Ben and Sam discuss Billy Hamilton, the Rangers’ “collapse” narrative, the Rays’ pickup of Freddy Guzman, and the AL Wild Card race.
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When writing about statistics, there’s always the matter of finding the right balance between brevity and significance. Oftentimes, you’ll want to use filters, for purposes of proper analysis, and these filters show up as written qualifiers. Too many qualifiers, though, will turn off an audience, because audiences want numbers to be pretty easily consumable. It can already be difficult to try to sell numbers to readers; there’s a responsibility on the writer’s part to keep readability in mind.
You run into this all the time in baseball analysis, because there are virtually infinite ways to whittle a sample smaller and smaller. Every split is a qualifier. But some are just necessary, and there’s no other way around it. Like, with pitchers, you just have to separate starters and relievers. Starters need to be compared only to starters, and relievers need to be compared only to relievers, because they’re entirely different jobs. You’ve got marathon runners and hurdlers. What they have in common is that they throw baseballs, but they throw baseballs in different ways, and they use their bodies in different ways, and they prepare in different ways, and so they should be treated as distinct player pools. You don’t compare Aroldis Chapman to Yu Darvish. You compare Chapman to Craig Kimbrel, and Darvish to Max Scherzer. Not separating pitchers is at best irresponsible.
Some of the focus in this post will be on starting pitchers. Much of the focus in this post will be on Yordano Ventura.
There is always a bit of a lull between the end of the minor league playoffs in September and the start of the annual top prospects lists in early November. Because of that gap, I’m breathing new life into an old feature that I wrote for the site in FanGraphs’ infancy back in 2008 and 2009.
The series ‘A Minor Review of 2013’ will look back on some of the major happenings in each MLB organization since the beginning of April as a primer for the upcoming FanGraphs Top 10+5 prospects lists. This series will run throughout September and October. I hope you enjoy the series and are eagerly anticipating the start of ‘Prospect List Season.’
Chris Davis hit his 51st home run of the season last night. 20 years ago, that would have been a pretty big deal, but the years around the turn of the century reset the bar for newsworthy home run totals. After having only two 60 homer seasons in the first 100+ years of baseball, we saw six such seasons in four years. 50 homer seasons used to be the stepping stone to greatness; now, Davis is still 22 home runs away from the single season record.
As we know, though, the game as its being played today doesn’t look like the game that was being played 15 years ago. The strike zone is bigger, the players are smaller, and both runs and home runs are much harder to come by these days. Chris Davis might not set any real records, but hitting 51 home runs (and counting) in this offensive context is still an accomplishment worth celebrating.
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: It’s Wednesday, and we’re now only two weeks away from the postseason, so there should be plenty to talk about.
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: The queue is now open.
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: Sorry about delay, Safari decided to just shut down completely for a few minutes.
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: I’m trying to use ti to get a little more battery life out of my Macbook Air, but man, I miss Chrome sometimes.
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: Anyway, enough of that. Question time.
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Do you think it’d be possible to get HR/PA for custom dashboards (for batters) instead of HR/FB? |
You won’t get Mike Trout to say he should win the Most Valuable Player award this year because his Wins Above Replacement total is higher than another player’s. But if you listen closely to him describing his game, you will hear the basic constructs for the argument that can be made in his favor. It’s a simple one.
There are a lot of different ways in which a dinger can be exceptional. It can be the fastest pitch hit for a dinger all season. It can be the slowest pitch hit for a dinger all season. It can be the longest or the fastest dinger all season. There exist plenty of exceptional dingers, and not too long ago, Miguel Cabrera hit one, against Phil Hughes. Hughes threw a pitch to Cabrera that PITCHf/x measured at almost two feet inside from the center of home plate. No matter — Cabrera hit it out, and what’s more is that it didn’t even look like it was a problem for him. The homer wowed everyone who watched, but according to Jim Leyland, that was something Cabrera could top:
What’s really stunning, [Leyland] said, is when Cabrera takes that same pitch — a pitch, by the way, that jams most right-handed hitters and results in either a foul or a weak grounder — and pounds it to the opposite field for a home run. Ponder the physics of that for a second.
According to Leyland, Cabrera has gone the other way for a homer off that inside pitch off the plate. Maybe Leyland was referring to what Cabrera has done with the team in batting practice. He hasn’t actually done what Leyland claims, at least not in a game, at least not in the PITCHf/x era. Mostly because that would be impossible. We don’t need to exaggerate Miguel Cabrera’s plate coverage; Cabrera’s true plate coverage is already an exaggeration.
In the interest of shaking up these electronic pages a bit, I’ve decided to dig into the old FanGraphs mailbag to answer some questions from questionable readers. Remember, if you are interested in asking a question of FanGraphs representatives, use the frequent chats that occur on this site, because that is a much better option. If you insist on emailing a question to the totally-not-made-up mailbag, send it to fangraphstotallyrealmailbag@reallyrealinternet.biz.
Question #1: Hey, who are you? – Stephen, Dallas, TX
Excellent question, Stephen. I’m David Temple. You may know me from my excellent work at NotGraphs, where I currently hold titles as Most Handsome and Best Writer. NotGraphs is that little purple section of this site. You should check it out — there’s a lot of really great work over there. Most of it comes from me.
Earlier this summer, former St. Louis Cardinals right-hander Bob Tewksbury took us through his outings in 1992 against the Chicago Cubs and the Atlanta Braves. He did so with the help of his old notebook, which includes scouting reports, results of individual at bats and more.
In the third installment of Tewksbury’s Notebook, the focus isn’t on specific teams. Instead, the veteran of 13 big-league seasons discussed how he approached pitching to 10 of the best hitters of his era. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben and Sam answer listener emails about extreme tiebreak scenarios, home run robberies, the winningest and losingest players, Mike Trout, and more.
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