Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 10/12/26
Hey everybody, welcome to the chat. Let's talk baseball!
Will Mark Kotsay still be the A's manager the next time they play a game?
I don't feel like I have any strong inside info on this one, but my gut feel is that he will not.
This year was just quite a bummer for the A's and I imagine that it feels important to them to be progressing, feeling like each year is better than the last, as they get closer to moving to Vegas
I'm not really sure how much of that is Kotsay's *fault*, per se, but it doesn't change that this year was no fun and some changes should be made. This is kidnd of the deal you sign up for as a manager.
How big of a deal do you think it is that the Guardians have 5 LHPs, 3 of whom can provide length, against a Rays lineup that struggles against LHP?
I think it matters a decent amount, but I do think it's also going to lead to some really interesting strategic decisions. Like, what you said about 3 LHP's who can provide length is very true. But if you bring these guys in for lefties (which makes sense) and want length out of them, that means they'll probably be facing the top of the Rays order, with the scary righties, when they're already tiring.
I think this series is going to be a fun 'how do you manage the bullpen' one on both sides, both of these teams are creative and flexible with their usage and both of their lineups feel exploitable if you press the right buttons.
Which club are you personally rooting for to win the WS of the 4 left?
I mean, my personal vote is for a 7-game world series like last year's, one of the best of my lifetime.
But if I had to pick teams, I think I'd go in order of longest droughts/never won's. So like, Brewers, then Rays, then Guards, then Dodgers. You could argue the Guardians drought is longest but they've at least won before. And the Brewers have been starved from both WS titles and appearances, and also the storyline of running into the Dodgers over and over is compelling
But like…. mostly I'm just rooting for good baseball.
Are the Rays, Guardians, and Brewers all making it to the LCS with a lower combined payroll than the Dodgers a good thing or a bad thing or not really a thing at all as it pertains to offseason CBA talks?
I think the answer is not a thing at all. If it's a thing in either direction, I assume it's good. Clearly it's possible to do well as a team that does not spend like the Dodgers. Clearly, it's also possible to do well by spending like the Dodgers. Each side will see what they want to see here.
The truth is that it'll play in the court of public opinion a bit but I can't imagine that either the union or the league is going to over-index on one year of playoffs. They're fighting for billions of dollars of money that they both think they're owed. Who happened to win these series probably won't swing their views around much.
what was lunch today?
I haven't had lunch yet. Late breakfast was a ham and cheese croissant from a local coffee shop/bakery, really delicious. Lunch will probably be on the later and lighter side as a result
Did you catch the ump cam view of the Abner Uribe strikeout last night? Hitting is impossible
Oh man, I sure did and every time I see those ump view things, I feel the same way. Forget hitting – seeing hte ball is hard!
how would baseball fandom be better or worse if fans were fully rational and understanding of variance and randomness? would that significantly affect employment of managers/management?
I think that fandom is great because you can hold separate the rational part of your brain (I know this is a random weighted number generator) and the tribal part of it (we deserve this! we'd win if the umps weren't biased)
I think even plenty of rational people experience sports that way, and I think it improves the experience
If everyone was fully rational and understanding of variance at all times the highs and lows wouldn't feel as high and low. And I see sports as escapism and like those highs and lows. So for me, it'd be worse, even if my articles about playign the percentages and thinking long-term would probably be better received :)
Jose Ramirez hitting 100 mph top rail out in Game 4, slider at his shoes out Game 5 most impressive plate coverage display… ever?
the lowball homer was just ridiculous. Sometimes you just have to tip your cap, you know?
Like, every hitter is a mistake hitter. But hitters also sometimes win on pitchers' pitches, and that's quite remarkable. Ramirez doing it twice in two days with totally different pitchers' pitches? The reason you have superstars on your team is so that they can flip the game, I guess. But yeah, he did that.
If the Dodgers do get eliminated, it's up to us to do everything in our power to promote this year's World Series in our circles. Was thinking about that this AM. Can't let a "bad rating World Series" get used against us!
So, I'm interested in what will happen if this is the case.
I think there's definitely something to the idea of main characters in baseball, and the Dodgers are clearly one
I think there are main characters in sports, really. LeBron vs. the good team du jour. Brady or Mahomes vs. everyone.
No one wants true parity. It's fun to have some throughlines and teams to root against (or root for, depending on your allegiance) where you kind of know their position across multiple years. The Dodgers have been an October bogeyman for a decade and they're starting to cash in a lot. The Yankees have been doing a great public service by letting some fanbase beat the famed New York Yankees once a year. I like this feeling of having my rooting interests and storylines spread over years so I can take the past into account in the present.
I don't know how that interacts with the various CBA proposals. But I do think it's real.
The way the new chat is setup you can great an fangraphs inception by leaving the chat and re-entering the chat through the window-in-window.
how valuable are individual batter/pitcher matchups, really? they stink of sss to me but sometimes i worry that, say, insistence on platooning misses something.
I think that individual ones are not super valuable but 'vs. pitch type' style stuff is useful
Like there are definitely guys who hit spin well, who see changeups well, that kind of thing. And there's the classic fly ball platoon, where fly ball pitchers are best against fly ball pitchers and so on
I think that managers are working with a whole host of stuff like that to create ideas of how matchups will go. It's not 'well he's hit him ewll before' but 'his swing matches up well with that guy's good pitch' or whatever.
I have matured in terms of my willingness to criticize specific pinch hitting decisions because I'm trying to be rational about where I have an info disadvantage, and I think this is one place where I for sure do.
I often wonder why there’s so much hate for the Dodgers. They seem like a dynasty team that is hitting the end of its competitive window with expensive contracts for aging stars. Is there a good reason to think they are any more likely to stay on top than the recent Astros or 90s Yankees?
I mean, people hated those teams too
'do people even think the Dodgers are more villainous than the cartoon-villain, literally caught cheating Astros?' I mean people hated that team at the time!
I think that the general state of the world is maybe conducive to it now, too?
Eat the rich, and so on.
But 'there's not enough parity in baseball' is not like a new thing. 'there's not enough parity in my sport' is a universal complaint, only outstripped (in rare cases) by 'there's too much parity in my sport'
What's the best argument for the Guardians winning this series?
Great pitching staff, Rays offense is kinda vulnerable, win a few close games thanks to Cade Smith
I mean, is this even THAT much of a mismatch? ZiPS has it at 51/49 Rays, for example
Has there been any research done that groups pitchers by release point (arm angle, extension, etc.) and looks at hitter performance based on those clusters?
I haven't seen any but it's an interesting idea. One thing you'd have trouble with is that arm angle + extension is not THAT far from a fingerprint of a pitcher, particularly if you use like rel_x and rel_z too
so you'd want to be careful about the grouping, basically, and make sure that the groups aren't just selecting for 'good pitchers' sometimes.
i am a young adult, early 20s, finishing out my degree. i'm having tremendous fun right now with my classes and my friends and my peers, but i look to the future and feel only dread at a world that seems to be deteriorating. what's giving you hope?
I think that in many ways, the world is the best it's ever been. That doesn't mean that it isn't deteriorating. That doesn't mean that a bad outcome can't happen. It doesn't mean there isn't a ton of injustice in the world right now, and it doesn't mean that that injustice is going to get solved.
But I don't think we've ever been closer than we are right now to massively blunting the problem of scarcity, if things break right. We have the technology, in a way that we simply didn't a generation ago
Do we have the collective will? No idea. Is it achievable in my lifetime? No clue. Will people even want it? Not sure. But if the world doesn't burn down soon, by kleptocracy or killer robots or global collapse or weaponized pandemic or whatever scary stuff keeps us up at night, I have to feel like our odds of solving the whole thing are better now than they were when my parents were my age.
who have been the most surprising players of the postseason so far in your opinion?
Gavin Williams has to be near the top of the list.
Maybe he is just the top of the list? What a monster.
Ben Rice did a great job putting an exclamation mark on his season and making it super clear I need to move him way up on trade value. Manny Machado turning back the clock really surprised me.
Oh, what about Patrick Bailey hitting well?! tHAT'S FUN.
ha, so fun I hit caps lock midway through
Did you ever decide on a name for RE-RA9? I think I suggested "ReRuns" in a piece I wrote about the Braves bullpen that used it but if someone else came up with something better I'm all ears
No but maybe I'll poll it in an article updating it for this year. Because we're starting to put polls in articles now. Living in the future!
ReRuns is pretty good though. Strong contender.
Given that the upcoming media rights negotiations + recent steady viewership growth together are perhaps both sides' main deterrent against losing games next year, do you think that a meaningful decline in WS/postseason viewership would change either parties' willingness to lose some?
I think if the Dodgers are in the WS and ratings are way down, yes. If it's Tampa Bay/Milwaukee, then I mean, the story writes itself and no one will worry about the trend.
Projections have the ALCS winner with a 1/3 chance of winning the World Series, and now a hydrogen bomb vs. coughing baby matchup is inevitable. Could a Dodgers-Guardians World Series end up being the most lopsided per projections? Would likely have >75% odds of winning
per projections, perhaps. I think we've talked about this before maybe but the FanGraphs odds aren't really optimized for playoff matchups, they're a lot better for understanding full team strength over the year, which is what they were designed for. That's why we post the ZiPS game-by-game odds, for example
Like I don't think it was reasonable to say that the Dodgers/Brewers series was 70/30 before G1, even if our odds said so.
We still have the Brewers as series underdogs! That does not track with what I would expect. It's kind of a known model hole, or like, it's using a different formulation fo the data, and it's important to know that it's not what we'd write in a vacuum or if we started from scratch and you asked us. it's a model output, basically.
ha well this is interesting. now that I'm looking at the data, markets are closer to that than I thought. Basically they're higher on the Brewers than we are, but not necessarily lower on the Dodgers by that much.
I think that's probably a bit overly harsh to the AL, because short series are random. BUt yeah, this is going to be a historic mismatch.
More of a question for Dan, but since you're here Ben: are you as surprised as I am that ZiPS has the Brewers as 53% favorites in game 2 vs. Yamamoto?
Very much so.
Mariners #6 Org was 16 years ago now (time, it goes) but if we were attempting to rank Orgs nowadays would LAD, MIL, TBR, and CLE all be Top Five for you?
I can't imagine leaving any of those out of the top five, agreed.
ok now an astros specific one, do you think they should trade yordan and/or pena? I was thinking maybe the middle ground of trade pena and try to extend yordan but perhaps trading both would benefit them the most
Oh this is interesting. I mean, I'd be interested in keeping Yordan forever and saying 'hey look we got a generational superstar for his whole career, lets' build some teams around him'
but I think that's kind of out of vogue with team-building, and particularly with the last time the Astros got good
There's a decent argument that the org needs a really hard reset, because it just feels like everything has been wearing down slowly in recent years. the farm, the big league team, the development, etc. So maybe full housecleaning is needed. But I kinda doubt you kick out the nerds, bring in Bagwell, and then have HIM do the trading away of stars. So maybe they'll try to run it back next year and then re-evaluate
Looked like the Dodgers had a lot of empty seats for their division series games. Are their fans getting jaded/spoiled?
Oh yeah, and I mean, can you blame them? They play in the CS every year. This happened to the Braves in the 90s very memorably, and I feel like it happens to the Yankees and Astros too
Also, I was in LA this weekend, and man, it's tough to get around town if you don't live near the stadium. You have to really want it. I imagine that beating up on the Braves doesn't quite bring out that desire in everyone when you know you'll get a chance for a better matchup in a week
There would be some fun irony if CLE were to attempt to navigate those tough RHB at the top of the TB order by using an opener. Thus allowing their LHP "starters" to get a bit more length.
Oh yeah, I don't hate that strategy at all depending on which starter is going. Like I said, I think this series will be a set of really fun matchups.
Interesting what you said re: criticizing pinch hitter decisions. I feel like that about pretty much everything. I'll sometimes wonder why a manager does something, but then I'll think of how they (a) know 100 percent more about managing than me (and every fan) and (b) they know 100 percent more about their team
Yeah, I am increasingly trying to focus on logical inconsistencies and spots where I feel like I know my stuff well and the theory really matters
So like, varying who your leverage arms face. understanding when to use a low-leverage arm vs. when to just press press press forever with your best guys. it's much harder to be like 'pitcher should have been pulled one batter earlier' than to say 'well don't have your lefty specialist face their lefty masher five times in a row'
It was also like 120 degrees in the sun at Dodgers stadium
Oh my god yeah, I was dying there this weekend and that's after the heatwave broke.
I've seen some people on Rays forums say that this is the best (or at least most well-rounded) Rays team ever. Do you think that's true? How do you evaluate that/is that type of question worth asking?
Iiiiiinteresting. I mean, it's not really the kind of question I generally engage with because it's kind of subjective and also they don't get to play against each other, but I know it's pretty fun to debate that kind of thing.
I think 'most-well-rounded' isn't falsifiable, so that's just a fun sports bar debate with no right or wrong answer
doesn't mean it's not fun to debate, obviously. as for best? I mean, I think it's pretty contextual to each season and I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that but I do think it's reasonable to say that regardless of what happens for here, this is one of the best Rays seasons ever. Win the whole AL with a ton of wins and some breakout players, beat the Yankees in the playoffs.
Is the familiarity effect of seeing a reliever a lot in one series reduced when the reliever has unusual traits, like a weird arm slot or pitch shape?
I'm unsure, and you could make an intuitive-sounding argument either way. For example, 'the effect is larger because so much of that pitcher's edge comes from novelty' or 'the effect is smaller because hitters are good at picking up on small variations within the population of arms, and these outliers are so different that they remain puzzling'
This is the kind of thing that I never have time to work on during the playoffs, and then never think to when it's not the playoffs. But good note for November, because building up a good set of offseason research pieces is just good business.
alright speaking of playoff rush, I need to get back to working on writing up Will Venable and the White Sox, so that I can get to some free agent ranking stuff as well. The accelerated playoff schedule this year has me a little behind the eight ball on that. Also there are two great games tonight, I can't wait.
So enjoy the playoffs! And we'll talk again soon. Including potentially in the open threads for games. Woohoo, baseball!
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
Interesting what you said re: criticizing pinch hitter decisions. I feel like that about pretty much everything. I’ll sometimes wonder why a manager does something, but then I’ll think of how they (a) know 100 percent more about managing than me (and every fan) and (b) they know 100 percent more about their team
Here’s the thing – I just don’t agree. Look at the NFL games this weekend, a lot of these guys just botch these decisions all the time.
Very interesting chat today!