Archive for Report

Examples of not baseball players.

Within the last 24 hours, both former Twins prospect Joe Benson and also former excellent A’s left-hander Mark Mulder have signed minor-league deals with the Marlins and Angels, respectively. What if — this post asks, though — what if, instead of Benson and Mulder the baseball players, what if the Marlins and Angels had signed Benson and Mulder the beloved fictional characters of American television?

“I guess that’d be pretty weird,” someone would probably say. “Please stop talking to me,” is likely another comment a person could make. “That’s not really a thing,” a third, totally accurate source could also assert.

True, truer, and truest, is how one might evaluate all those claims, in no specific order.

Halladay never even took organic chemistry.

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Just a day after announcing his retirement from baseball, former Philadelphia and Toronto right-hander Roy Halladay returned Tuesday with an even more startling confession — namely that, despite answering to the name “Doc” for almost the entirety of his 16-year career, that he isn’t a medical professional in any sense of those words, nor does he possess any formal training whatsoever in the health sciences.

“No, of course not,” Halladay said when confronted on Tuesday by a member of our Investigative Reporting Investigation Team and asked if he’d ever attended medical school. “I assumed it was pretty obvious from how I was drafted out of high school. I didn’t even go to college.”

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NEW YORK — The Yankees are interested in all of baseball’s remaining free agents, general manager Brian Cashman told the media, after Robinson Cano reportedly agreed to a 10-year, $240-million contract with Seattle on Friday morning.

“All of them, yes,” Cashman reiterated, when asked for clarification.

Players the Yankees are now in on: Everyone. Choo. Beltran. Infante. Tanaka. Drew. You. Me. Everyone.

— Andy McCullough (@McCulloughSL) December 6, 2013

“Even the free agents we’re not really interested in, we’re interested in,” Cashman added.

For the first time in free-agency history, the Yankees stood firm, not relenting to Cano’s exorbitant contract demands, even though he was a homegrown star destined for Monument Park.

“Everybody is replaceable,” Cashman said. “With free agents. It’s the Yankee way.”

Cashman has a point: the club’s spent $254 million on free agents Brian McCann, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Hiroki Kuroda in the last two weeks. Second baseman Omar Infante will likely end up a Yankee, whether he wants to or not.

“We’ve already signed Infante,” Cashman said. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

“If you’re a free agent, we want to talk,” Cashman concluded. “More importantly, we’d like to sign you.”

NEW YORK — Major League Baseball and FanGraphs, in an effort to have people shut up about Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout, and the American League MVP Award for one goddamned second, have teamed up to announce the creation of a new award, the Mike Trout Award, a source from the commissioner’s office told NotGraphs on condition of anonymity. An official announcement is expected Friday afternoon.

The Mike Trout Award will be given annually to Mike Trout, for being the best player in baseball, and to a player in the National League who represents the essence of Mike Trout by leading the National League in Wins Above Replacement, as calculated by FanGraphs. It’s hoped that the Trout Award will mercifully end the debate between the Baseball Writers Association of America, fans, and sabermetricians everywhere — mostly on the Internet — over who are definitively baseball’s most valuable players every year. Because after two years, it’s fucking exhausting.

The Trout Award was to have been created for the 2014 season and beyond, but after Trout versus Cabrera Part II in the American League, MLB, and especially Commissioner Bud Selig, who acted “with a sense of urgency,” according to our source, pushed up the award’s timeline.

“Seriously, no one at MLB really cares who wins the MVP awards,” our source said via email. “We just mostly want not to receive angry phone calls and emails and even one weird — and pretty graphic — fax, which we suspect was sent by Mr. Brian Kenny. In any case, we believe the Trout Award is the perfect solution to stop the insanity.”

The winners of the Trout Award — Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen — will be presented their awards on Monday in a ceremony at MLB headquarters in New York City.

At a certain point, it becomes too cumbersome and tedious to try and analyze which team will win a postseason game based solely on numbers. So, let us make our predictions based one which team SOUNDS better. Specifically, which club has a more pleasing team at-bat song. And by team at-bat song, I mean all of the at-bat songs of the starting lineup played at the same time.

I like the Red Sox in this one.

(at-bat music data via Designated Hits)

TORONTO — Blue Jays catcher J.P. Arencibia walked 18 times in 497 plate appearances in 138 games in 2013, his walk rate dropping to 3.6 percent, less than half the 7.4 percent he posted in his rookie year in 2011. And the 27-year-old is continuing to adjust: he’s hoping to eliminate walking entirely from his game in 2014.

“I’m just not going to do it anymore,” Arencibia said. “My approach is to go up there and try and drive the ball, hit the ball, and I’m going to try and do that every time I step into the batter’s box next year.”

For Arencibia, who hit 21 home runs and drove in 55 runs for Toronto this past season, and who’s fourth among major-league catchers with 62 home runs since 2011, the pros of not walking outweigh the cons.

“It’s one less thing I have to talk about, you know? If I vow to not take a walk and it happens, it’s a bonus, the way I see it. I mean, it’s impossible to keep everyone satisfied, so hopefully this will help.”

Arencibia walked only five times in 173 plate appearance after this summer’s All-Star break. He wants to bring that same second-half approach to spring training.

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A new discovery has left Mark DeRosa scratching his head.

After sitting down to eat breakfast on Wednesday morning over the previous night’s edition of MLB.com’s FastCast recap program, Toronto area resident Mark DeRosa was surprised to find not only that Mark DeRosa had produced a pair of key hits in the Blue Jays’ 3-2 extra-inning victory over the Baltimore Orioles the day before, but that Mark DeRosa still played baseball at any level at all, let alone the major-league one.

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Click to embiggen.

Since its inception in 1973 in a small alpine laboratory built by ice-cold power broker/mindfulness-studies instructor David Appelman, NotGraphs has been a byword for rock-hard science; its various contributors, all of them, each respectively bywords for rock-hard scientists. For granted, is how the reader takes this.

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SAN FRANCISCO — A joint research project conducted by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and Twitter, Inc. has concluded that there are no more original jokes to be made about Los Angeles Dodger Michael Young.

“Twitter is not only a fast, easy way to share ideas with one another,” said Lauren Fraser, a sports partnerships liaison for Twitter. “It’s a great tool for measuring and quantizing what certain communities are talking about. And the baseball community loves making jokes about Michael Young.”

The research project, which began in 2011, was put on hold for a spell during the 2013 season, a short time after Young was signed by the Philadelphia Phillies.

“After the Phillies signed Michael Young, jokes about him seemed to die down,” said SABR’s Executive Director, Marc Appleman. “We contemplated putting the project on the shelf, as it seemed we were going to fall short of witnessing every Michael Young joke being made. Then, he cleared waivers, and we saw an uptick. After that, he was traded to the Dodgers, and we started monitoring closely again.”

The tweet that completed the nearly-two year inquiry came from Twitter user @DodgerzGM, a parody account based loosely around Dodgers General Manager Ned Colletti. It stated “Yasiel Puig removed in the 6th inning so he can sit in the dugout next to Michael Young.”

“We had seen some Michael Young/Yasiel Puig jokes, but never one about them sitting together on the bench,” said Fraser. ” Young getting traded to the Dodgers made that happen. It’s a very exciting time for us.”

Fraser and Appleman said they plan to use this research in an upcoming presentation for the yearly SABR convention. They are looking to project a scroll of every Michael Young joke made on Twiiter, that will play the entire duration of the event. As a result, the next SABR convention will be extended to last four and half months. Details are still being negotiated.

TORONTO – The Toronto Blue Jays are set to bring Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson back into the fold. Henderson will be announced as the Blue Jays’ first-ever sliding coach after Tuesday’s matinee against the Braves, NotGraphs has learned.

The move’s being applauded in baseball circles, both for its outside-the-box thinking, and because the Blue Jays clearly don’t know how to slide, especially into second base. Rickey Henderson does.

“Rickey’s going to teach these fools how to swipe a bag without spraining an ankle,” Henderson said, when NotGraphs caught up with him at breakfast Tuesday morning.

“Rickey’s embarrassed, to be honest with you. First Reyes, now Lawrie. Who’s next? Bautista? It’s Rickey’s job to make sure nobody else goes down.”

Jose Reyes, one of Toronto’s many – and arguably the most – prized offseason acquisitions, was injured in only his tenth game of the season, when he slid awkwardly into second base in Kansas City on April 12. A severely sprained ankle will keep him out of the lineup until mid-to-late June.

“Rickey never wants to see Reyes crying on the field after stealing a bag again,” a determined Henderson said. “Ever.”

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