Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 4/20/26

Ben Clemens: Hey everybody, welcome to the chat. Let’s get to talkin’

Tacoby Bellsbury: PSA: If you want to go back to the native Jotcast links instead of the embedded version because it’s too compressed on mobile, click the square icon on the right end of the row with your user name.

Ben Clemens: neat! Not quite sure what this means but better visibility for Jotcast is nice

sandwiches: There was this great Sullivan article back in 2018 about how even after 81 games the projections still did better at predicting the 2nd half than either of season to date or pythag results to that point. Given the Brewers outlier propensity to beat the projections, is there a point where the inverse might be true for them? I’d imagine 21 games is more than a little early, but as of now they are at 83.1 wins via the default projections versus 92.6 wins using season to date mode.

Ben Clemens: that’s because season to date mode is mostly using last year’s stats. Like, they’re not even that good this year! 10th in baseruns

Ben Clemens: We’ve done many versions of that article over the years, the conclusions basically don’t change

Ben Clemens: soryr, I should say, they have not been very good so far this year. It’s fairly clera that looing at their 12-9 Pythag, BaseRuns, and actual record means not THAT much, you kno?

Ben Clemens: that’s not bad or anything. But looking at that and going ‘well they’re beating the model’ is not where my head goes. My head goes to ‘it’s April 20’

Oblivious M’s Fan: Happy Patriots Day! I actually had no idea the Red Sox played a early game every Patriots Day until this morning when I turned on MLB Network at work.

Anyway, I wanted to talk quickly about Kodai Senga. His K/9 is fantastic but walks and HR’s are up, which leads to an xFIP… lower then his 2025 FIP? I think their is reason to still believe in him as long as the BABIP goes down, but with the way the Mets are going I wonder if a trade will occur sooner rather then later.

Ben Clemens: yeah, I learned about it from Bostonian friends and I think it’s pretty cool. The marathon being on that day, the cool city connect marathon jerseys, great cohesion and overall cool

Ben Clemens: As for Senga: yeah, the walks are a big problem. I agree that he doesn’t have a huge home run problem in general, but he does have a big walks problem, and it hasn’t gotten better in three years so I do think that when he’s allowing homers, it’s gonna be ugly. the bases are just always juiced

Robbie314: The Cubs and Brewers are in last place in the NL Central with a record of 12-9.  Is this unprecedented?  What’s the best last place team in MLB history (measured by W-L differential, I’m not interested in five 1-0 teams)?

Ben Clemens: sounds like a question that someone else should ask the mailbag, and be sure to mention that Ben doesn’t have to answer this one, because I am interested but absolutely don’t feel like doing the research

Ben Clemens: You’d need the standings for every day in history, which, well

Ben Clemens: they exist! I do not envy the person whose task it is to design that query

Jays development: How good is the Jays’ development team in helping a player like Lenyn Sosa become more than what he was with the White Sox?

Ben Clemens: I mean…. if I told you I knew, I’d be lying. If they told you they know, they’re lying. I don’t have a lot of confidence that anyone can trade for a random utility guy and make him elite, though. If that were the case, the Jays would be winning every world series, you know? I think Sosa is what he is, and the Jays mainly just needed warm bodies

Big Buckston: Mick Abel to the IL with ominous “right elbow inflammation”… Absolutely gutted for him after 13 scoreless innings in his last two starts, it looked like he was starting to put it together.

Ben Clemens: Huge bummer. Couldn’t agree more

Ben Clemens: The Twins have been a really fun story this year. They have played a lot of very fun games and are doing well. Hard to argue with that

alex: How do you evaluate sequencing? Seems like many gains to be had by clubs there.

Ben Clemens: I actually have a foolproof plan for evaluating sequencing. I bet you every researcher you read has done a similar version of it.

Ben Clemens: 1. Spend dozens of hours on your pet sequencing model
2.It shows a result!
3.Spend forever normalizing that result b/c it’s so easy to have contaminating factors when you evaluate sequencing
4.after normalization, there’s no remaining effect
5.Spend dozens more hours on your new pet sequencing model

Ben Clemens: “Seems like many gains to be had by clubs tehre” is definitely true. And yet over a very long period of all of these teams employing armies of PhD’s, we haven’t really found much that I can see. Tells you something about how hard this problem is

O: Hi Ben, thanks for taking the time to chat. What’s wrong with the Royals’ offense?

Ben Clemens: It has the misfortune of employing a number of hitters who aren’t that great. Plus a few of their stars are slumping at once

Ben Clemens: But yeah, it’s been a very cold start for them. Maybe some of that is the weather, but a lto of it is that everyone is hitting poorly. The Royals, Mets, and Giants are last in MLB in scoring and I think that the Royals and Giants are basically getting cover because the Mets are so obviously awful at the moment

Crochet: Three of Garrett Crochet’s five outings have been horrific. Is that a trend or still a small sample size? Should I panic or be patient?

Ben Clemens: small sample size for me, unless he says he’s hurt or fatigued

Ben Clemens: and then, maximum alarm

Reds Enjoyer: How many innings does it take for bullpen stats to stabilize/normalize? In other words, at what point can good bullpen performance so far truly be predictive of good bullpen performance moving forward?

Ben Clemens: probably about 6 seasons

Ben Clemens: no, I dunno the exact answer but it’s forever

Ben Clemens: sounds like a fruitful topic to look into, but ‘stabilize’ for a gropu of relievers? always assume the answer is ‘never’

Nate: Cole Ragans has pitched in 5 games and has not really looked like himself. I’m not ready to call him cooked after 5 starts, but his command is suffering pretty significantly

Ben Clemens: Hsi command and stuff both look bad

Ben Clemens: I’m definitely concerned. Also his arm angle has dropped huge

Ben Clemens: I think that generally speaking, you can be less worried about early-season command misfires because they are much less stable intra-year

Stephen Vogt: My team’s offense, both results and underlying metrics, isn’t nearly as bad as most thought it would be.

Ben Clemens: So I was listening to the Cardinals announcers last week because I am a masochist, basically. They were praising the Guardians offense as one of the best in baseball in recent yers

Ben Clemens: so maybe what happened is just that all along, the Cards guys were right

Ben Clemens: and this is one of the best teams in baseball at hitting

Ben Clemens: but to be fair, the Guards are 19th in run scoring and 28th in BaseRuns run scoring

Ben Clemens: so I think the right opinion is that they’re probably still kinda bad

AL Central Casting: You mentioned a couple weeks ago that you had been doing more Lego building than board games recently. Might I suggest Monkey Palace as an interesting intersection of the two? We got it for our kids, but it has a surprising amount of strategy to it and I’ve found it to be much more enjoyable than I initially thought for a 10+ game with Lego branding.

Ben Clemens: uh, that sounds great

Ben Clemens: I will definitely take a look

Ben Clemens: right now we are building the Lego Notre Dame. Big project, looks amazing though

Chucky: Astros retool? Rebuild? Or let it ride?

Ben Clemens: I’d be really tempted to blow it all up

Ben Clemens: But honestly I think that the better course is probably to let it ride. I don’t think they get enough by blowing it up now rather than in July or in the offseason

Ben Clemens: so why not see if you coast back into the race. Best record in the division is 11-11, it’s not like it’s a runaway

Astros blow it up?: Does this mean trade Yordan?

Ben Clemens: oh man. That’s a really good point. I guess I mean yes? Which is why I’d want to hope as hard as possible that I’m wrong, wait until I had every chance to be proven wrong

Ben Clemens: Yordan has two years remaining after this one on his current contract, and at 19 mil a year, it’s quite the bargain

Ben Clemens: I think that yeah, if they’re actually blowing it up, that means trading Yordan. And probably Pena too. Possibly Brown. That’s why it’s so tough to consider

Ben Clemens: Also Brown is only a year younger than Yordan, what??

Ben Clemens: but yeah…. a retool here feels weird. like, these dudes are all old, they’ll be old next year. so that’s why I’d just stay the course until it’s CLEAR it’s not working

didace: I knew I was successful when I could buy the good Lego sets without considering the price. Lego is the best.

Ben Clemens: oh yeah, please do not look up what the big lego sets cost, lol

Laurel and JJ Hardy: Which happens first? Mets get back to .500 or Mason Miller gives up a run

Ben Clemens: the odds have to be heavily tilted towards miller gives up a run

Ben Clemens: what are the odds the Mets NEVER hit .500 this year? Definitely not zero

DJ: Do you think there will be MLB regular season games being played one year from today?

Ben Clemens: I do

Ben Clemens: what the hell are these people even fighting over? ‘gosh, it’s frustratign that the Padres sold for so much money and we all have to agree how to count our riches’

Ben Clemens: So like, I bet there’ll be plenty of posturing. And then it’ll work out

hit tool risk: if Murakami’s start is for real, do the white sox flip him? It’d be pretty awful from a pr perspective but it seems unlikely they’d pay him (unless Ishbia ends up footing the bill)

Ben Clemens: I’m writing about Murakami for tomorrow. But no, haha, I dno’t think that’s gonna happen. I think that would have bad long-term consequences for them, perhaps, too; make a big deal and then basically welch on it. I think that an extension seems reasonable, though – yeah, Ishbia footing the bill.

Insert Witty Name Here: You worked in finance before, what do those people think when fighting over how to count their riches?

Ben Clemens: well, we never had a work stoppage

Ben Clemens: that’s kinda my point

Ben Clemens: I was able to be angry at my bosses, hate the distribution of wealth, disagree with things… and then go hey, we sure do benefit a lot from keeping the lights on, let’s keep the lights on

J: I just want to shout out how cool all the Fangraphs Lab stuff is. I was content with my membership as is but will happily play with all the free toys you give me

Ben Clemens: Thank you very much. Comments like these mean a lot to me.

Ben Clemens: It can be really hard to see your impact at a place where the articles of the day replace the articles of the previous day. Not a lot of stuff I did in 2025 is still useful. But the Lab is a place where that’s not the case and that feels really good. Appelman’s baseball sim is super cool, too

Pop: Should the Padres be concerned about Machado’s drop in bat speed?

Ben Clemens: I don’t really think so, but I would be pretty worried about the fact that his average launch angle has varied from 12.7 to 16 over his entire career and is 7.4 now

Ben Clemens: Machado without the ball in the air? Not nearly as good of a hitter

Ben Clemens: maybe those are correlated, though. This stuff is pretty hard to tease out early in the year

Sal’s Mom: Should Ke’Bryan Hayes start selling out to pull fly balls? He makes great contact and hit the ball harder than average( at least this year) but somehow seems to always hit it at someone.

Ben Clemens: ‘should Ke’Bryan Hayes start trying to pull the ball in the air’ is one of those great questions in life. I’ve been saying this for about five years, ever since we ranked him aggressively in the first trade value series that I worked on

Ben Clemens: You look at his profile and go ‘oh man, if this guy could elevate and pull, he’d be amazing. how does he hit the ball so hard and play such great defense??’

Ben Clemens: and I’m sure he knows that, too, right? It’s not like he lives in a vacuum. But it just seems like he cannot. Or whatever he’s done to try to do it hasn’t worked yet, at least

Ben Clemens: I concur with you. And I really can’t tell you why it hasn’t happened, but it hasn’t happened

Nate: re: the Royals, at least Jac seems to be getting his feet underneath him a little, he’s finally translating that insane bat speed into a 91st percentile barrel rate

Ben Clemens: Yeah. I’m not saying they won’t pull it out, to be clear. One would expect Jac to turn into a reasonable major league hitter, he has the pedigree and tools. I’d say that the early returns on Carter Jansen are great too

Ben Clemens: Jensen*, whoops, I’ve made that mistake a lot this year for no good reason

Ben Clemens: But honestly, the Royals lineup always projected to have some weak points. We just thought that Witt, Garcia, Salvy, and Vinnie would make up for it

Ben Clemens: and so far those guys have hit a combined not-so-great, hence the bad results

TKDC: Assuming they both pitch a full season, who has a better ERA at the end of the season: Garrett Crochet or Bryce Elder?

Ben Clemens: let’s just do the lazy way and add up the FG projections. Elder projects to end the year with a 3.72, Crochet with a 3.69. So it’s basically bang on even

Meg Backwards is Gem: Who would be the biggest riser and faller if there was a redraft of the team fun draft today? I’m biased the Nationals scoring a billion runs a game while having the worst pitching in the league is objectively a fun outcome for a bad team

Ben Clemens: I’d put the Nats high and the Giants v low. They’ve been grim to watch so far. No one’s having fun

Sonny: It’s Patriots Day! Aka your annual reminder that baseball players sleep until noon every day.

Dilemma: Jeremiah Jackson is playing great second base for the O’s. Is he talented enough to become a super-utility guy when Holliday returns?

Ben Clemens: Against my pre-season expectation, I’ll say yet

Ben Clemens: yes*

Ben Clemens: I’ve been really impressed by him, especially his defense. I was worried that he’d be one of those ‘utility’ guys who is actually jsut below average everywhere, and he definitely has not been

DJ Tofu: Should we worry about Devers yet?

Ben Clemens: yeah, or at least wonder what the heck is going on this year. Last year he looked basically like Rafael Devers. This year his pliate discipline is fine but he’s just not hitting the ball in the air? And that’s basically his game so I think that is extra-worrisome. It’s not like he’s just getting unlucky in a bunch of peripheral stuff; he’s not putting the ball in places where it can do damage

War2D2: Any predictions on where Giolito eventually signs? At this point the rust has to be a serious issue, right? I just can’t imagine he’d be a league-avg arm until June, if ever.

Ben Clemens: I think he might just sit out the year. It’s gotten so late, I agree with you that this is gonna be hard

Reds Enjoyer: Re: NL Central, my preliminary research yesterday tells me the 2005 Nats are the best last place team ever at 81-81. The Braves won that division with 90 wins!

Bucco brewskis: How is Isaac Mattson so effective? He’s a one trick pony with a seemingly average trick. Is his fastball shape elite? Is it location sequencing? How are hitters not crushing his fastball every at bat?

Ben Clemens: yeah…. because anything can happen in small samples in baseball

Ben Clemens: This is not gonna keep up, haha. I watch these appearances and go yeeeeeeeeeesh

Ben Clemens: he’s allowing a 35% LD rate, that’s really something

Ben Clemens: like, batters ARE crushing his fastball. They’re tattooing the heck out of it. and also he doesn’t strike anyone out, and he walks too many. The 90% LOB rate and 0% HR/FB won’t hold up forever, and when you have a 7% K-BB, it’s just not going to last

Oaktown Blues: Nick Kurtz is gonna be fine right? .397 xwOBA but 64% contact rate and 33.7% K rate

Ben Clemens: yeah gonna be fine imo

Alex: Hey Mike Francesa, will the go 0-140 the rest of the year? I’ll hang up and listen.

Ben Clemens: yes

Sal’s Mom: Is this arm fatigue we’re seeing from Crochet after adding a huge amount of innings last year vs years prior?

Ben Clemens: definitely could be!

Ben Clemens: I mean, we won’t really get the full picture from the outside, which is reasonable, I get that

Ben Clemens: I’m definitely worried that’s what it is, though

Guest: Lenyn Sosa is hitting .273/.273/.364 with the Jays what am I missing here the Jays haven’t made him better?

Ben Clemens: in 12 PA. Yeah, I didn’t really get that one eitehr

Opifijikl: The Red Sox will turn things around right? It’s just early shenanigans?

Ben Clemens: I’m a little worried, just because their problem spots (infield) come where they have no backup options

Ben Clemens: but hey, the rotation depth is already paying off, with Crochet scuffling and Gray on the IL, they still have a great 1-5

Opifijikl: Happy Patriots day from MA. Got passed on the right by a Minuteman going 80 in a Yaris on 128 this morning.

Fyandor: Blue Jays, Red Sox, Mets, Phillies. Of these four teams with high preseason expectations and bad starts, who do you feel best about turning it around and who do you think is most likely to miss the playoffs?

Ben Clemens: I think I feel best about the Jays turning it around, and that’sonly partially because they have the best BaseRuns of the group so far. i also think that their issues have, more so than the other teams you named, been a temporary availability issue. They’re missing nine-ish key contributors at the moment, none of whom are out for the year

Oaktown Blues: Not sure if you saw the A’s/CWS extra inning game on Saturday. A’s had man on 3rd, 1 out, tie game bottom 11th. The in-the-hole hitter was a pitcher (A’s having lost the DH and emptied bench). CWS opted to pitch to the batter and lost on a sac fly. Just curious, would you have handled it any differently? Would it make sense to walk the bases loaded to face the pitcher, even if you have to get one more out after him?

Ben Clemens: I did watch that game and I was wondering about that! I had the Sox broadcast on and they dutifully kept track of where the pitcher’s spot was in the order. I don’t know what the right choice was there, to be honest. Like, I think I would? But it was close because I hate walking the bases loaded

Oblivious M’s Fan: This morning someone on r/baseball made a chart showing each manager’s ejections to games played, and it gives me an oppertunity to bring up my pet theory that Aaron Boone’s only actual job as Yankee’s manager is to get ejected. He’s the fall guy for the big ego players on the roster and one of the most entitled fanbases in Baseball. Everything else is secondary. Most likely an exaggeration, but an interesting one I think.

Ben Clemens: I 100% think you’re going in the right direction here, that a lot of Boone’s job is to take heat

Ben Clemens: There’s just so much heat when you’re talking about the Yankees. You need a heat sink. And Boone is very very good at doing that job

Ben Clemens: He’s also seemingly pretty good at clubhouse management and getting people comfortable with their roles. But yeah, the Yankees manager job is a lot about PR

mike: no real question, but as a White Sox fan, seeing a Sox player consistently in the top couple spots of the fangraphs player search bar is really blowing my mind. Even in the brief contention window none of the stars were ever close to that. No idea how sustainable Murakami’s output is but for now it’s awesome to watch

Ben Clemens: Murakami is proving very fun to write about

Ben Clemens: I’m loving this, a quote from our offseason scouting report: “…if Murakami is only ever the quality of contact hitter we’ve seen the last three years, with no changes or improvements, he basically can’t be a good MLB hitter.”

Ben Clemens: and well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Because if you’ve watched the Sox, um, he can’t hit the ball

Ben Clemens: he’s one of the batters in baseball least likely to make contact when he swings

Ben Clemens: but if he does make contact, ball go far

Dude: To recast my earlier question: Ty France’s Savant page makes him look like Ted Williams. In NL-only 10-team, how much should I care that he’s getting at-bats?

Ben Clemens: I think you should care almost exclusively about the AB’s at this poitn in the season

Ben Clemens: and like, preseason projections

Ben Clemens: now, having a Savant page that looks like Ted Williams makes the ABs more likely to keep flowing, don’t forget!

Jimmy (Catching) Crooks: I use the Team stat pages very frequently but these say they are being deprecated. Is there a replacement planned or would I need a custom dashboard to see the same team info?

Ben Clemens: which pages are thoes?

Sonny: Do you think there’s velocity/effort range for every mlb pitcher where they have 80 command? Like, if X pitcher tried throwing their 95 mph fastball 85 they could burn edges all day and who is the Greinke acolyte that will try this?

Ben Clemens: no, I don’t. The reason for that is this great old test from Sam Miller. In 3-0 counts to pitchers, zone rate is around 70%

Sully: Weathers, Warren, Gil: rotation, pen, AAA: go

Ben Clemens: rotation/pen/AAA is really fun. Um, Gil has to be last, right? So I’d just do them in the order you have them, even though I love Warren

Ben Clemens: also, I think Warren might play up a lot in relief. He feels liek a guy where a harder fastball might make the whole package play better

Troy: How concerned are we about Luis Castillo? The fastball just hasn’t played as well as recent years despite strong enough velocity

Ben Clemens: yeah I’m worried

Derek: Am I wrong in feeling that the Orioles just spent an offseason *doing things* and ended up, at best, only marginally better than where they were before doing all those things? Alonso is obviously a big get, but otherwise it just felt very performative from Mike Elias and I continue to believe he should be fired, as I have for the past 3 or 4 years

Ben Clemens: nah, I concur with you. As you may know, I have a long history of writing that the Orioles are great at tactics but poor at strategy, and I think this offseason was more of that

Ben Clemens: It’s jsut weird to have a core of good hitting like the O’s did and to be really stubborn around how to build out from it. I don’t have a perfect counterfactual for what they should have done, but I do think that the strategy has not really been good enough

Guest: Luke Raley is making Murakami look like Luis Arraez in contact frequency

Ben Clemens: fun stat from tomorrow’s article: 201 hitters have swung at 50 or more secondaries, Murakami’s 53.3% whiff rate is third-highest

Ben Clemens: …. and Raley’s whiff rate is 7 percentage poits higher than that

James: Aaron Judge’s average bat speed is down 2 mph this year. His max bat speed is similar to previous years. Does bat speed go up during the summer? How much is the contact point a factor in bat speed?

Ben Clemens: so a) yes it does

Ben Clemens: FanGraphs wrote a reserach article about this recently

Ben Clemens: but the answer is that it doesn’t go up very much

Ben Clemens: unfortunately, it’s kinda hard to find research, even recently published research, here, but let me dig it up

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/a-lukewarm-take-on-ice-cold-bats/

Ben Clemens: that said, average bat speed is just an average, and what types of swings go into it can change, so it can be misleading

Ben Clemens: fast swing rate is a good one, but still not perfect. it’s just hard to describe a hitter’s swing in one number

hit tool risk: James wrote a good piece about Murakami today https://soxmachine.com/2026/04/breaking-down-a-key-adjustment-from-mun… that has a good quote from Mune about missing breaking balls: “I was kind of letting the easy pitches go through, pass by me, and be breaking balls in early stages,” Murakami said via interpreter. “But now I’m seeing the ball a lot better now, and I’m really getting into the plate with a lot more confidence.”

Ben Clemens: cool article

Ben Clemens: huh, I mean, I guess we’re just writing a lot about him!

Ben Clemens: alright guys, there were some great questions today, but I’m falling behind on some other stuff I was hoping to do and today’s work has not been as smooth as I hoped, so I have to go get to that. Hope you had a wonderful time chatting, and I’ll see you at the same time next week.