Empty stadiums are hardly the weirdest thing about baseball in 2020. There’s the shortened season, the universal DH, the runner on second base in extra innings; if you’re looking for ways the game has changed, there’s no shortage. Today, however, I’d like to talk about those empty stadiums, and their effect on home field advantage. A quick warning: this is going to be an article full of dry tables and plenty of math. I think it’ll be worth it, though.

One question looms over everything else when it comes to home field advantage: what percentage of games does the home team win? Over a very long horizon, everything else is just noise. In 2019, for example, home teams won 52.9% of the games they played. In 2018, that number stood at 52.5%. Long-term home field advantage bounces around between 52% and 54%. It’s good to play at home.

How about this year? To look at 2020 data, we need to do a little manual work. So far this year, four teams have played “home” games in opposing stadiums: the Marlins, Blue Jays, Yankees, and Cardinals. The Orioles also played part of a suspended home game in Washington against the Nationals. In all forthcoming analysis, I’ve removed those games from both the home and away datasets used in this article. It’s never exactly clear what home field advantage is measuring — rest, comfort, the crowd, umpiring, or some mixture — so games with nominal home teams playing in away stadiums are best ignored for these purposes.

With that caveat out of the way and those games excluded, home teams have won 50.6% of their games through Monday, August 17. At the broadest possible resolution, home teams are winning a lower percentage of their games this year. Maybe the crowd really is king.

That’s wildly insufficient for our purposes, however. One of the key tenets of baseball analysis is that merely looking at wins and losses is usually insufficient unless your sample size is enormous. Normally, I’d suggest using Pythagorean expectation here to guess a record. That doesn’t work when looking at only home games, however, because home teams skip the ninth inning when ahead. In 2019, for example, home teams were outscored on the year. This year, they’re scoring slightly more runs than their opponents. We’ll need something more granular than Pythagorean record to find a result. Read the rest of this entry »

Off in the land of Out Of The Park Baseball 21, the doldrums of August have set in. The trade deadline is over — new acquisitions Brandon Belt and Jeff Samardzija are hardly the most exciting additions imaginable, but they’ve both given the team what we need, competent production at two weak points. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Pirates maintain a shaky grasp on first place; they’re two games ahead of the Brewers now, with every other team in the division at least 10 games in our wake.

Normally, the big news of the week would be Christian Yelich’s imminent return. A month and a half without an MVP candidate was a long road, but the team has done admirably, grinding out an 18-18 record. Take this year’s Brewers team and subtract Yelich, and a .500 clip would be hard to achieve. With Yelich in the fold by this weekend (assuming rehab goes smoothly), the division is ours for the taking again.

Unfortunately, “best player returns” doesn’t make for interesting reading. Did you know that Yelich is good? I did, and I bet you did too. Luckily, there’s a bigger mystery to dive into. While Yelich is the team’s best player, Josh Hader has the highest OOTP rating on the team, thanks to a setting that rates every player relative to their positional peers. On the 20-80 scale, he’s an 80 reliever, thanks to his unbelievable stuff grade:
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It’s easy to make light of the job of a baseball manager. Fill out a lineup card, pull your pitchers when they’re tired, and don’t call for any bunts? It often feels like we could all do that. Whenever I start feeling like it’s a cinch to manage, I think back to something my dad told me when I was younger: the manager’s job is to put his team in the best position to win.

Granted, that was before the sabermetric revolution, so managers weren’t necessarily doing a great job of it, but putting their team in the best position to win has always been the point of the job. If that sounds easy, so be it, but there are plenty of ways to mess it up, which means every decision a manager makes has the potential to be the thing they did that led to a loss.

With that theory of managing in mind, I did a double-take when I saw the Astros’ lineup on Sunday. Facing lefty Justus Sheffield, Dusty Baker submitted this lineup:

In a lot of ways, that’s a satisfying lineup against a left-handed pitcher: seven righties against just two lefties after accounting for switch-hitting Abraham Toro, and some big boppers among those righties. Seeing Josh Reddick batting second set alarms off in my mind, though. Read the rest of this entry »

When I sat down to watch last night’s game between the Dodgers and the Padres, I was ready for some offense. The Padres jammed their lineup with righties against Julio Urías, and while the Dodgers didn’t do anything special on their side to face Chris Paddack, they’re pretty much always terrifying. But I absolutely didn’t expect what happened, an 11-2 rout complete with a three-homer game from Mookie Betts.

The game was an impressive show of force from the Dodgers. Those are almost a foregone conclusion with such a potent lineup, even against Paddack — you can’t keep this group from the occasional offensive eruption. What impressed me most, however, was Betts’ first home run of the day. Take a look:

Mookie would hit a homer on the night he got his Silver Slugger. pic.twitter.com/bdBFAWvApw

— MLB (@MLB) August 14, 2020

Paddack would have been pleased with that pitch if he didn’t know the result. Betts is a judicious first-pitch swinger, so you can’t throw him something uncompetitive and expect to get a strike. At the same time, he’s Mookie Betts; you can’t toss a fastball down Main Street and expect to get out of it alive. Paddack chose an excellent compromise, just off the outside corner but close enough to draw a swing. He might have preferred it a few inches higher, but it was a good idea for a first pitch.

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It’s always important to remember that statistics can lie. They’re interesting, and if used with caution they can reveal all kinds of truths. Most statistics are silly, though. When we mock old guard baseball minds who quote eight-plate-appearance samples of one batter against a particular pitcher, or what Mike Moustakas has done in home day games this year, it’s implied: those statistics don’t tell you anything meaningful. So here’s what we’ll do today: I’m going to tell you a statistic, and then we’ll try to find out if it’s meaningful.

Carlos Santana has walked in 30.4% of his plate appearances this year. If you hear that and think “Wow, that’s a lot of walks,” you’re absolutely correct. Santana has always walked a lot, but not like this. Walking that often hardly looks like baseball. It lets him run a ludicrous, .182/.430/.255 slash line. The question is, does it mean anything?

Here’s a simplistic way of looking at it: Santana has batted a lot of times in the major leagues. He’s up to 6,226 plate appearances over 11 seasons of work. How many times has he walked this often in a 19-game stretch? Exactly none:

Think of it this way. Before the season, we projected Santana for a 14.8% walk rate. You can use a binomial probability calculator to estimate how likely it is he’d sustain a 30.4% walk rate over 79 plate appearances. As you might expect, it’s wildly unlikely — if his true-talent walk rate is still 14.8%, there would be a 0.03% chance of this happening. Read the rest of this entry »

When baseball finalized its jam-packed schedule for this year, one thing was immediately evident. Between an abbreviated ramp-up schedule and a dense slate of games, relievers would be in more demand this year. Starters would need time to get stretched out, and that’s extra innings for the bullpen. Stretches of six games in five days would be more common with fewer off days — a perfect time for a bullpen game, or for three competent frames from a minor leaguer and six relief innings.

True to form, 2020 has been a relief-heavy endeavor. As Jay Jaffe noted, starters are on pace to throw their fewest innings per start ever. You can do the math — that means that relievers are on pace to throw their most innings per game ever. Given all that, here’s a question for you: what does that mean for reliever rest and usage patterns?

The correct answer, as usual, is that it’s complicated. Not every relief pitcher is built equally, and not all of them play the same role on a team. You want 2014 Craig Kimbrel in the big spots and some worse reliever (saw the 2020 Kimbrel joke, passed it up, too easy) when the game isn’t close. “Relievers are pitching more innings” is incontrovertibly true, but I wondered how that usage broke down between groups.
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Before you start reading this article, you should know that the conclusion stinks. This isn’t one of those articles where facts stack neatly upon facts, revealing a hidden truth of baseball at the eleventh hour. It’s the opposite of that, essentially. Sometimes the hidden truth doesn’t reveal itself. Sometimes the stack of facts collapses, and you’re left trying to put the pieces back together. Anyway, I warned you.

The story starts with promise. Howie Kendrick, a 15-year veteran with a swing-first-and-ask-questions-later game, was doing something weird. Take a look at an extremely specific statistic, current as of August 9 — first-pitch balls in play, by year:

Of note, I’m only going back to 2008, because that’s the first year of pitch tracking data — Kendrick started in 2006, but those two missing years don’t really change the narrative here. That zero in 2020 doesn’t look all that suspicious — the Nats had only played 10 games — but it looks a little suspicious. It might not be holding a match, but there are burn marks on its fingers. Could Kendrick be changing something on the fly? Read the rest of this entry »

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Heading into this season, the NL West looked like a three-team race. That’s not completely fair — it looked like a one-team race for first with two other solid teams — but with a 16-team playoff field, somewhere between two and three teams from each division are headed to the playoffs, leaving it a three-team race for either two or three playoff spots.

Fifteen-ish games later, there are indeed three NL West teams in playoff position. The Dodgers are there, of course, and the Padres — no surprises here. But then there are the Colorado Rockies, 11-4 and leading the National League. It’s early — although with a quarter of the season already in the books for many teams, how early is up for debate. But regardless of the time of year, the Rockies are in first place, and I wanted to learn more.

One thing I could do to learn more is look at the Rockies’ individual performances, particularly on the pitching side. Charlie Blackmon is off to a hot start, though looking at a player with a .500 BABIP is rarely compelling 15 games into his season. For whatever reason, neither of those paths grabbed me. I thought I’d take a look at whether we could have expected this, and how surprised we should be. Read the rest of this entry »