Welcome to another installment of Five Things, a look at some things that caught my eye in baseball this week. As usual, I’d like to thank Zach Lowe, whose NBA column inspired me to start this one. This week has a few more things I don’t like than usual, from young players with defensive issues to young players missing the season with injury. Don’t fret, though: there’s a heaping helping of good defense, and even some amusingly awful plays for comic relief. Let’s get right to it.

1. Abysmal Defense in Winning Efforts
It’s hard to overstate how poorly the Giants fared on defense last Sunday. They kicked things off by letting a popup fall between three defenders, and that was just the beginning. They let that run score in ignominious fashion:

There’s no sugarcoating it; that was ugly. This might be worse, though:

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OAKLAND – The Coliseum was rocking for the first pitch of last night’s game. A crowd of 27,759 roared as Yandy Díaz grounded out to first. “Sell the team! Sell the team! Sell the team!” The coordinated chant broke down into roars and cheers as Ryan Noda gathered up the grounder and stepped on first, kicking off the wildest Tuesday night game you could ever imagine.

The fans – 23,000 more than attended Monday night’s fixture – came out to protest owner John Fisher’s attempt to move the A’s to Las Vegas. They came out to protest Fisher’s management of the team in general. More than either of those causes, however, they came out to cheer for the A’s. As much as the team’s recent trajectory makes them hard to root for, as much as ownership and the front office seem to be steering into the skid, Oakland fans remain some of the most passionate in baseball.

If you’ve never heard of a reverse boycott before, that’s not surprising: the fans more or less improvised the idea on the fly. Jeremy Goodrich, a college student and lifelong A’s fan, created a change.org petition calling for Fisher to sell the team instead of relocating. Stu Clary, a longtime fan, saw the petition and floated the idea of selling out a weeknight game as a signal that fan support for the A’s is merely dormant, not extinct. The concept caught on almost immediately. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that Andy Warhol didn’t actually say “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”? I was shocked to learn the truth. Apparently, two museum employees invented the quote when they were working on a Warhol exhibit. That makes the saying more interesting to me, actually: two anonymous people creating the work of someone famous for the democratization of art is enjoyable. But I digress: the point of bringing that quote up is that Nick Anderson is well into his second fifteen minutes of fame, and I’m pretty sure that this, too, is something Warhol would approve of.

It’s hard to imagine a better pitcher getting a worse contract than the one Anderson signed this offseason. He was one of the best relievers in baseball, period, from his 2019 debut until tearing his UCL in 2021. Heck, he was top 15 in reliever WAR from 2019 to ’21, and he basically didn’t play in one of those years. Sub-3 ERA, sub-3 FIP, the fourth-highest strikeout rate in baseball (39.6%) — Anderson was an elite closer, and the Rays used him accordingly. The Braves are paying him only $875,000 this year. That’s some kind of bargain.

As Esteban Rivera detailed last November, there were reasons to doubt that Anderson would come back strong. He looked diminished in his last few appearances before hitting the IL; his biggest weapon, a fastball with excellent carry that left batters flummoxed, lost its usual carry. Vertical approach angle is all the rage in pitch design these days, and that’s the case because it neutralizes the biggest weapon hitters have: power on contact. You can’t hit a home run if you can’t hit the ball, and flat-angled four-seam fastballs are great at doing just that. Read the rest of this entry »

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I hate to admit it, but I’m a bit of a grump these days. Specifically, I’m a grump about position players pitching. Every time Jay Jaffe chronicles the spread of the tactic, I get annoyed right alongside him. When some disinterested backup infielder lobs the ball in at 40 mph, I cringe. I was a fan of the rules that limited when teams can send hitters to the mound; in fact, I remember being disappointed that the rules weren’t more stringent when they first came out.

With that said, I have to take it all back now. I’m in on position players pitching – as long as we’re specifically talking about Brandon Crawford. He took the mound to close out a 13-3 Giants victory yesterday and did so in a way that position players simply don’t anymore: He tried as hard as he could.

There have already been multiple excellent breakdowns of how Crawford had always wanted to pitch and how he got the opportunity. I can’t match that kind of coverage – but I can take a different angle. He looked borderline acceptable out there, something you can’t often say of hitters taking the mound. How acceptable? Let’s do a pitch breakdown. Read the rest of this entry »

Five Things was off last week while I gallivanted around the country on vacation. Well, I’m back, and I’ve been furiously watching baseball to make up for the time I missed on the road. As such, some of these items are going to be amalgams of a few games because the same themes kept calling out to me. As always, this column was inspired by Zach Lowe of ESPN, whose basketball columns are some of the best in the business. We’ve got plenty to cover, so let’s get started.

1. Unexpected Pitching Duels
Last Thursday, the Rockies and Diamondbacks faced off in Arizona. The pregame forecast: runs galore. Zach Davies brought his 5.68 ERA to bear for the Diamondbacks (with a 5.65 FIP, it’s not like he’d been catastrophically unlucky) while Connor Seabold took the mound for the Rockies (5.94 ERA, 5.79 FIP).

Naturally, both pitchers came out in fine form. Davies started shakily but recovered to post three straight scoreless innings. Meanwhile, Seabold couldn’t miss; well-located fastballs helped him escape his first jam of the game to complete five scoreless innings:

The good times didn’t keep going – both teams scored two runs in the sixth to chase the opposing starter – but just for a moment, Davies and Seabold did their best impressions of aces. I love that kind of game, where you show up expecting a shootout and get a tense duel instead. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week at Baseball Prospectus, Rob Mains did some digging into home field advantage and found a very curious effect: home teams did worse in extra inning games than in regular-season games. More specifically, he found that home teams won roughly 54% of games overall but only roughly 52% of extra inning games. There are no two ways about it: that’s strange.

Mains looked into many potential explanations for this discrepancy: team quality, pitcher quality, games that were tied going into the ninth, and various ways of looking at how teams have adapted to the zombie runner era. Today, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with a slightly different way of thinking about why home teams are less successful in extras than they are overall.

My immediate thought when I heard this problem was something Ben Lindbergh mentioned on Effectively Wild: home field advantage accrues slowly, and extra innings have fewer innings than regulation. The minimum scoring increment in baseball is one run, naturally. Home field advantage is clearly less than a run per inning; it’s less than a run per game. I like to think of home field advantage as fractionally more plays going the home team’s way. A called strike here, a ball that lands in the gap instead of being caught there, and eventually one of those plays might put an extra run on the board. Read the rest of this entry »

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Earlier this year, Diamond Sports Group declared bankruptcy. That dry corporate action, precipitated by a huge debt burden, is starting to have real world consequences. This Tuesday, DSG missed a payment to the San Diego Padres, as Alden Gonzalez first reported for ESPN. That terminated the contract between Bally Sports (a Diamond subsidiary) and the Padres. By Wednesday, the Padres were off of Bally and broadcasting their own games via Major League Baseball.

That’s a pretty big escalation in what until now felt like a slow-moving situation. In fact, in bankruptcy court, Rob Manfred testified that the league received less than one day’s notice of this missed payment. “[They told us] less than 24 hours before they were going to go off the air that they were going to stop broadcasting Padres games,” he said. (Diamond’s lawyers have contested that timeline.) That led to the Padres terminating their contract with Bally Sports, naturally enough, and to MLB stepping in to broadcast games.

It’s no accident that the league was ready to wade into daily game production. They hired Billy Chambers, formerly a Fox Sports and Diamond Sports executive, as executive vice president of Local Media earlier this year. Hiring a regional sports network executive is a pretty good way to start building your own regional sports capabilities, and the league appears to have moved quickly here. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Olson is striking out a lot. Exactly 30% of the time, to be precise. His swinging strike rate has never been higher. He’s only posted a lower contact rate once, in his disastrous 2020 campaign. Obviously, then, you know how he’s doing this year: incredibly well. His 140 wRC+ is the second-best mark of his career. Clearly, something interesting is going on, so let’s take a look at what it might be.

Honestly, the strikeouts are nothing new for Olson. His career 24.1% strikeout rate isn’t ideal for a top-tier hitter, particularly one with limited defensive value. It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of his game. You can succeed while striking out a lot, but you have to do a lot of other things well to strike out a quarter of the time and be a great hitter.

Throughout his career, Olson has mostly done that. Take his 2019 season, when he struck out 25.2% of the time. He hit for a ton of power – even playing in the cavernous Coliseum, his ISO was in the top 15 in the majors – and walked enough to post a reasonable OBP. But you can see the downside easily. Consider 2022, for example. Olson again struck out roughly a quarter of the time – 24.3% – and walked a similar amount. He again posted a top-15 ISO; a lower number, to be sure, because 2022 had far fewer homers than 2019. But he ran a .274 BABIP, and that along with the fact that he was playing in a better offensive environment but putting up similar numbers meant he was only 20% above average rather than 35% above average.

Seen next to each other, these two seasons explain the chief worry with Olson. Without much change in his underlying skills, he was only 20% above average offensively last year:

That’s still a nice player, but a first baseman with that kind of batting line is hardly an All-Star. It was the 13th-best batting line for a first baseman in the majors, hardly better than his replacement in Oakland, Seth Brown. That’s the kind of tightrope that a player with Olson’s skill set is always walking; a slight dip in power or BABIP can be the difference between average and excellent. Read the rest of this entry »