Two thousand hits is not 3,000, and yet there was plenty of reason to celebrate Joe Mauer reaching that milestone on Thursday night at Target Field via a two-run single against the White Sox. If nothing else, it shores up the 35-year-old catcher-turned-first baseman’s case for Cooperstown, because 2,000 hits has functioned as a bright-line test for Hall of Fame voters for the past several decades. Neither the BBWAA nor the various small committees has elected a position player with fewer than 2,000 hits whose career crossed into the post-1960 expansion era, no matter their merits.

Just 34 of the 157 position players in the Hall for their major-league playing careers (including Monte Ward, who made a mid-career conversion from the mound to shortstop) have fewer than 2,000 hits, and only 11 of them even played in the majors past World War II:

Eight of the 11 players on that list had substantial career interruptions that contributed to their falling short of the milestone. Dickey, Gordon, Greenberg, Kiner, and Rizzuto all lost multiple seasons to military service, while Campanella, Doby, and Robinson were prevented from playing in the majors due to the presence of the color line, which fell on April 15, 1947 (71 years ago this Sunday) with Robinson’s debut. Of the other three, Ferrell and Lombardi were constrained by spending their whole careers as catchers; the former, a two-time batting champion, was classified as 4-F by the time the war rolled around, while the latter, one of the Hall’s lightest-hitting catchers (and the lowest-ranked in JAWS), was too old for the draft.

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This is Shakeia Taylor’s second piece as part of her April Residency at FanGraphs. Shakeia is an avid baseball fan and baseball history enthusiast. Her main interests include the Negro Leagues and women in baseball. She has written for The Hardball Times and Complex. She hosts an annual charity bartending fundraiser for Jackie Robinson Day, all of tips and raffle proceeds of which are donated to the Jackie Robinson Foundation. Though not from Baltimore, she’s still an Elite Giant. Shakeia can also be found on Twitter (@curlyfro). She’ll be contributing here this month.

Given the racial makeup of Major League Baseball, it might seem like baseball’s culture would be largely distinct from hip hop’s, but it isn’t really. Many players warm up to hip-hop music and use its songs as their walk-ups. In 1993, Seattle Mariners superstar Ken Griffey Jr. chose Naughty By Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray” as his walk-up song. The song would eventually become his personal anthem. Roc Nation, Jay Z’s entertainment company, represents baseball players, including Robinson Cano and Yoenis Cespedes.

And the game’s influence has been felt in hip hop, as well. Baseball caps, also known as fitteds, have become a mainstay in hip-hop culture. In a game that can at times feel dominated by pop country music, hip hop’s prominence in baseball — and baseball’s presence in hip hop — offers a foothold for fans of both who wish to see their interests intersect.

The relationship between baseball and hip hop is particularly deep in Chicago. Jay-Z has his Yankees cap, but 90s rap videos were all about the White Sox fitted. It became a symbol of the culture at a time when rap was going mainstream and rappers from both coasts were gaining popularity. The design and color scheme of the cap are simple, yet timeless.

The most ubiquitous White Sox cap design — which is also the club’s current cap design — is actually drawn from the 1948 White Sox logo, and was designed by the grandson of White Sox founding owner Charles Comiskey, Chuck.

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At 10-1, the Mets own the National League’s best record, but the bigger surprise relative to preseason expectations may be the Pirates, who after Thursday’s 6-1 victory over the Cubs are 9-3, are tied with the Diamondbacks for the league’s second-best record. After a 75-win 2017 campaign and then an offseason during which they dealt away Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen and pared their payroll to the majors’ fourth-smallest, the Bucs appeared destined to spend 2018 languishing with the other rebuilding teams. They may do so yet, but for the moment, their hot start is worth a closer look.

The 2017 Pirates were not much fun. They had just one month with a record above .500 (a 14-11 July), never got further than a game above .500, and finished 13th in the NL in scoring, with a lineup featuring just four players to produce a 100 wRC+ or better (McCutchen, Josh Bell, David Freese, and Josh Harrison) — and just two with a WAR of at least 2.0 (McCutchen and Harrison). Starling Marte drew an 80-game PED suspension, Jung Ho Kang missed the entire season after failing to secure a work visa in the wake of his third DUI conviction in South Korea, Francisco Cervelli was limited to 81 games by a variety of injuries, and Gregory Polanco regressed significantly (more on him momentarily).

On the other side of the ball, they were seventh in run prevention, but Cole looked more plow horse than thoroughbred, and while Jameson Taillon made an inspiring in-season return from testicular cancer, top pitching prospect Tyler Glasnow was pummeled for a 7.69 ERA and 6.30 FIP. Travis Sawchik has the gory details of the big picture.

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The New York Mets have the best record in baseball. The Mets, whose biggest free-agent signing was a player from last year’s 70-win team, are 10-1 on the season. The Mets, whose two biggest pitching acquisitions have compiled 2.1 totals innings so far this season, are 3.5 games up in their division and have already swept presumptive favorite Washington Nationals.

As Jeff Sullivan detailed earlier this week, no team has improved its playoff odds since the season began as much as the Mets. Winning 10 out of 11 games is certainly a surprising way to start. It would be surprising for any team — even the Astros have around just a 3% chance of winning 10 out of 11 games — but it isn’t all that surprising that the Mets are good right now. They should expect life to get tougher as the season goes on.

To provide a sense of how unlikely the Mets were to start 10-1, the graph below shows the odds of each win total from zero to 11 based on the assumption of the Mets as an 85-win team.

Eighty-seven times out of 100, the Mets end up with four to eight wins — with a one-in-120 shot at winning 10 games. I should also note that their schedule has been roughly neutral thus far, with the series against the Nationals balanced out by games against the Marlins. As for this version of the Mets, it might seem improbable after last year’s difficulties, but the Mets probably weren’t as bad in 2017 as their record ultimately suggested.

Consider a brief list of the factors that contributed to the Mets’ woes last year:

• A mere 30.1 innings from ace Noah Syndergaard, who was projected for 5.6 WAR.
• A mere 81 games from Yoenis Cespedes, who was projected for around three wins.
• Combined replacement-level production from the bottom of the rotation. Chris Flexen, Robert Gsellman, Matt Harvey, Steven Matz, Tommy Milone, Tyler Pill, Zack Wheeler, and Adam Wilk made 88 starts, put up a 6.12 ERA, and recorded -0.2 WAR.
• Despite good performances from Addison Reed and Jerry Blevins, one of the worst bullpens in baseball.
• Almost no production from the third-base position, which produced a 93 wRC+ and 0.6 WAR.

There are other factors, but those appear to be the main issues that caused the Mets to lose more than 90 games. We will look at what has changed or not changed in a bit, but first let’s consider that the Mets’ 70 wins might not have been a good representation of their talent level even with the issues above. The graph below shows team WAR in 2017 along with team wins from last year.

Notice first the very clear linear relationship. The more WAR a team accumulates, the more wins they get. If someone doesn’t believe in WAR, they are ignoring a very close relationship between WAR and wins. The relationship isn’t perfect, of course. Some teams (the ones above the trend line) outperformed their WAR totals, while others (below the line) underperformed them. Looking at the distance from the line can provide a sense of how much a team over- or under-achieved. The Mets show up as one of the biggest underachievers. The five teams with the closest WAR totals to the Mets — the Angels, Mariners, Marlins, Rockies, and Twins — won an average of 81 games last year, with the Marlins’ 77 wins representing the lowest figure. Even with the poor performances in the rotation and the bullpen, the Mets should have been better last season.

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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 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.

*****Sandy Baez, RHP, Detroit (Profile)
The right-handed Baez appeared among the Five on a couple of occasions last year. Signed for just $49,000 out of the Dominican in 2011, Baez features arm speed atypical of such modest pedigree.

Nor is he necessarily what colleague Eric Longenhagen would characterize as an “arm-strength lottery ticket”: Baez exhibited sufficient polish last season to record one of the better strikeout- and walk-rate differentials at High-A last season. He then struck out nearly a third of the batters he faced in a late-season two-start stay with Double-A Erie.

Baez was assigned to the Eastern League to begin the 2018 season, as well, and was excellent in his debut against Reading, striking out 10 of 17 batters faced while walking just one (box). A second start — in this case, against Bowie (box) — was more modest (20 TBF, 3 K, 1 BB), but the overall result after a week is strong.

Here’s a sequence from Baez’s first start, featuring a breaking ball, a slightly more impressive breaking ball, and then a high fastball for the strikeout:

https://gfycat.com/DirectAncientChupacabra

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The Playoff Odds page looks different! The playoff-odds data and simulation method remains the same; however, we have revamped our reporting page to make it easier to understand and more powerful.

The most noticeable changes are the table layout and the mobile layout. We’ve tried to make it easier to understand what the columns mean for users who are new to the site. The goal of the mobile layout is to allow users to reach the most important information more quickly. Every column on the desktop page is viewable on the mobile layout by clicking the “Full” button.

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It’s probably nothing, right? It’s probably one of those things we only notice because it’s the start of the season, and there’s not enough signal yet to drown out the noise. You know how early statistics can be. Ryan Flaherty is batting .333. Gary Sanchez is batting .122. Every so often, Flaherty will bat .333, and every so often, Sanchez will bat .122, but most of the time we don’t care, because most of the time we don’t even know. That’s the beauty of baseball come July and August. The sheer size of the data samples prevents us from looking like idiots.

So, it’s probably nothing. I don’t want to alarm you. At the same time, I’m finding something hard not to notice. I have to at least raise this as a point of conversation. You’re familiar with Freddie Freeman. Amazing hitter. Best player on the Braves. For a month and a half to open last year, Freeman performed like a league MVP, before getting unfortunately hurt. There’s nothing weird about the fact that Freeman looks good again. Got a 208 wRC+. There is, however, something weird about this.

Now Freddie Freeman isn’t swinging. All right.

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The Mets are off to a great start. They have increased their playoff odds more than other club since Opening Day. The Mets always had significant potential, and downside — considerable error bars in either direction — given both the club’s talent and injury concerns.

Now a couple turns through the rotation, the Mets’ starters have generally pitched well and remain healthy. Michael Conforto, meanwhile, has made a remarkable return from his shoulder injury. The Mets are being rewarded early for electing to bolster this talented, but highly volatile, core with the signings of Jay Bruce, Todd Frazier, and Anthony Swarzak.

But the Mets could also be better.

This week, the club sent down their second-best hitter (217 wRC+) and position player to date (0.3) in Brandon Nimmo, ostensibly because there was no place to put him following the return of Conforto. The Mets have Yoenis Cespedes in left, Bruce in right, and a resurgent Adrian Gonzalez at first base. The Mets also have a quality reserve outfield option in Juan Lagares. Nimmo is blocked. But let’s hope he’s not sequestered in Las Vegas for too long. The Mets have sidelined one of the more intriguing players in the game.

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The Phillies wouldn’t have signed Jake Arrieta if they didn’t think they had some chance to win right away. Arrieta would improve that case himself, and his acquisition addressed what had been a thin pitching staff, but even a few months ago, the Phillies were expressing some cautious optimism. Aaron Nola, obviously, is incredibly good. The team was willing to dismiss Jerad Eickhoff’s rough 2017 as a consequence of injuries. And much of the organization was excited about Nick Pivetta. With Nola, Eickhoff, and Pivetta, the Phillies could dream on a rotation that could hold its own, even before Arrieta came along.

Pivetta now has three 2018 starts under his belt, and the last two have been terrific. In fairness, we’re talking about a Marlins lineup that’s not at 100%, and a Reds lineup that’s even further from 100%. The competition has not been stiff. But Pivetta’s struck out 16 of 47 batters, without issuing one single walk. There’s improvement in the results, and even more important than that, there’s improvement in the process. As a rookie in 2017, Pivetta flashed a promising weapon. It would appear he’s now using it with more confidence. It’s time for the National League to get accustomed to seeing Nick Pivetta’s curveball.

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