The last travel day of the season is behind us, and regardless of what lies ahead, we can be sure that a champion will be crowned in Kansas City. It’s been an entertaining, largely well-played series to date, with both teams’ respective strengths and weaknesses on display. I’m not here today to predict how this matchup is going to turn out — I picked the Giants in five last week — instead, let’s take this opportunity to look at the best and worst Game 6 and Game 7 tandems among the 25 World Series of that length since the advent of divisional play in 1969. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam discuss Joe Maddon’s decision to opt out of his contract with Tampa Bay, then talk about other front-office comings and goings and Miguel Cabrera’s surgery.

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 499
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses obviously the World Series obviously.

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 32 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

If you’ve been consuming baseball analysis for any meaningful length of time, TTO comes as a particularly familiar acronym. It stands for Three True Outcomes — walks, strikeouts, and dingers — and for me, personally, it makes me think of Adam Dunn. And it makes me think of baseball writing eight or ten years ago, when at least I was starting to come into my own. But TTO can and does also stand for something else, something we’ve been talking and reading about a lot over the past several weeks — Times Through the Order. As in, the times-through-the-order penalty, that describes how starting pitchers become less effective over the course of a game. All those things you’ve read about how Starter X was left in too long by his manager? The criticisms are mostly founded upon the idea that pitchers get tired and over-exposed.

Those are tricky things to separate. It stands to reason pitchers get worse because they get more tired. It also stands to reason pitchers get worse because their opponents get more and more familiar with the pitches being thrown. You think about “looks”, and whatnot. We know there’s a TTO penalty during a game. And if any of it has to do with familiarity, then it seems like there ought also be a TTO penalty within a series.

Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2014-15 free-agent market.

Below are links to ballots for two players the author was an idiot for omitting.

Other Players: Nori Aoki / Brett Anderson / Chad Billingsley / Emilio Bonifacio / A.J. Burnett / Billy Butler / Asdrubal Cabrera / Melky Cabrera / Chris Capuano / Nelson Cruz / Michael Cuddyer / Stephen Drew / Gavin Floyd / Jason Hammel / Aaron Harang / Chase Headley / Torii Hunter / Josh Johnson / Hiroki Kuroda / Adam LaRoche / Jon Lester / Francisco Liriano / Jed Lowrie / Nick Markakis / Russell Martin / Victor Martinez / Justin Masterson / Brandon McCarthy / Andrew Miller / Kendrys Morales / Brandon Morrow / Michael Morse / Jake Peavy / Aramis Ramirez / Hanley Ramirez / Colby Rasmus / Mark Reynolds / Alex Rios / David Robertson / Francisco Rodriguez / Sergio Romo / Pablo Sandoval / Ervin Santana / Max Scherzer / James Shields / Ichiro Suzuki / Koji Uehara / Ryan Vogelsong / Edinson Volquez / Rickie Weeks / Chris Young (OF) / Chris Young (SP) / Delmon Young.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, the Giants and the Royals played Game 5 of the World Series, and an unusual thing happened. We’ll get to that. On Saturday, the same teams played Game 4, and in the bottom of the fourth inning, Yusmeiro Petit batted for some reason against Jason Vargas. Petit swung at the first pitch, maybe trying to catch the Royals off guard, as if the Royals even had a plan for effectively pitching to Yusmeiro Petit, who is a reliever. The bat hit the baseball and the baseball found the outfield grass. Remarked Andy McCullough:

Baseball!

— Andy McCullough (@McCulloughStar) October 26, 2014

“Baseball!” is the exclamation of those who understand that they’ll never understand the game. It’s an acknowledgment and an appreciation of the random by the learned, and classic Baseball! moments serve to underscore that there’s always a chance of anything, and baseball has a lot of repetitions. Weird things don’t usually happen, but there are enough events that the next one might be right around the corner. I mentioned that something strange happened yesterday, too. Madison Bumgarner didn’t need the help, but in the bottom of the eighth, Juan Perez faced Wade Davis and drilled a ball off the very top of the center-field fence for an RBI double. Perez is a player well-known for nothing and best-known for running better outfield routes than Michael Morse and Travis Ishikawa. Responded one David Cameron:

That was the most @cantpredictball play in history, maybe. — David Cameron (@DCameronFG) October 27, 2014

Basically, Cameron was calling it a Baseball! moment. So, which was the better Baseball! moment?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you missed the American League edition of this post from Friday, you can check it out right here.

I’m not going to bog this section down with a bunch of new words, I’d rather just get right into it. But first, if you want to gloss over the methodology really quick, I’ll re-publish it from Friday’s post:

First, our player pool. For catchers and infielders, I’m simply going with qualified batters. This is pretty standard. For outfielders, I’ve lowered the innings threshold to 600 innings, because outfielders move around more than infielders, and I don’t think an everyday outfielder should be discounted because he had to split his time between left field and center field.

Now, for the numbers. We’ve got Defensive Runs Saved and we’ve got Ultimate Zone Rating. Neither are perfect, and sometimes they disagree with each other, but when put together, I think we can all agree they do a pretty good job. I’ve prorated each to 1,000 innings and simply used a 50/50 split to determine each player’s total defensive value, per 1000 innings (tDEF/1000). In the tables, I’ve also decided to include each player’s Revised Zone Rating and Fielding Percentage, just because.

Catchers, as we know, are a whole other beast. We’ve got three main components of catcher defense that we can measure: controlling the running game, blocking pitches and receiving pitches. Only two of them are included in the advanced defensive metrics we use, and the one we’re leaving out (receiving) appears to be the most important skill. To make up for that, I simply added up the run values of each of these three components, using StatCorner’s catcher framing report for my framing numbers. Some people don’t agree with how much weight is given to catchers in framing data, and I kind of agree with that, but as the National League results will show, the top spot doesn’t simply go to the best framer.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve talked about James Shields a lot this postseason, and most of it hasn’t been all that positive. “Big Game” James had been lousy throughout this magical Kansas City run, and he was particularly bad in Game 1 of the World Series, getting pounded with line drives left and right and leaving after three innings. In Game 5, he went up against Madison Bumgarner again, and again he lost, mainly because Bumgarner was outstanding, to the point that we’re now talking about him in a historic context.

The big picture view there is that Shields has started two World Series games against Bumgarner and lost both, likely ending his Royals career and helping to put his team in a 3-2 hole headed back to Kansas City. That’s a factual statement, but it also misses something that was largely overshadowed by Bumgarner’s dominance and more confounding Ned Yost decisions: Shields was actually pretty good last night. As the indispensable Daren Willman of Baseball Savant noted, Shields’ 21.2% swinging strike rate in Game 5 was the best any starter had this postseason, topping Zack Greinke’s NLDS start.

It’s fair to note that Lorenzo Cain’s fantastic catch on a Hunter Pence ball in right field saved Shields at least one run and perhaps two, but there were also some questionable plays by Alcides Escobar and Jarrod Dyson that didn’t go down as errors, so, noted and moving on. Shields can’t control his defense, so let’s focus on what he could control.

Here’s what that meant: Shields pitched differently than we’d seen him pitch as a Royal, and perhaps differently than he ever has. It’s actually a little terrifying to think that a pitcher who has been very good for many years would change his approach in Game 5 of the World Series. Fortunately for him, it worked.

* * * Read the rest of this entry »

If you feel like the games this postseason have dragged a bit, congratulations, you’re not just turning into an old grump who wants to get to bed earlier. You could be, I guess, but that wouldn’t be the sole factor in why you’re annoyed at the length of these playoff games, even the exciting ones. Because in October, the game really has slowed down to a crawl.

On our leaderboards, we feature a stat called pace, which measures the time between pitches as recorded by PITCHF/x. During the regular season, the average length of time between pitches was 23.0 seconds; in the postseason, that has ballooned to 25.4 seconds.

2.4 extra seconds between pitches might not sound like a lot, but in the 30 postseason games that have been played so far, there have been 8,802 pitches thrown, or an average of 293 pitches per game. At 2.4 extra seconds between pitches, this has added an extra 11 minutes and 43 seconds to the length of the average game. In just these 30 postseason games, we’re closing in on almost six hours being added to the total time of games through the lengthening of the least interesting part of the sport.

So, who are the primary culprits in slowing the 2014 postseason down? To find out, I looked at the difference in regular season and postseason pace for every pitcher who has appeared in a game in the playoffs, and then multiplied that per-pitch difference by the number of pitches thrown. Here are the top 10 pitchers who most slowed the game down on a total time basis:

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »