The draft happened recently. I’m not a draft expert, which is why I seldom write about it, but one of my favorite and least-favorite things about the draft are the player comps. I like them for the color, but I dislike them for the hype. The draft does have to do something to sell itself, and the casual public wouldn’t benefit if drafted players kept getting compared to guys who never made it out of Double-A, but too many drafted players draw comps to elites, like, say, Roger Clemens, or Clayton Kershaw, or Cal Ripken. It’s like the amateurs are set up to disappoint from the get-go. Comparing amateurs to Hall-of-Famers sets expectations impossibly high, and does little to inform the viewers of the reality that most draft picks go nowhere. Tough sport.

We all remember players who were hyped as something they never became. We all remember players who fell short of their big-league comps. It’s almost impossible for a high pick to turn out as good as his comp, given that comps have mostly had long and successful major-league careers. There are some success stories. Obviously, there’s that Mike Trout fellow. And there’s Manny Machado. Even before he was drafted, Machado was compared to Alex Rodriguez. There were, in fairness, a lot of similarities. In unfairness, Rodriguez is one of the best players in the history of the game. The pressure was on from the beginning. And, say, would you look at that, but Machado is actually starting to resemble the very player who seemed to set too high a bar.

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I don’t know you, but I know you didn’t spend last night watching the Marlins and the Padres. Tom Koehler won. Jeff Mathis hit a grand slam. The most interesting player who appeared for the Padres allowed Jeff Mathis to hit a grand slam. The Marlins aren’t bad, and I know even the worst team in the majors is a team of elites, but, look, there’s compelling baseball and there’s less compelling baseball, and the game didn’t have much of a draw. The Padres did try to rally a bit in the seventh, but they wasted a runner on third with nobody out.

That runner reached by drawing a walk. He was stranded in large part because the two following batters struck out. The Marlins reliever in charge of the inning was one Kyle Barraclough. For the fifth consecutive appearance, he struck out multiple hitters. For the 13th consecutive appearance, he struck out at least one hitter. For the 16th time in his last 18 appearances, he walked at least one hitter. Don’t worry if you didn’t know anything about Barraclough before. You’re about to learn. Really, you already have.

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Last week, I published KATOH projections for the players who were drafted out of college in this year’s amateur draft*. As much as I love my projections, they only can only tell you so much about a player. Knowing a player’s projected WAR over a specified period is interesting, but it’s only one number. It simply tells you where a player falls on a spectrum of “good” and “bad.” It tells you nothing about how that player might accumulate those wins, or what he might look like doing it.

*Day one here, day two here, and day three here.

To put some faces to some of the hitters drafted in the first round, I generated some statistical comps using weighted Mahalanobis Distance calculations to college players since 2002. This analysis considers offensive statistics only, so the comps have not been filtered at all by position. The WAR columns refer to that player’s WAR through age 27.

You may notice that Mariners first-round pick Kyle Lewis isn’t included here. Lewis played in a non-elite conference, which has produced very few big leaguers historically. This made generating a KATOH-style projection for him less than straightforward.

*****

2. Nick Senzel, IF, Cincinnati

Proj. WAR thru age-27: 2.0

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A good way to get smart people to mock you on the internet is to make a big deal about small sample defensive metrics. There are actually a lot things for which people on the internet will mock you, but that’s definitely one of them. For instance, imagine someone told you that Kevin Pillar is the best defender in baseball because his 2016 UZR/150 is 41.3! That assertion would earn some ridicule because a center fielder with a true talent 41.3 UZR/150 would essentially be some kind of baseball magnet positioned behind second base, and I’m given to understand those violate rules 3.09 and 3.10.

Just pointing to a defender’s metrics, be it UZR or DRS, isn’t enough to win an argument. Pillar has a reputation as a great defender, but no one honestly thinks he’s 40 runs better than the average center fielder. At best, that number suggests that Pillar has made great plays at an unsustainable rate, and at worst, it shows that the metrics are imperfectly designed tools that use imperfect data.

In 2015, Pillar accumulated 14 DRS in center (1,236 innings) and 8 DRS in left (120 innings) to go along with his 14.0 UZR in center and 1.5 UZR in left. Over his most recent full season, he was an elite defender; during the first 66 games of 2016 he’s been even better. Pillar currently owns 11 DRS and a 15.4 UZR (all in center). We all acknowledge those estimates are noisy and the precise run values needn’t be taken at face value, but the underlying message is probably right: Kevin Pillar is playing outstanding defense.

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Like any baseball stat, Wins Above Replacement provides the answer to a question. The question, in this case? Something like this: accounting for all the main ways (hitting, running, defense, etc.) in which a player can produce value for his team, how many wins has this particular player been worth?

There are, of course, criticisms of WAR. Some valid, others less so. One prominent criticism is how defensive value is handled in WAR. Some don’t understand how it’s calculated. Others understand but also question how well it represents a player’s defensive contributions. These criticisms shouldn’t be dismissed. As with all baseball statistics, though, it’s necessary to consider WAR in the context in which it’s presented — that is, to remember the question a metric is intended to answer and the method by which it attempts to answer that question.

On Monday, I completed one such reminder in a discussion of players whose WAR totals this year are probably low based on what we know about their defense. Today, I’ll make another attempt — this time, by examining players whose WAR totals are probably inflated by defensive numbers unlikely to be sustained over the course of a season.

In the comments of Monday’s post, one reader, Ernie Camacho, noted:

[T]here is a weird tension in this article between quantifying and estimating what has already happened, on the one hand, and evaluating player talent, on the other. I’m not sure we should be blending the two.

This is a good point. That tension most definitely exists, and it’s possible that some of that tension is what causes people to discount defensive metrics — and WAR as a whole. I agree that, in terms of calculating WAR, we should not be blending what has already happened with what we think will probably happen. Over time, in an ideal world, WAR captures both. In smaller samples, however, this is more difficult to do. In fact, there’s actually something that does capture the blending when we have smaller samples: projections. If we want to capture a player’s talent level at any given moment, projections do that very well.

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We often treat knuckleball pitchers as if they were members of some long-forgotten sect, practicing their secret ninjutsu on the rest of the league with a pitch that defies gravity and cannot be classified. That’s fine, the knuckler is the rarest pitch in baseball, and it has its iconic moments. Let’s not begrudge anyone a little fun.

But once you peal back the layers on the pitch, you start to see that each truism about the knuckler isn’t necessarily true. In fact, there are probably more ways in which the art of throwing a knuckleball is similar to the art of throwing other pitches than it is different. At least, that is, in terms of strategy and outcomes. Mechanics are obviously a different story.

Let’s unpack some of the things we might hear about knuckleballs, and then us the data and the words of R.A. Dickey and Steven Wright to guide our analysis.

Velocity doesn’t matter.

Maybe this isn’t a thing that’s said a ton, but nobody breathlessly reports knuckleball velocity readings the way they do fastball readings, so at least implicitly we’ve decided that speed doesn’t matter as much with the floating butterfly.

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Jose Altuve has 18 steals in 19 attempts this season. No, that’s not the bizarre stat. That’s just an impressive stat. Jose Altuve is an excellent base-stealer! Among the 71 players with at least five steal attempts this year, Altuve’s success rate ranks third. Since he began receiving regular playing time in 2012, no one’s stolen more bases. He’s fast, he steals plenty of bases, and he steals them well. Which is what makes the bizarre stat so bizarre, and here it comes: despite being fast, stealing plenty of bases, and stealing those bases well, Jose Altuve has been a terribly costly base-runner.

It’s easy to assume that good base-stealers are also good base-runners. The best base-stealers, typically, are the fastest guys on the field, and the best base-runners, typically, are those same fastest guys on the field. But if you think about it, aside from simply being fast (which isn’t necessarily a requirement for proficiency in either skill), base-stealing and base-running really aren’t as similar as they might appear. Base-stealing is more about pattern recognition, acceleration, and timing. Base-running has more to do with risk/reward decision-making, fluidity, and instincts. A base-stealer runs in a straight line with a defined endpoint. A base-runner runs in angles. Speed and athleticism is all that really ties these skills together.

Altuve has the speed and athleticism. That’s for sure. But when it comes to his base-running company, he’s the only one:

Look at that list of names. Look at it! It’s literally a list of nine old dudes whom way too many baseball fans believe they could beat in a footrace, and then Jose Altuve, one of the best base-stealers in the world.

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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 Boston | 19:10 ET
Gausman (60.0 IP, 93 xFIP-) vs. Wright (82.0 IP, 101 xFIP-)
At one point, Tyler Wilson was listed as Baltimore’s starting pitcher for this game. Now, he’s not. Now, Kevin Gausman is. The future outcome of this contest is likely different for it: Gausman has been more successful than Wilson in ways that suggest he’ll continue being more successful. As for the effect on the world, this is less clear. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it sets off a tornado in Texas. If Kevin Gausman starts against the Red Sox instead of Tyler Wilson… one doesn’t know. That said, if the state of Texas experiences a particularly fraught week of violent storms, there’s likely to be finger-pointing in the direction of a certain Orioles right-hander.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Baltimore Television or Boston Radio.

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