I have a baseball pet peeve. It’s not the ongoing lockout, though that’s annoying. It’s not batters who endlessly step out of the box to adjust the velcro on their batting gloves. It’s not even my team failing to get a run home from third with less than two outs. My pet peeve is when broadcasts come up with team record statistics that are less than useless.

Today, I’m doing my part to fight back. This article isn’t about analyzing which of those stats are real and which aren’t; it isn’t even about analysis at all. It’s just some dumb statistics of my own that I made up to counter that trope that annoys me more than anything else: “When (basically any event in baseball) happens, the team has an incredible record!” I’ll also give you a baseline, so that when you hear one of these cherry-picked statistics in the future, you can put it into context. Let’s start with home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember that one time Lance McCullers Jr. threw 24 curveballs in a row? It was great, and it’s part of Astros (and Lance McCullers Jr.) lore. You’re supposed to intersperse breaking balls with fastballs, to make each play off of the other. Going against that – throwing the same thing over and over again and daring the other team to hit it – is delightful.

What’s so delightful about it? Throwing the same pitch a ton of times isn’t really it. Would you care if peak Mariano Rivera threw 24 cutters in a row, or Jake McGee threw 24 fastballs in a row? Probably not. Fastballs – and for this article, I’m treating a cutter as a fastball – are the default pitch, and if batters aren’t hitting them, why throw something else?

I’d argue that when you’re feeling it, curves and sliders can behave similarly, at least when it comes to the feasibility of throwing them over and over again. McCullers didn’t bounce 24 curves in a row – he commanded plenty of them in the strike zone. His curve isn’t just hard to hit because batters are looking for a sinker. It’s hard to hit because it moves like a hummingbird hunting nectar. It’s definitely cool seeing all those curveballs in a row, but it’s not as though he was relying on the deception of curveball versus fastball to sneak it past batters. They knew what was coming; they just couldn’t do anything with it.

That’s fine, I guess, if you’re into excellent, borderline-unhittable pitches. For truly impressive streaks of identical pitches, though, I’m partial to changeups. The reason for the pitch is right in the name – it’s a change from what the batter is expecting. In Spanish, it’s even more straightforward: cambio. There’s something magical about seeing a batter gear up for a fastball, only to flail awkwardly at something 10 mph slower.

Do it twice, and you’re using the hitter’s expectations against them in a different way, betting that with the changeup out of the way, they’ll go back and look for a fastball. Do it three times, and I’m not sure what you’re looking for. In unrelated news, let’s talk about César Valdez. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s play a quick game. I’ll list two potential starting rotations, and you tell me which one you’d prefer. First contender:

This would be one of the top few rotations in baseball. Nola might be slightly short of the average “top starter on a playoff team,” but it’s close. Webb turned unhittable last year. You can take your pick between Urías and Eovaldi as your third starter; I’m significantly higher on Urías than our Depth Charts projections. Manaea is wildly overqualified as a fifth starter.

Okay, so the bar is pretty high. What about rotation number two?

Burnes is one of the best five starters in baseball; maybe three teams wouldn’t plug him in atop their rotation, though he has some volume concerns. Snell is a risk as well, but one with a tremendously high ceiling. McCullers and Valdez as your third and fourth starters is an appetizing proposition, and Manoah provides yet more upside. This one projects for less WAR than the first rotation, but in fewer innings; it might tax your bullpen more, but in exchange you’re getting some top-shelf arms. I’d prefer rotation number one, but I think it’s quite close, and I wouldn’t fault you for picking number two.

Is that it? Are we just playing “pick your favorite fantasy team” here at FanGraphs? Don’t rule it out if the lockout keeps going, but no, I picked these groups to illustrate a point. The first group of starters? They were all among the top 15 pitchers in the majors last year at one particular skill: throwing first-pitch strikes. The second group? They finished in the bottom 15. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I’m looking into something that doesn’t require much explaining. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I’m looking into a situation that’s so good for the pitching team that in our minds, we go ahead and write it off. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting, though; it can just be hard to see why it’s interesting, which is why I’m writing about it. That’s right: let’s talk about when Jacob deGrom gets ahead in the count.

When the best pitcher in baseball has the advantage on a hitter, that hitter doesn’t do well – a real shocker, that one. With two strikes, deGrom turned batters into sub-pitcher-hitting-level zeroes in 2021:

Those aren’t typos. When deGrom hit two strikes before three balls, he struck out roughly three-quarters of the batters he faced and walked almost none. Survive until 3-2, and you stood a chance – he had a 12% walk rate and a mere 52% strikeout rate after 3-2 counts – but for the most part, facing deGrom with two strikes is a one-way ticket back to the bench. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I released a study of the average compensation that players who qualify for Super Two arbitration receive in their pre-free-agency years. Today, I’m replicating the same study for players who reached standard arbitration. This should help add numerical context to the negotiations between the league and the MLBPA around pre-free-agency compensation – though those negotiations aren’t going well at the moment.

As a reminder, I’m looking at the production and subsequent-year salaries of every player since 2013 to establish a rule of thumb for what players can expect to receive in arbitration given their production in the preceding year. The methodology will follow, but first, here’s the high-level summary of what players have received based on their service time, position, and production:

This table displays the amount of money a given player should make above the minimum salary based on who they are and what they did. Just as with the Super Two numbers, this broadly makes sense – players receive less per unit of production than they would in free agency, but their compensation gets close and closer to free agency levels (roughly $6.5 million above minimum salary per WAR) as they go further into arbitration. Read the rest of this entry »

One major point of contention in this offseason’s collective bargaining impasse is compensation for young players. In the two sides’ competing proposals, the existing Super Two system, which each year awards an additional year of arbitration to some pre-arb players with two-plus years of service time, has come up repeatedly. Whether it’s being replaced with an algorithmic solution, increased pay for some players based on performance, or an expansion of arbitration within the two-plus group, compensating these pre-arb but multi-year players is a key point of debate as the lockout wears on.

If we want to understand this debate, we need to understand how Super Two players have been compensated in the existing system. Without that context, the dispute can feel more theoretical than consequential, and it is obviously very consequential to the players involved. To that end, I decided to look at the last eight years of Super Two awards and come up with a rough heuristic for how their compensation relates to their production in those years. From there, I’ve created some rules of thumb, which I’ll share with you here before we get into the nitty-gritty details of how I did the calculations. Here it is, separated out by player type:

This table displays the amount of money a given player should make above the major league minimum based on how many times they’ve been through the arbitration process, their position, and their previous year’s production. Broadly speaking, the numbers make sense — players receive less per unit of production than they would in free agency, but their compensation gets closer and closer to free agency levels (roughly $6.5 million above minimum salary per WAR) as they go further into arbitration. Now let’s talk about how I got to these numbers, and the merits (and limits) of using this style of calculation to model arbitration awards. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

If you wanted to design a puzzle to attract my interest, you couldn’t do much better than pitchers who throw both sinkers and four-seamers. I love thinking about pitching. I love thinking about fastball spin, and I’ve been having a blast looking at approach angle recently. Want to kick it into overdrive, though? Add in platoon splits, and we’re really cooking with gas.

One of those weird, of-course-this-exists-but-we-don’t-talk-about-it splits is groundball pitchers against flyball hitters and vice versa. I first learned about this split in The Book, and while it’s always made sense, Alex Chamberlain put it into a pretty picture recently that brought it back to mind for me:

fly ball hitters perform better against ground ball pitchers, and ground ball hitters perform better against fly ball pitchers

(y-axis: pitcher influence on launch angle
x-axis: hitter LA, absent pitcher influence
colors: hitter wOBAcon bins) pic.twitter.com/K43Kj868T5

— Alex "Oxlade" Chamberlain (@DolphHauldhagen) January 21, 2022

There are some terms you might not know on there, like pitcher influence on launch angle. For that, you should read Alex’s work on launch angle here. Honestly, you should probably just read all of Alex’s stuff anyway – but particularly for this, his work is invaluable.

The key takeaway here? Against groundball hitters, sinkers are an excellent choice of pitch. The hitter tends to hit the ball into the ground and sinkers generally influence launch angles downward. The result is frequently a grounder, which is great for the defense. Similarly, if you’re facing a fly ball hitter, you want them to hit it even higher into the air, which means a four-seamer with solid rise is the ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

After more than a month of silence, talks between the league and the Players Association have finally heated up. Over the past week, the parties have exchanged proposals and counters, a welcome change from the negotiations’ previously slow pace; 42 days elapsed between the owners’ initiation of the lockout and their first proposal to the MLBPA. Yesterday, the two sides reportedly focused their discussion on players who have not yet qualified for salary arbitration, a key sticking point in the negotiations. Let’s go through each of those proposals and see what they would do to change the way young players get paid.

Before we begin, it’s worth mentioning that the two sides each recently dropped aspects of past proposals that the other disliked. The league had previously proposed changes to the arbitration system, including the elimination of the Super Two classification that allows some players to reach arbitration a year early, a non-starter with the union. The union had proposed an age-based free agency system that would shorten team control in many instances, which was similarly unpopular with the league. Each side dropped those long-shot ideas in this round of bargaining. Now, on to what was proposed yesterday.

First, both sides proposed instituting new salary minimums. The MLBPA suggested a new minimum salary of $775,000. The league countered with a tiered structure – $615,000 for players with less than one year of service time, $650,000 for players with between one and two years of time, and $700,000 for everyone else on a minimum salary.

“Players on a minimum salary” might not sound like a key part of the structure of baseball, but they absolutely are, as FanGraphs alum Travis Sawchik has covered. These players aren’t a huge part of the money, of course – “minimum” is a helpful word there. In 2021, teams spent roughly $3.842 billion on player salaries, per Spotrac. Minimum salaries accounted for roughly $289 million of that, or 7.5% of the total outlay. Read the rest of this entry »