Episode 668
Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses his observations — regarding St. Louis prospect Alex Reyes, for example — from the Futures Games; considers the projections versus scouting reports on Andrew Benintendi and Alex Bregman; plus also chronicles his transcontinental scouting trip.

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 1 hr 2 min play time.)

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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
Miami at Philadelphia | 19:05 ET
Fernandez (107.1 IP, 57 xFIP-) vs. Nola (96.0 IP, 72 xFIP-)
If Benjamin Franklin didn’t say it expressly, then he certainly thought it once or twice: the key in this life is to budget one’s resources properly — not just money, but also one’s energy and one’s time. It’s imperative, this practice, to keeping the mind sana and the body sano.

Today, the author utilized almost the entirety of his alloted time for this post to composing the unwieldy description of NERD’s postseason adjustment, which appears below. As a result, there’s no discussion of today’s most highly rated game.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Philadelphia Radio.

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With Tyler Thornburg traded to Boston today, we’re re-featuring this post, since it is now relevant again.

We are now officially two weeks away from MLB’s non-waiver trade deadline, and one thing is clear: over the next 14 days, you’re going to see a lot of relievers on the move. The teams that are definitely selling don’t have many starting pitchers to move, and the crop of walk-year hitters isn’t so great either, but what these non-contenders do have an excess of are relief pitchers.

Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller from the Yankees. Alex Colome and Xavier Cedeno from the Rays. Tyler Clippard and Daniel Hudson from the Diamondbacks. Ryan Madson and John Axford from the A’s. Jeanmar Gomez from the Phillies and Joe Smith from the Angels will probably be on the move, and that isn’t even counting guys like Mark Melancon or Steve Cishek who could get moved if things go south for their teams over the next couple of weeks. With nearly every contender looking at bolstering their bullpen, there’s enough demand to clear the supply of available relievers, but we’re definitely not looking at a shortage at the position like there are at other spots this year.

But yet, if I was hunting for a relief pitcher over the next two weeks, my first call would be to the Milwaukee Brewers. They’ve been baseball’s most aggressive team in remaking their roster since David Stearns took over last year, and you know that front office is looking for any opportunity they can to add long-term value, knowing their chances at contention over the next few years are slim at best.

Jeremy Jeffress, the team’s closer, is already generating plenty of trade chatter, as you’d expect from a closer with 23 saves, a 2.35 ERA, and a 96 mph fastball, but he’s not the guy I’d be after. Will Smith would have been a really interesting name if he hadn’t blown out his knee in Spring Training, and while he’s recovered enough to get back on the mound, he doesn’t really look like his old self right now; missing velocity and strikeout rates lead me to guess that the Brewers hold onto Smith and hope he rebuilds some value as he gets further away from the injury, then look to move him over the winter or next summer.

No, the guy I’d want is Tyler Thornburg.

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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
Baltimore at Tampa Bay | 13:10 ET
Bundy (38.0 IP, 116 xFIP-) vs. Odorizzi (104.2 IP, 101 xFIP-)
A lot hasn’t gone particularly well for Dylan Bundy over the last few years. After having been selected fourth overall in 2011 out of an Oklahoma high school and then promptly dispatching all manner of hitter up to Double-A as just a 19-year-old, Bundy experienced arm trouble which required surgery. Since then, he’s failed to reproduce the ecstatic promise of his first year — failed until this most recent month, that is. One wouldn’t necessarily notice it even by examining Bundy’s full-season numbers, but he’s been excellent recently.

Regard:

That’s Bundy over the most recent month (on bottom) compared to all of Bundy from before that. The difference is stark. More strikeouts, fewer walks, more ground balls — and he’s throwing harder. Which, perhaps that last variable is responsible for the first three: greater arm speed tends to have positive consequences beyond just a better fastball.

Of course, all that’s been in relief because all of Bundy’s career appearances have been in relief. This is his first start as a major leaguer. The point, though: Bundy appears more well prepared to handle a starting role now than the last couple years would lead one to suppose.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Tampa Bay Radio or Baltimore Television.

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Shin-Soo Choo and Jurickson Profar could have been pitchers. Both attracted the attention of scouts as hard-throwing amateurs. Choo starred for South Korea when they won the 2000 World Junior Championships and was named the tournament’s top pitcher. Profar excelled on the mound for Willemstad, Curacao when they won the 2004 Little League World Series and again when they lost in the finals the following year.

Each feels he could have gone on to pitch at the highest level. A big difference is that Profar didn’t want to pitch. Choo thought he was going to.

“I found out when I got to the States (in 2000) that I would be a hitter,” explained Choo, who originally signed with Seattle. “I thought I was coming here to be a pitcher. But I wasn’t the one making the decision. At first I was confused. Now I’m happy, because I get to play every day and not every five days.”

Making it to MLB as a position player was Profar’s goal from the start. Read the rest of this entry »

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(s)
Cleveland (Bauer) at Minnesota (Duffey) | 19:10 ET
Los Angeles NL (McCarthy) at Arizona (Bradley) | 20:10 ET
These two games receive the same precise score — to the 100th of a point — per the author’s haphazardly constructed algorithm. In the case both of Cleveland and Los Angeles, one finds talented clubs which feature greater than a 50% chance of qualifying for the divisional series. In the case of Minnesota and Arizona, one finds… not that. But then does find, on the other hand, at least a small collection of promising youth. Consider: the Diamondbacks feature the lowest average batters age (weighted by plate appearances) in the majors; the Twins, the fourth-lowest. Jake Lamb (3.2 WAR), Jean Segura (2.0 WAR), Robbie Grossman (1.2 WAR), Miguel Sano (1.0 WAR) are all in the midst of their age-26 season or something less than that, and all have recorded at least a win this year. Observing those two clubs, one is observes the future of baseball. But not literally. And maybe not even that figuratively. Not all of these brief entries are literary gold.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio, Los Angeles NL 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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Luis Valbuena has a 157 wRC+ since the beginning of June playing third base for the Houston Astros. Super-prospect Alex Bregman is beating down the door with his performance at Triple-A. Perfect fits be damned. Try and tell a contending club it’s got too many good players. They’ll find some room.

MLB.com’s Jesse Sanchez just broke some news:

Source: INF Yulieski Gurriel agrees to 5-year, $47.5 million deal with #Astros #Cuba More on https://t.co/mkcBseoZWQ pic.twitter.com/6uj12AgGGL

— Jesse Sanchez (@JesseSanchezMLB) July 15, 2016

Let’s get brought up to speed. Gurriel (previously spelled Gourriel) is 32, and he’s been considered Cuba’s best baseball player for about a decade. He’s primarily played third base, and also kicked around at shortstop and, more recently, second base. In 15 years between Cuba and Japan, Gurriel hit .335/.417/.580 with 250 homers and 121 steals. In early February, Yulieski and his younger brother Lourdes Jr., 22, defected from the island. In June, Yulieski was declared a free agent, able to sign with any club free of international spending limits. He’d been linked to the Dodgers, of course. The Mets had shown some interest. The Angels seemed to make some sense. Now, he’s an Astro.

BaseballAmerica’s Ben Badler worked up a scouting report on Gurriel last April in which he called him a plus defender at third with quick reactions, athleticism, a 70-grade arm, and the occasional mental lapse. He’s a complete hitter who bats from the right side, able to hit for average and draw a walk, and scouts see good bat speed that should translate to plus power in the majors. At the time, Badler drew comps to Hanley Ramirez and David Wright, which don’t sound so great anymore, but remember this was before the beginning of the 2015 season; Ramirez was coming off a 135 wRC+ at third base with the Dodgers, Wright was still Wright. Brian Cartwright does good work translating international player’s stat lines to MLB equivalents, and he projected Gurriel for a .283/.330/.458 line back in February, good for a .340 wOBA. There’s no expectation that Gurriel won’t hit.

Five years for a 32-year-old is perhaps a bit scary, and it’s a little more than what Dave Cameron estimated he might get last month, but Gurriel makes the Astros better now. Or, more accurately, in three weeks or so, which is when FOXSports’ Ken Rosenthal reports he’ll be ready to join the club. The Astros plan to keep Gurriel at third base, which creates an interesting positional logjam in Houston.

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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
Boston at New York AL | 19:05 ET
Wright (114.0 IP, 103 xFIP-) vs. Pineda (95.1 IP, 77 xFIP-)
Steven Wright and Michael Pineda are the same and also different. Like, for example, they possess probably 95% or 98% or whatever of the same genetic material. Because humans possess mostly the same genetic material. So, basically the same. But also, one of them’s a giant person from the Dominican, while the other is a more traditionally sized person from Torrance. So, rather different.

Here’s another manner in which they’re the same: they’ve both produced ERA numbers so far this season that’re wildly different than what their fielding-independent marks would otherwise suggest. But here’s also how they’re different: while Wright has very much outperformed his xFIP, Pineda has underperformed it.

Regard, by way of illustration, this table, which features the top-five qualified pitchers by absolute difference between xFIP- and ERA-:

It’s very likely that the appearnce of both pitchers here is more than a product of randomness. Wright, a knuckleballer, is almost certain to outperform his fielding-independent numbers. And as for Pineda, the opposite has been a trend, as well. Enough of a trend that one ought to regard it as a reflection of his “true talent”? Sure. Not to this degree. But sure.

This, in conclusion, has represented an attempt to identify a narrative where none was readily apparent.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Boston Radio.

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Of all the statistical advances made in the recent past, exit velocity seems to get the most attention. Broadcasts that still shy away from discussions of WAR or wRC+ or UZR are readily using exit velocity on batted balls. Part of that could be the novelty of it, and part of it is just a fascination with how hard and how far a ball is capable of being hit. Part of it could also be a sort of familiarity. Home-run distance has long been included in broadcasts, as has been a pitcher’s velocity. Exit velocity is an easy expansion of those numbers.

That said, exit velocity isn’t just a novelty. Despite issues with the data and the importance of launch angle and batted-ball data as a means to providing context, a player’s average exit velocity can tell us a decent bit of information about a player. With another half of data available (thanks to our own Jeff Zimmerman for his assistance gathering data), we can attempt to determine whether exit velocity from last season carried over to this season.

When I looked over the winter, the correlation on an individual player level between wOBA and exit velocity was relatively strong (r=.61) over the course of 2015 for players who had played a majority of that year. That number is not as strong so far this year (r=.50), but we are also dealing with a larger (237) universe of players with a lower level (200) of plate appearances over the first half of this season. It will be interesting to see if the correlation climbs a little higher as the season continues.

Last year, there was a solid relationship between first-half and second-half exit velocity. To determine how much of last year’s numbers carried over to this season, I compared the 116 players who recorded at least 200 plate appearances in each of the last three half-seasons. First-half exit velocity from 2015 correlated well with first-half exit velocity for 2016 (r^2=.52), but not as well as second half of 2015 with first half of 2016 (r^2=.57). The strongest relationship between the periods was between the entire 2015 season and the first half of 2016 (r^2=.62).

If you want the best bet for what a player will do this year, looking at a full year of data is the way to go based on the information we have, but we don’t know if that is uniform for all players. What about the players who experienced changes from the first half of 2015 to the second half of 2015? Did those changes carry over? Yes and no.

• For the 33 players who had large increases in the second half last year (at least 1.5 mph increase), the second-half exit velocity had a slightly higher correlation than 2015 total (r^2=.51 compared to .47). A good second half of exit velocity might be a harbinger of continued higher numbers.
• For the 23 players who produced a decrease of at least 0.5 mph, the decrease seemed to have less bearing, as there was a smaller correlation (r^2=.38) for the second half of 2015 to the first half of 2016 compared to 2015 as a whole to the first half of 2016 (r^2=.44). A dropoff in the second half in terms of exit velocity is less important than the full year of numbers, it would seem.
• For the players who had relatively consistent halves in 2015, those numbers have carried forward to 2016 (r^2=.74).

When I looked at the numbers over the winter, I was hoping to find some sort of application for the data I found. Everything else is fun to figure out (depending on your definition of fun), but to find something with utility would be most interesting. I looked at the population of players last season whose wOBA seemed to underperform or overperform their exit velocity — i.e., players who’d recorded above-average exit velocity but below-average numbers, and vice versa. I found that those players who underperformed their exit velocity in the first half saw their offensive numbers rise in the second half. Similarly, players whose offensive numbers seemed to overperform their exit velocity tended to have weaker number in the second half. Taking a look at those players for the first half of the season is probably worth a post on its own, so we’ll hold off on that for now.

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