If you’re looking for a sure sign that a manager is thinking in old-timey baseball cliches instead of playing to win, listen for the words “save situation.” There are tons of reasons not to use your best reliever in a big spot — load management, handedness matchups, heck, maybe he ate some bad sushi last night. “We wanted to hold him for a save situation”? Nope! Bad management alert… or at least, it was until the rules of baseball changed.

Love or hate the automatic runner in extra innings, it’s changed the tactical calculus of baseball significantly. Teams haven’t bunted as much as I predicted, which is fascinating in itself, but today, I’m more interested in which pitchers are doing the extra innings pitching. Before 2020, “saving” a pitcher for a lead was self-defeating, but that isn’t an automatic truth, simply a contextual one. Let’s delve into why that was the case, and why it might not be this year.

To explain how this scenario worked in the past, I’m going to use a hypothetical situation. It’s the bottom of the ninth inning in a tie game, and the visiting team has two options for pitching: Nick Anderson or Aaron Loup. They’ll bring one of the two in for the ninth, the other for the 10th if necessary, and then completely average pitchers for every inning after that.

More specifically, they’ll be bringing in pitchers with the career rate statistics that exactly match Anderson’s and Loup’s. This is an abstraction, so we’re ignoring opposing batters and handedness matchups, which a real-life manager would care about: for this article, we’re only worrying about whether bringing in your closer makes sense with everything else held equal. Here are those result rates:

Anderson is clearly better. In fact, over a million simulated innings (every batter receives a random result from each pitcher’s result grid until there are three outs), he allowed 2.80 runs per nine innings, while Loup allowed 3.74 runs. Anderson was better in terms of the percentage of innings holding opponents scoreless, too: 80.3% of his innings were scoreless, as compared to 76% for Loup. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

David Fletcher is 5 feet and 9 inches tall. By the standards of professional baseball, that’s quite short. He makes up for it a bit by standing upright in the batter’s box, but no one is going to confuse him for Aaron Judge anytime soon. That makes it all the more confusing that on Friday night, he did this:

First of all, wow! Are you kidding me? That ball was nearly five feet off the ground. Halfway to home plate, it was unclear whether Fletcher was taking a swing at a major league pitch or a piñata:

If you’ve been paying attention throughout his career, Fletcher making contact with that pitch will be less surprising. He’s a singular player, a contact machine who will defend the strike zone at all costs when the count reaches two strikes. So far this year, he’s swung at 51 pitches outside the strike zone and only missed nine of them. That 87.3% out-of-zone contact rate is higher than the league contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a wildly misleading set of years and statistics for you, to start this article off on a high note:

Boy, what a boring career. An average player, and average in a consistent way. There are no swings between 3 and 0, no is-it-a-breakout spikes or is-he-toast dips. Let’s zoom in slightly, though, because I’ll level with you: that was a cherry-picked set of statistics:

Fewer homers, wildly varying walk and strikeout rates — those static WAR totals were a trick! If you’ll forgive me the conceit, let’s do one last reveal of more statistics:

Ah, the magic of counting stats. Ian Happ is on pace to obliterate his best previous season. Let’s take a look at how he’s doing it, shall we?

When he reached the major leagues, Happ had an old man’s game trapped in a young man’s body; enough patience to draw a raft-load of walks, but also enough patience to get down in counts and strike out at an astronomical rate. The problem was that he didn’t draw enough of those walks to make up for the strikeouts: his batting eye simply wasn’t good enough to let him get away with the takes. After reaching a two-strike count, Happ struck out 54.4% of the time — that’s bad! The major league average over that timeframe stands at 42%. Read the rest of this entry »

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:
Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »