Even when I’m not trying to pay attention to Bryce Harper, he finds a way to capture my focus. Last night, I was seeing off a friend on the east side of Portland, and if I’d been thinking about any sport, it was hockey, since these are the days of the NHL playoffs. A TV was being projected onto one of the walls of the bar, and at first it was showing a minor-league hockey game. Eventually it switched to baseball highlights, which eventually turned to a game between the Nationals and the Giants. The Nationals won 2-1 in ten innings, but what stuck with me wasn’t the result, but rather a Bryce Harper double.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harper rip a Jeremy Affeldt delivery into right field. The ball skidded all the way to the fence, where it was recovered by Hunter Pence, but Harper pulled up at second with ease. He’d score minutes later. I’ve seen Bryce Harper double before, but this one was different. This one was an in-between grounder/line drive, and it was hit between the first and second basemen, and it made it all the way to the wall. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw something like that.

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It’s not right to say Fernando Rodney is back to being his old self, because right now he’s sitting on a career-high strikeout rate. But he is back to being unreliable, or at least, he has been unreliable, to this point in the 2013 season. Wednesday, in Toronto, he blew a save against the Blue Jays. He was removed after facing just three batters. The save was blown on Rodney’s sixth pitch, when Jose Bautista took him deep on an inside fastball at 98 miles per hour.

Rodney retired Edwin Encarnacion, then he walked Adam Lind. Lind didn’t score, so that walk didn’t really hurt. Lind walked on five pitches, and not on one. Certainly not on the first pitch that he saw. But I want to talk a little bit about that pitch anyway, just because. I want to talk about ball one from Fernando Rodney to Adam Lind, a 97 mile-per-hour fastball that just missed away. I know this sure seems insignificant, but baseball is insignificant, and you and I are insignificant, so let’s come together in our collective insignificance and celebrate all that ultimately doesn’t matter. Celebrate or don’t celebrate; eventually you will be dead.

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The Mariners stuck with it for 735 innings. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in baseball agreed that Jesus Montero could not catch at an acceptable level in the Major Leagues, the Mariners let him try for the equivalent of a half season spread out over eight painful months. Now, it seems like the organization is accepting the reality that Jesus Montero is not, and will never be, a Major League catcher. As of today, he isn’t even a Major League player.

The Mariners are swapping out Jesuses in their backup catcher role — Montero had already lost the starting gig to vaunted superstar Kelly Shoppach — by replacing Montero with Jesus Sucre, the polar opposite of Montero as a player. Sucre is a no-bat defensive specialist, but given Montero’s struggles on both sides of the plate, a non-prospect catch-and-throw backup is probably an upgrade at this point.

So, with Montero back in Triple-A for the foreseeable future, I figured it would be a good time to re-do an exercise we did with Montero 17 months ago, when he was first traded from New York to Seattle. At that point, we walked through a list of comparable bat-first prospects who reached the Majors at an early age, noting that players of this type have turned into superstars, but that the median forecast based on similar prospects called for Montero to turn into a good hitter, not a great one. I ended that piece with the following paragraphs:

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This morning, the following tweet from Gordon Wittenmeyer showed up in my timeline.

Cubs: 36 more H, 30 more 2B, 6 more HR and slug% 39 points higher than opponents. And 3.65 ERA. But 5 fewer runs, 9 games under .500. …

— Gordon Wittenmyer (@GDubCub) May 23, 2013

I hadn’t noticed this specifically, but once he said it, I did start to wonder about the Cubs record. After all, they’re getting quality offensive production from the likes of David DeJesus, Anthony Rizzo, Nate Schierholtz, and Luis Valbuena. Jeff Samardzija continues to look like an ace. Scott Feldman is living up his billing as the bargain free agent starter of the winter. Travis Wood is having a lot of success, even if it’s not all sustainable. Even after their early bullpen problems, Kevin Gregg has revitalized his career and has yet to give up a run in 11 innings of work.

With so many things going right, how are the Cubs 18-27? And, as Wittenmeyer’s tweet notes, are they actually playing better than their record suggests?

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Featured Game: Baltimore at Toronto, 19:07pm ET
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Featured Game: Baltimore at Toronto, 19:07pm ET
Regarding This Game, Who’s Starting It for Baltimore
Starting this game for Baltimore, in terms of a pitcher, is Compelling Baseball Prospect Kevin Gausman. The appearance will mark Gausman’s first in the majors.

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Yankees Global Enterprises, the parent company of the New York Yankees, has teamed with the Manchester City Football Club of the English Premier League to bring a new Major League Soccer team to New York. The team will be known as the New York Football Club and will begin action in 2015 MLS season. The New York Times reported that the Yankees have invested as much as $25 million toward the $100 million purchase price.

Manchester City is owned by an investment group led by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi. That group has been working with MLS for several years to launch a new New York franchise. The New York Red Bulls play in Harrison, New Jersey.

The Yankees’ involvement in the Manchester City bid came together quickly in the past several weeks. The two sides know each other well as the Yankees’ Legends Hospitality provides services at Manchester City’s home stadium. As Howard Megdal reported for Sports On Earth, the New York Mets were once considered by MLS as the group that would team with a partner for a new New York pro soccer team. The Mets’ financial difficulties made that impossible, which opened the door for the Yankees. Read the rest of this entry »

Used to be the hipster thing was to talk about pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving, and how it’s more important than it’s been given credit for. That was all well and fun, but people have a pretty good idea now, as the concept has gone borderline mainstream. And it turns out we don’t actually know that much about the effects, since it’s not as simple as calculating the difference between a ball and a strike. Of course, all else being equal, a good receiver is more valuable than a bad one, but we don’t know how much more valuable. The new hipster thing is to talk about receiving realistically. To distrust the idea of a guy being worth something like 50 runs above average. I live in Portland so you can trust me on my evaluation of hipster things.

Over the rest of this post, not everything is figured out. You could argue that very little is figured out, and so much more research could be done. Research by people with more time and way better technical skills. But I’ve decided to mess around with some numbers, and I’ll try to make this as reader-friendly as possible. I’m not going to lay out for you the true effects of good or bad pitch-receiving. Hopefully this’ll just make you think a little, before you think about something else.

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Vance Worley just got clobbered again, this time by the Braves. There’s no set and certain point at which a start turns into an official clobbering, but looking through Worley’s 2013 game log, I’d say this was the fifth or sixth time he’s been clobbered, in ten games. That’s an ugly ratio, and to make matters worse, recall that Worley was Minnesota’s opening-day starter. The Twins’ de facto ace owns an ERA over 7, with 82 hits allowed in just under 49 innings. His strikeouts are way down and on Wednesday he was chased by a double that followed an Evan Gattis grand slam. Two seasons ago, Worley finished third in the voting for the National League Rookie of the Year.

On May 17, Worley allowed one run in a start against the Red Sox, and he credited his improvement to mechanical tweaks he’d made in recent side sessions. He finished that start with three walks and a strikeout. At the end of April, following a rough appearance, Worley said he was throwing the way he wanted to be throwing. His pitches were fine, and his movement was normal. The results just weren’t present, for him. They still aren’t, and the only consolation for Minnesota is that Ben Revere has been bad, too.

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Is there an ideal ground ball rate for hitters? Should they be thinking about how many grounders they hit? Armed with some spreadsheets and a couple conversations with some Royals’ hitters, let’s see what we can discover.

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All winter, there were rumors that the Dodgers were open to trading Andre Ethier. All winter, the Dodgers declared that there was nothing to those rumors, and that they weren’t having second thoughts about the five year, $85 million contract they gave him last June. When spring training rolled around and Cuban import Yasiel Puig became The Hot New Thing, those rumors picked up again, since the Dodgers will need to open up a corner outfield spot for Puig at some point in the not too distant future.

But, LA remained patient and optioned the 22-year-old Puig to Double-A, giving him some experience against professional pitchers without throwing him immediately into the fire. They also gave Ethier a chance to play most everyday, and while they were unlikely to admit it publicly, they likely hoped that he could get off to a strong enough start to re-establish some trade value after his power fell off in the second half last year.

Today, though, manager-of-the-moment Don Mattingly sent a pretty clear signal that he is not Andre Ethier’s biggest fan, and you can probably start the clocking ticking on both of their exits from Dodger Land.

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Just a couple of years ago, Jacoby Ellsbury came out of nowhere of have one of the best seasons by a position player in years. He hit .321/.376/.552 (149 wRC+) with 32 home runs while playing center field that impressed both the Gold Glove voters and various fielding metrics. Although Ellsbury had been a first-round draft pick by the Red Sox in 2005 and had been a very good prospect in his minor-league days, it is unlikely many saw 2011 coming. While Ellsbury was amazingly fast — he stole 70 bases in 2009, one of only three players to steal 70 or more in a single season since 2000 — and had good contact skills, he had not shown anything close to that sort of power. In fact, he had never hit double digits in home runs in any major or minor league season prior to 2011.

It would have been unfair to expect Ellsbury to repeat his 2011 performance, but even so, he has been disappointing since then. His 2012 was derailed by an early shoulder injury and he ended up playing only 74 games while hitting just .271/.313/.370 (83 wRC+). Ellsbury is off to an even worse start this year at .242/.307/355 (72 wRC+), and while 212 plate appearances are not many, they are not nothing, at this point, either. The Red Sox are obviously in contention, and are arguably the favorites to win the East at this point. The divisional and playoff races look to be very tight, so contenders have to make every decision count. Figuring out what Ellsbury can offer or if they need to lessen his role is obviously a big decision for them. It is not that Ellsbury has to repeat his 2011 performance — far from it. He does not need to be a superstar for the Red Sox to have a chance. The questions are whether or not Ellsbury is going to keep flat-lining and how long Boston should wait to find out. The Sox are competing even with him hitting horribly now, but that is not something they want to live with if they do not have to do so.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Featured Game: St. Louis at San Diego, 22:10pm ET
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Featured Game: St. Louis at San Diego, 22:10pm ET
Regarding This Game, What a Reasonable Person Might Say
An entirely reasonable person could say, with regard to tonight’s Cardinals-Padres game, that it is not, strictly speaking, the most watchable of today’s scheduled games — because, for example, Mets right-hander Matt Harvey is facing the Reds this afternoon, or because, for other example, Justin Verlander faces Cleveland tonight, which club is 1.5 games ahead of Verlander’s Detroiters.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly exercise (introduced last month) wherein the author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to this exercise, of course, is a working definition of fringe. Currently, for the purposes of this column, it’s any prospect who was absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists. (A slightly more robust meditation on the idea of fringe can be found here.)

Three players retain their place this week among the Five: Mets infield prospect Wilmer Flores, recently promoted (to Triple-A, that is) Marlins left-handed prospect Brian Flynn, and Cardinals Double-A outfielder Mike O’Neill. Departing from the Five are promising Cleveland pitcher Danny Salazar — largely because shoulder soreness might be an issue — and Cubs infield prospect Ronald Torreyes, who did nothing in particular to lose his spot except fail to amuse the author completely.

Replacing the pair are two New York pitching prospects: the Mets’ Rafael Montero and the Yankees’ Jose Ramirez — about which pair the reader can learn more below.

All those points having been made, here are this week’s Fringe Five.

Wilmer Flores, 2B/3B, New York NL (Profile)
The salient points regarding Wilmer Flores remain unchanged since last week’s edition of the Fringe Five — remain unchanged, in fact, since the series’ inaugural dispatch in April. Flores is still just 21; he still controls the strike zone; and his primary offensive indicators (regressed home-run and walk and strikeout rates) remain roughly equal to those currently being posted by both Jurickson Profar and Oscar Taveras in the Pacific Coast League. Here’s his line over the past week: 20 PA, 1 HR, 1 BB, 3 K.

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Jose Ramirez‘s live arm was on display against Kevin Gausman this past Friday. The New York Yankees’ minor-leaguer consistently unleashed 94 mph to 95 mph four-seam fastballs against the Bowie Baysox from his low three-quarter arm slot. The pitch touched 97 mph, but Ramirez’s low release point kept it on the same plane on which it was released. It did, however, feature arm-side run.

Ramirez complemented his four seamer with an 81 mph to 84 mph changeup that featured significant vertical drop and slight fade as it neared the plate. The right-hander commanded the pitch well down in the zone and it was his go-to out pitch when he was ahead in the count. But his arm speed slows down noticeably during his delivering when compared to his fastball.

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Marcus Stroman is back, and he’s back big — at least to the degree a 5-foot-9 pitcher can be described as big. His first performance of the 2013 season certainly was. The 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays prospect threw five scoreless innings, with six strikeouts, for Double-A New Hampshire on Sunday.

Drafted 22nd-overall last year out of Duke, the right-hander saw his season start late due to a 50-game suspension incurred last August. Before going afoul of Minor League Baseball’s drug program, he made 15 appearances between two levels.

Stroman talked about what he brings to the mound — including his cutter-slider and his non-max-effort delivery — prior to Monday’s game in Portland, Maine.

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The lowest ERA on the Diamondbacks right now belongs to Matt Reynolds. The lowest ERA on the Diamondbacks belonging to a pitcher who’s thrown more innings than a really long baseball game belongs to Patrick Corbin. Monday night, Corbin took the mound in Coors Field with an ERA of 1.52. He came away with an ERA even lower than that, and at present his ERA is the second-lowest in baseball among starters. Only Clayton Kershaw has Corbin beat — Matt Harvey, Shelby Miller, Felix Hernandez, and everyone else is behind him. And Kershaw’s allowed three unearned runs. Corbin has yet to allow his first.

It’s been a brilliant season-opening stretch for a guy who now looks to have been underrated in the past. To pick on Keith Law, here he is calling Corbin a back-end starter, and here he is calling Corbin a No. 4. To pick on us, here’s Corbin as a potential No. 3, and here he is as a potential No. 3 again. Previously, it was thought that Corbin’s ceiling would be that of a mid-rotation starter, perhaps. Already, he’s exceeding that, and I’m not blaming the prospect evaluators. Corbin’s just beating expectations, and that’s worthy of a deeper dig.

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Johnny Cueto came off the disabled list and started for the Reds last night. He had been on the disabled list due to a sore right oblique; it was the same injury he experienced during last season’s playoffs. His unique twisting windup seems to be the reason that he’s suffered the same ailment twice now, and he has said he might consider changing his delivery to correct the problem in the future.

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