Just because of the sheer number of taken pitches in a season, hitters will frequently disagree on a call with the judge standing behind them. A certain number of disagreements are to be expected, but from the sounds of things, Dexter Fowler feels like he’s been disagreeing more than usual. Fowler doesn’t think his approach is worse, but his numbers are worse, so he identifies some iffy calls as a factor. This is what Fowler looks like after an iffy strike call:

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Twelve months ago, Eno Sarris wrote a great piece on how Dallas Keuchel grips each of his pitches. Today, hours before the Houston Astros ace starts for the American League in the All-Star game, we’ll take a look at his approach. We’ll do so with Keuchel’s own words, as well as those of his pitching coach, Brent Strom.

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Keuchel on setting up hitters: “When I go into a start, I’ll definitely look at the scouting report. I’ll watch video and make assessments of each hitter. But it’s also important to have a feel for what you’re doing and to command the ball to both sides of the plate. If I’m confident about a pitch that differs from the scouting report, I’ll try to execute that pitch to the best of my ability.

“You’ll see some of the smarter pitchers set-up guys, even though I don’t like the term “set-up.” If you can command your pitches away, say a fastball and a changeup away, then you can set hitters up for a fastball inside that they’ll take for a punch out. You can get feels for that during the course of a game. Read the rest of this entry »

A lesson you learn as you grow older is that everything is somewhere on a spectrum. Though we yearn for blacks and whites, for certainties and absolutes, the world is more complicated than that, littered with partials and mitigations. Seldom does everything point in one direction. Seldom do we even know about everything pointing. There is always much we can’t or don’t figure out. There is a neat thing, though, about spectra — each one has two extremes. So when we know enough, we might be able to identify points near an extreme. The least-talented running back. The most challenging summit. The worst called ball by an umpire.

Strikes and balls are most definitely on a spectrum. The strike zone might be precisely defined, but it’s impossible for humans to call it that way, given our own limitations, which means any given pitch has a certain likelihood of being called a strike, and a certain likelihood of being called a ball. Most controversial calls take place around the boundaries. That area where taken pitches end up as coin flips. But sometimes there are bad calls beyond the boundaries, within or without. These head toward our extremes. Armed with PITCHf/x, it’s possible to find the worst called ball, by looking for balls on pitches down the middle. They’re uncommon, but they happen. What’s been the worst called ball of the 2015 first half? The following pitch was called a ball, though it was 3.0 inches from the center of the strike zone:

The worst called ball is worse than this.

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Every season is a great season of baseball. It’s fair to say, however, that some seasons might be better than others; if unexpected teams succeed, records are broken, and exciting rookies debut on the biggest stage, we can witness something that transcends the customary ebb and flow of the regular season. At the All-Star break, 2015 has done exactly that.

The Twins are in the playoff hunt. A-Rod reached 3,000 hits. And, despite those unexpected and landmark events, this season’s greatest surprise might be the group of up-and-coming superstars that have broken into the big leagues. With Miguel Sano getting the call to the Twins two weeks ago, we’re now seeing many of the big-name prospects that we’ve been hearing about for the past few years: Kris Bryant, Joc Pederson, Carlos Correa, and Addison Russell (just to name a few) are all in major league starting lineups on a daily basis.

All of these players were at one time in Baseball America’s top 10 prospects list; all at one point have topped their respective team’s individual lists. It’s unusual to see so many top prospects called up in the first half of the same season, and it warrants our attention. With a chance to pause and look back on the season thus far, how have 2015’s rookies measured up against the rookie classes of the past decade?

First, we’ll look at the overall pre-All Star break production of this season’s positional rookie class compared to those of the past decade. As a cutoff, we’ll look at the combined production of the top 20 rookies for each season; that will seek to isolate only the best rookies in each season. Let’s look at the first-half production of each rookie class by Wins Above Replacement since 2005. Is 2015 actually a great year for rookie production, compared to the past decade?

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Ben and Sam banter about the All-Star Game and then discuss how the Oakland A’s should handle the next phase of their strange season.

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Television ratings for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, like most sporting events and television shows generally, have seen a viewership decline over the last few decades. This decline is not new. After an embarrassing All-Star Game in 2002 that saw Bud Selig call the game a tie, the powers that be wanted to help prevent a further decline in ratings and interest so they came up with a plan to make the game matter. Beginning in 2003, the league that won the All-Star Game would receive home field advantage in the World Series. The move has done little to prevent ratings from a slow decline over the next few years, but over the past five seasons, the ratings have remained steady despite an increasingly fractured television landscape.

Thirty years ago, the All-Star Game was the crown jewel of MLB’s regular season. Only around 50 baseball games were broadcast nationally, ESPN had not begun to broadcast games, and the All-Star Game was a rare opportunity to see the game’s best players. That rarity, combined with limited options for television viewing in general, came through in the ratings. The graph below shows the ratings for the MLB All-Star Game from 1967 through last season.

Source: Baseball Almanac and LA Times

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The Yankees boasted one of the best offenses in baseball in the season’s first half. Heading into the All-Star break, the team ranks third in the American League wRC+ and second in runs scored. But very little of this run scoring has come from the second base position, where the team has mustered only a 64 wRC+. Stephen Drew, with his 229 plate appearances of 69 wRC+, has been the primary culprit.

The Yankees second base situation just got a bit better, however. Or at least it did on the offensive side of things. The team called up rookie second baseman Rob Refsnyder on Saturday. The Bombers faced off against two left-handed pitchers over the weekend, making it an ideal time to break in their right-handed rookie second baseman. Refsnyder accumulated two hits in his first two games, including a towering home run off of Alexi Ogando yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

With the introduction out of the way, let’s get into the list. We’ll do 10 guys per day, wrapping up with the top 10 on Friday. Today, we’ll start with the bubble guys who made the cut, but keep in mind, the gap between players in this tier is quite small, and you could reasonably argue to rearrange them in just about any order you wanted. And a good number of the guys who missed the cut are very similar in value to these 10, so don’t get too worked up over a guy appearing in this group versus another guy who was an honorable mention. These guys are all very good, but this is the part of the list where the actual ranking matters the least.

In addition to the player’s biographical information, I’ve added a summary of his contract situation, and as a new feature this year, Dan Szymborski has provided me with five year ZIPS forecasts for all of the players on the list, which I’ve listed along with their 2016 projection. Of course, not every player listed is under control for the next five years — some are locked up well beyond that time frame — but this should offer you a pretty decent view of what a player is expected to do both in the short-term and the longer-term, according to Dan’s forecasting system.

For the contract details, I’m only displaying future obligations beginning with their 2016 salary. I’ve tried to ensure that these are as accurate as can be, but they were also collected manually, so there probably will be some mistakes; there are plenty of weird clauses and options that make aggregating all this information particularly annoying. Also, we’re not including things like All-Star bonuses or incentive escalators, as this is intended to give more of a big picture view than be a precise accounting of the exact cost of a future player. A few hundred thousand here and there won’t change the rankings.

Also, keep in mind that some players have contracts that give them a guaranteed minimum, but they are also able to opt-into arbitration when they are eligible. This is pretty common now with prominent international signings, and so some of these guys will probably earn more than their contracts currently call for, but I’ve still just included the guaranteed minimum in the future salary commitment because we don’t know for sure that they’re going to opt into arbitration yet.

Finally, we’ve also included a nifty little graphic at the bottom that visualizes a lot of the information contained below, so if you want to see the projections and contract status for everyone together, you can get a summary of that at the bottom. The chart goes out five years, so some players have additional value beyond what’s displayed, but it should give you a good overview of what each player offers going forward.

Alright, on to the list.

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Episode 579
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses the early returns from the international-signing period, the start of the 2016 draft season, and how agents both recruit and retain young clients.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 45 min play time.)

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