Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 5/18/26

Ben Clemens: Hey everybody, let’s chat

Alex Remington: Let’s say you were looking for reasons to either be optimistic or pessimistic about Austin Riley. What would you look for to persuade yourself that, after a couple of injury-plagued years of diminished performance, he a) had no fundamental alteration to his core talent level beyond normal aging, or b) he is fundamentally less than the player he once was?

Ben Clemens: Let’s start this off with a discussion of one of the players who I’ve struggled most with in Trade Value series past

Ben Clemens: I’m not quite in TV mode yet but we’re heading that way, and a good discussion of Riley is always worth having because he’s really had to pin down

Ben Clemens: okay, the pessimism is an easy case at this point. In his last 1111 PA, he has a 106 wRC+ and has been worth 4.6 WAR

Ben Clemens: that’s a nice everyday player, nothing more

Ben Clemens: It’s not like he has wildly underperformed his expected numbers in that time. He’s still hitting the ball hard. He’s still putting it in the air fairly often. Three seasons of an HR/FB around 13% aren’t screaming out for weird batted ball luck regression

Ben Clemens: so some kind of Marcel-ish lookback at this point is going to say hey, we’ve gotten a lot of evidence taht this guy is an average-ish hitter, SLG over OBP, who plays scratch-ish defense at third

Ben Clemens: so that’s an easy case. But the counterpoint is that yeah, the three years before that, He averaged a 136 wRC+ and put up 16 WAR over 2070 PA

Ben Clemens: as a good defender, to boot

Ben Clemens: The bull case is that he’s been hurt. He might still be hurt. He hit the IL 0 times from 21-23, and 3 times including a 60-day placement subsequently

Ben Clemens: He hasn’t topped 110 games played since 2023

Ben Clemens: I think you have to look at this and say that until you see some green shoots, the correct approximation of Riley’s talent is the ‘solid everyday player nothing more’ side. But you shade up from there, of course, because he’s been an MVP candidate type before, and it’s reasonable to assume there’s some delta of him doing it again

Ben Clemens: COindicentally, that’s what our projection systems seem to be doing. They have him down for a 112 wRC+, which is better than his recent form, but nowhere near his peak. And they have him down as an above average regula the rest of the year even though he’s been a below average regular so far this year

Ben Clemens: I guess the short answer of this very long discussion is that you should believe what players’ recent form tells you. But you should think about what might make you change that belief, too?

dirtypuer: do the giants have enough *thrust” to get back into the WC race?

Ben Clemens: watching the escalating Giants OF celebrations was delightful last week

Ben Clemens: one of my strongly held baseball beliefs is that guys like Drew Gilbert are a bit more valuable than we say they are, because the energy is infectious and it’s hard to stay juiced up and engaged for a long baseball season

Ben Clemens: I mean, they definitely have a shot. We have them at 10%, that doesn’t seem wild to me. Their start was SO bad but they’ve looked pretty much acceptable since the slow start

Ben Clemens: Devers has sneakily been one of the best hitters in baseball in May. Luis Arraez is on fire too. The pitching staff is not great, but I feel like it’s pretty well-suited to the home environment at least. And I 100% believe that Arraez’s defense is better than our models have it, particularly our projections, and that that will accrue to the team

Ben Clemens: but like…. they’re 7 games below .500 in May. We think they’re just okay. It’s still a difficult road

Oaktown Blues: Is Zack Gelof back to being good? It’s still a small sample and I’m skeptical, but his 75.6% contact rate is easily the best of his career, even including the minor leagues

Ben Clemens: Maybe this is just a problem with the way I watch baseball and equate it to the future, but I watched him play third base in the I-80 series this weekend and man, he looks so rough out there

Ben Clemens: it’s making it hard for me to be rational and unbiased about his hitting

Ben Clemens: I think I’m still a seller, for this reason: like you said, this is as much contact as he’s ever made. And uh, he’s barely above average and still has a .297 OBP

Oaktown Blues: If you had to guess, Shea Langeliers over/under 6 fWAR for full season 2026?

Ben Clemens: under

Ben Clemens: he’s a catcher

Ben Clemens: good bet in general, even if he’s on ‘pace’ to eclipse it

didace: The Nationals are now… good? Maybe not good, but perhaps they are interesting? Add a couple of average starting pitchers and all of a sudden they’d be winning lots of games.

Ben Clemens: Yeah, interesting

Ben Clemens: Their years and years of rebuilding have led to a lot of hitters who at the very least interest me. oh, and James Wood is a star

Ben Clemens: There are still a lot of weaknesses in this team. I think they need more than just a couple of average starting pitchers; they’re allowing 5.7 runs per game!

Ben Clemens: But they’re very fun to watch and I think that the offense is at least a little bit real. Like, will this keep being the best offense in baseball? I don’t think so. Will it be a top-10 offense the rest of the way? I do think so

Sid the Astros Kid: Heya Ben, kinda crazy how after TOS Zack Wheeler is right back where he was last season? I thought it was a career ender type of injury. Is it the dark arts, did he send away his injury and in the process manifest these loose bodies in every other pitcher known to mankind?

Ben Clemens: Thinking about injuries is just so hard

Ben Clemens: some people come back just fine. some are done forever. we never know the true severity

Ben Clemens: but yeah, isn’t this great? I’m a big Wheeler fan and I was extremely bummed to see him get hurt right towards the end of his prime

Ben Clemens: so if he gets a few more years of dominance, that’d be AOK with me

richwp01: White Sox have moved from “Fun Bad” to Fun. West Coast trip upcoming. Then AL Central and a tougher slate. How much should we brace ourselves for the letdown from now until the All Star Break?

Ben Clemens: I think that you should basically treat contention as a bonus this year and focus on the Fun part of it all still

Ben Clemens: like, don’t let yourself get hedonic treadmilled out of enjoying that the White Sox went 41-121 a few years ago and are now fun

Ben Clemens: they could play at a 70-win pace the rest of this season and I’d still consider it a big success. They’re fun, they have done a really good job of looking for good players in unexpected places and they’re letting the kids play

Daniel Bergman: Is is just me or has Aaron Judge not actually gotten hot yet?

Ben Clemens: oh totally

Ben Clemens: the guy is so good that we just take him for granted

Ben Clemens: he’s just playing normal aaron judge baseball

Ben Clemens: and it’s ludicrous

wheelhouse: when was the last time you saw a loss so bad it made you dread ever watching the team play baseball again? asking for a friend

Ben Clemens: I’m not sure this qualifies because I’m not really a big fan of any team anymore, but I went to what has to be one of the most soul-crushing losses a team can endure a few years ago

Ben Clemens: Josh Hader’s last season on the Brewers, they were in SF and my wife is a Giants/Brewers fan so we went with other Wisconsin people we know

Ben Clemens: Hader came in with a three-run lead in the bottom of the ninth and went HR, out, HR, 1B, HBP, 1B, grand slam

Ben Clemens: it was like, oh, what did we watch the first eight innings of this game for?

toshi: Ben, thank you for having a chat. I suspect the ABS challenge system affects very tall and very short batters most, as umpires used to either over-correct or not correct enough for their deviation from average player’s height. If so, which directions does it affect (strike zone shrink or enlarge) for them?

Ben Clemens: only three batters saw their strike zones enlarged this year per the official Statcast definitions that are in Baseball Savant files, and those batters by miniscule amounts

Ben Clemens: basically everyone’s is shrinking

Theodore: I see that the Washington Nationals have the highest runs/game to date, but ROS projections on here have them at the absolute bottom of the league. Any particular reasons why the ROS projections hate their offense so much?

Ben Clemens: I’m curious about this too. Some of it is just that we compress the projections a ton. THere’s only a quarter run’s difference between 30th and 10th

Ben Clemens: but I think a bigger issue is that I just am higher than our projections on a lot of these guys, and also think that the Nats are now sufficiently ‘deep’ (as in they have more than just a few good hitters) that they have a little bit more room for someone to underperform and lose their job

filter2: when is Ben’s annual Orioles article bc woof. there’s a lot to go over

Ben Clemens: I got tired of writing those because of the feedback, if I’m being totally honest with you

Ben Clemens: like I don’t really have a lot new to say about it, and eveyr time I write them I dread reading the comments

Ben Clemens: now, have I been right? on balance, absolutely

Ben Clemens: but eh, I’m not made of stone. I read the comments. It’s not so fun for eveyrone to tell you you’re a complete dummy and don’t understand baseball. And that annual article got me those comments more than pretty much any other single topic

jb1205: The Mets might actually have the makings of a good outfield with Benge and Ewing. So, maybe everything doesn’t completely suck.

Ben Clemens: Ewing is just a delight in the early going, huh?

Sid the Astros Kid: Ben semi baseball related question, what do you think is the best food to eat at a baseball game? I’m putting forth funnel cake cause I like something sweet/crunchy but always open to other arguments

Ben Clemens: I like sandwiches of various types. When Fuku debuted at Citi Field back when I lived in NY that was the peak

Ben Clemens: I feel like its quality has declined now that it’s all over the country – I had a Fuku sandwich in SF last year and wasn’t blown away – but something like that is gonna be my food of choice at most places

Ben Clemens: in SF, that means the crab sandwich, which is incredible, but I like a lot of similar regional options elsehwere

Mon Dattingly: Are we sure Cam Schlittler is not a top-3 pitcher?

Ben Clemens: definitely not

Ben Clemens: what would make us sure of that?

Gunnar Henderson: I know I just had a great game last night, but I’ve been hovering around the Mendoza line for much of the season. Is there something wrong with me? Am I still going to be a top-20ish dynasty asset moving forward?

Ben Clemens: see comments on Austin Riley, but now peel back the ‘he hasn’t been all that good in the two years before this one’ and replace it with ‘he was a freaking 5-win player in 2025, and that was a down year’

Ben Clemens: I’m not losing any sleep over Gunnar. People have bad stretches sometimes

Ben Clemens: you’ll have a better quality of life if you don’t worry about them too much, in my opinion

Surplus Valuez = Profits = Stolen Wages: “one of my strongly held baseball beliefs is that guys like Drew Gilbert are a bit more valuable than we say they are, because the energy is infectious and it’s hard to stay juiced up and engaged for a long baseball season”…Its funny intuitively this makes sense to me. How much of this is born from players basically needing to be a Good Employee 24/7/365 these days or its your reputation and earning potential?

Ben Clemens: oh, I have no real clue honestly, but it’s just one of those “I feel it even if I can’t math it” kinda things

Ben Clemens: I think that because I’ve worked at places that just aren’t fun, and they kinda drag on you a little bit. It’s still fun when times are good, but less so, and the bad times are even less fun

Ben Clemens: I think that has an aggregate effect, and that that effect might even be bigger now that everyone is just max on all the time

Ben Clemens: baseball players work HARD now

fanoftheman: ballpark totchos are 100% my new-age baseball snack winner

Ben Clemens: um, I was not aware of this food but yes please

small e: How much did Craig Breslow actually build a historically bad hitting roster that is less than the sum of its parts, and how much is just catastrophic underperformance from too many load bearing hitters?

bosoxforlife: A quarter of the season has been played and what has surprised you the most? i didn’t expect the Red Sox to be awful and unwatchable but the Cardinals being so much better than everybody anticipated is at the top of my list.

Austin Metzger: If you were running the Red Sox, are you blowing it up at the deadline (Gray, Duran, etc.) and looking at the future? (Anthony, Mayer, etc.)

Matthew VanWinkle: Under Alex Cora the Red Sox averaged 3.65 runs per game. (I’m throwing out the last 17-1 win because a lot of those runs came in garbage time, some of them against a position player pitching.) Under Chad Tracy they’ve averaged 2.89 runs per game. And yes they haven’t had Anthony recently but it’s not like he was setting the world on fire before he got hurt. Seems like the problems here run deeper than a thoroughly fired offensive coaching staff.

Ben Clemens: So, I hunted around for several related Sox questions so that you can all feel solidarity

Ben Clemens: I think it’s hard to pin all of this on Breslow for sure

Ben Clemens: I thought the work he did on the pitching staff this winter was quite good in fact. I would note that they came into the year with less depth in the infield than anywhere else, though

Ben Clemens: and like…. their infield has wildly underperformed expectations

Ben Clemens: it’s hard to pin Duran turning into a pumpkin on Breslow, for example

Ben Clemens: even if you think that he probably should have had another backup option to Durbin and Story

Ben Clemens: but really, what, we’re gonna blame Breslow for Marcelo Mayer and Roman Anthony combining for 0.4 WAR at the quarter pole?

Ben Clemens: this is just a perfect storm. team with a weak point has a catastrophic player failure at that weak point with no good backups, and at the same time plenty of the load-bearing places we all THOUGHT were just too good to fail also fail

Blue Jays fan: Davis Schneider has 8 batter-initiated successful ABS challenges in less than half the plate appearances of the leaders (Altuve and Garcia with 9). No question, just an observation of a short hitter with a good eye who was getting crushed at the top of the zone with bad calls prior to this season.

Oaktown Blues: Funny, Ben had never heard of totchos, but I’ve never heard of a Fuku sandwich

Ben Clemens: oh yeah, fair. It’s standard fare at the two stadiums I’ve gone to most in teh last decade, I’m probably overrating it. It’s basically an upscale version of a Chik-Fil-A sandwich

shandykoufax: Oh so when Matt Chapman chokes drew gilbert he’s “adding secret value” and “making his team better”, but when Jonathan papelbon chokes Bryce Harper he’s “bitter” and “attacking a teammate”

Ben Clemens: if you were trying to have the funniest comment of the chat, you can just stop now, the contest is over

Ben Clemens: Hello, Human Resources?

Schmegs: If an RP has to face three batters or finish an inning before being removed what happens if they face one batter and that ends the inning but then they come out for the next inning. Can the RP be removed after one batter of the second inning (their second batter total) because they finished and inning or do they now have to face a third batter because the inning isn’t at an end?

Ben Clemens: they now have to face a third batter

EccentricATLFan: It’s college softball instead of baseball, but worth highlighting Texas Tech’s comeback against Ole Miss on Saturday.  Not just coming back from 8-0 in the final regular inning, but also for the fact that, prior to then, not a single NCAA softball tournament game saw a comeback win from a team down 8+ runs out of 640 prior instances.  Such a fun comeback to watch.

Ben Clemens: 8-0 in softball is like 20-0 in baseball

Ben Clemens: that’s wild

bosoxforlife: Munetaka Murikami and Kazama Okamoto have 27 HR’s between them and the woeful Boston B__ms have all of 33 from the entire roster. These two power hitters were available on the cheap this past off season. More than any other of his numerous mistakes, failing to recognize that home runs are required to score runs in today’s game is the reason Breslow has to go.

Ben Clemens: Well, okay…. I’d be with you except for the fact that a lot of the guys we all expected to hit homers aren’t

Ben Clemens: I do agree that the Durbin style profiles are not stable in modern baseball

Ben Clemens: I believe that that was the big discussion we had here around his acquisition – the Brewers basically didn’t buy that he was as good as the projections because he had the unstable profile of a no-homers dude

Ben Clemens: and that yeah, maybe the Sox have relied on that too much in the aggregate? But one of Breslow’s big acquisitions this winter leads the Sox in homers

Mike: Hey Ben, I’m a longtime mariners fan who moved to the east sf bay and became an avid as fan until recently because of reasons. Also like to catch a giants game once in awhile. My question for you is…*checks standings*…what have you been cooking for dinner lately?

Ben Clemens: hahaha

Ben Clemens: um…. hey I still find the Giants and A’s fun to watch on TV, and particularly to go to in person

Ben Clemens: but I’ve made some good ones recently!

Ben Clemens: I highly recommend this salad:
https://www.bakedbymelissa.com/blogs/recipes/green-goddess-salad?srslt…

Ben Clemens: it sounds weird, it’s a chopped salad made by a cupcake blog? But we make this, eat it by dipping tortilla chips into it, absolutely delicious

Ben Clemens: just put in a big Weee order so I think that hakka-style eggplant is going to be on the menu this week

Ben Clemens: and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried Goodles, which are like protein-packed noodles that are supposed to be very easy to make – but we start with a box of those sometimes and then just mix in a fancy side to turn it into a meal that feels very extravagant

PokeyReese’04: Are the Brewers the new school Rays in being the smartest team in baseball? (trade Durbin, Kyle Harrison, Miz, etc.)

Ben Clemens: definitely. the question is how long that title will last – but right now they have it

Guest: On the topic of Drew Gilbert and the value of high-energy teammates, could this be a factor in Detroit’s poor performance?  Guys like Greene, Tork, Dingler, and now McGonigle all have a similar quiet, keep-it-professional attitude, which I’m not knocking, but maybe what they need is a little more fire and passion?  For a largely young team, they are kinda… boring?

Ben Clemens: haha perhaps. It might also hurt that their best player is out, and that Tork is just not that guy

Ben Clemens: but I mean, yeah, they might have more fun if there was someone going berserk in the dugout after wins

He who can but won’t be named: Should Bryce Eldridge go back to Sac to get regular playing time?  Or should the Giants start him regularly in SF so he can work it out?

Ben Clemens: I think they should definitely send him back down, because it’s very clear he’s not gonna plya

Ben Clemens: I understand why he’s not getting a ton of run. The team just doesn’t have a spot for him

Ben Clemens: Like, it’s one thing to say that he should play over Casey Schmitt because it’s a good long term plan. But uh, he’s not hitting well and I don’t expect him to suddenly become great, whereas Schmitt has been the best hitter on the team this year

Ben Clemens: and what, you’re going to bench Devers for him? Whatever your view on Eldridge’s career arc, I don’t think he’s in Devers’s league right now

Ben Clemens: so yeah, I’d send him down. I truly don’t understand the idea of just parking him on the bench

Guest: the first syllable of “noodles” does not rhyme with “good” – this is the biggest wordplay scandal since “palmeranian” in connections the other day

JakeJakeJake: Any reason for optimism for guys like Freddy Peralta, Yoshi Yamamoto, Cole Ragans? Came into the year thinking they’d be elite and just not seeing it yet.

Ben Clemens: Oh, I have a good one

Ben Clemens: those are three elite pitchers

Ben Clemens: so like, that makes me optimistic that they’ll pitch better at some point

Ben Clemens: I’m sorry, any reasons for optimism on Yamamoto? Watch the dude pitch!

PC1970: Feels like with all of the Red Sox/Mets talk, the Tigers terrible stretch is undernoticed- Other than Dingler, Mcgonigle, Greene, the hitting is just so bad. Keith with 0 HR’s, Tork with 1 HR in 38 games other than a 5 game HR streak, Carp was bad, now hurt..They just look awful.

Ben Clemens: I mean, you’re not wrong, but there’s some confirmation bias here: I bet you the fans of a LOT of teams think their team’s slump is under-discussed

Ben Clemens: like ‘the hitting is really bad other than our top 3 hitters’ is an affliction that strikes many teams

Ben Clemens: as is ‘this guy has been really crappy and you just don’t notice it because he had one hot streak’

lmb2020: Are you more of a “tarps off” guy or a “group thrusting” guy?

eeyorethedog: Whole new environment at Busch Stadium this weekend!

Ben Clemens: really a spectacular week in weird dudes being dudes celebrations

stephen1249: I have current M’s SS Crawford in a very deep 10×10. Is there any chance the M’s will dump Crawford and play the rookie Emerson at SS this season?

Ben Clemens: any chance? clearly yes, they just called Emerson up

Ben Clemens: but it’s gonna entail Crawford not having one of the best batting lines on the team

oaktownblues: Switched from my work laptop (not logged into FG) to my phone and saw that JotCast now says “Hi oaktownblues”. Does it tell you which of us is a FG member when submitt

Ben Clemens: no, but we’re experimenting with various stuff around this – not requiring you to be a member, but requiring you to be logged in, even as a non-member

Ben Clemens: I don’t keep up with the specifics but it’s something along thoes lines

mopete12: I’ve been going crossed eye trying to really understand the following baseball savant items: Barrels, Squared Up, Hard Hit %, and LA Sweet Spot %. My basic take away is that barrels are good and squared up % is essentially useless. Is there a real benefit to tracking squared up % or is it just there to let Arraez and Kwan have a bright red bar in their bat tracking metrics?

Ben Clemens: I mean, you’re not wrong in the aggregate

Ben Clemens: I think that squared up % is generally speaking a tough statistic to interpret

Ben Clemens: I built a whole tool because I wanted to pull something that made sense to ME out of it:
https://www.fangraphs.com/lab/squared-up-explorer

Ben Clemens: but basically, raw squared up rate doesn’t tell you a ton. I care about squaring the ball up at home run angles for guys wtih power, and at line drive angles for guys without it

Ben Clemens: LA Sweet spot is another tricky one. it’s not so good if you don’t have more context around power

bosoxforlife: I believe that today’s TTO game demands that power is the only driving force in modern offense. I follow batting average  as a method of discerning if there is an alternative to the home run. With an AL league batting average of .238 it is clear that stringing hits together just isn’t an alternative. Simply making contact is too difficult and credit the Rays for recognizing that any contact is beneficial and their judicious use of the bunt exemplifies this.

Ben Clemens: I definitely agree with your observation that power is the driving hitting force

Ben Clemens: I think the reason for this is that defenses and pitching have done two things that are really tough to adapt to. They catch more balls in play than ever because they’re getting better at standing in the right places. They also throw pitches that move more than ever, and that are harder to make contact with than ever

Ben Clemens: We know from tons of research that pitchers don’t exert a lot of control on how hard the ball gets hit, contingent on batters making contact, though

Ben Clemens: so batters know that the pitches are harder to hit, and also that if you put the ball in the field of play it’s harder than ever to be safe. So the smart move from an EV maximization standpoint is to make the contact that you do make undefendable

Ben Clemens: I am hopeful that one of the knock-on effects of ABS will be pitchers realizing that too many of their ‘unhittable pitches’ are unhittable but also not getting swung at, and taht the increased accuracy and also increased passivity of hitters means that throwing this way is resulting in too many walks

Ben Clemens: so you could see it pushing pitchers to a more ‘pitch-to-contact’ style, which might turn the equation around. BUt I’m just forecasting, and I really haven’t seen much evidence of that change in behavior yet

Kwan: Is it over? Has something changed about my profile or have defenses just gotten better at playing at the right shallow places?

Ben Clemens: I definitely don’t think it’s just about the defenses. One way of looking at this is that KWan’s line drive rate has gone 23%/25%/24%/26%/19%

Ben Clemens: and his hard-hit rate is a career low too

Ben Clemens: like, a .055 ISO isn’t just because your bloops aren’t falling

Ben Clemens: Kwan has historically basically tracked his xwOBA. This year, his xwOBA is down a ton. That’s worrisome!

Matthew Tobin: A bit of a hot take, but MLB should mandate at least 1 day game per day. I want something to watch while I eat lunch.

Ben Clemens: I couldn’t agree more

Ben Clemens: I really hate the feeling of finishing my article for the day, turning on the tv, and it says the first game starts at 4:15

Ben Clemens: what? c’mon man! it’s 2:30. I want to watch some random games

Indecisive Fantasy GM: Is there anything that should stop me from cutting bait on George Springer? I want to be patient but in a 10 team h2h points league, hard to justify it much longer.

Ben Clemens: I did it alreayd. I didn’t feel good about it but the benches were just too shallow

skip: How would you rank the projected career value of Burns, McLean, Misiorowski, Schlittler?

Ben Clemens: I almost didn’t put this one up because I’m struggling to come up witha  good ranking

Ben Clemens: I think I’d have it like Miz>McLean=Schlittler>Burns

Ben Clemens: but I don’t have huge confidence and I love watching all four

20longyears: Are the Pirates in trouble?

Ben Clemens: I am gonna say yes

Ben Clemens: generally speaking, that’s been a good lean in the 21st century

Sal’s Mom: Elly is tracking for ~8 WAR and really hasn’t had a hot streak yet

Ben Clemens: and he’s hitting well righty!

Ben Clemens: big year so far for the cohort of young athletic guys I’ve been irrationally high on for a while (Elly and Wood are the two I have in mind)

Junior Caminero Jr.: Is there any data on whether it’s more beneficial to have a winning record in the first or second half of the season?

Ben Clemens: I don’t remember the exact specifics but Dan looked into this and the general answer is it matters a little, but only inasmuch as it reveals team composition

Ben Clemens: like, if you traded for a bunch of dudes and got better, or you traded away a bunch of dudes and got worse, that matters

Ben Clemens: but it’s pretty small, and for static teams, it doesn’t matter

Ben Clemens: I think Dan found that preseason projections are STILL better predictors of playoff success than second-half record, even folding in the info that second half record gives you about team composition

CFH: Feels like a good time to be a Yankee fan – the team looks like a less of a one-man show than recent years, the underperformers (Grisham, Chisholm) are also the pending free agents, their current rival for the AL East looks kinda like a paper tiger (to me), the scary AL East rivals are underperforming – Yankee fans have a bit of a reputation for complaining about good teams so I thought I should say it

Ben Clemens: you love to see it

Ben Clemens: yeah it’s a good year for the Yankees so far. Ben Rice being good really solves a lot of problems

didace: “I am hopeful that one of the knock-on effects of ABS will be pitchers realizing that too many of their ‘unhittable pitches’ are unhittable but also not getting swung at, and taht the increased accuracy and also increased passivity of hitters means that throwing this way is resulting in too many walks” They could also change the check swing enforcement so that there are fewer called strikes. As an aside, why can a catcher challenge a non-swing call but a batter can’t challenge a swing call?

Ben Clemens: they’re testing it in the minors!

Straw: Is this just who Pete Crow Armstrong is? First half 2025 sure seems like the exception, not the rule.

Ben Clemens: My view is yes

Ben Clemens: and to be claer, this version of PCA is on pace for a 6-win season

Ben Clemens: I don’t think he’ll quite hit that, even, because I think his defense isn’t QUITE this good

Ben Clemens: but yeah…. look if you took first-half PCA from last year at face value, he should have been #1 in trade value

Ben Clemens: I think that some regression was already baked in

Ben Clemens: and he’s just hitting it now

Ben Clemens: with his approach, there’s just no way around some rouhg hitting stretches

grandbranyan: Anyone that doesn’t like 3TO should just watch the Brewers. 24th in HR but 4th in runs scored since 2024 with 1st in BsR (by over 15 runs), 3rd in ground ball rate, 1st in ground ball BABIP (by a dozen points), 1st in PA / 2nd in RBI with RISP

Ben Clemens: yeah

Ben Clemens: another reason to think of the Brewers as the modern-day Rays: they’re zigging wehre everyone else zags

Nomar6666666: What’s your feeling on how Lucas Giolito will do in San Diego?

Ben Clemens: I find myself surprisingly optimistic

Ben Clemens: Not like I think he’s gonna be an ace or anything

Ben Clemens: but I like his odds of churning out some usable innings

Ben Clemens: the Padres have a solid track record of getting something decent out of guys the rest of us are skeptical about, and Giolito was a perfectly acceptable depth starter just last year

Indecisive Fantasy GM: Thanks for answering my question! If I’m allowed a followup…would you prefer Nimmo or Caglianone ROS in a points league?

Ben Clemens: ooh. Probably Nimmo but I’m not an incredible fantasy player or anything

bosoxforlife: About the only thing that could help the hitters at this moment is a quick acceptance of the Adjudicated Check Swing. So many of the times that a hitter gets rung up are outrageous.

Ben Clemens: I agree that it’d be nice to have check swings not called so aggressively

Ben Clemens: that’s a clear lever that could be pulled to increase offense. I’m actually unsure why baseball hasn’t tried something before now

Ben Clemens: looking at what a swing meant in the 70s compared to now is silly

JD: No shot Bo Bichette opts out at end of season barring an absurd hot streak, right? He’s really struggling and looks like he’s presssing.

Ben Clemens: concur

MTF: Given the Guradians are the only team to have got by using five starters so far, and the paucity of good pitching in their system, are we seeing peak Guardians right now?  A wide open division race from here on out, would you say?

Ben Clemens: yeah, I think that’s fair. I think that they seem aware of this – leaning heavily on framing is a good way to make that sting less, for exmaple

Andrew Mattison: Are the playoff odds too sticky sometimes? I’m surprised to see the White Sox still well behind the Twins and Royals, both of whom have looked pretty bad, and the White Sox have those banked wins. I’m not saying that any of them are likely to make the playoffs, just that they seem similarly remote.

Ben Clemens: Yes.

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fun-with-playoff-odds-modeling/

Ben Clemens: the takeaway is basically this

Ben Clemens: the general moves the Bayes model is making – shading teams whose performance and divisional position don’t match our preseason expectations – make a lot of sense to me.

Ben Clemens: when I built a model that takes season-to-date stats more into account when they differ heavily from projections, I beat the existing model by a bit

Ben Clemens: alright everyone, this was a wonderful (and dense!) chat but it’s time for me to get back to my job

Ben Clemens: look for an article about Cristopher Sanchez tomorrow, plus some FG Lab tools in the coming weeks (perhaps one this week)

Ben Clemens: and lunch guy, I’m having leftovers of that green salad from earlier for lunch today