Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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While pace of play has been an issue discussed by the league for some time now, I’ve personally been slow to regard it as an actual problem for the sport. It’s been, for me, a matter that only casual fans would take note of — and that if they weren’t complaining about this issue, they would surely find another one about which to complain.

A couple of developments have changed my thinking, though. First, Grant Brisbee took the time to actually investigate two games held 30 years apart and came away with the conclusion that a pitch clock actually may make a substantial difference in the length of games. Second, players have continued taking longer than ever between pitches this season, despite the increasing talk about the league’s problem with pace of play.

Let’s start with a graph that illustrates the problem on a league-wide basis. Data is as of Thursday morning, but the Pace numbers won’t have changed much in a day, so that’s fine.

You can see the one time in the past decade that saw any marked shift downward was in 2015, when the league put a new rule in place mandating that batters had to keep one foot in the box (except after foul balls) during a plate appearance. From my viewing experiences, the rule doesn’t appear to have been enforced with the same vigilance over the last two seasons, and the data suggest the same thing. The effect has been a rise in the average pace of more than a second and a half since 2015, and 0.7 seconds more than the previous high in 2014.

This is a problem on a couple of levels. First, it shows that the players aren’t taking the Commissioner’s Office very seriously, unless there was a new memo or rule put in place that I have missed. Second, it shows that the players cannot be trusted to follow the honor system — and, as such, more heavy-handed methods of enforcement might be necessary.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »

These days, we’re blessed with a number of amazing young shortstops. Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager, for example, are already among baseball’s top players. Manny Machado is a shortstop who just accidentally plays third base. All of them are younger than 25.

Second base isn’t as notable for its youth. Last year, however, second basemen recorded one of the top collective offensive lines at the position in the history of the game. Good job, second basemen.

So both positions are experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. This led me to wonder which teams might be benefiting most from that renaissance. It’s rare that teams can keep a second baseman and shortstop together long enough to form a lasting and effective double-play combo. Right now, MLB has some pretty great ones. But which is the greatest — particularly, on the defensive side of thing? Let’s explore.

First, we want to know who has played together for awhile. Since the start of the 2015 season, 21 players have played at least 200 games as a shortstop, and 23 have done the same at second base. Cross-referencing them and weeding out the players who have played for multiple teams, we get the following list:

That’s a pretty good list. There are some tough omissions here. The most notable is the Angels, as Andrelton Simmons hasn’t been with them long enough to meet our bar here. Given Johnny Giavotella’s defensive contributions, however, we can guess that the combo here would be quite one-sided. Also excluded are teams with new double-play combos, like the Dodgers and Mariners. Not only are the Logan Forsythe-Corey Seager and Robinson Cano–Jean Segura combos new this season, but thanks to injuries they haven’t even played together much this season. Cano-Segura has only happened 22 times this season, and Forsythe-Seager only 10 times.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few seasons, the Diamondbacks haven’t been a team worthy of positive attention. Ever since Mike Hazen took the reins back in October, however, we’ve been keeping tabs on them. It started when Dave correctly noted that there wasn’t a clear direction for the D-backs to pick heading into the 2017 season. We’ve seen why through the first six weeks of the 2017 campaign: this season has presented the D-backs an opportunity. With the Giants’ rapid fade and the Mets’ injury troubles, the National League Wild Card is suddenly wide open, and teams like Arizona (and Colorado) have an opportunity to step into the void. As such, it’s time to start paying attention to the D-backs.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »