This morning, David Appelman announced our new Playoff Odds section on FanGraphs, which provides forecasts for the rest of the season and turns those into the chances of each team advancing to each level of the postseason, whether it be capturing the wild card, advancing to the division series, or winning each round of the playoffs. It’s a pretty nifty tool, and there’s a lot to be gleaned from the data, so I wanted to use a few examples from the current playoff odds page to illustrate some of the features now included on the site.

The Importance of Remaining Schedules

Since we rolled out our new Standings page earlier this year, we’ve had expected rest-of-season winning percentage for each team all season long, which is a nice way to look at the relative strength of each team. And since we had a rest-of-season forecast and we already knew what teams had done in the past, it wasn’t that difficult to combine them into an updated final win total. However, there was a piece missing; the actual schedules each team would play over the rest of the year.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you use FanGraphs regularly, you’re probably aware of the WAR framework, and the general ideas behind it. Basically, WAR attempts to sum up the value of a player’s hitting, baserunning, and defense and then compare it to what a replacement level player would have done with the same amount of playing time. While WAR is certainly not perfect, it works pretty well, and it tries to answer the question that baseball fans are frequently asking.

But it doesn’t every question, of course, and sometimes, we ask questions that WAR wasn’t designed to answer. For instance, questions of context are outside the scope of the metric, as it was intentionally created to be context neutral, identifying just the number and value of positive and negative events without including the situation they occurred in. WAR considers every home run to be equally valuable, whether it comes with the bases empty in a blowout or the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, baseball is just cruel.

Source: #Mets’ Harvey has partially torn UCL. Will be shut down. Determination on whether he needs Tommy John surgery will be made later.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) August 26, 2013

A couple of years ago, Stephen Strasburg was the best young pitcher we’d seen in a very long time, and then his elbow gave out. Matt Harvey was the best young pitcher we’d seen since Strasburg, and now it looks like his elbow might end up requiring surgery too. I have no personal affinity towards the Mets, but as a fan of baseball, this sucks. The game does not need any more “what if” stories. We already have one Mark Prior; we don’t need to start a fraternity.

Smart people of the future: Figure out how to keep great young pitchers healthy, please.

Over the weekend, various reports have emerged suggesting that the Angels are likely to fire either GM Jerry DiPoto or longtime manager Mike Scioscia in the wake of their disastrous 2013 season. While Scioscia denies that there is an abnormal rift between the field staff and the front office, there’s enough smoke here to believe that there is a fire somewhere, and it would actually be unusual if someone wasn’t held responsible for a $140 million failure.

Firing decision makers as a response to poor performance is standard operating procedure in Major League Baseball, and the GM and manager are the two guys whose job descriptions include taking responsibility for the results on the field. Both DiPoto and Scioscia know how this game works, and neither one would have much of a right to be surprised if they were let go following the season. However, if the Angels actually want to fix what is broken, they should be more interested in figuring out what went wrong and why rather than just meting out punishment to satisfy the desire to hold someone accountable.

So, what happened to the 2013 Angels? How can a team with the best young player the game has seen in 100 years still manage to be so awful?

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the Rays acquired David DeJesus from the Nationals a few days after Washington got him from the Cubs. The cost of both acquisitions was either a minor prospect or cash, as DeJesus is being moved essentially as a cost savings maneuver. He wasn’t in big demand at the trade deadline, and isn’t seen as a major acquisition.

A few weeks ago, the Rangers acquired Alex Rios from the White Sox, after this transaction was rumored for weeks heading up to the trade deadline. The Rangers received a lot of praise for getting a deal done in the wake of Nelson Cruz’s suspension, with several people noting that the Rangers got both “the best hitter” (Rios) and “the best pitcher” (Matt Garza) available this summer.

Perception is a funny thing. Here’s David DeJesus and Alex Rios, season to date.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I posed a thought experiment that had recently been posed to me: if Mike Trout were to become a free agent but declare that he would only sign a one year contract, how much would you offer him for the 2014 season alone? 2,800 people submitted answers — well, a little north of 2,800 now, but I had to dump the data into Excel at some point — and the results are pretty interesting. Let’s get right to them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I was asked what I think turns out to be a pretty interesting thought experiment: if Mike Trout was released by the Angels and became a free agent, but decided he did not want to sign long term with any other team and simply preferred to go year to year instead, where would the bidding war for a single year of Trout’s services end up?

This question gets at a lot of different points, many of them kind of fascinating. What percentage of a team’s total payroll can be allocated to one player while still leaving enough flexibility to put a contender around a superstar? Is a team better off allocating a majority of their available dollars to a few premium assets, then using low-cost filler to round out the roster, or by spreading their money around to multiple players in order to reduce the risk of one injury or a single bad year ruining their entire season? Should a team prefer an +8 WAR player over two +4 WAR players for the same cost?

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the Reds placed Jonathan Broxton on the disabled list with an elbow injury that will require season ending surgery, bringing to an end a disappointing year that began with a pretty nifty paycheck over the off-season. Broxton is hardly the only relief pitcher who got paid last winter and hasn’t quite earned his salary this season, however. Below is a table noting the performances of the 13 relievers who signed mutli-year contracts over the winter.

Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t done one of these link pieces in a while, but thanks to Dan Brooks pointing this out on Twitter, I have a new site to recommend: Phil Roth’s MLB payroll visualization charts.

Basically, it takes player and team payroll information from Baseball Reference and puts it into a set of interactive charts that lets you see the variance in MLB payrolls among teams by year, as well as seeing the building blocks for each team in each year. Here’s a couple of screen shots, though the interactive graphics are much, much cooler than just static JPGs.

Read the rest of this entry »