Award season is upon us. It is a time for arguing about ERA versus FIP, pitching to the score, defensive value, and the meaning of “valuable.” Fun, right? It is also a time for me to whip out fun little toys to recognize different kinds of offensive contributions. One of these is the basis for the Joe Carter–Tony Batista Award, which annually recognizes the hitter whose RBI total most overstates his actual offensive contribution.

Spoiler alert: it was a banner year for the National League Central. Taste the excitement!

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Last year, Dan Uggla hit .179 and was worth +0.5 WAR, eventually getting left off the Braves playoff roster. He’ll turn 34 next March. He is due $26 million over the next two years. And this winter, the Braves are going to try to convince another organization that he just needs a fresh start in a new location to salvage his career. Take him out of Atlanta, and maybe the bat speed will come back. Maybe he just needs a change of scenery.

In reality, it is much more likely that any observed change of scenery effect is really just positive regression to the mean, since you only really need new “scenery” when you’re coming off a bad year, leaving nowhere to go but up. Players who change teams in these situations likely underperformed in the prior year, leaving plenty of opportunity for improvement after they arrive in their new city.

Of course, it can go deeper than that as well. Sometimes, when going from one team to another, a pitcher or hitter acquires park dimensions that better fit their game or a clubhouse that might better fit their demeanor. Or maybe they’re a pitcher and they move to a better defensive team. Or they finally get platooned in their new city, allowing them to only play when they have the advantage. There are plenty of reasons why a player could be more effective on one team than another.

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Brian Wilson is a weird guy. You know that because you have eyes and watch baseball, and you’ve heard all about the beard and the Taco Bell ads. Honestly, I’m really not sure anything I say can sum up what he is better than this:  Read the rest of this entry »

Standing in between Arizona Fall League All-Star teammates Byron Buxton and man-child Jorge Alfaro is Boston’s soon-to-be-star: Mookie Betts. Maybe you didn’t notice the 5’9″ second baseman or his less-than-impressive numbers when you were scanning the AFL leaders, but that would be a mistake. Because the last time he struggled, he made adjustments and went on a tear that will have him zooming up prospect lists this winter.

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The Kansas City Royals were pleased with the numbers Hunter Dozier put up this summer. The 22-year-old infielder hit .308/.397/.495 between rookie-level Idaho Falls and Low-A Lexington. Given that many considered Dozier an overdraft, the Royals also likely were relieved.

First-year stats aren’t all that meaningful, but Dozier’s performance helped validate the decision to take him with the eighth-overall pick out of Stephen F. Austin State University. What the 6-foot-4, 220-pound right-handed hitter needs to do next is continue to swing a productive-enough bat to justify his move to third base. Drafted as a shortstop, Dozier saw the majority of his time at the hot corner after signing for an under-slot $2.2 million.

Dozier talked about his approach to the game — and his position in the future — near the end of his first professional season. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam discuss what the Yankees will (and should) do this winter.

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Writers and readers of this site found their way here via many different avenues, but with relatively the same goal in mind: to try and dig deeper into baseball, to deduct meaning from things that perhaps aren’t evident on the field. I think it’s fair to assume that we were brought to the game as a whole for totally different reasons. This is especially true for young people, but it’s generally the look of the game — the aesthetics — that draw people in initially. You may not (or know someone who does not) fall into this category — I understand I’m painting with broad strokes here — but the presentation of the game still appeals to the lizard parts of our brain. We think it’s pretty, we think it’s exciting, we think it’s fun to watch. This is why we scoff when the tired adage of “you can’t watch a game on a spreadsheet” gets bandied about. We do watch the games, of course. It’s what drew us in in the first place.

As far as the baseball season goes, we’re in a limbo of sorts at the moment. The World Series is over, and free agency has yet to start. Fans (and certainly writers) are waiting for that other shoe to drop. We’re in a holding pattern until we can start discussing and analyzing front-office moves, and looking ahead to the rookies, signings, and trades that will start shaping what a team will look like next season. There are a few of these dead spots in a year — when things just don’t really happen in a real meaningful baseball sense. It’s times like these when we can turn back to the aesthetic, to the eye candy. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2013 postseason was a wild ride. We witnessed crazy endings, ill-timed errors, bizarre managerial gaffes, and plenty of the usual heroics. Perhaps you may be interested to learn how certain plays affected a team’s odds of winning the World Series. Luckily, we have a stat for that.

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Somewhere during the playoffs, Dave was hosting and running a live game chat, and some hitter in some game took a hack at what appeared to be ball four. That prompted a reader to comment that he wished somewhere kept track of those, FanGraphs specifically, and while it isn’t always easy to fire off an email when you’re actively in charge of a live chat, Dave took a minute to pass the comment on to me as a suggestion. He said that it could be an offseason post, knowing that it’s the kind of thing that’s right up my alley, and would you look at that, it’s the offseason now. I know it’s the offseason because Twitter is already full of free-agency rumors. Baseball can’t stop, nor will it stop.

We’ve all seen hitters on our favorite teams chase fourth balls, and we’ve all sighed and rolled our eyes. We have a good idea of who’s over-aggressive and who isn’t, but swinging at that last ball is worse than swinging at an earlier one, because swinging at ball four denies a hitter a sure base. Every so often, it’ll work out, with the hitter singling or doubling or tripling or dingering. It doesn’t work out nearly often enough. No hitter on the planet is good enough to justify going after pitches out of the zone in three-ball counts.

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The Hall of Fame buzz around David Ortiz is understandable given the amazing World Series he just had. With few exceptions, Ortiz has been an outstanding hitter since coming to Boston in 2003, a performance that will certainly make him an intriguing candidate for the Hall of Fame. I do not know whether he will get elected to the Hall, and there are others who are good at such analysis.

But when we as fans argue about the Hall of Fame, we mostly argue about whether a player should go into the Hall of Fame. In this context. Ortiz’s career usually draws comparisons of his career numbers with other players who were primarily DHs like Frank Thomas and (more often) Edgar Martinez. Obviously, this is not an either/or proposition. Just because Thomas and Martinez are (in my mind) clearly worthy of enshrinement does not mean Ortiz cannot be. Thus the “Edgar first” position is not all that interesting to me.

I do happen to believe that Thomas and Martinez are worthy and that Ortiz is not, but rather than getting into that way of looking at the issue , I want to take a different approach. If Ortiz’s career to date makes him worthy of being in the Hall of Fame, what other players might also be worthy based on their numbers? Exactly how large are Ortiz’s advocates willing to make the Hall?

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