One of the great things about FanGraphs is the ever increasing number of stats and features available on the site. One of the downsides of that is that if you miss the initial announcement, things can get awfully confusing awfully quickly. In my efforts to update and expand the FanGraphs Library, I noticed a number of stats that slipped through the cracks and failed to get their own entries after debuting on the site. Today, we are correcting another one of those absences.

One of our most prominently displayed statistics is Defense, or Def if you’re checking out the leaderboards or player pages. We rolled Off and Def out about a year ago as simple combinations of stats we already offered on the site, but if you weren’t hanging out on FanGraphs in mid-September 2013, you might not have known what they meant. Def is simply fielding runs above average (Ultimate Zone Rating at FanGraphs) and the positional adjustment added together and tells you about a player’s total defensive value relative to league average. It is a cumulative stat, so it is based on the quality and quantity of your performance. To learn more about run value stats, check out last week’s entry in the Library.

As always, feel free to contact me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, in the comments, or during my weekly chat at 3pm eastern on Wednesdays with any and all FanGraphs and stat related questions.

A few years back, Mike Fast wrote an article for The Hardball Times called “Lose a Tick, Gain a Tick”. It basically looked at everything to deal with gaining or losing fastball velocity. Recently, I wrote a RotoWire article where I basically had to recreate Mike’s data, and I thought I would share the results.

The part of the article I looked into was the change in pitcher results, as their fastball changed velocity. Originally, Mike found starters saw their RA go up by 0.28 RA for each mph in fastball velocity they lost. For relievers, it was .45 RA. While I didn’t use RA values, I did get ERA, FIP, xFIP and K% changes between the 2013 to 2014 season. Here is what I found:

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If I asked you to guess who has been the best hitting team in baseball this year, who would you answer? Before writing this post, I probably would have guessed the Angels, though they actually don’t lead the league in any category one might consider a decent measure of team offense. If you just wanted the answer to be simple, you could go with the A’s, who have scored the most runs (650) of any team in the game, though there’s a traffic jam at the top, as the Tigers (649), Rockies (647), and Angels (642) are all close enough that they could take the lead with one big blowout.

But run scoring is hitting and baserunning and the order in which those events occur, so if we were just asking about which team has hit the best this year, using total runs scored might not give us a great answer. The next simplest answer would be to use something like wRC+, which focuses solely on a team’s performance at the plate and is agnostic about how they sequence those hits, so it is measuring what we generally think of as hitting talent. It also adjusts for park effects, which we want to do. By this measure, the best hitting team in baseball this year has been the Detroit Tigers, with a wRC+ of 109.

But even that’s not really looking at things on a level playing field, because the Tigers are in the AL and get to use the DH, while NL teams have to let their pitcher hit, which drags down their overall totals. So, what we really want to use is wRC+ with pitcher-hitting excluded, so that we’re just evaluating one team’s hitters against another. And if you use the toggle to look at team batting with pitcher’s excluded, you’ll find the best performance by a team’s hitters this year comes from the Pittsburgh Pirates, with a 113 wRC+.

Yeah, I was stunned too. Very quietly, the Pirates have really hit the ball this year. We know about Andrew McCutchen, but Russell Martin is basically hitting like Buster Posey, Neil Walker has been the best hitting second baseman in the NL, and play-everywhere-guy Josh Harrison has hit better than Robinson Cano this year. Toss in an improved bat from Starling Marte and a couple of okay platoon-types in Ike Davis and Travis Snider, and the Pirates line-up has performed better than any other in baseball this year. Who knew?

Last month, 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.

What follows is a list of all those same players, sorted by their WAR totals from the month of August:

Here are some observations regarding same:

• Oakland batters and pitchers produced just a 5.3 WAR collectively in August, the 20th-best such mark in the league. Notably, the five acquisitions included here accounted for slightly more than two of those wins — or, roughly 40%. The remaining 25 or so members of the roster, meanwhile, to have recorded a plate appearance or inning — they produced just three wins collectively (and Josh Donaldson was responsible for nearly two of those).
• Former Oakland outfielder Yoenis Cespedes recorded a 1.2 WAR for Boston in August — a better mark, that, than every Athletic besides the aforementioned Donaldson.
• Right-hander Brandon McCarthy has produced nearly an identical park-adjusted xFIP with the Yankees as he did previously with Arizona (73 xFIP- with the former, 77 xFIP- with the latter). His park-adjusted ERAs, however, have been wildly different (70 ERA- with the former, 131 ERA- with the latter). According to WAR as calculated with ERA (and not FIP), McCarthy has been responsible for 1.3 wins with the Yankees after accounting for -0.2 (negative wins, that is) in Phoenix.

News broke last night that Braves reliever Jonny Venters has yet another torn ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow. This comes a day after the Braves shut down Venters’ rehab program after the pitcher felt discomfort. We now know why he felt said discomfort.

Venters had joined a growing group of pitchers like Brian Wilson, Joakim Soria, and, more recently, Jarrod Parker who all required a second Tommy John Surgery. According to our own Jeff Zimmerman’s TJS database, were Venters to get a third surgery, he would be the second pitcher to ever do so. The first was Jason Isringhausen.

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There will be more of these with September call-ups looming and with 50 Future Value as the cut-off for who gets a post, Herrera just barely qualifies.  Take a look at the Rangers list or yesterday’s Rockies list to get an idea of what 45 and 50 FV means.  The last of the 50 FV prospects is generally around the 150th best prospect in the game.

Thanks to Jeffrey Paternostro for the above video.

Hit: 45/55, Game Power: 45/50, Raw Power: 50/50, Run: 50/50+, Field: 45/50, Throw: 45/45+

Note: From now on, when I list scouting grades for a player in an article, they will appear on his player page in real time, so pop over to Herrera’s page and marvel at technology.

Using the process from the org prospect list format, the triple slash line upside for Herrera is .280/.345/.430.  This is taking the projected tools above, converting them into stats (i.e. 55 bat converts to .270s batting average), then rounding up a bit (how much for each tool depends on the player) to account for “upside” rather than “projected output.”

Dilson Herrera is a bit of a grinder, with one scout comparing him to Mark Ellis.  That may not be what Mets fans are hoping for from a hotshot prospect that hit his way from A-Ball to the big leagues in his age 20 season, but part of the appeal with Herrera is how quickly he reached his ceiling (or close to it).

He was a known prospect on the July 2nd circuit from Colombia but only got a $220,000 bonus, with multiple millionaires from him class looking like total busts already.  This was due in part to Herrera’s 5’10 stature, the fact that he wouldn’t fit at shortstop in the big leagues, he isn’t a quick-twitch athlete and his swing is a little funny.  He’s worked his way to being an average second baseman, which was also in doubt at one point, and will post average to slightly above run times.

Herrera loads his hands up (behind his ear) rather than back (at or below shoulder height) like most hitters do.  This normally creates length to a swing, with the quick downward motion to start a swing often leading to more downward motion than is necessary and a loop to the swing path.  Herrera has had to prove it for the past few years, but he has very good awareness of the bat head, feel to hit, bat control or whatever you want to call it and he makes more consistent hard contact that almost any other hitter with this swing.

Being this advanced at the plate at 20 often leads to All-Star upside, but as I mentioned above, Herrera isn’t that kind of guy physically.  He’s a solid 50 for most scouts and he may reach that ceiling by Opening Day next year.  Not bad for one of the two players (along with Vic Black) the Mets received from Pittsburgh last season in exchange for two rentals (Marlon Byrd and John Buck).

One of the great things about FanGraphs is the ever increasing number of stats and features available on the site. One of the downsides of that is that if you miss the initial announcement, things can get awfully confusing awfully quickly. In my efforts to update and expand the FanGraphs Library, I noticed a number of stats that slipped through the cracks and failed to get their own entries after debuting on the site. Today, we are correcting one of those absences.

One of our most prominently displayed statistics is Offense, or Off if you’re checking out the leaderboards or player pages. We rolled Off and Def out about a year ago as simple combinations of stats we already offered on the site, but if you weren’t hanging out on FanGraphs in mid-September 2013, you might not have known what they meant. Off is simply batting and base running runs above average added together and tells you about a player’s total offensive value relative to league average. It is a cumulative stat, so it is based on the quality and quantity of your performance. To learn more, check out the new entry in the Library.

As always, feel free to contact me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, in the comments, or during my weekly chat at 3pm eastern on Wednesdays with any and all FanGraphs and stat related questions.

Yesterday, we rolled out a new WAR leaderboard here on FanGraphs, giving you the ability to see position players and pitchers in the same spot. Today, David Appelman has made this tool even better by allowing you to choose between three flavors of pitcher WAR, since not everyone agrees on how pitcher performance should be evaluated.

The default remains our WAR based on a pitcher’s FIP (and infield flies), but now you, can also choose to see the list with a pitcher’s WAR based on runs allowed (RA9) or a 50/50 blend of both. While giving a pitcher credit for half of the difference between his FIP-WAR and his RA9-WAR gets away from the “trying to measure exactly what happened” concept, it probably is a more accurate portrayal of a pitcher’s overall value than either FIP or RA9, which take the most extreme positions possible on the amount of credit or blame a pitcher should get for the results of balls in play.

Blending the two is a very crude and imperfect way to look at things, and also means that you get into double counting defensive performance at the team level — the value of hits being turned into outs is already being credited to position players — but on the individual player level, it probably is closer to the truth of the pitcher’s value in that season than either FIP or RA9.

Empirically, there’s not a lot of evidence that blending the FIP and RA9 evenly is correct, but if you’re just looking for a quick-and-dirty way to give the pitcher some credit/blame for his in-play results and sequencing, this likely gets you in the ballpark. None of the three versions of pitcher WAR are “correct” in every single situation, so we’re giving you the ability to pick your poison based on your own preferences. Enjoy!

If you click on the Leaders tab here on FanGraphs, you’ll be taken to this page, which shows you the performance of position players in 2014. If you wanted to see who the best pitchers of the year have been, you have had to switch over to the pitcher’s tab, and there was no place on the site to see a list with pitchers and hitters in the same place. Until now.

Thanks to David Appelman, we have a new WAR leaderboard that shows the totals for both position players and pitchers in the same spot. Additionally, since WAR is a counting stat, there is no playing time minimum that needs to be met, so you’ll see Troy Tulowitzki still ranks 9th overall in WAR this season, though he won’t appear on the batting leaders page because he has not met the standards of qualification for the batting average title set out by MLB. This list is the best place to look if you want to see how someone stacks up against all players, not just position players or pitchers.

You can access this leaderboard at any time from the dropdown under the leaders tab. It is listed under WAR tools, and is called Combined WAR Leaderboard.

The leaderboard can be sorted by league, or by team, so if you want to see all of your team’s players in one list, you can do that from here. And this tool goes back through 1871, so you can also use this for prior years as well.

You’ll also notice a note in the upper right-hand corner of the page that is worth mentioning here; these listed WAR totals are only for the player’s primary responsibility, so it’s batting WAR for batters or pitching WAR for pitchers.

While some NL pitchers do accumulate real value at the plate, we thought it made more sense to have the numbers be consistent with what we show on the player pages and the leaderboards, rather than having this be the only place on FanGraphs where batting and pitching WAR are added together. And of course, AL pitchers are not given the opportunity to produce value at the plate, so it’s a little bit of apples-to-orange comparison. But we do list batting WAR for pitchers (and pitching WAR for position players) on their player pages and the leaderboards, so if you want to create a leaderboard that accounts for this, you can do that. That’s just not what this tool is for.

We hope you enjoy the new feature.

NC State left-hander Carlos Rodon was selected third overall by the White Sox during the most recent major-league draft on the strength of a fastball/slider combination about which obscene poems have been written — which poems, shortly after having been written, were also then ripped up and thrown into the fire by the confused and perspiring scouts who wrote them.

More quickly than even those totally enamored scouts could have reasonably predicted, Rodon has parlayed his ecstatic repertoire into an excellent, if brief, minor-league career. After striking out 15 of the 42 batters (35.7%) he faced over four appearances with High-A Winston-Salem, Rodon earned rather an aggressive promotion to Triple-A Charlotte. There, he’s produced roughly the same rates, having now recorded 11 strikeouts against just 28 batters (39.3%) over two starts and 7.0 innings — including a four-inning, eight-strikeout performance on Sunday (box).

Command has been an issue: over those same seven innings at Triple-A, Rodon has recorded five walks — that is, against roughly 18% of the batters he’s faced. Even so, his capacity to miss bats in the highest of the minor leagues has created the very real possibility that he might appear in the majors at some point in September.

Regard:

On Carlos Rodon, GM Rick Hahn says no set plan yet whether he will be Sept. call-up. Could be a starter if he does get call.

— Colleen Kane (@ChiTribKane) August 20, 2014

“No set plan” indicates the Sox are willing to entertain the idea of promoting Rodon to the majors — which, that’s a remarkable thing in itself. Consider, for example, this table, which features every player from the past five years to make his major-league debut in the same year he was drafted:

That’s a list of only two players — and, notably, both Rodriguez and Sale were deployed as left-handed relievers on clubs which, if not necessarily in the thick of contention, at least managed second-place finishes in their respective divisions. The present iteration of the White Sox, meanwhile, aren’t even in the thin of contention. And the prospect of Rodon actually starting major-league games months removed from his last college appearance is an unusual, compelling one.

In conclusion — and for no other reason than because it’s beautiful — here’s footage of Rodon’s slider from his most recent start with Charlotte:

And that same pitch in slow motion: