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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There’s a certain asymmetry allowed in the game. Lineups can be arranged in whatever order. Defenses can be shifted however you want. The biggest and most obvious example is how every single home ballpark is unique. Distances are the same from mound to plate, and from base to base, but outfields and fences are completely different, wherever you look. It’s counted among baseball’s various charms, and I can’t recall anyone ever complaining. Every park is a different park, and it’s something we’re pleased to accept.

Yet, in theory, there’s one core component of the game that’s held constant for everybody. In theory, every player and every team is to work with identical strike zones. It would be absurd for the rules to allow the zone to be flexible, beyond considering a hitter’s particular stance. The zone is something fundamental, something necessarily equivalent, and there’s no good reason why any team should stand to benefit. In theory.

In reality, we know better! In reality, we know certain teams get better zones than others. Some of it comes down to randomness. Noise alone could explain certain fluctuations. Yet some of it is also by design. You’re the last people to whom I need to explain the concept of pitch-framing. This isn’t all about framing, but that’s a big part. Anyway, they’ve played almost three months of 2017 regular-season baseball. To this point, the Dodgers have received the friendliest strike zone, by far.

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One frequent topic of debate this season is whether Max Scherzer has overtaken Clayton Kershaw as the majors’ best pitcher.

Scherzer, for example, has recorded the majors’ second-largest strikeout- and walk-rate differential (29.1 points), behind only Chris Sale (30.5 K-BB%), while Kershaw ranks a somewhat distant third (24.6) by that measure. Scherzer (3.1) trails only Sale (4.6) in the FIP-based version WAR and leads all pitchers by the sort calculated with runs allowed. Scherzer also leads both Kershaw and Sale in Bill James’ starting pitcher rankings, something akin to world rankings in golf and tennis.

Depending on what metrics or qualities one cares to cite, the identity of Best Pitcher is open to debate. What’s not debatable is that, over the past three years or so, Scherzer has been the pitcher most likely to do something incredible in any given outing.

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Earlier this week, Travis Sawchik took note of some steps that Colorado Rockies pitchers have taken this year to better succeed in the context of the team’s challenging home park. Jeff Sullivan added to the conversation the next day, observing that the Rockies have been fantastic on the road this season. To continue the investigation of Colorado’s strong campaign, I’ve attempted here to understand what factors have contributed to the Rockies’ road record — which stands at 25-13 entering today, the second-best mark in the majors. My conclusion? A good bullpen, the club’s first decent defense in quite some time, and some luck.

The Rockies have one of the best records in the majors this year. Examining merely the raw numbers, one might conclude that the club’s offense, which ranks fourth in runs per game, is largely to thank for that. That would be a bad conclusion to reach, however. For the Rockies, in their stadium, fourth is actually quite bad. After adjusting for park, the team’s offensive is 15% worse than league average, fifth worst in the majors. One might argue that the park adjustment penalizes hitters too much for Coors Field. Perhaps that’s the case. Even so, the Rockies have recorded a below-average offensive mark away from Coors, as well. Their offense, by most measures, just hasn’t been that great.

There are also suggestions that the club is perhaps getting a bit lucky. While the Rockies have compiled a 47-27 record overall, Pythagorean win percentage (which estimates a club’s record based on runs scored and allowed) has them at 43-31, while BaseRuns (which strips out sequencing) has them at 40-34. That could go a long way in explaining the Rockies road record: just chalk it up to luck and be done.

We can’t actually do that, though, because most of that luck has come at home for the Rockies. In 36 home games, Colorado has outscored their opponents by just 19 runs; on the road, that margin is 46 runs. At least in terms of runs scored and prevented, the Rockies have earned their road success.

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