As is fast becoming a holiday tradition, the Padres and Rays made a high-profile trade last night. Blake Snell, the former Cy Young winner and Rays ace, is headed to San Diego, as Dennis Lin, Josh Tolentino, and Ken Rosenthal first reported. The Padres are sending a bevy of players back, both prospects and major leaguers: Luis Patiño, Francisco Mejía, Blake Hunt, and Cole Wilcox.

Last time the two teams hooked up, Snell was virally critical of Tampa Bay’s perennial strategy: trade players a year too early rather than a year too late, prioritizing team control and pre-arbitration salaries over current production. Last year, that was Tommy Pham, whose $7 million arbitration projection simply didn’t work in Tampa. This time, Snell himself is the monetary sacrifice. The extension he signed before 2019 has three years and $40.8 million remaining, which is a phenomenal bargain for his employer and also too expensive for the penny-pinching Rays.

Snell immediately becomes the best pitcher in the Padres rotation, which boasts Chris Paddack, Dinelson Lamet, Zach Davies, and a sampler platter of interesting prospects headlined by Mackenzie Gore and Adrian Morejon. Mike Clevinger will miss 2021 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, but he’ll return in 2022 to co-star in a spectacular rotation.

Snell may never recapture the overall production of his 2018 Cy Young season (1.89 ERA, 221 strikeouts in 180.2 innings), but he’s been consistently excellent for years now, albeit on a shorter leash than many elite pitchers. His strikeout rates hardly waver: 31.6% in 2018, 33.3% in 2019, and 31 % in 2020. His walk rates have been consistent as well: 9.1%, 9.1%, and 8.9% respectively. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, we at FanGraphs put out a call for broadcaster ratings. The votes are now in. Today, we are releasing the last of those rankings, as well as selected commentary from each team’s responses. A similar survey of radio broadcasts will follow early next year, with a final summation at some point after that.

If you missed teams 30-11, you can catch up on those installments here and here. You can also peruse the initial surveys for the East, Central, and West if you’d like to see a list of each team’s booth.

As a refresher, our survey asked for scores on four axes. I’ll recap them briefly here before sharing the booths you thought were the league’s best.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. This isn’t limited to statistical analysis, and many of the booths that scored best excelled at explaining pitching mechanics. This score represents how much viewers feel they learn *about baseball* by watching.

“Charisma” covers the amount of enjoyment voters derive from listening to the announcers fill space, which takes on many forms. The booths that scored best on charisma varied wildly, from former players recounting stories of their glory days to unintentional comedy and playful banter between long-term broadcast partners. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, we at FanGraphs put out a call for broadcaster ratings. The votes are now in. Starting yesterday and continuing today, we are releasing a compilation of those rankings, as well as selected commentary from each team’s responses. A similar survey of radio broadcasts will follow early next year, with a final summation at some point after that.

As a refresher, our survey asked for scores on four axes. If you’d like a thorough explanation of them, as well as a listing of each team’s broadcast groups, you can read our articles for the East, Central, and West divisions. I’ll also recap them briefly here before starting off with the bottom third of the league.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. This isn’t limited to statistical analysis, and many of the booths that scored best excelled at explaining pitching mechanics. This score represents how much viewers feel they learn *about baseball* by watching.

“Charisma” covers the amount of enjoyment voters derive from listening to the announcers fill space, which takes on many forms. The booths that scored best on charisma varied wildly, from former players recounting stories of their glory days to unintentional comedy and playful banter between long-term broadcast partners.

“Coherence” focuses on play-by-play, but it also covers how well broadcasters stay in tune with the game. The most coherent broadcasts strike a balance between telling stories and informing viewers of the current state of the game. That’s a tough balance to strike, and many broadcasts that scored well on charisma did worse in terms of coherence. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, we at FanGraphs put out a call for broadcaster ratings. The votes are now all in, and over the following days, we’ll be releasing a compilation of those rankings, as well as selected commentary from each team’s responses. A similar survey of radio broadcasts will follow early next year, and a final summation at some point after that.

As a refresher, our survey asked for scores in four areas. If you’d like a thorough explanation of them, you can read the introductory article, but I’ll also recap them briefly here before starting off with the bottom third of the league.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. This isn’t limited to statistical analysis, and many of the booths that scored best excelled at explaining pitching mechanics. This score represents how much viewers feel they learn about baseball by watching.

“Charisma” covers the amount of enjoyment voters derive from listening to the announcers fill space, which takes on many forms. The booths that scored best on charisma varied wildly, from former players recounting stories of their glory days to unintentional comedy and playful banter between long-term broadcast partners. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t want to write this article. One of my favorite things to do, back when I was a full-time Cardinals fan and part-time writer, was wait for the first few weeks of the season and then start ogling velocity changes. There’s almost nothing that made me feel so unabashedly happy as seeing an extra tick or two out of some arm I’d written off the previous year. Why spoil that magic by looking into whether it actually matters?

Nothing fun can come of using data to look at incuriously held beliefs, but that’s never stopped me before, so I decided to examine pitchers who experienced velocity gains from one year to the next. Do their fastballs grade out better? Do they strike out more batters? Walk more? Do they hold the gains from one year to the next? I had no clue, but I decided to find out.

First things first: 2020 goes right out the window. The season started in late July, and no one had anything approaching their normal offseason routine. Temperatures were weird, workloads were changed on the fly, and some teams were affected by COVID-related cancelations; trying to tease something out from that noise is pointless and unnecessary. I’ll just use 2015 through 2019 instead.

Why 2015? That’s when Statcast first arrived, and with it a new tracking system. I could, I suppose, use data since 2008, but I wanted to minimize the chances of false readings stemming from the change in systems. 2020 also featured a change — to camera-based readings instead of radar — but we’re already throwing it out anyway, so no big deal there.

In each year, I looked at the population of starters who threw at least 500 four-seam fastballs. I then found the year-to-year changes for each pitcher-season combination. Justin Verlander, as an example, averaged 93.4 mph in 2015, 94.1 mph in 2016, 95.3 mph in 2017, 95 mph in 2018, and 94.6 mph in 2019. That means his ‘15-’16 change was 0.7 mph, his ‘16-’17 change was 1.2 mph, his ‘17-’18 change was -0.3 mph, and his ‘18-’19 change was -0.4 mph. This gave us a database of 236 pitcher-seasons from 2016 to 2018 — I’m leaving out changes between 2018 and 2019 because I want to know what happens the year after a pitcher gains velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s talk a little bit about outrage. How would you feel if you were Edwin Rios and this happened to you?

Outraged is the way I’d feel. Come on! There’s nothing about that pitch that says strike. 4,356 pitches were thrown over the plate and within an inch up or down from that one, and none of the other 4,355 were called strikes. This call is outrageous! It’s unfair.

Sadly, I’m not Jeff Sullivan, so I’m not going to do a post about the worst called balls and strikes of 2020. I wanted to start with that pitch as an appetizer, though, because I do enjoy the genre of “pitch that shouldn’t be a strike gets called a strike.” But forget quality — it’s overrated. Let’s focus on quantity instead.

On September 9, Tyler Anderson threw 100 pitches. He received a whopping 22 called strikes — not too shabby! It was his second-best mark of the year in games where he threw at least 50 pitches. Here’s the real kicker — 12 of those 22 weren’t in the strike zone.

Let’s look at one of those to set the stage. Here’s a pitch that got Dylan Moore looking for a strikeout:

Wait, is that haze in the background? Indeed it is — this game was played under a wildfire-induced haze. No, it’s not that Mariners game against a Bay Area club that was impacted by wildfires — you’re thinking of the Oakland-Seattle clash on September 14, a doubleheader played in and under smoky skies. It’s also not that Mariners game against a bay Area club that was played in San Francisco — you’re thinking of the September 15 decision to relocate the A’s/Mariners tilt to California to avoid the unhealthy Seattle air. 2020 sure was a doozy. Read the rest of this entry »

Before we get going, a heads up: this article is about a mathematical model that explains tanking. I’ll give you a preview. The way baseball is currently set up, it’s no surprise teams tank. If you want to fix that, the game’s competitive structure must change. I suggest a few ways to accomplish that change at the end of the article, but be warned: the bulk of this is a no-nonsense dissection of why teams keep tanking even as the returns go down. Personally, I think the game should make the changes I suggest, because the boom and bust cycle of team contention makes for a fraught fan experience. The way the game is set up now, however, it’s no surprise that teams do it.

The logic behind tanking is straightforward and solid. Being in the middle is the worst; there are no prizes for winning 85 games, flags fly forever, and so on and so forth. You’ve surely heard it enough times that you don’t need a repeat, but just for completeness’s sake, we’ll do it one more time.

By trading present concerns for future value, you make your team better in the future. As a byproduct of trading present concerns away, your major league roster gets bad — bad enough, hopefully, that you’ll move to the top of the draft. Additionally, with no pesky need to be competitive, you can use your major league roster to give borderline players extended tryouts. Hit on a few of them, and that’s even more tailwind for the future.

In essence, tanking is making a bet that taking a step back now will let you take two steps forward sometime in the future. Even if that isn’t the case, being quite bad for a while and then quite good for a while sure sounds better than being mediocre the whole time. Tanking works on both axes, which explains its continued appeal. Do you think your team will win something like 77 wins? Blow it up! 75 wins? Blow it up! 70 wins? You guessed it. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the 2020 season, the Cincinnati Reds were a team on the rise. For two straight seasons, they’d built for the present, acquiring a dynamic pitching staff and attempting to rebuild their once-potent lineup. 2020 was going to be their year, the last year before Trevor Bauer’s free agency and the first with Mike Moustakas, Nick Castellanos, and Shogo Akiyama in tow.

The year didn’t work out particularly well for them, though. Their pitching was excellent, but the offense sputtered, and they scored a literal zero runs in their two playoff games, one of which went 13 innings. Just like that, the season was over. The team has been busy so far this offseason — they non-tendered Archie Bradley and Brian Goodwin, extended Bauer a Qualifying Offer before seeing him leave, and traded relievers Raisel Iglesias and Robert Stephenson. They’re also reportedly open to dealing Sonny Gray. Is the Reds’ brief run over?

I’m not so sure. Yes, the Reds have gotten worse this offseason. There’s no arguing that. Their Cy Young winner left in free agency (assuming he doesn’t return to Cincinnati, which seems unlikely). They traded their closer to save $8 million. They might be trading one of their other two great starters to save a little more money. That all sounds bad, no doubt.

Heck, though: you can make anything sound bad by describing it that way. The Cubs non-tendered two high draft picks who both contributed in 2020 to save a few bucks. The Cardinals declined an option on Kolten Wong that would have been a bargain — they explicitly stated that it was entirely to lower their payroll commitments for next year. The Brewers didn’t want to pay Corey Knebel, so they sent him to the Dodgers, who very much wanted to pay Corey Knebel. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »