo as a player, but I know that now I’ll keep my eye on him. I didn’t have any reason to think about him before.

By velocity and movement, the best comparison for Lugo’s curve in the PITCHf/x era is Brett Myers‘ curve. Myers threw a phenomenal curve for an entire decade. Garrett Richards has another comparable curve, but he’s never thrown it much. Jake Arrieta’s curve also compares well, so that’s promising. Lugo’s curve appears to be a major-league pitch. A major-league out pitch, even. We’ll see about the other pitches.

Lugo picked up his first-ever big-league strikeout on a curve. It’s with a clip of that curve that I’ll leave you today.

How interesting an arm is Seth Lugo? I don’t know. “More” would be one answer.