Last week, noted fast boy Chris Taylor made an out at second base in a Dodgers intrasquad game. That’s hardly news; players run into outs all the time, particularly in games that don’t matter, while they get used to when they should and shouldn’t gamble. There was just one notable thing about this out, however:

#DontRunOnChico

Chris Taylor tried tagging up & got thrown out by the Dodgers' clubbie ?

(via @SportsNetLA)pic.twitter.com/kdei3zYdJl

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) July 12, 2020

That’s right; the fielder on the play wasn’t an active roster Dodger, or a minor leaguer, but clubhouse attendant Francisco “Chico” Herrera. As if that play wasn’t enough — gunning down a runner from deep left field in Dodger Stadium is no joke — he doubled up on impressive plays by doubling Gavin Lux off of first base after a spectacular outfield catch:

Chico does it AGAIN! ? pic.twitter.com/MoFCwQXeKS

— SportsNet LA (@SportsNetLA) July 15, 2020

Chicomania is in full swing in Chavez Ravine. Justin Turner wore a #LetChicoHit t-shirt for batting practice one day, and questions about Chico are a mainstay in Dodgers press conferences at this point. The excitement led play-by-play announcer Joe Davis to ask for a statistical assist:

Just chatted w/ @CespedesBBQ, who posed this question: would the Dodgers make the playoffs w/ Chico in LF? I would love to see an actual analytical breakdown, @fangraphs.

— Joe Davis (@Joe_Davis) July 16, 2020

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This morning, we concluded our review of the outfield with Jay Jaffe’s look at right fielders. Now we wrap up the position players with designated hitter.

It’s hardly a secret that the era of the dedicated slugger at designated hitter is over. The hulking, positionless behemoth that so many think of hasn’t been the norm at the position for years. The “new-school” model is a whirring mass of position players getting rest while still playing. A second baseman here, a left fielder there, sprinkle in a dash of good-hitting catcher on an off day, and bam, you’ve got a modern DH.

The top of our list, however, shows the inadequacy of that DH model. That’s something that many AL teams do these days, and it’s something that most every NL team will do this year without the benefit of a roster built around the position. But the teams that get the most value out of designated hitter aren’t doing it in parts. They’re tabbing single players — in many cases players who could play the field if necessary, but not always — and giving them the lion’s share of the at-bats. Yordan Alvarez, J.D. Martinez, Nelson Cruz — give me any of them over the best time-share DH situation in the league, the Cubs and their Kyle Schwarber and Friends model.

There are still many ways to build a DH. You can feed many mouths, or let the big dog eat. And there’s no real need to stand out at the position to be a great team; the Astros have Alvarez, but that’s a happy accident of his development, not a long-term plan on their part. Think of DH as a fancy dessert after a great meal; a standout one sticks in your mind, but it’s certainly not integral to the experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a question that you, the fan, might have in a few weeks: My team is 4-8. Is it time to get worried? In a regular 162-game season, that’s not exactly a puzzle: nope! Things are fine, my friend. Sip a frozen drink, or crack open a bag of chips, or whatever it is that you do to relax. Maybe watch a baseball game!

In a 60-game season, things will feel more consequential. That’s convenient, because they’ll also be more consequential. There’s a saying that you can’t make the playoffs in your first month, but you can miss them. This year, that’s out the window. Start out 9-3, and you’re feeling pretty good. Start 3-9, and it’s time to start booking remote cabins for your October socially-distanced vacation.

I wanted to be a little more quantitative than “it’s important to start well.” My first thought was: let’s fire up the Playoff Odds Calculator (an arcane table in David Appelman’s basement that spits out the odds of each team making the playoffs after he mutters some incantations) and give a team a hot start to see what it does to their odds. After that, we can fire up the ZiPS-ulator (a sentient robot living in Dan Szymborski’s attic) and compare.

There’s a problem with that plan, though: it depends on the messy vagaries of our estimation of a team’s strength. A 4-8 start is less painful for the Dodgers than the Diamondbacks because we think the Dodgers are better. The same goes, to a varying extent, for every team in baseball. The schedule matters, but so do our idiosyncratic views on team talent.

Instead, I wanted to create a true neutral scenario, one that you can apply in a general way without specifically digging into what we think of your team. I built a bubble baseball universe that consists of only a single five-team division. Each team has the exact same talent level, and there’s no home field advantage. That means that a 162-game season would, on average, look like this:

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After analyzing the infield positions, our attention shifts to the outfield. First up? Left field.

Ah, left field, the last refuge of scoundrels. Last year, we wondered if teams’ evolving understanding of defensive metrics was changing the kinds of players they stashed in left field. This year, despite Christian Yelich moving over from right, the answer is a resounding “nah.”

That’s not to say there are no Alex Gordon types, plus defenders without the necessary arm to handle right. Even with a universal DH, however, left field is the domain of the Willie Calhouns, Jesse Winkers, and Eloy Jiménezes of the world. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s the shallowest position in the league; we project only four teams to accrue 1 or more WAR out of left this year, by far the least across all positions.

Is this a fluke of generations and circumstances? Will left field look different when Dylan Carlson establishes himself, or when a future outfield acquisition in Atlanta forces Ronald Acuña Jr. back to left? What if Giancarlo Stanton plays more left and less DH? There are certainly ways for left field to climb the rankings hierarchy. For now, however, it’s a big pile of middlingly athletic misfits who don’t have another clear spot on the diamond. Oh, and then Yelich and Juan Soto, both of whom are playing a completely different game than the rest of the field here. Read the rest of this entry »

Reynaldo López had a bummer of a 2019. Offense is high around the league, but a 5.38 ERA is still terrible. Pitchers don’t adjust for league offense or batted ball luck in their heads; they pretty much know the way the numbers work. Two is otherworldly, three is good, four is average, and five is “what am I doing wrong?” Honestly, it doesn’t even get that much better if you do get fancy; he had a 5.04 FIP and a 5.27 xFIP, so it’s not as though he was just getting unlucky. Those were 8% and 15% worse than league average, respectively — not great.

But wait — López was worth 2.3 WAR last year. That’s not Jacob deGrom or anything, but it’s a totally acceptable number, not at all in line with the string of fives that comprise his runs allowed statistics. Is this just a sign of how bad replacement level pitchers are? Nope! It’s a sign of a quirk in our WAR calculations and a quirk in López’s game.

When we calculate a starting pitcher’s WAR, we use FIP, with one small modification. Infield fly balls are automatic outs, and in our WAR calculations (but not in the FIP numbers we display) we count them as such by treating them as strikeouts. It’s a true enough outcome — infield fly balls pretty much always turn into outs. Grounders, line drives, and other fly balls are all soup, but a popup’s fate is known the moment it’s launched.

López gets a lot of infield fly balls. In 2019, he led the majors with 36. In 2018, another year where he managed 2.3 WAR with a 108 FIP-, he tied Max Scherzer for the major league lead with 38. Outs don’t get much easier than this:

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Today on FanGraphs Live, join me to recap everything that has gone on this year up until the All-Star break. We will be joined by commissioner Brad Johnson, who can answer all your questions about online leagues, our online league, and why he’s batting Breyvic Valera leadoff. Read the rest of this entry »

Today puts a neat bow on the with-no-live-baseball portion of the Out Of The Park season. Next week, there will be actual live baseball games. This week, it’s the OOTP All-Star Break, which means there won’t be any games all week. The All-Star Break is the traditional first-half/second-half delineation, so everything is lining up perfectly, a fake-baseball-video-game Stonehenge.

In the game, on the other hand, not everything is going according to plan. Last week, Christian Yelich strained his oblique, an injury that will keep him out of commission until the end of August. This week, we’ve relinquished the NL Central lead. Not to the jerk Cubs, or the flavor of the week Reds, or even Milwaukee’s long-term nemesis, the Cardinals. The Pirates — the Pirates! — have blown past us and now sit atop the division.

It’s not as though this came out of nowhere. They’ve been just off the pace for the better part of a month now, lurking in second place keyed by a robust pitching staff and just enough offense. They haven’t avoided the injury bug completely, but it’s been less harsh; closer Nick Burdi recently tore his labrum, Jarrod Dyson is on the shelf with a muscle strain, and Chris Archer missed his most recent turn in the rotation. Despite those injuries, however, the Jolly Roger has been raised:

It’s tempting to view these passing of the torch moments — the pursuing team tracking down their long-standing tormentor and seizing the reins — as final. A king has his reign, and then he’s deposed. It doesn’t work that way. We could be back in first place by the first game after the break and never give it up. We could trade the lead back and forth for the balance of the year. Any number of things could happen.

In other Brewers news this week, Brett Anderson, recently restored to the starting rotation, is on the IL with a dead arm. That’s his third trip to the IL this year, not to mention a four-day stretch earlier this season when he had a dead arm that didn’t require IL time. Oh yeah — he also has a 12.24 ERA. The time may have come to move on. Read the rest of this entry »

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Earlier this week, Miguel Castro’s hard changeup caught my eye. It’s a weird, good pitch, and it’s thrown by a pitcher who might otherwise fade into the background. What’s more, he’s still bad against lefties despite a spectacular pitch for attacking them. About the only thing that made sense to me in the whole scenario was that Castro uses his changeup to attack lefties, the way right-handed pitchers are supposed to.

We’ll get to whether that’s true in a moment. First, let me introduce you to a righty pitcher who looks at this conventional wisdom — changeups to lefties, sliders to righties — and says eh, pass. Maybe not introduce you, actually, because he’s a notable pitcher on a marquee team, but at least alert you to his weirdness. Meet Tommy Kahnle, the man who throws his changeup when he shouldn’t.

As a rule, pitchers hate changeups to same-handed batters. Of all the pitches that righties threw to righties in 2019, only 7.1% were changeups or splitters (a splitter behaves almost exactly like a changeup, and pitch classification algorithms sometimes struggle to differentiate between the two, so for the remainder of this article I’ll be lumping both pitches together). On the other hand, they love them against lefties — 17.5% of right-to-left pitches were changeups. It’s pitching 101.

Kahnle surely took pitching 101; he just doesn’t seem to care. His changeup is his best offering, and he absolutely leans on it against lefties. 59.6% of his pitches to lefty batters in 2019 were changeups. It can’t even properly be called a secondary pitch; it’s just a primary pitch! Nothing to see there — a changeup-heavy pitcher throws a lot of changeups to opposite-handed batters. Where it gets interesting is when he faces righties. What does he do there, in the matchup his pitch wasn’t designed for? Why, he throws a changeup 44.2% of the time, of course.

He’s not alone in this weirdness — Héctor Neris and Tyler Clippard, just to name two, do similar things. But Kahnle interests me, because he wasn’t always this way. In 2017, he was spectacular. A 2.59 ERA, a 1.84 FIP, a Gerrit-Cole-facing-minor-leaguers 37.5% strikeout rate and a minuscule 6.6% walk rate — he was nothing short of dominant. That year, he threw a changeup to righties 14.7% of the time. Huh? Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s article is about a form of baseball that doesn’t exist in real life. Let that be a disclaimer upfront — if you’re looking for an interesting middle reliever or 10 reasons why Christian Yelich is great against fastballs (number six will shock you!), this isn’t the article for you. That’s not to say those don’t exist — I wrote about Miguel Castro literally yesterday, for example. But today’s piece simply won’t be one of them.

With that out of the way, let’s set the stage. I’ve been playing a lot of Out Of The Park Baseball 21 lately. Some of that is for an article series, but some of it is because I want baseball in my life, and the game absolutely delivers. One mode in particular has been a great avenue for the analytical rabbit holes I love diving down: tournaments.

Without going into the specifics of the way the game is built, I’ll give a rough outline of the problem that first interested me. The standard tournament format is a 32-team bracket that plays best-of-seven series in each round. There’s no reseeding, no fancy gadgets; just 16 seven-game series, followed by eight, then four, then two, and then the finals.

In almost all other ways, the game approximates baseball. You field a 26-man roster, players need rest, and starters and relievers have realistic stamina. There are all kinds of fun roster choices to make — mid-career Tony Gwynn or young Pete Rose in right field, peak Ichiro or 1997 Bernie Williams in center, to name two — but for the most part, it’s a faithful simulation of baseball.

There is, however, one very specific wrinkle. In these tournaments, there are no off days. The first set of series takes place over seven consecutive days. As soon as the last series is decided, the next round begins the following day. You could, in theory, win the first round in seven games, win the second round in seven games, and end up playing on at least 18 straight days even if you sweep or get swept in the third round. Read the rest of this entry »