In real life, when a player starts the season poorly, it’s tempting to chalk it up to variance and sample size. Through April 23 of last year, for example, Jackie Bradley Jr. was hitting .134/.203/.164, good for a -7 wRC+. The rest of the way, he hit .239/.335/.461, a 104 wRC+. Nothing was wrong!

That’s the snarky, detached analyst view. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t work that way on the actual team. It’s harder, when you’re living through the oh-fers and demoralizing strikeouts, to determine whether or not to give that player as much playing time over the rest of the year. Of the 10 players with the worst batting lines on that day, eight saw their playing time meaningfully curtailed over the remainder of the season.

And that brings us to our Out Of The Park Brewers. The FanGraphs readership’s intrepid management has led the team to a 13-12 record, which is an okay enough start all told; there have been injury issues across the pitching staff, Luis Urías is still rehabbing from his offseason injury, and there was that absolute pasting at the hands of the Mets.

But there’s one disturbing performance that stands out so far; Lorenzo Cain is hitting .136/.212/.153, good for a Bradley-Jr.-in-bad-times wRC+ of -7. It’s by far the worst line on the team; Orlando Arcia has played poorly enough that he’s lost most of his playing time to Brock Holt, and even he has a 30 wRC+.

What’s a manager to do? It’s not obvious. The team is built for Cain to be an anchor; the corner positions are a grab bag of mix-and-match players. Christian Yelich can man left or right with equal aplomb, and the other outfield slot can be filled by nearly anyone; Avisaíl García, Ryan Braun, Ben Gamel, Holt, or even Eric Sogard. But only Gamel and Yelich can even fake center, and I’m skeptical that either could do it full time. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a confession to make, one that might be uncool in the modern, hyper-optimized world of baseball analysis. I love bunts.

I know, I know. I’ve been spending most of a recent article series on old World Series tactics railing about bad bunts. I’ve read Moneyball; outs are bad and runs are good. That’s all true, but I can’t help it. I love to see a well-executed bunt for a hit. Drag bunts, sneak attacks aimed at shifts — I love them all. So today, I set out to find the best bunter.

A quick refresher of why bunting is bad: it makes outs. If you want some proof of this, look no further than a run expectancy chart from 2019:

If you haven’t read one of these before, no worries. Each number represents how many runs scored, on average, from the relevant combination of baserunners and outs until the end of the inning, across all games in 2019. The bases go down the left side, and the outs go across the top. If you have runners on first and second (120 in the table) with no outs, for example, you should expect to score 1.537 runs in the rest of the inning.

This doesn’t mean you’ll always score that many runs, obviously. But it’s a useful baseline. Unless you have some very weird batters coming up (very good or very bad would both do), you can estimate a player’s contribution to how many runs you’ll score by comparing the base/out state before and after their turn at bat. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I began looking at strange decisions made in past World Series. Partially, it’s very interesting to me, and partially, there’s no baseball happening at the moment, but we have to write about something. This week — yep, still no baseball. And so here is the next installment in Wild World Series Tactics.

1998

The one thing you definitely know about the 1998 World Series is that the Yankees swept the Padres. It wasn’t pretty — the Padres were outscored by 13 runs in four games. But the Padres had a sweet lineup, for the most part. Tony Gwynn anchored the lineup from the two hole, and even though he was nearing the end of the line, he still put up a 130 wRC+ this year. Quilvio Veras was a credible leadoff hitter, their worst hitters were at the bottom of the lineup — this batting order wouldn’t raise eyebrows today.

The Yankees were no slouches in the roster construction department either. Part of this might be due to who the number two hitters are; Gwynn and Derek Jeter were both great hitters who happened to fit the old stereotype of a bat control guy. The leadoff hitters still fit the speed mold. Whatever the case may be, however, both of these lineups looked great for the time.

For the first six innings of Game 1, if you ignore the graphics, this could almost be a recent game. There were no bunts, no intentional walks, and three home runs. Both pitchers went deep, but Kevin Brown was a 10-WAR pitcher in 1998, and David Wells was the Yankees’ ace; that’s hardly weird. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Baseball Invokes UEC Contract Provisions

Per a report by Ken Rosenthal, Major League Baseball will invoke a force majeure provision in the Uniform Employee Contract signed by all non-player personnel on May 1. The provision allows for the suspension of contracts in extraordinary circumstances. The provision has been available to teams since the declaration of a national state of emergency on March 13, but until now hadn’t been used.

The consequences of this decision aren’t yet known. Teams could do anything from leaving everything exactly as-is to furloughing all of their non-player workers, though healthcare benefits will remain the same. Still, even if teams don’t immediately act, it’s a tough situation for workers, including front office personnel, coaches, and scouts, who must now face the prospect of reduced salary or even unemployment while planning for an uncertain season. (Non-player personnel are not unionized.)

The Braves, Giants, and Phillies have already committed to paying their employees until May 31. Other teams will surely follow suit. But it’s hard to read this move as anything other than a bargaining chip for teams. With the specter of unemployment looming over them, employees might be more amenable to changing the terms of their contracts. The Players’ Association has already reached an agreement with MLB on salary changes in the event of a shortened season, and it appears that non-player employees may soon need to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting yesterday, I began a hunt through old World Series games for strange tactical decisions. Things were weird in the early ‘90s — MVP candidates bunting, intentional walks so thick they blocked out the sun, and raft-loads of pitchers overstaying their welcome. How did things go in the next half-decade? Better. But not that much better — the event that inspired this project, Byung-Hyun Kim throwing 61 pitches and then pitching the next day, wasn’t until 2001. We’ve still got plenty of weirdness going on. With 1994 lost to the strike, we’ll jump back in in 1995.

1995

The Braves were back with a retooled roster — Chipper Jones, Fred McGriff, Ryan Klesko, and Javy Lopez headlined the new crop of hitters. Marquis Grissom manned center, put up a .317 OBP, and — you guessed it — led off. Mark Lemke (79 wRC+) batted second, and just… come on, Bobby Cox, stop messing with my mind.

Ryan Klesko hit .310/.396/.608 and batted sixth — sure wouldn’t hate getting him a few more at-bats. Even Charlie O’Brien, Greg Maddux’s personal catcher, was better with the stick this year than Grissom and Lemke — he hit seventh. Cleveland was just as bad — they had Omar Vizquel hit second while Manny Ramirez, in a season where he hit .308/.402/.558, languished in seventh. In fact, Vizquel was the worst regular hitter on the Indians, period.

Game 1 was a buttoned-up affair — there aren’t a lot of tactics to talk about when Greg Maddux throws a complete game in 95 pitches. The only real points of interest were two Cox pinch hitting decisions — he pulled Klesko for journeyman Mike Devereaux, then pulled O’Brien for light-hitting Luis Polonia. Both over-valued platoon edges relative to talent levels. The pinch hitting penalty wasn’t commonly known then, which doesn’t help. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I learned an astonishing fact while listening to Effectively Wild. In the 2001 World Series, Byung-Hyun Kim blew a save while throwing 61 pitches. The next day, Bob Brenly sent Kim right back out there, and he blew another save. I knew the back-to-back blown saves part, but 61 pitches! Imagine the uproar if that had happened last year.

This got me wondering: just how weird were baseball tactics 20 or 30 years ago? What else were teams doing that would shock a modern audience? While we wait for real baseball, I decided to find out. Starting with the 1990 World Series, I’m going to hunt for tactical decisions that would look out of place today, and see just how different baseball is.

1990

Tony LaRussa is the father of modern bullpen management, but he also had a new-looking batting order; his best four hitters in Game 1 by wRC+ batted 1-4. Lou Piniella, meanwhile, batted 92 wRC+ Billy Hatcher in the two spot. Chris Sabo, a career 110 wRC+ hitter who posted a 121 wRC+ in 1990, languished in sixth. That’s nothing too wild for the time — the second spot in the lineup was long given to “bat control” guys — but it looks antiquated next to the A’s lineup.

The first game wouldn’t look out of place in 2020. LaRussa pinch hit for ace Dave Stewart after only four innings, looking to spark a rally in a game the A’s trailed 4-0. Piniella and the Reds used only three pitchers, because ace Jose Rijo went seven strong innings, and even up 7-0, they used their top two relievers to get the last six outs. Boring! Read the rest of this entry »

For the most part, our communally managed Out of the Park Brewers are like any other baseball team — minus the fact that they don’t exist in real life. In at least one way, however, these Brewers are unlike any real major league team. Over the weekend, they lost in a fashion that no team has ever done. Eno Sarris’s Mets trampled our Brewers 26-1, a score that hasn’t happened since 1904, and likely has never happened at all in the majors. Losing 26-1 is the kind of game you have to see to believe. We can’t see this one, though, so you’ll merely have to accept my narration, because such a tremendous beatdown is worth talking about.

How could a team implode so completely? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the team came into this Saturday’s confrontation nursing some injuries. Josh Hader was battling shoulder discomfort that made him unavailable for a few days. The previous day featured an 11-inning loss to the Mets, which left several bullpen arms tired. That brings up our first recipe for disaster: a short start.

Freddy Peralta didn’t have it on Saturday. He started off with a walk, and by the time Brandon Nimmo had finished his elaborate sprinting-and-pointing walk celebration, Pete Alonso launched a first-pitch home run. Peralta managed to escape the inning without allowing any further runs, but not convincingly so; his five first pitches resulted in three balls and two balls in play (there was a double play).

The game still looked normal in the bottom of the first. Avisaíl García drew a walk and Keston Hiura added a single, though the team couldn’t capitalize. Still, this isn’t how 26-1 games look after one inning. Heck, Steven Matz threw more pitches than Peralta in the first frame. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, two competing plans for an alternate-site baseball season were leaked. The first was the so-called Arizona Plan: Send all 30 teams to Arizona, rotate games between the available fields, and play an abbreviated major league season with no in-person audience. That plan has its logistical pitfalls, but one of the few things the plan doesn’t alter is the existing divisional structure of baseball. Aside from a shorter season and its attendant complications, baseball would mostly work the way it always has: the Red Sox, Rays, and Yankees would attempt to club each other into submission, the AL Central would be full of rebuilding teams, and so on.

The second plan, the so-called Arizona-Florida plan, would be something else entirely. Instead of recreating the exact structure of the league in one city, this plan would place each team at their spring training facility. Many of the logistical issues from before would still need to be answered. Assuming those can be handled, however, there’s still one major twist: instead of existing divisions, the teams would be grouped by geographic proximity — and, of course, given that the existing setup isn’t 15 AL teams in one location and 15 NL teams in the other, the leagues would be scrambled.

Per Bob Nightengale, the divisions would look like this:

That’s quite the scramble. Dan Szymborski is running the new divisions through ZiPS to get an idea of what it does to teams’ playoff odds, but I thought I’d consider the mechanics of playing with 15-team leagues, as well as highlight some interesting matchups, to give you some sizzle to go with your steak, as it were. Read the rest of this entry »