Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 9/1/26

Ben Clemens: Hey everybody, welcome to the chat

Ben Clemens: I’m taking Brendan’s chat slot while he’s on vacation, but I don’t really know that much about prospects, so if you ask me a Brendan question, I’ll probably reply with some silly and generally under-informed answer

Ben Clemens: but if you want to know about my normal nonsense? I’ve totally got you

nathand33: Hey Ben, what’s your take on using Aroldis Chapman in a tie game in the 9th? With the extra-inning runner rule in play, is there an analytical argument for holding your best swing-and-miss arm for the 10th inning instead of deploying him in a clean 9th, or does win probability still favor ensuring regulation stays tied?

Ben Clemens: you’ll never believe this, but I wrote about this specific situation

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/save-your-closer-terms-and-conditions-may-…

Ben Clemens: basically yes, there is an analytical argument

Ben Clemens: but it’s pretty marginal

Ben Clemens: that’s never stopped me before, of course

small e: After two years in a row of the AL’s 3 best(2026) / 3 of the 4 best(2025) teams being cornered in one half of the bracket due to the AL East division, would you change the playoff format and do you think the commissioner’s office will try to? As a Red Sox fan I find it very annoying to have to hope and pray for the possibility of any playoff home games while a possibly under-.500 AL West winner is guaranteed them.

Ben Clemens: oh, I would definitely change the format

Ben Clemens: not even a question

Ben Clemens: I’m not quite sure how I would

Ben Clemens: but I’d definitely want to change it

Ben Clemens: don’t worry, we’ll surely be writing about new playoff ideas this winter

SPArn: Did you catch the Nats ninth inning meltdown Sunday? In a season filled with them, it was still a special one. For another example of a bewildered pitcher, I really encourage you going back and watching Tom Cosgrove on the Joe Mack sac fly, if you haven’t seen it already.

Ben Clemens: I didn’t, but oh man, what a week for collapses

Ben Clemens: the Giants one was also amazing

Nathaniel: Just hope you saw that Dave Flemming and Jon Miller were geeking out over the Trent Harris curveball article last week!

Ben Clemens: I did, quite the thrill

Justin Krupp: Am I being overly optimistic based on half a minor league season and a few good at bats, or do the Giants have something with Jonah Cox?

Ben Clemens: i mean, could it be something? yes. is it 100% something? nothing is

Ben Clemens: but would I be excited too? totally

opifijikl: Are you going to watch Jedixson Paez’ start tonight and see some 80 control? What do you think about control over stuff pitchers, like he seems to be?

Ben Clemens: I probably will not, but I’ll probably watch some clips of it afterwards. I’m a big proponent of control-over-stuff pitchers in general, especially because stuff feels easier to add

Ben Clemens: I’m a sucker for the guys who are dotting corners and getting it done with fastball shape instead of raw velo

opifijikl: Are there any ways to quantify the time from start of swing (bat on shoulder) to contact with the ball? What stands out to me every time I watch Roman Anthony hit is how his bat goes from his shoulder to the strike zone especially quickly, like a rattlesnake striking. Is there anything to this? Is it correlated with good/bad things?

Ben Clemens: you could do something like bat speed divided by swing length

Ben Clemens: there was a good presentation at saber seminar talking about how this specific input, basically rotational acceleration, is useful and not measured directly

Swings Low: What’s your favorite storyline of the 2026 season

Ben Clemens: has to be the White Sox

Ben Clemens: like, they’re on track for a bye

Ben Clemens: not to make the playoffs as the last wild card, to be one of the two best division winners. how wild

maximus74: can i get a silly and uninformed answer about which prospect has you most excited?

Ben Clemens: well you definitely can

Ben Clemens: I’m most excited to see Eli Willits. Because man, he’s hyped, and man, I have  very very little idea how he’ll turn out

Ben Clemens: his batting lines are wild in a good way, he could grow into almost anything, and he’s a switch-hitting shortstop walking more than he strikes out at high-a at 18. Also, he’s batting .223

hayz11: Cam Schlittler is undoubtably great, but having watched a bunch of his games I still find it hard to understand how he does it. Basically just throws fastballs at the top of the zone with ok command and bad breaking balls. And then no one can touch him. Remarkable that it works, especially as a starter!

Ben Clemens: very good fastballs, though

Ben Clemens: also the cutter is kind of a pseudo-breaking-ball, which helps

Ben Clemens: it has a lot of IVB, so it’s not quite a gyro slider, but it diverges like 10 inches from his fastball horizontally, sounds like a brekaing ball to me. it just happens to move 95 mph

Ben Clemens: i have been slow moving Schlittler up in my mental list for basically the reasons you’re talking about. I definitely was below consensus on him when I talked to people about trade value

Ben Clemens: basically i’d say the breaking balls aren’t that bad. our models love all his stuff, more than I do probably

Ben Clemens: and he gets away with it because no one can square anything he throws up

Iain Bernhoft: It seems like most things in baseball that could be chalked up to “mentality” are actually sample size variance. And yet: the Mariners continue to find new bullshit ways to lose games via careless mental mistakes and meltdowns. At what point does one point the finger at the team (and fire the manager)?

Ben Clemens: yeah it’s like, MOST things are, but not all

Ben Clemens: and it really is hard to distinguish

Ben Clemens: I think that from my perspective, this is kind of a tough call, but lots of managerial firings are like “well we don’t know if it’s the manager or not, but it might be, and we don’t like the good stuff they do enough to offset the risk that this downside comes from the manager’

Ben Clemens: no one really *knows* ever, you know? but at some poitn the risk/reward tips over into ‘yeah it might be’

SPArn: Verlander was getting flashbacks to World Series Bregman and Soto and nipping it in the bud. I think there’s a false Max Clark perception because of the Tik Tok, tattoos, chains, etc. But he’s revealing himself as an introspective data nerd. Books, covers, etc.

Ben Clemens: oh wow, I totally forgot Verlander was a character in that world series even though of course I was thinking of Soto when I saw Clark

Ben Clemens: Like, Bregman’s not so much, but the childlike glee Soto did it with

marz: Did WPA award Colton Cowser +1.000 points for that catch? (also holy hell did you see that catch?)

Ben Clemens: it doesn’t. in fact, wpa doesn’t award anything to fielders

Ben Clemens: but like, yeah, that was a win. one win exactly of value. hard to argue otherwise. you can argue who deserves the credit on many of these – like, if an outfielder makes a routine catch that ends the game, do they get credit for that?

Ben Clemens: but in this particular instance, very few outfielders make that play, hard to argue he deserves less than, say, 95% of the credit

Alexander: Hi Ben! Fellow Ben, Ben Brown had a neck injury setback last week. I’m concerned about his long term outlook. What does a like named person say about this?

Ben Clemens: loved Eric’s notes about seeing Brown pitch

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/scouting-notes-on-the-rehabbing-cubs-and-d…

Ben Clemens: I mean, I’m worried! He doesn’t have a long track record and he’s been hurt a lot, so my mind immediately goes to ‘how many times can he get hurt while still throwing the same high quality stuff’

Ben Clemens: i hope it works out. i’m worried for him, and for the Ben Cinematic Universe

drplantwrench: BREAKING NEWS: ARTE MORENO SOLD THE ANGELS

Ben Clemens: this is huge

Ben Clemens: man

Vee: i dislike the implication that data nerds don’t have tattoos!

Ben Clemens: agree

Ben Clemens: I have a tattoo

Ben Clemens: no one would argue that I’m not a data nerd

drplantwrench: BEN THIS IS THE HAPPIEST IVE FELT IN A DECADE

canderson20: New just broke that Arte Moreno is finally selling the Angels to Stan Kroenke of all people. How long do you think before we start to see things take shape under new ownership? As a person from St. Louis I have a particular disdain for Kroenke but he does own some pretty successful franchises in different sports already.

Ben Clemens: yeah, look, the St. Louis stuff rubs me the wrong way still too

Ben Clemens: as a longtime Cardinals fan whose family still lives in St. Louis (hi Roy)

Ben Clemens: I have to imagine things are gonna get better, though. gimme the devil I don’t know after the last 20 years of the Angels

Swings Low: Considering Imanaga has too much trouble keeping the ball in the park, seems likely he won’t have a rotation spot for Cubs in playoffs. Cubs will probably not have a single pitcher making a playoff start with over 1 WAR contributed to the team in the regular season.

Ben Clemens: man

Ben Clemens: that’s crazy

Ben Clemens: it does look like it’ll possibly be true, though, depending on how the rest of the regula rseason goes

Ben Clemens: for flukish reasons, of course, like injuries and trades and all. but still, what a stat

jackbauer: Shouldn’t the Dodgers move to a five-man rotation (or, at a minimum, have Skubal and Snell throw every five days)? In a seven-game series, the 1/5 and 3/7 starters throw on four days of rest (2/6 is the only one with five days of rest, which was Yamamoto in the 2024 WS and 2025 NLCS and WS). Glasnow was excellent on four days of rest over the weekend.

Ben Clemens: they appear to have made the calculation that it’s less important to get guys acclimated to the amount of rest they’ll have in the plyoaffs, and more important to just use them less

Ben Clemens: I think that’s probably okay. I don’t tihnk Skubal doesn’t know how to pitch on four days’ rest or anything. But I’m not a biomechanics expert, I defer to them on how this plays into rest, habit, that kinda stuff

Swings Low: Oh man sorry for all the Cubs comments, didn’t realize you were a Cards fan. Is PCA your MVP?

Ben Clemens: eh, not really a specific team’s fan for quite some time at this point. PCA is surely the MVP, though. Who else?

David Wiers: McGonigle is kind of doing it all, and given his pedigree, yeah that scans. But have you seen any of his baserunning? A modest 12 SB to 2 CS, but StatCast has him at +5 (tied for third best in baseball) for baserunning runs and his six Advances is tied for 2nd most.

Ben Clemens: tied for 7th-best in baseball, to be fair, but yeah, it’s impressive. His baserunning hasn’t jumped out to me this year but that’s the kind of thing you don’t easily notice watching a game

ajleff: AJ Ewing legit?

Ben Clemens: hoenstly I still have no idea

Ben Clemens: it’s clear that the building blocks of a very good outfielder are tehre

Ben Clemens: i’m a little bit worried by how much he’s striking out relative to how much power he’s hitting for

Ben Clemens: I’m encouraged by the fact that they seem to just be whiff strikeouts more than chase strikeouts, though

Ben Clemens: as in it’s not like he’s just waving at everything by a long shot

sliderinthedirt: Genuinely crazy how quickly PCA went from a center fielder clone of Javier Baez to literally peak Mike Trout

Ben Clemens: it’s nuts, right?

Ben Clemens: I changed my tune on him pretty heavily from last year’s trade value to this year’s

Ben Clemens: there’s definitely some ‘once is an accident twice is a trend’ there but like

Ben Clemens: how did last year’s second half portend this year’s season? it kinda didn’t

Ben Clemens: he just is much better than i expected, by a lot

Vee: Is Clay Holmes an extension candidate on the north side? He’s a great fit and vice versa.

Ben Clemens: yeah, I think that would make sense, with the standard caveat that things are tougher to judge around the lockout

Ben Clemens: like perhaps the cubs jsut feel like extending zero guaranteed offers, period, until they learn the new lay of the land

Ben Clemens: but yes, a pitching-needy team with a pitcher currently throwing well for them who has a player option feels like a great fit. tear up the option (which he wasn’t going to exercise anyway), write a new deal for 3/60 or whatever, announce it before the playoffs start

Ben Clemens: feels like a win/win to me for a team that clearly intends to compete indefinitely and also clearly needs some rotation help

jtrichey: Gotta say I was on the other end around here in that I didn’t think Wetherholt should be rookie of the year. Now it seems like a moot point, but if I had a vote it definitely would have gone to Spencer or McLean. I just don’t trust the defensive numbers enough for that to be the edge.

Ben Clemens: I don’t have a rookie of the year vote

Ben Clemens: I odn’t have any BBWAA votes, to be clear. I’m not a BBWAA member

Ben Clemens: but if I did, I would be voting for Wetherholt

Ben Clemens: My view is that it’s fine to discount the defensive numbesr. Even by a good amount if you want. But you shouldn’t ignore them totally, you should jsut weight everything by how sure you are it matters

Ben Clemens: or is accurately reflecting things

Ben Clemens: and even if you lop off quite a bit of the defensive value, I still think he a)comes out the best b)has a very bright future, top prospect who clicked immediately in the majors

Ben Clemens: whether to consider a player’s long-term potential in RoY voting is a philosophical question, it’s not clearly answered by the criteria of the award, but I would use it as a tiebreaker

Ben Clemens: if you made me vote today, my ballot would be 1. Wetherholt 2. McLean 3. Benge but I haven’t dived incredibly deeply

Ben Clemens: what with not having a vote and all

blackcubeofdarkness: where do you rank the current cubs outfield (PCA, happ, suzuki + conforto/shaw) in recent memory? in WAR, at the pace they’re going at they would end up the 6th best outfield of the century between 2012 LAA and 2016 CHC

Ben Clemens: this is giving me most home runs by a father/son duo vibe

Ben Clemens: no disrespect to Suzuki, who’s having an awesome year and is a guy I’ve liked (and probably over-hyped) for a long time

Ben Clemens: I think my first year of bold prediction contests on Effectively Wild, I had ‘suzuki leads the NLC in wRC+’ and I’ve just stayed bullish since

Ben Clemens: it’s very impressive. having a 10 win outfielder makes it a lot easier to have an elite historical outfield, though

canderson20: Report came out this weekend that James Click is considered to be the frontrunner for the A’s open GM position going into the offseason. How excited should I be as an A’s fan compared to the last decade+ with Forst at the helm? I’m struggling to contextualize how much of the Astros dynasty success was due to his wins as the GM. Thanks!

Ben Clemens: I think the cleanest read is that we don’t know how much his stewardship mattered, but that it sure seems like he was doing some stuff right that wasn’t refreshed after his departure

Ben Clemens: you’ll never know. we’ll never know. the inputs are very obscured from the outputs. But I don’t get the ick from his tenure in Houston, at the very least

cyanocitta: Also, I know that the sample size is miniscule, but what’s your read on Brett Bateman so far? His BABIP is .433, which is clearly unsustainable, but he was already trending high for multiple seasons in the minors. It has been discussed before how predictions of a “regression to the mean BABIP” can sometimes be fallacious, in that there can be casual factors—either some element of skill, or a lack thereof—driving core batted-ball trends. How much of Bateman’s profile holds up in the long run, and to what extent can he reliably keep squeezing weak line drives through the infield gap?

Ben Clemens: i don’t know the specific numbers to answer your question in its entirety, but basically I don’t believe much of it

Ben Clemens: he doesn’t hit a ton of line drives, which is something that would make me believe

Ben Clemens: he might be a true talent somewhat high babip guy, his minor league numbers are somewhat suggestive

Ben Clemens: but this is the best BABIP of his career by some margin

Ben Clemens: and like, eh

Ben Clemens: you don’t generally go wrong betting against that continuing

Ben Clemens: I’ll likely do a deeper dive on this later in the month because you’ve intrigued me and I’m light on topics

Roman Ajzen: re playoff format, isn’t the easiest fix to go back to 2 divisions? Maybe that would require expanding to 32 teams (great) but MLB lived with a 4 team AL West for a while so I don’t see why it would be a huge issue

Ben Clemens: yeah something along these lines

Ben Clemens: maybe no divisions!

Ben Clemens: the balanced shedule kinda rocks anyway

Ben Clemens: let’s just lean into it more and give the teams with the best records the best spots

mike sixel: Every team makes the second season…..but man, the best teams get byes and the worst teams need to win A LOT more games than the middle teams to advance…..every fanbase is engaged all year long, and into the second season for at least a game…..

mike sixel: Less playoff teams, more cities that don’t care about August and September baseball.

Ben Clemens: i was wondering about this, but I think that in the end, I don’t like it enough

Ben Clemens: it’s a fun idea but I think the idea of getting rid of some of the existing guaranteed home games is too hard of a pitch

canderson20: To add on to my Click question, I think if he comes in and immediately overhauls the pitching department for the organization I’ll feel more comfortable giving him additional credit for them being as good as they were for so long. Maybe some of that is the current pitching situation being so dire for the org, but they always seemed to turn out good arms under his direction.

Ben Clemens: yeah, I think I roughly agree with this

Ben Clemens: it’s an unknown

Ben Clemens: but I’m willing to believe that he is doing some good stuff

oriolesbullpen: What are your thoughts on Luis Robert Jr. being signed, and Luis de León being called up?

Ben Clemens: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/like-a-bird-on-the-wire-orioles-get-robert…

Ben Clemens: that’s Michael’s take

Ben Clemens: I don’t have much take period on De Leon, but I think Baumann nailed it on Robert

Ben Clemens: why not try?

Ben Clemens: surely they’re not picking up his option

Ben Clemens: but this just feels like good busniess for everyone

Ben Clemens: alright, on that note, I’m giong to call the chat for today and go figure out what’s for lunch today

Ben Clemens: sorry if I wasn’t able to get to your question today, there were just too many good ones

Ben Clemens: I am now switching to reading a bunch about the Angels sale for an article tomorrow

Ben Clemens: have a wonderful week, and of course a wonderful Labor Day weekend