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 Boston | 16:05 ET
Stroman (74.2 IP, 91 xFIP-) vs. Wright (69.2 IP, 100 xFIP-)
The rules of baseball dictate that, at any given time, a team is permitted to field only eight players plus a pitcher — and, in the case of the American League, an extra “designated” hitter. Given those particular limitations, one is surprised to see the most current iteration of this site’s WAR leaderboard for the last 30 days:

Batter WAR Leaderboard, Last 30 Days

	Name	Team	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	wRC+	BsR	Off	Def	WAR
1	Ben Zobrist	Cubs	109	.418	.509	.648	211	0.6	15.1	1.8	2.1
2	Marcell Ozuna	Marlins	116	.406	.448	.689	204	-0.1	14.3	1.6	2.0
3	Mookie Betts	Red Sox	133	.322	.391	.669	179	1.0	13.5	1.2	2.0
4	Mike Trout	Angels	118	.319	.449	.532	173	2.3	12.5	1.6	1.9
5	David Ortiz	Red Sox	112	.371	.446	.845	233	-1.1	16.5	-2.6	1.8
6	Kyle Seager	Mariners	118	.400	.458	.629	196	-0.1	13.3	0.3	1.8
7	Ian Desmond	Rangers	118	.372	.390	.593	161	2.4	10.9	2.5	1.8
8	Xander Bogaerts	Red Sox	134	.363	.403	.548	156	-0.2	8.6	3.2	1.7
9	Corey Seager	Dodgers	125	.310	.352	.612	161	-0.3	8.8	3.4	1.7
10	Jackie Bradley Jr.	Red Sox	107	.374	.467	.714	212	0.3	14.3	-2.1	1.6

Four Boston players, is what one finds here — despite, as mentioned above, how a club is allowed to deploy only nine hitters in any particular game. Not only have the Red Sox deployed certain players with sufficient regularity to produce runs in volume, but four of those players have produced runs mostly better than anyone else. All four of those Boston players are likely to appear in this game — which the reader can watch or not watch at his or her discretion.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Boston.

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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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Lance McCullers puts a lot of thought into his craft. The 22-year-old right-hander fashions himself a bulldog — understandably so; his father was a big-league closer — but in between starts he puts on his pitching-theorist hat. In many respects, he fits the analytic Astros’ paradigm to a tee.

Selected 41st overall by Houston in the 2012 draft, McCullers features a mid-90s fastball and a killer curveball. His lack of a consistent changeup has been a cause for concern, but to this point he’s thrived with the two plus pitches. Twenty-six games into his big-league career, McCullers has a 3.44 ERA and has averaged over a strikeout per inning.

McCullers talked about his pitching approach, which focuses more on spin than location, following a mid-May outing in Boston.

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McCullers on his adaptive approach: “I don’t like putting labels on people, like, ‘He’s a finesse guy’ or ‘He’s a power guy.’ The game will dictate how I pitch. If a team is trying to jump on my heater early — they’re really hunting fastballs — I have no problem throwing 60-70% offspeed and using my fastball for effect.

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Ben and Sam talk to ESPN Stats & Info’s Mark Simon about fun-fact philosophies, David Wright, Daniel Murphy, and other notable players, and his new book, The Yankees Index.

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Generally, the theory is that even top prospects bust. Byron Buxton is the toppest of top prospects, but even that distinction can’t protect him from failure of one kind or another. Exploring that theory is much more difficult when you’re the player himself. Or the writer asking that player about those expectations and the difficulties he’s been having so far. “You’re going to have a stamp on you wherever you are, but I try to put it to the side,” the struggling Twin said recently before a game with the Athletics. It’s hard not to empathize.

The theory with Buxton is that the tools are there but that he needs to make an adjustment to major-league pitching. It’s looked bad, but the talent is in there.

In 195 major-league plate appearances so far, Buxton has struck out 36% of the time and walked just 4% of the time, for a 32-point differential between his strikeout and walk rates. It’s a toxic combination. And rare. Consider: among 106 top-10 prospects since 1990, only Javier Baez has recorded a worse strikeout- minus walk-rate differential in his first 200 plate appearances.

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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, 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, CF, Cleveland (Profile)
Allen debuted among the Five proper last week as a result not merely of his promising statistical indicators and strong collection of tools, but also for the manner in which his profile, in its entirely, caused — and continues to cause — the present author’s intuitive faculties to become illuminated. Certain readers might suggest that the author is working here merely on the promise of a “hunch.” This is impossible, of course: a brief examination of the literature reveals that the only demographic capable of channeling “hunches” are hard-boiled television police detectives burdened with the responsibility of bringing the plot of a weekly procedural show to its final act. No, what the author has experienced more closely resembles certain of the qualities described by F.C. Happold in Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology in the chapter regarding characteristics of mystical states. Whatever the precise vehicle, one finds that Allen’s past week has been excellent. Over his last 32 plate appearances, the 23-year-old center fielder has produced a a 6:5 walk-to-strikeout ratio, nearly a .200 isolated-power mark, and a 4-for-4 stolen-base record.

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Over the last few years, sports conferences have become a popular endeavor. Inspired mostly by the success of the Sloan Sports and Analytics Conference held each spring, others have seen an opportunity to gather a bunch of interesting speakers and host a series of Q&As, and you now have a host of options to pick from if you want to attend one of these shindigs throughout the year.

But for baseball fans who are reading FanGraphs on a Friday in June, there’s one conference that remains the gold standard: The Saber Seminar.

The official name of the event is Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball, and the two-day conference lives up to that title, providing speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, including team executives, analysts, and scouts, independent researchers, academics, members of the media, and people just breaking into the realm of trying to discover truths about the game. Over the course of a weekend, the event provides a wide range of different talks, spanning just about every type of analysis there is in baseball. It is, without fail, one of my favorite weekends of the year.

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Can you name the starting pitcher with the lowest ERA in the month of May this year? If you paid attention to the Pitcher of the Month awards announcements yesterday, you might know the answer. If you’ve been paying attention to Major League Baseball at all over the past five years, you can definitely guess it. The answer, to nobody’s surprise, is Clayton Kershaw, who posted a ridiculous 0.91 ERA over six starts. What’s infinitely less intuitive and more thought-provoking is the identity of the pitcher who is second on the May ERA leaderboard: CC Sabathia.

In the interest of full disclosure, a bit of leaderboard manipulation is necessary in order to find Sabathia’s ERA ranked ahead of every pitcher not named Kershaw. A groin strain sent Sabathia to the disabled list after his start on May 4th and limited him to just four starts and 26 innings pitched for the month. So, if we’re being technical, Sabathia’s 1.04 ERA was second in the majors among starting pitchers with a minimum of 20 innings pitched. But the arbitrary nature of month-long splits isn’t why we need to talk about Sabathia. We need to talk about Sabathia because that great month contributed to his ERA doing this:

Sabathia closed out his 2015 season with a 2.86 ERA over his final nine starts. The difficulties he experienced off the field — and which immediately followed that impressive run — have been well-documented and are outside the scope of this analysis. Let’s focus entirely on what we know has happened on the field, which is that Sabathia has picked up right where he left off, recording a 2.85 ERA through his first eight starts of 2016. Considering Sabathia turns 36 years old next month and is coming off a disappointing three-year stretch during which he posted a 4.81 ERA, there are two obvious questions here. First: how did this happen? And second: will it last?

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