The Call-Up 2012 (CUSTOM): The Essential Guide to the Rest of the 2012 Baseball Season

By Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts and Ben Lindbergh

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Jul 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118356449

Book preview

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

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

Fact: Mike Trout is better at things than you are. The 20-year-old is quickly developing into a bona fide superstar at the major-league level, showing all five tools and a mature approach to deploying them. Having played in 40 games in 2011, Trout isn’t a virgin in white at the highest level, but his performance so far in 2012 is adding vocal range to an already massive choir, all of whose members are singing in unison about the mythical and magical qualities of the talented outfielder. How many players in the game can boast of top-shelf speed, well above-average defensive chops at a premium position, a bat that has batting champion potential, and power that will only increase during the maturation process? The players in this particular queue are elite, but they are also lonely and isolated from the peers. They own skill-sets that video game simulations struggle to match. They win awards. They stand alone. By the end of the 2012 season, this exclusive club will be one member larger.

Mark Trumbo LF

Born: 1/16/1986 Age: 26

Bats: R Throws: R Height: 6’ 3’’ Weight: 220

First, the bad: in eight games at third base, Trumbo had a .714 fielding percentage, and there were at least more two base hits in front of him that seemed playable for an average third baseman. So that idea ended, just late enough for Trumbo to get 3B eligibility this year and next in your roto league. The good: in Albert Pujols’ figurative absence, Trumbo has been the Angels’ best hitter, playing his way into the lineup as an outfielder (where he is considerably less toxic, if limited). Once thought to be destined for a platoon, he has been particularly strong against righties this year, with more home runs and a better walk rate than against lefties.

Adam Jones CF

Born: 1/8/1985 Age: 26

Bats: R Throws: R Height: 6’ 3’’ Weight: 220

Matt Kemp is the only true center fielder with more Wins Above Replacement Player than Jones since the start of the 2009 season. The various defensive measures are in disagreement over how good Jones is