Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman 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. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
San Francisco at Chicago NL | 14:20 ET
Bumgarner (187.2 IP, 86 xFIP-) vs. Arrieta (168.0 IP, 89 xFIP-)
The present author repeats this sentiment below in a tortuous explanation of NERD’s playoff adjustment, but it merits some brief consideration here, as well: per FanGraphs’ playoff odds, the Cubs have now recorded more wins than the Central division’s next-best club, St. Louis, is projected to record by the end of the season.

Regard that same sentiment, in lightly photoshopped form:

What this means is that, as of now, it would be possible for the Cubs to lose all the rest of their games and still likely win the Central division.

As for their opponent today, San Francisco, they currently occupy a very different place: where the Cubs’ near future is more or less settled, the Giants’ is opaque. Whatever methodology one references, the Giants feature roughly an equal chance of winning the division as merely qualifying for a wild-card spot as doing neither.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: San Francisco Radio or Television.

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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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Episode 679
Dave Cameron is the managing editor of FanGraphs. During this edition of FanGraphs Audio, he discusses how the club with the league’s highest payroll has found itself relying on a player who was out of affiliated baseball in 2015, recapitulates some of this experiences at Pitch Talks, and reflects briefly — and forlornly — on FanGraphs’ attempt to publish organizational rankings half a decade ago.

This episode of the program either is or isn’t sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 42 min play time.)

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The Milwaukee Brewers are close to etching a spot in the record books. In a year where the average team attempts 0.72 steals per game, they’re running 1.42 times per game. The closest the league’s ever come to that rate is 1987. That year, a combination of Vince Coleman, Harold Reynolds, and Willie Wilson tested the peripheral vision of pitchers and catchers league-wide.

Relative to league average in 2016, this year’s Brew Crew is way out in front:

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Sometimes very talented position players stall on their way to the majors but stick around until they finally make good on their potential. Other times, slightly less talented position players keep slowly moving up the rungs of the minor-league ladder until they finally get their chance. This latter path marks the one traveled by Ryan Schimpf of the San Diego Padres, who is one of the better old rookies of the last half-century.

On the pitching side, however — especially where starters are concerned — the good old rookie is a more rare commodity. Junior Guerra is one such rookie, though, and the 31-year-old — off the disabled list tonight for the Milwaukee Brewers — is having one of the more remarkable pitching seasons in major-league history.

If you are a fan of either the Milwaukee Brewers or Carson Cistulli, you are likely familiar with Guerra. As to the former, Guerra has pitched very well this season, making 17 starts with a 2.93 ERA (68 ERA-), 3.65 FIP (84 FIP-), and 2.3 WAR on the season. As to the latter, regard:

• In early May 2015, after Guerra’s first 24.2 innings in an MLB organization in half a decade, Cistulli placed Guerra in his Fringe Five, noting that he had been signed by the White Sox out of the Italian league after having also pitched professionally in Spain and Wichita. (He’s pitched in Mexico, too, but after his release by the Mets in 2009, he went six seasons without pitching for an MLB organization).
• Just one day later, so entranced by Guerra’s profile, Cistulli furthered his study of the aging prospect in a post, showing off his mid-90s fastball and devastating splitter in helpful .gif form.
• That season, Guerra appeared not once, not twice, but three more times that year in the Fringe Five, making him one of the most prevalent players in Cistulli’s weekly exercise with his pace only slowed by four relief innings in the majors with the Chicago White Sox, who placed him on waivers at season’s end, when he was picked up by the Milwaukee Brewers.
• To nobody’s surprise, Cistulli then placed Guerra in his Fringe Five earlier this season, and when Guerra made his debut for Milwaukee, Cistulli called it a Jubilee Event.

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For the second straight year, I have been given the right to cast a vote for the National League Cy Young Award. Last year, the task of picking between three deserving winners was practically impossible, and I ended up going with Jake Arrieta over Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke by the thinnest of margins. After last year’s embarrassment of riches, however, it looks like this year, the choice will come down to picking between some candidates with some more obvious flaws.

Just going by runs allowed, there’s a big pile of guys who have all been roughly similar in value.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman 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. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Toronto at Tampa Bay | 19:10 ET
Stroman (167.0 IP, 78 xFIP-) vs. Cobb (Season Debut)
Last year, Toronto starting pitchers combined to produce a collective 10.9 WAR. This year, with roughly a month remaining in the season, they’ve already surpassed that mark, having recorded 12.3 WAR as a group entering play today. Naturally, Aaron Sanchez (3.7 WAR) and J.A. Happ (2.7 WAR) have been central to that effort — and have produced numbers roughly equivalent to Stroman’s own 3.0 mark. Normalize for the vagaries of home-run allowance, however, and Stroman not only represents the best pitcher on his own club, but the third-best starter among all major-league qualifiers. Translating that to run-prevention would benefit the Blue Jays greatly, which club currently faces among the least certain postseason scenarios in the majors.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

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I hadn’t planned on talking to Zack Greinke about the game he’d started the night before, but then, for the second time in his career and the first time since his rookie year, he went six innings and recorded only one strikeout. It was a win for the team, but maybe not his finest game, that one against the Giants on Tuesday night. So I had to say something. “They make a lot of contact,” he grumbled, “but it wasn’t ideal.”

When I asked him if anything was different, he shrugged. “Against guys like Denard Span, Ben Revere, Buster Posey, I’m not going to spend a lot of pitches going for the strikeout. They make too much contact.”

We’ve heard this sort of thing before, of course. Pitching to contact is even espoused as a general philosophy by some organizations. But it’s a little surprising to hear from this pitcher, who regularly strikes out 200 batters a year, even if he’s told us before that pitching to FIP — pitching to limit the walks and increase the strikeouts — just led to hard contact in the zone.

He also gave us a name! Denard Span, he of the 3.7% career swinging strike rate, good for 11th-best overall since he’s been in the league. Span, because of his contact-oriented skill st, has forced Greinke to approach him differently.

So let’s look at Greinke’s plan against Span this past Tuesday and see what he was trying to do.

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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 in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) received a future value grade of 45 or less from Dan Farnsworth during the course of his organizational lists and who (b) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on a midseason list or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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.

Yandy Diaz, 3B/OF, Cleveland (Profile)
Last week, August Fagerstrom wrote a piece documenting how, in the absence of Michael Brantley, Cleveland’s Jose Ramirez had performed an admirable impression of the injured outfielder. Here’s how he summarized the similarities between the two players:

Brantley never struck out; Ramirez has never struck out. Brantley ran a league-best 92% contact rate; Ramirez this year is 11th, at 88%. Brantley walked enough to turn his elite batting average into an elite on-base percentage; Ramirez has done the same. Brantley suddenly began hitting for more power than folks had expected; Ramirez has 10 dingers.

Now that Ramirez has become Brantley, that leaves the role of Jose Ramirez available to another member of the Cleveland system. The most likely candidate to fill that vacandy? Yandy Diaz. Like Ramirez, he’s always recorded excellent contact rates. Like Ramirez, he’s always recorded above-average walk rates. Like Ramirez, he’s exhibited more power as he’s ascended through the affiliated ranks. And like Ramirez, he’s demonstrated positional flexibility, as well.

This past week has been representative of Diaz at his best. Over 24 plate appearances for Triple-A Columbus, the 25-year-old Cuban has recorded walk and strikeout rates of 8.3% each while also producing a .273 isolated-power figure on the strength of three doubles and home run — this while making starts at third base, left field, and right field.

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