For the last half-decade, Anaheim (the city — the team is just the Los Angeles Angels these days) has been home to the best shortstop defense on the planet. That’s because in 2015 the Angels traded for Andrelton Simmons, the best defender in the game by UZR, DRS, OAA, the eye test, general acclaim, and common sense.

Simmons reached free agency after the 2020 season, and a reunion seemed unlikely after he opted out of the last week of the season. The team is trying its luck in the trade market again, though: last night, they acquired José Iglesias from the Orioles in exchange for two pitching prospects:

Orioles announce they have acquired RHP Jean Pinto and RHP Garrett Stallings from the Los Angeles Angels in exchange for INF José Iglesias.

— Dan Connolly (@danconnolly2016) December 3, 2020

Iglesias, too, is a brilliant defender at the position. He’s rangy and sure-handed, but his standout defensive attribute might be his strong, accurate arm. In fact, he graded out as the best defensive shortstop in the majors in 2020 per Statcast’s Outs Above Average. In fairness, he only played 24 games at the position due a strained left quad, which means the sample is even smaller than the already-small 2020 season would normally entail, but still: best in baseball! Read the rest of this entry »

Sabermetrics has had all kinds of effects on the baseball world. One of the big ones, for me at least, is that it’s changed the way I listen to announcers almost completely. When I was younger, they were my only gateway to understanding the game, so I treated every pearl of analyst wisdom like a fundamental truth of the game.

That’s simply not the case anymore. Obviously so, in my case: It would be pretty embarrassing for me if I wrote about baseball five days a week for years and still used announcers as my only source of knowledge. Even before I was a writer, however, I was a consumer of baseball writing and analysis, and the sheer deluge of data and thinking has long weaned me from needing to get my learning exclusively in the form of pronouncements from on high.

One thing that gets missed in the rush to overthrow the old order and install new quantifiable gods and goddesses of baseball truth, though, is that a lot of the things announcers taught me when I was a kid are true! It really is important to hit the cutoff man, and some fastballs do really look like they’re rising as they cross the plate. I’ve been looking into another such piece of received wisdom recently, and it’s absolutely real: lefty batters struggle to hit pitches on the low and away corner.

You know the pitch I’m talking about, because you can picture Cody Bellinger taking a defensive swing in your mind’s eye:

Or Juan Soto taking a borderline pitch and grimacing or shuffling appropriately:

Instinctively, I was sure that this was true, but I couldn’t exactly explain why. What is it about lefties that makes their swing look awkward in that location? I simply couldn’t tell you, and so I began to doubt myself. Is it really an unhittable spot, or was I falling victim to the same old thing from my youth, over-relying on something I’d been told without proving it myself? Read the rest of this entry »

Watch any amount of baseball these days, and you’ll see a familiar pattern: a catcher giving a pitcher a high target for his fastball. This is hardly a secret; it’s so obvious, in fact, that I don’t really know how to make a good introduction out of it. Did you know that pitchers throw four-seam fastballs high in the zone? You did! I don’t need to tell you that. But this article is about four-seam fastballs, so the paragraph feels necessary.

Anyway: Four-seamers work better when they’re thrown up in the zone. That’s not some silly contextual thing, or even really up for debate. It’s just how the pitch works. The backspin on the pitch means that hitters generally make contact under the center of the ball. Given that the normal launch angle for a ball up in the zone is already high, hitting under a high pitch means pop-ups and lazy fly balls. It also means whiffs.

Don’t believe me? I mean, first of all, just watch some baseball. The pitch that dots the top of the strike zone makes hitters look foolish with great frequency. You can also take a look at this table, which divides the strike zone into vertical thirds and looks at only four-seam fastballs:

Fastballs in the upper third of the strike zone are the best of both worlds. Batters miss them more frequently than the other two sections, and even when they make contact, they’re not doing so with authority. Fail to find the top of the zone, and things get worse. Fastballs that wind up in the middle third of the plate still miss bats at an acceptable clip, but if the hitter connects, you might be in for a bad time.
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Ah, the introductory paragraph of a free agency signing piece. Normally, this is a space to let loose and spend a while thinking up a pun about the team and the player linking up. I must sadly tell you, however, that I can’t bring myself to do it. The degree of difficulty is the fun, and Mike Minor’s name is too easy, so you’ll just have to settle for the facts: the Kansas City Royals signed Minor to a two-year deal over the weekend, as Ken Rosenthal first reported.

When Minor left the Royals after a dominant 2017 season of relief work, he looked like a classic conversion arm. He’d been workmanlike over parts of five seasons with the Braves, never overwhelming but also never disastrous. After a brutal series of injuries ending in shoulder surgery, however, Atlanta cut him loose, and he landed with the Royals on a two-year deal. Kansas City turned him into a reliever, and he promptly annihilated the AL Central — his 2.55 ERA and 2.62 FIP represented a new level of performance, and he looked like a relief ace created out of whole cloth.

As he returns to Kansas City three years later, the situation feels both familiar and strange. Familiar, in that he’s spent the last three years putting in a performance that was, in aggregate, a little bit better than average. His run prevention numbers look slightly worse for having played two years in an extreme hitter’s park, but even then, a 4.07 ERA and 4.37 FIP will play, and that works out to an 85 ERA- and 95 FIP- after park adjustments. Even including a rough 2020, Minor looks like a workmanlike pitcher again.

Is he heading back to Kansas City to relieve? Almost certainly not. You see, Minor’s 2019 raises hope that there’s a little bit more there than meets the eye. He started the season strong, with a 2.54 ERA and 3.78 FIP, which led to his first All-Star nod. He faded down the stretch, though he still finished with 4.1 WAR and did even better (6.4 WAR) if you focus on runs allowed rather than FIP.

Even if you want to disregard the half-by-half split and focus on the aggregate, something stood out: Minor threw 208.1 innings, a career high. He followed that up with another 11 starts in 2020, essentially a full season of work. A starter who can put up decent rate statistics over a full workload is a valuable commodity in today’s game, particularly given the fact that essentially every pitcher in baseball will throw many more innings next year than they did this year, which likely increases the chance of injury. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at FanGraphs, we devote a lot of time to analyzing baseball. I flatter myself to think that our analysis, in some cases, helps shape the way you consume the sport. Measured in that way, however, we fall far short of the influence that your local broadcast of choice exerts. We may grace your brainwaves for a handful of minutes every day, but every time you watch a game on TV, the announcers are granted three hours to shape your view and enjoyment of the sport.

In fact, I would venture that no one group contributes more to your enjoyment and understanding of baseball than your most frequently-viewed broadcast crew. Despite that, it has been over four years since we last compiled a ranking of broadcast groups. Starting Monday and continuing until today, we will post a series of surveys, one for each major league franchise. We will then use the results of these surveys to compile a comprehensive fan-based ranking of all television broadcast crews.

When you peruse the section for your team or teams of choice, you will find a link to a poll. That poll covers three categories, as well as an overall ranking. In addition, there is a separate space for any additional comments you would like to make. The eventual ranking of broadcast teams will be quantitative, but I will include relevant comments from this section in my writing of those rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at FanGraphs, we devote a lot of time to analyzing baseball. I flatter myself to think that our analysis, in some cases, helps shape the way you consume the sport. Measured in that way, however, we fall far short of the influence that your local broadcast of choice exerts. We may grace your brainwaves for a handful of minutes every day, but every time you watch a game on TV, the announcers are granted three hours to shape your view and enjoyment of the sport.

In fact, I would venture that no one group contributes more to your enjoyment and understanding of baseball than your most frequently-viewed broadcast crew. Despite that, it has been over four years since we last compiled a ranking of broadcast groups. Starting yesterday and continuing until tomorrow, we will post a series of surveys, one for each major league franchise. We will then use the results of these surveys to compile a comprehensive fan-based ranking of all television broadcast crews.

When you peruse the section for your team or teams of choice, you will find a link to a poll. That poll covers three categories, as well as an overall ranking. In addition, there is a separate space for any additional comments you would like to make. The eventual ranking of broadcast teams will be quantitative, but I will include relevant comments from this section in my writing of those rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at FanGraphs, we devote a lot of time to analyzing baseball. I flatter myself to think that our analysis, in some cases, helps shape the way you consume the sport. Measured in that way, however, we fall far short of the influence that your local broadcast of choice exerts. We may grace your brainwaves for a handful of minutes every day, but every time you watch a game on TV, the announcers are granted three hours to shape your view and enjoyment of the sport.

In fact, I would venture that no one group contributes more to your enjoyment and understanding of baseball than your most frequently-viewed broadcast crew. Despite that, it has been over four years since we last compiled a ranking of broadcast groups. Over the course of the next three days, we will post a series of surveys, one for each major league franchise. We will then use the results of these surveys to compile a comprehensive fan-based ranking of all television broadcast crews.

When you peruse the section for your team or teams of choice, you will find a link to a poll. That poll covers three categories, as well as an overall ranking. In addition, there is a separate space for any additional comments you would like to make. The eventual ranking of broadcast teams will be quantitative, but I will include relevant comments from this section in my writing of those rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

Allow me to present you with assorted statistics from two players. They aren’t exhaustive, of course, and I’m trying to mislead you, but still:

Batter A looks a little bit better. He hit the ball hard more frequently and topped out at a higher exit velocity. Player B had a better xwOBACON — a mouthful of letters that simply means using xwOBA to measure a player’s quality of contact — but I think I’d take the hard hit rate and maximum EV of Player A anyway.

Here’s a further wrinkle: both of these players are, by reputation at least, among the best defenders at their respective positions. Player A is the better defender relative to his peers — he’s won five Gold Gloves to Player B’s zero — but Player B plays a position 20 runs up the defensive spectrum, meaning he has provided more defensive value per plate appearance in his career than Player A. Who would you rather have had on your team in 2020?

From these statistics — and specifically these statistics — it’s not exactly obvious. You might have a leaning one way or the other, but it can’t be more than a 60/40 decision. That’s not to say that you would have a tough choice going forward — Player A just turned 28, while Player B will turn 38 before the start of the 2021 season. Also, you don’t actually get to pick which one to add to your team, because Player A is under contract for next year. You could totally add Player B, though: he’s a free agent after a two-year run with the fifth team of his major league career.

Enough with the blind nonsense: Player A is Mookie Betts. You should have taken him! Player B is Jeff Mathis, frequent butt of incompetent-hitting jokes and widely reputed to be one of the worst hitters of all time. Sounds like we’re going to need to do some further digging. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve heard of home field advantage. It’s simply a part of sports, like gravity or Tom Brady being competent and obnoxious. Here’s a dirty little secret, though: A decent chunk of home field advantage is actually first-inning advantage. Here, take a look at how home and away batters performed in the first inning and thereafter from 2010 to ’19:

The first inning has the biggest gap, with only the fifth coming even close. It’s a consistent effect year-to-year, and it’s a big deal: A 22-point edge in wOBA works out to three-quarters of a run per game, which would work out to roughly a .570 winning percentage, significantly higher than the actual edge. If you could bottle that edge and apply it to every inning, baseball would look very different.

This isn’t some novel effect I’ve just discovered. It’s well-established, though I’ve never seen a completely satisfactory explanation for it. Could it be that the home team’s defensive turn in the top of the first warms them up for their turn at bat? Maybe! One counterpoint here: Home DHs have a 20-point wOBA advantage on away DHs in the first inning, then only a six-point advantage thereafter. Maybe it’s not that, then.

A theory that makes more sense to me is that home pitchers have a unique advantage in the first inning. In that inning, and that inning alone, they can exactly predict when they’ll be needed on the mound. Have a perfect warmup routine? You can finish it just before first pitch, then transition directly to the game. Visiting pitchers are at the mercy of the game. Start too late, and you won’t be ready in time for the bottom of the first. Start too early, and an extended turn at the plate might leave you cold. Read the rest of this entry »