Author Archive

Can’t We All Just Go Home?

Nationals Phillies
Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

Baseball is unique among major American sports for its lengthy schedule. For six months a year, there’s a game nearly every day. Every. Dang. Day. Working for the weekend? There’s no such thing; Saturdays and Sundays are for games. Want to have a lazy one and “work from home” with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and an eye on your emails? Yeah, uh, that’s not going to work, though you can at least wear pajamas in the dugout.

We marvel at the physical prowess of players all the time, but I’m interested in their mental fortitude. It’s hard to keep grinding day in and day out for half a year. It’s harder still when there’s no postseason carrot dangled in front of you. I’ve never personally been in a pennant race, but I imagine a chance at a hunk of metal is a great motivator. Without that powerful incentive, spending a few months with no mental breaks is beyond my ken.

Earlier this year, I observed that down-and-out teams perform worse than expected late in the season. That seems entirely reasonable. I’ve always wondered where that effect comes from, though. Every time I try to look for hitting or pitching performance relative to expectations late in the season, I find a whole lot of nothing. Read the rest of this entry »


Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 10/3/22

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Baseball’s Top Relievers Are Really Good

© Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

Tuesday night, I watched Ryan Helsley face the middle of the Brewers order in the bottom of the eighth inning. It went roughly how you’d expect – strikeout, groundout, strikeout. He came back out for the ninth, and after an inning-opening walk, closed out the frame with another two strikeouts and a groundout. It didn’t feel surprising; that’s just what great relievers do at the end of games.

That wasn’t always the case. The game has changed over the years. Relievers are pitching fewer innings per appearance, and doing so in better-defined roles. Strikeouts are up everywhere. Velocity is up everywhere. Individual reliever workloads are down, which means higher effort in a given appearance despite bullpens covering more aggregate innings. I’m not trying to say that the current crop of relievers doesn’t have structural tailwinds helping them excel. But seriously – top relievers now are so good.

Look at the top of this year’s WAR leaderboard for relievers – either RA9-WAR or FIP-based WAR will do – and you’ll see a veritable wall of strikeouts. Edwin Díaz, Devin Williams, A.J. Minter, Helsley, and Andrés Muñoz are all in the top 10 and all run preposterous strikeout rates. They’re good in an in-your-face way. Since I’ve watched baseball, dominant late-inning relievers have succeeded by striking batters out, but that trend has accelerated in the past decade or so. Here, take a look at the strikeout rate of the 10 top relievers in baseball, as determined by fWAR, every year since integration:

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Why Are Catchers So Dang Slow?

Yadier Molina
Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

It doesn’t take a keen eye for analysis to watch a baseball game and guess which player is the slowest. You could grab a stopwatch and time them running to first, or you could just take a look at the short and stout guy crouching all game and wearing body armor. I’m not breaking any ground when I tell you that catchers are the slowest major leaguers.

A less settled question: why are they so slow? Is it the armor? Is it the short and stout part? Is it the deleterious effect of crouching all day? We have eight years of sprint speed data, so I decided to dig into it and look for an answer.

First things first: I constructed a sprint speed aging curve. To do that, I took every player-season with at least 10 competitive runs starting in 2015. For each player-season, I noted their age, position, sprint speed in year one, and change in sprint speed in the subsequent year (assuming they made at least 10 competitive runs). For example, Byron Buxton was 21 in 2015 and posted an average sprint speed of 30.9 ft/sec on competitive runs while playing center field. The next year, he again posted an average sprint speed of 30.9 ft/sec. Thus, I recorded 21, CF, 30.9, and 0 (change). Read the rest of this entry »


I Don’t Believe in the Cleveland Guardians*

© Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

Oh, did that title get your attention? I thought it might. Bad news, though! It was just a trap to get you to read this. I’m here to talk about the same thing we talk about around this time every year: projections offending people. I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s just the name of the game when October comes around. We post playoff odds before the season, which means we’re always missing on some team or other. That’s right: as best as I can tell, Cleveland fans are upset that we gave their team a 93.3% chance of making the playoffs in 2019, only to have them miss out on the postseason.

Okay, fine. I’m actually talking about the Guardians making the playoffs this year after starting the season with a 7.5% chance of winning their division, as the league helpfully noted on Twitter earlier this week:

I brought up the 2019 example to make a point: our odds miss in both directions. They’re not biased for or against the Guardians specifically. I thought it might be useful to look into a few things our model doesn’t handle particularly well that might have understated the Guardians’ chances, a few things the team did well to improve its odds, and a few breaks along the way that Cleveland deftly took advantage of. Read the rest of this entry »


Trevor Rogers Changed it Up

© Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

Trevor Rogers was a revelation in 2021. He went from having a forgettable first major league season in 2020 to being a near-ace in short order, piling up strikeouts galore en route to a 2.64 ERA with the peripherals to match over 25 starts. You can’t throw a stick in Miami without hitting a pitcher who’s a potential difference-maker, but even against that backdrop, Rogers looked like one of the team’s brightest young stars.

This season hasn’t gone according to plan, to say the least. Rogers has been slowed by injury, hitting the IL thanks to back spasms and later a lat strain that shut him down for the year with the Marlins out of contention. But even when he wasn’t hurt, he struggled across the board. He struck out fewer batters, walked more, gave up 150% more home runs than in his 2021 campaign in fewer innings, and generally looked like a fish out of water.

If you’re painting with a broad brush, the story here is easy to understand. Rogers was better than expected in 2021, so our expectations got too high, and then he went back to his pre-breakout form. If you look closely, though, that’s not what happened at all. Rogers changed a ton about his game. Some of that change was good, some was bad, and I’m quite curious to see what sticks when he returns next year. Read the rest of this entry »


Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 9/26/22

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The Guardians Saved Their Closer

© Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

Tuesday night, the White Sox and Guardians played to a standstill over the first eight innings of a game that would help decide the fate of the American League Central. Of course, getting late into the game with a chance to win suits both teams just fine. The White Sox have Liam Hendriks anchoring their bullpen, while the Guardians have Emmanuel Clase in the same role in theirs.

Hendriks pitched a scoreless top of the ninth. But even with the Guardians’ two best setup men, Trevor Stephan and James Karinchak, out of the game, Clase cooled his heels in the Cleveland bullpen while Enyel De Los Santos matched Hendriks out for out. What was Terry Francona up to?

He was, in fact, playing the percentages. “Never save your closer” is a modern analytical truism, but it wasn’t designed for the zombie runner rule. When every inning works the same, you should always get your best pitchers into the game post haste. The only difference between the ninth and 10th innings used to be that you might not get to play the 10th. That’s not the case anymore.

As I examined in 2020, making the 10th inning a higher-scoring affair than the ninth changes optimal pitcher usage. When all the action is in the 10th, it follows that you want your best arm pitching then. Walking the tightrope in extra innings and escaping without a run allowed is quite difficult; it’s an inherently higher-leverage spot, which means using your best reliever pays off.

The easiest way to think about it is with someone like Ryan Helsley or Edwin Díaz, a pitcher who frequently ignores runners on base thanks to strikeouts. Outs aren’t all created equal. With a runner on first and less than two outs, a groundout is the best kind of out thanks to the chance of a double play. With a runner on third and less than two outs, strikeouts and popups reign supreme. With the bases empty, everything is the same. The base/out state determines a lot about the optimal style of pitching. Read the rest of this entry »


An Update on Aaron Judge’s Historic Home Run Pursuit

© Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

I regret to inform you that there won’t be many more of these articles about Aaron Judge’s chase for 60, 61, and 62 home runs. It’s not because they aren’t fun to write (they are), or because they aren’t well-received (I think they are). Judge is just hitting home runs too dang fast. What game should you go to if you want to see his 60th home run? It was Tuesday. You missed it. The way he’s hitting, 61 and 62 don’t seem far behind.

Here, for example, are the game-by-game probabilities of Judge hitting his 61st homer:

Aaron Judge 61st Home Run Odds
Day Opponent Home/Away Odds of Hitting 61st HR
9/22 Boston Home 31.0%
9/23 Boston Home 19.1%
9/24 Boston Home 14.0%
9/25 Boston Home 10.2%
9/26 Toronto Away 8.1%
9/27 Toronto Away 5.6%
9/28 Toronto Away 3.8%
9/30 Baltimore Home 2.4%
10/1 Baltimore Home 1.7%
10/2 Baltimore Home 1.2%
10/3 Texas Away 0.7%
10/4 Texas Away 0.5%
10/4 (doubleheader) Texas Away 0.4%
10/5 Texas Away 0.3%

If you’re a Yankees fan, the next four games in the Bronx are a double dip of fun. If you attend all four, you have a 75% chance of seeing him tie Roger Maris for the franchise (and American League) home run record. It would be against the arch-rival Red Sox, who have been eliminated from postseason contention. And of course, the first day is the best day to see number 61, because there’s no chance he will have hit it before then. Read the rest of this entry »


J.P. Feyereisen, Record-Setter

© Reinhold Matay-USA TODAY Sports

I think we could all use a little more positive reinforcement in our lives. Imagine typing away at your desk job (c’mon, it’s not that much of a stretch to guess that you’re reading this at work) when your boss sends you a message. “Hey there,” they say. “You just set a record! You contributed positively to 13 meetings in a row. I’d like to take the webcam you were using for those meetings and put it in the Hall of Fame.”

Wouldn’t that feel great? Sure, it’s kind of meaningless, but let’s assume your job is important enough that people actually go to this Hall of Fame. It would be awesome! Look, the suspenders that a manager wore while suggesting casual Fridays for the first time. Behold the napkins left behind from the first successful working lunch. I’d enjoy getting credit for random records once in a while. It feels good to do something no one else has ever done.

Setting a record, any record, is inherently cool. But setting a record for something that everyone who does your job is always trying to do? That’s an entirely different level. An example: J.P. Feyereisen is out for the remainder of the year, which means that he’ll set a modern record at the conclusion of the season. Read the rest of this entry »