Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about an odd Neifi Perez appearance, John McCain’s Diamondbacks mention, EW’s August eclipse event, and a questionable fun fact, then talk to Janell Wheaton, a left-handed catcher for the Florida Gators Women’s College World Series team, about why baseball is biased against left-handed catchers (and why it shouldn’t be). Lastly, Ben banters (with himself) about an ankle-injury hypothesis.

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Brilliance in small samples can be intoxicating. Case in point: in a poll conducted by ESPN this preseason, 41% of respondents predicted Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez would slug between 31-40 homers this year. Another 10% called for more than 40. For reference, of the 38 hitters who reached the 30-homer threshold in 2016, only one of them (Evan Gattis) did work as a catcher.

On the one hand, it’s not difficult to understand the reason for that sort of enthusiasm. Sanchez was excellent in 200-plus plate appearances for the Yankees last year, hitting 20 homers and recording just over three wins in a wonderful late-season burst. On the other hand, expecting a player to continue that kind of pace — especially a young catcher with limited exposure to major-league pitching — is probably unreasonable.

I attempted to warn everyone about the pitfalls of such expectations back in March. From that post:

In the fantasy baseball world, only Buster Posey is being drafted earlier at catcher. Generally conservative projection systems forecast that Sanchez will be a star this season. ZiPS pegs Sanchez for 27 homers, a 112 wRC+, and a 3.4 WAR season. PECOTA’s 70th percentile outlook has Sanchez recording 33 homers, a .504 slugging mark, and 4.8 wins. And the Fans’ average crowdsourced projection for Sanchez is a .274/.344/.488 slash line and 5.4 WAR season. The Fans believe, in other words, that Sanchez and Bryce Harper are going to produce similar value this season. …

Even in Yankee Stadium II, Sanchez wasn’t a good bet to repeat his 40% home-run rate on fly balls (HR/FB). In fact, his current mark, just shy of 27%, is still well above average. And while Sanchez could go on to produce a monster second half, the first third of the 2017 season has been a reminder not to draw too much from a small sample.

It’s not that Sanchez has been a poor player to date; quite the contrary, in fact. He’s been an above-average hitter (121 wRC+) at a position where we rarely see such offensive production. He’s having a really good year so far. He’s just not the superstar many expected him to be in his first full season. He’s still one of the more valuable young players in the game, and we know all about his potential. But his .256/.343/.471 slash line better resembles a career minor-league line (.275/.339/.461) produced over nearly 2,500 at-bats than his briefer showing last season.

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Currently 5.5 games out of first place in the AL Central, it’s still unclear whether the Royals will go for it one last time with a number of the same pieces from their championship season, or if they’ll perform a massive sell-off of multiple potential free agents. Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Jason Vargas are among those who could be moved. Perhaps Kelvin Herrera, just another season from free agency, could be gone as well. Mike Moustakas might not get the notoriety of some of his teammates, but whether the Royals go all-in or sell, it’s Moustakas who should play the most important role.

Just a few seasons ago, Moustakas was a part of a disappointing group of formerly heralded prospects on the Royals’ major-league club. In 2014, as the Royals shocked just about everyone with their run to the World Series, Moustakas finished the season with a line of .212/.271/.361, good for just a 75 wRC+. Even with solid defense, the result was a barely replacement-level season. Moustakas had a problem: he was a fly-ball hitter in a spacious park. In the 2014 postseason, Moustakas hit four homers in his first six games, but was mostly quiet the rest of the way.

That power from the 2014 postseason didn’t really carry over to 2015, but once the summer hit — around the same time baseballs began flying out of the park at a much greater rate — Moustakas surged. Due to a knee injury, he recorded only 113 plate appearances the next season, but the power showed up in limited time — and it has continued in a big way this season. The graph below shows Moustakas’ 15-game rolling ISO, allowing us to see where Moustakas took off.

In the first half of 2015, Moustakas had become a ground-ball hitter, and the 35% fly-ball rate he recorded over that period would have been the lowest of his career if it had continued. He was pairing those grounders with a very low 11% strikeout rate, .315 BABIP, and very little power. The result was a 115 wRC+ over the first half, not too bad for a guy with a career 82 wRC+ in nearly 2,000 plate appearances. As for the change in approach, maybe it was because he was slotted at the No. 2 spot in the lineup and felt he had a role to play. He hadn’t ever been a guy to run up a decent BABIP on account of all the fly balls, so it’s unclear whether this strategy of grounders was going to work long term. We’ve never had to find out.

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Austin Sodders is building a groundswell of support among prospect followers. Ranking among the leaders in multiple Midwest League pitching categories has a way of doing that. In 10 starts for the West Michigan Whitecaps, the 22-year-old southpaw in the Detroit Tigers organization has a 1.39 ERA, a 0.98 WHIP, and is striking out a batter per inning. And while W-L records are to be taken with a large grain of salt, there’s certainly nothing wrong with being a perfect 6-0.

Sodders was selected in the seventh round of last year’s draft, so it’s fair to say that he’s exceeding expectations. At the same time, it’s not as though he came out of nowhere. The UC Riverside product passed up a chance to sign with the Pirates out of a junior college in 2015, and he comes from a baseball family. His father, Mike Sodders, is a former first-round pick by the Twins, and his older brother, Mike, Jr., had a stint in the Angels system.

Sodders wasn’t certain where he’d end up when last June’s draft rolled around. He knew the Tigers were among the teams interested in him, but they hadn’t — nor had anyone else — supplied him with any concrete expectations. They have, however, helped him build a more solid foundation since bringing him into the fold.

A retooled breaking ball has been a boon to his development. When I mentioned that the Baseball America Prospect Handbook says his slider will “morph into a small cutter at times,” he knew exactly what they meant. For that reason, the pitch is now in his rear-view.

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The Pirates’ trade of Proven Closer Mark Melancon prior to last season’s trade deadline was met with much hostility at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. The trade was seen in the public, and some corners of the clubhouse, as a white flag being raised, the Jolly Roger lowered at PNC Park. The Pirates remained on the fringe of the postseason picture at the time of the deal. Melancon had been a fixture of the 2013-15 playoff teams.

But those who aren’t focused solely on the Stanley Cup finals are no longer complaining in Pittsburgh. In return for Melancon, the Pirates acquired pitching prospect Taylor Hearn and a headline piece in Felipe Rivero, who is becoming one of the game’s elite left-handed relief pitchers.

We know all about the talents of Zach Britton, Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, the sport’s most dominant left-handed relievers. But Rivero is on the brink of joining their company. And if you’re interested in who’s occupying the ninth inning for major-league clubs — say, fantasy baseball purposes — Rivero might soon be closing games for the Pirates due to Tony Watson’s struggles.

Oh, how the Washington Nationals would like to have Rivero and his four-plus seasons of control back. As we inch closer to the trade deadline, the Rivero deal serves both as a model and warning in how to operate at the trade deadline, where overpaying is almost always a mistake and heeding the lessons of the Stanford marshmallow experiment is typically wise.

To be fair, the Nationals didn’t think they were trading this kind of arm away for 60-plus days of control over Melancon. Like many pitchers before him — A.J. Burnett, Jason Grilli, Francisco Liriano, Ivan Nova, Edinson Volquez, and, yes, Melancon himself — Rivero has made significant improvements since being traded to Pittsburgh.

Let me offer a quick a synopsis on the Rivero story: the lefty has refined his command since arriving in Pittsburgh, he’s added velocity — hitting 102 mph this season — and, in addition to a quality slider, he now boasts an elite changeup.

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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.

Wilmer Font, RHP, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
Last Friday, the right-handed Font struck out 10 of 20 batters he faced over 6.0 innings against Milwaukee’s Triple-A affiliate Colorado Springs (box). Last night, Font added seven more strikeouts against 23 batters in a game against the Cubs’ Triple-A affiliate in Iowa City (box). The result of those two starts? This: 12.0 IP, 43 TBF, 17 K (39.5%), 1 BB (2.3%), 7 H, 1 R. That’s quite good.

As to whether it’ll translate to the majors, the author of this post isn’t entirely confident. Consider: Font recorded four swinging strikes in the first inning of last Friday’s game. Here’s video of all four:

All four of those whiffs were produced by way of the fastball. The next three whiffs were produced by the fastball, as well. That’s a great deal of reliance on a pitch that — in terms of velocity, at least — is probably just average. The probability of a journeyman with an average fastball dominating major-league hitters with that same pitch is low. But minor-league success often begets major-league success, and Font has had a considerable amount of the former this year. As an alumnus of the indy leagues, his success is already improbable.

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The Mets were supposed to be good. Heading into the season, we projected them for 87 wins, a bit behind the NL’s elite trio, but solidly among the top teams that were expected to contend for a playoff spot. With Yoenis Cespedes back in the fold and a strong pitching staff led by a dynamite rotation, expectations were high.

Then, everyone got hurt. Seth Lugo and Steven Matz couldn’t make it out of spring training, thinning the team’s expected rotation depth. Lucas Duda and Wilmer Flores went down at the same time in April, leaving the team without a real infield. Cespedes got hurt a week later, then Noah Syndergaard’s arm started hurting a few days after that. Travis d’Arnaud injured his wrist in the first week of May. Jeurys Familia developed a blod clot not long after. Asdrubal Cabrera hurt his thumb.

Even the guys who aren’t officially hurt might not be healthy. Matt Harvey‘s stuff has backed up to the point that he doesn’t really miss bats anymore, and now looks like a back-end starter. Robert Gsellman’s spin rates have nosedived, and his effectiveness has gone with it. Jose Reyes isn’t hurt, but given his 53 wRC+ and below-average defense at third base, the team would be better if he were.

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The draft is right around the corner, and KATOH’s here with some content. Today, I give you projections for the top-250 draft-eligible college players. This list considers all Division 1 players who logged at least 100 plate appearances or batters faced this season. These projections don’t just incorporate this year’s data, but also consider performances from 2016, 2015, and last summer’s Cape Cod League. I consider this to be a vast improvement over the work on amateur prospects I’ve done in the past.

I derived these projections using a methodology similar to the one I use for minor leaguers. I ran a series of probit regression analyses on historical data to determine the likelihood that a player will reach a variety of WAR thresholds (Playing in MLB, >0.5 WAR, >1 WAR, >2 WAR, etc.) through age 28. The resulting probabilities were used to generate a point estimate for each player’s WAR through age 28. The projections take into account performance, conference, age and height. They also account for defensive position for hitters and batters faced per game for pitchers. All of these factors are weighted accordingly based on the major-league careers of historical college players.

There are thousands of Division 1 baseball players, and the data is often unruly and prone to inaccuracies. Furthermore, determining who’s draft-eligible is often tricky, as birthdays and high-school graduation years are sometimes hard to track down. A bunch of front offices didn’t realize T.J. Friedl was eligible for the draft last year, so this isn’t just a me problem. All of this is to say that I can’t be 100% sure nobody was left off erroneously, so feel free to ask if your favorite college prospect isn’t listed.

I will provide further analysis on many of these players once we know where they end up, so check back next week. One quick observation: there’s been much debate over whether Louisville’s Brendan McKay should be selected as a pitcher or a hitter. KATOH sides strongly with Team Pitcher, as it ranks him No. 1 among college players as a pitcher and No. 191 as a first baseman. However, since he’s primarily focused on pitching to date, I suppose one could argue he has more development left than your typical 21-year-old hitter with his numbers.

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