With Jacoby Ellsbury out of action for at least the next couple of weeks with a knee sprain, the Yankees called up former first round draft choice Slade Heathcott to help fill the void in the outfield. If it feels like you’ve been hearing about Heathcott for a while now, that’s because you have been. The Yankees took Heathcott 29th overall out of high school way back in 2009, but it’s taken him until now — at age-24 — to crack the major leagues.

Heathcott’s extended stay in the minor leagues hasn’t been due to a lack of talent, but has been almost entirely the result of injury. Slade’s spent an awful lot of time on the shelf since he was drafted back in 2009. Here’s a look at his lengthy injury history courtesy of Baseball Prospectus. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, the Padres promoted one of their best remaining prospects, Austin Hedges, to join the Major League club to serve as Derek Norris‘ backup. It was a bit of an odd move, given that Hedges might have just been figuring out how to hit professional pitching, but the Padres wanted to upgrade their roster and saw more short-term value in having Hedges catch a couple of times per week in the big leagues.

Well, apparently, the Washington Nationals are going to try a similar trick, as Ken Rosenthal reports that the team is promoting infield prospect Wilmer Difo, with outfielder Jayson Werth potentially heading to the DL.

Sources: #Nationals expected to promote IF Wilmer Difo. Werth a candidate for DL.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) May 19, 2015

Difo spent all of last year in low-A ball, started this year in high-A, and was promoted to Double-A a few weeks ago. He’s consistently hit well, showing both contact and some power, but he has a grand total of 33 games above low-A ball in his career — even though he just turned 23 — so to say it’s been a quick rise would be an understatement. But now the question is what the Nationals are going to do with him?

Shortstop is blocked by Ian Desmond, who while struggling at the moment remains one of the best players at the position in the game. Yunel Escobar has hit well while playing both second and third base, but has primarily settled in at third in Anthony Rendon’s absence, leaving second base to Danny Espinosa, who is also hitting far better this year than he has in prior years. Neither Escobar nor Espinosa need replacing, so Difo is apparently coming up to serve as a utility infielder until Rendon returns, at which point the team won’t even need him in that role.

Difo is an interesting player, and could potentially be a starter for the Nationals as soon as next year, but he doesn’t have a clear role on the 2015 Nationals, and having him sit on the bench in the big leagues isn’t going to help speed up his development. I’m not entirely sure why promoting a prospect to sit on the bench is becoming a trend, but it probably shouldn’t be. In the end, this likely won’t matter much at all, but it’s a little weird to see another prospect promoted at a time when the big league team doesn’t need him to actually play.

Bryce Harper continued terrorizing Major League pitching yesterday, coming a double short of the cycle against the Padres. For the season, he’s now hitting .338/.476/.729, good for a 215 wRC+, and it seems pretty clear that we’re seeing the breakout season of a truly elite hitter. As Jeff Sullivan noted a couple of weeks ago, Harper has made some significant changes this year, and now that he’s pulling the ball and getting it into the air with regularity, he has turned his raw power into high-level production.

He won’t keep this up all year, of course, and will eventually return to human levels of production. But it’s worth noting that even when he does, Harper will have essentially replicated the first couple of years of Miguel Cabrera’s career. Here are their career numbers through age-22.

Miggy’s age 20-22 seasons came from 2003 to 2005, so while his unadjusted numbers are slightly better, Harper actually has been more productive at the plate when you add in today’s pitcher-friendly run environment. And, of course, Harper’s line is still predominantly made up of his data from ages 19, 20, and 21, with only six weeks of his age-22 performance mixed in.

If we add in the Depth Charts rest-of-season forecast for Harper — which calls for him to hit .287/.382/.524 for the rest of 2015 — in order to create an expected line through his complete age-22 season, Harper’s career numbers would be .280/.368/.497, with a .373 wOBA and a 136 wRC+. The full list of hitters in baseball history that stepped to the plate 2,000 times by the end of their age-22 season and put up a 136 wRC+ or better? Mike Trout (165), Ty Cobb (159), Mickey Mantle (149), and Mel Ott (147). Ken Griffey Jr was at 134. Alex Rodriguez was at 130. As noted, Cabrera was at 131, and in fewer plate appearances, which skewed his numbers more towards his more developed years.

Bryce Harper is pretty, pretty good.

Wins Above replacement (WAR) is probably the best known composite statistic that attempts to estimates the entire value of a player to a team in a context-neutral and park-adjusted environment. It is also an incomplete model, and while we’re always trying to make it as comprehensive as possible, that does require updating the formula from time to time; just this past March we added a few more things to try and make it even better.

In an effort to increase understanding of the all the factors that go into calculating WAR, I have created the following diagram to the various player statistics and league average values which have gone into the calculation. Our goal is to always make the process as transparent as possible, and hopefully this infographic can help on that path.

DISCLAIMER: This diagram is meant to summarize the process of calculating WAR, it does NOT contain every detail necessary to accurately perform that calculation. For a full description of the formulas and equations please see the library page, which more fully explains the process.

The very left of the diagram contains the stats which are the basic building blocks of WAR. These include the familiar walks, singles, doubles, triples, and home runs along with the alphabet soup metrics: UBR, wGDP, UZR, and RPP. Most of the latter stats are built on proprietary data, so you won’t be able to calculate our version of WAR from scratch yourself, though you could substitute your own fielding and baserunning metrics.

The right side contains the finished product, a player’s WAR components. The oval shapes represent inputs, while the rectangle shapes represent calculated components which are steps along the way to get WAR.

The WAR diagram is divided into six component areas: Batting, Base Running, Replacement, League, Positional, and Fielding. Four of those six areas also fall under either the Offensive or Defensive region, which are the greatest differentiators of talent. These areas represent different WAR component stats we host on FanGraphs in our Value section on our leaderboards.

The runs from the six areas are aggregated to yield runs above replacement (RAR), which is then converted into wins using each year’s specific R/Win ratio, and that resulting value is WAR.

Even for those readers who regard Gary Huckabay’s contention from the late 90s that there’s no such thing as a pitching prospect — even for those who regard it as perhaps an exercise in hyperbole, the notion of a 30-year-old pitching prospect likely sounds absurd. Prospectdom, first of all, implies some degree of future potential, which itself implies some degree of youth. And second of all, what information exists regarding aging curves suggests that, if a pitcher wasn’t a prospect at 20 or 25, there’s little reason to suppose that he would be at 30, with years of abuse behind him already.

And yet, in the absence of that word (i.e. prospect), there’s a shortage of appropriate terms for what White Sox right-hander Junior Guerra is. At 30 years and 118 days, he’s made zero major-league appearances. Indeed, he recorded his first Triple-A appearance* just last Thursday. His rookie eligibility, in other words, is not in question. And yet, as noted in yesterday’s edition of the Fringe Five, Guerra has produced one of the top strikeout rates among all qualified minor leaguers while also exhibiting sufficient arm speed to suggest that his success isn’t the product merely of deception or veteran wiles.

*Affiliated Triple-A appearance, that is. Guerra played for Yucatan of the Mexican League in 2012, where he produced an unambiguously poor 20:22 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 28.0 innings.

Guerra made his second Triple-A appearance ever shortly after that newest installment of the Fringe Five was published. The purpose of this post is to report the absolutely most basic information regarding that start — and, probably mostly, to provide more footage of Guerra’s repertoire.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here at FanGraphs and RotoGraphs, I occasionally delve into articles that look at split-data, and have had to create a simplified version of our wOBA formula in order to generate some numbers where wOBA isn’t easily available.

wOBA is simply a rate-stat version of a linear-weights calculation, but because the relative values of events change according to the run environment, the value of the different types of outcomes that go into the formula change from season-to-season. This is why why we publish the guts of wOBA, so that you can see exactly how to calculate wOBA for any given year.

But if you’re looking at multiple years including different run environments, it can be helpful to have a basic wOBA formula that gets very close to the results for any individual year, but includes static values and a set formula. To that end, I’ve created what I call Basic wOBA, which does exactly that; follows the year-by-year wOBA shifts very closely without needing to update the variables for each season. We’re not rolling this out as an official version of wOBA, and it won’t appear on the site itself, but it will be referenced occasionally in articles, and so it is helpful to have the formula listed as a reference for when it is called upon.

After some testing, here is the equation we decided to use:

Basic wOBA = (.7* (BB + HBP) + .9*1B + 1.25*2B + 1.6*3B + 2*HR)/PA

Looking back at players with more than 200 plate appearances since 1980, the R-squared between the actual wOBA and Basic wOBA is 0.986, with a value of 1.0 being a perfect 1:1 relationship. So while not perfect, it will give a nearly equal value in almost every case.

If you see Basic wOBA referenced in an article, this is the formula that isbeing used.

Giant Dutch- and/or Danish- and/or Texan-American Noah Syndergaard is at this moment making his major-league debut for the New York Mets in Chicago. One thing he’s exhibited with considerable frequency over the course of his inaugural start is a fastball at ca. 94-98 mph. Another thing is what Branch Rickey would probably have referred to as “hella moxie” were he (a) still alive and also (b) a resident of California’s Bay Area for some reason.

The purpose of this post is to address neither of those qualities, but rather to document Syndergaard’s first memorable curveball — with which curveball he struck out Cubs shortstop Starlin Castro for the second out in the second inning.

Here, for the benefit of the reader, is action footage of that curveball in real time:

Read the rest of this entry »

Position: TrackMan Cape Cod Data & Operations Intern

Location: Cape Cod, Mass.

Description:
At TrackMan Baseball we measure stuff – the speed, spin and movement of pitched and hit baseballs.

We do this using proprietary 3D Doppler radar hardware and software. The majority of Major League teams use our products and services for player development and evaluation. We also work with collegiate, Japanese and Korean teams, premier amateur baseball organizations, broadcasters and equipment manufacturers. Our business is growing fast. By the start of next season we will have a network of radars installed in more than 100 stadiums on three continents, and dozens of remote systems traveling the US.
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Position: Minnesota Twins Applications Programmer, Baseball Systems

Location: Minneapolis

Description:
This position offers wide-ranging exposure to current programming models and methods in a fast-paced Agile environment. As a member of the front office, collaborate with the Baseball Operations staff to develop, deliver, and maintain data driven solutions for player evaluation, player development, and statistical analytics. Ideally, the candidate will be a core .Net applications programmer with experience focused on SQL Server data integration and back-end API services to consume and present new perspectives on an evolving set of interesting sources of data. Strong communication and interpersonal skills will enable the candidate to enjoy direct relationships with product users.
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Among all the barely read posts published by the author at this site, one of the most barely read ever was this past Thursday’s effort dedicated to the Mexican League, in which post I endeavored to identify the five players within that circuit whose combination of age and performance most recommended them to a place (hypothetically, at least) within affiliated baseball.

The purpose of this current dispatch is not to comment once again upon the virtues of that Thursday post, nor to bemoan its lack of audience. Rather, it’s to (first) show and (then also) tell the reader why Mexican baseball oughtn’t be ignored.

With regard to the allure of that league, here’s a visual argument very decidedly on its behalf (from here):

And here’s a brief explanation of that visual argument: it’s an excerpt from the box score from today’s game between Mexico City and Tijuana. Specifically, it’s the part of that box score which documents Tijuana’s pitchers. What one notes is that those pitchers were Jose Contreras (formerly of the White Sox and Yankees) and Dennys Reyes (formerly of an extra-large major-league uniform). “Importer/Exporter of the Marvelous,” it reads on each of their business cards. And how do I know this? Because of Mexican baseball, is how.

QED.