I watched Hisashi Iwakuma’s no-hitter, and I wrote about it, and in writing about it, I included the following screenshot:

That’s Jesus Sucre, setting up for a high fastball to Manny Machado. The pitch was executed well, and Iwakuma got his out. Now, writing about the no-hitter didn’t leave me much space to analyze individual matchups, but something I noticed was that Sucre set up high against Machado pretty often. Really, he just set up high pretty often, more often than in the average Iwakuma start, but it was the pitches to Machado that caught my eye, and it made me curious. Does Machado have a vulnerability upstairs, like last year’s version of Mike Trout? After finishing the no-hitter post, I turned my attention to Machado’s breakout year. Allow me to spoil the rest of this post: no. There is no high-pitch vulnerability. In fact, quite the opposite!

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Ben and Sam banter about casting news, then discuss the St. Louis Cardinals’ seemingly incredible luck.

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One week before the trading deadline, the Baltimore Orioles looked like a team that might sell, coming off a three-game sweep at the hands of the New York Yankees and dropping the opening game of the series against the Tampa Bay Rays. Their record stood at 46-49 and, with 5.5 games and four teams standing in between them and the second wild-Card spot, moving pending free agents Chris Davis or Wei-Yin Chen for prospects looked like a real possibility. Perhaps lost in the frenzy of the Toronto Blue Jays’ moves, the Orioles won seven of eight games, attempted to shore up some of their outfield issues with a trade for Gerardo Parra, and continue (now) to hang around the playoff race even as they continue to fly under the radar.

Free-agent-to-be Chris Davis has had a well-timed run both for himself and his team in the second half, hitting 12 of his 31 home runs in the last 25 games. Davis’ .281 isolated slugging percentage ranks fifth in all of Major League Baseball behind only Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, Nelson Cruz, and Mark Teixeira. He has improved as the season has gone on, and has done better at handling high-octane fastballs, per Mike Petriello at mlb.com. Davis has not been alone, either, as Manny Machado moves toward stardom with the fifth-highest WAR in MLB built on an excellent season at the plate that has risen to the level of his incredible defense. Adam Jones has also put up another very good season in center field. With those three players anchored within the first four slots of the lineup, the Orioles have scored a respectable 4.4 runs per game.

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If you’re a regular reader, you may have come across my previous article on the limitations of the StatCast batted-ball data. It’s limited in size, not generating a velocity reading on just over 25% of batted balls. That wouldn’t be a huge deal if that substantial number of missed readings were randomly dispersed across BIP types, but they are not. Weakly hit balls are being missed at a much higher rate: over 56% of batted balls classified as popups were missed, as were over 28% of grounders, likely mostly of the weakly hit variety.

This limits the amount of detailed analysis that can be done, but it doesn’t eliminate it. Since the missed reading rate on fly balls (18%) and liners (17%) is much more manageable — and random — analysis of these two groups might yield some useful results. Today, let’s take a crack at calculating some park factors for the first half of the 2015 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Yankees prospect Jorge Mateo has some serious wheels. In 96 games with Low-A Charleston, the Dominican-born shortstop stole an eye-popping 71 bases. He leads the South Atlantic League by more than 14 steals, despite the fact he was promoted to High-A a little over a week ago. Mateo’s posted gaudy stolen-base numbers in past years too. He swiped 11 bags in just 15 games in the Rookie-level Gulf Coast League last year. The year before that, he lead the Dominican Summer League with 49. If you hadn’t guessed it by his stolen-base totals, his speed grades out as an 80 on the 20-80 scale.

Speed is clearly Mateo’s calling card, but he’s no slouch with the bat, either. The shortstop hit a respectable .268/.338/.378 in 96 games in the South Atlantic League, and has hit .464/.500/.714 in 30 plate appearances since his promotion to High-A, giving him a wRC+ of 116 on the year.

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This article was originally developed as an oral presentation given by the author to the Society for American Baseball Research at their SABR 45 Convention in Chicago on June 27, 2015. The presentation, which featured the innovative use of video, audio and transitional animation embedded within a PowerPoint deck, was awarded the annual Doug Pappas Research Award as the best of the 32 oral presentations made during the convention that weekend.

This article has been repurposed from that deck. Since the Retrosheet play-by-play data on which this study was predicated were updated just days before the original presentation, all the data provided during the oral presentation have been updated for this article.

In the first installment of this Little League Home Runs series, we first reviewed the proposed definition of the Little League home run and found both the earliest recorded incidence of the event itself and of the earliest use of the term. In the second installment, we contemplated some of the statistics and oddities attended to the history of the Little League home run, including a link to a file listing all 258 Little League home runs that have occurred in big league history.

In this installment, we will boldly call the entire premise of the first post into question by reviewing that original proposed definition and discuss — and I mean with you, not just in my head — whether that definition is the right one, or whether we should adjust it based on available facts on the ground.

We initially selected the two-criterion definition of (1) two or more errors on the play and (2) batter scores on the play because of its simplicity. As we said before, simple works really well: you simply go into Retrosheet’s play by play files, simply plug these two parameters into their proprietary BEVENT tool, and all the plays that match them come right up. Couldn’t be much simpler.

But despite that the Little League home run can be defined in this simple manner, the $64,000 question is: should it? Not all two-error/batter-scoring plays look alike, and they encompass a wide range of plays occupying the spectrum between hilarious gaffe-filled boners (which sounds like an uncomfortable physical condition, doesn’t it?) and mild defensive glitches on good long hits.

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For those casual baseball fans who might have found residence under a slab of basalt for the past two months, let’s get you up to speed: Carlos Gonzalez has been locked-in recently. Post All-Star break (that date chosen for simple convenience), CarGo is fourth in baseball in wRC+, tied for first in homers, and first in ISO. So, on Monday night, we shouldn’t have been too surprised when he did this:

Seeing the initial flight of the ball while watching this game, I thought this was a double in the gap that was going to short-hop the fence. The Rockies telecast said about the same thing. Instead, it was a frozen rope that didn’t come down, sailing into the first few rows of bleachers.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet 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
Washington at San Francisco | 22:15 ET
Strasburg (68.0 IP, 84 xFIP-) vs. Vogelsong (105.2 IP, 120 xFIP-)
Yesterday, for the first time, the author endeavored to participate in one of the daily fantasy contests such as those offered by DraftKings and FanDuel — a practice which, one notes, bears a strong and (welcome) resemblance to gambling. Gambling is not unlike drinking insofar as (a) it yields great pleasure in moderation but also (b) if you indulge in it to excess, your wife says to sleep on the couch. Impossible to ignore is how compelling a baseball game can become in proportion to the amount of one’s hard-earned he has wagered on the result of that game. It’s probably accurate to say, for example, that I watched Danny Salazar’s start last night with the sort of intensity typical of a terrier monitoring a backyard for squirrels or a pubescent heterosexual male monitoring any vaguely female human. Writing for RotoGraphs today, Brad Johnson suggests that Stephen Strasburg represents a strong investment in daily-fantasy play. The haphazardly derived algorithm which produces the NERD game scores here also appears to favor the Washington-San Francisco contest.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: San Francisco Radio or Television.

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Note: the author recently employed new restrictions regarding eligibility for inclusion. Any player is excluded from eligibility whose name has appeared among the midseason prospect lists of Baseball America, Keith Law, or John Sickels.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple 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 both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) absent from the midseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Keith Law, and John Sickels, and also (c) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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