The active roster button on the leaderboards has undergone a change in how the results are presented. The team displayed in the results will now only show the player’s active team. This goes for the teams section of the leaderboards as well.

For instance, if you check the active roster box, Jon Lester’s team will appear as only the Oakland Athletics, since that is his current active team. When you look at the team leaderboards and you check the active roster box, Jon Lester’s stats with both the Red Sox and the Athletics will be attributed to the Athletics line of data.

Previously, the team displayed in the results was the team(s) the player had played on during the selected time period.

Last week, we updated our Library entry for Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP). This week, FIP’s sister-stat Expected Fielding Independent Pitching (xFIP) got the same treatment. If you’re looking for a defense independent pitching statistic that also tries to strip out some of the inherent fluctuation in home run rate, xFIP is for you. Head over to the full entry to learn more about it.

If you missed it last week, there’s also a blog post in the Library that breaks down the basics of why using metrics other than ERA will help you develop a better understanding of how well a pitcher is performing.

As always,  please feel free to pose questions or comments below or find me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44 if that’s more convenient. Also remember to stop by our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chat (Wednesdays at 3pm eastern) to learn more about our stats and our site.

As of this writing, the Pittsburgh Pirates have a better than one-in-four chance of making the postseason. One of their pitchers, Charlie Morton, was recently placed on the disabled list with hip discomfort. Morton’s value is not necessarily reflected in his win/loss record, but he’s been an extremely serviceable pitcher this year, worth over a Win Above Replacement. Morton is the type of pitcher one would want during a playoff push as a reliable starter or a very effective reliever.

Depending on the severity of Morton’s injury, the Pirates may not have that luxury. Morton is being replaced for the time being by Gerrit Cole, a young pitcher with promise who, if healthy, should fill in quite admirably. But there’s an underlying cost to Morton’s injury that doesn’t involve Cole or the Pirates or the playoff race in general. It has to do with Morton’s place in baseball history — specifically the amount of batters he plunks.

Morton already has a hold on the record books, as it happens. In 2013, he hit 3.25% of the batters he faced with a pitch. That is good for a modern-era record. This season, he averaged a hit batsman 2.94% of the time. That averages out to about 3.1%. Pitchers are less likely to walk Adam Jones than Charlie Morton is to hit a batter. If Bartolo Colon were to bat against Charlie Morton, Colon would have almost the same chance of getting hit as he would of getting a hit. (Note: Colon did face Morton twice this year. Neither a hit nor HBP was recorded).

So Charlie Morton hits a lot of batters, is what I’m saying. He’s drilled likely candidates like Jon Jay and Anthony Rizzo, as well as less likely candidates such as Kyle Lohse and Tim Hudson. Morton doesn’t discriminate, it seems. It could just be that he’s a product of his time. I mean, batters are still getting hit at a pretty good rate, historically speaking.

But here’s the leaderboard sorted by HBP/TBF (minimum 115 IP) for the past 30 years.

This is to what the title of this post was alluding. Morton is one tenth of one percent away from holding the two most plunk-happy seasons in recent memory. Depending on his timetable and workload he still may have a chance, but if Pittsburgh falls further out of contention or Cole proves himself to be a worthy replacement (and the Pirates look at Morton’s win/loss record as a proof of performance), we may not see Morton pitch again in 2014.

This is admittedly a weird record and one that causes pain to batters, so perhaps I shouldn’t be rooting for Morton to pull this off, but I still am. Because when pitted against the Clayton Kershaws and Felix Hernandezs of the world, guys like Morton need to carve out their own little notch in history.

I really wanted to end this with a George Clinton funk/plunk reference that didn’t sound forced or hokey, but I just couldn’t. Feel free to add your own attempts in the comments. I’m sure they’ll be lovely.

While the author has referenced the birth records neither of Cubs infielder Javier Baez nor Cleveland infielder-outfielder Zach Walters for the purposes of composing this brief post, circumstantial evidence — like how they were born in different countries and also exhibit little physical resemblance — circumstantial evidence suggests that they are not brothers.

What they’ve demonstrated in terms of baseball performance, however, invites comparison. Both have shown considerable power. Both have also exhibited a proclivity for striking out. Overall, their collected offensive skills have produced slightly above-average batting lines in a limited sample.

Indeed, among all batters to have recorded 50-plus plate appearances this season, here’s a list of all the ones to have produced an isolated power greater than .250, a strikeout rate above 30%, and simultaneously a wRC+ of 100-plus:

Three players, is how many that is: Baez, Walters, and Houston’s Chris Carter. If the former two are brothers from a different mother, then Carter is the issue of a third mother still — a mother who, for all her probably many virtues, doesn’t offer much in the way of defensive value.

Baez and Walters, meanwhile, have both recorded major-leagues innings at shortstop this season. Yes, the former has played more second base; the latter, a number of other positions. That an organization has considered deploying them towards that end of the defensive spectrum, is the point.

None of this is to suggest that Baez and Walters will certainly become the same player. The former’s superior pedigree and younger youth suggest the possibility of a higher peak. That the pair have been mostly indiscernible in the very earliest parts of their major-league careers appears to be a factual thing, though.

With the release of Kiley’s first prospect list for FanGraphs, we’ve updated the player pages to include some basic scouting grades.

These will continue to get updated as we have new information on players. And as Kiley continues to roll out his prospect evaluation lists, we will add players from additional teams.

The outfield can get boring. But you can spend time thinking about your positioning at least. And if you spend a lot of time thinking about positioning, as Sam Fuld does, then you’ll eventually dissect every part of the play as it sets up. Even the catcher’s butt.

From pitch to pitch, I’ll try to guess with the pitcher. I’ll just take a couple steps in that direction. Sometimes, once the catcher sets up early enough, I can tell something. If the guy is set up middle and his ass is up a bit, I can tell it’s offspeed if a runner’s on base. He’s getting ready to block the pitch because you’re more likely to get a ball in the dirt. You can sort of read stuff from the catcher and think of what pitch is coming. — Sam Fuld

Can we mere laymen see this change in catcher butt height?

Let’s look at a game from the weekend and compare the catcher’s posterior positioning. Both of these images come from the first inning of the Braves against the A’s at home this past weekend. Julio Teheran is throwing Evan Gattis an outside changeup in both instances, as well. But Gattis is in a different receiving position in each case, with the bases empty on the left and a runner on first in the picture on the right:

Knowing an offspeed pitch is coming, as you would in this situation if you were looking in the right place, would allow you as an outfielder to take a step towards the pull field. A step can make a difference.

It gets boring out there in the outfield, and Sam Fuld thinks of all sorts of things to fill the time. Sometimes he thinks about the catcher’s butt.

I wrote over on the main blog today about tomorrow’s debut of the organizational prospect lists. Head over there for the details of what to expect, but in general I’m looking to give as many objective measures as possible of what scouts think about the top prospects in the game. With 20-80 grades on every tool, an overall Future Value grade, a risk rating, projected triple-slash line and various other measures, there’s a risk of interpreting having a lot of data as having certainty about the future.

I often see fans berating each other on social media about the risk and/or upside of a prospect (whom they’ve never seen and never talked to a scout about) being CLEARLY higher/lower than another, ending the exchange with something like, “look at the rankings of these three publications, there’s a consensus and you’re wrong.” I suppose that’s inevitable with the commodification and proliferation of scouting reports on top prospects, but I wanted to be clear that my effort to better explain my opinion about a prospect doesn’t mean I’m as certain about the future as what I’m writing may suggest. Dave tweeted about this idea earlier this month:

Guys like Roark are one of the reasons why I think “upside” is so overrated for pitching prospects. We don’t know anyone’s “upside”. — David Cameron (@DCameronFG) August 7, 2014

Throwing 99 and having a nasty breaking ball obviously helps. But 88 at the top of the zone works too if you can locate. — David Cameron (@DCameronFG) August 7, 2014

Mike Trout was the 3rd prospect in the Angels system after he was drafted, according to Baseball America. After the 2007 season, Cliff Lee was 29, due to make $3.75 million for 2008 and had essentially zero trade value after two straight years with an xFIP over 5.00. Big league organizations often can’t even see elite players just a year or two in advance.

If Mike Trout wasn’t even the top rated outfield prospect in the Angels’ system at one point (it was Peter Bourjos), then technically every player’s upside is to be the best player in the game.

It would make my job easier if I just said that about every prospect, but, much like how MLB clubs treat the draft, I realize there are no perfect rankings, just people trying to do a little better than the competition. I’ve sat in draft rooms and war rooms during the trade deadline and I can tell you that there isn’t rocket science happening in these rooms. The thing that separates those conversations from what I’m writing is the quantity and quality of the information, not necessarily the decision-making process.

I think with these org rankings that I will be upping the quantity and quality of the prospect information that readers are accustomed to seeing. That being said, even if I magically had all the proprietary information of all 30 teams and unlimited resources, it’s still just putting lipstick on a pig.

Well, it’s here. Or, it will be soon. Not soon as in less than 48 seconds from now, but in just a few slim hours, it will be time for the FanGraphs Boston Meetup. We hope you can join us. Here, once again, is the info, in both link and block quote form:

Sometimes, we nerds like to go out on the town. One of those times is the weekend of the Saber Seminar, which is one of the best events (if not the best) on the yearly sabermetric and/or sabermatic calendar. This year’s Saber Seminar is August 16-17. So, just as we did last year, we’re once again going to set up shop at The Mead Hall in Cambridge the night before Saber Seminar, on Friday, August 15th!

So come join Dave Cameron, David Appelman, Carson Cistulli, David Laurila, Matt Swartz and myself tonight at any time from 7 pm to midnight. George Springer won’t be playing, but there should still be plenty to talk about!

Yesterday, Max Scherzer and Mike Fiers each struck out 14 batters in their respective starts against the Pirates and Cubs. When such a thing happens, there’s a danger in concluding that this sort of thing must not be special, and that it happens all the time. The wiser among us — and me — know that this is still pretty rare. But just how rare? I decided to investigate.

Now, if I’m using the Baseball-Reference Play Index correctly, and lord knows I might not be, I see that in their searchable regular season database — which runs from 1914 to the present — there have been 342,540 games started. But I wanted also to eliminate those rare occasions where the starting pitcher, either through ineptitude or injury, fails to record an out. Using the “at least 1 out” criteria lops off another 1,000 or so games, so now we’re working with 341,258 games started. I also limited things to nine-inning starts, since no one cares that Tom Cheney struck out 21 batters in a 16-inning start in 1962. This actually knocked our sample down much more significantly, all the way down 309,263 starts. I feel that that is justified, otherwise not everyone is operating on the same playing field. If you disagree, feel free to let me know about it in the comments.

From there, I calculated the percentages and came up with this handy table. Since I’m a glutton for punishment, I also added in a couple of extra year-based filters to put things into further context and so that you have the freedom of choice in selecting your arguments on Scherzer’s, Fiers’, and/or any other pitcher’s behalf. After all, this is America.

Note: My look here is pretty simplistic. If you want a more detailed look, check out Neil Weinberg’s post over at Beyond the Box Score from May. It has cool graphs and junk.

One of the first things that pops out at me, besides how rare the 14-strikeout game, is that across all years, a two-strikeout game is more common than a zero- or one-strikeout game. I wouldn’t have guessed that.

We can also see that while 14-strikeout games have become ever so slightly more frequent, they aren’t even close to one percent of all games started. That’s pretty legit.

Below, is the list of all the pitchers who managed the feat since 1995. Feast upon them.

If you’ve spent any time around FanGraphs or other sabermetric-leaning sites, you’ve certainly heard about the statistic Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP). FIP is one of the bedrock pitching statistics at FanGraphs and is the basis for our Wins Above Replacement (WAR) calculation for pitchers. Clearly, having a good handle on what FIP does and doesn’t tell you is important if you want to get the most out of FanGraphs.

To that end, the FanGraphs Library entry on FIP just got a makeover and now provides a more detailed breakdown of what FIP is, why we care about it, and how to use it. If you’re a little hazy on how and why FIP works, it’s a very useful place to start. There’s also a new entry in the FanGraphs Library blog examining why FIP is step forward from traditional stats like ERA.

As always,  please feel free to pose questions or comments below or find me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44 if that’s more convenient. Also remember to stop by our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chat (Wednesdays at 3pm eastern) to learn more about our stats and our site.