Archive for 2017

People love experiencing rarities. We flock to see Halley’s Comet when it comes around every 75 years, and to botanical gardens to see the blossoming of a flower that smells like death. There’s a thrill to seeing — or in the case of the flower, smelling — something that few others have. It’s not a unique experience, but it’s close. We likely experience many of little moments like this every day without realizing it. We only register the major events, like comets or death flowers, or Joey Votto pop ups.

Since he first entered the big leagues in 2007, Joey Votto boasts the lowest infield-fly-ball rate among all qualified batters at 1.3%. That figure was slightly lower before yesterday’s game against the Cubs, when he did this.

That’s the first batted ball that Votto has popped up to an infielder in fair territory since September 16th, 2016 — and that previous pop up was caught on the outfield grass, what Play Index describes as being in the “Deep SS-3B hole.” In fact, every pop up to an infielder by Votto in 2016 was described as deep in the hole. To find Votto’s last pop up that was caught by an infielder in fair territory that was actually in the infield, you’d have to go all the way back to May 24th of 2015, when Trevor Bauer got him to pop up to second base.

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Round bat, round ball, traveling in different directions: the eight-word story of hitting really captures some of the difficulty of that practice. When you get into the art of choking up — moving the hands up the barrel and shortening the bat — you uncover a whole world of players attempting to address that difficulty. David Kagan examined the physics of choking up today at The Hardball Times. Here, we ask the practitioners what they think. It turns out, the players serve up some conventional wisdom, but also some insight into the reasoning behind the practice.

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On Tuesday, I discussed MLB’s expected wOBA (or xwOBA) metric and one of its problems — namely, that guys with great speed might have the ability to outperform their xwOBA on a regular basis. I also pointed out that, despite this drawback, xwOBA should have considerable utility. This post looks at one potential aspect of that utility when it comes to projecting future performance when we have only completed just a small portion of the season.

Comparing wxOBA and wOBA for individual players over the course of a season, one find a pretty strong relationship — a point which I establish in that Tuesday post. To take things a step further, I’d like to look here at the relationships of these stats over the course of a couple seasons and see how they correlate from year to year. In order to establish a baseline, let’s look at how players with at least 400 at-bats in both 2015 and 2016 fared by wOBA.

So we see a decent relationship between wOBA marks in consecutive season. It certainly would be strange if there weren’t some relationship between a player’s offensive statistics from year to year, as players generally don’t get a lot better or a lot worse in such a short span of time — even if the players who do meet those criteria make for more interesting stories and analysis. So we see that, from 2015 to 2016, there is a relationship with wOBA. What about xwOBA?

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Yesterday, Nick Stellini noted that there might be an AL East bidding war for third basemen this summer. The Red Sox’ current third basemen are a collection of misfits, while the Orioles could choose to shift Manny Machado back to shortstop to replace J.J. Hardy if they find there aren’t that many appealing options in the shortstop trade market. Both teams are playing well enough to expect to be buyers, and in some form, the left side of the infield looks like a place both teams could make real improvements.

But if I’m Dave Dombrowski, I’m probably not planning on trading for a third baseman this summer. I think there’s a pretty decent chance that the Red Sox’ stretch-run third baseman is already in the organization.

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Gareth Morgan’s BABIP went down on Tuesday. On the balls in play that he recorded, the Seattle Mariners outfield prospect grounded out, flew out, and singled. He had other at-bats, as well. In one of them, he fanned for the 46th time on the season. In the other two, he homered.

Morgan’s stat sheet is… intriguing. The 2014 second-round pick is slashing a solid .291/.352/.473, with four long balls, in 122 trips to the plate. He’s put up those robust numbers despite a 39.3% strikeout rate.

And then there’s his ball-in-play fortune. Prior to the aforementioned dip, it stood at .491, the highest mark in professional baseball. (He now ranks third, at .475, having been leapfrogged by Clinton Lumber Kings teammate Anthony Jimenez and Blue Jays prospect Bo Bichette.)

The 21-year-old native of Toronto, Ontario, wasn’t aware of that statistical factoid when I spoke to him after Tuesday’s game. Nor could he offer an easy explanation for the mix of whiffs and safe landings.

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A frequently asked question this spring in FanGraphs chats, and presumably around water coolers inside and outside the Beltway, concerned which Bryce Harper we would see in 2017.

Would we see the 2015, Ted Williams-like, Griffey Jr.-in-his-prime, Hall-of-Fame-trajectory version? Or would we see something closer to the perplexing, if still productive, 2016 version. (Harper must have been restricted by nagging injuries last season, right?)

So far it seems like the answer is more likely the former, but perhaps it is neither. Instead of settling for somewhere between those outcomes, perhaps what Harper has really set out to do is to exceed the extremely high bar he set in 2015.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric forefather 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.

How are they calculated? Haphazardly, is how. An explanation of the components and formulae which produce these NERD scores is available here. All objections to the numbers here are probably justified, on account of how this entire endeavor is absurd.

Most Highly Rated Game
Colorado at Minnesota | 19:10 ET
Chatwood (48.0 IP, 92 xFIP-) vs. Berrios (7.2 IP, 136 xFIP-)
The Mysteries are a series of episodes from the life of Jesus of Nazareth on which Catholic people meditate while praying with a set of rosary beads. Twins right-hander Jose Berrios is a different sort of mystery — one who features impressive physical tools and an excellent minor-league track record but who has nevertheless had trouble preventing runs at the major-league level. His season debut was superficially promising (he allowed just one run in 7.2 innings) but troubling in other ways (he struck out only four of 27 batters and allowed a lot of fly balls). His opponent, Tyler Chatwood, has recorded one of the league’s lowest strike percentages but has compensated for it — from an aesthetic point of view — with one of the majors’ quickest paces.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Colorado or Minnesota Radio.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a mid-start adjustment by Clayton Kershaw and answer listener emails about what constitutes a “jam,” pitchers who’ve allowed the most first career hits, how to analyze player problems and improvements, team abbreviations, hitters who homer and bunt, left-handed infielders, whether bats could be causing the home-run surge, and more.

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As a FanGraphs reader, you’re presumably familiar with the TTO acronym. Just in case you’re not, TTO stands for Three True Outcomes, and said three true outcomes are walks, strikeouts, and homers. They’re the outcomes least likely to lie to you; they’re the outcomes that tell you the most about the individuals involved. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that there are more strikeouts now than ever before. You also know that home-run rates have taken off. So this plot should fit with what you’d figure. Viewing over an entire century of baseball, you see league-wide TTO% taking flight.

This season, a third of all plate appearances have ended with either a walk, a strikeout, or a homer. As recently as 1992, it was more like a quarter of all plate appearances. It was a fifth of all plate appearances in 1946. The image there speaks for itself, so I suppose I don’t need to address it any longer. The trends are up, is the point. There’s no sign of this pattern changing course.

Recently, the Effectively Wild podcast received a listener email, asking how high is too high. That is, how high could TTO% go before the game just feels all weird and broken? I didn’t have a good answer. I’m unconvinced the average fan cares about this as much as analysts do. We’re the ones who need stuff to write about, while the average fan just wants to know if a given team is winning or losing. Here’s one thing I can say: The future might look like the Rays. Nobody else TTOs quite like the Rays do.

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