It was an inauspicious start to the season for Michael Feliz. It’s been an inauspicious start to the season for the entire Houston Astros ballclub. One of them’s turned it around, providing hope to the other.

Feliz’s numbers, on the whole, are impressive, and even they come with something of an asterisk. In 20 innings of relief work, the 22-year-old right-handed rookie has struck out 33 batters and walked four — only two pitchers in baseball currently have a better K-BB%, and they both wear pinstripes. You’ve probably heard of them. The asterisk is that Feliz has walked just four batters all year, and they all came in his season debut, a 107-pitch relief outing back on April 6 after starter Collin McHugh recorded just one out. Feliz was thrust into action in the first, asked to eat innings, faltered, and was promptly sent to the minors for a fresh arm. He was recalled a couple weeks later, and since then, he’s been completely unhittable.

Dating back to that April 26 recall, Feliz has struck out half of the batters he’s faced, and he’s walked none of them. He’s getting ground balls, and he’s working multiple innings. Before the year, you might’ve only known Feliz’s name by being an Astros fan or a prospect hound — while he fell just outside of preseason top-100 prospect lists, most evaluators viewed him as a top-10 piece in a deep Astros’ system. Now, he’s turning heads, with the kind of numbers that practically demand attention.

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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
Pittsburgh at Miami | 19:10 ET
Cole (53.1 IP, 100 xFIP-) vs. Fernandez (60.2 IP, 63 xFIP-)
Were Noah Syndergaard and Nathan Eovaldi and Carlos Martinez and Yordano Ventura — were none of those four to exist, the starters in this game between Pittsburgh and Miami would possess the top two average four-seam velocities among all qualifiers. This presupposes, of course, that Cole and Fernandez weren’t somehow also altered. Which, have Syndergaard and Eovladi and everyone — have they died in this hypothetical scenario? Or have they merely never been born? Is it possible that their presence is detected only by their absence, not unlike a black hole? Can a man step in the same river twice? Of course, he can. As long as he’s brought his towel with him, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Pittsburgh.

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On Monday, the White Sox lost 1-0, so that makes things fairly uncomplicated — they lost because they didn’t score. It happens. Also, they ran into Matt Harvey, and the Mets had reportedly identified a problem with Harvey’s mechanics beforehand, so if Harvey’s back on track now, well, there’s no shame in losing to him. Matt Harvey is an ace, and sometimes aces shut people out.

That’s how the White Sox lost their most recent game. Now let’s talk about the previous games.

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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
St. Louis at Milwaukee | 14:10 ET
Martinez (53.0 IP, 106 xFIP-) vs. Guerra (30.0 IP, 100 xFIP-)
Were one to view — like the author is currently viewing — the NERD game scores for today calculated down to the second decimal, what that one would find is that today’s game between the Cardinals and Brewers actually isn’t the most highly rated. That distinction — which is a strong word for what that is — belongs rather to the Boston-Baltimore encounter (6.09 NERD). The Houston-Arizona game (5.89 NERD) also possesses a higher score than this one (5.80 NERD). What neither of those contests offers, however, is the Brewers’ Junior Guerra, which right-hander features not only one of the world’s top split-finger fastballs, but also sufficient experience abroad to substitute periodically for Rick Steves on the latter’s PBS travel program. Research indicates, for example, that Rick Steves visited San Marino long enough only to produce a five-minute video regarding it, while Guerra recorded over 60 innings as a pitcher there in 2014.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Milwaukee.

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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 Toronto | 13:07 ET
Price (62.1 IP, 70 xFIP-) vs. Dickey (60.2 IP, 99 xFIP-)
Research indicates that knuckleballers typically prevent runs at a rate better their fielding-independent numbers would suggest. R.A. Dickey, whom the reader will recognize as a knuckleballer, is no exception to this rule. Between 2010 (when he began throwing the pitch at about the current rate) and 2015, Dickey produced a 102 xFIP- but 89 ERA- — which is to say, an expected FIP about 2% worse than average, but an ERA about 11% better than average. In 2016, the figures are inverted. Dickey’s recorded a 99 xFIP- and 110 ERA-. “What’s happening?” one is likely asking — about not only R.A. Dickey, probably, but also about this entire frightening world.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Boston.

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Chad Bettis throws both a cutter and a slider. Or maybe he throws cutters but not sliders? That determination largely depends on how you parse pitches. Whatever your opinion, you probably won’t get much of an argument from him. The Rockies right-hander isn’t 100% sure himself.

“Both,” was Bettis’s initial answer to my ‘Cutter or slider?’ question. That was followed by less-than-definitive elaboration.

“It’s the same grip; it’s just me manipulating it to make it shorter or bigger. With one, I’m more behind the ball and with the other I’m a little more on the side of it. When I want to make it a little sweepier, I can. When I want to make it short and tight like a cutter, I can do that too.”

Bettis had a slider at Texas Tech, although he’d already begun developing a cutter by the time Colorado selected him in the second round of the 2010 draft. Prior to last season, the cutter is all he’d thrown in pro ball.

The reintroduction of a slider — if that’s what you choose to call it — came about mostly by accident. 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
New York AL at Tampa Bay | 16:10 ET
Pineda (49.2 IP, 86 xFIP-) vs. Moore (51.0 IP, 95 xFIP-)
Here’s a fact that’s concurrently startling and true and startling: as of Friday night, the Tampa Bay Rays — a club which not only plays in a legitimate pitcher’s park but which also features one of the league’s lowest collective payrolls — led the majors in home runs, having accumulated one more than both the Mets and Orioles. Adjusting for park, one finds that the Rays had produced a home-run rate approximately 2.1 standard deviations better than league average. The next best club by that measure? The Mets, at 1.6 standard deviations above the mean. Here’s who’s been the best at homering for Tampa Bay: Corey Dickerson. As of Friday, he’d recorded homers in 5.6% of his plate appearances. Here’s who’s been second-best: Steve Pearce. He’d also produced a 5.6% mark. Here’s who was third: Steven Souza Jr., at 5.3%. To find the rest of the team’s numbers, the reader will have to perform his or her own calculations. Or, alternatively, abandon all curiosity about the rest of the team’s numbers, thus rendering it unnecessary to perform all those dumb calculations.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Tampa Bay.

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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 655
Eric Longenhagen, previously of ESPN’s Draft Blog and Crashburn Alley (among other sites), has recently been named the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs. On this edition of the program he discusses the top-five prospects of the 2016 MLB draft, the benefit of Atlanta’s recent trade for a competitive-balance pick from Baltimore, and the most notable upcoming events on the scouting — as opposed to the Gregorian — calendar.

This episode of the program is 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 11 min play time.)

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When the December three-way trade between the Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, and Los Angeles Dodgers was announced, you could sense Dodgers’ fans frustration. “Dodgers, Reds, Sox Complete Three-Way Trade Centered Around Todd Frazier,” is a great headline if you’re a Dodgers fan. Until you realize that Frazier isn’t coming to Tinseltown. Surely this was a mistake. After all, Justin Turner was having knee surgery, and how good is he, really? “We need Frazier!” the people of Los Angeles almost certainly said.

Well, it didn’t work out that way for the boys in blue. And, as it turns out, that’s just fine, as Trayce Thompson has been a revelation this season.

Before we get into why and how he’s been a revelation, I want to share a brief nugget of FanGraphs history with you. At one point, we had been considering a book project, and we crafted a few sample pages for it. On one, we placed blurbs for four players, one of whom happened to be Thompson. Here’s the blurb Carson Cistulli wrote for him (click to embiggen):

So, whenever I see Trayce Thompson’s name, I think of this, and it makes me smile. As I think you’ll agree, that blurb is Vintage Cistulli.

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