The Best of FanGraphs: December 5-9, 2016

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 and blue for Community Research.

MONDAY
Giants Make Obvious Move, Sign Mark Melancon by Eno Sarris
Eno isn’t exactly optimistic about the long-term prospects of this signing.

Will Andrew McCutchen Rebound? by Mike Podhorzer
Probably not, since there isn’t a lot of rebounding in baseball. That’s really more of a basketball thing.

The Pinstripe Mezuzah, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yankees by Evan Davis
A heartfelt piece from Evan on how baseball can change our lives.

TUESDAY
Chris Sale Makes the Red Sox the AL Team to Beat by Dave Cameron
Dave Dombrowski was brought in for a reason. There’s no turning back now.

Scouting the White Sox’ Monster Return for Chris Sale by Eric Longenhagen
This is an impressive piece of writing that was written on deadline — doesn’t get much better than that.

Jorge Polanco is the anti-Christian Yelich by Al Melchior
This was actually Al’s second article for RotoGraphs, so this is more of a belated welcome to the team, but a welcome nonetheless!

The Screwball: Wanna See How the Comedy Sausage is Made? by John Paschal
John takes you behind the scenes.

Finding the Real Eric Thames by Will Franta
It’s just two pictures, but Will finds something interesting with regards to Thames’ swing.

WEDNESDAY
The Win-Win Trade of Jorge Soler and Wade Davis by Dave Cameron
Unless The Cyborg really has been terminated…

Adam Eaton Is the Nationals’ Newest Star Player by Jeff Sullivan
To quote Jeff, “this is about as good as a Plan C could get.”

2016 Disabled List Information and the Future of Injury Analysis by Jeff Zimmerman
Required off-season reading. Don’t forget about it in the deluge of Winter Meetings content.

THURSDAY
The Reality of Aroldis Chapman by Nicolas Stellini
Reality, as always, remains complex. It becomes even more complex when the player in question generally only enters the game when your team is near victory.

FRIDAY
Projecting Yesterday’s Rule 5 Picks by Chris Mitchell
The Rule 5 Draft isn’t what it once was, but Chris Mitchell is what he once was, and more!

“Pitch” Episode 10: Finale by Sarah Wexler
Pitch aired its season finale on Thursday, and Sarah was here to cover it, as always. Alexandra Simon also wrote about the show this week over at The Hardball Times. You should read both pieces.

2017 Top 50 Fantasy Prospects: First Look by Trey Baughn
It’s never too early.





Paul Swydan used to be the managing editor of The Hardball Times, a writer and editor for FanGraphs and a writer for Boston.com and The Boston Globe. Now, he owns The Silver Unicorn Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Acton, Mass. Follow him on Twitter @Swydan. Follow the store @SilUnicornActon.

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#KeepNotGraphs
7 years ago

Last summer, WBE asked other commenters to speculate on a RAJ/Dave Stewart trade talk transcript.

This week, the two of them* actually traded a bunch of talk in the comment section of this post on Ian Desmond:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/lets-get-weird-ian-desmond-is-a-rockie//#comments