Framing-related links of the week
It’s been an eventful week for framing on the internet. If you're here because you’re interested in catcher receiving skills, you might also want to take a look at these three articles:

Estimated historical framing: More great work by Max Marchi, who used Retrosheet pitch-by-pitch data to estimate framing performance going back to 1988. He also took a look at how receiving skills age. Next on his to-do list: estimated framing for minor leaguers, and the quantification of game-calling.

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Though I spend the vast majority of my time at Raising Aces immersed in the analysis of pitching mechanics, the best part of the game is the filthy stuff produced by the mechanical process. One of my favorite features at BP is Sam Miller's “The Best Pitches Thrown This Week,” in which the audience is inundated with GIFs of the nastiest projectiles caught on camera. Inspired by Sam's work, in conjunction with our human compulsion toward dicing the season into manageable chunks of information for the sake of over-analysis, I decided to conjure up a collection of the best stuff from the first quartile of the 2013 season.

The categories were chosen to reflect the elements of a well-rounded repertoire, with the data split into fastballs, breaking balls, and off-speed pitches. In appreciation of the qualitative value of elite pitching, both subjective and objective elements were considered when constructing the following lists, yet the end results were too close to call. I plead the audience to help me fill the gaps by voting for their favorite candidate in each pitch-type category and submitting votes in the comments section. [Stats through games of 5/15]

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Most of our writers didn't enter the world sporting an @baseballprospectus.com address; with a few exceptions, they started out somewhere else. In an effort to up your reading pleasure while tipping our caps to some of the most illuminating work being done elsewhere on the internet, we'll be yielding the stage once a week to the best and brightest baseball writers, researchers and thinkers from outside of the BP umbrella. If you'd like to nominate a guest contributor (including yourself), please drop us a line.

Alex Speier covers the Red Sox for WEEI.com. His playing career reached its zenith when he started a game-winning rally by getting beaned. He rarely sleeps, has many questions, and ventures few answers, while demonstrating proclivities towards sesquipedalianism, circumlocution, and the unintentional misuse of foreign languages. Though he is terrified of 140-character communiques, you can follow him on Twitter @alexspeier. 
 

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The Thursday Takeaway
Performance variations from season to season are common in baseball—given the extent to which batted-ball luck and other uncontrollable factors can impact the game—and they can seem especially glaring during the late-spring months, when sample sizes are still small and a few bad apples can turn a sweet stat line sour.

Matt Cain, who allowed 21 home runs in 219 1/3 innings in 2012, has already watched 13 balls sail over an outfield fence in 56 1/3 frames this year. Jay Bruce, who authored 34 bombs in 155 games last year, has just three to his name through his first 40 games of 2013. The Indians, whose 705 team OPS last year was 22^nd in the majors, now sit atop the leaderboard with a 791 clip to date. But few turnarounds, positive or negative, can rival the complete 180 executed by the Rays bullpen, which last year was one of the most reliable and dominant units in the league.

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Let me put this right up front, because it's the eye-catching number: Bartolo Colon's percentage of batters walked through eight starts this season (i.e. through 47 1/3 innings pitched, i.e. through 189 batters faced, i.e. almost 30 percent of the way to the number of hitters he faced last year) is 1.1 percent.

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Question: I never liked Veras as the closer for Houston; I thought Fields would take over that job. What do you think? Also, how about Paul Clemens?

Answer: Veras isn't the most inspiring closer, but he has been getting the job done for Houston of late. He has also been the best reliever thus far in a fairly weak pen. Fields is currently on a rehab assignment and recovering from a forearm strain. The injury is minor, but it means that the Astros are likely to ease him back into action when he returns later this month.

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If you’re anything like me, trading can sometimes be a scary proposition, especially if your team is shaping up to be a contender. Nothing is worse than an ill-advised trade initiating a team’s downward spiral when maintaining the status quo of players would have been the better option.

As unpleasant as the outcome of a trade can be, equally as displeasing is the feeling of discomfort during negotiations.  I’m sure you’ve felt before the pressure to respond decisively to an offer and maybe even formulate a logical counter of your own when really you just want to avoid making any drastic decisions.

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Thus far in our series, we have focused on the first selection in this year’s shadow draft, which will include a selection for each of the Red Sox’ first 15 draft picks (for a refresher on the series, review the earlier Dissecting the Draft pieces). In our last installment, we set our preference list for Tier One, which consists of the talents we rate higher than the typical talent we’d expect to have available to us at our draft slot (seventh overall).

Tier One

1. Jonathan Gray, RHP, Oklahoma University | Scouting Report
2. Mark Appel, RHP, Stanford University | Scouting Report

3. Clint Frazier, OF, Loganville HS (Loganville, GA) | Scouting Report


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Welcome to the Weekly Pitching Planner. Each week I will cover the pitchers are who slated to make two starts and help you decide who you should start and who you should sit. Sometimes guys will be in the “consider” where they might have one good start, but a second tough one and then your league settings might determine whether or not you should go forward with him. The pitchers will be split by league then by categories:

Auto-Starts – These are your surefire fantasy aces. You paid a handsome sum for them either with an early draft pick or high dollar auction bid so you’re starting them anywhere, anytime. Guys can emerge onto or fall off of this list as the season evolves. There won’t be many – if any – notes associated with these groupings each week. We are starting them automatically so why do I need to expound on how awesome they are and will be in the coming week?

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At some point, you’ve probably thought to yourself that you could do a better job than the man on the mound for your team, especially if your team has ever employed Jonathan Sanchez. And every so often, amateurs do get the chance to outshine actual pitchers. These brave volunteers are known as “position players,” and they’re occasionally called in to provide a desperate manager with outs so that a blowout game may mercifully end. Surprisingly, these rescue arms are not off-the-charts terrible, with position players who’ve debuted since the 2000 season posting a combined 6.84 ERA (6.76 FIP) in 51 1/3 innings—and that drops to a 5.11 ERA (6.34 FIP) if you exclude Paul Janish’s two rough innings.

The Yankees were in dire straits on Wednesday night after the unpredictable Phil Hughes lasted only 2/3 of an inning, surrendering seven runs on six hits and two walks. This forced manager Joe Girardi to get 5 2/3 innings of long relief from Brett Marshall in his major-league debut. After Marshall’s pitch count reached 108 pitches with two outs in the ninth, Girardi asked Alberto Gonzalez, a journeyman infielder with no prior professional pitching experience, to get Robert Andino out. Somehow, he did. (Granted, Andino, who owns a .236 OBP, is among the easiest outs in baseball. But still.)

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There’s a strange thing that happens to normally rational baseball writers when discussing the Yankees. People who would normally question every assumption and demand to see some empirical proof blindly believe that the Yankees have mastered the dark art of picking up past-their-prime players and restoring some of their former success. The only evidence is anecdotal, so we know we’re being naughty and going off the reservation, sabermetrically speaking. But like Luke Skywalker, we’ve searched our feelings, and we know it to be true. And we’re only kind of kidding.

When the Yankees traded for a struggling Ichiro Suzuki last July, The Great Grant Brisbee—after acknowledging the absurdity of what he was about to say—wrote this:

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