I don’t know if you’ve heard, but here at FanGraphs we enjoy the occasional number. Even our logo has its own bar graph. Today our topic is competitive runs, a statistic that rarely gets the love and appreciation it deserves, due to the fact that it’s mostly made up. Competitive runs is a classification created for Statcast. In order to measure average sprint speed, you need a pool of plays when players will presumably be running their hardest:

Competitive runs are essentially just the sample size. When you go to Baseball Savant’s leaderboard, the players are always sorted from fastest to slowest. However, you can also sort by competitive runs, and I can never resist. All season long, one player was absolutely trouncing the field:

Amed Rosario is the grand champion of competitive runs. The difference between Rosario in first place and Brandon Nimmo in second place is the same as the difference between Nimmo and Jeff McNeil in 34th place. I’m sure Nimmo takes some solace in knowing that he’s the undisputed leader of the non-competitive run. Whether it’s a walk or a hit by pitch, the dude straight up loves scampering to first base for his own particular reasons:

Turning our attention back to Rosario: It’s not as if he’s just racking up competitive runs as a counting stat. He also leads the league on a rate basis, no matter which rate you choose:

I don’t know about you, but I think this is incredibly fun. Competitive runs is an incidental statistic. It’s just scaffolding for another stat, but there’s one person who plays baseball like competitive runs is his own personal pinball machine. The other reason I love it is that even though competitive runs exists only to serve a higher master, it’s still a descriptive stat in its own right. A player’s competitive runs total tells you plenty about the way they play the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Right-handed reliever Mychal Givens is returning to the Orioles. The deal is for one year and $3 million, with a mutual option for 2024 worth $6 million. If he declines the 2024 option, he receives a $1 million buyout. If he accepts and the Orioles decline their end, he receives a $2 million buyout. Baltimore’s 40-man roster is full, so the team will need to make a move to clear space for him.

Coming off a 2022 season in which he posted a 3.38 ERA and a 3.96 FIP over 61.1 innings, Givens provides some experience to a young Baltimore bullpen that features standouts like Dillon Tate, Cionel Pérez, and closer Félix Bautista. Baltimore’s relief corps was ninth in the league with a 3.49 ERA in 2022, with a 3.72 FIP and 3.53 SIERA that ranked seventh and 13th, respectively.

The Orioles selected Givens out of high school in the second round of the 2009 draft. Originally a shortstop, he missed a couple of seasons after injuring his thumb sliding into first, strengthening the arguments of baseball curmudgeons the world over. He converted to pitching in 2013, reached the majors two years later, and made an immediate impact, posting a 1.80 ERA and 0.9 WAR in just 22 appearances. Over his first four big league seasons, his 5.1 WAR was 15th among all relievers. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry, but this is going to be kind of a bummer. Our topic today is the crushing weight of statistical determinism. In researching this article, I learned something that increased my knowledge but also decreased my sense of the possible, and it made me a little bit sad. I would now like to share my sadness with you. We’re going to be studying the Victor Robles Problem.

You might not remember the days when Victor Robles was a star prospect. After short, impressive stints in 2017 and ’18, he had a breakout season in 2019, putting up a 92 wRC+ and 3.5 WAR, and finishing sixth in NL Rookie of the Year voting. ZiPS projected him for 3.3 WAR in 2020. If he could take the next step offensively, he’d be a star; if his offense remained just a bit below average, he’d still be a very productive center fielder. Instead, he turned in three straight seasons with a wRC+ under 70. Here are the Statcast gearboxes for his rookie season and 2022:

There’s a whole lot of blue in the top two rows. Plate discipline was the concern when Robles was first called up, and that was certainly an issue, but the lack of power stands out much more. Although his max exit velocity indicates that he has the capacity to hit the ball hard, Robles’ average exit velocity has been in the first percentile in each of his big league seasons, and his hard-hit rate has never been better than fifth percentile. The Victor Robles Problem is a question: Can a player who didn’t hit the ball hard as a rookie ever turn into a good hitter? Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago at the Winter Meetings, Nationals manager Dave Martinez told reporters that the team was looking to add a veteran starting pitcher. On Friday, MASN’s Mark Zuckerman reported that Washington did just that, making its biggest move of the offseason by signing free agent Trevor Williams. The two-year, $13 million commitment, per The Athletic’s Stephen J. Nesbitt, represents the team’s third-biggest contractual commitment, behind the long-term deals of Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin.

Williams played a significant role with the Mets in 2022, starting nine games while Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer were on the IL earlier in the season and making 21 relief appearances. Given New York’s glut of solid right-handed relief arms, he didn’t make the roster for the Wild Card Series against the Padres. Had he been on the Nationals in 2022, his 0.6 WAR would have been third on the staff, and his 3.21 ERA and 3.88 FIP would have been fourth (among pitchers who threw at least 25 innings).

Williams will immediately become the most reliable arm in Washington’s starting rotation. At Federal Baseball, Patrick Reddington noted that he had a 1.80 ERA against the Nationals in 2022, so if nothing else, they’ve co-opted a former tormenter. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets have done it. They’ve finally landed a superstar starter to replace Jacob deGrom. Wait, sorry, I’m being told that someone already wrote about the Justin Verlander signing. Instead, I’m here to talk about José Quintana, who signed a two-year, $26 million contract, according to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Will Sammon.

Just to be clear, Quintana was a very good pitcher in his own right this year. Despite his 6–7 record (I’d like to see you try starting a game for Pirates and being credited as the winning pitcher), he posted 4.0 WAR, a 2.99 FIP, and a career-best 2.93 ERA, pacing the Cardinals down the stretch after a deadline trade.

The 34-year-old will no doubt enjoy his new role as the precocious youngster of the Mets’ starting staff, next to wizened aces Verlander and Max Scherzer. In fact, as the rotation stands now, the 27-year-old David Peterson is the only starter younger than Quintana. The Mets will be expecting a whole lot of innings from pitchers who are just a few years away from having an entire bookshelf devoted to biographies of Winston Churchill. Read the rest of this entry »

You might have heard that the Mets got hit by a record 112 pitches in 2022, but New York wasn’t the only record breaker in that particular category. Cincinnati’s pitching staff breezed by the 2021 Cubs’ modern era record of 98 HBPs with weeks left in the season, and they kept right on plunking. In the last game of the year, Graham Ashcraft sailed a sinker into both the triceps of Patrick Wisdom and the record books, giving the Reds 110 hit batters for the season. That number edged them past the 1899 Cleveland Spiders as the most contact-oriented team of all-time.

Those bloodthirsty Spiders hit 109 batters and lost 134 games, then folded just before the invention of the zeppelin. Eleven of those HBPs and losses were credited to Harry Colliflower, a former carpenter who won his first start, then lost 11 straight decisions and his spot in the big leagues. That’s the company the 2022 Reds kept. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s Winter Meetings are in full swing! Now is time to make some trades. Now is the time to sign some free agents. You and I are going to put together a team. What should our team look like? Don’t worry. I’ve already decided for us.

In 2022, Mets batters got hit by 112 pitches, setting a new single-season major league record. Ever since they broke the record, I’ve been wondering how many HBP a team could rack up if they made it their sole mission. That’s our challenge.

We’ll be building our roster using Steamer projections for the 2023 season, and we’ll assemble a lineup with the goal of obliterating the Mets’ record. We’re going to get hit often and we’re going to get hit with style. To get us in the spirit of the enterprise, I’ve named our new team the Cooperstown Contusions. Before you ask, yes, our mascot will be an anthropomorphic bruise:

Read the rest of this entry »

You might want to buckle up. This is an article about small sample sizes, so there’s a statistically significant chance that things are about to get rowdy. It was supposed to be an article about which outfielders are better or worse than you’d expect them to be based on their sprint speed.

Just for fun, here’s the chart I started with. I turned Outs Above Average into a rate stat I’ll call OAA/150. It’s a player’s OAA per 1,350 innings, or 150 games. (I tried several other metrics, dividing by chances instead of innings, and working with UZR and DRS range metrics. This worked best for my purposes.) The sample is 544 outfielder seasons in which the fielder had at least 50 chances on balls with a catch probability below 96% (hereafter known as starred chances). I’ve labeled the two players who stood out the most in either direction in 2022.

Daulton Varsho good, Andrew Vaughn catastrophically bad. No surprise there, but I love charts like this, thick at the bottom and thin toward the top. They show how many paths there are to each outcome. Speed is a big component of OAA; the correlation coefficient of the two is 0.54. But outfielders also need to get good jumps, make plays at the wall, and be able to run down balls in all directions. There are lots of different combinations of skills that can land you in the bottom or middle of the chart. To get to the top, you need to be good at all of them. You also need to be lucky. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Renfroe was probably getting tired of Milwaukee anyway. After spending the first four years of his career in San Diego, he will join his fifth team in five years as the Brewers sent the 30-year-old outfielder to the Angels in exchange for pitchers Janson Junk, Elvis Peguero, and Adam Seminaris.

Starting with the Los Angeles side of the deal: the Angels know what they’re getting in Renfroe. He’s a bat-first corner outfielder who relies on power to make up for what he lacks in on-base ability. After a poor showing in 2020, he bounced back with a 113 wRC+ in ’21 and posted a nearly identical season in ’22, good for a 124 wRC+ in the tougher offensive environment. He hit 60 home runs between the two seasons and posted a .315 on base percentage in both. He’s projected to make $11.2 million in arbitration this year, then move on to yet another team in 2024 as a free agent.

Renfroe owns a career wRC+ of 136 against lefties versus 97 against righties and has often been viewed as a platoon candidate. He improved his wRC+ to 120 against righties in 2022, however, after putting up 101 wRC+ in 2021. And while his defense isn’t to OAA’s liking, DRS and UZR both tend to rate him right around average, and his excellent arm helps to make up for what he lacks in range. He’ll slot into the outfield next to Mike Trout and Taylor Ward. Steamer projects the trio for 10.3 WAR — a big improvement after Los Angeles got just 0.3 WAR from its left fielders last year, good for 27th in the league. Even though Steamer expects Renfroe to take a step back next year, his projection of 2.0 WAR would patch a significant hole. Read the rest of this entry »

During Game 3 of the ALCS, Jeff Francoeur noted that 10 of the 12 pitchers who had surrendered postseason home runs to Alex Bregman were All-Stars, eliciting a comment about how Bregman hits well against good pitching. That’s undoubtedly a fun fact, but the notion has been rattling around my brain for the last couple weeks. I’ve definitely heard stories about players who hit good pitching, but I’ve never heard of anyone looking at splits based on the quality of the pitcher on the mound.

The main problem with that idea is a logical one. Break down any batter’s performance into its constituent parts, and you’ve entered a zero sum game. If you’re at your best against great pitchers, that means you’re hitting worse against everyone else. It’s hard for me to imagine that there are many players who fare better against Justin Verlander than they do against, well, anyone on the Nationals.

There could be players who are less bad than average, but if I had my choice of superpowers, I’m not sure that’s the one I’d pick. It would definitely help out in the playoffs, but over the course of the season, batters see a lot more average and poor arms than they do great ones. I’d rather perform well the majority of the time. Read the rest of this entry »