When baseball fans quibble with sabermetrics, one of the arguments I hear is, “If we can already predict everything that will happen, then why isn’t baseball just played on a computer?” It’s a funny stance to me for two reasons. First, statistics can’t predict everything; they can only tell you the odds of an event occurring. And, second, the randomness of baseball — and, really, sports in general — is something that even the most devout statisticians can marvel at.

Mike Fiers threw the second no-hitter of his career last week. Rachael McDaniel did a brilliant job of explaining how unlikely it was for Fiers, the individual, to have the fortunate of joining the group of 35 pitchers to throw two no-hitters in the big leagues. I just want to borrow a few lines from McDaniel’s prose, but you should really read the whole thing. It’s great:

That’s the wonderful thing about pitching achievements, the no-hitter and the perfect game. With their length and intensity, with the level of collaboration and the sprinkling of luck that is necessary to sustain that nine-inning walk along the knife’s edge, there is so much room for serendipity. In the annals of the no-hitter, you can just as easily find the greatest of all time proving why they’re the greatest as you can a roster of unlikely heroes — rookies, journeymen, washed-up veterans — who, for those few hours, reach out and find perfection.

I want to take a second crack of explaining how unlikely Fiers’ second no-hitter was, but with a different angle: math. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it premature to call Michael Brantley the best free agent signing of the 2018-19 offseason? Probably, but that depends on how one defines “best.” Also important are the words “so far,” which are admittedly not in the initial question, but are still significant nonetheless. If we are trying to determine a total return on investment, we’d need to evaluate the impact of many factors, including those not specifically seen on the field.

By this process, one could argue that Bryce Harper has been the “best” free agent so far, generating increased interest in baseball in Philadelphia (attendance numbers are an indication of this) and setting the professional sports record for most jersey sales in the first 24 hours of a launch. Those are certainly positive numbers for the Phillies’ brass, but that’s not what I’m looking at here.

Narrowing our focus down to on-field production alone, no 2018-19 free agent signee has been better so far than the Astros’ new outfielder. Though 37 games, Brantley has produced 1.7 WAR, putting himself in first by a 0.4-win gap over the next closest player, Charlie Morton. He’s half a win ahead of the next position player, with Eduardo Escobar and DJ LeMahieu each having been worth 1.2 wins. Read the rest of this entry »

In his first week in Philadelphia, Bryce Harper came out firing on all cylinders. He homered in three of his first four games, including a long blast (and majestic bat flip) in his first game back at Nationals Park, where he was greeted with a chorus of boos.

But since Harper’s first five games of the 2019 season, he’s been hitting like one of the worst hitters in baseball. That is, before he broke out in a big way last night, going 2-for-3 with a single, walk, and grand slam. But, in a much larger sample of 128 plate appearances between when the Nationals series ended and last night, Harper had slashed just .185/.313/.343 with as many home runs (three) as he had in his first 23 plate appearances in those first five games. The 80 wRC+ he put up during that stretch ranked 201st out of the 283 hitters with at least 50 plate appearances. Harper was not only failing to hit like a superstar, he was actually hitting like one of the worst players in the league. Read the rest of this entry »

It all started with what I thought was an innocuous tweet.

The Reds released outfielder Matt Kemp on Saturday, and I sent a tweet with a few sabermetric stats — wRC+, WAR, and xwOBA — from his 2019 season. A few hours later, actor Chad Lowe (the brother of Rob) quote-tweeted my original post remarking that, and I’m paraphrasing here, analytics are ruining baseball. (The actual tweet contains profanity, but here it is if you’d like to see it.) My mentions filled up from there, and my original tweet ended up getting ratio’d by baseball fans who do not care for advanced stats. Lowe’s tweet started a new debate over the prevalence of sabermetric stats in mainstream baseball analysis, and it all played out in my notifications tab.

Since Saturday, Lowe and I have found a point of similarity, that being that there are some unquantifiable factors that go into the construction of a winning baseball team. It was a crazy few hours on Saturday night, to say the least.

Of course, I think we all know which side of the “saber v. Traditionalist” debate I fall upon, so this article isn’t going to be a further discussion about that. What I actually want to get into is the topic that prompted this whole debate: Kemp. Read the rest of this entry »

To be frank, there aren’t a whole lot of reasons to watch the Marlins this season. As of this writing, they’re just 9-21 and already eight games out of first place. Unfortunately, the FanGraphs’ playoff projections had the Marlins’ odds at a measly 0.0% prior to the season. As you might have expected based on their record, these odds have not changed after a month of play.

The Marlins, as a team, have produced just 1.2 WAR this season. Of that, left-handed starter Caleb Smith has accounted for 1.0. Yes, you read that correctly. A single player on the Marlins’ 25-man roster has produced 83% of the team’s entire WAR. I don’t know if that is good or if that is bad. Well, I know that Smith is good, and the Marlins are bad. So, I guess that answers that.

Smith has had a stellar beginning to his season. In six starts, spanning 36 innings pitched, Smith has posted a 2.00 ERA, 2.81 FIP, and a 26.9 K-BB%. His aforementioned 1.0 WAR ranks 13th among qualified starters, and his 33.6 K% is tied with Blake Snell for fourth. The only pitchers with a higher strikeout rate than Smith this season are Gerrit Cole (37.6%), James Paxton (36.2%), and Jacob deGrom (34.8%). I’ll let those names stand for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, most baseball fans are probably aware of Cody Bellinger’s start to the 2019 season. Through 31 games and 132 plate appearances, Bellinger has put up an almost-immortal .431/.508/.890 slash line, with a 256 wRC+, swatting 14 home runs, drawing 19 walks and striking out just 15 times.

He’s leading baseball in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, wOBA, wRC+, home runs, RBI, and runs scored. (He’s even stolen five bases so far this year, good for 15th.) As the calendar has now officially turned, Bellinger has tied the record for most home runs before May 1, and has set the record for most RBI before May 1.

Now, this season, baseball’s March 28 Opening Day was the earliest that it has been in history, giving Bellinger (and, Christian Yelich, who also tied the home run record) a few more games than their historical counterparts to set these marks. And, as we know, more games equals more opportunities to pad one’s numbers, especially counting stats like home runs and RBIs.

(Warning: I’m about to talk some about RBI. I also know that RBI isn’t an especially illuminating stat. I am writing about this for historical sake, so just bear with me.)

Consider this: Bellinger set his RBI record on April 29, his 30th game of the season. Mark McGwire and Juan Gonzalez — who previously shared the RBI-prior-to-May-1 record with 36, each doing so in 1998 — had only played 25 and 24 games, respectively, upon reaching that pinnacle. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most popular idioms in the English language is “guinea pig.” It’s simple — we’ve probably all used it — and yet it means so much. To be a “guinea pig” is to be the subject of something new or different. It can be as simple as being the first to try a new toothbrush, and range to something as weighty as testing a new drug.

In baseball terms, the Atlantic League is serving as Major League Baseball’s guinea pig this season. In a deal struck in early-March, the two organizations agreed to change certain rules for the Atlantic League’s 2019 championship season as a way to test said modifications before MLB considers implementing them itself.

One of the more contentious rule changes was the prohibition of the infield shift. The rule itself, as explained in the press release, was simply the requirement of “two infielders to be on each side of second base when a pitch is released.” If the rule is broken, “the ball is dead and the umpire shall call a ball.”

Well, last Thursday, the Atlantic League’s Opening Day, the anti-shift rule was utilized in a game between the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs and the Sugar Land Skeeters. Former big leaguer James Loney (remember him?) was at the plate in the bottom of the fourth inning. On the first pitch from Blue Crabs righty Daryl Thompson, Loney hit a soft ground ball to second baseman Angelys Nina, who easily threw him out at first to begin the inning. Read the rest of this entry »

The hit-by-pitch, as we know it today, predates the American League itself. It was in 1887, a good 14 years before the founding of baseball’s Junior Circuit, that the rules of this sport were amended to award a runner first base when hit by a pitcher’s usually-errant toss to home plate. (Interestingly enough, though, the statistic of a “hit-by-pitch” has been kept since 1884.)

Today, the hit-by-pitch generally flies under-the-radar. Of course there is the notable exception, the retaliatory hit-by-pitch, which does rear its ugly head around every few weeks. And we do often find ourselves talking about a hit-by-pitch when it unfortunately injuries one of our favorite players. But, other than that, it’s an event that just happens. There’s not much else to it.

Or so I initially thought. As the years have gone by, hit-by-pitches have been slowly increasing, and it really hasn’t gathered much attention from the greater baseball community. The 2018 season saw an all-time high in hit batsmen with 1,922. And in 2019, we are on pace to break the 2,000 mark for the first time in baseball’s history. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcell Ozuna has had a solid start to his 2019 season. Through 89 plate appearances, Ozuna has hit .256/.348/.615 (150 wRC+) with eight home runs, producing 0.6 WAR. Ozuna’s WAR total puts him in the 67th percentile among qualified hitters to begin the year; that’s not elite, though it’s certainly not bad, either.

But what if I told you that there is a pitcher who has produced as much position player value as Marcell Ozuna, as Nelson Cruz, as Jean Segura, Whit Merrifield, Byron Buxton, Jay Bruce, Mike Moustakas, and a host of other solid hitters? Would you believe me? Could you guess who it is?

One of the (few) fun things about small sample baseball season is the ridiculous numbers that come from it. Jay Jaffe already covered some of these blips from both the pitcher and hitter perspective, but there’s one overlapping case that, at least to me, was worth discussing in its own separate piece, the answer to the above questions, perhaps obvious given this piece’s title: Zack Greinke.

This whole idea came about when I was glancing over the Statcast leaderboards at Baseball Savant a few days ago. At the time, the default setting on the hitter numbers was just 10 batted ball events, allowing for some smaller samples to sneak their way into prominent positions on the board. But there’s no position more prominent than No. 1, and seeing Greinke leading all major league hitters in barrels per plate appearance made me chuckle. It also made me take a second look at his season stats this year.

In 13 plate appearances, Greinke has slashed .500/.545/1.300 (361 wRC+). He has hit two home runs, two doubles, and a single, all while drawing a walk without registering a single strikeout. That’s better than Barry Bonds‘ slash line after 13 plate appearances (.400/.538/.900) in 2004, when he went on to post a ridiculous 1.422 full-season OPS. Let’s marvel at that for a second while we watch Greinke’s two home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

As you probably already know, strikeouts are on an upward trend. Since 2005, baseball’s strikeout rate has increased every single year, and here in the first few weeks of 2019, it is up yet again. Hitters are striking out at a 23.3% rate, already representing a percentage point increase over their 2018 mark.

There is one team, though, that appears to be bucking the strikeout trend in a big way. Through 776 plate appearances, the Angels have struck out just 16.0% of the time, the lowest rate of any team in the major leagues. In the same breath, Los Angeles’ hitters are walking at the 14th-highest rate, 9.7%. This excellent combination of limiting strikeouts and drawing walks has resulted in a team-wide 0.60 BB/K ratio, which unsurprisingly leads the league.

Of course, a lot of this might have to do with Mike Trout. In 77 plate appearances, Trout has 18 walks to just nine strikeouts. But even if you were to remove Trout from the Angels’ team-wide stats, their strikeout rate would only “jump” to 16.5%. This would still be 1.9 percentage points better than the next closest team, the Athletics (18.4%).

This unique characteristic that Angels hitters are demonstrating clearly goes beyond Trout. In fact, among the 10 Angels hitters with at least 50 plate appearances, four have more walks than strikeouts. Across the rest of the league, there are only seven non-Angels hitters who have 50 plate appearances and can say the same, and no other team has more than two. Read the rest of this entry »