One particularly appealing quality of European football for people like the author who are desperate to exude an air of worldliness, is the lack of official club nicknames. Manchester United, for example, are known popularly as the Red Devils*, Southampton as the Saints, and Everton as the Toffees. In none of those instances, however, does the nickname appear either on the club’s uniform or its official crest. Rather, the nicknames are largely — or, at least, more largely than in the States — the province of supporters and journalists, lending some (perhaps illusory) sense of the communal to the wildly capitalist affair of spectator sports.

*A devil actually does appear on the current iteration of Man U’s crest, but was added nearly a hundred years after the original formation of the club.

Nor is this sort of arrangement entirely alien to American baseball. The Brooklyn Base Ball Club was known alternately as the Grays, the Grooms, the Bridegrooms, the Superbas, and the Robins, before officially adopting the (Trolley) Dodgers nickname in 1933. And even despite the ubiquity of official nicknames in the modern version of the game, there are still unofficial ones used with considerable frequency — as in the instance of the Pittsburgh Pirates, for instance, known popularly as the Buccos; the Los Angeles Angels, known as the Halos; or the San Diego Padres, known as the Friars.

This post is designed to serve as an appeal to readers to supply those commonly used nicknames (like Buccos and Friars and Halos) which are distinct from the official one used by the club itself. Readers are invited to err on the side of the obvious. (So, even suggesting the O’s for the Baltimore Orioles is still of some benefit.)

With a reasonably complete list assembled, writer/grapher/researcher Sean Dolinar will attempt to discover which of these unofficial nicknames is currently in greatest use among fans and journalists. The results, one supposes, will be useless and fascinating.

Bryce Harper is having a career year emerging as one of baseball’s elite players. He leads all qualified batters in Major League Baseball in wins above replacement (WAR), weighted on-base average (wOBA), isolated power (ISO), and weighted runs created (wRC+). Harper has a wRC+ of 223, which means he’s created 2.23 times as many runs as the league average. wRC+ compares players to the rest of the league, because the stat is calculated relative to the league average.

I created a few interactive histograms to place a few of Harper’s stats in more context. For those who are not entirely familiar with histograms, they show the distribution of a particular stat. A narrow distribution has individuals clustered closer together, while a wide distribution has individuals that differ more. You might be familiar with the ubiquitous bell curve – the normal distribution. Histograms are important because they can provide a lot of information about the league quickly. While the wRC+ stat tells you how much better than league average the player is, it doesn’t tell you how many other players did as well.

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If you enjoyed the previous diagrams for position player WAR and offensive stats, then you’ll enjoy the diagrams for pitching stats. Just like the previous two diagram posts, the best instructions on how to precisely calculate the stats are in our library. However, the diagrams provide a visual conceptual overview of what affects the different pitcher stats.

The first set of stats are divided into three subcategories, based on denominator. The first is balls in play (BIP) and the pitcher batting average on balls in play (BABIP) stat. This is the same as batter BABIP except it’s calculated from the pitcher’s perspective. Total batters faced (TBF) is the second subcategory, where there are two stats: K% and BB%. These again mirror the batter’s version.

The innings pitched (IP) is the subcategory with the most familiar pitching stats. Innings pitched effectively counts every out the pitch has made, divides that by three to get IP. The most basic stats IP-based stats are K/9, BB/9, and HR/9. Walks plus hits per inning pitched (WHIP), a stat we don’t use a lot at FanGraphs, divides the total number of hits and walks by the number of innings pitched. Earned run average (ERA) does the same thing but also scales it to a full, 9-inning game. Fielding independent pitching (FIP) and expected FIP (xFIP) both use defensive-independent outcomes to estimate ERA. The FIP constant scales the stat to be comparable to ERA. xFIP is the same as FIP except for the HR input is change to fly balls (FB) and converted to HRs by multiplying FB by the league average HR/FB ratio.

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If one were to go to Minor League Central, navigate to the 2013 High-A pitching stats against lefty batters, and sort by SIERA with a minimum of 30 innings (against lefties), Taylor Rogers — a pitcher in the Twins organization — ranks first. If one were to repeat this exercise for Double-A in 2014, using a minimum of 35 innings, Rogers also rises to the top. For Triple-A in 2015 with a minimum of 25 innings? Rogers again!

I’ll admit I chose those innings limits somewhat arbitrarily to make sure Rogers’ name was at the tippy-top, but you get the idea: Rogers has baffled minor league lefties. Since he began his pro career back in 2012, Rogers has spun an excellent 2.01 SIERA against southpaws. Read the rest of this entry »

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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