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
Cleveland at Baltimore | 19:05 ET
Kluber (103.2 IP, 71 xFIP-) vs. Chen (81.0 IP, 98 xFIP-)
According to the hastily arranged computer math devised by the author, there are actually three games of similar hypothetical interest today: Reds at Mets (featuring Johnny Cueto and Noah Syndergaard), Yankees at Astros (featuring Nathan Eovaldi and Vincent Velasquez), and this one. The reader could choose any one of them, theoretically, and experience roughly similar levels of pleasure — pleasure which, it goes without saying, will dissipate shortly after the conclusion of said game, thus depositing the reader back into the ongoing production of Sartre’s No Exit to which life amounts.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.

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Among the many complains of Mets fans at the moment is that the defense hasn’t been doing enough to support a pitching staff that carries the burden of trying to do everything. It stands to reason, if you’re going to be built first and foremost around run prevention, you’d want to do as much as you can to, say, prevent runs. It’s not a total surprise the Mets have had some defensive issues; they’ve had Wilmer Flores at shortstop, after all, and Michael Cuddyer in an outfield corner. More of a shock is what’s been taking place in the outfield middle. Juan Lagares has been playing defense like a normal and mortal person.

Which a team can’t afford, when said player has Juan Lagares’ bat. The Mets wouldn’t have signed Lagares to a five-year contract if they didn’t believe in him. They were clearly comfortable with the idea of a starting center fielder who does most of his helping on defense. But Lagares, right now, would be evidence to the contrary of the idea that defense doesn’t slump. How much of this seems like a real thing, and how much seems like just a few bad breaks?

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Ben and Sam banter about baseball crimes, All-Star voting, and Diamondbacks GM Dave Stewart, then answer listener emails about perfect games, discuss stats about cycles, and more.

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The Mets have lost seven games in a row. It’s never a good time to lose seven games in a row, but a particularly bad time is when the rival Nationals decide to win five games in a row. So it is that the Mets have ceded control of the National League East, falling perilously close to the surprisingly competent Braves. Now, if you just fast-forwarded from the start of the season to now, these standings wouldn’t be a surprise. The Nationals were supposed to run away with the division. The Mets were supposed to be okay, and the Phillies were supposed to suck. Outside of the Marlins, it seems mostly normal. But sequences of events matter, and the way the year has gone for the Mets makes this current situation feel desperate. A season feels like it’s slipping out of their grasp.

There’s an awful lot of pressure on Sandy Alderson to make a move. Alderson feels it, and he’s been in communication with other front offices. Here’s one move, that just showed up literally as I was writing the above paragraph:

Source says #Mets calling up Matz. Two different club officials declined comment when asked. Team again could be pondering six-man rotation.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 25, 2015

This has been coming. Fans knew Steven Matz was on the way. But, consider the first tweet response to that:

Young Ideas ?@DickYoungsGhost 23m23 minutes ago

@Ken_Rosenthal Unless Matz can bat .400 and play all other positions, still doesn’t help the @Mets.

During the losing streak, the Mets have scored nine runs in seven games. They’ve had a bottom-five NL offense for the year, and a bottom-five NL offense the last month or so. Pressure isn’t on to make any move — pressure is on to make an offensively-minded move. It’s understandable, given how the Mets have looked. But it might very well be prudent for Alderson to keep on taking the boring approach.

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The Miami Marlins are about to get a lot better as a baseball team. Jose Fernandez, one of the most exciting and superlative pitchers in major-league baseball, is set to return next week. Martin Prado and Michael Morse should be back shortly. Henderson Alvarez, who has made just four starts all year, is progressing in his rehab. Mat Latos, who struggled mightily to begin the season, is beginning to show signs of life as the velocity on his fastball continues to creep forward. The Marlins should soon have the team they expected to enter the year with — the team that some, this author included, thought would make the playoffs as a wild card. The problem for the Marlins is that it is already too late this season, and the team needs to start thinking about next year.

The Marlins began the season as a .500 team and the Fangraphs Playoff Odds gave them a 27% chance of making the playoffs. As they were missing their best starter at the time, but his return was factored into those odds, it is fair to assume that the team was not going to be very good to start the season and that they would actually be a below .500 team for the early part of the season. They started the season poorly enough that they fired their manager and replaced him with the general manager. Often times, a team that fires its manager makes that move because the team is underperforming, and the managerial change appears to work as the team tends to play up to its talent level. For the Marlins, the team’s record has not improved with the managerial change. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: this edition of the Fringe Five contains no illustrative video footage, on account of it was largely composed by an author en route from New England to Chicago and by means of the fragile internet connections along that journey.

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) 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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In this age of Hitf/x and StatCast, batted-ball velocity is a hotter topic than ever. We only have had access to such data for a limited period of time, but the hypothesizing regarding the loudest contact-makers in the game’s history has been going on as long as the game itself. A similar debate regarding the quietest contact-makers has been, shall we say, a bit more quiet. Earlier this week we used contact scores to run down the most authoritative hitters of the modern era. Today, let’s flip the script and look at the bottom of the contact authority list.

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Keith Law did not like this week’s trade (ESPN Insider article) that saw Touki Toussaint and Bronson Arroyo go from the Arizona Diamondbacks to the Atlanta Braves. It’s not that Law didn’t like the trade from the perspective of one team or the other. It’s that he didn’t like the spirit of the trade, period: it was, indisputably, a swap of contracts instead of an even exchange of on-field talent.

What does a league look like where plenty, if not most, trades are motivated by their financial implications? Well, it’s not the end of the world: this is what the NBA has been about for years. The NBA combines baseball’s almost entirely guaranteed salaries with a soft cap, like baseball, that, unlike baseball, is restrictive enough that even mid-market teams can unwittingly bump up against it. “Expiring” contracts — or, inefficient deals with less than a year remaining on them — have been a long-coveted NBA asset: salary albatrosses are willingly taken on precisely because they will end quickly enough for the team to have an even more valuable asset — space and flexibility underneath the cap — in time for the offseason free-agent market.

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