FanGraphs Baseball

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
Toronto at Cleveland | 19:10 ET
Stroman (119.0 IP, 81 xFIP-) vs. Salazar (55.0 IP, 81 xFIP-)
The author’s haphazardly constructed algorithm has identified today’s Toronto-Cleveland game as the most appealing. While, at this point in the season, a club’s playoff odds — and, specifically, the proximity of those odds to 50% by the coin-flip method — are weighted more heavily than pitching-related variables, the performances this year by Marcus Stroman and Danny Salazar have been exceptional or something like exceptional this year. This, in conclusion, accounts for the logic behind the selection of this game as the day’s most appealing.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.

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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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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 and midseason lists released by Baseball America or BP’s recent midseason top-50 list — 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.

Yonny Chirinos, RHP, Tampa Bay (Profile)
This represents Chirinos’s third consecutive appearance among the Five. His start this week, on Wednesday against Pirates affiliate Indianapolis, was consistent with the others he’s produced over the past month or so. Against 26 batters over 6.0 innings, the 23-year-old right-hander recorded an 8:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio and conceded his lone earned run on a homer (box).

Chirinos continues to exhibit impressive comfort with his secondary pitches, showing a willingness to throw them in all counts. Indeed, he began his most recent appearance with three different pitches, all for strikes, to dispatch swiftly of Indy leadoff hitter Eury Perez.

This video footage documents that sequence:

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Heading into the year, the Mariners plan seemed to be to acquire as many low-ceiling middling prospects as they could find and throw them all at the wall, hoping one or two would help stabilize the back end of the team’s rotation. Over the last year and change, they’ve acquired and started Ariel Miranda, Dillon Overton, Chase De Jong, Chris Heston, Christian Bergman, and Ryan Weber. Thanks to a .220 BABIP, Miranda’s been a reasonable enough starter for the team, but most of the other guys made a few low-quality appearances and were then shipped back to Triple-A.

But the Mariners are apparently undeterred, and are trying this strategy one more time.

#Mariners acquire LHP Marco Gonzales from St. Louis for minor league OF Tyler O’Neill.

— Ryan Divish (@RyanDivish) July 21, 2017

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The other day in the Giants’ clubhouse, I told Jeff Samardzija he was close to setting a record. “I don’t want to hear about it,” laughed the amicable righty. “No, no, a good one,” I pointed out, informing him of how he’s close to recording the best strikeout-to-walk figure of all time.

“Doesn’t mean I don’t have plenty to figure out,” he responded back.

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It’s been an utterly lost season for the San Francisco Giants. Sure, it’s not an even year, so finding the Giants outside of the playoff mix isn’t a total shock, but the second-worst record in baseball? Not exactly what Bay Area fans had in mind.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about UCLA’s pitcher overuse problem. At one point in that piece, I provided a comparison between league-wide and Bruins-only Pitch Smart violation rates. Pitch Smart represents a series of guidelines designed to protect the health of young athletes.

The NCAA benchmarks I reported in that post on UCLA were slightly different than those I found last August, as Pitch Smart’s age 19–22 guidelines have changed over the past year.

A brief summary of the old and new criteria:

By and large, the 2016 and 2017 guidelines are similar. But there are two differences: one is a change in the pitch boundary separating three- and four-day rest periods; the other is in the fine print, where it’s recommended that pitchers shouldn’t be used on three consecutive days. Because that qualification didn’t exist last year, there was a loophole in the “rules.” MLB and USA Baseball didn’t (and still don’t) set a firm ceiling for workloads — they say that the appropriate limit varies from arm to arm — so pitchers could throw fewer than 30 pitches each and every day without defying the guidelines. Now, a Pitch Smart-adhering pitcher can’t string together more than two straight outings.

Let’s look at how often the average NCAA pitcher defies both editions of Pitch Smart recommendations. Both sets of violation rates are broken up by class year for the 2012–2015 NCAA pitcher population.

The guideline adjustments send nearly all collegiate violation rates upward. In the regular season, the figures only rise by a few ticks. But when it comes to tournament appearances, rates increase by an extra 1% for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The end result is a further magnification of the overuse issues across college baseball. The older a pitcher gets, the more likely a coach is to abuse his arm. And violation rates rise sharply in the NCAA tournament, where upperclassmen are being used irresponsibly in over 10% of their appearances.

This is Matt Swartz’ fifth piece as part of his July residency at FanGraphs. A former contributor to FanGraphs and the Hardball Times — and current contributor to MLB Trade Rumors — Swartz also works as consultant to a Major League team. You can find him on Twitter here. Read the work of all our residents here.

When I tell people about my side career as a baseball analyst, they frequently ask me of what research I’m most proud. The answer? The work I did establishing that teams receive fewer WAR per Dollar when signing free agents away from other teams than when re-signing their own players.

My clearest and most thorough analysis of this topic came in the 2012 Hardball Times Annual. The results were initially met with strong skepticism when I published a post on the topic at Baseball Prospectus back in 2010. It took a couple years of evidence before I was able to persuade the sabermetric community that it was true — and, more importantly, that the reason for this phenomenon was that teams re-signing their own players had better information on them.

My 2012 Hardball Times Annual article tested and confirmed that this held true for a variety of players. Traded MLB players and traded minor-league prospects both tended to underperform their projections when compared to untraded players.

What’s the significance of this discovery? Generally speaking, it means that an “average” player who reaches free agency is overvalued by his projections relative to another “average” player who doesn’t reach free agency. So much of sabermetric analysis involves looking at free agents. Suddenly, I had research indicating that such analysis was based on a biased sample. The results immediately colored every potential free-agent signing. With every free agent I encountered afterward, I began asking myself: “is there some reason this player’s original team let him go?”

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Faced with an expensive market for premium starting pitching, but in possession of one of the least effective rotations in the majors, the Twins are reportedly close to finalizing a deal for left-handed Braves pitcher Jaime Garcia.

Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press has more information:

The Braves would pick up less than half of Garcia’s remaining obligation, the person with direct knowledge said, but that figure was still being discussed along with which player or players the Twins would surrender. Medical reports were still being evaluated as well, but the deal was said to be “very close to final.”

Entering Friday, the Twins (48-46) are surprisingly just a half-game behind the Indians, the reigning AL champs and and heavy division favorites. The Twins are also just a game behind the Yankees for the second Wild Card spot in what is expected to be a bit of a log jam. So there’s some cause for optimism.

At the same time, however, Minnesota ranks 25th in the majors in BaseRuns win percentage (.438), suggesting they’ve benefited considerably from sequencing. Entering Friday, FanGraphs expects the Twins to finish with 78 wins and 84 losses. Overall, the club possesses a 10.6% probability of reaching the postseason according to FanGraphs’ playoff odds — and a 2.6% chance of capturing the division. The projections, in other words, don’t have much belief in the current roster.

So with 68 games to play, the Twins find themselves in a somewhat delicate position, in close proximity to a postseason berth but quite possibly lacking the roster to really go for it.

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