FanGraphs Baseball

Two months ago, almost on the nose, the Padres concluded their offseason by picking up Craig Kimbrel. It was a pretty big move between the Padres and the Braves, but the players of real consequence were Kimbrel and Matt Wisler. Of what was left, there were either long-shots or money exchanges. Onto the Padres, the Braves dumped Melvin Upton. Onto the Braves, the Padres dumped Carlos Quentin and Cameron Maybin. This was about financials, more than talent. The teams wanted rid of those contracts.

In a way, Upton and Maybin sort of canceled out. Both were frustrating center fielders with ceilings higher than their recent performances. Upton needed to get away from Atlanta. Maybin needed to get away from San Diego. We’ll see what Upton is able to do, when he’s back and healthy. But Maybin was slotted in immediately as a regular. And while I intend this more as a fun fact than as a cheap shot, I’ll note that, at the moment, Maybin has a higher WAR than Wil Myers, and a higher WAR than Matt Kemp. He’s hitting better than he ever has before, and now, after rolling the dice, it looks like the Braves might have a real center fielder for a couple of years.

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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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Aroldis Chapman has struck out more than one-third of the hitters he’s faced this season, a phenomenal number for most pitchers. For Chapman, however, that number represents a major drop from his incredible 2014 season when he struck out more than half the batters he faced. When he gave up a game-tying three-run home run to Philadelphia Phillies rookie Maikel Franco last night, it represented the first home run he’d given up in more than a calendar year. Now is hardly the time to panic over one of the best relievers in the majors, but there are some concerns over his most recent performances. Chapman is still throwing the ball hard (although not quite as hard), and he got off to a great start in 2015. Over his last half-dozen appearances, however, he hasn’t been able to get the ball in the strike zone. Hitters have picked up on his lack of command and since taking a week-long break in the middle of May due to a Cincinnati losing streak, Chapman’s performance has suffered.

Relievers are constantly under a microscope due both to the limited number of appearances they make and the relative importance of those appearances, but it can be difficult to decipher problems over the course of the whole season due to limited innings, let alone a couple weeks. Chapman could be pitching just as he always has and gotten a few bad results. He could be going through a tiny rough patch in an otherwise great season. Something could be seriously wrong, and we are seeing glimpses of its beginnings. Knowing precisely what Chapman’s problem has been over the last few weeks is near impossible. We’re picking up bread crumbs in an enclosed room. We can glean information from those crumbs, but we do not yet know where those crumbs lead. It’s too early.

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My debut post at FanGraphs took a look at Twitter engagement metrics for every major-league team’s official Twitter account during the off-season. I promised a follow-up analysis to see if anything changed, and a lot did. The Cubs moved past the Mariners as the most engaging team on Twitter, and the Pirates produced the most media tweets in May.

Full details of the analysis can be found in the original post, but to summarize, we are looking at what teams use the most media and what teams are engaging with their fanbases the most over the month of May. Numbers are no substitute for quality engagement or customer service, but these metrics do shed light on how MLB teams are using their official Twitter accounts.

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It’s a pretty average year for draft-eligible talent in North Carolina, with Duke right hander Michael Matuella leading the way as a possible first-round pick, despite undergoing Tommy John surgery after just a few starts. West Columbus High School center fielder Eric Jenkins is the state’s second-best prospect, a 70-grade runner with projectable hitting tools who should go inside the top two rounds.

After those two come a sheaf (the correct collective noun for prospects) of players who grade similarly talent-wise after the third round. Among them are UNC center fielder Skye Bolt, Charlotte Christian HS right-hander Jackson Kowar, Marvin Ridge HS left-hander Max Wotell, Southpoint HS left-hander Garrett Davila and Greenfield HS outfielder Isaiah White.

UNC, the state’s top exporter of pro prospects, once again runs deep with draft talent, even if it won’t produce a first-rounder as it has five times in the last six years. Of the potentially seven Tar Heels who could be signing pro contracts in the coming weeks, Bolt is the most interesting (and mercurial), and there are a few more who show enough promise to justify clogging up the FanGraphs servers with the following words and moving pictures.

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To the extent that most fans pay any attention to legal issues relating to Major League Baseball, they are typically aware that MLB is somehow immune from antitrust law. How exactly this came to be, however, is often less well understood. And in many cases, fans may not have a firm grasp on precisely how this antitrust exemption actually affects MLB’s operations.

Having written a bit on the topic, I thought I’d begin an occasional series of posts examining baseball’s antitrust exemption to help clarify some misconceptions regarding what is admittedly a rather peculiar legal doctrine. This first post will recount the history of baseball’s exemption, dating back to its creation in 1922. Future posts will consider the current scope of the exemption – i.e., what it does and does not cover today – as well as the practical effect that the exemption has on the league.

Although some fans mistakenly think Congress granted baseball its antitrust exemption, the immunity really results from a nearly 100-year-old decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in a lawsuit arising out of the last on-field challenge to the American and National leagues’ dominance over the sport. Back in 1914 and 1915, the Federal League of Professional Baseball Clubs tried to establish itself as a third major league by signing roughly 50 major league players away from their then-current teams – the most notable of which was probably Hall-of-Fame shortstop Joe Tinker. Read the rest of this entry »

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Yesterday, the Mariners traded for Mark Trumbo. Of course they did. More than any other franchise in baseball, the Mariners have a history of seeing value in bat-only sluggers, often surrendering defensive value to try and build a line-up that can conquer Safeco Field. I’ve been predicting the Mariners would trade for Trumbo all year, and with the Diamondbacks finally admitting that they needed to clear up their roster logjam, this was one of the easiest deals to see coming.

Of course, the fact that the Mariners have been acquiring players exactly like Trumbo for years, and never really having much success in doing so — even though the the acquisition of Nelson Cruz has gone as well as could possibly be imagined so far, the team’s position players are still 22nd in wRC+ and 28th in runs scored — makes it easy to point out that Trumbo is more of what the Mariners already have, but not at all what they lack. The Mariners have a .298 on-base percentage as a team, and they just acquired a guy who has a .299 OBP this year (while playing in hitter-friendly Arizona) and a .298 OBP for his career. This factoid was pointed out by a litany of people on Twitter in the aftermath of the trade.

Would feel better about Mariners if they got AJ Pollock, not Trumbo. Their problem is being 14th in AL in OBP, not 9th in slugging

— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) June 4, 2015

The team with the second-worst OBP (.298) in the American League just acquired a hitter with a .298 career OBP/.299 OBP this season.

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) June 4, 2015

Hey, another low OBP guy! Problem solved! https://t.co/m8fNiJX4pV

— David Schoenfield (@dschoenfield) June 3, 2015

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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
Chicago NL at Washington | 19:05 ET
Arrieta (65.0 IP, 72 xFIP-) vs. Gonzalez (59.0 IP, 84 xFIP-)
It’s possible that the people in American society who aren’t thinking, with at least some kind of regularity, about Cubs right-hander Jake Arrieta — it’s possible that the reason for this absence in their lives is because they don’t particularly care for the sport of baseball or are working to give their children the opportunities they never had or are otherwise engaged. It’s also possible, however, that those same Americans have just never been given the opportunity to observe four of Arrieta’s curveballs in a row by means of embedded looping video. The purpose of this post at FanGraphs.com is to facilitate that opportunity for people in American society.

Regard:

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Chicago NL Television.

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Usually, around this time of year, there still isn’t really much of an active trade market. Not only are teams wrapping up the process of figuring out what they already have — front offices everywhere are dedicated to the draft. Meanwhile, in Seattle, Lloyd McClendon says he’s always being reminded by his analytics department that the team should be okay. And in Arizona, just the other day, Dave Stewart stood by Mark Trumbo, calling him one of the team’s biggest threats. Based on the circumstances, you wouldn’t expect trades, generally. And based on the words, you might’ve figured Trumbo would stay put, and the Mariners would stand pat.

That’s what you get for thinking things. Wednesday afternoon, the following trade was agreed to:

Mariners get:

• Mark Trumbo
• Vidal Nuno

Diamondbacks get:

• Welington Castillo
• Dominic Leone
• Gabriel Guerrero
• Jack Reinheimer

Interestingly, while Arizona is getting the prospects and selling the main piece, they’re currently closer to a playoff spot than Seattle. But that’s kind of Seattle’s whole reason, and Arizona doesn’t fancy itself a real contender just yet. From the Diamondbacks’ perspective, this relieves a roster crunch, with Jake Lamb coming back and forcing Yasmany Tomas somewhere else. And from the Mariners’ perspective, Mark Trumbo feels like one of the most obvious acquisitions in years. He fits the mold, partially based in truth, of being a dinger machine who doesn’t really do anything else. But as easy and fun as it is to snark, that doesn’t make this a bad trade. And as much thump as Trumbo has, that doesn’t make this a big trade. It’s not actually of great significance, nor is it wildly lopsided.

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