| 12:02 |
 Dan Szymborski: Let’s get this party* started!
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| 12:03 |
Dan Szymborski: Disclaimer: There may not be an actual party
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| 12:03 |
: SSS or has Acuña taken the next step?
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| 12:03 |
Dan Szymborski: I’m optimistic. Dude’s 22!
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| 12:04 |
Dan Szymborski: Especially amazing given where he was after the first week
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| 12:04 |
: What do we think about Zach Davies? .248 ERA, 4.29 xFIP, 4.28 SIERA
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There are a lot of reasons the San Francisco Giants, typically a contender now gone moribund, are hanging around the .500 mark. One is the breakout of outfielder Mike Yastrzemski, grandson of legendary Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Carl. Hitting .294/.402/.563 for a 158 wRC+ and ranking second among MLB hitters with 2.3 WAR, Yaz: The Next Generation is a legitimate MVP candidate, though he’s likely stymied in that endeavor by Fernando Tatis Jr. But Yaz’s sterling 2020 campaign represents broad improvement in a number of areas to the extent that it’s likely that he’s truly established a new baseline of performance at age 30.
The natural inclination for the Orioles would be to think of Yastrzemski as the one that got away. Back in the 1987 Baseball Abstract, Bill James coined the term of “Ken Phelps All-Star,” referring to overlooked players who could play in the majors but for one reason or another did not have the full opportunity to prove it. Sometimes it was a limitation that teams just couldn’t overlook. Sometimes the player broke out past an age where teams could be bothered to care. Sometimes it was simply an inability to understand baseball performance. While the last seems a little mean, 1980s front offices were not particularly progressive in terms of baseball analysis. It’s useful to remember when we’re fighting over stuff like volatility of defensive measures in WAR or FIP vs. ERA that just a generation ago, drawing walks wasn’t widely accepted as both a real skill and a skill worth valuing.
But that’s not really Yastrzemski. This isn’t someone who was spending his mid-20s terrorizing Triple-A hitters and failing to get an opportunity; he put up a .688 OPS at age 24 and a .716 at 25. The last name certainly wasn’t giving him any more opportunities than he deserved. Perusing his minor league translations would give you the idea that his glove played enough to be a fifth outfielder for someone but that his bat had little of his grandfather in it. Read the rest of this entry »
As you read this, Albert Pujols is still trying to hit his 660th home run, tying him for fifth all-time with Willie Mays. This round-tripper will very likely be 40-year-old Albert’s last big career milestone. He could still catch Alex Rodriguez, next in the home run gauntlet at 696, or even get the roughly 200 RBIs needed to catch Hank Aaron’s all-time record, but at his age and advanced state of decline, these will likely need a minimum of two more full-time seasons. So why does a player like this find his way into a ZiPS Time Warp? The cruelty of time ensures that most Hall of Famers surpass milestones when they’re well into their declining years, but in the case of Albert Pujols, we have that rare all-time great who was a shadow of himself for half of his career.
The greatness of 2000s Pujols hardly needs to be restated, so we won’t dwell on it too long. Through the first decade of his career, he hit .331/.426/.624 with 408 home runs, 1230 RBIs, and a sterling 70.6 WAR. Through age 30, that comes out to sixth all-time in homers, eighth in RBIs, and eighth in WAR (Mike Trout has pushed him back to ninth in the last number). The first time he ended a season as a major leaguer and didn’t tally an MVP vote was in 2013, the 13th season of his career. That’s short of the 15-year streak of Barry Bonds, but he didn’t get his first MVP tally until age 25.
Unlike many of these all-time greats, Albert emerged in the majors fully formed with little need for adjustment. As impressive as a .329/.403/.610, 37 HR, 7.2 WAR debut was for a 21-year-old, it’s stunning how he managed having only played three games above A-ball. Even Trout, our gold standard for phenomitude, only hit .220/.281/.390 in his first 40-game cameo; after his 40th game in the majors, Pujols had a 1.150 OPS. It was this quick burst into the majors at such a young age, along with his steep decline, that fueled the rampant speculation that Pujols, originally born in the Dominican Republic before later moving to New York and then Missouri, was a few years older than his birth certificate claimed. While the actual truth of this story remains a mystery, no evidence has ever been presented that is robust enough for me to dignify with even a hyperlink. Read the rest of this entry »
| 12:01 |
Dan Szymborski: It is a time to chat!
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| 12:01 |
Dan Szymborski: The chat is now!
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| 12:01 |
Dan Szymborski: Now is the chat.
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| 12:02 |
: Where can I get my ” I Know Who Dan Szymborski is and I am a Better Person For It” T- Shirt?
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| 12:03 |
Dan Szymborski: I’m just happy that there’s a Dan Szymborski character on a TV show! (Young & the Restless). I don’t need a Dan Szymborski t-shirt empire.
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| 12:03 |
: There are few things I love more than daytime baseball
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Even in a wackily truncated season like this one, the trade deadline serves as an important landmark in the playoff hunt. While players will still be released and signed, lose their jobs and get injured, the dramatic changes in team quality are largely over. For a projectionist such as myself, it also comes as a relief as I no longer have to worry about spending time crunching the numbers only to have a 14-player, three-way trade go down just after I file an article. The players teams have on their rosters now are more or less the ones they have at their disposal over the rest of the season.
Before we get to the division-by-division standings updates, let’s take a quick look at how the last few days altered teams’ playoff odds. I projected the rest of the season for each team based on both their roster prior to the deadline’s moves and their roster as it stands post-deadline. I then compared the results to see which club saw the biggest rest-of-season gains and losses.
| Team | Division Before | Division After | Diff | Playoffs Before | Playoffs After | Diff | World Series Before | World Series After | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toronto Blue Jays | 0.6% | 1.4% | 0.8% | 56.8% | 69.6% | 12.9% | 1.6% | 2.3% | 0.7% |
| Miami Marlins | 2.5% | 2.8% | 0.4% | 34.2% | 37.9% | 3.7% | 1.0% | 1.1% | 0.1% |
| San Diego Padres | 7.5% | 10.1% | 2.5% | 96.7% | 98.0% | 1.4% | 6.4% | 7.0% | 0.6% |
| Cincinnati Reds | 3.4% | 3.5% | 0.1% | 35.0% | 36.2% | 1.2% | 1.0% | 1.0% | 0.0% |
| Philadelphia Phillies | 18.4% | 19.2% | 0.8% | 79.6% | 80.6% | 1.0% | 3.5% | 3.5% | 0.1% |
| Colorado Rockies | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 21.6% | 22.4% | 0.8% | 0.6% | 0.6% | 0.0% |
| New York Mets | 2.1% | 2.1% | 0.0% | 33.3% | 33.7% | 0.5% | 1.0% | 1.0% | 0.0% |
| Chicago Cubs | 67.8% | 68.6% | 0.8% | 96.1% | 96.2% | 0.2% | 6.0% | 6.0% | 0.0% |
| St. Louis Cardinals | 21.6% | 21.2% | -0.4% | 75.0% | 75.1% | 0.1% | 3.2% | 3.1% | -0.1% |
| Houston Astros | 25.4% | 25.4% | 0.0% | 96.8% | 96.9% | 0.1% | 4.6% | 4.6% | 0.0% |
| Oakland A’s | 74.5% | 74.5% | 0.0% | 99.7% | 99.7% | 0.0% | 7.8% | 7.8% | 0.0% |
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 92.4% | 89.8% | -2.5% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 15.5% | 15.2% | -0.3% |
| Tampa Bay Rays | 65.3% | 64.7% | -0.5% | 99.9% | 99.9% | 0.0% | 10.5% | 10.5% | 0.0% |
| Atlanta Braves | 76.5% | 75.3% | -1.2% | 98.2% | 98.1% | 0.0% | 7.3% | 7.2% | -0.1% |
| Chicago White Sox | 33.5% | 35.5% | 2.0% | 97.0% | 96.9% | -0.1% | 5.7% | 5.8% | 0.1% |
| Pittsburgh Pirates | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.4% | 0.3% | -0.1% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| New York Yankees | 34.1% | 33.8% | -0.3% | 99.4% | 99.3% | -0.1% | 8.0% | 8.0% | 0.0% |
| Cleveland Indians | 46.0% | 42.8% | -3.2% | 98.4% | 97.7% | -0.7% | 6.6% | 6.3% | -0.4% |
| Los Angeles Angels | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 5.6% | 4.7% | -0.8% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% |
| Washington Nationals | 0.6% | 0.5% | -0.1% | 16.0% | 15.1% | -0.9% | 0.4% | 0.4% | 0.0% |
| San Francisco Giants | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% | 46.1% | 45.0% | -1.1% | 1.5% | 1.4% | -0.1% |
| Detroit Tigers | 0.2% | 0.3% | 0.1% | 19.9% | 18.7% | -1.2% | 0.4% | 0.4% | 0.0% |
| Minnesota Twins | 20.3% | 21.4% | 1.1% | 94.4% | 93.2% | -1.2% | 4.7% | 4.6% | -0.1% |
| Seattle Mariners | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 5.1% | 3.8% | -1.3% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% |
| Boston Red Sox | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 4.2% | 2.9% | -1.3% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% |
| Baltimore Orioles | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 7.4% | 5.5% | -1.8% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% |
| Kansas City Royals | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 8.1% | 6.2% | -1.8% | 0.2% | 0.1% | 0.0% |
| Milwaukee Brewers | 7.2% | 6.6% | -0.6% | 51.1% | 49.2% | -1.9% | 1.6% | 1.5% | -0.1% |
| Texas Rangers | 0.1% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 7.5% | 4.9% | -2.6% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% |
| Arizona Diamondbacks | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 17.0% | 12.0% | -5.0% | 0.5% | 0.3% | -0.2% |
The San Diego Padres and Cleveland Indians reached a whopper of an agreement on trade deadline day, with Cleveland sending pitcher Mike Clevinger, outfielder Greg Allen, and a player to be named later to the Padres for shortstop Gabriel Arias, catcher Austin Hedges, pitcher Cal Quantrill, first baseman Josh Naylor, pitcher Joey Cantillo, and shortstop Owen Miller. A nine-player trade is a significant deal, and with so many familiar names and a legitimate major league ace in the mix, this is one that will be looked back on for a long time, regardless of how it works out for either side.
The Padres have seen the wisdom of pushing in all of their chips for some time, though not always with the right cards in their hand. Just a few months into A.J. Preller’s stint as the general manager, the team decided to go all-in coming off a 77-85 season, bringing in Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, Wil Myers, James Shields, Derek Norris, and Will Middlebrooks in a two-month period over the 2014-2015 offseason. Problem was, the team wasn’t holding a high pair in that particular card game, and with the team’s talent otherwise generally unimpressive, San Diego actually won fewer games in 2015 than in 2014. Those moves cost them money, time, and players such as Yasmani Grandal, Trea Turner, Max Fried, Joe Ross, and Zach Eflin. That the team later turned a bag of lemons into liquid gold by landing Fernando Tatis Jr. for a struggling James Shields was a nice post-credits vignette for this tale of tragedy and heartbreak, but was hardly a reasonable expectation at the time of these moves.
In 2014, the Padres traded players they needed for players they didn’t.
2020 is a whole different story. This time around, the Padres are indisputably a serious contender, a 21-15 team, one that our projected standings now peg with a 98% chance of making the playoffs. Nor does this kind of performance appear to be any kind of fluke, at least in the eyes of the ZiPS projections. ZiPS saw Wild Card upside for the Padres in 2019 — which didn’t happen — but forecast an even better team in 2020, one it projected with an 87-75 record and a 52% chance of making the playoffs back before the season’s postponement. Read the rest of this entry »
The San Diego Padres have added another bat to 2020’s second-best lineup so far, acquiring first baseman Mitch Moreland from the Boston Red Sox for two prospects, third baseman Hudson Potts and center fielder Jeisson Rosario. Moreland will almost certainly slot in as the team’s full-time designated hitter, occasionally spelling first baseman Eric Hosmer.
If during a word association game prior to the season, you had said “stopgap first baseman,” I almost certainly would have answered with “Mitch Moreland.” Never amazing but also rarely terrible, Moreland has been a fixture as the long-term/short-term first baseman for Boston the last four seasons. Peaking at 2.2 WAR for the 2015 Rangers, he’s put up between 0.7 and 1.0 WAR in six other seasons, building a handy little pillow fort between average and replacement level.
This season, on the other hand, has been something better. Moreland has already hit the 1 WAR milestone in just 22 games thanks to a .328/.430/.746, 203 wRC+ line. No, he’s not suddenly channeling the shade of Ted Williams, but he’s legitimately hitting for more power than he typically does. By Statcast’s barrels per batted ball event, Moreland ranks second in baseball behind only Miguel Sanó. It’s not that he’s actually hitting the ball that much harder, but he’s gotten more loft in his swing; Moreland’s 20-degree average launch angle against fastballs and 19-degree average launch angle against breaking pitches are career highs, both nearly double his marks from 2019.
And while Moreland is unlikely to ever finish among the league leaders in home runs, he has become quite good at harvesting pitchers’ regrets. Statcast defines “meatballs” as middle-middle pitches; an average hitter swings at about 75% of those. Moreland’s rate is at 87.3% in 2019 and 2020 combined, meaning he’s only half as likely as the typical player to leave his bat on his shoulder for those pitches. Here’s his radial chart against middle-middle over those two seasons:
Since Voros McCracken pondered the meaning of BABIP back in 2001, much of sabermetric research has had an increased focus on volatility. This is especially important when you run projections — as I do from time to time when the mood strikes me — since that volatility has a way of confounding your prognostications. While the evidence suggests that hitters have much more of an actual BABIP “ability” than pitchers do, it doesn’t mean that such an ability is on the same firm ground as, say, plate discipline or the ability to crush the ball into an alternate universe. Even still, outliers tell us a lot even if we expect some of those outliers to remain outliers to some degree.
As odd as it still seems, we’re essentially at the halfway point of the 2020 season for most teams. Weird BABIP numbers don’t magically just work themselves out in a normal 162-game schedule, so we would expect them to do so even less when the season is only 60 games. In a situation like this, estimates of what BABIP a player “should” have based on their advanced data will have more relevance to future seasons than the actual BABIPs do.
One feature built into ZiPS — and into the next iteration of the in-season model — are “z” stats, ZiPS’ attempt to make sense of volatile numbers. For stats like pitcher homers, zHR is far more predictive than the actual number of home runs allowed is (the most predictive model using just HR and zHR weighs the latter about nine times that of the former). zBABIP for hitters isn’t quite on the same level, with an r-squared of only 0.54 historically, but it does still add a lot of information about which players exceeding or falling short of typical BABIP numbers “deserve” to do so. Read the rest of this entry »
| 12:04 |
Dan Szymborski: And welcome to the last SzymChat of August and the first-half of the season?
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| 12:04 |
Dan Szymborski: “half” lol
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| 12:04 |
: White Sox second in BaseRuns. Are they actually like really good?
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| 12:06 |
Dan Szymborski: I think they’re a good team! The highs are very good. There’s a lot to like in the starting lineup except for RF
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| 12:06 |
Dan Szymborski: EE still could get going
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| 12:06 |
Dan Szymborski: And Danny Medwick has made things interesting!
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Back before the Chicago Cubs decided to go full-on Ebenezer Scrooge, they aggressively pursued top players in free agency to improve their roster. One of those players was Yu Darvish, an ace for the Rangers and Dodgers after seven years of dominating the Japan Pacific League, a feat he accomplished while still a teenager. Darvish was the best pitcher available after the 2017 season and the Cubs signed him to a six-year, $126 million contract, a sum commensurate with his abilities. And unlike his first deal in the majors, Darvish didn’t have to contend with a posting fee; when the right-hander came to the States, the Nippon Ham Fighters got nearly as much ($51.7 million) as he did ($56 million).
The initial returns were not promising. The Cubs won 95 games in 2018 before being bounced in the Wild Card game by the Colorado Rockies, while triceps and elbow issues limited Darvish to just eight games. Those were mostly ineffective games to boot, as his walk rate jumped to career highs, his ERA and FIP ballooned to near five, and he failed to complete the fifth inning in five of his starts. MRIs revealed no structural damage to his arm, but the team was careful; the triceps is important in the arm deceleration phase of a pitcher’s delivery:
Activity of the triceps muscles, as well as activity of the anconeus and wrist flexor muscles, helped the joint’s ligaments apply a compression force during this phase in order to stabilize the elbow and prevent elbow distraction.
Darvish was already a veteran of one Tommy John surgery and the Cubs were rightly conservative about rushing their ace to full-time duty. The first victory of 2019 was just staying healthy, which he achieved; Darvish only missed a single start down the stretch due to forearm pain. But the control wasn’t there in the early-going and a third of the way through the season, his ERA was at 5.40 with an extremely worrying 38 walks in 11 starts. Indeed, even late as Independence Day, Darvish’s ERA was north of five. Read the rest of this entry »
