Not too long ago, FanGraphs editor Carson Cistulli was watching a broadcast of a baseball game during which the announcer remarked offhandedly that the pitcher’s batting average of .231 was equivalent roughly to a .400 mark for a position player. His interest piqued, Cistulli asked his FanGraphs colleagues: if not .231 precisely, then what is the equivalent of a .400 batting average for a pitcher? After nobody else expressed any interest in doing the same, I endeavored to answer the mostly frivolous question.

The easiest way to go about solving the problem is probably to look at percentile ranks — that is, at seasons from position players, broken into percentiles by batting average, compared to the same percentiles for pitchers. That’s where I started, at least. I looked at all qualified position players from 1986 to 2015, finding nearly 5,000 player-seasons. Then I turned to pitchers. Because no pitchers qualified for the batting title during that time range, I chose a threshold (a somewhat random figure of 50 plate appearances in a season), yielding nearly 1,500 pitcher player-seasons.

I created percentiles for both groups and set them at 10%, 33%, 50%, 67%, and 90% to yield averages. The table below shows the results:

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How do you know when a knuckleball pitcher is good? It’s not an easy question to answer. We know it’s not just a matter of having a knuckleball — there have been bad knuckleball pitchers. But the pitches themselves aren’t easy to scout, and the whole idea behind an effective knuckleball is sort of the lack of consistency. There’s not a large sample of these pitchers to examine, which further complicates things. A knuckleballer is the most unusual player type in the game, someone who can be almost impossible to trust, but someone who also throws a pitch that seems almost impossible to hit.

There’s a line somewhere. There has to be. There’s a line beyond which a knuckleball pitcher is legitimately good, and maybe that’s when he throws 60 good knuckleballs out of 100, or maybe it’s when he throws 90 good knuckleballs out of 100. We’ve seen R.A. Dickey be an ineffective knuckleballer, and we’ve seen him be an effective one. The pitch gave his career a second chance, which is one of its magical aspects. At some point, I suppose, you just have to look at the numbers. The numbers will tell you when a knuckleballer is working. I don’t know of any other approach, and what the numbers are indicating is that Steven Wright has mastered the weirdest pitch in the sport.

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Like my piece from two weeks ago, this one contains notes from the desert backfields of Extended Spring Training. Of note today: the professional debut of Brady Aiken. Appearances by Tim Lincecum, Huston Street and Dakota Chalmers serve your main side dish.

Brady Aiken, LHP, Cleveland Indians

Current Level: Extended Spring Training, Age: 19.3, Height/Weight: 6’4/225
Drafted: First round of 2015, 17th overall, signed for $2.5 mil

You should all know Aiken’s backstory by now (drafted by Houston, unsigned, Tommy John surgery, drafted by Cleveland), so let’s cut right to the chase and talk about the stuff. Aiken was 89-92 mph, with just decent arm acceleration and a bit of effort, though less of both than he had in high school. The fastball was quite straight and the kids at the White Sox’ Extended camp slapped it around. Aiken’s curveball has retained its impressive pre-surgery shape and depth. It bent in between 76 and 80 mph and a few of them were above average. The changeup (Aiken threw two, one at 85 and one at 86) was firm and below average, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect much more from a pitch so dependent on feel and release at this point in his rehab. Aiken will likely spend some time here in Arizona for Rookie-level ball before he heads to an affiliate, if he does at all. There’s no reason to draw conclusions based on how he looked, especially with so many opportunities for evaluation ahead, so keep in mind that this is just a snapshot of where things are at right now.

As you can see from the video, Aiken has become rather large. He’s listed at 205 pounds, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s pushing 230 right now. Whether that’s good or bad or anything at all is hard to say. Aiken was a workout warrior in high school (crossfit, box jumps, etc.) so it’s possible this is new found beef was added intentionally. It’s just one more thing to monitor throughout the summer. Aiken’s delivery in high school had, in my opinion, better pacing and balance and was generally more athletic and had less recoil than what he showed on Saturday.

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Heading into the season, there was probably no more polarizing team in baseball than the Diamondbacks. Despite adding Zack Greinke, Shelby Miller, and Tyler Clippard over the winter, our preseason forecasts pegged Arizona as a 78 win team, a win worse than they finished a year ago. The organization themselves saw a wildly different picture, and so many articles were written about the divide that I had to write a piece in March trying to dispel the notion that we had some kind of bias against the franchise.

You know what’s happened since then. First, the team suffered a devastating loss when A.J. Pollock’s lingering elbow issues turned into a season-ending injury right before Opening Day. Then Zack Greinke gave up seven runs in his first regular season start with the team, and struggled through a slow start to the season. Then Shelby Miller imploded, pitching worse than any other starter in baseball this year. And now it’s the end of May and the team is 23-30, already nine games behind the Giants in the NL West race.

But this isn’t a post gloating that we were right all along. In reality, some of the D’Backs optimism surrounding their team has actually been more correct than our pessimism about the team’s chances, if you look beyond the overall record, anyway. Our projections didn’t like the Diamondbacks because it had a negative view of their role players, thinking that this was basically a stars-and-scrubs team that relied too heavily on a few elite players. But so far, those role players have been carrying the team, keeping it afloat while the big names struggle.

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Last week, Rian Watt published a terrific piece at Vice Sports on the growing use of wearable technology by Major League Baseball teams for purposes of collecting players’ biometric data. If you haven’t read Watt’s article, go check it out, it’s fantastic. In short, though, the piece explores the ethical implications of MLB teams asking their players to wear devices — such as the Readiband sleep monitoring system recently employed by the Seattle Mariners — that collect data that can not only be used for purposes of fine-tuning players’ on-field performance, but also potentially for roster- and contract-related decisions as well.

For instance, while the sleep-tracking data provided by Readiband could certainly help players adjust their sleep patterns to maximize their chances of performing at a peak level on the playing field, this data could also give teams insight into a player’s habits undertaken in the privacy of his own home. It’s not hard to imagine a team ultimately incorporating such information, or other forms of biometric data, into their player evaluations in ways that may ultimately harm a player’s career prospects or earning potential.

In addition to the ethical considerations surrounding the use of these technologies explored in Watt’s article, the collection of biometric data by MLB franchises also has potential legal implications as well. As Watt notes in his piece, wearable technology may very well become an issue during this year’s collective-bargaining negotiations between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association. Indeed, Pirates’ infielder Cole Figueroa recently mentioned during an episode of the Effectively Wild podcast that a number of MLB players are growing increasingly concerned over the potentially adverse consequences of the growing use of this technology by their teams.

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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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