Martin Cervenka is looking to join a select group of his countrymen. Currently the lone product of the Czech Republic in professional baseball, the 24-year-old native of Prague is hoping to follow John Stedronsky (1879), Frank Rooney (1914), and Carl Linhart (1952) as the only Czech-born players to see big-league action.

Cervenka has been climbing the ladder slowly, but surely. Signed by Cleveland when he was 16, he began playing stateside two years later — the Indians wanted him to finish high school first — and he’s currently strapping on his catcher’s gear in Lynchburg. He’s also swinging a much-improved bat. In 32 games with the high-A Hillcats, Cervenka is slashing .280/.328/.407.

Competition-wise, it’s a long way from Prague to pro ball.

“Back home, it’s a bunch of clubs playing on weekends only,” explained Cervenka, who estimated there are “five or six” baseball diamonds in Prague. “There are 10 teams in the top league, and something like 14 teams in the second league. In total, they play about 55 games a year. There are some really good players, though. We have one of the top four or five (national) teams in Europe.”

Outside of Czech baseball’s small inner circle, even the best players are largely anonymous. Despite his unique standing, Cervenka is basically John Doe. 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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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
Arizona at San Diego | 22:10 ET
Ray (45.1 IP, 86 xFIP-) vs. Perdomo (34.1 IP, 70 xFIP-)
Among starters who’ve recorded 30 or more innings so far this season, San Diego’s Luis Perdomo has produced the very best ground-ball rate (70.5%). What else he’s done — and what represents a departure from his rookie campaign last year — is also to miss bats at an above-average rate. Pairing those two results with such frequency is rare. By way of illustrating how rare, please consider the following handcrafted chart, which identifies not only Perdomo but also other who’ve recorded a similar combo pacakge of outcomes so far this season.

Dallas Keuchel, Lance McCullers, and Alex Wood are objectively effective pitchers. Perdomo’s teammate Trevor Cahill hasn’t previously been so effective, but is now effective. Shall one conclude that Perdomo is likely to be effective, as well? One shall, probably.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Arizona or San Diego Radio.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on a few topics from their previous episode, including allowing first career hits, defining jams and, naturally, bat-boning, then banter about the Mets and Kenley Jansen and discuss why we’re seeing fewer fastballs and Clayton Kershaw vs. Chris Sale.

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PITTSBURGH – Daniel Murphy spends much of his offseason in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, where he hits in the batting cages of his alma mater, Jacksonville University. He works out there alongside his brother, who is also an alumnus of the program and who is also a local high-school coach. At the university, with his brother’s high-school team, Murphy will often talk about the craft of hitting with amateur players.

Murphy is, of course, one of a number of hitters who has changed his swing, improved his launch angle, and enjoyed significant success and improvement. He was an early adopter along with the usual names mentioned like Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez. But as Murphy talks to players at the grassroots level about swing concepts, he notices there are often curious looks when he discusses the idea of hitting fly-balls.

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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
New York AL at Tampa Bay | 19:10 ET
Severino (42.0 IP, 68 xFIP-) vs. Ramirez (24.2 IP, 82 xFIP-)
Typically, when a pitcher records an ERA that’s a whole run higher than his xFIP, the result is a bad ERA. Luis Severino’s fielding-independent numbers have been so good this year, however, that despite allowing an extra run every nine innings, he’s still been better than average overall. Among his main virtues is arm speed: Severino has produced the highest average fastball velocity among qualifiers by nearly a full mph. Among not his virtues is allowing home runs. As for prudence, justice, etc., the author lacks sufficient knowledge of the situation to comment.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Tampa Bay Radio.

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These days, we’re blessed with a number of amazing young shortstops. Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager, for example, are already among baseball’s top players. Manny Machado is a shortstop who just accidentally plays third base. All of them are younger than 25.

Second base isn’t as notable for its youth. Last year, however, second basemen recorded one of the top collective offensive lines at the position in the history of the game. Good job, second basemen.

So both positions are experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. This led me to wonder which teams might be benefiting most from that renaissance. It’s rare that teams can keep a second baseman and shortstop together long enough to form a lasting and effective double-play combo. Right now, MLB has some pretty great ones. But which is the greatest — particularly, on the defensive side of thing? Let’s explore.

First, we want to know who has played together for awhile. Since the start of the 2015 season, 21 players have played at least 200 games as a shortstop, and 23 have done the same at second base. Cross-referencing them and weeding out the players who have played for multiple teams, we get the following list:

That’s a pretty good list. There are some tough omissions here. The most notable is the Angels, as Andrelton Simmons hasn’t been with them long enough to meet our bar here. Given Johnny Giavotella’s defensive contributions, however, we can guess that the combo here would be quite one-sided. Also excluded are teams with new double-play combos, like the Dodgers and Mariners. Not only are the Logan Forsythe-Corey Seager and Robinson Cano–Jean Segura combos new this season, but thanks to injuries they haven’t even played together much this season. Cano-Segura has only happened 22 times this season, and Forsythe-Seager only 10 times.

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On Wednesday, Aaron Loup threw this up-and-in fastball.

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