Over the last few years, we’ve done a random collection of events in cities around the country, usually calling them something like FanGraphs Live. We’d get a few of our staff members together to hang out with a bunch of our readers, spend a few hours talking baseball, and generally have a great time. We always meant to do more of them, but the logistics of finding places to host the events always served as something of a barrier, so they ended up being scheduled sporadically.

Well, for those who were hoping for more of these kinds of events, we have some good news. We’ve teamed up with the guys behind the Pitch Talks series, and as they roll out their baseball speaker series across the U.S., we’re going to be pretty heavily involved, with our writers as part of the show and friends of FanGraphs joining in for some fun discussions. I was up in Toronto for the two year anniversary show last week, and it was a blast, with roughly 600 Blue Jays fans packing out a music venue for a few hours of fantastic discussion and mildly-drunken banter about the game we all love. We are really looking forward to helping bring that kind of fun to more cities around the U.S.

For the first stop on the tour this summer, we’re coming to Boston.

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In a draft year that’s churning out a better college hitting crop than the industry expected before the season began, Wake Forest infielder Will Craig is another such college hitting prospect that’s making a strong case for a top-two-rounds selection.

I saw Craig this weekend when the Demon Deacons visited N.C. State for a three-game series that included a rare Monday night game, which aired on ESPNU. He’s a high follow mostly for his bat, and he’s done nothing but rake since he arrived in Winston-Salem. As of publication, he’s comically slashing .466/.581/.909, placing him inside the nation’s top five in all three categories. Perhaps then it’s no wonder that he surfaces as the ACC’s top draft-eligible batter in Carson Cistulli’s latest installment of top college players by (maybe) predictive stats.

The video below moves from batting practice to pre-game infield to game swings. For the sake of an evaluation, it helped that he was facing N.C. State left-hander Ryan Williamson, a solid pro prospect who gets his own video and bullet point further down. Both videos also feature receiving demonstrations by N.C. State catcher Andrew Knizner, another solid prospect who gets mentioned in this space.

Physical Description

Craig looks every bit of his listed 6-foot-3, 235-pound constitution, a big-bodied frame that has reached its full development. His natural strength is concealed by a soft, thick build that’s supported by a pair of tree trunks. He also has unexpected rotational athleticism for such a big dude, which is more apparent when he’s pitching than when he’s doing anything else. Ideally, his pro training regimen trims 10-15 pounds and replaces the void with muscle. Craig was drafted by the Royals in the 37th round of the 2013 draft out of Science Hill HS (Tenn.), where he teamed with Tigers lefty Daniel Norris.

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Based on what was happening in my Twitter feed, scouts drooled over few players in spring training quite like they drooled over Adam Conley. My memory might be exaggerating things, but I know that Conley was getting a fair bit of hype. Now, the problem was that there’s not much meaningful analysis we’re able to do with spring-training performance, especially those that take place in Florida, away from any PITCHf/x instrumentation. But, wouldn’t you know it? Conley just pitched well on Wednesday in New York, nearly beating the Mets. You want to talk a little bit about Adam Conley? Let’s talk a little bit about Adam Conley. That way we can at least get him on our collective radar.

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Pretty obviously, it’s too early to learn much from our 2016 regular-season sample sizes. In most cases, we just need to be patient until the sample sizes grow, over the course of weeks or months. We go through this every single year, and it’s just part of re-transitioning into the baseball routine. But what if we could work backwards? Take Kelvin Herrera. What if we could increase his sample size by including last year’s playoffs? It sounds weird, but I’ll tell you why it’s possible: Just in time for the playoffs, Herrera started doing something. He’s continued that something into 2016, and it’s made him unfair.

I’m not even deterred by the fact that I wrote about this last October. I generally don’t like repetition, but it’s a new year, now, and Herrera’s keeping it up. So I won’t stop until more people understand that Kelvin Herrera now possesses a reliable breaking ball, and that goes with his blazing heater and high-80s changeup. The breaker comes in around 81 – 84, and based on what we can see, this is turning Herrera into a monster.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about whether they would want to play in a major league game, un-fun facts, chyron decisions, GM hypotheticals, robot pitchers, and more.

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The way these things – meaning “baseball” – go, the Orioles probably won’t be undefeated for long. Baseball is all about losing. The best teams lose a lot. The worst teams lose a lot a lot. I’m not sure the Orioles are the latter of those things, but even if they’re the first a loss is coming, so we’d better get to this while we can.

Have you seen the standings? Jeff Sullivan examined them a couple days ago here at website Fangraphs dot com and, further, he examined the teams that have improved their chances of making the playoffs the most since the season began.

Now hold that thought because we’re going to come back to it. Remember the preseason? That’s the time we all pretend we know what’s going to happen and make predictions about the upcoming season. These predictions are stupid stupid stupid predictions that will always be wrong because predictions about baseball are always wrong. Anyway, if you examined (lots of examining!) those preseason predictions — specifically the ones concerning the American League Eastern Division — you would find many different permutations. You’d find people who predicted the Red Sox to win the division, others who predicted the Rays, and many others who predicted the Blue Jays. Some even predicted the Yankees. Did anyone pick the Orioles? I didn’t see anyone. The Orioles were the one team it seems nobody thought was going to do squat in the AL East this season. So, of course of course of course they’re 7-0 and in first place. Of course.

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In this week’s third unexpected outfield prospect callup, the Atlanta Braves summoned speedy outfielder Mallex Smith from Triple-A to replace the injured Ender Inciarte. Smith’s been on a tear lately. He slashed an outstanding .346/.393/.808 in spring training, and had a loud three games in Triple-A to start the year. It seems that was enough to convince the Braves he was ready for the next level.

Smith split last season between Double-A and Triple-A, hitting a combined .306/.373/.386 with an eye-popping 57 steals. In 2014, he lead all of organized baseball with 88 stolen bases. Smith’s control of the strike zone and lofty BABIPs result in high OBPs, which allows him to take full advantage of his top-notch speed. Power is the one piece that was missing from Smith’s offensive profile, but just about everything else is there.

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It’s not easy to hit a home run to right field in Fenway Park. It’s actually quite difficult to hit a home run to right field in Fenway Park, even as home runs go. There’s a common misconception that Fenway yields a bunch of cheap dingers. By quantity, Fenway keeps itself reasonable. But it does claim one particular type of cheap dinger, the one where a hitter manages to wrap the ball around Pesky’s Pole. If you place the ball just right down the line, you can hit it 305 feet and take your four bases. It’s absurd when it happens, but so is the fact that we dedicate so much of our attention to the sport in the first place. Don’t tug on that absurdity thread, unless you’re prepared to question more than you’re used to.

Tuesday afternoon, I was watching the Orioles play the Red Sox, and J.J. Hardy slashed a liner to right that bounced off the top of the fence beside the pole. I thought to myself, “ehh, maybe that’s worth an article.” Shortly thereafter I left the house and didn’t think much about it. Imagine my surprise when I found out Hardy did it again, a few innings later. The batted ball itself was different, but the result was the same: Twice in one contest, the right-handed Hardy homered next to the pole. That’s a whole different level of absurd.

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Building a rotation is a difficult task for any organization. Drafting and developing prospects takes time and patience and often yields little in the way of results. Free agency is incredibly expensive not merely for proven pitchers, but unproven and mediocre ones, as well. Trades mean giving up talent and making sacrifices for the future. There is not a best way to build a rotation, but some teams have more limitations than others financially and the most efficient way to build a rotation includes young, cost-controlled starters. Ideally, a team would want the best rotation at the least possible expense. It’s a difficult task, but the New York Mets (to name one team) appear to have accomplished it.

A few weeks ago, FanGraphs previewed the 2016 by using the Depth Chart Projections found here to rank the teams by position. While the exercise itself is most useful for creating context around the projections — and to highlight individual players and teams — the foundation for the whole endeavor is the projections themselves. While often a very small difference exists between certain teams in terms of wins, it’s also true that two equally productive starting rotations, for example, can have very different costs (in dollars). That has an effect on how the corresponding teams can distribute salary throughout the rest of their respective rosters.

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Strikeouts are up! That sentence is obvious enough that the exclamation mark is probably unnecessary. After all, strikeout rates have been trending upward for a long time. Just take a look at the league’s K% over the last two decades:

For a variety of reasons, things really started to trend upward around 2005, but we settled around 20.4% in each of the last two years. Strikeouts appeared to be plateauing. Or, at the very least, their growth rate was starting to taper off. The red line, however, shows the increase from 2015 to 2016. The MLB strikeout rate entering play on Wednesday is 22.0%, a full 1.6 percentage points higher than the previous zenith and a year-over-year jump similar to the 2011 to 2012 spike.

In other words, the preceding exclamation point might be warranted. Strikeouts are indeed up(!) in 2016.

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