Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 2/19/26

Ben Clemens: Hey everybody, welcome to the chat. I’m just getting some coffee brewing, since I’m used to a slightly later chatting window, but let’s get started and then I’ll take a quick break to fuel up

Chris Hanel: Have you started thinking about your bold preseason predictions?

Ben Clemens: Bold? yes. How to make them not way too bold? no

Matt VW: Does the change in MLBPA leadership make a lockout more likely? less likely? not move the needle at all?

Ben Clemens: I’m thinking it won’t move the needle at all

Ben Clemens: the fact that Meyer was already the chief negotiator makes me feel like they’re gonna stick with the existing strategy without too much trouble

Oaktown Blues: The lab stuff is really cool. So far in the pitching bot visualizer every pitcher/pitch combo I’ve tried has had a 0% danger miss rate – is this a glitch or are those types of pitches exceedingly rare?

Ben Clemens: oh yeah, if you ask a Lab question today, I’ll answer it. I’m pretty excited about it and also would love to hear any feedback, which is why I switched into a chat on the day of it coming out in the first place

Ben Clemens: This is probably because you haven’t started looking at late counts. Early in the count, there are basically no danger misses, because batters don’t swing enough

Ben Clemens: but when the pitcher is ahead, danger misses change a ton

Ben Clemens: my favorite example of this is Ryan Helsley, slider, two strikes

Jesse: Re: Fangraphs Labs — we’re truly getting closer to Fangraph’s mission of democratizing baseball analytics, huh?

Ben Clemens: I sure hope so

Ben Clemens: I talked about this a lot with Sean, and I’m not sure how much it came across in the introductory article, but that’s a lot of the goal. I’ve made a lot of one-off tools over the year for my own edification but I always thought that I’d learn more if more people could look at the data

Ben Clemens: after all, one of the big benefits to writing for FanGraphs is that I’m basically hooked into good baseball data via IV. I got a lot better at carving stuff up after a few years in the FG data ecosystem. But why hoard that stuff? Now everyone can look at it

JJ: Just dropping a line to say I get a ton of complements on my fangraphs retro sweatshirt anytime I wear it! Also, do you buy Randy Vasquez’s second half success last year? Probably not sustainable at that level but I would buy a step change in command and stuff

Ben Clemens: I was too late to get the retro sweatshirt, but my wife got the sweater and it draws a lot of compliments wherever we go

Kate: Picks to click still coming today from the prospect team?

Ben Clemens: yes indeed. Prospect Week will continue until we run out of Weeks

War2D2: I haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet, but congrats on the FG Labs launch! I don’t work in web dev anymore, and the part I miss most is when something would go live for the first time and other people could see what you’ve been working on for months.

Ben Clemens: It’s extremely satisfying. My first time ever doing this, too. I’ve never been a developer at all, so it’s a real thrill

Ben Clemens: I was up late last night just thinking aobut how cool this all is

Bob: Can Mike Trout have one more good healthy season….PLEASE

Ben Clemens: Man, I sure hope so

RAH: Is some sort of small market or anti-big market bias showing when I find myself more interested in the position battles for the Royals and Brewers than, say, the Dodgers and Red Sox?

Ben Clemens: I don’t think so, I think there’s some implied ‘well I’m gonna hear enough about the Dodgers and Sox during the season’ there that is probably true

bringbackpologrounds: Are the Mariners poised to build an AL West dynasty of their own? What are the biggest internal/external obstacles that could prevent this?

Ben Clemens: I mean, the biggest external obstacles are just that the AL West isn’t a bad division. even the cheap-o A’s look pretty good, and appear to be spending a bit more. The biggest internal obstacles? Something like ‘trouble developing hitters’ but it’s unclear whether that’s a stadium thing, regime thing, random thing

Jake Jortles: So, behind the scenes at Fangraphs Labs, is it anything like the Muppet Labs?

Ben Clemens: It is exactly like the Muppet Labs, in fact

Ben Clemens: Baumann just pops up with ominously bubbling beakers, and Beekers, all the time

JJ: Would labs ever accept user-coded visualization projects if given a framework rubric?

Ben Clemens: user-coded? dunno. user-inspired? oh yeah, the feedback form is not just for show. Sean is coding up a ‘change log’ page so we can make a few adjustments as we speak

david t: Is there a hot streak analyzer for pitchers? I remember seeing some data one time on how pitchers can get on hot streaks but I’m wondering if the data set (1x every 5-6 days) and matchup makes this type of analysis too noisy?

Ben Clemens: There isn’t yet, but I can tell you that we have three new lab ideas in the hopper already, and ‘expand hot streak in at least a few ways’ has been really popular separately from thoes

Ben Clemens: so I’d expect to see more features, and perhaps pitching, in the medium term

Ben Clemens: this was really just a proof of concept, honestly: PitchingBot Visualizer and Squared Up Explorer were already tools I had in my head, but building something new from Jason’s idea was a good test of the Lab framework

Alex: Ben, who is your favorite active baseball player?

Ben Clemens: oh man, this is a tough one

Ben Clemens: I like Logan Webb a lot. I like Jacob deGrom a lot. Big fan of Masyn Winn and Lars Nootbaar too

Ben Clemens: I think it’s Webb? I get to watch him pitch a lot, I enjoy his un-flashy greatness, and also I like to see how he tinkers

Eminor3rd: Do you ever sense yourself getting tired of analyzing baseball THIS closely? I had a good 10-year run of a voracious appetite for info and cutting edge takes, and I’ve found myself over the last five years or so kind of sliding into “maybe I just want to watch it and not think about it too much,” which wasn’t a feeling I expected to have.

Ben Clemens: Oh, this is a real thing for sure. It’s actually a big reason behind the Lab. Doing the same thing for a long time wears on you even if the thing is interesting. So doing something totally different – the big questions in the lab for me are about computer programming and design, not sabermetrics – keeps everything feeling fresh and fun

md: re: small/big market bias – was discussing with a colleague the other day and i think if you’re interested in small market battles more it’s because you’re already so plugged into baseball that you’ve heard ad nauseum about rafael devers picking and or not picking up a glove that other things are just MORE interesting, right?

Ben Clemens: Yeah, I think that’s similar to what I meant and maybe a better way of saying it

Ben Clemens: Like, you’re just gonna hear enough about the Red Sox

Ben Clemens: I promise you

Ben Clemens: same with the Dodgers, Giants, Mets, etc.

Ben Clemens: but yeah, if you don’t follow much, that might not be true, and at that point hearing about the stars is more interesting

aiyer917: What’s your favorite coffee brew?

Ben Clemens: I hate to confess how basic I am, but just drip coffee from whatever local roaster

Ben Clemens: I have a nice oxo coffee maker and a burr grinder, and they work super well

Ben Clemens: I’m also very unsnobby about coffee. I mostly just like hot drinks. I think the first podcast I did for FanGraphs involved Meg lightly mocking me for my predilection for drinking hot water by itself

Oaktown Blues: Does a team like the A’s with a strong position player core have more upside cases than a team like the Pirates with strong pitching? My thinking is that pitching development is more volatile than hitting, so it’s likelier that the A’s stumble into a good staff than it is the Pirates stumble into a good lineup

Ben Clemens: It’s an interesting question. So on one hand, yes. But on the other hand, you have the offsetting issue of top pitching being incredibly expensive in trade and free agency

Ben Clemens: like, the point about the development is very true. but also, the Pirates did a pretty good job of getting solid hitters for cheap this winter. there’s no ‘get solid pitchers for cheap’ button

Ben Clemens: so I’d say that the Pirates strategy might be lower ceiling. If the A’s spike on a few pitchers, man, that’s a good team

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/hitters-keep-getting-younger-pitchers-stay…

aiyer917: I know you talked about it in your recent piece(which was awesome), but do you think there’s a world where the Red Sox holding all 4 OFs works out nicely for them? (One of abreu breaking out, duran holding at this current level, or rafaela hitting a bit more)

Ben Clemens: Oh, for sure

Ben Clemens: It doesn’t even have to be that complicated. What if one of them gets hurt?

Ben Clemens: or what if one of the guys we thought was good enough to be a starter just sucks?

Ben Clemens: having extra options lowers your risk of ruin substantially, there are definitely ways that it works out

Ben Clemens: I’m a lot more okay with their plans now that htey managed to get a solid infield together anyway. I still suspect that they could have found a better way to move an outfielder, but the issue wasn’t ‘too many outfielders’, it was ‘too many outfielders and not enough infielders’ and at least they fixed the second part

Guest: Is the refresh to Eno’s Stuff+ coming soon? Also, looks like there’s a ton of new plate discipline/pitch arsenal/general Statcast stats buried in the custom leaderboard options. Playing around with them, it looks like there are some slight disagreements between some of them and what’s displayed on Savant. (I’m thinking of Z-Contact% (mlb) and O-Contact% (mlb) specifically.) Is this intentional? Are the new stats going to be made more forward-facing at some point?

Ben Clemens: as to stuff+, probably. I am a little less involved on that side of things, but I expect so. Also, I’ve got my grubby little paws into the PitchingBot code, as a side effect of working on the Lab, and I think I’ll have some newer stuff with that at some point this spring too

Ben Clemens: as to the slight disagreements, I haven’t looked through all of them, but i have a strong suspicion for those two specifically: how we treat foul tips

Ben Clemens: I really don’t know what the right answer is here. Savant treats them as swinging strikes. We treat them as foul balls. I think I lead the swinging strike way? But I definitely don’t think it’s cut and dried, and Jon Becker would tell you with very strong conviction that counting them as swinging strikes is dumb

Brooks Robinson stan: Any chance the O’s can swing a package deal including some of their 1B surplus, to strengthen pitching? I don’t mind the Eflin/Baz/Bassitt moves, but if we could only just elevate one of them a leetle bit…

Ben Clemens: So, I guess this would mean Ryan Mountcastle?

Ben Clemens: ummm…. basically, no. Just as an example, ZISP has Mountcastle down for a 107 wRC+, 31st best among first basemen. That’s about the same as Nathaniel Lowe (minor league deal with CIN), and meaningfully lower than Luis Arraez (1/12, plus he ‘plays second base’)

Ben Clemens: and Mountcastle has 1/7 plus a club option…. not a lot of daylight there to what you can get for basically free

Ben Clemens: teams just don’t need ‘surplus 1b’ anymore

Ben Clemens: unless it’s star-level 1b

War2D2: I would always drink way too much coffee, to the point that it was affecting my sleep and attitude. Then I realized all I really wanted was something hot to drink. Team Hot Water for the win.

aiyer917: Do you feel like your background in trading/finance formed a pretty nice segway into your current work? Currently have a very similar set of interests myself.

Ben Clemens: oh, 100% yes

Ben Clemens: not with the writing, necessarily. but with idea generation and that knid of stuff, absolutely

Guest: I’m really curious about Castellanos at first base for the Padres. Is there any similar move to compare his position switch to best? Feels different than Harper as that was also injury related.

Ben Clemens: I don’t really have an easy comparison for you but I guess a lot of guys have switched to first over the years

Ben Clemens: it’s just that very few guys have been as bad as Castellanos at defense, while switching so late in their career, so I think we just have to see how it works rather than trying to estimate how it might go based on a sketchy set of comps

Random Fact Generator: A subscription to Fangraphs provides excellent value.

Ben Clemens: concur!

GA Blood: I read earlier this week that multiple owners are suggesting that the game cannot survive under it’s current economic setup (read as: without a salary cap). Isn’t this a really bad business strategy? I’m having a hard time understanding why the holders of billion-dollar assets would voluntarily come out and suggest that they’re facing imminent ruin instead of trying to offload the assets themselves. How long can they really force a lockout before it devalues their investments?

Ben Clemens: I mean, I don’t really buy their contention, and I don’t think they’re actually going to stick to it

Ben Clemens: I also don’t think they’re really convincing anyone, teams keep selling!

Ben Clemens: I think it’s just negotiating stance stuff. and like, the players can see the real books. but trying to court the public has been a successful strategy for owners in the past

Ben Clemens: ‘these ingrate players’ with variously veiled racial animus has been a really strong argument for generations, why stop now?

RH: What other disciplines should the Olympics introduce for baseball players next time out? I want to see a 1 on 1 game between pitchers and hitters representing different countries. Points for line drives only maybe

Ben Clemens: oh man, I’ve been thinking about medal inflation a lot these olympics as I watch all the nonsense sports

Ben Clemens: and also, find out that i love all the nonsense sports

Ben Clemens: the brother/sister team of Slovenians winning mixed doubles ski jumping was amazing

Ben Clemens: so: home run derby

Ben Clemens: I think you could see a bunt derby like the KBO all star game

Ben Clemens: maybe some version of a team rundown-escaping challenge?

Ben Clemens: but home run derby is an easy one. individual medals to go along with team ones

Tacoby Bellsbury: Petition to name your new toy the Flab.

Ben Clemens: haha, pass for now but if it takes off, I’ll have no choice but to accept it

Charles: Hi Ben, Love your work. I have been listening to a few podcasts to get ready for the season. Tablesetters Baseball had Shawn Spradling previewing WBC which was tremendous. What is your hype level for WBC?

Ben Clemens: it’s very high. I’ve podcasted a little and I’m also loving Kiri’s pod-by-pod previews

Ben Clemens: I went to the last WBC, dunno if I’ll make this one but the vibe was immaculate

md: also about the finance background – “hedges are for gardens” is one of my favourite articles of yours and I personally love your writing especially in the life to explain sports realm

Ben Clemens: thanks very much

Ben Clemens: yeah – when I get a chance to overlay useful expected value lessons (the kind of finance i did is a lot about learning how to REALLY measure expected value) with baseball, I feel like I do a good job with it

War2D2: Kind of out of left field, but the question about comparing the Pirates (great arms, no bats) vs. the A’s (thumpers, human equivalents of one of those spring-loaded pitching machines that loft wiffleballs for kindergarteners to hit in the back yard) made me think about the 2015/16 Cubs, and how they had a historic group of prospects and bought a top-notch rotation to win one (1) championship. I’ve often said that the main reason the window slammed shut as quickly as it did wasn’t the bats not developing like they should, but that they signed the wrong pitcher in Lester instead of Scherzer (Lester was great in 2016, then below league avg for the rest of that contract while Scherzer was winning Cy Youngs and racking up 7-WAR seasons). Have you ever considered doing a retrospective on teams whose windows of contention were much shorter than they should have been, and what the management did wrong to cause it?

Ben Clemens: it’s definitely really interesting to think about, and I do keep a list of retrospective ideas just in case baseball every pauses for a while

Ben Clemens: I think it’s also interesting to see how the Cubs plan got xeroxed (maybe it’s the Astros plan, honestly?), and then since everyone was doing it the price of pitching just kept climinb

Ben Clemens: climbing*

Ben Clemens: the article about relative pitcher and hitter age is relevant here too

GBS42: No question, just thanks for all your terrific analysis and writing!

Insert Witty Name Here: Just wanted to take a moment to recognize how far Fangraphs has come to where we have The Lab.  We live in an embarrassment of riches in a game of throwing a ball and hitting it with a stick.

Ben Clemens: I’m choosing to think of these as a congratulations to all of FanGraphs, and yeah, this is great

Ben Clemens: It’s pretty thrilling to live in a world where if we have an idea for data, we can just make it

Ben Clemens: or well, make the idea, not make the data

Ben Clemens: I’ve learned a lot about using little dummy datasets to test out my data viz tools in the last few months, but don’t worry, you guys get the good stuff

Alex: Should baseball be in the summer olympics? Do you have a opinion with WBC existing?

Ben Clemens: I think the normal setup of it being non-MLB guys is okay with me. It wouldn’t crush me if they got rid of it, though – I think it’s kinda like soccer in the olympics. like, sure, great, it’s there! but I’d rather watch the World Cup, and everyone knows that, which is why they send juniors there

Foul tips: Seeing as they are not exactly either foul balls or swinging strikes (and if anything might be more akin to a swinging strike for the batter and foul ball for the pitcher), couldn’t they be their own category?

Ben Clemens: I mean, it’s tricky! It’s not a foul ball for the pitcher if there are two strikes!

Ben Clemens: but yeah, maybe they coudl be their own category. that gets into an analysis paralysis issue, though

Ben Clemens: like we were looking at how to show Attack zones (heart/shadow/chase/waste) on FG, and you just get so many columns so quickly

Jeff in Jersey: Hi Ben. Thanks as always. Do you have a “dark horse” among the projected-to-be-around .500 teams that you have a strong feeling will surprise? Conversely, is there playoff-projected team you don’t feel good about? (Mine: Reds might be really good if the kids make a step forward; Yankees are one Judge injury away from being a middling offense)

Ben Clemens: I would cheat and say teh Brewers because I think our odds are too low on them

Ben Clemens: excluding that, I think I’d say the Diamondbacks. There’s a lot of risk but couldn’t you see Gallen just shooting back to stardom and that driving a really good team?

Ben Clemens: oh, and playoff team wise, I think the Phillies are a lot more at risk than our odds indicate. they’re always kinda injury-brittle, just because of how Dombrowski likes to build teams, and I think that leaves them very vulnerable on the pitching front this year

Ben Clemens: to be clear, I think Dombrowski is a great GM and that his method of building teams is smart risk/reward thinking. but there’s risk!

Michael – FG since 2016: if I had good suggestions for an article suggesting real solutions for CBA, who should I email?  I used to contact Mr USS Mariner but he abandoned us.

Ben Clemens: the community blog! Not that we publish stuff from it all that frequently, but we do, and I like a lot of the articles in it

Ben Clemens: https://community.fangraphs.com/utility-in-a-pinch-does-versatility-br… was the last one

Colton: Apparently Kurtz worked with Judge’s hitting guy over the offseason. Have you or anyone at FG ever thought about looking into some of his stuff for an article? He’s very abrasive and single-track minded, but he’s had a hand in helping the best hitter we’ve seen since Bonds/Pujols and it doesn’t seem like he’s slowing down anytime soon.

Ben Clemens: Me? definitely not, not really what I do

Ben Clemens: anyone at FG? Couldn’t say, I think it would have a lot to do with whether he’s crossed paths with David Laurila, but it’s not like our daily article roll is full of a bunch of reported interview stuff

Jack: Zac Gallen is so interesting to me as it feels like 2026 could be a huge bounce back year, or he could be possibly out of a job in a year’s time (not just because of a lockout). What needs to go right for him this year?

Ben Clemens: Yeah, I’m with you

Ben Clemens: Gallen is one of my least favorite pitchers to analyze, believe it or not. I can’t figure out what he does to make it work

Ben Clemens: and I also can’t figure out what hcanged to make it stop working

Ben Clemens: so I will just say that he needs to get back the ability he had to basically sequence and disguise his fastball into usefulness

JamesStirling: Hi Ben, Who will get more holds in the Toronto bullpen, Rogers, Varland or Garcia? Who would be next in line if Hoffman is injured?

Ben Clemens: it’s gonna be fun to see rubber armed Rogers and rubber armed Varland compete for this

Ben Clemens: I think it has to be one of those two. And if it were me, I’d go Rogers first up for more saves just b/c of his lack of platoon splits

Ben Clemens: but I’m not super confident in that

Nomar6: Just wondering what effect the new ABS system will have on pitchers heavily dependent on their sweeper pitch.

Ben Clemens: I’m gonna do a quick live search to answer this one

Ben Clemens: okay – 5132 sweepers taken in the shadow zone outside the regulation strike zone, 747 strikes (15%)

Ben Clemens: 20% called balls on sweepers in the shadow-in zone, taken

Ben Clemens: so right now, the umps have been slightly under-calling sweepers

Ben Clemens: that said, i ran the same thing for changeups and it’s 11% accidentally called as strikes, 24% accidentally called as balls

Ben Clemens: so I’d say that sweepers will probably be like a lot of other pitches

Velocity is a Vector: Why do we talk about pitch velo(city) or exit velocity when we really mean speed? Velocity is speed in a direction, but there’s never a direction component included. Do people just like using big words?

Ben Clemens: we do, and yes, people like using big words

Ben Clemens: I used to try to write speed instead of velo on every single article

Ben Clemens: and eventually it’s just like, no, sorry, the industry term is velo, you have to use it

Inspector Houlihan: If salary wasn’t part of the equation, what silly baseball roster trope would you most want to be?

Inspector Houlihan: Would you want to be the bizarre reliever who brushes his teeth between innings, the hyper-energetic Kike Hernandez, crusty veteran pitcher who’s been pitching since the Cold War, the Matt Stairs-esque pinch hitter who shows up to do one job in the 9th?

Ben Clemens: I’d want to be John Brebbia. I guess that’s closest to the bizarre reliever

Square up explorer: is this career or single season based? Is there a way to see individual weeks/months to co hot streaks

Square up explorer: is there a way to track square ip statistics on a week/week basis in comparison to hot/cold streaks? Could be useful injury return information

Ben Clemens: mmmmm….. probably not

Ben Clemens: to get into the nitty-gritty of it, the squared up explorer isn’t actually calculating the bubbles live for every point of data you give it. I’m pre-calculating it because the math involved is annoy8ing enough relative to the raw stats that the webpage would lag

Ben Clemens: so i’ve pre-calculated the data and saved it into its own pre-transformed state for every player you look up. I think doing that for every span would basically be impossible.

Ben Clemens: or like, it would be impossible to do with any reasonable amount of performance

Ben Clemens: for other tools where we’re just dropping the data in without doing much transformation, it’s much easier to show short spans

Ben Clemens: the other issue is that the sample sizes would be really small

Oaktown Blues: Is there a source on Kurtz working with Judge’s guy? I can’t find anything online. Maybe Colton can weigh in

Insert Witty Name Here: Re Velo: aren’t pitches going in a direction and balls exiting the bat in a direction so there’s velocity? I’m probably wrong, but that was always how I thought about it.

Ben Clemens: I mean, they are

Ben Clemens: we just aren’t citing the direction

Ben Clemens: it’s like, 70mph on the highway? that’s the speed you’re driving at

Ben Clemens: 70mph due west? velocity

Insert Witty Name Here: Say you had to spend 2026 watching every Logan Webb pitch in person with the caveat that you cannot obtain any stat during that time. How close do you think you’d be guessing his WAR and Stuff metrics?

Ben Clemens: hmmmmmm

Ben Clemens: I think I’d do okay. I’d do just fine at WAR, because I can count runs and whatnot

Ben Clemens: stuff is tricky b/c I already know a lot about him,b ut I’m not sure I’d recognize it if I didn’t already know how good his sinker’s stuff is, for example

Colton: Braden tweeted out yesterday that Kurtz went yard to center with a 120mph EV. Teacherman, Judge’s hitting guy, tweeted last night a text thread where someone asked what the correlation was between loading without moving your hands and hitting because it was his cue and he went yard to center with a 120mph EV.

aiyer917: what level of mathematics did you have to use most frequently in your finance days? do you find the baseball stuff requiring a similar level of technical sophistication?

Ben Clemens: um…. like, nothing that fancy

Ben Clemens: I think that various versions of portfolio theory required good understanding of correlation math, and I did a lot of Bayesian inference too

Ben Clemens: it’s good to understand the idea behind the models that your quants build, but knowing every little detail is less importnat than understanding how it can break

Ben Clemens: I’d say the same in baseball. Learning a ton of math is nice. Learning what the math won’t show you, or the ways things break down, is way nicer

Colton: By Braden, I’m talking about Dallas Braden. Should’ve added that.

Insert Witty Name Here: Replace Logan Webb with say Andrew Painter who no one knows how his stuff will look this year – how well could you grade his Stuff (should ask Eno this question too).

Ben Clemens: Oh yeah that would be WAY harder

Ben Clemens: I think I’d do okay if his stuff was the obvious kind of great, and poorly otherwise

Crabcakes: I love baseball in large part because of the stats and analytics, but a sad side effect for me is the optimization of player approaches makes for less diversity of player types.  As such, I’m unreasonably attached to guys like Chandler Simpson in the hopes they can make a “run really really fast” approach work.  For this season, what odds would you give on (a) Rays have him run wild and he steals like 70 bases, (b) sits a bunch because the bat is hollow and he ends up with 30-40 SBs, or (c) the Rays decide he’s not actually good and banish him to the minors by mid-May?

Ben Clemens: oh yeah, that I agree with you about

Ben Clemens: I think that a)is actually the most likely because I think heh’ll figure out how to be a great defender

Ben Clemens: but I’m definitely a little bit sad that our projections don’t agree and have him in the 30-40 range

aiyer917: did you work mostly in portfolios? or options/other stuff too?

Ben Clemens: i did fixed income relative value stuff, mostly as a PM, but also as a market maker

bringbackpologrounds: Which MLB superstar is the most likely to be ripping his teammates on burner accounts, a la Kevin Durant?

Ben Clemens: what a delightful question

Ben Clemens: I have no idea how to answer it, I just want to note that I love KD

Ben Clemens: this kind of pettiness is next level

Ben Clemens: I guess maybe Nolan Arenado?

Ben Clemens: I only say that because I have a memory of him barehanding a baseball, turning to the opposing dugout to say ‘watch this’, and then basically no-looking it to first

529: Does having two elite defenders next to each other amplify or diminish each other? Or neither.

Ben Clemens: my guess? neither, because they steal a few balls from each other but allow for better certainty of who’s where which raises their efficiency on other balls

Ben Clemens: but yeah, I have no idea how to measure this

RAH: Continuing the small market/big market thing… I actually wonder if it’s more about wanting to see teams clear their hurdles. I’m more interested in the Mets than you would think if mainly looking at market size and payroll. They are still the LOL Mets playing in the shadow of the Yankees. Sort of how I loved watching Nomar and Pedro break the curse of the Bambino, only to despise “Red Sox Nation” a few years later.

Ben Clemens: another reasonable suggestion

Ben Clemens: ‘Will the Dodgers defeat their greatest hardship – the fact that sometimes the risotto in the team buffet for lunch is gummy?’

Ben Clemens: like, I’m not clicking on that story

Appogies: I accidentally hit sent again before finishing and called “Crabcakes” “crapcakes”. I’m sorry crabcakes.

Ben Clemens: there’s another comment that goes with this, but I wanted to put this one first, out of order, b/c it made me laugh

Response to crapcakea: I feel like the optimization of player approaches has become too cookie cutter. Luis Arias seemed like a bat to ball savant who could use his fringe power to hit thr ball 330-370 feet down the left field line for home runs. It turns out he only ended up hitting the ball 290-320 feet. Optimizing his skills look very different.

Ben Clemens: Yeah, for sure

Ben Clemens: that said, I do think teams are doing more than we see to work on this

Ben Clemens: we just don’t hear about it

Ben Clemens: Arraez was a lot better before he bought into the ‘you must never strike out’ myth, for the record

Ben Clemens: like, he’s become more unique, but less good

Ben Clemens: I don’t know if you’ve looked at his graph on the Squared-Up Explorer, but it’s silly. just like, a straight vertical line at 90% squared up rate ,with the softest bat speed in baseball

Jack: How do you feel about the Orioles pitching moves so far? I like the Helsley bounce back buy, and Baz is controllable if a bit underwhelming and has injury risk, and Bassitt is a floor raiser. But get the sense that “more” or “bigger” would have been preferred by the fans

Ben Clemens: I like a lot of them in isolation, but I’m not bought in on the overall strategy

Ben Clemens: they’re probably gonna get an offseason overview treatment in the same vein as the Mets and Red Sox now that the heavy lifting of getting the Lab running is done

Tacoby Bellsbury: I’m clicking on the Dodgers headline about the risotto because I know Baumann wrote it.

mike: Are we supposed to believe that losing Lopez and replacing him with a guy with a 5 ERA is only going to cost the Twins 3 wins? I’m not sure I get how pitcher war reflects reality here?

Ben Clemens: I mean, you probably are. one way to think about it is 150 innings of Lopez’s 3.75 ERA is 62.5 runs, 150 innings of a 5 ERA is 83 runs

Ben Clemens: 20 runs in 25 starts. the guy allows an extra run a game or so, and it’ll probably be chunked out, plenty of games with many extra

Ben Clemens: i mean, just as another example that isn’t proving much but shows how noisy this stuff is, Lopez made 14 starts, 75 innings, 2.74 ERA 5-4 record. Zebby made 16 starts, 79 innings, 5.56 ERA, 5-6 record

Ben Clemens: don’t use win/loss records

Ben Clemens: but also don’t overestimate how many wins you can add with one dude

Surplus Valuez = Stolen Wages: Pete Alonso and Gunnar Henderson or Kurtz and Wilson?

Ben Clemens: Pete and Gunnar for me by a bit

Ben Clemens: like… I love Kurtz

Ben Clemens: I am verrrry skeptical of Wilson

Arraez and sliding scale for square up rate?: I was just about to reply about his squared up stats when you said that. Yes, it’s clear he should sacrifice some of that for more bat speed. I’d be curious what his 90% would look like. Also, does it make sense to create a sliding scale based on bat speed. As it currently stands, 80% is great for evaluating (part of) the hit tool, but a sliding scale would allow us to see whether guys like Stanton could go down to 65% to hit home runs with more regularity or Arraez needs 95% for extra base hits. I’m losing syntax rapidly but getting excited.

Ben Clemens: yeah, i mean, I think that this extra analysis probably has merit, I think ‘blasts’ or whatever are basically this

Ben Clemens: that’s why we have the little table out to the right with bat speed, hard hit rate ,that kinda thing

Ben Clemens: it’s tricky, though. it’s not like there’s an easy tradeoff between squared-up rate and bat speed. and then would you just want exit velocity by launch angle? I suppose that’s what the endgame would be. maybe that’s another option for the future, but I enjoy thinking about things in terms of how frequently a batter gets to the ball square, and then to think about bat speed on a seprate axis

EccentricATLFan: Just also saying that I’m yet another one who’s finding the new FangraphsLab tools to be awesome (and of course cutting into work productivity).  Especially loving the PitchingBot visualizer tool, and currently using it to see which pitches might be more interesting than expected.  For example, currently looking at Colorado’s Seth Halvorsen, and while the focus generally seems to be on his raw fastball velo (no surprise since he averages 100), it turns out that his splitter might be worth taking a closer look at since he seems to command it surprisingly well.

Ben Clemens: thanks for the kind words. I’m pretty excited to see what people come up with with these new tools

Ben Clemens: alright, I’m gonna call it a chat and go read some of the feedback we’ve gotten on the Lab. Again, I want to say thanks to everyone for all of their suggetsions. And I apologize for the lack of nonsense in the chat today, we’ll have to make up for that next time