Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 5/9/22

Ben Clemens: Hey everybody, welcome to the chat

Ben Clemens: I’m gonna keep this one to around an hour today, so let’s get right into it.

Nikhil: How are you feeling about this batch of rookies? As exciting as you hoped?

Ben Clemens: I’m having fun with them so far, but I wish Witt and Rodriguez were hitting a little bit more

Armadillofury: How many BBE’s does it take for barrel rate to stabilize?

Ben Clemens: Boy, are you in luck, I wrote about this just today!

Ben Clemens: The answer is: I don’t love the word stability, but hitter barrel rates become meaningful really quickly and pitcher barrel rates don’t

Sirras: My wife and her friends played through King’s Dilemma recently. Highly recommend! (I played the board and the prompt reader as a way to shoehorn in an extra player who couldn’t commit to every session)

Ben Clemens: I had not heard of this game but it sounds amazing

Mike Soroka: If I’m back after the ASB like the Braves say I’ll be, what are you going to expect from me the rest of 2022?

Ben Clemens: I’m going to expect nothing and be pleasantly surprised at whatever they get

Ben Clemens: Soroka is a really fun pitcher, I hope he does well, I’m a big fan of the super-grounder-heavy young pitchers across the league these days

Ben Clemens: But he’s pitched so infrequently due to freak injuries that you can’t really rely on him for length, and he’s super rusty too

James: Should the Astros consider using 5 infielders in some situations with Framber pitching? His GB/FB ratio is insane.

Ben Clemens: Speaking of!

Ben Clemens: Probably, in some very specific situations. I wrote about this once when the Dodgers did it against Eric Hosmer:

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-dodgers-get-shifty/

Ben Clemens: Overall, though, the cost of not fielding a fly ball is high. So I think they should do it in circumstances where it makes sense (vs. extreme gb hitters basically) but be very judicious about it

bill: Oops – continuation of FIP vs other metrics. So you and others point out that FIP is predictive. Its a great indicator of a pitchers talent level. Totally agree with that. But it isn’t reflective of things that have actually happened, and I think for that reason it isn’t a good indicator of WAR, in the strictest terms. Were talking about WINS above replacement, not hypothetical wins. FIP seems to miss the variable swings that pitchers have on days where they are on or off. Yesterday Erick Fedde had a FIP disaster, but he continually had the angels off balance and was really effective with his pitch selection, and didn’t allow a run. The batters were clearly frustrated and were not making great contact. That is a thing that actually happened. He presented value. FIP shows that he has tons of weaknesses as a pitcher, but that is a separate issue than assessing what he did yesterday. Is FG also going to start using XwOBA to calculate war? its just a fundamentally flawed approach to assessing what happened

Ben Clemens: Eh, I just wildly disagree with this. We don’t use RBI to calculate WAR either, and that’s closer to ERA than anything else is

Ben Clemens: Should we penalize Juan Soto b/c his homers have all been solo? That’s WINS he’s not getting

Ben Clemens: Is FIP perfect? Most certainly not

Ben Clemens: But we don’t use heavily context-dependent stats for hitters, and no one argues that we should

Ben Clemens: FIP does a pretty good job of capturing the things that pitchers do that help their team win, as opposed to htings that happen to them that help their team win, like a good defensive play or whatnot

Ben Clemens: I think some kind of SIERA-based WAR or something like that would be interesting

Ben Clemens: But like…. the whole ‘it’s what happened on the field’ thing doesn’t make much sense to me. We very specifically de-contextualize hitter statistics to make WAR

Ben Clemens: batting WAR is very much not what happened on the field

DJ: Are you buying into Eric Lauer’s breakout being sustainable?

Ben Clemens: I’m still not

Ben Clemens: Maybe I’m just being a dummy, but I keep looking at him and keep not seeing what he’s doing that has made it work. I’m just going to keep thinking he’s an above-average pitcher, keep looking at him, and see if something clicks — but I’m not sold on it yet

The guy who asks the lunch question: What’s for lunch?

Ben Clemens: Impossobolognese that my wife made last night (that’s Bolognese made with Impossible meat)

Mike: It’s May and Taylor Ward is still good.  Is he good, an all star, or let’s wait for pitcher adjustments?

Ben Clemens: Good, not All Star

Ben Clemens: Dan wrote about this recently: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-angels-hot-start-is-partially-taylor-m…

Ben Clemens: Seems good! I just don’ believe he’s gonna keep it up, and the BABIP kinda looks that way too

Smiling Politely: How is Kershaw still great at lower velocities (and is it replicable and worth teaching to others?)

Ben Clemens: Pinpoint control and two excellent secondaries. I think it helps that his fastball has always gained a lot of value from deception and location, too

bill: thanks for responding! – but if that really reveals a pitchers ability, itll even out over time! and it shows what happened.

Ben Clemens: But… so should it for batters, right?

Ben Clemens: It takes FOREVER for pitcher ability to even out

Ben Clemens: That’s why we don’t do it

Ben Clemens: I mean, we could just use wins and losses for WAR. That’s wins on the field in the purest way. Or record in games where a pitcher pitched, or whatnot. But we all know the noise is too high. It’s all just a matter of how much noise you’re willing to accept vs. how abstracted from literally ‘did the team win’ you’re willing to go

Appa Yip Yip: Santiago Espinal is rocking a .348 wOBA with a .372 xwOBA with a much more sustainable BABIO than he used to have. What’s going on here?

Ben Clemens: He’s big!

Ben Clemens: I don’t actually know how much that matters. Let me say this: I still think he’s a roughly average to above average hitter. But I think he has excellent defense, and I think that his kind of game gets overshadowed a bit less with less lively balls, so I think he should be a good player going forward. But I don’t think the offense is going to continue at that rate

Ben Clemens: I have been an Espinal fan for a while, so maybe take this all with a grain of salt, but I think he’ll still have more WAR than Matt Chapman at the end of the season, at least on a per-PA basis

Derek: Randy Arozarena has been worth -4.0 runs on the basepaths this season!??

Ben Clemens: He’s, uh, a voracious baserunner

Ben Clemens: I don’t think he always makes great baserunning decisions, which is nothing new. Stealing home looks really smart when you pull it off and really bad when you don’t. I don’t think he’s actually this bad on the basepaths, but the guy makes a lot of outs that he doesn’t need to, and he just doesn’t take enough extra bases to make up for it

Bettsbellingercaruso: It’s funny how our perceptions of players can easily differ w the same wrc+ with the dead balls.

Bettsbellingercaruso: mookie has a 137 wrc+ with a .801 OPS. He had a 135 wrc+ in 2019 with a .915 OPS lmfao. Dead balls

Ben Clemens: The balls: they are dead

Ben Clemens: I totally agree, though. Changing offensive environments are really wild, and hard to wrap our head around

Armadillofury: Re Lauer –  he increased his FB velo from 92.6 to 94 and spin from 2256 to 2302 leading to a higher wiff rate (40% vs 27%).  He increased the SL, CT and CB usage at the expense of the FB and low whiff CH.

Ben Clemens: That’s definitely all true (that spin rate is pretty much right in line with how much it should go up given the extra velo). And, uh, lots of pitchers throw 1.5 mph harder and don’t improve their career ERA by 2.5 runs and career FIP by 1.5

Ben Clemens: I’m not saying Lauer isn’t better. But all of the sudden he’s throwing a decent fastball and striking out 36% of the batters he’s faced? I’m not convinced

Sodo Mojo: Have you played Project L yet?  My wife bought it sight unseen from Kickstarter which is usually not a good sign but it is very fun and plays a little like Patchwork.

Ben Clemens: No but that sounds incredible!

Ben Clemens: Gonna look it up after the chat

Colton: Do you think Alek Thomas affects Varsho’s playing time in AZ and by how much?

Ben Clemens: I do: I think he’s going to lose one start a week more or less

Ben Clemens: Might still get into those games — let’s call it 3.5 PA a week, which stings but Varsho played a ton for a catcher-eligible guy anyway

Brian: which guardian breakout is more  sustainable? Miller, Naylor, or Gimenez?

Ben Clemens: I believe most in Miller of those three

Ben Clemens: Gimenez is on a crazy batted-ball heater, and I don’t think Naylor can hang on to his strikeout rate gains given his approach at the plate. He’s kind of a sneaky David Fletcher type, but I don’t think he has the power or patience to make that really sing as a 1b only guy. I buy Miller’s approach more; he’s obviously not a 200 wRC+ guy but he hits the ball hard, elevates, and takes walks,

Ben Clemens: Sounds good ot me!

Derek: Are you more sold on the D-Backs or Rockies?

Ben Clemens: Actually, the Rockies

Ben Clemens: Not super sold, or anything, but I’ve watched more of the DBacks than the Rockies this year and they feel a batter or two away from falling apart all the time

Ben Clemens: Maybe the Rockies do too and I just haven’t watched enough of them yet, but I’m also more worried about DBacks pitching than Rockies pitching

Sirras: King’s dilemma – best played with 5 people who are all willing to buy into the RP element of their houses. This group played that each session was a different generation of the family and gave each session’s character a silly/punny name. Do recommend

Ben Clemens: Making up house rules that increase immersion is a favorite of mine

Ben Clemens: That feels like an excellent way to do it

Pedro: Would you keep Jon Gray or Ryan Yarbrough in an AL-only 5×5? Thx

Ben Clemens: Gray. Yarbrough feels like he’s kinda balanced on the head of a pin the past few years in terms of making it work with his stuff, and well, I think he fell off the pin

#notapril: Can we get a deep dive on Rowdy? Can’t figure out if he’s a ten team talent or just on a heater, and everyone’s got different opinions.

Ben Clemens: Jay just wrote about him late last week, so there probably won’t be *more* Rowdy content:

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/rowdy-tellez-is-absolutely-mashing/

Ben Clemens: But for my money, heater

Smiling Politely: Is it normal to have all but 1-2 1B with sub-zero def components for WAR? Or is it a SSS? Is that due to the penalty (and if so…seems problematically harsh?)

Ben Clemens: Nope, that’s pretty regular. I also think it’s about correct — I’m doing some research on changing positional adjustments with Statcast data baked in, but 1b penalty is very unlikely to change

Ben Clemens: When primary 1B’s play the outfield, they are ABYSMAL

Ben Clemens: A lot of them can’t play the rest of the infield b/c they’re lefties — but the ones that do are not good

Ben Clemens: It’s no accident that Dom Smith is a scratch-ish 1b (per UZR and DRS, 1b OAA is weird) and an abysmal outfielder

Armadillofury: The hitter vs pitcher imbalance is too much right now. I’m watching Yankees vs Rangers it’s painful to watch. The hitters look about as comfortable against Jon Gray and Nestor Cortes as they would against 1999 Pedro and Randy Johnson

Ben Clemens: It’s really something

Ben Clemens: I’m curious to see what will happen as things start heating up weather-wise but I’m not enjoying this style of baseball as much as I have recent years. It’s not that I need all the homers, but without the homers, offense is just not as fun

Ben Clemens: Batting average this low is really bad

Ben Clemens: For my enjoyment of the game

Jim: The Angels are good and Mike Trout has a 210 wRC+. Would be so good for baseball for this guy to finally get some October exposure

Ben Clemens: Agreed

Appa Yip Yip: If you had a pet pig what would you name them? I would go with Sam, short for Sam Hamwich.

Ben Clemens: What a great name

Ben Clemens: That’s all I have to say about that

joe: has staff ever floated the idea of having a positional adjustment neutral WAR featured somewhere on the site?

Ben Clemens: No, but that’s kind of interesting

FIP follow-up: So from a non-predictive standpoint, if you were comparing two SPs with substantial workloads and completed careers, would you place a higher value on FIP or ERA?

Ben Clemens: Oh, definitely ERA

Ben Clemens: FIP is not some end-all be-all. It definitely misses part of what makes pitchers succeed

Ben Clemens: But the noise in ERA is so great that it’s weird ot use a stat that says, maybe, 40% pitcher skill and 60% other stuff to do one-year WAR when you could use a stat that’s more like 80% pitcher skill 20% league average

Ben Clemens: I’ve talked with Appelman about having some way where our career WAR’s use ERA… there really are things that pitchers do to outperform or underperform FIP

Ben Clemens: It’s just, those things are rare and tend to smooth out over time, but they’re quite noisy in one-year samples

Ben Clemens: Let’s say that a pitcher has the true talent to outperform what their HR, K, BB, HBP would imply by half a run of ERA. That’s huge!

Ben Clemens: Five qualified pitchers last year (out of not that many) exceeded that 0.5 mark to the upside (ERA worse than FIP)

Ben Clemens: Seven exceeeded it to the downside

Ben Clemens: I’m gonna need more than one year’s data to say that Robbie Ray is a true-talent FIP beater like that

Joe: Moncada comes off the DL today.  I can activate him today, but would have to drop either KIKI Hernandez or Steven Kwan or Jonathan Villar.  Who would you drop?

Ben Clemens: I think probably Villar? Pretty worried about the playing time there, which really matters

Arrozarena: Is “on a heater” a new term?

Ben Clemens: It’s not but I guess me saying it has made people say it in the questions? Poker term, for me at least

Yank this: Odds of the NYY infield looking like this in 2024 : 1B-Judge, 2b- Gleyber, 3B- Volpe, SS- Peraza ?

Ben Clemens: 15%

Ryan: Which assesses how good Nolan Ryan was the best: bWAR, fWAR, or WARP? It’s so strange how large the discrepancy between them is

Ben Clemens: Over Nolan Ryan’s career, I’d actually go with our RA9-WAR (or bWAR)

Ben Clemens: I think that bWAR is adding random volatility based on the way they consider defense, but the results are pretty similar to RA9-WAR for Ryan specifically

Cortes: On the other hand, is Cortes not in fact Pedro?

Ben Clemens: Can’t argue with that!

Judge: Why would Judge be at 1B in two years? Ignoring that he might leave, he is a very good outfielder.

Ben Clemens: I assume it’s b/c of injury. I don’ think he’s very likely to end up at first either

Depot: Do you have a favorite baseball YouTuber?

Ben Clemens: I don’t watch a ton of YouTube, but it’s easily Bailey (Foolish Baseball)

Ben Clemens: It’s very much my vibe of baseball enjoying

kcbbq: Will Twins send Royce Lewis back down when Correa returns? I know they brought him up as they thought the worst for Correa but his injury hasn’t even landed him on the IL. Seems like it’d be foolish to use him as a DH as his defense is as good if not better than his bat.

Ben Clemens: I think so?

Ben Clemens: For me, he’s just up until Correa stops hurting

Ben Clemens: I know they haven’t actually said that, but I’d like to keep getting Lewis AB’s full time

Trout: The points you’re making in the chat would’ve been great for the article

Ben Clemens: I wasn’t hoping to do a sweeping defense of FIP, because I’m not sure it’s the perfect WAR metric or anything (it’s surely not), but maybe I should have

Ben Clemens: I find the FIP/ERA argument to be tiresome, to be honest

Ben Clemens: I thought that article was an interesting way of looking at it, and one that Appelman suggested to me, so I wrote about it, but a full-blown ‘here’s why your ERA WAR is weird’ was never really the plan

Ryan: I do, too. Why’d you write an article about it then? Just wanted to settle the score?

Ben Clemens: Well, I find the argument that FIP ‘ignores 60% of what a pitcher does’ to be even MORE tedious than the debate

Ben Clemens: And since I write about statistics at FanGraphs, I’m getting the debate whether I want it or not. So I’d like to at least be rid of that particular line. But yeah, I’d be happy if there were less of it

Guest: What you’re not counting on Ben is that by the time Correa is healthy three more Twins will be on the IL, with how things are going for them

Ben Clemens: Oh boy, I hope not

Ben Clemens: But it’s been a tough injury start for them, no doubt

Lars: When a team is down 2+ runs how do you feel about a slugger bunting against the shift leading off an inning?

Ben Clemens: If they can bunt well, I’m into it. I think that bunting is quite hard, but that successful bunters against the shift (Brandon Belt is my personal favorite) should keep doing it. Getting on base is valuable, particularly in a situation where you need multiple runs

Kuff66: Following up on the pet pig question, when my daughter was like 7 years old, she drew a picture of a pig wearing a Phillies jersey for me and called it Cole Ham-els.  I’ve never been more proud.

Ben Clemens: Should we just do pig content here? That’s also an excellent name

Ben Clemens: I’m not sure that I should steal from Effectively Wild, but I really enjoyed Max Purrzher as a cat name

Ben Clemens: Animals named after sports are just fun to me

Guest: I was always a big fan of Royals great Mike Swiney

Ben Clemens: and of course, Babe “The Great Hambino” Ruth

Farhandrew Zaidman: Has Buehler’s stuff gotten just a littttle bit worse over the years? Seems like the velo is down a tick, command is only great not stellar, and the reliance on the cutter grows each year. This is purely anecdotal by the way, I’m interested in what the numbers say.

Ben Clemens: Sorry, digging up a point about Buehler that someone else made, gimme a second

Ben Clemens: Ai yai yai I failed

Ben Clemens: His fastball has gotten worse, is the point

Ben Clemens: Sorry about that pause and don’t find a thing

Ben Clemens: But it’s a little slower, the movement isn’t quite as good (seems like his release point has changed quite a bit, as Alex Fast shows here

), and he’s not locating it quite as well

Ben Clemens: So overall I’m worried about him being not as good as he was in the past — while recognizing that there’s room below that to still be great

Marshall: Clayton Purrshaw, Justin Purrlander and Max Purrzer are all locks for the HOF.

Ben Clemens: Clawton Purrshaw imo

The Ghost of Bobby Thigpen: The White Sox just told the Twins (and everyone else) to hold their beer while they count their injuries…

Ben Clemens: Two straight years of this nonsense for them

Ben Clemens: Their trainer must be worrrrrrried

Mork Borg: So, have the Red Sox played themselves out of the expanded post-season?  It looks like the current projections are for 80 wins, but they _seem_ worse than that.

Ben Clemens: I think they have played themselves out of the playoffs, yeah

Ben Clemens: Our standings basically agree

Ben Clemens: It’s just hard to spot that many wins in the ALE and make the playoffs, even with an expanded field

Ben Clemens: When Dan was looking at the White Sox last week, he noted that the average AL WC3 in his simulations was around 88-90 wins

Ben Clemens: That’s going to be a reach for Boston at this point

Ben Clemens: Not that they can’t do it, but they really need to get on a roll soon if they want to get back to a good enough pace. 10-19 is a big hole to climb out of

The Ghost of Bobby Thigpen: Can we stop the cat stuff right meow?

Ben Clemens: Meow listen up, people can keep makin cat puns if they want to

Guest: Is there a measurable adjustment period for players who leave Coors? Story is simply not as bad a player as he looks right now, and comparing that to Arenado who was good not great last year, but looks like his old self now…

Ben Clemens: I haven’t seen a study of that done but it might be interesting

Ben Clemens: Chuck it in the ‘investigate soon’ bin

#notapril: I sat Cortez for Cease this week. 🙁

Ben Clemens: Ooooof. Well, I think Cease is really good this year too?

Ben Clemens: He’s a really interesting case, he overhauled his fastball more or less completely while in the majors

The Ghost of Bobby Thigpen: The record is 6, but I think you can do 10…

Armadillofury: Why are the balls hand made in the year 2022?

Ben Clemens: I generally agree with you. It’s strange! I think there’s some charm to it, but c’mon, let’s get things consistent

The Real Ben Clemens: Logically I know at some point either Greinke’s strikeouts or his ERA are going to come up, but like…….it’d be super whacky and cool if he just pitched another 100 innings like this

Ben Clemens: I am rooting for it SO hard

Ben Clemens: Greinke being a magical being who exists outside of normal baseball is something I’m very much here for

Ben Clemens: But uh, speaking of the whole ERA/FIP debate that we seem to be having for some reason today, Greinke’s career ERA? 3.4. Career FIP? 3.44

Ben Clemens: He, by the way, has the single largest divergence in wOBABIP (wOBA on balls in play) out of everything i studied

Ben Clemens: His 2015 season

Farhandrew Zaidman: Treinen looks like he’s going to be out until at least the second half. Do the Dodgers need to make a back end of the pen move or should they sit pat for a bit? Lots of electric arms in AAA/AA.

Ben Clemens: If I were them, I’d sit pat for a bit but plan on upgrading in July if several of their prospects aren’t lights out

Dan: I think the odds judge is Yankees first basemen in 2024 is less than 15% to have that happen and the other three things would be much less than 15%

Ben Clemens: Yeah that’s totally fair. If I thought about it longer I might have said 2% or something like that

Ben Clemens: I do think the others are somewhat likely? Some permutation thereof

Ben Clemens: But the Judge thing seems quite unlikely

Guest: You leaving Cortes in if he takes this *whispers no hitter* into the 8th/9th?

Ben Clemens: For me, depends on how he’s looking and feeling. If he’s still feeling good and not laboring, not missing a lot of spots, I’d be tempted to

Ben Clemens: I don’t see him as a max effort, sudden burn out kinda guy. If he’s pitching within himself and not tiring, who doesn’t want a Cortes no-hitter?

Leland: Do you buy into the conspiracy that owners tinker with the balls to affect next year’s free agent class? So they don’t have to pay them as much. Deaden the ball before a class of hitters, liven it before a class of pitchers, etc.

Ben Clemens: I don’t

Ben Clemens: Never attribute to malice what you can to incompetence, basically

Ben Clemens: The league has just been buffoonish around the changing baseball, and that’s my default assumption when there is baseball buffoonery

Depot: If Nestor was having such a good outing he’d be in line for the Win

Ben Clemens: Can’t argue with that logic

Gerrit Cole: Am I back? Or was I never really gone?

Ben Clemens: Extremely ‘never really gone.’ People saying Cole was bad underestimate pitcher performance variance.

Ben Clemens: This isn’t just a Yankees fan thing, but a LOT of Yankees fans thought he was a fake ace for a while there. Lots of fans overreact to small-sample over- or under-performance from their pitchers

Ben Clemens: Cole doesn’t always help it with his ‘I was 3 minutes late ot my start’ excuses, but yeah…. he’s been great the whole time, maybe ex a few weeks of figuring out how to throw without Spider Tack

Didace: Hand-made-balls. I always thought it was only the stitching that was done by hand. They just can’t get a machine to do it better.

Ben Clemens: Ah yeah that’s what I meant, hand-stitched

Kelenic: What do the M’s do with Kelenic at this point? Seems like a pretty epic bust for being one of the top prospects in all of baseball.

Ben Clemens: I mean… send him back to the minors, hope he mashes there, and give him another shot if he does

Ben Clemens: What are you supposed to do? He just looks awful

Ben Clemens: I wasn’t super-optimistic about his call-up last year, but uh, I did not expect anything like this level of futility

TomBruno23: Paul DeJong…Toast?

Ben Clemens: Oof… Yeah, I think so

Ben Clemens: His swing just looks unplayable at the moment. Maybe it’s a confidecne issue or something? He’s so late and also so under every pitch he squares up. An average launch angle of 22.7 degrees is really hard to wrap my head around. He’s just launching lazy fly balls all over the place

Ben Clemens: Also there’s a hole in his bat in the strike zone. I don’t know what you do, but giving everyday PA’s to somebody who is just visibly lost feels like a bad decision

joe schlabotnik: thank you for saying nice things about yadiel hernandez last year. he is one of the best stories in baseball. so happy to see him putting together such a nice streak

Ben Clemens: Huge fan of his! 33-year-old rookies are always cool, his story is neat, and I love his style of player — all-fields line drive hitter

Ben Clemens: Love to see what he’s doing this year

Trev: FIP – Why is the denominator IP and not PA. Isn’t IP also defense dependent to a degree?

Ben Clemens: I dunno

Ben Clemens: If I were making it and were smarter at math, etc., I’d start from wanting to use TBF for sure

Guest: Trade Kelenic back to the Mets I hear Cano is available

Ben Clemens: The Mets don’t have Cano’s rights anymore, they released him. But otherwise, I love this joke, I really did enjoy suggesting that the White Sox should trade Craig Kimbrel for a nice high-floor 2b like Nick Madrigal

Depot: More WAR for the rest of their careers: Yadi, Pujols, or Frank Schwindel?

Ben Clemens: Schwindel lol

Ben Clemens: Alright, on that note, I’m gonna call it a chat. Thank you everyone for hanging out with me today, and thanks as well to the trolls whose comments I didn’t post. Readers are readers! Have a great week everyone, and let’s do this again next Monday.