This past Wednesday, I talked to Oakland A’s pitcher Chris Smith for the first time in close to a decade. After we’d exchanged pleasantries, I asked the now-36-year-old right-hander how he’d describe his career. His answer came as no surprise.

“Oh, man, how about rollercoaster?,” suggested Smith. “It was a rollercoaster early on, and it’s continued to be a rollercoaster.”

That’s an apt assessment. Since being selected by the Red Sox in the fourth round of the 2002 draft, Smith has experienced ups and downs worthy of Six Flags. A dune buggy accident compromised his 2003 season, and he’s bounced — mostly in the minors — from Boston to the Brewers to the Mariners to the Padres to the A’s.

And then there was his three-year hiatus away from affiliated ball.

“When the Mariners let me go (in May, 2011), I thought I was done,” admitted Smith. “I got released because of my performance — not because of health — and I was OK with that. If I wasn’t good enough, it was time to move on. I went back to UC-Riverside and became the pitching coach there.”

It turned out that he wasn’t done after all. After a year spent coaching at his alma mater, Smith was convinced to make a comeback in independent ball. Read the rest of this entry »

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 (one last time) about Cleveland’s winning streak, Lenny Harris and an Ichiro record, Jeff’s successful search for the fly-ball revolution, and the increasing difficulty of scouting position players, then draft the World Series contenders that would be the best (and worst) stories.

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There are five spots on a Cy Young ballot. This season, in the American League, only the first two are going to matter. Last year, Justin Verlander received the most first-place votes, with 14, but he was ranked second on just two ballots. Rick Porcello, meanwhile, received 18 second-place votes in addition to his eight at the top spot. Porcello ended up the winner.

This year, Chris Sale and Corey Kluber are likely to occupy the top two spots on every ballot, and whoever receives more first-place will probably take the award. The pair have produced very similar statistical records this year, so voters will have to split hairs to decide which of the two is more deserving. Let’s begin splitting some of those hairs right now, examining defense, contact quality, various sorts of WAR, and how they all influence each other when it comes to the two best pitchers in the American League.

To provide an initial tale of the tape of sorts, here are a few numbers with which most readers will be pretty familiar.

The strikeout and walk numbers are pretty equivalent. Sale has the edge in homers and innings, leading to a lower FIP and therefore WAR. Kluber has a much lower BABIP, which helps him lead in ERA. If you want to factor for league and park, we can do that. Sale’s FIP- is 50 to Kluber’s 57, and Sale’s ERA- is 61 to Kluber’s 54. Part of Kluber’s ERA advantage comes from that BABIP. He also has an 81.6% left-on-base percentage compared to Sale’s 76.7%, though, so part of the advantage is simply due to sequencing.

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A couple of weeks ago, I talked about why Rhys Hoskins‘ early process should give Phillies fans a reason for real excitement. His combination of frequently hitting the ball in the air while still making above-average contact is the foundation for high-level offensive production.

At that point, though, Hoskins had just 47 plate appearances in the Majors. Anyone can have a good 47 plate appearances, so I tried to emphasize that the results of his first 10 or so games shouldn’t have changed your opinion of Hoskins much. There were encouraging signs in the approach, and other hitters with similar skillsets also got overlooked by prospect rankings on their way to stardom, but I tried to avoid making a big deal about Hoskins running a 159 wRC+ for a couple of weeks.

Well, it’s been three weeks since that post went up, and now the results themselves are worth paying attention to.

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Rarely do the graphs line up as nicely as they do for Twins shortstop Jorge Polanco, who changed his season — and maybe his baseball future — on a dime. Over a span of 310 plate appearances leading up to the end of July, he’d recorded a slash line of .213/.265/.305, a mark roughly 50% worse than average after adjusting for park and league. In the 170 plate appearances since then, however, he’s produced a .347/.409/.626 mark, 70% better than league average. There’s been some batted-ball fortune maybe, but that hardly accounts for the enormity of the improvement in the numbers.

While the change in outcome has been significant, the change in process has been relatively simple. Polanco has basically followed three steps to rethink his approach, allowing the former top prospect to regain his standing with the team.

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While so much recent focus on the Dodgers has (rightfully) centered on their recent stretch of poor play, how about this ray of sunshine: the club is on the cusp of receiving a nine-win season — the sort of value one can only dependably expect from Mike Trout — from a lone source this year.

Surprisingly, the player responsible for this unusually high level of production isn’t Corey Seager or Justin Turner or even Clayton Kershaw. It’s not even a single player, at all, but a combination of two players at one position: catchers Yasmani Grandal and Austin Barnes. The pair has accounted for 8.1 BWARP, the Baseball Prospectus version of wins above replacement that also accounts for pitch framing.

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Introduction
The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise (introduced a few years ago) conducted by the author with a view to identifying and monitoring the most compelling of those rookie-eligible minor leaguers 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 all their attendant midseason lists, as well. Nearly every week during the minor-league season — with the exception of those immediately following the birth of his loud, new son — the author has submitted the names of five “compelling” minor leaguers, each name attended by a brief summary of that prospect’s most relevant credentials.

Generally speaking, the word compelling has been used to designate those prospects who possessed some combination of the following:

1. Promising statistical indicators; and

2. The ability to play on the more challenging end of the defensive spectrum; and

3. Youth relative to minor-league level; and

4. A curious biographical or statistical profile.

With minor-league regular seasons now complete, the author presents here a summary and discussion of the Fringe Five for 2017.

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The Cardinals won again on Thursday. It should go without saying they’re far from being the hottest team in baseball, but they’ve played well over the last couple months, hanging around in both the wild-card and Central division races. The Cardinals have won 36 of their past 60 games, which, over a full season, would be good enough to put them on a 97-win pace. Other teams have been better, but the Cardinals have been strong.

Something that strikes me about this Cardinals team in particular is its distribution of talent. Tommy Pham wasn’t expected to make this kind of impact. Neither was Luke Weaver, or Paul DeJong. Dave just wrote about the emerging Jose Martinez. It’s a team with surprises, but then, it’s also a team light on elites. Pham is their only 4+ WAR player. Carlos Martinez is their only other 3+ WAR player. So many other players have just been…good. Helpful enough. These Cardinals seem like the very opposite of top-heavy.

That’s an impression. Below is the math. Following a hunch or two, I broke down every single team, in terms of its basic WAR distribution. We can start off by just looking at overall WAR.

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