The Rays Tank: Tim Beckham talks about his injury

Bill Chastain from MLB.com has an article and video about Tim Beckham's knee injury. Lots of quotes from Beckham and Maddon about exactly how the injury happened, and how Beckham is recovering.

Just a few days after Bradley writes a comprehensive article about the current state and future of pitch framing research, Harry Pavladis and Dan Brooks have to go and add to it. They've explained Baseball Prospectus's method (and they've been both smart and thorough, so read it) for calculating how much value a catcher adds via his framing skills, and they've included those numbers on the BP player cards (Ryan Hanigan and Jose Molina both rate well, as expected). Additionally, check out the sidebar. They've applied a similar method to pitch blocking. This is fantastic work from BP.

Jason Parks ranks teams by top talent under 25 (major or minor league). The Rays come in ninth.

This was from a few days ago, but I missed it. Noah Woodward at The Hardball Times revisited and updated Josh Kalk's (who now works for the Rays) work on predicting pitcher injuries using PITCHf/x.

Other Links

Matt Swartz at The Hardball Times examines class, race, and weather, and how it goes into who becomes a major league ballplayer.

Bill Barnwell (a football guy) takes a look at sports teams still not hip to these new analytics.

In comparison to the above, Chris Cotillo did an interview with the Astro's GM, Jeff Luhnow (who is hip), in which he discusses draft pick compensation and how the Astros use their analytics team.

Jeff Sullivan: Does pitching to the park matter?

ICYMI, this weekend MLBAM announced they will deploy a defense tracking system and make the data freely available, with a soft launch this season and a full roll out in 2015.