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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The Braves have had a pretty lousy season, and General Manager Frank Wren has lost his job because of it. The team announced today that John Hart will take over as interim GM.

The Braves have dismissed general manager Frank Wren. John Hart has been named as the interim GM.

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) September 22, 2014

Speculation to date has focused on Hart or former GM John Schuerholtz taking more active roles in the baseball operations department, and the placement of Hart as interim GM, leading a formal GM search that includes Schuerholtz and Bobby Cox, seems to confirm those reports. Previous rumors have suggested that the most likely outcome is that either Hart or Schuerholtz will directly oversee baseball operations, with assistant GM John Coppolella getting promoted to the GM role.

Eno did an interview with Coppolella back at the 2010 winter meetings, which you can read at that link.

Yesterday, in these electronic pages, FanGraphs contributor and Italian-American street tough Mike Petriello published a much-deserved paean to Cleveland’s Carlos Carrasco, which right-handed pitcher has recorded the second-highest WAR among all pitchers over the last month and the absolutely lowest park- and league-adjusted xFIP among 111 qualifiers over that same interval.

Among Petriello’s observations is one concerning Carrasco’s split-change to the effect that it (i.e. the split-change) is simultaneously absurd and nearly impossible to hit — appended to which comments, and for the pleasure of the wide readership, were technicolor video examples of the pitch in question.

With a view towards facilitating even more pleasure for that same readership, what I’ve done below is supply three additional examples of Carrasco’s split-change from 2014 — the objectively most impressive examples, actually, where most impressive is defined as those changeups which feature the greatest overall movement relative to a spinless ball and also induced a swinging strike.

For each pitch, I’ve included the relevant batter, the date, the velocity, and then both the horizontal- and vertical-movement figures relative to a spinless ball from the catcher’s perspective, such that a negative horizontal figure denotes armside run from a right-handed pitcher.

No. 3
Batter: Michael Morse   Date: April 25th
Velocity: 88.8 mph   Movement: -6.0 in. by -3.2 in. (6.8 in.)

Footage:

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Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is one of the the hallmark statistics available at FanGraphs and to match its prominence on the site, we’ve updated and expanded our Library entry on WAR. This week, you’ll notice more information in our basic WAR primer and a detailed page on how to calculate WAR for position players.

We’ll be updating the pitcher specific WAR page in the next couple of weeks and there is a blog post that walks you through a complete example of the position player WAR calculation. Look for it in the FanGraphs Library.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, come to our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chats (Wednesdays at 3pm), or get in touch with me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44 if you want to learn more.

I’m an unabashed fan of Denard Span, and for my money, he remains one of the game’s most underrated players. But I’ll admit that when I saw this a few hours ago, even I was surprised.

Below, a side by side comparison of Span and Jacoby Ellsbury since the start of the 2012 season.

Over the last three seasons, Span has essentially been Ellsbury’s equal. They walk the same amount, and while Ellsbury has a tick more power, Span strikes out a little less. Their slash lines are almost identical, and once you adjust for the offensive environments they’ve played in, Span’s wRC+ is actually a point higher, even with less power. Ellsbury’s a better base stealer, but UZR and DRS like Span’s defense a little more. They aren’t perfect clones, but the differences are small, and the overall value has been very similar.

They’re basically the same age — Span was born in February of ’84, Ellsbury in September of ’83 — and have the same general set of skills. Ellsbury’s additional power allows one to see him as a player with a bit more upside — his 2011 season did happen, after all, when he hit as many home runs that year as Span has in his career — and he’s been a slightly better player over his entire career. If you look at their whole big league resume, Ellsbury is at +27 WAR in 3,800 plate appearances, while Span is at +22 in 4,000 plate appearances. On a per-600 PA basis, that gives Ellsbury roughly a +1 WAR advantage.

But the entirety of that difference comes from one year (which occurred four years ago), when Ellsbury was maybe the best player in the game while Span dealt with symptoms from a concussion. That season happened, and it counts, but we’re now on year three of Span and Ellsbury being basically the same player.

The Nationals have a crowded outfield, and the assumption has been that they may look to trade Span this winter. But he’s going to make $9 million next year, and the market just valued a very similar player as a $22 million per year player on a long-term deal. It might be easy to think that Span is a replaceable part, given the team’s depth, let’s not underestimate Span’s impact on the Nationals, and assume that he’d be so easy to replace. Denard Span is really good.

The Athletics just signed a deal to make Nashville their Triple-A affiliate. After fifteen years, the River Cats will leave Sacramento behind. The move will push Oakland’s Triple-A team further away, but it may give them a more neutral run environment and a nicer home park. Perhaps proximity is overrated?

For a team that seemingly gets the most of their forty-man roster, you’d think the A’s would want their Triple-A team closer by than Nashville. Need Drew Pomeranz for a start? He’s just a bus ride away, ready to go. Need an extra infielder tonight? Call Sacramento and tell them to get Andy Parrino in his car.

Turns out, the A’s don’t actually shuttle more than your average major league team. Below is a table that shows the number of callups by team. The third column shows DL activity (both on and off the DL) as a sanity check — a DL’ed star begets a minor league callup, after all. Courtesy ProSportsTransactions.com:

20 teams have made more minor league moves than the A’s, despite the fact that only eight teams had more disabled list moves.

So it seems the team decided that the benefits of moving to Nashville outweighed the benefit of having the team closer by for thirty-odd moves a year. Fresno was available, for example.

What were the benefits to Nashville? Well, Nashville is building a new 10,000 seat park that will open next year, so that’s nice. That means better facilities for their young players, and perhaps better health outcomes. The contract is fairly boilerplate with little room for negotiation, and there’s absolutely no chance that the Nashville stadium sweetened the deal at all.

But the Athletics also move into what looks like a more neutral run environment. We don’t know yet how the new stadium will play, but the PCL Pacific Western Division — Sacramento, Reno, Tacoma, Fresno — holds three of the highest-scoring teams in the league. In the new American South division, Memphis scored the most, and it came in ninth overall in the PCL.

If there are ancillary benefits to having your Triple-A team close, there are also ancillary benefits to a more neutral run environment. For the ease of travel — not only for players, but for scouts and team employees — the team acquired a park that may keep their players more healthy while also allowing their pitchers to develop in a more normal run-scoring division.

Earlier today, the author published a post regarding rather young Mets shortstop Wilmer Flores and how — somewhat surprisingly, given basically every scouting report about him — Flores had played a mostly average shortstop over 400-plus innings.

Said post included select footage — both of Flores misplaying relatively harmless ground balls and also Flores recording outs on batted balls that are converted less than 50% of the time. What it lacked, however, was any footage of Flores making actual, normal shortstop plays. The purpose of this current post is to address that pressing issue.

Here, for example, is Flores cleanly fielding and throwing to first a ground ball by Miami third baseman Casey McGehee in the fourth inning of the Mets game last night:

And here’s Flores doing basically the exact same thing two innings later:

Finally, here’s Flores backhanding a Donovan Solano grounder in the ninth and, once again, making an entirely acceptable throw to first:

And because it exists, here’s a final GIF of that last play, except from a different angle:

Two years ago, Mike Trout had the best age-20 season of all-time, by Wins Above Replacement. Last year, Trout had the best age-21 season of all time, by Wins Above Replacement. This year, Mike Trout will not have the best age-22 season of all time, because he’s regressed a little bit and also because holy crap Ted Williams.

But just because Trout hasn’t had the best season of any player ever at this age doesn’t mean we can’t have fun appreciating where his updated career totals have him relative to everyone else who has ever played the game. So, here are the five best players through their age-22 season, by WAR.

Modern defensive metrics have error bars, of course, and that goes double for numbers from 100 years ago, so you can essentially do whatever you want with those DEF numbers and adjust accordingly; this list is not gospel. But there’s Trout at the top, and even if you ignored defense and position to just rate by offensive runs above average, he’d fall all the way to #2, behind only Ted Williams.

But that’s not unexpected; the guy who ranks #1 in WAR at both age-20 and age-21 should rank at the top of this leaderboard. So instead, here’s a slightly more fun list; the best players through their age-23 season, all time, by WAR.

Trout is virtually tied with Mickey Mantle for #4 on this list, ranking behind only three Hall of Famers. And Mike Trout has not yet had his age-23 season. That will be next year, and with another reasonable Trout season, he’ll pass Williams and take the top spot on that list too.

Things will get a little harder two years from now, since Ty Cobb put up 47 WAR through his age-24 season, meaning Trout will need 18 WAR over the next two years to catch him. He can do it — he’s put up 18 WAR the last two years — but it’s not a shoo-in, and so in a few years, we might actually have a list of best careers through a specific age where Trout is not #1. But it wouldn’t be too shocking if he caught Cobb and ended up atop that list too.

Let’s appreciate what we’re seeing here. The term generational talent gets thrown around too much, but Mike Trout is a generational talent.