Position: Baseball Info Solutions, Research & Development Associate

Location: ~ Allentown, Pa.

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The Saber Seminar — my favorite baseball conference of the year — takes place in Boston next weekend. Ticket sales end Monday, so this is your last chance to get in on the action. If you’re on the fence about attending, perhaps this recently released schedule will help:

Saturday:

Presentations by FG/BP writers:

Jonah Pemstein, Bill Petti, Jeff Zimmerman, Bryan Cole, Harry Pavlidis, Rob Arthur, Jonathan Judge, and Dan Brooks.

Four separate Q&As with Red Sox staff:

Ben Cherington, John Farrell, Tom Tippett, Jared Porter

Other neat stuff!

Sunday:

Presentations by cool people:

Wendy Thurm, Alan Nathan, and a series of abstracts that are always really interesting.

Q&As with members of the Royals front office, plus a player development panel with Red Sox personnel.

Media panel with some great writers and myself.

And if you stick around to the bitter end, I take questions and make jokes.

Seriously, it’s a packed schedule, and you won’t regret attending. A ticket is just $140, or $65 if you’re a student, and every dime received goes to The Jimmy Fund, so you’re not only getting a deal, you’re getting a deal and supporting cancer research at the same time.

If you’re in Boston next weekend, this is a no-brainer. If you’re anywhere near Boston, you should strongly consider making the trip in. If you’re nowhere near Boston, it’s probably still worth getting on a plane. If you’re reading FanGraphs, you like baseball, and if you like baseball, you’ll really enjoy this conference. Come hang out with us next weekend.

The best part of writing about baseball? First, you get to watch baseball. Then you get to write about it. That’s how it works. The worst part? The worst part is that you can’t watch it all. No way. There’s like — add the two, carry the one — well, I’m no sabermetrician, but there’s like a lot of baseball to watch, way too much for the average human even if that human owns some sort of picture-in-picture-in-picture technology by which to watch, say, the trinitarian terror of Trout and McCutchen and Harper wreak simultaneous havoc.

What is this a long way of saying? This is a long way of saying that until Monday night, I had not personally witnessed (nor even been impersonally aware of) Johnny Cueto’s revolutionary wiggle. Have you seen this thing? The Detroit Tigers sure have. And so have fans of the Royals, at least those lucky enough to have witnessed the dominant shutout — four hits allowed, zero walks given, many wiggles supplied — that the newly acquired Cueto provided in his Kauffmann Stadium debut.

A trip through the archives reveals that Cueto introduced his wiggle-icious windup against the Nationals on July 7, rendering Ian Desmond but a helpless bystander. Watch the scene and realize that Desmond, poor Desmond, has just witnessed the dawn of a new age. Watch it and realize that Desmond just got Cueto’d!

It’s just crazy amounts of awesome, is it not? It’s as if Luis Tiant and Gale Sayers — well, that would be a biologic impossibility — as if Luis Tiant and whoever is the Lingerie League’s most evasive tailback spawned a super-incredible love child who boasts an outstanding four-seamer/changeup combo and who suddenly belongs on So You Think You Can Dance. Cueto thinks he can dance, and does. Taking the Tiantian pause to a delightful extreme, he turns his back to the hitter and promptly stops — so dramatically that you think you hit the pause button — and then shimmies like he’s trying to evade the Lingerie League’s leading tackler. You half expect — no, fully expect! — Cueto to add the terpsichorean equivalent of a triple Salchow, even if, were a runner on base, the umps would be like, “Um… balk?”

For his part, Tigers manager Brad Ausmus thinks the windup is illegal, as if Cueto should be ticketed and forced to attend Defensive Pitching School this weekend. Indeed, after watching the righty go all Dirty Dancing on a ninth-inning whiff of Ian Kinsler, Ausmus told the Associated Press: “Really, the way the rule reads, you’re not supposed to even alter your motion. That’s the way the rule reads.”

Well, boo you, Brad Ausmus!

Remember: We watch baseball. A lot of it. And watching baseball is supposed to be fun. Seriously, does this look like someone who’s busy reading the rulebook?

The Brewers announced today that Doug Melvin is going to “transition into an advisory role” with the team, which is probably the nicest language you can use to fire someone. The Brewers have been in need of a new direction for a while now, and a new front office should help kickstart a rebuild that is already a bit late in getting started.

In terms of potential candidates, Twitter is already offering plenty of speculation.

#Brewers have hired executive search firm Korn Ferry to organize GM search. Will target younger candidates with knowledge of analytics.

— Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) August 11, 2015

Number of people in the industry think Brewers will look within for next GM–Ray Montgomery is well regarded around MLB.

— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) August 11, 2015

Cooper’s tweet is somewhat reinforced by this follow-up from Tom Haudricourt:

Attanasio made it clear that he considers Craig Counsell the team's manager and GM candidates will be told so.

— Tom (@Haudricourt) August 11, 2015

If you’re committed to Counsell as the manager, and that is not a negotiable point, outside candidates may be less interested in the job, knowing that they not get to pick their own staff. An internal candidate like Montgomery, who worked with Counsell in the front office before he was named manager in May, would probably have less of a problem going with the continuity line of thinking.

If the team does decide to go outside the organization, Jerry Dipoto would probably be one of the more popular names, though given that he just lost a power struggle with an owner over an empowered manager, perhaps this wouldn’t be the kind of spot he’s hoping to land. There are also an army of highly qualified assistant GMs around baseball, many of whom will likely make for excellent GMs when given the opportunity. The Brewers could also go big and aim for Dave Dombrowski, but they’d probably have to make him team president to compete with other offers he’s going to get, so if they’re just looking for a GM, he’ll probably have better options.

Either way, this should lead to some necessary changes in Milwaukee, and perhaps help the team get along with renovating the roster while admitting that the current group is unlikely to contend in the NL Central in the near future.

On the one hand, cultural critics suggest openly that — not unlike the bread-and-circus efforts of Caesar’s Rome — that sport serves as an opiate of the masses. On the other hand, a thing that people fail to recognize is how opiates make you feel indestructible and also there are no side effects.

In conclusion, what one finds here is footage of three fastballs, all thrown by Colorado rookie right-hander Jon Gray this evening against the Mets for strikeouts — and all recorded at 95 mph or greater. Mere diversion or monument to human potential: this is the reader’s choice, ultimately.

Daily projections courtesy of SaberSim.com are now available on the player pages and in a sortable format!

Matt Hunter, creator of SaberSim.com, explains the projections:

FanGraphs has long been home to a variety of excellent projection systems, each with its own distinguishing features that attempt to predict future performance as effectively as possible. Though these systems differ from one another in many respects, one common trait is that they project performance over an extended period of time—season, rest of season, or even multiple seasons. Beginning this week, FanGraphs will also feature a daily projection for each player. The daily projections are created by SaberSim, and are updated each day to reflect the specific factors the player will encounter in the matchup at hand.

SaberSim, as the name suggests, utilizes simulation to produce player and team projections. By simulating – thousands of times – every event of a particular game, the simulator is able to account for the unique context of each game and the interaction between players, using the actual posted lineups and starting pitcher assignments. It starts with Steamer rest-of-season projections (including handedness splits) for each player, then adjusts the probability of each event based on a number of context-specific factors. These include: regressed home-plate umpire strikeout/walk tendencies, handedness- and event-specific park factors, game-time temperature and wind speed/direction, home/away splits, and perhaps most importantly, batter-pitcher matchups using the Odds Ratio method. The adjusted rates are then fed into the simulator, which keeps track of the outcome of each play and the statistics for each player over the course of the simulated games.

The daily projection for every player in a starting lineup on a given day is featured towards the top of his player page, and the full leaderboard can be found in the Projections page linked above. The projections consist of the mean number of each outcome a player produced over the course of thousands of simulated games. Therefore, the numbers displayed do not represent the probability of each event happening, but rather the average number of times it happened per simulated game.

A quick note on these projections: the simulator currently only runs games with a single starting lineup for each team – for lineups that aren’t yet posted, we use the team’s most recent lineup vs. the opposing pitcher’s handedness. This means that until lineups are officially posted, you may not see projections for all players – if, for example, a player had a day off the day before. Because of this, the projections are most accurate and useful after all lineups from a given game are official. Usually this occurs about 4-5 hours before start time.

Over the past year and a half, SaberSim has grown from a basic simulator to an advanced tool for projecting daily performance on an individual and team level. While all player projections can be found right here on FanGraphs, you can find additional data and tools, such as specific team and player distributions and a daily fantasy lineup optimizer, on SaberSim.com. We look forward to sharing these daily projections with the FanGraphs community over the days and weeks to come, and welcome any comments, criticisms, or suggestions as we continue to improve the effectiveness of the simulator and the site. Enjoy!

On June 23, 1971 – that’s two months after A Fistful of Death had its release date, for those of you who crave historical context – Phillies pitcher Rick Wise enjoyed the kind of performance that might best be described as “The Good, the Great and the Wise,” if only because it perfectly fits this narrative. On that day in Cincinnati, the 25-year-old righty not only no-hit the Reds but also homered twice, racking up three of Philly’s four runs batted in, in a 4-0 victory against the defending National League champions.

That’s the sort of game you might have twice in a lifetime: once, when you’re a 25-year-old righty on June 23, 1971, and once when you’re 10 in the Pony League.

Why do we mention this? It’s not because we own stock in Rick Wise’s Most Fabulous Day Ever Enterprises. It’s because yesterday, against the same Philadelphia franchise, Dodgers righty Zack Greinke had the kind of performance that might best be described as … well, you saw the headline up there, right? It perfectly fits this narrative.

In L.A.’s eventual 10-8 victory, Greinke, who entered the game with an ERA of a precocious Pony Leaguer (1.41), allowed six earned runs – five in the first inning alone – but balanced that stink job by going 3-for-3 at the plate, with three runs scored, a solo homer and one theatric bat flip.

In so doing, he became the second Dodgers pitcher to score thrice in a game since Claude Osteen in 1970; the first to go 3-for-3 or better with a home run since Leo Dickerman in 1923; and the first to yield five earned runs in the first inning of a game in which he also bat-flipped like nobody’s business since…well, you Dodgers historians will have to answer that one.

Greinke now enters his next start with an ERA of 1.71 and a batting average of .220. What does it all mean? First, it means that baseball is, as ever, just plain weird. It also means that given his abilities at the plate, plus the fact that he allowed just one earned run in his final six innings, Greinke is still worth A Fistful of Dollars.

Seriously.

The 1964 Spaghetti Western, a forerunner to The Good, the Bad and The Ugly, has made $14.5 million to date. And if we value each win – i.e., $/WAR – at around $7 million, then Greinke, with a 2015 fWAR of 4.2, is worth roughly twice what the Clint Eastwood shoot-’em-up has earned, with enough left For a Few Dollars More.

Seriously. The budget for that Spaghetti Western was just $600,000.

Although he was perpetually young for his level, Ketel Marte more than held his own at every stop as he ascended through the Mariners system. In 2013, he posted a 91 wRC+ as a 19-year-old between Low-A and High-A. In 2014, at the tender age of 20, he put up a 105 spot between Double-A and Triple-A. This year, his .314/.359/.410 showing in Triple-A resulted a 107 wRC+. Even more impressive is that he did all of this while primarily playing shortstop.

Yet, despite his history of success at a young age, Marte’s always flown under the prospect radar. He’s never appeared on a top 100 list, and barely made Kiley McDaniel’s top 200 list heading into the season.

With Robinson Cano banged up last week, the Mariners called Marte up to the majors. But in typical Ketel Marte fashion, his call up flew under the radar, overshadowed by this year’s wild trade deadline. I’ll admit I didn’t even notice he had been called up until just a couple of days ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Just to be clear, there are two separate positions here.

Position: Sydney Blue Sox, Baseball Analytics Intern

Location: Various locations throughout US, with a preference for Chicago

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Position: Cleveland Indians, Developer – Baseball Systems

Location: Cleveland

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