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, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan discuss the hot start of Phillies rookie Rhys Hoskins, the recent improvement of Byron Buxton, the position-player-pitching of White Sox minor leaguer Grant Massey, the Marlins’ Stanton-driven surge to .500 (and beyond), the Tigers-Yankees brawl, picking on umpires, and Michael Conforto’s injury as the latest symptom of the sad state of the Mets.
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If the postseason started today, five teams in the top half of major-league payrolls at the beginning of the year would qualify for the playoffs: the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, and Washington Nationals*. That means that five teams in the bottom half of Opening Day payrolls would make the playoffs as well — in this case, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies, Houston Astros, and Minnesota Twins.
*Numbers current as of yesterday.
Presenting the standings in this way might give one the impression that we remain in an age of great baseball parity. An age in which the Kansas City Royals can win the World Series, Cleveland can get there, too, and teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates can sustain multiple years of playoff contention.
That isn’t quite the case, however.
Of the clubs that feature top-six payrolls this season, three have playoff chances of at least 96% (Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs). A fourth, the Yankees, aren’t too far behind. If the Twins can’t hold on to a playoff spot and are overtaken by anyone but the Rays, the only team in the bottom 12 of payrolls this season to make the playoffs will be the Arizona Diamondbacks, and even their spot isn’t a guarantee. Money buys players, and those players rack up wins for their ball clubs. Last season, at around this time, I took a look at the relationship between payroll and wins, and noted that the relationship was one of the strongest we had seen in a while. This is what it looked like at the end of last season.
Last season saw one of the strongest relationships between payroll and wins to exist in several decades. Here’s how the relationship has developed since 1990, with help from data courtesy Brian MacPherson.
In the early 90s, Major League Baseball was coming off an era of collusion and lack of expansion. That, combined with a new influx of talent from outside the United States, meant that simply paying for major-league talent wasn’t the only solution to winning major-league games. (To track back further, read Dave Studeman’s piece in Hardball Times on the subject.)
PNC PARK — On Wednesday, I approached Yasmani Grandal on something of a covert mission in the visiting clubhouse at PNC Park. I was attempting to extract a candid answer from the Dodgers catcher.
I did not formally introduce myself, though he could surmise I was a reporter from my visible media credential, and possibly from my build and attire.
I began by asking him if he knew where he finished in NL MVP voting last season.
“I heard someone voted for me,” Grandal said.
I asked Grandal what he thought of that vote.
This is Ashley MacLennan’s fourth piece as part of her August residency at FanGraphs. Ashley is a staff writer for Bless You Boys, the SB Nation blog dedicated to the Detroit Tigers, and runs her own site at 90 Feet From Home. She can also be found on Twitter. She’ll be contributing regularly here over the next month. Read the work of all our residents here.
Since the beginning of his tenure as commissioner, Rob Manfred has made a concerted effort to address issues associated with pace of play and, more broadly, the appeal of the sport to fans. One of the main problems facing him? How to create a new generation of fans to keep the game alive and flourishing for years to come.
The issue, as many see it, is how to sell a game to a demographic composed largely of people who can barely look up from their phones long enough to cross the street, let alone sit in a stadium for three straight hours, watching the nuanced and, yes, sometimes slow game of baseball unfold before them?
There’s certainly an effort to connect with fans by means other than simple on-field action. Teams are attempting to tap into the younger fan base by offering promotions via the Ballpark app. Checking in at Guaranteed Rate Park for the first time? Go get yourself a free t-shirt. Visiting Camden Yards? Take a guided tour of the stadium and maybe win a commemorative print.
Gameday promotions seek to appeal to popular trends, with mixed results. The Tampa Bay Rays have recently featured a Fidget Spinner promo that was met with some sarcastic side-eyeing on Twitter, but their DJ Kitty onesie night was so popular fans around the world were begging for the item online, and those who didn’t get one of the 15,000 onesies were heartbroken, and frankly a little mad. (It’s worth noting average Rays attendance is 15,876, so this should have been enough onesies for almost the entire crowd.) That’s the sign of a popular promo — and of an organization successfully tapping into a cultural moment.
The presence of teams online is, in and of itself, an attempt to reach out to fans in this brave new digital era. The Twitter accounts of the Rays, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago Cubs, among others, frequently exchange witty banter with one another, share memes, or use gifs to start online fights. It’s engaging, entertaining, and infinitely retweetable.
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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.
The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.
Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels*, and (most importantly) lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated list — such as the revised and midseason lists released by Baseball America or BP’s recent midseason top-50 list or Longenhagen’s summer update — will also be excluded from eligibility.
*All 200 names!
In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.
Ryan Helsley, RHP, St. Louis (Profile)
With this appearance, Helsley now ascends to first place on the arbitrarily calculated Fringe Five Scoreboard presented at the bottom of this post. He recorded one start since last week’s edition of the Five and was predictably effective, producing a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 7:2 against 21 batters over 5.2 innings (box). Through five starts with Springfield, the right-hander has produced a better strikeout- and walk-rate differential at Double-A (18.1-point K-BB%) than he did at High-A (16.3).
In that most recent appearance, Helsley exhibited both the plus fastball and effective breaking-ball combinations that’s typical for him. Here’s an example of three pitches in the cutter/curveball continuum, all to the back foot of a left-handed batter:
Back in 2014, the average baseball team scored 4.07 runs per game. That was down only a tenth of a run from the year before, which was down only a little more than a tenth of a run from the year before that, but a definite trend was emerging. An average of 4.07 was the league’s lowest mark since 1981, and there were gathering concerns that offense was being suffocated. No one really knows how low is too low, but Rob Manfred considered various ideas that might re-inject some hitting. This is why conspiracy theories persist to this day.
Rather conveniently, see, offense bounced back in 2015. It surged again in 2016, and it’s surged only more over the past five months. The average team now is up to 4.68 runs per game, which feels more familiar. The surge has been powered by a well-publicized and well-examined home-run spike, but at the end of the day, offense is offense, right?
It is, and it’s good that hitters again have a chance. The balance of power had felt like it was shifted too far. But in a certain sense, you could argue that this offensive surge is artificial. For a variety of reasons, home runs are up, and they’ve gone up right when they needed to. But offenses now are so very home-run reliant. Everything to follow is probably obvious, but I might as well explicitly lay it out. Home runs are taking over the game.
Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Rich Hill’s heartbreaking no-hit bid and the new and not-improved Carter Capps, follow up on Albert Pujols and player nicknames, and answer listener emails about what constitutes a “journeyman,” Ryan Braun and the Hall of Fame, Ryan Goins’ new type of small-sample success, what would happen if teams played all of their games against each opponent in a single extended series, Harvey Haddix and the best starts ever, a pitcher’s single-minded pursuit of no-hitters, the uniqueness of Joey Gallo, Boston’s mysteriously league-leading intentional-walk total, how to talk to players, and more.
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A few days ago, the Cubs rallied to beat the Blue Jays in 10 innings. It was the 10th inning that was the most dramatic, but the Cubs had a chance to finish things off the frame before. In a tie game in the bottom of the ninth, Kris Bryant batted with two on and one out, against Ryan Tepera. It was one of the highest-leverage plate appearances for Bryant on the year, and he quickly found himself behind 0-and-2. A borderline ball call extended the at-bat, but then Tepera threw a pitch outside. The screenshot says everything you need to know about what happened next.
Kris Bryant is one of the best players in baseball, and he might well be the best player in the National League. Of that, there’s no question, and before we get any deeper, I want to try to get one simple point across. It’s probably futile, but, anyway: There’s a difference between saying a player is unclutch, and saying a player has been unclutch. The former would be a hell of a statement. The latter is easy enough to demonstrate with evidence. Clutch performance tends to be volatile; it hasn’t been shown to be a sticky attribute. It is not my belief that Kris Bryant is actually, naturally, unclutch.
But Kris Bryant has been incredibly unclutch. Historically unclutch. It’s the one place where he’s come up short. As much as I love the things he can do, the data he’s assembled is stunning.
