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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Almost right after after treating us to Tyler Glasnow day, the Pirates are giving us another promising debutante to fuss over. First base prospect Josh Bell will debut for Pittsburgh in tonight’s game against the Cubs. Bell crushed Triple-A pitching this year to the tune of .324/.407/.535.

Bell posted a healthy .212 ISO in Triple-A this year, but in years past, he’s hit for an underwhelming amount of power — especially for a 6-foot-4 first baseman. Between 2014 and 2015 combined, he managed just 16 homers, and didn’t exactly compensate with loads of doubles and triples. Instead, he made lots of contact, which resulted in loads of singles. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonah Keri and Dave Cameron at the Wilbur Theatre (photo by Michelle Jay).

Last night, a collection of the Boston area’s most notable analysts and writers — plus a few guests from elsewhere, too — made their way to the Wilbur Theatre as a part of the Pitch Talks series. The night involved stories from former major-league pitcher Bill Lee, insight from Boston Red Sox general manager Mike Hazen, and riveting analysis about the state of the sport itself. One of the topics discussed by several of the local beat writers was the direction of the coverage of the game.

“It’s a way to connect with fans personally that you don’t get very often,” said Evan Drellich, the Red Sox beat writer for the Boston Herald. “It’s nice to hear what’s on people’s minds, and try to give an answer. The feeling you always have walking away is we could have gone on talking more, or you wish you could have gone down this road. These discussions are just the tip of the iceberg in all subjects.”

While the panel of Red Sox writers (Alex Speier, Peter Abraham, Dan Shaughnessy, Jen McCaffrey, and Evan Drellich) spoke about the state of the Red Sox — from the lack of dominance of David Price to the recent trade of Aaron Hill — they also touched on the way social media’s presence has affected the way games are covered.

One topic in particular was the lack of diversity in the field of sports writing. Shaughnessy pointed out there are no full-time female sportswriters currently at the Boston Globe, and McCaffrey was the only woman analyst who spoke during the four segments at the event.

McCaffrey, who writes for MassLive.com, also discussed the way social media has changed the way news is reported. The trade for Hill by Boston just a half hour before the event began was an example of how news breaks faster, with Drellich mentioning during the panel that he had missed the trade and within minutes of it happening, found out Red Sox president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski was already conducting a conference call.

The panel also took questions from fans, which ranged from further discussion about diversity in the media, to why the credentialing process in Boston is more difficult than elsewhere, to what the Red Sox can do at the trade deadline. With the flood of mentions and questions on social media, being able to hear analysts discuss questions with audience members was a refreshing and different experience.

“This is one of the more fun parts of the job,” said FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron. “I think sometimes the commentary on Twitter or online can be a little bit negative, people like to give you more negative than positive feedback, so it’s nice to have these events where you can say ‘Oh, people actually do enjoy our work and what we do’ and get together as a community.”

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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
Washington at New York NL | 19:10 ET
Strasburg (99.2 IP, 73 xFIP-) vs. Syndergaard (101.0 IP, 57 xFIP-)
The author is quoting himself and plagiarizing others when he states that, at its best, sport acts as a medium by which one can observe people working at the outer margins of human potential. Tonight’s encounter between Stephen Strasburg and Noah Syndergaard represents the apogee of this virtue in sport — provided that’s how one uses the word apogee. Stephen Strasburg throws hard and features excellent command. Noah Syndergaard throws hard and features excellent command. Observing the pair, the spectator has the opportunity to be transformed — or, at the very least, to be diverted temporarily from this cavalcade of horrors.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

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Three seasons ago, Matt Harvey was one of the best pitchers in all of major-league baseball. Over 26 starts, his 2.00 FIP was the best among all starters. His 2.27 ERA placed behind only Clayton Kershaw and Jose Fernandez’s marks by that measure. Despite a relative deficit of innings, Harvey’s 6.5 WAR was third among pitchers behind only Clayton Kershaw and Adam Wainwright.

The reason for that low-ish innings total? A partially torn UCL that ended Harvey’s season in August and ultimately required Tommy John surgery. Rehab kept Harvey off the mound for the entire 2014 campaign, as well, but he came back strong in 2015, posting a 2.71 ERA (82 ERA-) and 3.05 FIP (80 FIP-), and proved instrumental in getting the New York Mets into the World Series.

The 2016 campaign has been an up-and-down one for Harvey — and will feature much more down than up going forward, as reports indicate that the right-hander will undergo surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome. For the Mets, the loss of Harvey is a threat to their postseason odds. For Harvey himself, it’s a threat to his career.

On May 20, Eno Sarris wondered, What’s Wrong with Matt Harvey? His conclusion: that maybe the slider wasn’t quite as good as it had been, by movement or location, and that a little bit of work on that pitch might right the ship. For a time after that, Harvey appeared to have gotten things in order. In five starts beginning May 30, Harvey went at least six innings in every start, striking out 25 against five walks with a 2.25 ERA and 2.08 FIP. His strikeouts were down a bit from last year in that stretch (25% to 21%), but his walks also decreased (7% to 4%).

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Yesterday afternoon, Dylan Floro made his major-league debut. Anyone who has ever pitched has pictured what it would be like to stand on a major-league mound for the first time. The dream of striking out the first batter you face. The fear of giving up a home run on your first pitch. There are countless different ways to envision that first trip to the mound playing out, but I somehow doubt Floro ever pictured this happening on the ninth pitch of his major-league career:

That’s a lead-footed future Hall of Famer attempting a steal of second to draw a throw and set up the current greatest position player for a steal of home. That really happened. Albert Pujols stole second and Mike Trout stole home, because in baseball anything is possible. But part of what stood out about this play, beyond the fact that Mike Freaking Trout stole home, is that it served as a reminder that Trout has re-emerged as one of the best base-stealers in the game.

Yesterday, Jeff Sullivan outlined adjustments Trout is making at the plate which have enabled him to sustain his mind-boggling consistent run of greatness — a run which is now in its fifth (!) season. The fact that he’s continually evolving, adjusting, and growing as a player is just one part of what has made Trout such a joy to watch. One of those well-documented changes for Trout came when he lost a bit of speed after swiping 82 bags across his first two full seasons, 2012 and 2013. During the next two years, he didn’t steal nearly as many bases, but the loss in base-running value was offset by the fact that he simultaneously grew into a significant increase in power. 

Slowing down while adding power in his 20s — even his early 20s — was a logical enough progression that we came to accept Trout’s new norm. But now something strange is happening.

Base-stealing Mike Trout is back? Fifteen stolen bases through 86 games puts him on pace for a 28-stolen-base season — more stolen bases than he’s recorded in the past two seasons combined. That’s still not quite the rapid pace of his early seasons, but it’s a remarkably surprising development, nonetheless.

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The Pirates have developed a reputation for their work with pitchers. Ray Searage seems to receive most of the credit, but the club’s recent successes with arms like Francisco Liriano, Edinson Volquez, A.J. Burnett, J.A. Happ, and Joe Blanton is probably a group effort to some degree. No matter who the true pitcher whisperer is, the Pirates have clearly become a team that takes pitchers who weren’t great and turns them into pitchers who are good.

It’s not clear if the club is particularly adept at targeting pitchers who are poised to recover or if they have a formula for fixing arms with strong potential. In either case, all their recent success suggests the Pirates have something working for them that most teams don’t. And when a reputation like that takes hold, it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of assuming they’re going to go on like this forever. Call it a Ray Searage halo.

Unfortunately for the Pirates, the halo has not protected Jon Niese.

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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 an updated prospect 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.

Greg Allen, OF, Cleveland (Profile)
This represents Allen’s sixth appearance among the Five proper this year — the top mark among prospects who don’t also possess the exact same DNA, arranged in precisely the same manner, as Sherman Johnson. Allen has been both (a) incredible overall and (b) even more incredible recently. Regard, by way of illustration, the following table, which contains certain of Allen’s most relevant numbers relative to the 200 other qualified position players across all of High-A.

Naturally, this isn’t a perfect method: the run enivornments of the Carolina League (to which Allen belongs) differ from those of the California and Florida State Leagues, the former possessing greater offensive production; the latter, less. Still, one finds that the Cleveland outfielder possesses elite numbers by several different measures.

The effect is heightened when one compares Allen’s numbers since May 27th (the date of his first appearance among the Five) against all the same qualified batters — a sample of 152 plate appearances.

If one interested in identifying a plus hit tool merely by numbers alone, Allen is an ideal case study. He’s recorded one of the top three walk rates at High-A while also recording one of the top three (which is to say, lowest) strikeout rates — while also converting batted balls into hits at a rate higher than almost everyone else.

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