Update: Sold out again.

Three weeks ago, we announced a FanGraphs Live event in Washington DC on July 5th, and the response was enthusiastic; you guys sold out in the event in just a few days after just that one announcement. However, after the event was announced, ESPN promoted the Nationals game to the Sunday Night telecast, moving the time of their game from 1 pm to 8 pm, so we had to adjust the time of our event as well; it will now be held from 4 pm to 7 pm so as to not conflict with the Nationals game that night.

Due to this time change, four people who were going to previously attend have had to cancel, and we are now making their tickets available for purchase. These are likely the last four tickets we’ll sell, so if you wanted to go but didn’t get tickets last time, this is going to be your best shot.

The cost of the event is $10, and that includes one drink from the bar. For more detailed information, you can visit the event page. I would imagine these four tickets won’t last long, though, so if you want to hang out and talk baseball with us, maybe just hit that big button down below and get your tickets while they last.

Position: Detroit Tigers Baseball Operations Intern

Location: Detroit
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Well, this is something. A year ago, internal messages and reports from the Houston Astros were leaked online, causing a good amount of embarrassment for the franchise. After the documents were leaked, the team’s General Manager Jeff Luhnow made the following statement:

t’s a very unfortunate circumstance. When somebody illegally from the outside breaks into a proprietary database that we have, not all the information that was published is accurate. Some of it is not. I really can’t get into what was accurate and what wasn’t. Some of it was. But it was an illegal activity and we’re going to pursue it and try to find out who did it and prosecute them because it’s not something that should be happening.

And then it was mostly forgotten about, at least publicly. Sure, people made jokes, but the story had faded from memory, and was in the past at this point. Until today, when the New York Times released this story.

The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors are investigating front-office officials for the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most successful teams in baseball over the past two decades, for hacking into the internal networks of a rival team to steal closely guarded information about player personnel.

Investigators have uncovered evidence that Cardinals officials broke into a network of the Houston Astros that housed special databases the team had built, according to law enforcement officials. Internal discussions about trades, proprietary statistics and scouting reports were compromised, the officials said.

The officials did not say which employees were the focus of the investigation or whether the team’s highest-ranking officials were aware of the hacking or authorized it. The investigation is being led by the F.B.I.’s Houston field office and has progressed to the point that subpoenas have been served on the Cardinals and Major League Baseball for electronic correspondence.

The story goes on to state that the “hack” was fairly low-tech, as these things go; it appears that someone with access to the password histories used by Luhnow (and those who followed him to St. Louis) were simply used to gain access to the Astros systems. Unfortunately for the “hackers”, they used a computer at a home that was easily tied to the Cardinals — perhaps a home rented out for Spring Training — and the trail was simply followed from there. This does not exactly seem like the work of criminal masterminds.

It will be interesting to see what MLB does when the FBI finishes their investigation. The story mentions that those accused of participating have not yet been punished by the team, but that seems very likely to change; there are going to be some firings over this, and it will be interesting to see how high up the ladder this goes. And I would imagine MLB will likely look into punishing the organization beyond just the individuals involved.

A year ago, the Astros were seen as an embarrassment for their on-field play and for letting their secure resources get released into the public. Today, their team is in first place and it seems like they were legitimately victims of theft from another organization. Now, it is the Cardinals who might end up as the embarrassed organization.

“We’re some kind of hot right now.”

Those words were spoken by Toronto manager John Gibbons following today’s 13-5 shellacking of the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Truer words have rarely been spoken. The Blue Jays have won 11 straight, outscoring their opponents 88-44 in the process. The club currently boasts the best run differential in MLB, at +71.

Infielder Ryan Goins said “The only word to describe it is ‘fun,’ adding that “Everybody is coming here every day, knowing we’re going to win.” Outfielder Kevin Pillar, who acknowledged that the team is “well aware it’s 11 games,” echoed the F word, saying “It’s fun for baseball and it’s fun for our fans.”

An entirely different F word is on the tongues of Bostonians. Boos rang through Fenway Park as the shellshocked Red Sox lost their sixth straight. The team picked by many to win the AL East is now 10 games under .500 and taking on water fast. Manager John Farrell, who was once let go by the Blue Jays, is seemingly in danger of a similar fate in Beantown, a recent vote of confidence from ownership be damned. (And if you listen closely, you can hear a chorus of ‘I told you so’s’ from north of the border.)

I asked Gibbons if he could sense frustration in the opposing dugout.

“Every team in this league goes through that,” said Gibbons. “We’ve been on the same side of it, where nothing seems to go right. You struggle and your fans start ripping you. Especially in this town. This can be a cruel business and this town is the worst. Here and probably New York. They let them have it. Sometimes there’s no place to hide when things go bad.”

Things are going very badly in Boston right now. In Toronto, it’s a different story. Blue Jays players are making sure to say the right things – “We’re just taking it day by day and trying to win games ” – but the smiles in the clubhouse this weekend were evident. This team is confident. The Red Sox are looking for places to hide.

Phil Coke, who joined the Blue Jays bullpen today, has traded in his slider for a cutter. I’ll write more on that in this Sunday’s Notes column. Tonight, I’ll share something the lefty reliever told me that seems hard to believe. Then again, the person he was talking about was no mere mortal on a baseball field.

According to Coke, Mariano Rivera could throw a cutter while long tossing.

“When I was a rookie, Mariano was my throwing partner,” said Coke, who broke in with the Yankees. “He was throwing me 300-foot balls that didn’t cut until the last five feet. It was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I was like, ‘How are you doing that?’

“The movement was short and late. It was crazy. He would throw the ball, and I’d be like, ‘Here comes a four-seamer.’ Then, wham! It was on line to hit me in the face, then all of a sudden I had to bail out from where I was standing to catch the ball way over there. Mariano would just smile at me.”

A cutter from 300 feet? Come on, Phil. How is that even possible?

“I swear on my life,” Coke told me. “It was crazy.”

The existence of this post on FanGraphs.com relies on the premise that not only is the author of the post a person, but also so is the reader. Individual human people, despite possessing rich and unique interior lives, often share certain concerns, as well. One of the author’s big concerns, for example, is to avoid fainting like the overwhelmed heroine of a French novel while having his blood drawn at the doctor’s office. Another, naturally, is not accidentally entering an adulterous affair merely to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life — much like the heroine of a French novel might, for example.

The universality of these sentiments is manifest, I’m sure.

A third and final of my concerns is knowing precisely which of the players about to appear, starting Saturday, in the College World Series — knowing which of those players has also recently been selected in the major-league draft.

What follows is an attempt to provide that sort of knowledge. I’ve benefited greatly from Baseball Reference’s draft database in the composition of this post. I’ve benefited equally from the contents of the Bota Box full of Malbec on top of my refrigerator.

***

School
University of Arkansas

First Game
Saturday, June 13, 3:00pm ET vs. Virginia

Draftees
Andrew Benintendi, OF (7th overall, Boston)
Trey Killian, RHP (9th round, Colorado)
Bobby Wernes, 3B (30th round, Houston)
Tyler Spoon, OF (35th round, Boston)

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1) Italian-American switch-pitching Pat Venditte uses both hands to express himself on the podium.

2) It takes Pat Venditte twice as long as to stretch, and to get warm.

3) Pat Venditte’s six-finger glove was made by Mizuno for him, but the model was designed for switch-pitcher Greg Harris.

The Greg Harris Mizuno that Venditte uses. Photo Courtesy Jorge L. Ortiz and USAToday.

4) Pat Venditte’s name on the lineup is in blue, previously a color reserved for switch-hitters.

5) Pat Venditte dropped down to sidearm from the right side after surgery, but not because of the surgery. That was more “result-based” the pitcher said this week — he was having trouble getting righties out and Gil Patterson on the Yankees “pretty much forced me to pitch side-arm” for which the pitcher is now “very grateful.”

(Gil Patterson may have been looking at this diagram from Jeremy Greenhouse — showing the advantage for different arm slots — when he forced Pat Venditte to go sidearm.)

6) Player reactions to Pat Venditte aren’t actually that strange. “When you spend seven years in the minor leagues, the only hitters that haven’t seen you yet are the guys that have been established up here for a long time.”

7) “Almost all of the time,” the manager tells Pat Venditte which arm to use.

8) There are days when Pat Venditte is only available to pitch with one of his arms. He pitched the entire 2013 WBC strictly left-handed for Italy.

9) Pat Venditte’s arsenal is about the same against both hands, except he’s got more gas on his sinker and more drop on his slider from the right side.

As a righty:

As a lefty:

10) Pat Venditte’s sinker falls short of almost every benchmark — movement, velocity, and swinging strike rate at least — for an average pitch for either a lefty or a righty.

To the extent that all human endeavor is futile, the author’s attempt this past Tuesday to identify a small collection of amateur prospects likely to develop into better professionals than their draft slots might otherwise suggest — this endeavor was also futile. Perhaps even moreso, actually, owing to how — with the exception of having once had kind words, apparently, for the minor-league version of Chris Heston — the author’s credentials in this (and every) field are minimal.

Regardless of its worth (or lack thereof) I did produce a document featuring certain collegiates who possess profiles similar to players in the past (Matt Carpenter, Ben Zobrist) who’ve parlayed a combination of above-average baseball skills and below-average physical tools into successful careers. Nine of the ten players included in that post were selected by major-league clubs this week in the draft, and what follows represents a record of which teams signed which of those prospects in which rounds — with a view, I suppose, towards beginning to monitor their progress through affiliated baseball.

Eric Cheray, C/2B, Missouri St. (Sr) (Profile)
Club: N/A   Round: N/A

Profile in Brief
Senior hitter with excellent plate discipline, perhaps less excellent infield defense. Selected in the 17th round by Oakland last year; undrafted, curiously, this one.

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The Indians drafted an ambidextrous pitcher earlier today, taking Ryan Perez out of Judson (Illinois) University in the 12th round. According to Cleveland scouting director Brad Grant, the 21-year-old Perez is a different kind of switch-pitcher than Oakland’s Pat Venditte.

Unlike Venditte, Perez doesn’t switch hands each time a new, different-sided batter steps into the box. On multiple occasions, Indians scouts watched Perez throw the first five innings of a game left-handed, and the next two right-handed. As for whether the team plans to have him begin switching for a platoon advantage, a la Venditte, Grant said “We’ll get him in the system and try to figure it out.” Plans are for Perez to begin his professional career with short-season Mahoning Valley.

According to Grant, his scouting staff turned in reports on Perez as both a left-handed and right-handed pitcher. The club feels he’s “a little further advanced (left-handed), but he has talent from both sides.” Perez “throws just as hard from both sides and is up to 90 mph,” and “has got a breaking ball with both hands.” His arm slot, which is the same from each side, isn’t as low as Venditte’s, but rather “more of a three-quarters slot.”

Perez’s primary difference from Venditte is the manner in which he switches, and from a durability point of view, it may be advantageous. As Grant put it, the most-unique of Cleveland’s 2015 draft picks has “the flexibility to throw in back to back to back games, because he could go left-handed one game, right-handed the next, then go back to left-handed the next day.”

With the first couple rounds of the MLB draft now complete, the top drafted talent will soon be merged with previous top-prospect rankings to create new lists. Well, I will jump the gun and give a snapshot of where these players could end up being ranked by looking at past draft and prospect-list information.

For the prospect information, I will use Baseball America’s top-100 prospect list, published annually each spring. The reason I will use it instead of other sources is that the information goes back to 1990, which gives me 26 match drafts and prospect rankings to examine. To start with, here are the overall metrics on players just drafted will end up on Baseball America’s rankings:
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