Hundreds of college pitchers will be selected in the MLB draft over the next three days. They’ll vary widely in talent and readiness, ranging from raw power arms to pitchability-types lacking premium stuff. Many will be tied together by one commonality: heavy usage in college. Last year, I found that deep starts and meager rest stints are all-too-frequent occurrences for collegiate pitchers. Do the same standards apply to the cream of this year’s draft crop?

Let’s focus on the most coveted collegiate pitchers: the projected 2017 first-round draftees. First rounders capture fan attention, pepper prospect lists, and generally have the best shot at becoming solid MLB contributors. Big leaguers will be found in the later rounds, of course, but it’s the first rounders who are paid the most money and carry the highest expectations. So let’s look at the ten NCAA pitchers — starters all — projected by Baseball America to be selected in the first round this evening.

I pulled game logs from the NCAA’s statistics pages for each of the pitchers, capturing all of their pitch counts and batters-faced totals from their college careers (up through yesterday’s games). Where the NCAA was missing pitch counts, I recorded the data from game logs on team websites. For the few instances in which this secondary effort bore no fruit, I estimated pitch counts by taking the pitcher’s batters faced total in that game, and multiplying it times the average pitches per batters faced for that pitcher-season.

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With the weekend now officially in the books, Aaron Judge is the new owner of the longest home run of the season. He’s also the new owner of the fastest-hit home run of the season, which is additionally the fastest-hit home run of the admittedly brief Statcast era. Allow me to note that these were two different home runs.

Aaron Judge is not the result of some kind of hype train gone off the rails. He’s not just some hot hitter who’s got number-types overexcited. Sure, he could cool off. Sure, further adjustments will be made. But Judge, in April, was baseball’s sixth-best hitter. In May, he was baseball’s fourth-best hitter. In June, he’s been baseball’s second-best hitter. Aaron Judge is a candidate to win both the Rookie of the Year and the MVP awards at the same time, and he’s doing things other players don’t do. At least, other players not named Giancarlo Stanton. Pre-Statcast, we would’ve assumed that Judge is a freak. With Statcast, we know that Judge is a freak, someone pushing the limits of on-field human capability. If you’re not in love with Aaron Judge, it’s not some noble rebellion against the media’s east-coast bias. It’s about you closing off your own heart.

Judge is amazing. He’s why every big-power type with a strikeout problem gets chance after chance. Judge is the embodiment of so many dreams come true. Here’s what’s just as nuts: Judge isn’t solely responsible for carrying the Yankees’ offense. Judge is but one soldier in the Yankees’ push for home-run supremacy.

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As a rookie in 2010, Stephen Strasburg turned in an amazing 68 innings of baseball. He struck out 33% of the batters he faced, posted a 2.91 ERA, and recorded an even better 2.08 FIP. Alas, it wasn’t to last: his season was felled by an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery. Seven years later, he’s putting up his best numbers since that debut season. This season, if nothing else, has underscored a point that’s often ignored: Stephen Strasburg has already had a pretty good career.

Often, we focus on the negative — or, at the very least, allow our enthusiasm to create expectations that are unlikely to be fulfilled by reality. In the case of Strasburg, a highly touted former No. 1 pick, there’s been plenty of room for such expectations — or there has been for me, at least. In my head, I’m often overly critical of Strasburg, because he’s an injury risk. He’s only tossed 200 innings in a season once, and he only reached 180 innings in one other season. And yet, in his last outing, he passed the 1,000 innings pitched mark for his career. He’s one of just 1,219 pitchers who have done so, out of 9,366 players who have pitched throughout history. That’s just 13% total to have reached 1,000 IP, and Strasburg is among them. Not bad for a guy who’s always injured.

When Strasburg put up 2.5 WAR in those 68 innings back in 2010, you’d be forgiven if you thought a string of five-win seasons were about to follow. He’s never quite gotten there. His best was a 4.5 WAR in 2014. He might have gotten there last year, as he compiled 3.9 WAR in 147.2 IP. But alas, elbow trouble limited his contributions once again. But while he’s never reached the 5 WAR threshold in any given season, he’s tallied at least three wins in five straight seasons, and he’s working on his sixth this season. That sort of consistency is hard to pull off. For instance, the only other pitchers who tallied at least 3 WAR in each season from 2012 to 2016 were Madison Bumgarner, Cole Hamels, Clayton Kershaw, David Price, Chris Sale and Max Scherzer. And while those six pitchers averaged 1,060 IP across those five seasons, Strasburg tossed just 832.1 IP, making him far, far more efficient in his consistency.

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Because most of my writing for FanGraphs is based on my KATOH projection system, you might regard me as the exact opposite of a scout. My work is often presented against the backdrop of traditional scouting lists in an effort to identify players who may by underrated by the scouting consensus. Lately, though, I’ve been trying to see more prospects in person in order to put faces and bodies to the stat lines I spend so much time analyzing.

Specifically, I’ve attended a number of high-school and college games this spring in an effort to see as many draft-eligible prospect as possible, including a few who are likely to be selected in the first two rounds tonight. My looks have been defined by one constraint, however — namely, my general reluctance to leave the five boroughs of New York.

What follows is specific sort of document, then, based on a combination of in-person looks, statistical performance, and geography. It is, in short, the pref list of someone who refused to stray far from New York City while compiling it. The mediocre scouting video is my own. KATOH numbers are included for college players and represent projected WAR over first six major-league seasons.

1. MJ Melendez, C, Westminster Christian HS

Westminster Christian isn’t located in New York, at all, but rather the Miami area. The school’s baseball team visited Brooklyn’s Grand Street Campus in April, though, so they’re eligible for this list.

Melendez is the catcher for Westminster Christian. He’s a joy to watch behind the plate, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a catcher move the way he does. He sets a low target with his Tony Pena-esque stance and has the arm strength and athleticism to throw to second from his knees — a maneuver that made Benito Santiago an elite defensive catcher back in the day. He also showed quick hands at the plate. High-school catchers are always a gamble, but Melendez oozes athleticism, so perhaps he’s a gamble worth taking.

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Long-time UCLA baseball coach Gary Adams was nearing the end of his coaching tenure when he made his way to The Ball Yard in 2003 to talk hitting philosophy. The Ball Yard is a spartan hitting facility, containing two batting cages, located in a nondescript building in a business park in Chatsworth, Calif. There, Doug Latta and Craig Wallenbrock, a former major-league scout, worked as private hitting instructors. There was a UCLA connection: Bruins star Chase Utley was a client of Wallenbrock, and other UCLA players had worked at the facility.

Whatever you want to call the effort in the majors to hit balls less often on the ground, much of the grassroots movement — many of the alternatives to traditional and professional hitting philosophy — began at places like The Ball Yard, the hitting equivalent to garage start-ups.

At some point, Adams and Latta engaged in a separate conversation as they walked to exit the facility. After Adams listened to their philosophies on the swing, after hearing Latta’s antipathy for a ground-ball-oriented approach, Adams asked Latta a hypothetical question: what kind of swing would he have recommended Dave Roberts to adopt? Robert was a former UCLA standout under Adams, one who became a useful major-league player, mostly known for his speed. He is, of course, now the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Roberts slashed .266/.342/.366 over parts of 10 major-league seasons.

Even many proponents of the #NoGroundballs club would look at Roberts as an exception, a player who should put the ball on the ground to ensure that his speed is a factor as often as possible. As a layman of hitting mechanics, that concept makes sense to this author.

“I think that’s what Dave did. He made it to the big leagues,” Latta said of hitting ground balls. “But I think Dave Roberts could have had an outstanding career. He had incredible makeup. He’s a phenomenal manager because of his makeup and the way he approached the game. Good outfielder. But what happens if he suddenly hits like a Justin Turner? (Turner is a Latta client.) He could have been one of the great lead-off men of his generation.”

Had he worked with Roberts, Latta would have recommended dramatic swing changes. Perhaps today’s Roberts comp is Billy Hamilton: a player with incredible speed but whose swing and whose ability to hit have limited his overall value and the utility of his speed. Hamilton is a player who has probably been coached to hit the ball on the ground since he began playing baseball. With changes to his approach and swing, Latta thinks, the offensively challenged Hamilton could get to some untapped potential. (Hamilton has a 60 wRC+ for the season and 70 for his career.)

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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
Chicago NL at New York NL | 19:10 ET
Lackey (70.1 IP, 95 xFIP-) vs. deGrom (72.0 IP, 76 xFIP-)
As noted by Dave Cameron already this morning, the 2017 MLB draft begins tonight. The event provides an opportunity to contemplate the respective futures of talented young amateur players. It also represents an occasion on which to remember the (sometimes unlikely) origins of talented current majors leaguers.

One such talented current major leaguer is right-hander Jacob deGrom, who was selected by the Mets out of Stetson University in the ninth round of the 2010 draft. A player selected at that point in the draft can be expected to produce, on average, slightly more than a win over the course of his entire career. Since 1965, pitchers drafted in the ninth round who subsequently signed with the selecting club have recorded 0.6 WAR a piece. As for deGrom, he’s already compiled 13 career wins, or 20 times more than one might expect by that measure. He is, like all of us, an anomaly.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Aaron Judge’s latest home runs, Terrance Gore’s first home run, the Angels without Mike Trout, and a Mets precedent for the odd Neifi Perez appearance discussed on the previous episode, then talk to listener Ryan Nelson about his research into which teams have had the most and least recent success in the amateur draft and what fans should expect from a typical team’s draft class.

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