After a few days of something more substantive than speculation, the Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Dodgers appear finally to have conducted official business with each other. Eduardo A. Encina and Ken Rosenthal outline the particulars of that business via social-media platform twitter dot com:

At the very center of the trade, of course, is Manny Machado, one of the best major leaguers currently authoring one of his best major-league seasons. Machado will help the Dodgers address a shortstop position that has created uncertainty for the club ever since starter Corey Seager was forced to undergo Tommy John surgery at the beginning of May. Machado is projected for slightly more than two wins over the rest of season — about a win more than Chris Taylor (who’s received most of the starts at short in Seager’s absence) and also about a win more than a combination of Cody Bellinger, Enrique Hernandez, and Joc Pederson (who’ve received most of the center-field starts with Taylor at short).

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Position: Entry Level Data Engineer, Baseball Research and Development

Description:

The Rockies are looking for a full-time Entry Level Data Engineer to join their Research and Development team. The successful candidate will assist with the expansion and optimization of their data warehouse and data pipeline architecture, with a focus on collecting, cleaning, transforming, managing and validating data using distributed computing and storage systems.

Responsibilities and Duties:

• Create, maintain and optimize data ETL/ELT pipelines
• Documentation of data/pipelines
• Ensure the ingestion of data and errors are handled without interruption
• Process and securely store extremely sensitive data for callback and future use
• Prepare distributed, disjoint, multi-formatted data sets for data scientists
• Research and investigate new and interesting datasets to include in our data warehouse
• Perform quantitative research related to baseball strategy and player evaluation
• Collaborate with coaches, scouts and baseball operations staff to suggest process improvements

Requirements:

Education and Work Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering
• Candidates still in school (junior or senior level) with extensive work towards such degree will be considered
• Understanding of relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQL Server
• Ability to effectively use multiple programming languages
• Knowledge and understanding of baseball and baseball statistics

Functional Skills

• Ability to work evenings and weekends required
• Passion for the intersection of baseball and data
• Passion for quality data
• Strong organizational skills and ability to self-start
• Strong intellectual curiosity
• Desire to learn and contribute
• Ability to work in a collaborative and open team environment
• Ability to develop and maintain successful working relationship with members of the Front Office

To Apply:
Qualified candidates should send their letter of interest and resume to BaseballJobs@rockies.com no later than July 29th, 2018.

Position: Data Architect

Location: Pittsburgh, PA

Description:
The Data Architect is responsible for putting into place and maintaining the processes and systems to efficiently integrate and effectively make available baseball related data from both external and internal sources in order to provide the backbone of evidence based decision making.

Responsibilities

Primary:

• Responsible for the daily operation, performance, and maintenance of the data assets used within Baseball Operations. Makes use of Pirates’ standards and industry best practices to implement efficient and high performance access to data.
• Design, create, and extend processes for data extraction, transformation, cleansing, and load to and from internal and external data sources for both structured and unstructured data.
• Evaluate potential data providers and design and implement data models for storage and access to new types of data that integrate with the existing data and application architectures.
• Design, create and maintain reporting structures using SQL Reporting Services and Tableau and participate in one-off research projects to answer specific questions.
• Design and implement data mining processes as a part of predictive modeling in conjunction with the Quantitative Analyst and other staff members.
• Design and implement data mining processes as a part of predictive modeling in conjunction with other staff members.

Secondary:

• Departmentally: Participate in gathering and documenting user requirements for existing and new systems. Understand business processes and required outcomes of the system and creates requirements definition document defining the business use cases.
• Organizationally: Acts as a resource for database and SQL coding projects within the organization. Assist other staff developing SQL scripts, stored procedures, and other database objects where required.
• Industry: Acts as the point of contact with MLB in understanding and planning for future infrastructure needs and changes as the structure and breadth of information changes over time.

Position Requirements

Required:

• Bachelor’s Degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent.
• Two years experience administering enterprise level data structures using SQL Server technologies including SQL Reporting Services and SQL Server Integration Services.
• Expert knowledge of SQL and database administration tools. Knowledge of SQL Server replication topologies. Understanding of database documentation and design tools.
• Experience with cloud based architectures and tools including Amazon S3, EC2, Databricks required.
• Experience participating in multiple aspects of the software development life cycle including requirements definition, design, development, testing, and implementation.
• Demonstrated ability to work with users to understand business processes, document system requirements, and develop data structures that meet business objectives.

Desired:

• Experience with Python, .NET..
• Experience with statistical analysis software such as R, SAS, SSPS.
• An understanding of sabermetric techniques for player evaluation strongly preferred.

The Pirates are an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

To Apply:
Please apply here.

Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Andres Gimenez, SS, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Hi-A   Age: 19   Org Rank: 3   FV: 50
Line: 3-for-5, 2B, 3B

Notes
Gimenez is a 19-year-old shortstop slashing .280/.350/.430 in the Florida State League. That’s good for a 107 wRC+ in the FSL. Big-league shortstops with similar wRC+ marks are Trea Turner (a more explosive player and rangier defender than Gimenez) and Jurickson Profar, who have both been two-win players or better this year ahead of the break. Also of note in the Mets system last night was Ronny Mauricio, who extended his career-opening hitting streak to 19 games.

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Major League Baseball announced the rosters for its Futures Game last week, the annual “prospect All-Star Game” which takes place the Sunday before the All-Star Game itself. We’ve made a page on THE BOARD specifically for the Futures Game representatives. It has tool grades, scouting reports, video, and other stuff with which you can play around.

There may be some discrepancies between the player evaluations on this page and those that appear elsewhere on THE BOARD. The grades on the Futures Game section of THE BOARD represent our most current evaluations of these players. The evaluations on the team lists, meanwhile, will be updated altogether shortly in the future. Kiley and I will be in Washington D.C. a week from now to see these guys in person. The Futures Game is Sunday, July 15 in Washington D.C.

I’ve touched on it before, but I don’t think we talk nearly enough about how weird it must be to be a major-league baseball player. Sure, they’re wealthy and get annoyed with their boss like anyone else, but they’re also frequently naked around their work friends. Their workplace is so strange. People spit in the office, and those spitters don’t always aim well, which means flecks of spit on their shoes. We watch them be bad at their jobs, but they never get to see us botch a sale or split an infinitive.

Sometimes, their pants rip just a little bit, near the butt.

This happens to the literal best players. They continue to wear those pants for several hours. They then get new pants. They don’t have to pay for them.

And they litter. Gum wrappers, seeds, the sticky leftovers of athletic tape. They use a bunch of paper cups — seemingly a different one every inning! — and then just throw those cups on the floor of the dugout. It’s a move that must strike your average desk-job worker as odd; insurance adjusters are generally expected to recycle.

Perhaps Mike Leake secretly aspires to more traditional office work. In the top of the fifth inning of his July 4th tilt against the Angels, Leake was pulled in favor of Nick Rumbelow. He looked hot and frustrated. The camera finds him as he takes a long, grumpy drink of water. Here we are, watching him after he just failed. He gives the cup an angry little flick. Runners on the corners. Might be time to litter. He stares into the middle distance. Grumble, grumble, bad day. But then…

He puts the cup back! He drinks from the cup, puts his lips full on it, and then puts it back on top of the stack. Presented with this less typical baseball workplace weirdness, we are left to conclude that Leake either has a stack of cups for his own personal use throughout the game — the result of considered cup tastes — or cares deeply about the environment, or else is thoroughly untroubled by the idea of a teammate grabbing his previously full-lipped cup off the top of the stack. It might be an act of care, but it could also be sort of awful.

I suppose, in that respect, Mike Leake has shown that the dugout is actually just like every other workplace, defined as they often are by drudgery, and grumpy types, and small bits of heedlessness borne of opaque personal agenda or indifference to washing the mug you just used before putting it back in the break room dish drainer.

Maybe being a baseball player isn’t so weird after all. Except for when you’re naked with your fellows. That remains strange.

On Wednesday, the Reds sent righties Dylan Floro and Zach Neal, as well as international pool space, to the Dodgers for RHPs James Marinan and Aneurys Zabala. Marinan, Los Angeles’s fourth-round pick in 2017 out of Park Vista High School in Florida, made three starts in the AZL before the trade. Zabala, whom the Dodgers originally acquired from Seattle for Chase De Jong, was pitching in the Low-A Great Lakes bullpen.

Both pitchers have size and big-league arm strength. Marinan is 6-foot-5, 220, while Zabala (though listed at 175) is closer to 250. Zabala was throwing 96-100 while he was with Seattle, but his conditioning wavered after the trade and the fastball was in the low 90s when I saw him last year. He also had, and still has, issues repeating his delivery, which leads to scattershot fastball command. His velocity is back up into the upper 90s this year, and he can spin a breaking ball. He has above-average relief stuff, but is a high-risk prospect because of how far the command needs to come — and because the stuff has roller coastered over the last two years.

Marinan is a bit more stable. He has a four-pitch mix glued together by a low-90s sinker and average change that flashes above. He can throw an average curveball for strikes, and the slider can miss bats away from righties when located. He could end up with a bunch of 50s, maybe a 55 changeup and command, and become a solid No. 4/5 starter. Both players are likely three years away from the majors, at least, though Zabala will essentially be ready as soon as his fastball command improves, if it does.

For five or seven years or whatever, the author of this post published a daily collection of so-called NERD Scores — ratings, that is, intended to summarize, in one number, the appeal of a particular game to the sort of people who visit FanGraphs. Most readers ignored this daily service. Others were compelled to note its flaws with some regularity. A small minority suggested that it was of some benefit.

Due to a combination of influences — the birth of a child, a slight change in roles here at the site, ungovernable sloth — the author decided this spring not to publish the daily NERD posts this year. This has allowed me to dedicate extra time to pursue my favorite — namely, adding hyphens to the compound adjectives utilized by other authors in their work at this site. Unsurprisingly, FanGraphs has survived the absence of this content.

Recently, however, one interested party has proven what I suspected all along — that the NERD scores are the province of unthinking and -feeling robots. Enterprising millennial John Edwards has identified the least profitable use for his programming and coding skills — namely by crafting a Twitter bot that publishes the NERD scores automatically.

Here, for example, is today’s (somewhat uninspiring) slate of games:

And an apology that suggests that alerts will mark the start of each game:

Edwards himself has suggested that the feed is a work in progress. For those who prefer some guidance for their daily viewing habits, this seems like a promising resource.

Whether you’re a Washington, DC-area resident or a visitor who will be in town for the All-Star Futures Game, you’re invited to the great Politics and Prose Bookstore on Saturday, July 14 at 6 pm, where ESPN’s Keith Law and I will discuss and sign our respective books, Smart Baseball (William Morrow, 2017, now out in paperback) and The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). During my years at Baseball Prospectus, I was part of half-a-dozen bookstore events at P&P, and they always drew great crowds for engaging discussions and enjoyable interactions with readers, and I have no doubt that this event will deliver the same.

As a prospect-focused senior baseball writer for ESPN Insider, a former member of the Toronto Blue Jays’ front office, and an alumnus of Baseball Prospectus, Keith is uniquely positioned to explain the evolution of talent evaluation within baseball and to examine the trends that are shaping the field in the 21st century. Whether you’re a long-time stathead or a newcomer to this little corner of the game, you’ll enjoy his book (full title Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball) and you can order a signed, personalized copy ahead of time here.

The Cooperstown Casebook is the culmination of a decade and a half of my research and writing about the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum — the forces that shaped the Hall and its honorees, and the battles to recognize and honor the game’s greats and its history, with an emphasis on how advanced statistics have changed our understanding of what makes a Hall of Famer. You can read plenty more about the book here and at my publisher’s page as well as Paul Swydan’s review, and there’s an exceprt from my chapter about Bert Blyleven and Jack Morris here. To order a signed, personalized copy to pick up at the event, click here.

This event is free to attend with no reservation required. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis.

Politics & Prose Bookstore
Saturday, July 14, 6 pm
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20008
Map

Dodgers infielder Max Muncy is an instrument of the Absurd, nor is there much evidence to the contrary. He owns, for example, a name that has traditionally been the province exclusively of mid-century private detectives. He’s also a former fifth-round pick who entered the season with roughly -1 WAR and yet who, somehow, is currently leading his club by that same measure. Muncy’s bona fides wherein the ridiculous is concerned are beyond reproach.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Max Muncy has once again had a rendezvous with the improbable. Batting in the first inning tonight against the Cubs, Muncy drove a fastball from Kyle Hendricks to center field — over the center-field wall, in fact. Instead of remaining over the center-field wall, however, what Muncy’s home run did instead was to re-enter the field of play and strike innocent bystander Albert Almora on the head. Did it kill or even just injure Almora? Signs point to “No.” But did it cause him a moment’s indignity? Yes, not unlike the sort one experiences just by living.