Keynan Middleton has been drawing rave reviews since being called up by the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in early May. The 23-year-old righty reliever has reached triple digits with his fastball, and his slider has given hitters fits. There have been a few hiccups along the way — rookies aren’t infallible — but shining moments are becoming commonplace. Just this past week, Middleton twice punched out Aaron Judge with 100-mph heaters.

Not surprisingly his confidence level is high. That much was evident when I spoke to him prior to Friday’s game, in Boston.

“I get asked by friends and family who my least favorite player to throw to is,” Middleton told me. “I really don’t care. It could be David Ortiz, it could be Babe Ruth. Whoever is in the box, I’m going to go out there and give you my best stuff, and if you win, you win. I’ll tip my cap to you.”

No cap-tipping was needed that night, but there was a number-retiring ceremony before the game. I asked Middleton if it was meaningful to be at Fenway Park — it was his first time there — especially with David Ortiz being honored. Read the rest of this entry »

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric forefather Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game.

How are they calculated? Haphazardly, is how. An explanation of the components and formulae which produce these NERD scores is available here. All objections to the numbers here are probably justified, on account of how this entire endeavor is absurd.

Most Highly Rated Game
Colorado at Los Angeles NL | 22:10 ET
Chatwood (90.1 IP, 92 xFIP-) vs. Kershaw (103.1 IP, 68 xFIP-)
One doesn’t require the aid of a haphazardly constructed algorithm to reach the conclusion that a game started by Clayton Kershaw might offer thrills and/or delights. Of course, there are a number of things one doesn’t require in this life and yet pursues anyway. Like a degree in the humanities, for example. Or a distant father’s love.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL Radio.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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 a non-revelatory tweet, cycles, Bryce Harper vs. Aaron Judge (and also vs. expectations), Jarrod Dyson’s homers and bunts, and Ben Davis’ 2001 bunt against Curt Schilling, then respond to Tom Verducci’s articles about baseball trends and explain why they aren’t worried about rising strikeout or home-run rates.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric forefather Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game.

How are they calculated? Haphazardly, is how. An explanation of the components and formulae which produce these NERD scores is available here. All objections to the numbers here are probably justified, on account of how this entire endeavor is absurd.

Most Highly Rated Game
Colorado at Los Angeles NL | 22:10 ET
Freeland (81.2 IP, 108 xFIP-) vs. Wood (61.2 IP, 59 xFIP-)
Navigating to FanGraphs’ WAR leaderboard for pitchers, one doesn’t find Dodgers starter Alex Wood listed among the league’s top-10 pitchers. One doesn’t find Wood’s name at all, in fact. This isn’t because Wood has pitched poorly. To the contrary, he’s been excellent. Rather, it’s because the pitching leaderboard only includes qualifiers. Indeed, after setting the innings threshold to 0, one finds Wood listed ninth by WAR — a mark he’s achieved in roughly two-thirds the innings as the pitchers on either side of him. The presence of Wood is one of this game’s multiple appealing qualities.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL Television.

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This is Michael Lortz’ fourth piece as part of his June residency at FanGraphs. Lortz covers the Tampa Bay baseball market for the appropriately named Tampa Bay Baseball Market and has previously published work in the Community pages, as well. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of all our residents here.

There’s been a lot of circumstantial and empirical evidence showing winning baseball games has an effect on the amount of tickets purchased in subsequent games. In 2008, Michael Davis of the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri S&T) concluded that team success leads to greater attendance. However, Davis’s study had a huge flaw. He limited his study to “only the ten major league baseball teams that have played in the same city for over 100 years. This list includes five National League teams: the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Cardinals; and five American League teams: the Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees.”

For the sake of determining whether wins matter, that’s way too small of a sample size. Davis might have had enough data points, but his data points were not representative of the wide array of situations with which franchises must contend.

In 2012, Dan Lependorf wrote a post for The Hardball Times concerning the relationship between wins, attendance, and payroll. Whereas Davis went deep in time for a few teams, Lependorf analyzed every team from 2000 to 2011. Lependorf concluded that the relationship between wins and attendance produced an R-squared of .27. There was an even stronger correlation to attendance and wins the previous season (R-squared = .3). Attendance in a season featured an even stronger relationship to attendance level in the previous season (R-squared = .8).

Every sports team in every city will draw at least one fan. In Major League Baseball, we can also guarantee that every team will win at least one game. We can also guarantee a top level of attendance depending on the maximum capacity of the stadium. For the Rays, that would be 40,135 times 81 — or 3,250,935. And, of course, the most wins the Rays can have in the regular season is 162.

Since 1999 (excluding their inaugural season), the Rays have averaged 1.4 million fans and 75 wins per season. They’ve had eight seasons over 75 wins and nine seasons over 1.4 million fans. Since 1999, the correlation between the Rays’ winning percentage and attendance per game produces an R-squared value of .52.

That is almost double the correlation Davis found for teams. So despite the claims that wins don’t matter to attendance in Tampa Bay, they do. To a point.

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In the coming days and weeks, you will read quite a bit about which teams should buy and which should sell, at FanGraphs and elsewhere. As the midpoint of the season approaches, the Pirates once again reside on the bubble. They’re a team once again with a slim but mathematically possible path to the postseason — a 2.9% chance, according to FanGraphs projections — a team that most expect to sell prior to the deadline.

Dave placed the Pirates in his sellers bucket earlier this week in his examination of the forming market, also noting that Andrew McCutchen had rebuilt some trade value due to his recent improvement — possibly a result, that improvement, of McCutchen having finally identified a swing flaw. After a lengthy down period, which included his baffling age-29 decline last season and an even worse start to the 2017 season, McCutchen more resembles his former self. The Pirates tried to move him last winter without success. If teams believe his current run is a result of tangible change, that could make him more appealing.

Jon Morosi of FoxSports reports that the Pirates will listen on Gerrit Cole

Executives from other Major League teams said this week they expect the Pirates will listen to offers for Cole ahead of the July 31 non-waiver Trade Deadline, and that the A’s will do the same with Sonny Gray. …. For both the Pirates and A’s, a crucial part of the Trade Deadline calculus must be the opportunity to capitalize on an apparent shortage of No. 1 — and even No. 2 — starters available on this year’s trade market.

So what should the Pirates do?

They should sell, probably, but in a particular sort of way. In fact, they might have created a model to follow last deadline.

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 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 America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels*, and (most importantly) lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated list — such as the revised top 100 released last week by Baseball America — will also be excluded from eligibility.

*All 200 names!

In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Zack Granite, OF, Minnesota (Profile)
A former 14th-round draft pick, Granite now leads the International League in batting — by a considerable margin, as noted by David Laurila yesterday in the introduction to his interview with Granite.

Batting average obviously has shortcomings as a measurement of player value. For one, it stabilizes only in large samples. For two, it’s merely part of the overall offensive picture. That said, Granite has also consistently recorded strikeout rates below 10% — meaning he’s likely to produce higher batting averages anyway. Moreover, because of his baserunning and defensive abilities, Granite is the sort of player who could actually prove useful to a club despite a somewhat empty batting average.

In any case, Granite rendered his batting average a little less empty this week, hitting his second home run of the season, as documented in the following video presentation.

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So far, the Diamondbacks have been a major surprise, and although every surprise is, by definition, surprising, there are degrees. What makes the Diamondbacks all the more surprising is that they are where they are without Shelby Miller. A Miller bounceback was supposed to be key to their hopes, but then he got hurt, which should’ve been trouble. Enter Zack Godley. Godley has plugged the hole, and then some.

Relative to last season, Godley’s been one of the more improved starting pitchers in the major leagues. While he has several elements going on at any one time, his main trick is a dynamite curveball that he’s fallen in love with. By run values, it’s been baseball’s second-best curveball, behind Corey Kluber and above Lance McCullers. Godley’s curve is something special, and it causes one’s discipline to deteriorate. It’s not an easy pitch to lay off.

Godley, on Thursday, got a start in Colorado. He faced Charlie Blackmon to lead off the bottom of the first, and Godley got Blackmon to a two-strike count. A couple curves couldn’t finish him off. Nor could a couple non-curves. Godley’s seventh pitch came in a 2-and-2 count, and at last he threw the pitch that he wanted. The curve caught the plate, but it plummeted below the zone. It was labeled for the dirt, but too sharp to spit on. It was the swing-and-miss curve to make Blackmon go away.

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