We rarely talk about Aaron Harang. When we do, it’s usually to describe him as a “safer” player rather than a good one, or perhaps to poke a little fun at his appearance. He never ranks very highly when it comes time to make lists, and we’re generally at a loss to describe his success. And yet, he keeps churning out solid seasons of baseball.
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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, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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In Monday’s “Opening Day Staff Survey,” Dave said the storyline he was most looking forward to this season was, “Breaking in young pitching prospects as relievers.” This was a little bit vague, but he elucidated on it further later that day when he recorded his weekly podcast with Carson. If you skip to the 30-minute mark, we get to the heart of the issue:
“Earl Weaver used to do this all the time with his relievers back in the 70s, but he broke them in as long relievers; we didn’t really have these one-inning specialists that they have today. So you’d break in these young pitchers, but they’d go two, three, four innings. They’d have to face hitters multiple times, they’d have to work on multiple pitches, they’d have to pace themselves a little bit. To me, that’s a little bit different than breaking in a guy as a ninth-inning guy or as an eighth-inning guy and telling him to throw as hard as possible for 15 pitches.”
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: Hi everybody!
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| 6:02 |
: Not sure who is with me tonight, but we’ll start at 9 pm ET. BASEBALL IS BACK! Let’s talk about it.
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| 9:02 |
: OK, let’s do this. I never spoke with Jeff, so I think I’m flying solo tonight.
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Baseball! |
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: INDEED!
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In terms of an AL-only league, is Medlen, Nova or Matt Moore a better DL stash for a team looking to win this year? |
Opening Day is here! Can you feel it? Like we always do about this time, it’s time for some predictions. We already laid out our predictions for postseason teams and awards, but I thought we could take it a little further this year. We have lots of unique voices here in the FanGraphs family of blogs, and so we thought we’d ask them a few more questions and see what they had to say.
There were nine questions in all, symbolic of baseball’s usual nine innings of play. We asked some questions that called for some explanation, and some that didn’t. We’ll start with the ones that didn’t. In total, 31 people took the survey, though not everyone answered all of the questions, and some people provided more than one answer for some questions, because not everyone can be decisive and/or has multiple hot takes to give.
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, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Before the season’s soft opening on Sunday night and grand opening on Monday, we are compelled to to offer you our staff predictions. We attempted to pull in as many of our authors as possible from across our family of blogs, because the only thing better than predictions is predictions by a ton of people!
We’re usually not so good at this sort of thing. Or, more to the point, we’re not any better at it than anyone else. But we enjoy doing it, because it marks the start of a new season. Last season was no different. Boston and Oakland were pegged as division winners, and Tampa Bay was pegged as a Wild Card. Prince Fielder and Jason Kipnis got MVP nods, and Xander Bogaerts got plenty of Rookie of the Year love. Only Boston as a division winner really sticks out as hilarious, but all of these missed the mark by a great deal. Nevertheless, we press on! We also conducted a more in-depth staff survey, and we’ll dig into that on Monday morning.
American League Postseason Teams
East: Boston (20), Baltimore (7), Toronto (7), New York (2), Tampa Bay (2)
Central: Cleveland (24), Detroit (14), Chicago (0), Kansas City (0), Minnesota (0)
West: Los Angeles (22), Seattle (14), Oakland (2), Houston (0), Texas (0)
Wild Card: Seattle (12), Toronto (10), Detroit (9), Chicago (6), Oakland (4), New York (1), Tampa Bay (1), Boston (14), Cleveland (11), Los Angeles (7)
The AL East is wide open enough that every team got a vote, something that didn’t happen in either the 2013 or 2014 editions of our staff predictions, in any division. Outside of that, the divisions are fairly unininteresting aside from the two votes for Oakland. Note that the three consensus division winners are listed at the end of the Wild Card votes, since it would be confusing if they won multiple things.
Even though you’re good enough at math to add up totals from division and wild card winners, let’s total up and check out who the overall postseason favorites are.
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: Hi everybody!
I haven’t talked to Jeff yet, but assuming he is in, tonight will mark the glorious return of the Menage a Chat! That’s right, Chris Cwik, newly of Yahoo! Big League Stew but always a FanGraph’er at heart, will e back in the building! So get your questions in, and we’ll see you at 9 pm ET. And remember, this time next week there will be baseball on. As Luke Cage/Power Man would say, Sweet Christmas!!! See you soon. |
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: Hi guys! The menage a chat is back!
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: What’s up, nerds?
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: Who let Chris in?
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Oh god, not Cwik. |
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micah johnson? next big 2B??? whats your take??? |
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, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »
What do we have here? For an explanation of this series, please read this introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data below is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems, with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.
Yes, we know WAR is imperfect and there is more to player value than is wrapped up in that single projection, but for the purposes of talking about a team’s strengths and weaknesses, it is a useful tool. Also, the author writing this post did not move your team down ten spots in order to make you angry. We don’t hate your team. I promise.
Last week, Craig Edwards detailed the death of the long man. Another position that has been dying a slow death is the designated hitter as we know it. Many teams just rotate people through the spot these days. Last season, American League teams started an average of 10.9 players at designated hitter. Just six of the 15 teams were in the single digits, and only the Tigers started fewer than five DHs. Enough of the eulogy, let’s get to 2015:
