C.D. Pelham has had a good couple of weeks. On June 22, the 23-year-old southpaw was promoted from the high-A Down East Wood Ducks to the Double-A Frisco RoughRiders. Two days ago he got even better news. Thanks in large part to a fastball that has a mind of its own, Pelham learned that he’d be representing the Texas Rangers in next Sunday’s All-Star Futures game.

A few short years ago, the 6-foot-5, 230 pound Pelham had little idea where his pitches were going. In his first two seasons after being selected in the 33rd round of the 2015 draft out of Spartanburg Methodist College, he walked a staggering 56 batters in 56-and-a-third innings.

The lefty reined in his wildness by getting his mind right. Pelham pointed to the mental side of the game as having been the biggest issue, explaining that he lacked confidence and spent too much time dwelling on his previous pitch — “whether it was good or bad” — rather than focusing on the one he was about to throw. Conversations with a “peak performance guy” in the Rangers organization (Josiah Igono) helped him turn a corner, and while no one is ever going to mistake him for Greg Maddux, Pelham no longer needs a GPS to find the strike zone. In 32-and-a-third innings this year, he’s issued a much more respectable 15 free passes.

He’s also missed a lot of barrels. Pelham has fanned 40, held opposing batters to a .197 average, and he’s yet to be taken deep. Squaring up his heater is hard for two reasons. Not only does it sit in the mid-to-upper-90s, it moves… well, in pretty much whichever direction it pleases. 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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It wasn’t so long ago that building things was a pretty dangerous pastime. The most extreme example of this is probably the Panama Canal; over 5,000 people died in its construction. Five people died erecting the Empire State Building. It’s safer now to construct great buildings; such fatalities are significantly rarer than they used to be. But as we learned last week, the risk inherent to the construction and maintenance of any structure, especially large venues like stadia, will never be zero.

Enter SunTrust Park, the brand new, state-of-the-art venue for the first-place Atlanta Braves. The Braves’ surprising season took a tragic turn on June 26, when workers found a dead body inside a beer cooler at SunTrust. The body was later confirmed to be that of Todd Keeling, a 48-year-old inventor most famous for designing and patenting a technology which dispensed beer at several times the conventional rate. Keeling had already installed his technology in Guaranteed Rate Field and Target Field. Ben Brasch of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described the technology, called “Draftwell taps,” this way:

The Braves said Monday that the new Draftwell taps installed throughout the ballpark cut down pour times from a 14-second average to five seconds.

Delaware North Sportservice, which manages food and beverage service at SunTrust Park, said the new boozy tech will also keep the beer colder and fresher with more “brewery-intended flavor.”

Target Field in Minneapolis, home of the Twins, installed Draftwell taps and increased its keg yield from 87 to 94 percent, said Delaware North spokesman Marc Heintzman.

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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 Longenhagen and McDaniel’s most recent update have also been excluded from consideration.

*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.

Jake Hager, SS, Milwaukee (Profile)
Last week, the author of this post included Hager among the Fringe Five for the first time. Just this morning, meanwhile, Travis Sawchik dedicated some internet words to Minnesota infielder/outfielder/little potato Willians Astudillo. The relevance of those two events? Like Astudillo, Hager appears to be experimenting with a zero-true-outcomes approach. Since last Friday, the Brewers prospect and brief resident of the independent American Association, has compiled 19 plate appearances without recording a walk or strikeout or home run. With a couple doubles and a triple, though, he still managed to produce an isolated-power mark above .200. At a very basic level, players are most successful when they are making meaningful contact. Hager, who continued to make the vast majority of his defensive starts at shortstop, has done that.

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Willians Astudillo has captured baseball’s collective imagination — and for good reason.

In an age when the march toward three true outcomes seems inevitable and indomitable, Astudillo arrives as an outlier of outliers, an offensive peformer who never walks or strikeouts, whose batting line would make much more sense if it were produced by a 19th century hitter.

When the Twins called up Astudillo late last month, Jeff Sullivan examined his curious numbers at every professional stop. It is believed Astudillo first appeared in these Web pages as Carson’s “guy” way back in 2016.

Fittingly, Astudillo has not struck out or walked through his first 14 major-league plate appearances.

Said Astudillo of his approach to the Star-Tribune:

“Coaches try to change my approach,” he said. “It’s just who I am. I’m a free swinger.”

Said Twins baseball operations chief Derek Falvey to the Star Tribune:

“I don’t think he gets to [strike] three very often. He’s an aggressive guy. It’s not a secret. I’m not revealing anything the advance work won’t show. He attacks the ball and makes good contact. Sometimes that profile plays well off the bench when you think about different types of guys to bring in the sixth, seventh, eighth inning.”

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In an AL West where the Astros and Mariners appear playoff bound, the A’s are resurgent, and the Angels have generated their share of interest thanks to the play of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, the Rangers’ season hasn’t been a whole lot of fun. A slew of early-season injuries quickly buried them, and it wasn’t until June that they posted their first month above .500 (14-11, and now 39-49 overall).

Even so, they’ve offered reasons to watch, and one lately has been the play of Shin-Soo Choo. On Wednesday, the 35-year-old outfielder/designated hitter homered off the Astros’ Gerrit Cole, extending his streak of consecutive games reaching base to 44; he later singled off Cole, as well. Alas, Choo sat on Thursday night, forestalling his chance to tie Odubel Herrera for the longest on-base streak in the majors over the past two seasons. He’s been nursing a mild right quad strain for at least a week, sitting out two games while Adrian Beltre DH-ed.

On-base streaks don’t get the same kind of love as hitting streaks, in part because of the historic primacy of batting average and the romanticization of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak from 1941, which might be one of the sport’s unbreakable records. As it happens, the record for consecutive games reaching base via a hit, walk, or hit-by-pitch (not an error or a dropped third strike) is held by DiMaggio’s rival, Ted Williams, who reached base 84 straight times in 1949. But guess who’s tied at No. 2, at least going back to 1908, the period covered by the Baseball-Reference Play Index:

On May 14, 1941, the day before he began his 56-game hitting streak, DiMaggio went 0-for-3 with a walk against the Indians’ Mel Harder. And while he was held hitless by Harder’s teammates Al Smith and Jim Bagby on July 17, ending that streak, he did walk in his second plate appearance that day, keeping the on-base streak alive. He then collected hits in each of the next 16 games before going 0-for-4 without a time on base in the opener of an August 3 doubleheader against the St. Louis Browns.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the third-place Nationals and Wade LeBlanc’s extension, then answer listener emails about trading Bryce Harper, signing Bryce Harper, throwing super-slow pitches, a DH as the best player ever, hitting flares on purpose, losing games to set up a specific playoff matchup, John Olerud and the Hall of Fame, when to tell fans to “make some noise,” the players with the most RBI against one team, forcing opponents to play out of position, an MLB re-entry rule, drafting based on publicly available info, the worst playoff teams and best non-playoff teams, a mysterious masked player, and more, plus a real-time reaction to the Nats’ incredible comeback and Stat Blasts about the best hitters after 0-2, the Rockies being better on the road, and the low leaguewide home-field advantage.

Audio intro: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Makin’ Some Noise"
Audio outro: Buzzcocks, "Noise Annoys"

Link to Travis’s post about the Nationals
Link to info on the batted-ball “donut hole”
Link playoff teams with worst winning percentages
Link to non-playoff teams with best winning percentages

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Rays using backup catcher Jesus Sucre as a pitcher to protect a lead, the return of Shohei Ohtani, Javier Baez’s exciting and silly steal of home, and what life would be like with deferred payments. Then (29:58) they bring on Phillies international scouting director Sal Agostinelli to discuss his Willians Astudillo-esque career, discovering, signing, and developing Astudillo, the July 2 signing period, scouting teenaged players, amateur scouting vs. international scouting, the importance of makeup, how to judge international-scouting success, signing players despite being saddled with a small bonus pool, the difficulty of focusing on baseball in Venezuela, expanding into new international markets, and more.

Audio intro: Talib Kweli (Feat. Nigel Hall), "Mr. International"
Audio interstitial: Nat King Cole, "Calico Sal"
Audio outro: Stackridge, "The Road to Venezuela"

Link to Jeff’s post about position-player pitchers
Link to list of deferred payments
Link to Javier Baez’s steal of home
Link to Philadelphia Inquirer feature on Sal Agostinelli
Link to 2018 team WAR from international amateur signees
Link to feature on Phillies’ international scouting
Link to Sal’s baseball-training site

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 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS