Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 3/9/26

Ben Clemens: Hey everybody, welcome to the chat

Ben Clemens: The WBC is in full swing, spring training has started, some of the last few free agents are signing; the regular season is right around the corner, and I’m excited

Ben Clemens: let’s talk baseball

Beano: Thoughts on the reemergence of Wili Castro in Denver? He might have a career year – yes?

Ben Clemens: I mean, sure?

Ben Clemens: most people might

Ben Clemens: if you mean that he’s batting .636 in spring training, it’s 13 PA

Ben Clemens: but he’s a nice player! before he fell apart in the second half of 2025 he was working on three straight plus seasons

Ben Clemens: not crazy to think he’ll just be that guy again. and hoenstly, 2024 Willi Castro would be the Rockies’ best player

Guest: Will the Assorted City Athletics be able to get enough good pitching in time to support their hitting core?

Ben Clemens: I think so, but I don’t think it’s this year

Ben Clemens: I think that the hope is that they start spending money on pitching, to go with all the hitting, in 2027 and into 2028

Ben Clemens: but like…. this version of the pitching staff needs a lot of things to break right

Key Flaw: After any amount of time on a job, there feels like it is a slog (even if it is something you love). How has the day-to-day doldrums of writing about and analyzing baseball been compared to your old corporate job? Is this more seen in the offseason where you are more feeling like writing content than about what is actually happening?

Ben Clemens: Oh, it’s very real. If you do a job, it’s a job

Ben Clemens: and I need variety in my life. I’ve picked jobs like ‘bet on interest rates’ and ‘write about baseball’ because they are hopefully not repetitive

Ben Clemens: Let’s just say that the FanGraphs Lab is a real part of how I keep myself motivated

Ben Clemens: I really like doing different things and changing up my responsibilities

Matt: Hey Ben, what do you think a peak PCA season will look like? Obviously carrying a sub-5% walk rate isn’t great, but gold glove CFs with 70 XBH don’t grow on trees

Ben Clemens: I think it’ll look like 2025

Ben Clemens: 5.5 WAR thanks to an outlier defensive season, amazing

Ben Clemens: a gold glove CF who’s 10% above average offensively is a hell of a player

Ben Clemens: like, maybe he spikes a 7 WAR season in there somewhere thanks to a crazy babip?

Ben Clemens: but I am not betting on him suddenly becoming an elite hitter given his pitch recognition struggles

Oaktown Blues: Did you read Project Hail Mary? Are you excited for the movie?

Ben Clemens: I haven’t read it yet – because my wife got it for Christmas and I’m waiting for her to finish it to read it

Ben Clemens: but I’m really excited, I’ve read all of Weir’s other books and I’m hyped for the movie

Phil: “If you do a job, it’s a job.” Couldn’t agree with this more. I am in academia, very different industry, but doing what I know is a (possibly unattainable) dream job for a lot of people. I am grateful when I take a step back, but the day-to-day is still a slog. “I love my job” means I derive a general satisfaction, not that it’s continuously or even consistently pleasurable.

Ben Clemens: Yeah, totally

Ben Clemens: there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way

Ben Clemens: it’s still good to do work that’s satisfying

Ben Clemens: but like…. if you tell yourself that ever feeling bored, tired, or frustrated means you don’t love your job, things won’t work out well

Babip Roberts: Given everything we know now that we didn’t know in 1992, would you say that it was a mistake to put a team in Denver? Does it distort baseball to such a degree that it’s not really worthwhile?

Ben Clemens: not at all. I think it’s a great idea. I also love going to Rockies games and think Colorado and Denver absolutely merit a team

drplantwrench: semi-miserable academics RISE UP

Houzer: Given Parker Meadows lackluster Spring, should the Tigers make an aggressive offer on Brenton Doyle? Would Max Anderson get a deal done?

Ben Clemens: Just to be clear – Parker Meadows has 25 PA in spring training

Ben Clemens: I’m more worried about his lackluster 2025

Ben Clemens: but buddy, wait until I tell you about Brenton Doyle’s 2025

Ben Clemens: I truly have no idea if Anderson would get the job done. I’m guessing not b/c the Rockies seem to like Doyle. But this is not a case where the Tigers absolutely need Doyle to compete. Would he even make them better? I’m unsure. I like him and am sympathetic to the fact that he had some off-field struggles last year that probably cost him concentration and probably won’t repeat in 2026, but like…. dude has a career .284 OBP playing in Coors

Dodgers Blue: How much have you moved Mick Abel up your rankings based on what we are seeing this spring?  I assume the Twins will cap him around 130 IPs, if he holds a starting job all season?

Ben Clemens: Me personally? Zero

Ben Clemens: what with him having thrown 10 innings across 3 starts and all

Ben Clemens: honestly if you’re coming here looking for spring training takes, you’re going to be disappointed, I’m sorry. I just don’t think it matters that much. I spend a lot of time watching spring games, but not b/c I’m scouting the stat lines

Ben Clemens: I just like watching baseball

Woodrow: All time NBA starting five with each player from a different decade??

Ben Clemens: I’m not sure I’m good enough at the NBA to do this but depending on how you define decades, I’m guessing you could get something like Magic/Jordan/Lebron/Russell/someone

Ben Clemens: and like…. cool, neat, don’t need to do much more work than that

Woodrow: All time batting lineup with each player from a different decade??

Ben Clemens: similarly, without putting TOO much work into this, you can get Williams/Ruth/Mays/A Rod/Schmidt/Hornsby/some other dudes

Ben Clemens: let Bonds DH, or maybe Ted, or hell, plant one of those dudes at first and get one of Judge or Ohtani in too

Dodgers Blue: What does your crystal ball predict will happen with the glut of quality IFs in Seattle over the next 2 years: Donovan, Cole Young, Michael Arroyo, Crawford, Colt Emerson.

Jerry Dipoto: Given our competitive window and where we’re at with Julio/Cal/Naylor… should I extend Brendan Donovan? Passan put out a tweet stacking him up to Bo after the trade and I feel like now would be the time to pounce before he’s a year away from FA….

Ben Clemens: I think the M’s will make a bona fide attempt to extend Donovan. I don’t know if he’ll take it, though I expect he’s motivated to given his relatively light career earnings

Ben Clemens: Crawford is surely on the way out. The Col’s are going to have a shot at two infield spots, let’s say their median expectation is one. That means Donovan is gonna have a job almost no matter what

Ben Clemens: and the M’s have done a good job laying down some anchor contracts in Julio and Cal, but they could use more controllable above average players. I think this makes a lot of sense and I expect them to try pretty hard to find something

Guest: Tim Duncan can finish out your starting 5 if you like- Russell 60s, Magic 80s, Jordan 90s, Timmy aughts, LeBron the past 23 years.

Ben Clemens: Perfect. I couldn’t really squeeze Shaq in there but Duncan is a great compormise

WBC enjoyer: Am I crazy for thinking the Cardinals will have a much better rotation than their 27 ranked projection. They just have like 10-12 really intriguing upper minors arms now. They were 25th in fWAR last year and that was with Fedde, Mikolas, and Pallante throwing 500 absolutely terrible innings.

Ben Clemens: I actuallyw as on the Viva El Birdos podcast last night talking about a similar thing

Ben Clemens: I mean, the Cards have some intriguing arms. So do most teams in baseball

Ben Clemens: Also like… Pallante is in this year’s rotation!

Ben Clemens: I think they’ll probably be better than last year. But we’re projecting Dustin May for more innings than he’s ever thrown before, McGreevy to be league average in a big chunk of innings, Pallante to improve a ton…. and we still think they’ll be bad

Ben Clemens: it’s not so much that none of the minor leaguers can surprise. It’s that they need like three of them to surprise, or to get way better than the past performance from multiple guys on their big league rotation

Ben Clemens: like, sure. that can all happen. But it’s not the path of least resistance

Sam: Is there a baseball equivalent of Lebron? Somebody who was a super heralded prospect, came up and was almost immediately a top 5-10 player in the game, then stayed at that level for over 2 decades.

Ben Clemens: A Rod? Bonds? borderline Bryce Harper?

Cal: Os fan here. Was thinking about Os super-prospects who have graduated. It seems like folks have been high on several Os players and the consensus is coming back to earth some. Thinking of Holliday as the #1 overall prospect, Gunnar as 1a/1b in the trade value series, Adley high up in the trade value and picked preseason as top catcher, Westburg high up in the trade value series. Feels like things havent panned out like those evaluations would have implied. Anything to worry about with Os process? Or just bad luck? Or me catastrophizing?

Ben Clemens: I think it’s probably a mix of a few things. I’m still pretty high on Gunnar, for example, and wouldn’t lump him in with the rest

Ben Clemens: and Westburg’s biggest issue has been that he can’t stay healthy. He’s played at an All Star level when available, surprisingly enough

Ben Clemens: the Adley thing – yeah, look, this didn’t pan out the way I expected. I really don’t know what to make of it, especially since the ceiling is clearly there

Ben Clemens: I don’t have a good answer for that aside from catching prospects are inherently risky b/c catching is hard

Ben Clemens: Lastly, HOlliday, and:

Houzer: What are you expecting from Jackson Holliday this season- given the pedigree; but with the injury

Ben Clemens: I mean, I’ve been the low man on Holliday for a long time, so you have to bake that into your evaluation

Ben Clemens: but like…. I think he’s gonna be just okay

Ben Clemens: league average hitter with weirdly-shaped production. maybe below that this year b/c of his injury

Ben Clemens: I mean the guy had a fully healthy year, played 149 games, improved his strikeout an walk rates, beat his xwOBA, and was worth 1.2 WAR

Ben Clemens: let’s be realistic. you can hope for the best but the pedigree is less of a meaningful input after seeing his MLB struggles

Surplus Valuez = Stolen Wages: Henderson is going to be a monster FA

Ben Clemens: seeeeriously

Sad: Ben, thanks for doing these.
What is it with can’t-miss prospects that actually miss? For every Bryce Harper there’s a Dylan crews. There was nothing apparent that would show that he would be a b*st, but it’s looking more and more likely. What happened to him, and to you foresee him every becoming that 4-5 WAR guy he was promised to be?

Ben Clemens: I mean, I think that this is basically people not understanding uncertainty well enough

Ben Clemens: can’t miss doesn’t exist

Ben Clemens: and also, while in retrospect these things can be explained, a lot of it is unknowable ex ante

Ben Clemens: if eveyrone knew exactly how every player would turn out, baseball would suck

Phil: I had never seen Oviedo pitch before this spring and I’m impressed. Is he better than the fringe 5 role he’s kind of structurally assigned to for now?

Ben Clemens: Hello. Welcome To Oviedo Central. Here’s an article I wrote about how excited I was to see Oviedo start

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/finding-corbin/

Ben Clemens: It’s from November, 2020

Ben Clemens: The stuff? It’s great. You look at him throw and go oh yeah, this is what I’m talking about

Ben Clemens: the issue is consistency, or at least, it has been

Ben Clemens: I think that if he can start repeating his mechanics better, the stuff is unquestionably there

Russ: How do you think Grayson Rodriguez and Coby Mayo will fare this season? What would a successful season for each of them look like?

Ben Clemens: Rodriguez is easy. He just needs to be healthy

Ben Clemens: If he throws 125 innings, 2026 is a success

Ben Clemens: If I’m the Angels, I let him ramp up at whatever speed he needs, because the results just aren’t as important as the ability to be back on the mound for a real amount of time

Ben Clemens: Mayo is trickier. I think that success for him means finding his way into the playing time rotation

Ben Clemens: he just wasn’t quite able to do that in 2025. So I’m guessing it’s like a hot start that gets him run at 3B, enough time spelling Alonso at 1B, and then he’s like 25% above average offensively in June and they decide that he just has to play full time somehow

Sid the Astros Kid: went to the wbc on friday and saturday. I gotta say I love watching games in person the atmosphere is so good

Ben Clemens: I’ve only been to one game and it wasn’t even good – Canada against GB last WBC. And it was still SO Fun

Guest: Is there a back of the envelope way to use your/rally’s dollar per WAR framework for extensions or is that something you’d need to look at more closely?

Ben Clemens: probably something to look at more closely. But I’d basically say that teams should offer more friendly terms, options and escalators and stuff, to guys who might hit the top end outcomes

Ben Clemens: how that works exactly, I haven’t worked out yet. but the direction makes sense

Oaktown Blues: How hyped can/should I get about superlative statcast results for prospects in Spring Training? This is the first year with Spring statcast, so we don’t know exactly how it translates to regular season – would you expect it to have similar predictive power as regular season statcast results?

Ben Clemens: relative to sample size, sure. the sample sizes are REALLY tiny in spring, though

Ben Clemens: like, the bat speed numbers are real

Ben Clemens: but it’s not liek bat speed translates all that cleanly to production

Ben Clemens: I think the Statcast numbers are great for establishing new levels for guys, that kind fo thing. I am never like ‘oh this minor leaguer has to succeed because of his raw measurables’ though

Ben Clemens: they’re fun. It’s fun to speculate on upside based on these numbers. But the old adage that you can’t learn THAT much in spring is still true

Guest: I’m curious, have you had any interest in getting into machine learning? You feel like the writer at Fangraphs most likely to start learning PyTorch for some project

Ben Clemens: I have used some fancy regression techniques for various stuff in the past

Ben Clemens: including my fringe-y minor leaguers series ,which I’ve stepped away from a bit in recent years

Ben Clemens: thanks to realizing it was getting less valuable as the mainstream scouting community’s fluency with data increased rapidly

Ben Clemens: I’m also knee deep in the guts of PitchingBot trying to understand it better, and I’d say it’s basically an example of this

Ben Clemens: The only thing holding me back is that it’s very dense and the results are not always all that fun to communicate in writing

Ben Clemens: balancing the ‘learn new stuff’ part of the job and the ‘explain cool stuff to people so that they like reading it’ part is not always easy

Idiotic Failson: So far I love the ABS system. How do you feel about it?

Ben Clemens: I’m into it. I also love bad challenges

Ben Clemens: just, so delightful

Sir Nerdlington: How soon until I can believe my kid’s breakout is real? He’s hitting .571 in their three high school scrimmages so I should expect that to hold for the season, right?

Ben Clemens: depends. did you put a blast sensor on his bat to check out his barrel rate?

Ben Clemens: if you did, it’s real. if you didn’t, it’s fake, because you can only succeed by putting sensors on bats

Fin: What is Marcelo Mayer’s 90th percentile outcome? Willy Adames? Is there a real (say, 25% or greater) chance that the issues with breaking balls sink him and he peaks as a defense-first utility guy?

Ben Clemens: I don’t have a good sense for percentile outcomes and ceilings and stuff

Ben Clemens: it’s just not the way I perceive baseball, I don’t think I’m very accurate at judging that

Ben Clemens: that said, is there a 25% chance that he peaks as a defense-first utility guy? I mean, of course there is

Ben Clemens: like, he didn’t tear up Triple-A in 2025, he didn’t tear up Double-A in 2023, he missed half of 2024 and hwile he was amazing, a lot of it came down to a .367 BABIP that he just does not have the batted ball profile to back up

Ben Clemens: it’s really hard to be a great major league hitter. there’s no shame in failing, even for top prospects

Ben Clemens: One thing I really like about his profile is that the defense gives him a really nice floor and a while to figure things out. He can help the big league team out even if he’s not hitting

Ben Clemens: but if we’re being rational, Bayesian actors here, the odds of it not working out are appreciable

Not Ben Clemens: How much interaction occurs between people like yourself as third-party evaluators and Major League Orgs? You hear about teams coordinating with the Drivelines of the baseball world, do you ever receive questions, offers, etc from a scouting or valuation standpoint directly from MLB front offices or agents at Fangraphs?

Ben Clemens: I try to cultivate a network of people I’m friendly with and would love to share info both ways

Ben Clemens: It helps most during trade value time, because I do really lean on my friends and acquaintances on the team side for sanity checks, and frequently for debates about players I’m high ro low on

Ben Clemens: aside from that, there are a few guys I keep up with more frequently, and those tend towards bouncing non-player-specific ideas off of each other

Ben Clemens: like, I’m not gonna go ask them whether they think x player’s fastball is mis-evaluated by our model. That’s kinda weird. But we might talk about dollars-per-war frameworks or how much money might get spent in free agency or that kind of thing

Mike Lommler: I’ve used a couple forms of machine learning in the ecological sciences. Cool stuff and quite useful for predictive-type work, but one of my complaints is that they are often a bit of a black box when it comes to explaining “why” something may be happening.

Mike Lommler: The “why” is also an issue with any sort of model with too many inputs, though.

Ben Clemens: Yeah, I concur

Ben Clemens: I think that’s why the pitching models are useful as numbers and yet aren’t driving articles as much as you’d think for something so transformative on the data front

Ben Clemens: the results are a lot more interesting with a why, basically

drobber: Have you ever analyzed hitting performance vs quality of pitcher? I know that sounds basic, but I really mean: I’ve wondered if there are players who hit relatively the same against all pitchers (regardless of how good they are) vs hitters who are completely hopeless against “good” pitching but mash against “bad” pitching.

I think this would be trackable in minor league performance and really influence how you see players’ ceilings (and, in the majors, would definitely influence lineup strategy).

Ben Clemens: Here’s something Davy did about it

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/nobody-actually-hits-good-pitching/

Ben Clemens: I feel like I did something about this with Tyler O’Neill as my example in the apst, too

Ben Clemens: though I can’t find it

Ben Clemens: I’d basically say that the sample size means it’s really hard to say anything about it, and when you do some kind of split half validation the numbers say ‘this is not really a real skill’

EccentricATLFan: Perfect solution for how the Braves can use the Profar money: help lure former A’s top draft pick Kyler Murray to Atlanta.  Braves get an additional outfielder, Falcons get a QB, Murray needs a home city to play in…what could go wrong?

Ben Clemens: my Michael Penix Jr. dynasty shares are screaming at you

Ben Clemens: but I love the idea of bringing Kyler back into the two-way fold so I’m back in

EccentricATLFan: Just want to point out that Houston’s minors signing of Steven Okert has to be one of the best bargains of last offseason by getting a generic-y Quad-A guy and making his slider a demon to face.  Not only did that pitch have xwOBA of only .206 against with a 40.7% whiff rate (including one of the best Z-Contact% among sliders generally), but PitchingBot Visualizer shows that it was above average in Danger Miss%, Waste Miss%, and Squandered% with better than average command.

Ben Clemens: oh for sure. really nice one

bosoxforlife: It is not news that the Red Sox have a glut of outfielders and they also have an even greater glut of potential starters and no left hand middle relievers. At this point it appears as if Oviedo has the inside track to the fifth starter spot. Can you see a scenario in which Early and Tolle are used in this role?

Ben Clemens: I think so, but I think it’d be an anti-fragility kind of setup from Boston’s standpoint. As in, they plan on a pitcher getting hurt and just don’t know which one. So they run one of their good starters as a multi-inning reliever in the bigs to get him a little time and keep him at least somewhat stretched out, while planning on the rotation clicking into place iwth the first elbow twinge

Old Timey Baseball: Your “plant one of those dudes at 1B” take above got me wondering about the modern player, and how many poor-to-middling corner outfielders and 2Bs in today’s game would be dominant defenders in Teddy Ballgame’s time, just because of superior athleticism.

Ben Clemens: my guess: lots

Ben Clemens: they’d just cover more ground

Ben Clemens: guys are freak athletes these days, and they spend probably twice as much aggregate time drilling because sports are just more professionalized

Ben Clemens: now, bring thoes old dudes to the present and let them train for a decade and I don’t think that’d happen

Ben Clemens: okay, topic change for me because I had this written down and forgot to ask last week

Ben Clemens: what kind of visualizations do you want in your wildest realizable dreams?

Ben Clemens: The next crop of lab tools is in development

Ben Clemens: the one I’m most excited about is Paired Pitches, which lets you see how pitches play off of each other at different locations in and out of the zone

Ben Clemens: but there’s space for a lot more

Ben Clemens: what do you wish we had?

Ben Clemens: and while questions fill up about that, let’s answer some nonsense

Guest: Who on FG staff would make the best Traitor? The best Faithful?

Ben Clemens: I think that Davy would make a great faithful. He’s very earnest and very effective at conveying what he’s feeling

Ben Clemens: i feel like a big liability as a faithful is people not believing you or your actions being sketchy

Ben Clemens: a Traitor? I mean, the easy choice is Dan. He likes to play the villain. But I’m gonna say Meg, actually. I think that keeping a ton of stuff in your head straight is one of the hardest skills of being a traitor. It was the downfall of a few people this year. Meg has the highest cognitive load of anyone keeping the site functioning and releasing articles regularly, so I think she’d be the best at that particular skill

Phil: One of the EW team previews mentioned Jeff Sullivan and Dave Camerom being involved in a trade. How active is the FG alumni network? Curious how often this happens without getting reported.

Ben Clemens: I’m guessing, of course. But I make a poitn of chatting up FG alums wherever I can, particularly at the winter meetings

Jeff in Jersey: is it more or less entertaining to see the USA UBC team win by smaller margins than expected?

Ben Clemens: i think more. I have to be honest with you, the round robin phase of the WBC is not wildly compelling to me compared to the knockout rounds when the good teams play

Ben Clemens: so making the round robin games better? strict upside

Houzer: So the Tigers are learning that Parker Meadows prob isn’t even a stop-gap solution to Max Clark .. and maybe Max Clark is still a few years away from getting here. Is it crazy to throw a package at San Diego for Tatis that is headlined bye Clark?

Ben Clemens: and fine, this one: hilariously crazy and I don’t think this makes much sense at all

Ben Clemens: I don’t think it’s enough, I don’t think the Padres are trading Tatis, I don’t think the Tigers are acting like they want to pay someone as much money as Tatis

small e: How can the Red Sox get Masataka Yoshida to believe the entire season is the WBC?

Ben Clemens: hypnosis

Kelly: Hey Ben, I have a few questions. First off, how dare you?

Ben Clemens: this was actually the first question I got today – I just didn’t have a great place to put it until now

Ben Clemens: I guess my response is: make me stop, then

Klubot3000: Please tell me you’ve seen Teo Davidov? Is the two-forehand style going to sweep the tennis world??

Ben Clemens: …. it is not

Ben Clemens: but I love it

Ben Clemens: I have to say, learning to hit a two-handed backhand a few years ago made me wonder why more people don’t at least try a two-handed forehand

Marc K: Just read your Brewers article. Superb.  Have you read about or seen the new kick change that Kyle Harrison developed over the off season?  It’s been devastating and his overall stuff has been great (I think he had 8 Ks in 3 innings yesterday).  If this is real it may make that Durbin trade look pretty good.

Ben Clemens: I knew he developed it. He sure had a fip-a-palooza of a game, huh? 8k, 2BB, HR

Guest: reading your Brewers article now– assuming you were putting it together for a while, but did you see Kyle Harrison this weekend? Does his 8 ks in 4 IP change your calculus at all on that trade?

Ben Clemens: I mean, of course it doesn’t

Ben Clemens: that’s not how one spring trianing start works

Ben Clemens: but like I said…. the reason this trade makes sense or doesn’t make sense in the end has to do with stuff I can’t see

Ben Clemens: the Brewers make a lot of these trades where some not immediately evident skill makes them like a dude a lot

Ben Clemens: is Harrison that guy? Definitely could be. Obviously the tools are loud

Ben Clemens: I wrote this last year about how to think about the trajectory of post-hype sleeper pitchers:

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-quickly-should-you-change-your-mind-ab…

Ben Clemens: adding new pitches is interesting for sure. keeps the range of outcomes wide. would you be happy if he turned into fellow post-hype sleeper Quinn Priester? Probably still yes

Oaktown Blues: Leo De Vries for Eury Perez: who says no?

Ben Clemens: oooooooooh

Ben Clemens: boy, I think the Marlins would, but I love the idea of the A’s offering this

Guest: re FG Labs: i noticed on the leaderboards you’re starting to roll out attack zone plate discipline stats, some way to combine that with bat tracking would be very cool (sorry this is such a vague suggestion lol)

Ben Clemens: I mean, I’ll take that as a generic suggestion

Ben Clemens: I’ve been more on the pitching side so far but one suggestion we got was a squared up explorer only for bat path instead of launch angle. interesting!

Ben Clemens: something about changing behavior by attack zone based on count sounds good too

Mike Lommler: Via some form of wizardry or sci-fi technology, you can transport one non-HOF-caliber player to 1968 and see how they would do. Who do you choose?

Ben Clemens: oh man. Oneil Cruz

Ben Clemens: could you imagine?

Welland Jackfish: Would Bob Gibson throw at Oneil Cruz just because he was insulted by the long hair?

Ben Clemens: I mean, Bob Gibson would probably throw at him and not really care why

Ben Clemens: but could you imagine the staredown after a 600 foot bomb or whatever?

Ben Clemens: god, it’d be delightful

Idiotic Failson: Aroldis Chapman throwing 104 in ’68 would melt brains

NPO: Do you know if there’s been an attempt to quantify the value of taking pitches in regards to wearing a pitcher out? Like a 6 pitch at-bat against a good starter is worth 0.001 more WAR/WPA than a 5 pitch at-bat, etc.

Ben Clemens: People have definitely tried this in the past

Ben Clemens: I’ve never seen anything approaching evidence that it exists. doesn’t mean it doesn’t, just that we can’t measure it yet

Sad: I understand internal development “hit” rates differ organizationally, I just can’t figure out the why. What makes teams differ in their scouting and development? The Guardians and Rays are always praised for their developmental system and they always seem to be better at churning out consistent major league talent than say Cincinnati or NYM. Are different data points held in higher regard, is coaching better, is traditional scouting more important than modern age analytics will admit, or something else entirely? Obviously if we knew every reason, all teams would be better lol, just curious if you have any specific insights?

Ben Clemens: I mean, if you knew the answer to this, the Reds would hire you

Ben Clemens: I think that there’s something to good organizational culture. I have plenty of experience in the past of being the same Ben at two different places and thriving or struglging based on the way things worked at those places

Ben Clemens: so I’d say there are two things. First, there’s data. New techniques, new ways of sorting players, etc. This advantage is generally not stationary, b/c personnel changes, and obviously the teams taht are behind are incentivized to hire guys from the teams who are ahead. people talk, etc.

Ben Clemens: then there’s some nebulous organizational culture/health/process term that is a lot harder to copy

Ben Clemens: it’s not quite the same, but Meta spent a trillion dollars basically signing all the good AI free agents

Ben Clemens: but bummer, they work at Meta! And so they haven’t produced anything coherent

Ben Clemens: b/c the organzational culture sucks, in my opinion

Ben Clemens: so there’s surely some of that going on on the team side, and it’s really hard to measure from the outside but also clearly impactful

bosoxforlife: I have completely lost touch with ST. I am watching Colombia-Panama right now on the big screen and DR-Israel just ended. The Red Sox have 16 organization players in the WBC and their ST lineup is unrecognizable

Ben Clemens: same. I like to have some random baseball on all the time. and for most of spring, I don’t really care what the results are

Ben Clemens: but yeah, some of these spring rosters are so bad now that I’m not even going to really watch them

Ben Clemens: until the WBC is over

Ben Clemens: plus, hey, I can watch the WBC

Ben Clemens: alright, I gotta go eat some lunch

Ben Clemens: lunch question guy, we’re having leftovers of an NYTimes calendar recipe, sheet pan gnocchi and veggies. It was spectacular, I’d never had baked gnocchi before but I highly recommend it

Ben Clemens: have a wonderful week everyone, and let’s check back in for some clashes of titans in the WBC before long