Hot takes are famously a huge part of the sports industrial complex, but here at FanGraphs, we’re not very good at them. I took a crack at some American League bold predictions yesterday, but honestly, they were pretty bland. Picking the relative fortunes of a bunch of good-but-not-great teams? Boring. A top prospect might be Rookie of the Year? Boring.

Today, I’m going a little further. If the last takes were jalapeños with some seeds removed, these are serrano peppers. I said I’d be ecstatic hitting half of my predictions from yesterday; today I’d be pleased with one in the first three (the fourth one is relatively unadventurous). As always, these aren’t my median predictions, merely corner cases that I think are being undervalued. Will they happen? Probably not. But they could, and I don’t think people are giving them enough credence. Onward! Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, I don’t like to make predictions. For one thing, they’re hard! The amount of public information out there is borderline overwhelming. Beating the wisdom of the crowd isn’t easy, particularly when the crowd is using fancy models and copious batted ball data to be wise.

The other big problem with making predictions is that they’re usually wrong if they’re bold. That’s the nature of the game — a bold prediction can’t be the majority of the probability mass, or it wouldn’t be bold. How fun can it possibly be to read a list of things that probably won’t happen?

Well, hopefully very fun, because I’m going to make some this week. These aren’t going to be completely wild guesses, of course, because I do have some idea what I’m doing, but I’m not expecting to go 100% on these. If I go two for four, I’ll definitely call that a win. These are merely the synthesis of some observations that I’ve made over the past year or so, sprinkled with a little bit of boldness dust where necessary to make them exciting instead of milquetoast. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training games get silly quickly. By the time the veterans have hit the showers, it’s time for raw prospects and reclamation projects to duke it out. So unless you’re a Carlos Estévez fan or a Padres loyalist, you probably didn’t see this live:

That home run, hit by Joshua Mears, is the hardest-hit ball of spring training so far — or, it was before a Giancarlo Stanton line drive yesterday that I’m totally ignoring for the purposes of this article. At 117.3 mph, it would have been one of the hardest-hit balls in the entire 2020 season. Laser beam home runs are fun to watch, though it’s a good thing a kid made a backhanded catch, or a reclining couple might have caught a baseball with their bodies.

Even if you didn’t see it live, you might have seen MLB Pipeline tweet about it. Failing that, maybe you read about it on MLB.com. Homers, especially smashed ones that show off Statcast, tend to make the rounds. Home runs are big business, and they get reported as such.

What you almost assuredly don’t know is that the previous inning, someone hit the third-hardest-hit ball of the spring (well, fourth now — thanks, Stanton). Feast your eyes on 115.6 mph of pure… well, pure groundball single to shortstop:

Surprisingly enough, MLB.com didn’t write an article about that one. This won’t be on any highlight reels for the year. And yet, that’s the hardest-hit tracked batted ball of Brendan Rodgers’ career. Given that he’ll be playing in the majors this year and Mears will be on a bus in some city you’ve never heard of, the grounder was more meaningful to this major league season. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

If you want power, pull the ball in the air. It’s a truism because it’s true. On pulled air balls (line drives and fly balls), batters hit .558 with a 1.285 slugging percentage in 2020. When they went to the opposite field, they hit .297 with a .522 slugging percentage. It isn’t rocket science; pulling means power, and power means production.

Want another way of putting it? Those opposite-field air balls were hit with an average 86.8 mph exit velocity. Only 26.6% of them were hit at 95 mph or harder. When batters pulled the ball, they did far better — they checked in at 94 mph on average and 54.7% were 95 mph or higher. You don’t need any fancy statistics to tell you how much better that is.

Even if you take for granted that a batter hit the ball hard, it’s still better to pull the ball. When batters barreled up balls to the pull side, they slugged 3.283. A barrel is high-value by nature, but a slugging percentage of 3.283 is still hard to fathom. Those balls were hit a comical 105.6 mph on average, and hitters posted a 1.679 wOBA on them — again, you don’t need me to tell you that’s good. It’s good!

Barrel a ball to the opposite field, and the results aren’t bad, per se — after all, a barrel is a high-value hit by definition. Compared to the gaudy results on pulled barrels, though, it’s a disappointment; a 2.588 slugging percentage on 102.4 mph average exit velocity, good for a 1.347 wOBA. Good, but not as good as it could be; pulling the ball creates more juice.

Got that all straight? It’s harder to barrel the ball up when you hit it to the opposite field. Even when you do, it’s hard to get as much production out of it as you do to the pull side. Great, we have that covered. Now, meet Eloy Jiménez:

That’s an opposite-field barrel, one of 10 such batted balls Jiménez hit last year. That led baseball, and it wasn’t some volume-based fluke; 21.3% of the opposite-field balls that he hit, period, were barreled. That’s almost double his rate on pulled balls (11.9%). Did Eloy figure out how to beat the sheer inevitability of pull production being better? Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, faced with the prospect of an undetermined amount of time with no baseball to watch, I started an experiment: with the help of the FanGraphs reader base, I would crowd manage a team in an online Out Of The Park Baseball league. The OOTP Brewers made a series of crowd-determined decisions throughout the season, with plenty of un-voted upon input by me in the bargain. We fell short of the playoffs, but managed to finish above .500.

That league didn’t end when the season did. Since the virtual 2020 season wrapped up, players have been flying around in free agency, and now that spring training has started, I thought I’d check in on the team and work out some 2021 plans.

The team’s biggest move last year was an in-season trade for Kevin Gausman, a pending free agent. He’s a bigger deal in the game universe than in real life, a borderline top-25 starter with elite control. Rather than let him walk, we signed him to a four-year extension at $23 million per year.

Sounds like a lot, right? Well, our league isn’t a perfect reflection of real life, because most teams are trying to win now. Role playing as a rebuilding team is understandably not everyone’s cup of tea. Take a look at some contracts that notable free agent starters signed this offseason, as well as my scouts’ estimation of them on the 20-80 scale:

The starting pitching market was indeed frothy, and half of those contracts had player options included as well, most notably Stroman, who has three separate chances to get out of the deal. I also left out another 55, because he’s now a Brewer. Collin McHugh signed a two year, $16 million deal with a team option for a third year at $6.5 million. His deal is the cheapest, but he’s the worst of the group; he’s more homer-prone than you’d like in our home bandbox. Read the rest of this entry »

Framber Valdez was a revelation in 2020. After a forgettable debut in 2019, he threw 70.2 innings of pure excellence last season, the highest total on the team. His emergence buttressed a rotation that lost Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander from the last time we’d seen them. Even with Lance McCullers Jr. recovered, no Astros starter had a better projected ERA in 2021 than Valdez. Unfortunately, he fractured the ring finger on his pitching hand on Tuesday, and his availability this season is now in doubt after doctors recommended surgery.

The play where he hurt himself was nothing out of the ordinary:

The play where Framber Valdez fractured his left ring finger. pic.twitter.com/69wlrtNQaf

— Tony Adams (@adams_at) March 3, 2021

A comebacker, a reflexive stab, a quick grimace: you see it all the time. With Valdez awaiting further medical guidance, though, it’s worth both considering his rapid ascent and wondering what Houston will do to replace his innings in an already-shaky rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re probably still underrating Yordan Alvarez. I don’t mean this as a slight. I’ve never met you, most likely. I don’t know what you think about Alvarez. Maybe you’re a friend, or a hopeless Astros homer who thinks that every player they acquire will turn into Mike Trout, or just someone who believes in small-sample breakouts. But the odds are, you don’t remember how good Alvarez has been.

Let’s demonstrate some of this with lists. Here is a list of the top five hitters in baseball, as projected by Steamer and ZiPS:

The best player in baseball, two of the game’s brightest young stars, the 2020 NL MVP, and then Alvarez.

Is that where Alvarez lines up in your head? Probably not. That’s no fault of your head — he only played in two games last year, and only 89 so far in his major league career. Our brains aren’t wired to see a debut and think of someone as one of the best players in the game. No one’s wondering whether Kyle Lewis or Ke’Bryan Hayes is Freeman’s equal with the bat. That’s just not how baseball works. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 Philadelphia Phillies were bad at defense. Bam, there’s the story. Print it. Talk to you again tomorrow.

Oh, you want more than that? A reasonable request — this is FanGraphs, after all. Fine, then. The Phillies allowed a .342 BABIP last year, the highest mark in baseball and one of the highest marks ever. Some of that is due to the short season — it’s easier to be extreme in fewer observations — but some of it was because their defenders were inept at turning batted balls into outs.

What went wrong? For one thing, the Phillies played below-average defenders at most infield spots. We’ll exclude catcher, of course, because that’s a different kind of defense, but the tough defense extended across the diamond. Alec Bohm is a first baseman playing third. He’s not there for his defense, but with Rhys Hoskins at first, the Phillies got his bat into the lineup by any means necessary.

Next to Bohm on the diamond, Didi Gregorius is similarly defensively stretched. He played an acceptable shortstop earlier in his career, but he’s now on the wrong side of 30 and trending downwards. Both DRS and Statcast’s OAA think that he’s been one of the worst shortstop defenders in baseball over the past two years (UZR thinks he’s acceptable).

At second base, Jean Segura is the lone Philadelphia defender who you could consider overqualified for the position. He was a below-average defender at shortstop, but he’s adapted well to playing second base. All three defensive systems saw him as an above-average defender at second. He’s the only defender (other than Realmuto) on the entire team where that was the case in 2020.

Unfortunately, Segura was forced to cover a lot of ground, because he was flanked by two range-deficient defenders. We’ve already covered Gregorius, but Rhys Hoskins manages to show that first base defense isn’t completely meaningless. He’s one of the worst defenders there by every metric, and it’s not just scoops or stretches or any of those things you expect first basemen to fail at. He simply has no range whatsoever; he combines below-average top end speed with DH-esque burst; it’s not apples to apples, but his home-to-first time is about the same as J.D. Martinez and Nelson Cruz’s. Read the rest of this entry »