CLEVELAND — Jason Benetti is notable in many ways. He’s one of the youngest television play-by-play men in the game at 34. Only Dodgers’ voice Joe Davis (30) is younger. Benetti is one of the few broadcasters to have a law degree (Wake Forest, 2011). He is one of the few (perhaps the only?) play-by-play broadcaster who has MC’d the Saber Seminar in Boston. His credentials suggest he’s open-minded to FanGraphs-style analysis. His age, meanwhile, suggests he might represent the next wave of baseball broadcaster — one, in this case, who is more comfortable with advanced analytics and who sees the game from a new perspective. While Benetti has an appreciation and understanding of new-age numbers, he still considers himself a storyteller first and believes including “humanity” in a broadcast is as important as any metric.

His duties have gradually expanded as he replaces long-time broadcaster Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, who broadcasts only select games, and who will retire at the end of the season. Benetti, a Chicago native and lifelong Sox fan, will tell you he has his dream job, towards which he worked while spending 10 years broadcasting in the minor leagues from independent ball, to Salem, Va. (2007-08), to the Nationals’ Triple-A Syracuse affiliate (2009-14).

For a long time, Benetti balanced law studies with broadcasting in the spring and summer. He intended to have a law career. But the game kept coming back to him, he told me — including his big break when he was hired by the White Sox in 2016. He will tell you, as he told The Chicago Tribune, cerebral palsy is only a small part of who is.

I found Benetti in the White Sox road clubhouse Tuesday, where one can almost always find him before games talking to players, gathering information. In a way, he’s part reporter and part data analyst. He agreed to speak to me about what he feels his responsibility is as a broadcaster, how he prepares, how he balances calling a season for a team in transition, and how he sees the broadcast industry evolving and adapting to modern challenges:

FanGraphs: A reader might spend five or 10 minutes with a piece at FanGraphs or another media outlet (and that’s if they become engaged with it). But if a viewer watches the entirety of a game, you have their ear for three hours. I’d argue there’s no greater influential platform in a local media. Do you see it that way? Do you feel a sense of responsibility?

Jason Benetti: The level of responsibility comes in both fairness and accuracy. We need to be honest about what we are seeing and know what we are seeing is anomalous or not. So I think the tendency is to see a play that happens and is poor and immediately reach for, ‘Oh, you gotta make that play.’ And that’s what fans do and that’s what I did when I was a kid. But I also think there’s a part of it where you have to understand that baseball is such a long year that there are going to be outliers. Michael Jordan missed shots. I’m not saying that Michael Jordan is on the current White Sox. But I am saying that I think responsibility lies in knowing what people’s tendencies are, knowing when they are breaking them, and being as well informed as we possibly can as to what we are seeing fits what we know about that person — or it breaks the mold enough that we need to rethink the person overall.

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Episode 817
This past Friday, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel published version 3.0 of their mock draft. On Monday, the draft itself is scheduled to begin. This edition of the program was both recorded and published on Sunday. Discussed: the greatest shifts between v 2.0 and v 3.0 of Longenhagen and McDaniel’s mock draft, the players (like USF left-hander Shane McClanahan) for whom team evaluations seem to differ greatly, and a scenario in which Detroit doesn’t select Auburn righty Casey Mize with the first overall pick.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 7 min play time.)

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Adam Haseley was drafted eighth overall last year, so his potential goes without saying. That doesn’t mean there aren’t question marks in his profile. When Eric Longenhagen blurbed the 21-year-old University of Virginia product in our Philadelphia Phillies Top Prospects list, he cautioned that “Some scouts have concerns about his bat path.”

I asked the left-handed-hitting Haseley why that might be.

“My interpretation would be that I was wanting be more direct to the ball,” responded Haseley, who put up a .761 OPS last year between short-season and low-A. “Something I’d started doing at UVA was trying to create more launch angle — I wanted to hit balls in the air with true backspin — but coming into pro ball there was more velocity than I’d ever seen in college. I had to adjust to that, and my way of adjusting was to get more direct, which resulted in a flatter angle. Now I’m trying to find that happy medium between the two.”

His quest for middle ground remains a work in progress. Two months into his first full professional season, Haseley has a 48.4 GB% and just three home runs in 217 plate appearances with high-A Clearwater. Compare that to his final collegiate campaign, where as a Cavalier he went deep 14 times in a comparable number of chances. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Clayton Kershaw‘s latest back injury, the “opener” strategy spreading to L.A., and the unexpected sources of production that have helped keep the Dodgers in the race, as well as Kole Calhoun‘s historically slow offensive start to the season, Jaime Barria and record-setting pitch counts within innings, Indians rookie Shane Bieber as the successor to Josh Tomlin, baseball analogs to the J.R. Smith debacle in the NBA Finals, and two upcoming baseball events. Then (26:21) they talk to former major leaguer and EW folk hero John Jaso about his attempt to talk his way past an usher at Tropicana Field last week, his affinity for sailing, his laid-back, “Such is Life” philosophy, why he didn’t always fit in well within baseball clubhouses, the difficulty of being oneself within a hierarchical, regimented sport, his memories of catching Felix Hernandez’s perfect game and coming up with the 2008 Rays, his recovery from concussions, his opinion of hitting for the cycle, and more.

Audio intro: Oddisee, "Such is Life"
Audio interstitial: Neil Young, "John Oaks"
Audio outro: Montero, "Clear Sailing"

Link to Saber Seminar event page
Link to Beyond the Baselines: Celebrating Women in Baseball
Link to video of John Jaso Tropicana Field usher encounter
Link to “Such is Life” tweet
Link to Jaso’s retirement announcement

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Below is what will probably be our final full-text mock draft for 2018. Unless, over the weekend, something happens that necessitates longer explanation, a final mock on Monday will probably just have names and skeleton text. We think Casey Mize remains the favorite to go first, with the only potential pitfalls being a Mize injury at regionals or that Detroit reaches a breaking point with Mize’s bonus demands. We don’t think that scenario is likely, but that it has something like a 5-10% chance to happen at this point, so we’ve included the way we think the dominoes fall if it does happen, which ends up being only four picks changing. Remember, you can learn about the players we talk about here on our 2018 Draft Board.

1. Detroit Tigers – Casey Mize, RHP, Auburn

Less likely alternate scenario: Joey Bart, C, Georgia Tech

If something happens with Mize, then we think the pick is Joey Bart, but ultimately we think Detroit will pick Mize and sign him for a bonus between $7.4 million (slot at 2) and $8.1 million (slot at 1), likely toward the lower end of that range. The Tigers have been tied to Georgia prep center fielder Parker Meadows, Pennsylvania prep center fielder Mike Siani, and Mississippi prep righty J.T. Ginn for their second pick. Wisconsin OF Jarred Kelenic has been mentioned as a name they’d like to move back there as well, but we don’t think that’s feasible as he seems signable and has too many suitors between here and Detroit’s next pick.

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This past weekend, the San Diego Padres completed a trade, sending Janigson Villalobos to the Minnesota Twins in exchange for Phil Hughes.

The precise players involved aren’t of particular significance. The Padres’ prospect list contained 75 names and Villalobos was not among them. As for Hughes, he had recently been designated for assignment after pitching poorly over the last three seasons. Much of that subpar performance was due to injury and included thoracic outlet surgery. As Jay Jaffe recently chronicled, few pitchers return to prominence after TOS.

By designating Hughes for assignment, the Twins appeared willing to eat the roughly $22 million remaining on his contract through next season. The Padres are taking on some of that obligation in exchange for a competitive balance draft pick, so the functional part of the trade looks like this.

Padres get:

• 74th pick in 2018 draft and $812,200 in bonus pool money that goes with it.

Twins get:

• $7.6 million, with $7.25 million paid next season, per Jon Heyman.

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Max Scherzer has already won three Cy Young awards, and if he’s keeping them on his mantel, he might need to do some remodeling, as he’s threatening to add a fourth. The 33-year-old righty is having, by some measures, the most dominant season of his career — and one of the most dominant of all time.

After carving apart the admittedly hapless Orioles on Wednesday night (eight innings, two hits, one walk, no runs, 12 strikeouts), Scherzer leads the NL in a host of statistical categories both traditional and advanced: wins (nine), innings (79.2), strikeouts (120), strikeout rate in two flavors (13.6 per nine and 38.7% of all batters faced), K-BB% (32.6), hits per nine (5.5), FIP (1.95), and WAR (3.2). Meanwhile, his 1.92 ERA ranks second behind Jacob deGrom, who right now looks like the only other NL Cy candidate with more than a puncher’s chance, which is to say that it will take somebody else going on an an unforeseen roll — perhaps Clayton Kershaw, whose 2016 and -17 injuries already factored into Scherzer’s hardware tally — to justify a place in the discussion.

In terms of ERA and FIP, our heterochromic hero has enjoyed strong stretches such as this at various points in his career — more or less annually since 2013:

However, Scherzer has never put together a full season this strong, which is to say Kershaw-esque. Where the Dodgers’ lefty ace has banked two seasons with both his ERA and FIP below 2.00 (2014 and ’16), Scherzer’s lowest full-season ERA was last year’s 2.51, while his lowest FIP was his 2.77 in 2015. Even in his award-winning seasons, he’s never led the league in either category, whereas Kershaw has five ERA titles (tied for third all-time with Walter Johnson, Sandy Koufax, Pedro Martinez and Christy Mathewson, trailing only Roger Clemens with seven and Lefty Grove with nine) and two FIP titles.

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels, and (most importantly) FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel* and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated, midseason-type list will also be excluded from eligibility.

*Note: I’ve excluded Baseball America’s list this year not due to any complaints with their coverage, but simply because said list is now behind a paywall.

For those interested in learning how Fringe Five players have fared at the major-league level, this somewhat recent post offers that kind of information. The short answer: better than a reasonable person would have have expected. In the final analysis, though, the basic idea here is to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Jonathan Hernandez, RHP, Texas (Profile)
Hernandez appeared here last week among that group designated as the Next Five. In his lone start since then, the right-hander recorded 11 strikeouts and just one walk while facing 27 batters in 8.0 innings for High-A Down East (box). Over his last three appearances now, Hernandez has produced strikeout and walk rates of 44.4% and 5.6%, respectively, in 20.0 innings.

Signed originally out of the Dominican Republic for $300,000 during the 2012-13 international signing period, Hernandez looked more like a “pitchability righty” in his first exposure to professional ball, according to Eric Longenhagen. More recently, however, the 21-year-old has developed greater arm speed, sitting 93-96 mph during a recent start.

There’s some concern, also according to Longenhagen, that Hernandez’s arm slot might leave him vulnerable to left-handed batters. Thus far this season, he’s actually been quite strong on that account, recording better strikeout and walk figures against left-handed batters (40.0-point K-BB%) than right-handed ones (19.8).

Here’s footage from a recent start of Hernandez striking out a left-handed batter on three pitches — what appears to be a pair of breaking balls follows by a stiff, but effective changeup:

https://gfycat.com/HopefulHollowKouprey

And here’s slow-motion footage of that final pitch, with what appears to be the sort of pronation typical of a changeup:

https://gfycat.com/ImpeccableSneakyBat

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