If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Internet in my years covering prospects, it’s that people are irrationally interested in the next big thing. A well-known former first rounder close to the big leagues moves the needle for fans, but the completely unknown flame-thrower that hits 100 mph in rookie ball gets almost the same amount of attention for some reason.

Part of this is the proliferation of ridiculously deep dynasty fantasy leagues, but I think, at a deeper level, humans like the “new shiny thing” aspect of learning something completely new. I think this explains why trade rumors often get more attention than breakdowns of actual trades.

I’m often asked way before July 2nd if that year’s international signing class of Latin 16-year-olds has a franchise type, once-a-decade player—Miguel Cabrera, Miguel Sano, Felix Hernandez, etc.—which is the question I often find myself asking scouts to open a discussion about the top players in the class. In short, there isn’t that player (yet) for next July 2nd, though I’ll get another look at many of the top players in the class next month. There are already rumors of a player in the upcoming class having a deal for $3 million, but multiple players get about that much every year, even with the new international pools in place, so that doesn’t automatically make him that super elite prospect.

However, there is a player for the 2016 July 2nd period, 22 months from now, that is drawing that kind of scouting attention. He’s 14 years old and he’s a Venezuelan shortstop named Kevin Maitan.

I won’t waste time breaking down the tools for a 14-year-old, though I should admit I have scouted Latin kids this young when trainers want to show me their best players for future July 2nd periods after I watch a workout for their best players in that year’s class. International scouts start paying real attention to prospects as early as 12 or 13. There are some things that aren’t natural for domestic scouts that you do when projecting kids that are this young, like projecting speed to improve as the kid physically matures, but the broad scouting indicators are often surprisingly accurate for projecting years into the future. Player like Bryce Harper, Eric Hosmer and Justin Upton were all noticed as early as 14 or 15 to be elite draft prospects and in a country where the kid is training for and scouts are scouting for his age-18 season.

You hear almost every star player from a Latin country eventually used as a comparison for a raw teenager, but international scouts generally don’t invoke Miguel Cabrera. That’s the Bo Jackson-type talent you don’t use to compare to teenagers. Even Vladimir Guerrero gets comp’d sometimes, though with Vlady’s son being in this year’s July 2nd crop and having similar mannerisms, that at least makes some sense.

Maitan has been compared to Cabrera by most of the scouts I’ve asked about him. He’s unusually physically mature for his age and flashes all the tools you want to see to throw that Cabrera comp around: he can play shortstop pretty well now, he’s got more raw power than most kids a few years older than him, he has smooth actions in defense and at the plate and so on.

Obviously, it’s still ridiculously early in the process to anoint a 14-year-old the next big thing, but scouts have already starting doing it, with rumors Maitan has already been offered seven figures by multiple clubs.  I won’t name the clubs that have been tied to him for a few reasons, but it’s still unclear if that matters, because MLB could still be aiming to institute an international draft for 2016.  If that happens, it would add another big benefit to having the worst record in the 2015 season.

At the beginning of August, the present author utilized what a reader might have recognized as “the least possible amount of effort” to the end of compiling a pair of leaderboards — one for hitters, one for pitchers — of all the players who’d been traded both (a) during the month of July and (b) to a contending club, where contending was defined as a club that possessed better than 10% odds of qualifying for the divisional series as of July 31st.

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Grantland’s Ben Lindbergh published a great piece last Friday, going through the laundry list of myths we hear rolled out every October, and showing that there is little or no evidence to support nearly any of them. On his hit-list:

Recent Performance Doesn’t Matter.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but it’s maybe the most important thing to remember, as we’re going to hear the word “momentum” about a million times in the next 24 hours. The A’s stumbled into the playoffs, going 29-38 in the second half of the year, the worst second-half record of any team that has made the postseason since 1995, but two of the three prior teams to win fewer than half of their games in the second half of the season went on to meet in the World Series. And as Jay Jaffe showed, even looking at just the final month, or the final few weeks, or even the final week of the season doesn’t really tell us anything about what is going to happen in October.

It’s very tempting to put a strong emphasis on what we’ve seen lately. Don’t do it. Recent performance isn’t predictive of future performance.

Experience Doesn’t Matter.

Lots of people have studied this. Lots of people have reached the same conclusion. Young, old, experienced or not; we can’t find any evidence that any particular group outperforms in the playoffs. I guess this is why the “they don’t know they’re not supposed to win” cliche was invented for times when the “experience is the only thing that matters” cliche is proven wrong.

Pitching Doesn’t Win Championships.

Having a heavily loaded front of the rotation is great. Having really good hitters is great. Having a great bullpen is great. There are lots of ways to win. No single way has proven better than the other.

He goes through a longer list, and provides plenty of good links, so keep the piece handy when you’re being inundated by announcer cliches over the next month. Most of them are total bunk.

The 2014 MLB regular season is officially something that happened. With its passing comes the need to get our affairs in order, for the lists, they are coming. They will be many, they will be tenacious. You, there! Guard that outpost! Get those archers ready, there’s no time to lose! The first of the lists are coming over the horizon. Brace yourselves, there is no end in sight.

Here are the most-improved (qualified) hitters of 2014, by the metric of wRC+:

Seeing names like Martinez, Brantley, and Altuve on this list shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise, given the news surrounding their 2014 efforts. Some other interesting names pop up, however. Anthony Rizzo has taken a significant jump. Alcides Escobar has gone from loathesome to respectable, and Jose Bautista got better which doesn’t seem very fair.

In contrast, here are 2014’s least-improved (again, qualified) batters. You could also say these batters got the most worse, but that doesn’t sound either correct or pleasing.

The top three names here offer an interesting juxtaposition of two sluggers falling to around league-average, and a pretty-good hitter falling off like a Clayton Kershaw curveball. The inclusion of Davis and Craig on this list is notable, as if I expand the search to the last 20 years, they also make the cut.

Both Chris Davis and Allen Craig rank in the top seven of worst hitting drop-offs of the last 20 years. The reasons why should warrant some deeper digging. This is neither the time nor place for such digging — with these things typically being left for the cold, dark expanses of winter. For now, let us gaze upon these lists, acknowledge that they are indeed lists, and glean whatever value or joy we desire from them.

This year, American League designated hitters have posted a combined 99 wRC+. On the team level, the Tigers are first, at 164. Right in the middle are the Twins, at 115. At second-worst, we find the Royals, at 80. Then, buried deep, there are the Mariners, at 62. Depending on your metric of choice, it’s quite possibly the worst team DH season ever, and though responsibility is split, the biggest offenders have been Corey Hart and Kendrys Morales. Hart’s had some injury issues after missing all of 2013 due to bigger injury issues. Morales missed time because of himself.

Morales had to wait to sign as a free agent until after the draft, after he and his agent misread the market. Morales received a prorated $12 million, which guaranteed him a significant amount of money, and it was assumed Morales wouldn’t need much time to shake off the rust that had accumulated during the delay. As a Twin, Morales posted a miserable 59 wRC+, but the Mariners added him as an upgrade anyway, figuring that he’d just had his spring training in Minnesota. As a Mariner, he’s posted an only slightly less miserable 77 wRC+, and he’s at 73 in September. Morales is doing the opposite of finishing strong, and he’s challenging to post the lowest WAR in the league.

So, last offseason, coming off a productive year, Morales couldn’t find himself a home as a glove-less DH. At that point, though, he was at least a designated hitter who could hit some. Now he’ll be a free agent again, and he’s a year older, and he didn’t learn how to play defense in the meantime, and his offense has been dreadful. 2014 for Morales has been a complete disaster, and at this point it’s hard to envision him signing for guaranteed money. He’ll receive plenty of interest, and come February he’ll be in somebody’s camp, but Morales isn’t worth signing as a bench guy because he has no defensive flexibility. And he’s not worth signing as a regular DH because he hasn’t been the “hitter” part of the title for a year. He has to prove himself again, and I have to think the best he’ll find is a minor-league contract with a spring invitation.

Adam Dunn kept playing after bottoming out in 2011, but he’d been signed to a huge contract. Aubrey Huff kept playing after 2009, but he was somewhat defensively versatile. Paul Konerko returned to the White Sox this year as a part-time player, but that’s a special circumstance. Jose Vidro was finished after 2008, when he was newly 34. Morales isn’t 32 until next June, but he’s running a lower ISO than Matt Dominguez, and he’s lousy on the bases, and he’s a double-play machine. The one thing he’s supposed to be able to do, he hasn’t done, and that’s bad news for a one-dimensional player.

Odds are Morales will play in the bigs in 2015. Guys with a track record of hitting will receive multiple opportunities, and so Morales isn’t out of chances. But he might never again see huge money, and this coming year he shouldn’t even see guaranteed money. Maybe because of that, Morales will make for someone’s offseason upside play. Maybe he’ll turn out to be a bargain. But, sitting out for so long? Kendrys Morales shouldn’t have sat out for so long. It’s hard to say how much that cost him, but it’s not hard to say it cost him a lot. It probably hurt his performance, and it definitely hurt his wallet.

The second wild card looked like it might goose the final weekend, but all it did was lightly spank it. There’s only one team with anything more than 1% chance of making the playoffs that’s not currently in a playoff spot. Team Entropy has failed, and only the Mariners can bring any chaos to the final weekend, unless the Pirates and Royals catch their division leaders on the final day.

Most of the juice comes from home field advantage in the wild card game. And that might not have as much meaning as it does in other sports. From this LA Times piece in 2011:

“Baseball in general has the lowest home-field advantage of all sports,” said Tobias Moskowitz, coauthor of “Scorecasting” and a professor at the University of Chicago. “We don’t find that there is any difference in the postseason versus the regular season, once you adjust for the quality of teams.”

Even though baseball is the one sport where the dimensions of the field vary in each ballpark, allowing teams to mold their rosters to the idiosyncrasies of their home stadiums, it is also the sport with the lowest historical home-team winning percentage. Over the last three complete seasons, the home team has won 55.5% of the 7,288 games. Over the last century, that figure has hovered around 54%.

The Giants, who would have dropped from a Steamer-projected 3.02 FIP from Madison Bumgarner to a 3.85 FIP projection from Jake Peavy in the same system, have already made their choice. No matter where the NL Wild Card game is played, Madison Bumgarner will be pitching in it.

Will the A’s, Royals, and Pirates follow suit and declare their best pitcher their wild card game starter?

The Sunday starter for the A’s is Sonny Gray, and currently Jon Lester is slated to go for the wild card game there. Since Gray’s expected work (3.61 Steamer-projected FIP) is so close to Lester’s (3.49), there’s little reason to muck with that schedule if only a few percentage points of advantage in a one game playoff are on the table.

The difference is larger for James Shields (3.63) and Yordano Ventura (3.91), but still not as stark as the one between the Giants’ two possible starters. Shields is Big Game Shields, acquired for just this sort of game, so he’ll start to the Wild Card game.

The Pirates, though. They start Francisco Liriano (3.31) on Saturday and Gerrit Cole (3.56) on Sunday, or at least that’s what the schedule says right now. If they do indeed use those pitchers in a quest for the division, and fail, they’ll be left with Edinson Volquez (4.12) most likely. So that’s your rotation and battle to watch.

If the Pirates are tied or one game out in the division on Sunday — will they start Cole and leave an inferior pitcher for the wild card game? Team Entropy has one last situation to root for, it seems.

If you’re looking for a quick summary of a player’s performance or skill set, one of the first statistics you might glance at is their Isolated Power (ISO). ISO is the difference between a player’s slugging percentage and their batting average and is their average number of extra bases per at bat. Typically, we use ISO to approximate a player’s power.

Over in the Library, we’ve updated and expanded the page on ISO, so if you’re looking to get up to speed on what ISO means and how to use it, along with a quick reference chart that tells you what a good ISO is and what a horrible ISO is, go ahead and check it out.

And as always, feel free to ask questions below in the comments section or stop by our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chat (Wednesdays at 3pm eastern). You can also find me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44 if you have FanGraphs related inquiries during the remainder of the week.

Do you live in upstate New York? Do you want to watch Jonah Hill do this on a large screen tomorrow night?

If so, then do I have the announcement for you. Tomorrow night, St. John Fisher college is hosting a screening of Moneyball, which will be followed by a Q&A about how analytics have been incorporated into the decision making process of professional sports teams. I’ll be included as a panelist in the discussion, which should go for somewhere between an hour to an hour and a half.

The event is free and open to the public. If you’d like to attend, the event will be held in the Wegmans School of Pharmacy, room 139, beginning at 6 pm. The Q&A portion of the evening will be held after the screening of the movie.

So, Rochesterians (?), come hang out with me tomorrow night. It will be fun.

In early July, just a month after baseball’s amateur draft in early June, the author published a statistical report for all of those first-rounders both to have (a) signed with the relevant selecting club and (b) recorded either a plate appearance or inning as an actual professional.

What the author has done in what follows is repeat that same exercise — but, in this case, with the end-of-season stats featuring all of those same players. Below, the reader will find a pair of leaderboards (one for batters; one, pitchers) of the aforementioned first-round selections. That same reader will also find some moderately helpful notes, featuring assorted shallow observations regarding the numbers and players featured here. Links to the relevant FanGraphs leaderboards are available here: Batters / Pitchers.

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Earlier this afternoon, managing editor of FanGraphs Dave Cameron suggested that, given the opportunity to vote on this year’s American League MVP award, that he’d place Cleveland outfielder Michael Brantley second on his ballot. While there are likely those who would find the selection grounds for outrage, they are generally not the sort who would find their way to this internet weblog. Indeed, despite lacking substantial power, Brantley has produced — thanks to a combination of excellent contact skills, an above-average BABIP, and efficient baserunning — has produced the second-most runs offensively among all major-league batters.

Another thing Brantley has done this season — as of this past Friday, at least — is record a combination of at least 20 home runs and 20 stolen bases. Given the number of other variables that inform player value, adjudging a player’s performance merely by home runs and stolen bases is of limited utility. However, those two metrics also both (a) serve as decent proxies for power and speed (i.e. two useful baseball tools) and (b) actually produce runs on their own. Because of that, and due to Brantley’s recent admission to the 20-20 club, I wondered how other recent 20-20 players have fared in terms of wins.

To find the answer, I identified all the player seasons between 2004 and -13 in which a batter had recorded both 20 home runs and also 20 stolen bases.

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