Ben and Sam banter about Kolten Wong and the scout who signed Mike Trout, then talk about a controversial call with playoff implications.
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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Milwaukee at Pittsburgh | 13:35 ET
Wily Peralta (184.2 IP, 101 xFIP-, 1.0 WAR) faces Vance Worley (96.1 IP, 98 xFIP-, 0.9 WAR). The Brewers entered play yesterday with just a 1% probability of qualifying for the play-in game, odds which increased to ca. 3% following the club’s 1-0 victory over the Pirates on Saturday (box). Did their odds triple, or improve by two mere percentage points? How the reader answers that question is illustrative of his/her view of the world.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Milwaukee Radio*.
*Unless Bob Uecker hasn’t traveled. In which case: Milwaukee Television?
This edition of FanGraphs’ NERD scores has appeared later than usual, on account of the author’s dog America ate a weird thing and required a visit to the local veterinary clinic. Everyone is healthy now, although the author is also $100 poorer.
Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Detroit at Kansas City | 13:05 ET
Max Scherzer (207.1 IP, 82 xFIP-, 5.1 WAR) faces James Shields (214.1 IP, 93 xFIP-, 3.7 WAR). While most assume that Big Game James is actually a sobriquet having been assigned to the Kansas City right-hander for his performances in important contests, the truth is that Big Games James Shields is actually the pitcher’s full given name — and appears on his birth certificate — but that he’s generally gone just by “James” so that friends and acquaintances wouldn’t mistake him for a conceited. In either case, his club would benefit from a strong showing against the Tigers, who lead the Royals by 1.5 games in the Central.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Detroit Radio.
Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, purple for NotGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Episode 485
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses, among other things, the effects of Tony LaRussa’s hiring on the D-backs’ scouting and player-development staffs.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 52 min play time.)
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I have a little theory I choose to believe because it keeps me warm when times are cold. That theory is that, in every offseason, there’s a championship team to be built, and to be built reasonably, without costing an unrealistic amount. It’s not something that can ever be proven, and it’s not even necessarily interesting if you consider an offseason has virtually infinite possibilities, but I like to think the pieces are always out there, no matter how bad a team might’ve been the year before. It allows for hope, independent of circumstances. If it wasn’t your year, it could be your year.
We can at least try to support the theory with numbers from 2014. On the one hand, we can’t say anything about winning a championship, because you can never predict how that’ll play out. But to compensate for that, why don’t we take the idea to the extreme? Let’s say the idea is to build a good team. Nevermind building a good team through a reasonable sequence of moves. How about building a good team through an impossibly cheap sequence of moves? How about doing that without any kind of foundation already in place?
The idea, in short: construct a good 2014 baseball team out of players that would’ve cost nothing or almost nothing to acquire before the season. I’m not going to worry about getting 25 guys; I’ll just fill the important spots. The theory holds up to some extent, as the team you see below would, statistically, be about as strong as the best in the league. The obvious caveat is that, under different circumstances, maybe these players don’t put up the same performances. Maybe they received particular instruction from their 2014 employers, that maybe they wouldn’t get in the hypothetical organization we’re running. Totally valid! And maybe Troy Tulowitzki would’ve busted had he been drafted by the Mariners. We can never really know anything, so let’s just keep things simple and have some fun before we’re all dead.
We’ve provided a lot of odds this season. There are current playoff odds, based on projections. There are current playoff odds, based on season-to-date numbers. There are current playoff odds, based on coin flips! There are past playoff odds, from any date in 2014. There are division series odds, and league championship series odds, and World Series odds. We’ve also, more quietly, provided single-game odds during the year. At the start of each day, these are based on the starting pitchers and the team projections. Later on, the odds are updated to take into consideration the respective starting lineups. We haven’t put these numbers to much editorial use, but they’ve been there, and over the course of the year most of the kinks have been worked out.
So, okay, keep that in mind. Those numbers have existed. Something else to keep in mind: the Rangers just swept the A’s in three games in Oakland. The Rangers are terrible. The A’s are just playing terrible. Have you connected the points? Allow me to connect the points. Turns out that was a particularly remarkable sweep.
The other day Dave announced our fabulous new FanGraphs Player of the Year Award. He also said the 11 voters would be encouraged to write about their process. And so I thought I’d kick things off today by talking about mine.
In case you don’t want to click on the link, the criteria for the award is as follows:
The criteria for the award will be rather simple: which player, through his on-the-field performance, most deserves to be recognized for his outstanding play within the given season? It is an attempt to honor outstanding performances, and to consider the relative merit of all players who contributed within that season, regardless of position or quality of his teammates.
I’ll say it up front; the headline you just read is a little bit of a trick. This post is about Hunter Pence perhaps being more valuable this year than most of us realized, but because I have an NL MVP ballot this year, I can’t get too deep into my personal opinion of where Pence belongs on the ballot. This isn’t me explaining why Pence should rank at some particular position in the final MVP tally; it’s me using Hunter Pence to talk about one primary way where I think the stats that are normally used to determine MVPs might miss some real value, and that goes for WAR as well.
By either traditional or even normal advanced metrics, Pence doesn’t have much of a case. He’s hitting .290 with 17 HRs and 72 RBIs as a corner outfielder, which isn’t going to fly in a season where Giancarlo Stanton hit twice as many bombs and has driven in an extra 30 runs. And it’s not like the more sabermetric numbers help his case that much either; Pence has a .345 OBP and .463 SLG, so he ranks 22nd in the NL in OPS, one spot behind Seth Smith. Yeah.
Even adjusting for park factors only gets Pence’s wRC+ up to a tie for 18th in the NL, in the same range as Michael Morse, Neil Walker, and Starling Marte. You probably won’t see too many people arguing for those guys as MVP candidates, and rightfully so, and these are Pence’s peers even by our most often cited hitting metric. So, why am I writing about Hunter Pence and the MVP?
I attended the Sports Analytics Innovation Summit in San Francisco last week. On Tuesday, I wrote about the presentations that focused on player training, development and performance. You can read that article here. Today’s post will discuss how teams and leagues use analytics to boost ticket sales and enhance the in-game experience. As with the performance presentations, NFL and NBA teams were most strongly represented.
This season, the Giants started experimenting with a repurposing system where season ticket holders let the Giants re-sell tickets they can’t use, and the proceeds from this second sale are split 50-50. The Giants pioneered the use of dynamic pricing for single-game tickets with ticket analytics company Qcue. (I explained the ins and outs of dynamic and variable pricing in this post.) The 12,000 non-season ticket holder seats are subject to dynamic pricing from the time they go on sale until the game starts. On the day of the game, the prices could change 400 times. The season ticket holder price for each seat is the dynamic pricing floor (so as not to undercut the secondary market for season ticket holders.
The Giants have aggressively used dynamic pricing to keep alive their sell-out streak — which dates to September 2010. Stanley admitted that the Giants have “left money on the table” to keep the sell-out streak alive because the ownership group likes the sell-out streak and because it builds a narrative of scarcity, and that helps with season ticket holder renewals. My thoughts: I was pleased to finally get a Giants executive to admit that the sell-out streak is itself a marketing ploy and has been somewhat contrived.
