Episode 810
Eric Longenhagen was told by a source before publishing his Astros list that right-hander Josh James, a former 34th-round pick and generally obscure prospect, had been recording higher fastball velocities in camp. Given James’ age and modest numbers as a professional, Longenhagen omitted him from the Astros list anyway. In the meantime, however, James has cobbled together one of the best starts in all the minors. Should it have been obvious? Would Longenhagen do anything differently? Those are questions the host of FanGraphs Audio fails to ask explicitly.

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

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 51 min play time.)

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Last Monday, I wrote on this very site about both the lawsuit Indians uberprospect Francisco Mejia has filed against Big League Advance (“BLA”) and also BLA’s counterclaim. With the rise of branding contracts in professional sports, Mejia’s lawsuit likely represent a harbinger of things to come — rather than an aberration unlikely to be repeated — as a new frontier in sports litigation develops.

Shortly after publishing that piece, I spoke with BLA Chief Executive Officer Michael Schwimer about his company, the Mejia lawsuit, and what the future might hold. Schwimer, it should be noted, was good enough to spend a full hour being grilled by an attorney while simultaneously fathering his two young children, an arrangement most reasonable people would consider to be less than ideal.

Big League Advance

Schwimer himself is a former major-league pitcher, owner of an abbreviated 48-inning career with the Philadelphia Phillies marked by a lot of strikeouts (9.62 K/9) and a lot of walks (4.25 BB/9). After leaving the game, he started Big League Advance. Schwimer said he started BLA because of his own experience in the minor leagues. “I was reffing basketball games [to make ends meet],” Schwimer told me. “I was babysitting.” Schwimer believed there was a better way, and BLA was born.

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PITTSBURGH — For as long a there have been coded messages designed to secretly pass information before prying eyes, there has been someone trying to break the encryption, from the Babington Plot to the Zimmerman Letter. For as long as there have been signals in baseball, there has been an opponent trying to identify a pattern and steal the signs. And with every game televised, with cameras everywhere, teams have never before been more paranoid about protecting their messages.

Complicating matters is the commissioner’s concern about pace of play, which has manifested itself this season in the form of a limit on mound visits. Now a pitching coach’s capacity to deliver a message directly is even more constrained. Pitching clocks might be on the horizon. The need for signals is even greater.

In the face of all this, at least one club appears has responded with their own innovation.

Last Sunday, the Washington Nationals broadcast noticed an unusual card sheathed in clear plastic on a wristband that was adorning the left arm of Rockies catcher Chris Iannetta. The MASN cameras zoomed in for a close-up in an attempt to satisfy the curiosity of color man F.P. Santangelo and to discern the contents of the card.

This author went into investigative mode, paused the television, pulled up the game on my laptop via MLB.TV, and took a screenshot of the image.

Attempts to unlock the code via crowdsourcing on social media were unsuccessful.

Is the cipher unbreakable? The Rockies think so.

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It took a no-hitter — a 108-pitch, 10-strikeout gem by the A’s Sean Manaea — to stop the Red Sox in their tracks, snapping their eight-game winning streak and dealing them just their third loss of the year in their 20th game. Though they lost to the A’s again on Sunday, they’ve spent time in some rarefied air in recent days.

When the Sox beat the A’s on Friday night to climb to 17-2, they became the first team in 31 years to reach that early-season pinnacle, and just the sixth since 1901, when the American League began play:

Two of those five teams went on to win the World Series. The 1955 Dodgers, managed by Hall of Famer Walter Alston and led by Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider (and also featuring a 19-year-old bonus baby named Sandy Koufax), started the year 10-0 and ran their record to 22-2 before taking their third loss. By that point, they were nine games ahead of the National League pack; they would win by 13.5 games, then claim their long-awaited first championship by beating the Yankees in a seven-game World Series.

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The player by whom I’m most fascinated in the major leagues is Javier Baez. It might be because, the first time I saw him, what popped into my head was “Alfonso Soriano.” It might be because Baez, despite being able to do this, and this, and this, has yet to post even a 2.5-win season. I admit to thinking, after Baez’s 2013 season, that he was going to be a superstar. It hasn’t happened yet. But the tools are so loud that I’ve never stopped looking for signs that a breakout might be coming.

If Baez were to break out, it would probably resemble his effort over the first three-plus weeks of the 2018 season. Including Sunday’s game, Baez has produced a 187 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR in 80 plate appearances. Both figures place him among the top 10 qualifiers in the majors. His .444 isolated-power mark is first among that same group.

Of course, it’s always best to view March and April statistics with three shakers of salt and a heavy dose of skepticism. Accordingly, when looking further into how Baez has succeeded this season, I expected to find a good bit of luck. Turns out, there might very well be something here.

Last week, Travis Sawchik posted an update on the fly-ball revolution which heavily featured Baez. But Baez’s numbers, so far this season, are very different beyond just an increased propensity for hitting fly balls. Consider the following:

It’s hard not to notice that one of these years is not like the others, small sample size notwithstanding. So far, Baez has walked more often than ever before and also struck out less often. To put it a different way, consider: Baez has drawn six walks so far this season. He drew 15 walks in all of 2016. Baez has struck out 17 times in 19 games this month. He struck out 21 times last April in 17 games.

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Trey Mancini did some tinkering prior to the start of the season. Hoping to “limit a bit of pre-swing movement,” he decided to lower his leg kick. The Baltimore Orioles outfielder hit that way throughout the offseason, and he continued the experiment in spring training.

Then, about a week and a half before opening day, he returned to doing what feels natural.

“I am who I am,” Mancini told me last weekend. “The leg kick is just something that works for me — there’s a comfortability factor involved — so once I realized what I was trying didn’t feel totally right, I went back to my old one.”

Mancini felt that the lower kick disrupted his timing. 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 the strange standings, turnover in the Reds’ dugout, the hot starts by the Red Sox and Mookie Betts, the side effects of pitchers’ increasing avoidance of the strike zone, and the struggles of the Mets’ self-described starting pitcher Matt Harvey. Then they talk to former FanGraphs writer Corinne Landrey, now a quantitative analyst for the Philadelphia Phillies, about transitioning from writing to working for a front office, how joining a team affects fandom, how the Phillies’ front office has evolved, the gap between public and private knowledge, working with Gabe Kapler, shifting from rebuilding to contending, and more.

Audio intro: Modest Mouse, "Sunspots in the House of the Late Scapegoat"
Audio interstitial: Metronomy, "Corinne"
Audio outro: Prince, "Sometimes it Snows in April"

Link to Jeff’s article about the Red Sox offense
Link to Jeff’s article about Mookie Betts
Link to Ben’s article about Matt Harvey’s first year
Link to Ben’s article about pitches out of the strike zone

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