The highest average fastball velocity among major-league qualifiers in 2014 was the 97.0 mph mark produced by Kansas City right-hander Yordano Ventura. What follows is an animated GIF of Georgia sophomore Robert Tyler striking out Florida State outfielder DJ Stewart — ranked 20th overall, Stewart, among Kiley McDaniel’s way-too-early draft prospect rankings — on a pitch recorded at that same exact velocity. Tyler has produced five strikeouts against just 10 Florida State batters over 3.0 innings (in a game available by way of SEC Network Plus via Watch ESPN).

Here’s the fastball in question:

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Colorado’s previous center-field camera.

Twice now over the past four or so years, the author has attempted to rank all 30 clubs’ center-field broadcast cameras by some combination of shot angle (in which more central and lower is generally preferred) and shot size (in which closer up and not longer is generally preferred). It’s required some combination of art and science, this endeavor, but has produced, if nothing else, a reference for anyone with access to MLB.TV, MLB Extra Innings, or some other manner of game video, so that he or she might be better equipped to choose the ideal feed.

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Over the last week, we’ve published a bunch of prospect-related content, including Kiley McDaniel’s Top 200 list. So, as an end-of-week recap, I thought it would be useful to collect it all in one place. This is that place. We’ll start with Sean Dolinar’s pretty graphs, and then link to all the various prospect pieces that ran here on FanGraphs this week.

Top 200 Prospects — Kiley McDaniel

Top 200 Prospects: The Process and Introduction — Kiley McDaniel

Top 200 Chat — Kiley McDaniel

Top 200 Podcast — Kiley McDaniel and Carson Cistulli

KATOH projections for the Top 200 — Chris Mitchell

KATOH’s Top 200 Prospects — Chris Mitchell

Taking a Stab at Valuing the Farm Systems — Dave Cameron

Everyone is a Prospect — Dave Cameron

How Many Good Players Were Good Prospects? — Jeff Sullivan

It’s become a practice of the present author in recent years to purchase — before FanGraphs’ annual spring pilgrimage to the desert — to purchase a new ballcap in February, with a view towards cultivating within my colleagues a combination of jealously and respect that my actual “work” is incapable of producing.

Last year, an exhaustive search — painfully documented over a series of posts — resulted in the acquisition of a Winston-Salem Spirits cap from 1994 with a weird red sun and melancholy eagle on it.

This year’s edition of the search began last week and continues today.

To wit:

NOS 90s SEAGRAM’S GIN snapback hat rap hip hop (Link)
Style: Tasteful Snapback
Time Left: N/A
Cost: US $14.99 (Buy It Now)

There are many reasons for an octogenarian male to fall asleep whilst fishing for lake trout from the bow of a reasonably priced pontoon boat. To do so in the absence of this tastefully appointed cap, however, is poor form. Poor form all around.

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Since my specialization at FanGraphs is graphics creation, I aim to produce many non-traditional, yet thought-provoking data visualizations regarding different aspects of baseball throughout the year.

With free agency is winding down as pitchers and catcher report to Spring Training, I created two graphics showing different views of the free-agent signing period from November to February 18, 2015. I pulled data from FanGraph’s 2015 Free Agent Tracker, which includes the signing date, salary information and the contract length.

The first graph shows the total Average Annual Value (AAV) of all players signed each week. From this visual, teams spend the majority of their money within the first two months of the off-season with the bulk of the money spent right after the Winter Meetings. January and February show substantially less activity except for Max Scherzer’s $210 million, 7-year deal. Overall, most of free agency activity takes place before Christmas.

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A couple of days ago, I examined how the players listed on Kiley McDaniel’s top 200 list graded out according to KATOH — my prospect projection system. Well, not exactly. I actually examined how his top 142 prospects — those that he ranked — graded out according to KATOH. I left off the 58 honorable mentions who just missed the cut for receiving a full writeup. Each of these guys received a 45+ FV rating from McDaniel, which means their most likely to peak as weak everyday players or back-end starters. Think Charlie Blackmon or Mike Leake. While none of the names listed below are likely to be stars, or even average regulars, all of them are pretty good bets to make at least some sort of big league impact. Read the rest of this entry »

The title of this post is also a question I asked myself while writing a different post that appeared at TechGraphs this morning — over the course of which I provide a nearly competent summary on how and where to watch college baseball online.

One reason to do that (i.e. watch college baseball) is merely because, at a time when the professional game is only just beginning to yawn and stretch its legs after hibernating for the winter, the gentlemen ballplayers of America’s universities have already begun their season in earnest. And a second reason for watching it is (and I’m quoting myself when I say this), is that it allows one to become acquainted with a number of players who’ll be selected during baseball’s amateur draft this June.

How many players, though? It’s a question that’s been answered previously but not recently — and not as substantively as one might like.

To answer the question, then, I sorted through the draft data at Baseball Reference. Using said data, I found two ways of answering the question — looking first at entire drafts from the past three years and then, second, at first-round selections* from the past 10 years.

*The difference in career WAR produced by first-round picks versus later-round picks is substantial. If a viewer’s interest is in watching perhaps a future, real major leaguer, the first-round threshold is a useful one.

Below are the results from the last three complete drafts, rendered into graph form by new and talented FanGraphs contributor Sean Dolinar. 4Yr denotes draftees from four-year colleges; JC, draftees from junior colleges; and HS; draftees from high schools.

First, year by year:

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Rob Arthur took a very interesting look at how fans are talking about their teams on Reddit, and if you measure things by quantity, there’s only one team more active than Mets fans right now. It’s not surprising that the Giants rate highest when it comes to total emotional words on reddit, though — their team is on quite a run.

Re-sort the list to reflect average positive words per negative word, though, and a different picture emerges:

Yup, down there at 26th you’ll find the Mets. So it looks like Mets fans ‘feel’ the most, at least if you define it by amount of words on Reddit. It’s a Shakespearean question: would you rather feel the most, good and bad, or be a Rays fan, feeling very little, but most of it upbeat?

One missing factor here is the size of the fanbase. For lack of a better easily found way to measure that, we’ll use total attendance. Let’s divide number of affect words by the yearly attendance last year to see of Mets fans are truly dedicated in their misery.

Yup. Mets fans feel. They feel a lot, at least on Reddit. More than any team in baseball, perhaps. For better or for worse.

The parties in the minor league wage litigation were in court last Friday to debate two motions filed by the MLB defendants, and by the end of the hearing Judge Joseph Spero suggested that he was currently leaning towards issuing a split decision.  As a refresher, the litigation involves claims by two groups of former minor league players contending that MLB and its teams’ pay practices violate the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), with many minor leaguers making less than the federally guaranteed minimum wage once all of their work-related duties have been accounted for.

MLB responded to these claims in several ways.  Of particular note for present purposes, all 30 MLB teams asked the court to transfer the case from California to a federal court in Florida, which they argued would be a more convenient venue for the trial.  In reality, MLB was hoping to take advantage of favorable legal precedents, as Florida courts have previously held that minor league baseball teams are seasonal operations immune from the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime requirements.

During Friday’s hearing, however, Judge Spero indicated that he was unlikely to transfer the case.  This is a significant victory for the minor league plaintiffs.  Had the case been transferred, the Florida court would be bound by the earlier precedent mentioned above, and as a result the new court would have likely dismissed the case against MLB in relatively short order.  Should that have happened, the minor league plaintiffs would then have had to hope that the U.S. Supreme Court would be willing to take the case in order to overturn the Florida precedent.  Barring Supreme Court intervention, the minor leaguers would have had to proceed against MLB only under state law, claims that would have been less effective at securing the nationwide reform the plaintiffs are hoping to achieve.

At the same time, though, Judge Spero also suggested that he was currently leaning in favor of granting a motion to dismiss the case filed by 11 MLB teams (the Orioles, Nationals, Yankees, Rays, Braves, White Sox, Indians, Pirates, Phillies, Tigers, and Red Sox).  These teams had argued that they were not subject to the California court’s jurisdiction because they do not maintain any business presence in the state.  In particular, unlike the other 19 MLB teams, these 11 are not currently affiliated with any California minor league teams.  The plaintiffs had argued that these teams do employ scouts in California, while also routinely traveling to the state to play MLB games.  Judge Spero, however, seems to believe that these contacts are too limited to justify forcing the 11 teams to defend themselves in California court.

Rather than dismiss the teams from the case, though, Judge Spero gave the plaintiffs the opportunity to present additional evidence establishing the teams’ link to California.  In particular, he suggested that the plaintiffs identify minor leaguers who played in California for the 11 teams and are willing to participate in the wage litigation.

If the plaintiffs can find such players, it appears that they will be able to proceed with the case against all 30 teams in California.  If not, then the minor leaguers may be forced to move forward against only a smaller subset of MLB clubs. Ultimately, this difference may prove less significant than it at first seems, as a victory in the case by the plaintiffs against 19 MLB teams would likely still result in major reform to the entire league’s minor league pay practices.  But securing a dismissal would still allow the 11 affected teams to avoid paying damages for past violations of the law (assuming the plaintiffs don’t file a second suit against those teams in another jurisdiction), a potentially significant cost savings.

The following changes/fixes/additions were made:

1. We now have projections for Jung-Ho Kang and Yasmany Tomas. Kang checks in with a .249/.307/.399 (.312 wOBA) line and Tomas with a .252/.292/.433 (.317 wOBA) line.

2. We tweaked our projected league offensive level. We were projecting an average ERA of 3.88 and are now projecting an average ERA of 3.83 (for comparison, MLB pitchers had a collective ERA of 3.74 last year and 3.87 the year before). Before, we projected an average wOBA of .319 and now we’re projecting an average wOBA of .317 (non-pitchers had a wOBA of .315 last year and .318 the year before). In short, we’ve moved from projecting an offensive level like that of 2013 to level between those of 2013 and 2014.

3. The levels that low minors pitchers stats are regressed towards were adjusted to reflect the fact that they are, in fact, low minors pitchers. Will Locante is a good example of this change. Previously, Locante projected to a 4.43 ERA with the thinking that, if he does pitch in a Major League bullpen this year, he must be better than his low minors numbers indicate. With our new regression mean, Locante projects to a 5.19 ERA. This is in some sense wrong, since if he does pitch in the Majors he’s probably better than that, but it’s also a better estimate of how good Locante is right now since this projection is not conditional on his pitching in the Major Leagues. Where we have a fastball velocity for a low minors pitcher (from a scouting report) his projection will now take into account both his velocity and the fact that he’s only pitched in the low minors.

4. Projections are adjusted to better take into account changing league offensive levels. This primarily affects minor leaguers and foreign players who have been pitching in other leagues (and we wanted to make this adjustment before projecting Kang and Tomas) but will also have a (muted) effect on pitchers whose past MLB data is from longer ago. To explain why we felt that this is necessary, in 2009 MLB pitchers struck out 18.0% of the batters they faced while pitchers in Japanese leagues stuck out 18.9%. Last year, however, MLB pitchers struck out 20.4% of batters and JPL and JCL pitchers continued to strike out 18.9% of batters. If we use the same translation in 2014 that we used in 2009 we would be underrating pitchers from the Japanese leagues. A similar phenomenon holds when translating minor league statistics to MLB levels. Our change would have helped Masahiro Tanaka if we had implemented this last year and it still helps him a bit: dropping his projected ERA to 3.37 from 3.44. This change is a boon to Noah Syndergaard, however, dropping his ERA all the way down to 3.61 from 3.91. Cuban batters also get a significant boost: Jose Abreu is up from a .385 wOBA to .394 wOBA and Rusney Castillo jumps up from .317 to .328.

5. You may also notice higher BB/9 projections and, accordingly, higher ERA projections for MLB relievers who haven’t thrown many innings in recent years. Joel Hanrahan’s BB/9 jumps from 3.2 to 3.7 and Daniel Hudson’s from 2.2 to 2.8.

6. Batters’ projected lineup slots were updated and R and RBI projections were adjusted accordingly.

We’re hoping that these mid-off-season adjustments don’t catch you off guard. Our thinking is that when we see ways in which our system is falling short, we should fix them as soon as we can. That said, we fully expect that this will be the last update to the underlying algorithm this off-season. Playing times and roles may well change but the system for producing player rate projections will not.