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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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Episode 585
In this belated episode of FanGraphs Audio, fill-in host David Temple talks to former NotGraphs writers about what they are currently up to, and also about their memories of writing for the now-dead section of the Internet.

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

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 2 hours, 16 min play time.)

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Say what you will about the Mariners over the years, but at least they’ve thrown the American League’s last three no-hitters. And, say what you will about the significance of a no-hitter, but they’re undeniably exciting and cool, sometimes little oases of elation in a year that’s otherwise lost. You don’t need to overthink it. People like no-hitters. People like them because they’re neat. Hisashi Iwakuma just threw one, Wednesday afternoon in Seattle against the Orioles. The Orioles can hit pretty well!

It wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world, because Iwakuma has a history of being pretty good. It still qualified as a legitimate surprise, because Iwakuma had never before completed a major-league game, and this year he hasn’t entirely been himself. Much like Robinson Cano, it appears that Iwakuma has only righted himself too late to save the Mariners’ season. The best to hope for now is the occasional cool moment, and Iwakuma delivered as much as he could.

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There are three reasons to be interested in Chase Utley as a baseball player. One, there’s his whole history. Utley’s track record of being one of the best second basemen in baseball. If his career ended today, he’d be a borderline Hall-of-Famer. Two, he’s available. The Giants are reportedly in negotiations, with the Phillies looking to keep getting younger. If you want Utley, you can have him, provided you give a little something, and provided Utley is open to the chance. Three, this:

Good news on Utley: Per source, he not only is feeling better, but also has figured out a flaw in his swing that was caused by ankle injury.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 15, 2015

Utley’s numbers this year are very bad. He’s not one to typically offer excuses, but Utley injured his right ankle over the winter, and it never really got quite right. Lousy on-field performance followed, and then Utley went to the disabled list for a while. There’s no positive evaluation of what Utley’s been. The Giants are presumably thinking about what Utley might be now. They’d only be interested if they thought that Utley was better. His numbers since returning from the DL the other day are better. Small-sample numbers mean only so much, though. The numbers aren’t the encouraging thing. The swing is the encouraging thing.

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Absent a Carlos Gonzalez-like run of home runs by Mike Trout, Nelson Cruz or another slugger over the last fifty games of the season, major-league baseball looks likely to fall short of a 50-homer season for the fourth time in five years and seventh time in the last nine seasons. Only Chris Davis and Jose Bautista have notched 50-homer seasons since the end of the 2007 season after 23 such seasons between 1995 and the 2007 season. Despite the relative drought in 50 homer seasons, power is up this season over last with multiple players poised to hit more than 40 homers after only Nelson Cruz hit 40 last season.

A month ago, major-league baseball moved to the All-Star break with just over half the season finished. At the time, seven players had at least 25 home runs, giving the league an outside chance of producing a 50-homer season. That group was led by a player who has yet to crack 40 home runs in Giancarlo Stanton. Unfortunately, he had already been injured for several weeks and, despite his 27 home runs, he might fall short of 40 homers again this year. Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and Bryce Harper were all one behind Stanton with 26 home runs, and J.D. Martinez and Todd Frazier entered the break with 25 home runs.

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It will be a challenge for the 2015 USA Baseball Collegiate National Team (CNT) to match what the previous two editions of the club have achieved in terms of the draft. The 2014 CNT produced 10 first-rounders in this year’s draft, including five of the top six college players taken as well as four of the top six picks overall. The 2013 CNT also produced 10 first-rounders.

That’s why ranking the top-20 prospects on Team USA isn’t an easy exercise. The majority of the players have the tools to land in the first round, so there are a few places on this list where the talent runs together. Nevertheless, the obvious strength of this year’s team was power arms with pitchability. The weakness was the lack of impact middle infielders.

Because of the length of this feature, we decided to split the list into two parts. You can see the 11th-20th ranked players and honorable mentions here.

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