The Best of FanGraphs: March 24-28, 2014

Each week, we publish a lot of content here in the FanGraphs family. Between the main blog, RotoGraphs, NotGraphs, The Hardball Times and the Community blog, we publish well over 100 posts each week. It can be hard to sift through all that content, even for us! So, we’re here to help. Starting today, we’re going to put up this Best of FanGraphs post every Saturday, to help you catch up on all the great content you didn’t get a chance to read in the past week. Or, if you did, this post will serve as a reminder to go back to the comments and explain to us just how wrong we are. Either way, this should be a good cap to the week, and then David Laurila will ease us into the next week with his Sunday Notes feature on … you guessed it, Sunday.

We’ll pull from the whole FanGraphs family, picking 10-15 stories that we feel you really should read before the week draws to a close. The links are color coded — green for FanGraphs, burnt sienna for RotoGraphs, purple for NotGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community. They are listed in this order as well in each day, just for the sake of consistency. We hope you like this catch-up post. And if you don’t, or have suggestions on how we can make it better, let us know down below. Enjoy!

All Week

The Positional Power Rankings wrapped up this week. I’m not going to link to every single post, since you can click back and find them all in the Featured Articles box, but just know they were all great and you should read them.

Also great, at least for fantasy baseball owners, was that this week marked the return of the RotoGraphs Bullpen Report. Alan Harrison, Colin Zarzycki and Benjamin Pasinkoff do a great job with this feature, and their closer grid is always my first stop when plumbing for prospective closers.

Monday

The Myth of Six Years of Team Control, by Dave Cameron
Spurred on by George Springer turning down a long-term contract offer from the Astros, Dave goes in depth on just how long teams control players for.

The Impossibly Possible Marlins Juggernaut, by Jeff Sullivan
Jeff puts the claim of many people that the Marlins have a lot of good, young pitching, under the microscope.

A Five-Year Old’s Scouting Report of Her Own Self, by Carson Cistulli
Carson’s niece can hit the ball 100 seconds.

Tuesday

Joey Votto is Picking his Battles, by Eno Sarris
Eno interviews Votto to find out just what parts of his game the Reds’ first baseman is working on improving this season.

The $9 Pitching Staff, by Mike Podhorzer
One of the tenets of fantasy baseball is spend more on position players than pitchers. Mike takes that to the extreme here.

Wednesday

Padres Fans Finally Get Their Team on TV; Dodgers & Astros Fans, Not So Much, by Wendy Thurm
The title is pretty self explanatory here. The Padres, after a protracted absence of baseball on television, finally find a respite.

The Right Way to Platoon a Spot on your Fantasy Roster, by Brett Talley
The way you thought is probably not the right way.

Thursday

Methodology and Calculations of Dollars Per WAR, by Matt Swartz
Matt had a fantastic three-part series on $/WAR here. This was part two of the series, and it had the bulk of the nerdy math, but you should also definitely read Part One and Part Three as well.

What’s the Value of a Home Run These Days, by Elliott Evans
Elliott discovers that the value of a home run ain’t what it used to be.

Friday

100 MPH = Tommy John Surgery?, by Jeff Zimmerman
Everyone loves velocity, but Jeff wonders whether or not we should love it a little less.

Bryce Pudding?, by Jeremy Blachman
Bryce Harper admitted his affinity for ice cream this week, so Jeremy invented some ice cream flavors in his honor (note – Commenters frequently steal the show on NotGraphs posts, and Diane Firstman may have done just that with the very first comment of the article).