This offseason, it seems like everyone is coming at a premium price. Pablo Sandoval, Russell Martin, Victor Martinez, Nelson Cruz, Nick Markakis and Billy Butler all smashed their crowdsourcing projections. Zach Duke got $15 million and we didn’t even bother crowdsourcing him! And we haven’t even reached the Winter Meetings. Yet not every free agent has been uber-expensive — relievers in particular. Sure, Andrew Miller is poised to break the bank, but there have been a number of budget reliever signings. Let’s take a tour through some of them, shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Have you heard? The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2015 is now available for sale. You can check out the table of contents and read some excerpts from the book. When you finish that you can purchase it from our independent publishing platform, Createspace, in print form, or from Amazon in print or Kindle form.

But wait, there’s more! Because we’re giving folk, and since it’s the beginning of the holiday season and all, we want to give you a chance to win yourself a free copy of the book. Today is your final chance to win a trivia contest based on one of the articles in the book (we also ran contests yesterday and Monday). The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will win a free physical copy of the book (sorry, no free Kindle version). It’s just that simple!

Today’s question comes to us from Matthew Murphy’s article entitled “Teams Capitalize on Antiquated Arbitration System.” In it, Matthew deploys that old standby, the blind player comparison. Here is the comparison table:

So, the question before you today then, dear reader, is this:

Can you name all three players in the blind comparison?

Good luck! And to our stateside readers, Happy Thanksgiving!

Have you heard? The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2015 is now available for sale. You can check out the table of contents and read some excerpts from the book. When you finish that you can purchase it from our independent publishing platform, Createspace, in print form, or from Amazon in print or Kindle form.

But wait, there’s more! Because we’re giving folk, and since it’s the beginning of the holiday season and all, we want to give you a chance to win yourself a free copy of the book. So today and tomorrow (and yesterday), we’ll be running a trivia contest based on one of the articles in the book. The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will win a free physical copy of the book (sorry, no free Kindle version). It’s just that simple!

Today’s question comes to us from Chris St. John’s article entitled “Not All Fly Balls Are Created Equal.” In it, Chris developed a metric for the expected run value (xRV) of fly balls. A bit of explanation:

For example, say a ball is hit 400 feet to straight center and hangs in the air for 5.3 seconds. Of the balls hit with this trajectory and using the ranges given above, there were one error, 46 fly outs, 16 doubles, nine triples and 12 home runs. Using the run value for each, the expected run value (xRV) for this trajectory is 0.72.

Chris breaks down the trends, as well as the leaders and laggards for average xRV from 2012-2014. We’ll focus on the latter today. The question before you today then, dear reader, is this:

Can you name three of the bottom five players in average xRV from 2012 through 2014?

Keep in mind that you’re looking for players who have played with some regularity.

Good luck!

Have you heard? The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2015 is now available for sale. You can check out the table of contents and read some excerpts from the book. When you finish that you can purchase it from our independent publishing platform, Createspace, in print form, or from Amazon in print or Kindle form.

But wait, there’s more! Because we’re giving folk, and since it’s the beginning of the holiday season and all, we want to give you a chance to win yourself a free copy of the book. So today, tomorrow and Wednesday, we’ll be running a trivia contest based on one of the articles in the book. The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will win a free physical copy of the book (sorry, no free Kindle version). It’s just that simple!

Today’s question comes to us from Dave Studeman’s piece on WPA entitled “The Story Stat, Circa 2014.” In it, he tells us how he defines the “biggest” game of the year. To wit:

When I say “biggest” game, I mean the one with the most in-game drama. When teams swap leads, or just threaten to take a lead, win probability moves up and down a lot. When one team takes an early lead and cruises to a win, win probability basically moves in just one direction.

So I use swings in win probability to quantify how much drama there was in each game. Specifically, I take all the swings in win probability and divide by the number of innings in the game. (If not for this last step, all extra-inning games would be ranked ahead of nine-inning games.)

So, with that in mind, dear reader, the question before you today is this:

Which two teams were involved in the “biggest” regular season game of 2014?

Good luck!

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 »

9:00	: Hi everyone and useful info for the off season.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

9:02	Comment From Rated Rookie Most offseason/hot stove rumors.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »