Any Day Now Beer Base Ball

The next time I write one of these things, I’ll have a new site to link to. BeerGraphs should be up next week — it has to be. We have a launch party next week — happy hour at The Public House in San Francisco (it’s a Giants away game) — and so we have to be up. No choice in the matter. BeerGraphs will have leaderboards with beer stats, reviews, and also analysis based on our numbers. Should be a lot of nerdery, all based on adult sodas.

In the meantime, I’m out there talking to players still. First up was Austin Wilson, a great player at Stanford that hasn’t quite lived up to his tools. Still, he’ll be a first rounder in the draft, and it was great to hear him talk about how he sat in on bullpens when he was hurt, just to see the spin on the ball. I went on a podcast to talk about it, and just talking about him unearthed some really interesting facets of scouting.

I also talked to Matt Cain, but that’ll publish next week. This week, I wrote about John Jaso and how he’s taken things that he learned from catching and used them on the basepaths and at the plate. As with Wilson’s standing in on bullpens, I loved hearing Jaso talk about running on pitches that he thought would be in the dirt before they even hit the dirt. He’s a smart guy.

I saw Tyler Skaggs a while back and was not impressed. 88-89 on the fastball, great curveball, nothing changeup. Thought he was a back-of-the-rotation guy. I saw him this week, and, well, the changeup looked better. And then I put him up against Kevin Gausman and still liked Gausman. And then Gausman threw two stinkers. Now I don’t know what to think.

Getting Blanked this week was checking in on some players that were injured last year and could have outproduced their projections this year.