The Call-Up 2012 (CUSTOM)

Description

Like the bestselling Baseball Prospectus annual, this midseason debut provides the latest scoops and analysis to help super-fans follow their favorite teams, and fantasy players win their leagues. July and August is when the smartest teams pull off the big trades or see big contributions from previously obscure rookies. This book pulls out the teams and players with the most crucial updates since the start of the season, with plenty of articles, lists, and leaderboards. The Call-Up also offers some major innovations in sabermetrics, like Mike Fast’s groundbreaking work on measuring the value of a catcher to his pitchers.

Baseball Prospectus is America’s leading provider of statistical analysis for baseball, combining entertaining commentary and accurate forecasting via books, blogs, articles, and a website.

Sujets

• Sport
• Baseball
• Sports collectifs
• Béisbol
• Ligue majeure de baseball
• Recreation
• Major League Baseball
• Baseball Prospectus
• Grandes Ligas de Béisbol
• Sports

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 18 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781118356449
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Call-up 2012


The Essential Guide to the Rest of 2012 Baseball Season
By the Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts
Edited by Ben Lindbergh

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 by Prospectus Entertainment Ventures, LLC. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com . Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions .

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 9781118356449 (ebk)
ISBN 9781118356432 (ebk)

CONTENTS
Title Page
Preface, Ben Lindbergh
Chapter One: Outliers
Chapter Two: The Baseball Prospectus Top Prospects, Kevin Goldstein
Chapter Three: The 2012 Draft’s New Rules, Kevin Goldstein
Chapter Four: What We Really Know About the Shift, Colin Wyers
Chapter Five: The Decline and Fall of the Texas Rangers, Sam Miller
Chapter Six: Removing the Mask, Mike Fast
Chapter Seven: Keeping Up with the Friedmans, Ben Lindbergh
Chapter Eight: Farewell to a Phenom, Bradford Doolittle
Contributors
Preface
By Ben Lindbergh
In his foreword to Baseball Prospectus 2011 , Joe Posnanski wrote, “This book you’re holding? This is when baseball begins.” After 17 editions of the annual, thousands of baseball fans besides Posnanski have become conditioned to associate our book with the approach of Opening Day. Pavlov’s dog had his bell; the baseball fan has his BP annual. Your mouth probably won’t water when the box containing the book shows up, but your thoughts might turn to your favorite team or your fantasy draft, and with good reason. The arrival of the annual each year is as sure a sign that baseball is about to begin as pitchers and catchers reporting or bored beat writers filing stories about players who came to camp in the best shape of their lives.
At Baseball Prospectus, we spend a lot of time talking to scouts and combing through stats in order to develop the most accurate pictures of players, which we present in the annual both in our comments and in our PECOTA forecasts. But as much as we pride ourselves on our predictive powers, the annual is just what Posnanski said it was: a beginning. The end doesn’t come until the last out of the World Series—which, not coincidentally, is about when we start working on the sequel. Every season, countless events that we couldn’t have seen coming occur. That is, as they say, why they play the games. It’s also why we write the books, and why we can fill several hundred pages with new material every spring. We wouldn’t want it any other way.
Still, it’s a long time between Annuals. As soon as we submit the book to the publisher, entropy goes to work: players switch teams, get hurt, or get arrested, and we always wish we could add more, even after we’re holding printed copies in our hands. What’s more, we always have a lot to say about baseball. As a result, we’ve decided to do a mid-season update to the annual this season, called The Call-up . It’s not a substitute for the big book you already bought or the new one you’ll start seeing on shelves in seven months or so, but it will help tide you over until then.
In addition to a brilliant preface, The Call-up includes 55 brand-new comments by 10 of your favorite BP authors about some of the season’s most interesting players. The Annual contains thousands of profiles of relatively obscure players, but you won’t find your team’s fifth outfielder here (unless your team’s fifth outfielder is suddenly a star). These are the prominent players who’ve done something different and—in many cases—defied our expectations so far this season. Basically, if someone were to make a dramatic montage of the first few months of the season, set to the sound of Aerosmith’s “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing,” these are the guys for whom we’d want to have clips. We’ve also included updated PECOTA predictions of their rest-of-season statistics.
Major-league action isn’t the only kind that matters. Minor leaguers are baseball’s future, and we know that many of you enjoy dreaming on their potential as much as you enjoy watching the present performance of players who’ve already fulfilled or fallen short of expectations. Consequently, BP prospect guru Kevin Goldstein has updated his Top 101 prospects list for The Call-up , including new commentary for selected players. If you want to know which top prospects have improved their stock or failed to take a step forward since last winter, read Kevin’s new rankings. Then log on to Twitter and ask him precisely when you can expect each prospect to be promoted to the majors. That’s his favorite kind of question. Or was it his least favorite? Huh. Well, it’s one of those.
Finally, we’ve selected some of our favorite recent articles from BaseballProspectus.com to reprint here, in the tradition of the back-of-the-book “Fungoes” essays that used to appear in the annual. These weren’t selected scientifically, and if you subscribe to the website, you’ve probably already seen them. However, we enjoyed them enough that we didn’t want anyone to miss them, and even if you’ve read them before, you might want to take another look.
In 1933, H.G. Wells published The Shape of Things to Come , an ambitious vision of what Wells saw in store for the world in the centuries to come. He got a lot right, but he also got a lot wrong. Wells probably would have appreciated the opportunity to do an ebook update, but he never got the chance. We’re not quite as ambitious as Wells was, but we’re still in the dubious business of forecasting the future, and we have plenty more to say on the subject. We hope you’ll enjoy what we have to say in The Call-up , and we’ll be back with Baseball Prospectus 2013 next spring.
Outliers
HITTERS

Albert Pujols 1B
Born: 1/16/1980 Age: 32
Bats: R Throws: R Height: 6’ 3’’ Weight: 230 YEAR TEAM LVL AGE PA R 2B 3B HR RBI BB 2009 SLN MLB 29 700 124 45 1 47 135 115 2010 SLN MLB 30 700 115 39 1 42 118 103 2011 SLN MLB 31 651 105 29 0 37 99 61 2012 ANA MLB 32 676 92 38 0 30 101 73 YEAR TEAM LVL SO SB CS AVG_OBP_SLG TAv 2009 SLN MLB 64 16 4 .327/.443/.658 .361 2010 SLN MLB 76 14 4 .312/.414/.596 .340 2011 SLN MLB 58 9 1 .299/.366/.541 .315 2012 ANA MLB 74 10 1 .287/.366/.506 .317
YEAR TEAM LVL BABIP BRR FRAA WARP 2009 SLN MLB .299 1.4 26 11.5 2010 SLN MLB .297 3.5 14.1 9.0 2011 SLN MLB .277 -0.9 13.5 6.1 2012 ANA MLB .281 -1.8 1B 15, 3B -0 5.7

Time and again, we fool ourselves into thinking that a player might just be so great that the aging curve doesn’t apply to him. But it does: Tiger Woods, Bob Dylan, Martin Scorcese, you and me. What greatness is supposed to buy is a head start, so that it takes years of decline before death finally catches up. But two months into Pujols’ 10-year deal, it’s not entirely clear whether he is frittering away this advantage. He followed up the worst April of his career with the second-worst May, though June looked more like a Pujols June. He is swinging at more high fastballs than he ever has, and more sliders away than he ever has. His spray chart looks like a terrifying epidemiological map, with uncontrolled outbreaks at third base and shortstop. Pujols averaged better than 8.5 WARP per year from 2009 to 2011, so even a 25 percent cut would make him an MVP candidate, which is what PECOTA expected (and expects). That’s still the best bet, but ask Ralph Kiner, Eddie Mathews and Ken Griffey, Jr. how much future production greatness guarantees.

Mike Trout CF
Born: 8/7/1991 Age: 20
Bats: R Throws: R Height: 6’ 1’’ Weight: 200 YEAR TEAM LVL AGE PA R 2B 3B HR RBI BB 2009 ANG RK 17 187 29 7 7 1 25 18 2010 CDR A 18 368 76 19 7 6 39 46 2010 RCU A+ 18 232 30 9 2 4 19 27 2011 ARK AA 19 412 82 18 13 11 38 45 2011 ANA MLB 19 135 20 6 0 5 16 9 2012 ANA MLB 20 594 92 29 7 17 74 49 YEAR TEAM LVL SO SB CS AVG_OBP_SLG TAv 2009 ANG RK 28 13 2 .360/.416/.506 .359 2010 CDR A 52 45 9 .362/.452/.526 .346 2010 RCU A+ 33 11 6 .306/.384/.434 .320 2011 ARK AA 76 33 10 .326/.414/.544 .343