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.

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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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In 2003, the Yankees drafted Tyler Clippard in the ninth round out of a Port Richey, Florida high school. The righty signed, and began his professional career that summer in the Gulf Coast League, 40 miles from his hometown. Inking a contract was largely about location.

“My decision out of the draft was to play collegiate baseball in Tampa or play professional baseball in Tampa,” said Clippard. “I obviously didn’t know which team I’d go to, but it being the Yankees had a lot to do with me saying, ‘OK, let’s start my pro career, because I’m going to be close to home.’ Had I been drafted by anybody else, I probably would have played college ball (at the University of South Florida).”

Clippard knew New York was a possibility – “It was them and a couple of other teams” – so he wasn’t surprised when the Yankees selected him 274th overall. As for when he expected to hear his name called, that was a complete mystery. “I could have been drafted anywhere from the third round to not at all,” Clippard told me. “Going in, I had no idea. But like I said, because of where I’d be playing, I decided to sign.”

Clippard subsequently spent the 2005 season with the club’s Florida State League affiliate, which is also located in Tampa. In 2007, he was dealt to Washington, where he played until being dealt to Oakland prior to the start of the current campaign.

Sometimes you don’t get a ton of time with a guy, and sometimes his translator expresses frustration at your first question, because sometimes he’s heard it way too often. So sometimes, you get to talk to a guy like Jung-ho Kang, and sometimes you get five questions answered, quickly.

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In recent weeks, Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan have written about why the Minnesota Twins are unlikely to be the first-place Minnesota Twins much longer. Paul Molitor’s team is 31-21 (pending the outcome of today’s game), but for reasons outlined in the articles, a descent in the standings – possibly a steep one – is imminent.

Unless it isn’t. What if they continue to outperform their expectations and their peripherals? What if the Twins are this year’s Orioles?

There are similarities. Baltimore has made an art form out of winning close games and confounding skeptics, and that’s what Minnesota has been doing. Neither team is star-laden or in possession of an ace. Each has a manager whose attention to detail is borderline obsessive.

I brought up the Orioles comp to Molitor before today’s game, expecting him to pooh-pooh it. Instead, he lent credence to the idea that his team is somewhat akin to last season’s surprise AL East champs. Read the rest of this entry »

My debut post at FanGraphs took a look at Twitter engagement metrics for every major-league team’s official Twitter account during the off-season. I promised a follow-up analysis to see if anything changed, and a lot did. The Cubs moved past the Mariners as the most engaging team on Twitter, and the Pirates produced the most media tweets in May.

Full details of the analysis can be found in the original post, but to summarize, we are looking at what teams use the most media and what teams are engaging with their fanbases the most over the month of May. Numbers are no substitute for quality engagement or customer service, but these metrics do shed light on how MLB teams are using their official Twitter accounts.

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