The market for starting pitching this offseason should be robust. I find starting articles with sentences that use words like “market” and “robust” is a great way to weed out readers. So, if you’re still with me, welcome to an article about Jordan Zimmermann!

The Zimmermann I’m referring to, by the way, is the Zimmermann that pitches, not the Zimmerman who hits. The Nationals are lousy with Zimmermen(n) so it’s easy to get confused. This particular Zimmermann, the subject of this here article, will be a free agent next season. After his big 2014 season, the Nationals talked to Zimmermann’s people (when you’re about to be a big money free agent you get you own people) about a contract extension to stay in DC beyond 2015 when his contract expired, but those talks didn’t get anywhere and then last off-season the Nats signed Max Scherzer. They did that because who doesn’t love a SuperRotation, but also as a replacement ace, as the club believed Zimmermann and to a lesser extent Doug Fister weren’t likely to stay in Washington after 2015. I don’t know what figures were discussed between Zimmermann’s people and the Nationals but it’s fair to say by not signing, Zimmermann passed on a lot of money.

Now, one half season into that decision and a half season from free agency, I wanted to take a look at Zimmermann to see how his decision is panning out.

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It’s the All-Star break, which means no baseball for four days. And, around here, the All-Star break means that I spend five days writing about the most valuable trade chips in the game, as it’s once again time for our annual Trade Value series. This is actually the 11th year I’ve done this list, as my first one came back in 2005, and it included immortals like Daniel Cabrera, Felipe Lopez, and Bobby Crosby. I moved the list to FanGraphs back in 2008, so this will be the eighth edition here on this site.

As always, I’d like to acknowledge that this project has been borrowed from Bill Simmons, who did his own NBA Trade Value series at Grantland, and Jonah Keri has taken up the torch over there, doing a baseball version once the regular season ends. It’s a fun project, and one I’m glad Simmons popularized.

As a quick overview for those who might be new to the series, he’s the basic concept: which players would bring the most return in trade if they were made available by their current clubs? To answer this question as best as we can, we not only look at a player’s performance — both now and in the future — but also the amount of years a team would be acquiring a player for, and how much that player would earn in salary before he could become a free agent. The most valuable assets in the game aren’t just great players, but they’re great players who aren’t getting paid like great players. Naturally, this causes this list to skew very young, as MLB’s pay scale is geared to take money from inexperienced players and give it to veterans. Given that teams also like to build around young stars, this causes many of the most valuable trade chips in the game to be guys at the beginnings of their careers.

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Given all the controversies they’ve been through this year, you’d almost want to think the Angels were having a bad season. Only a few months ago, ownership ran Josh Hamilton out of town, and while it did so figuratively, you get the sense it would’ve done it literally. Not very long after that, a team executive was dismissed after using words like “segregation” in an interview about ticket policies and attendance. And of course, the other week, the general manager packed up his office and left, his relationship with Mike Scioscia finally reaching the breaking point. From a PR perspective, for the Angels, it’s been a year to forget. Except for this recent stretch of winning, that’s moved the Angels into first place.

The baseball season will suck you in. It’s 162 games long, and it wants you to feel every single one of them. It wants you to celebrate every runner left stranded; it wants you to curse every failed call to the bullpen. The baseball season pitches itself as an election — every game matters. And it’s true, that every game does matter. But it’s terribly easy to get too wrapped up in the day-to-day trivialities. Ultimately, every team will win a bunch of games, and every team will lose a bunch of games. Baseball is best consumed every day, but it might be best understood every week or two. An ordinary standings page will include an “L10” column. You can learn a lot from one glance. Forget, for a moment, about all of the details; over their past 10 games, the Angels are 7-3. The Astros and Rangers are both 2-8. The A’s and the Mariners are a harmless 5-5. Divide a season into 10-game blocks, and over the most recent block, the Angels have made their move.

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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
Los Angeles AL at Seattle | 16:10 ET
Heaney (20.1 IP, 81 xFIP-) vs. Walker (97.1 IP, 99 xFIP-)
Young Angels left-hander Andrew Heaney has produced, over his first three major-league starts, both a higher strikeout rate and lower walk rate than he had (before that) as a member of Triple-A Salt Lake. “Ought one expect that trend to continue?” is the sort of question a reader might reasonably ask the author, a person (the author) paid to cultivate ideas about professional baseball. “No,” is the probable answer, insofar as one ought not to expect anything — anything but disappointments proceeded by sorrows. In any case, this game represents an opportunity to observe Heaney’s virtues more closely.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles AL Television?

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Last month, the Indians selected Brady Aiken with the 17th overall pick of the amateur draft. There’s a distinct possibility that several of the sixteen teams that passed on the southpaw will someday regret doing so. They all might regret it. Aiken arguably has the best raw talent of any player taken.

When he’s healthy.

Aiken is, of course, recovering from Tommy John surgery. What’s curious – at least to me – is that so many teams were seemingly scared away by that fact. This year’s draft was viewed as sub par, and Aiken went first-overall in 2014. The Astros not signing him made sense at the time – and their medicals were proven right – but the elbow fears are now in the rear-view. He’s already gone under the knife.

A full recovery from Tommy John surgery isn’t guaranteed, but chances are good that the 18-year-old will come back strong. Indians scouting director Brad Grant expects exactly that, based on precedent. Read the rest of this entry »

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
Houston at Tampa Bay | 16:10 ET
Keuchel (130.1 IP, 69 xFIP-) vs. Odorizzi (76.2 IP, 93 xFIP-)
It is sometimes said of certain jokes or other forms of copy that they “write themselves.” A regrettable instance of anthropomorphism, this — like all instances of anthropomorphism, that is, which don’t expressly involve a bulldog wearing a monocle and speaking in a posh British accent. Jokes and other forms of copy are incapable of writing themselves for a number of reasons, such as (one) they don’t have hands and (two) also no brain. Were text capable of writing itself, however, it would appear in this exact space and would read something to the effect of “By the methodology utilized by the author, the Houston Astros remain baseball’s most compelling and aesthetically appealing club. Indeed, in addition to their conspicuous youth and strength, the team now also possesses odds of reach the divisional series closer to 50% than any other team.”

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Tampa Bay Radio.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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The first thing you learn about following sports is that there’s nothing more important than the standings. Wins and losses are everything. They control how you feel about a team, and they control how you feel about the individual players. They determine whether a team will be in contention for a championship, and as far as people believe, when they first get into this, it’s all about titles. It’s not, but that realization comes down the road.

Something you learn later on is that, yeah, the standings are important, but they might not be predictive. It’s fun when your team has a bunch of wins, but that doesn’t guarantee a bunch of future wins to follow. Sports fans are always doing what they can to try to tell the future. No one can ever do well, but you can do better or worse.

Future-telling is the goal of projection systems. You could argue, maybe, the goal is to estimate a player or team’s true talent at a moment in time, but true talent is virtually indistinguishable from expected future performance. Projections are everywhere in baseball analysis. Even when the word itself isn’t used, observers are always making educated guesses about what’s going to happen, which is a form of projecting. Official projection systems formalize it.

People have some trust issues with projections. Humans always want to believe they’re smarter than human-designed machines or systems, and they especially distrust projections when they show something different from what’s already happened. When projections are at odds with evidence, projections are given funny looks. It’s perfectly natural, yet it leaves projections always needing to be validated. In this article, let’s consider projections. And let’s consider wins and losses. And let’s consider what matters more, if we’re trying to look ahead.

A little over a month ago, I tried a project. I had, in my possession, 10 years of preseason team projections. The season was also about two months old, so I reviewed the previous 10 years of baseball, around the two-month mark. I was curious what was a better predictor of the next four months: team performance over the first two months, or preseason team projection. As it turned out, the projections fared quite a bit better. After two months, you’re better off keeping the same opinion of a team you had in March.

Here, I want to do something similar. But there are two twists.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

On Wednesday night, Alex Gordon strained a groin muscle chasing a fly ball. If you just adjusted in your seat, I don’t blame you — it sounds painful. He’ll be out for eight weeks, which is better news than the team could have received. If the Royals can hold the fort down until then, they just may have him back in time for the stretch run. Of course, injuries don’t always follow a defined timetable, so we’ll see. Still, there’s hope Gordon can come back. That’s better than nothing. The question is, though: how will they absorb his loss?

For now, they are going to roll with Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando. This isn’t a bad plan! As I’ve discussed in the past, Dyson is worthy of a starting position. His defense is still top notch. Here’s a reminder:

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Miguel Sano is off to quite the start to his big-league career. The hulking 22-year-old is hitting .385/.500/.577 through his first eight games with Minnesota, and has reached base in all but one of those contests. His 205 wRC+ is the 11th highest in baseball in the month of July, and he’s provided a significant boost to the middle of the Twins lineup.

Sano’s major-league career may be only a week old, but he’s been in the limelight for years now. He was seen as a generational talent when the Twins signed him as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican back in 2009. And the controversy surrounding his signing inspired Peletero — one of baseball’s best and most well-known documentaries.

Once his signing was finally completed and documented, Sano proceeded to punish minor-league pitching. Between 2010 and 2013, he mashed .279/.372/.567 as an infielder, with most of his reps coming at third base. Sano had some trouble making contact, as evidenced by his 26% strikeout rate, but he more than made up for it with his mammoth power. On the strength of his 80-grade raw power, his isolated-power figures (ISOs) were consistently near or above .300, which frankly doesn’t happen all that often. All in all, Sano was always among the very best hitters in his league, despite being much younger than his competition.

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