Due to a fractured thumb, the Royals will be without Mike Moustakas for at least the next few weeks. No doubt, Kansas City will miss their three-plus win, All-Star third baseman. But as is often the case in baseball, one man’s misfortune is another’s opportunity. In this instance, the beneficiary is Cheslor Cuthbert, whom the Royals recalled from the minors to replace Moustakas.

Unless you’re a Royals fan or a prospect connoisseur, you might have no idea who Cheslor Cuthbert is, but my nerdily-sorted spreadsheets really like the Nicaraguan infielder. Last year, he hit .277/.339/.429 as a 22-year-old in Triple-A. He also struck out in an encouragingly low 14% of his trips to the plate. He already looks like a Royal.

That performance, along with the fact that he plays primarily third base — a somewhat premium defensive position — landed Cuthbert at 74th on KATOH’s preseason top-100 list, placing him tops among Royals farmhands. That was before he opened this season by slashing .333/.402/.624 in 24 games. He was one of the very best hitters at Triple-A over the season’s first month, and was quite possibly the best prospect-age hitter in Triple-A.

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On Thursday, the Nationals arrived on the north side of Chicago to begin a four game series that was billed as a potential NLCS preview. The 20-6 Cubs were squaring off with the 19-8 Nationals in a match-up of two of the best teams in baseball, and while it’s still early, the series was supposed to serve as something of a test for a Cubs team that spent April beating up on a lot of weak opponents.

Test passed. Javier Baez’s 13th inning homer yesterday gave the Cubs a four game sweep over Washington, which followed their three game sweep in Pittsburgh, so the boys from Chicago’s north side have now have a seven game winning streak, with all seven games coming against legitimate contenders. Questions about early season strength of schedule can now be put away, and with the way the Cubs are not only winning games but crushing their opponents, it’s pretty clear that this Cubs team is currently in a class of their own.

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The Cubs decided to position Dexter Fowler a bit deeper in center field this season, and it might have saved a no-hitter. Anthony Gose, vocal critic of defensive metrics, also finds himself a bit further from home plate, likely due in part to those same metrics which Gose called a “scam.” Research done by Baseball Info Solutions’ owner and chairman John Dewan in 2013 suggested that, generally speaking, fielders who play shallow in center, like Fowler and Gose used to, don’t save enough runs on the balls hit in front of them to make up for the runs lost on balls hit over their heads. The arrival of Statcast has given fans and teams alike previously unprecedented access to information regarding fielder positioning, and the most visible team-mandated adjustments this season have been those which move outfielders closer to the fences in an effort to prevent costly extra base hits at the expense of a few more singles.

But the Pittsburgh Pirates are their own team with their own identity, and if we’ve learned anything about how the organization operates during the Neal Huntington era, it’s that they’re constantly searching for ways to use data to their advantage, and that they’re not afraid to pull the trigger on a radical change. And so while a deeper center field may seem en vogue, the Pirates are zigging while the Cubs, Tigers and others zag, and have instead instructed not only McCutchen, who played one of the five deepest center fields in baseball last year, to bring it in, but also the rest of the outfielders, too.

From a Travis Sawchik story last month, for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“In reviewing the numbers last year, there was so much collateral damage done in front of us, balls that fell in, extra bases that were taken by guys trying to get to balls,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said. “It was glaringly apparent that we could make an adjustment, especially with the athleticism of our outfielders and change the dynamic of what’s gone on as far as run prevention.”

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A quick check of the pitching leaderboards for qualified starters reveals an unsettling fact for the Red Sox: David Price has the second-worst ERA in baseball. Cue the alarm bells! The Sox paid for an ace, and instead, they’ve gotten the exact opposite of an ace — as far as outcomes are concerned, at least. Seven starts into the season, some element of worry has to be merited, right? The answer is yes, of course, because an ERA of almost seven for a No. 1 starter after over a month of games has to be worrying. Price has been terrible, and if you’re worrying about him or would like to, that’s probably merited. The reason why we’re here is to look into whether his performance thus far is grounds to for worry in the future, as well: though Price can’t get any of his clunkers back from the past seven starts, we can certainly look into whether those clunkers might presage future clunkers.

First, let’s start with the bad news, because it’s always better to end with good news. The bad news has been right there in front of us in every single one of Price’s starts this season, flashed up on a board in the stadium or on our TV screens during every pitch: his velocity is down. Way down. Lowest it’s ever been. That’s worrisome not only because velocity loss leads to a smaller margin of error, but also because velocity loss is the most visible indicator of injury. The drop captured in the red box in the chart below — depicting Price’s velocity by month from 2011 to 2016 — ought usually to inspire some concern (chart courtesy of Brooks Baseball):

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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
New York NL at Los Angeles NL | 22:10 ET
Matz (28.2 IP, 70 xFIP-) vs. Kazmir (31.2 IP, 103 xFIP-)
If the season ended right now, that’d be unusual. Because the 2016 schedule clearly dictates that games ought to be played through September, is why. And because literally millions of consumers have purchased tickets to contests scheduled for May 10th and beyond, is also why. If the season ended right now, it’d probably be the result either of some emergent issue within baseball itself — along the lines of a strike — or, alternatively, the product of a national crisis that would render the country’s taste for diversion either impractical or vulgar or both. If the season ended right now, it would likely mean that a lot of people’s lives had changed for the worse. In any case, if the season really did end right now, Mets left-hander Steven Matz would possess the second-best WAR mark among all rookie pitchers — behind only the Dodgers’ Kenta Maeda, who’s a rookie in one sense but less of a rookie in another sense.

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One can be excused for having lost track of the many twists and turns in the long-running broadcast-rights-fee dispute between the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals. Over the past four years, the two teams have waged an extensive legal battle over how much the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) ought to be paying the Nationals for the team’s local television rights, with both sides capable of pointing to various victories and defeats along the way.

For those interested in a longer recap of the many ins and outs of the dispute, we have previously covered all of the gory details here on a number of occasions over the last several years. In short, though, under the terms of the 2005 agreement in which Baltimore allowed the Nationals to move to Washington, D.C., the teams agreed that they would renegotiate the television rights fees that MASN — the vast majority of which is owned by the Orioles — would have to pay the Nationals every five years.

Unable to reach an accord on the Nationals’ rights fees for the 2012-2016 time period, the teams eventually took the dispute to an arbitration heard by Major League Baseball’s Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee (RSDC), which ultimately awarded the Nationals $60 million per year in broadcast rights fees from MASN. Dissatisfied with this outcome, MASN and Baltimore then took the matter to court, successfully persuading a New York state judge (Judge Lawrence Marks) to overturn the RSDC’s arbitration decision late last year. In particular, Judge Marks ruled that because the Nationals’ legal counsel in the dispute — the Proskauer Rose law firm — had previously represented several of the RSDC members’ teams, the firm’s participation in the arbitration created the appearance of potential bias by the RSDC in favor of Washington.

As I noted this past December, both sides then appealed Judge Marks’ ruling to the court of appeals. The Nationals argued that the trial court had erred by throwing out the arbitration award; MASN and the Orioles, conversely, have asserted that Judge Marks should have permanently disqualified the RSDC from rehearing the dispute. That appeal remains ongoing.

Washington, however, believing that MASN has been underpaying it for years, is not content to sit back and wait for the appellate process to run its course. Instead, the team is now asking Judge Marks to order the Orioles to re-arbitrate the matter before the RSDC, even while the appeal continues. MASN and the Orioles, meanwhile, have unsurprisingly opposed this request, countering last week by asking the trial court to postpone any future arbitration in the dispute pending the outcome of the appeal.

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Ben and Sam discuss Bartolo Colon’s first career home run, the Cubs’ continued success and willingness to walk Bryce Harper, and The Good Wife’s series finale.

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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 New York AL | 20:05 ET
Wright (32.1 IP, 105 xFIP-) vs. Severino (25.2 IP, 91 xFIP-)
Given both the width and also the breadth of the world — and all the possibilities contained within it — there’s a non-zero chance that someone on this earth has declared that “The only thing less appealing than watching one Red Sox-Yankees game is watching two Red Sox-Yankees games in a row.” Of course, such a statment is necessarily false. Because, regard: if one were to compose a list of unappealing things and yet omit a number of the more serious dermatological conditions — many of which Job himself would regard as a bit far-fetched — then one would have composed a flawed list. Moreover, one is forced to concede that a contest featuring by Steven Wright (a knuckleballer who’s experienced success this year so far) and Luis Severino (who’s produced one of the highest average fastball velocities) — that such a contest possesses some merit.

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Brewers pitching prospect Jon Perrin issued his first free pass of the season on Friday night. Accompanying that solitary walk on his stat sheet are 47 strikeouts and a 2.50 ERA over 36 innings of work. Pitching for the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, Perrin has essentially been the Midwest League equivalent of Greg Maddux in his prime.

His long-term goal isn’t necessarily to be the next Maddux. Nor is it to be the next Josh Tomlin, a more realistic control-and-command comparable. Perrin aspires to be an attorney.

The 22-year-old right-hander graduated from Oklahoma State before being drafted by Milwaukee last year in the 27th round. He took his LSAT over the winter, and if he gets an acceptance letter from his target school there’s a good chance he’ll bid baseball adieu. Read the rest of this entry »