Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley talk to Kelly Pracht, the CEO and co-founder of predictive analytics startup nVenue, which has provided the real-time probabilities displayed on this season’s MLB Network-produced Friday Night Baseball broadcasts on Apple TV+. They discuss nVenue’s origin story, its sports-betting ambitions, its 100-plus-input machine-learning model, which factors are and aren’t predictive of performance, Ben and Meg’s misgivings about some of the displayed probabilities, and much more. Then (1:04:37) Ben and Meg bring on FanGraphs writer Ben Clemens to discuss the results of his study about how nVenue’s odds compare to a simplistic, one-factor model, and why they think the accuracy of the system matters.

Audio intro: Remember Sports, “Odds Are”
Audio interstitial: Sunflower Bean, “Beat the Odds”
Audio outro: The Rock*A*Teens, “Count in Odd Numbers”

Link to Friday Night Baseball details
Link to nVenue’s website
Link to article about nVenue fundraising
Link to SportTechie on nVenue
Link to SportTechie on nVenue again
Link to D Magazine on nVenue
Link to InnovationMap on nVenue
Link to nVenue YouTube video
Link to nVenue on PitchBook
Link to nVenue on Crunchbase
Link to Emily Bender on AI
Link to machine learning wiki
Link to overfitting explainer
Link to SABR on machine learning
Link to “reach base probability” tweets
Link to Ben Clemens’s nVenue study
Link to Ben’s study data
Link to Brier score wiki
Link to league count splits

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Judging by the tributes that poured forth on the occasion of his death at the grand age of 101 years old on Friday, there’s a solid chance that Roger Angell — a man who bore first-hand witness to Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, and Mike Trout — was your favorite baseball writer’s favorite baseball writer, even though he was never a full-time baseball scribe at all. Unburdened by the daily deadlines of the beat reporter, the competition for scoops among the national writers, or (to use his term) the weight of objectivity, Angell instead mused at length in the pages of the New Yorker in a capacity that served as a sidelight to his longtime role as a fiction writer and editor. Though his frame of reference stretched so far back that he spotted Ruth walking around Manhattan as a child, and spoke of Napoleon Lajoie with his father, he didn’t take up writing about baseball until age 40. He reported, but with a twist: “I’m reporting about myself, as a fan as well as a baseball writer,” as he told Salon’s Steve Kettman in 2000.

With the luxuries of looser deadlines, greater space, and the ability to depart from sportswriting conventions, Angell filed eloquent and erudite essays a handful of times every season, writing about the year’s winners and losers, its superstars and promising newcomers, its sunsetting old-timers, and its zeitgeist as experienced from his vantage as a privileged outsider. Over the course of six decades that took him from man-in-the-seats dispatches to deep explorations of the game’s intricacies with its master craftsmen, he assembled a body of work — primarily collected in The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Late Innings (1982), Season Ticket (1988), and Game Time (2003) but continuing as late as his 2015 collection, This Old Man: All in Pieces — that is unrivaled, revered, and beloved.

“I wanted to concentrate not just on the events down on the field but on their reception and results,” wrote Angell in the introduction to The Summer Game. “I wanted to pick up the feel of the game as it happened to the people around me. Right from the start, I was terribly lucky, because my first year or two in the seats behind first or third coincided with the birth and grotesque early sufferings of the Mets, which turned out to be the greatest fan story of all.” Read the rest of this entry »

If I may, I think the uncertainty regarding this season’s offensive environment has made us a bit paranoid. Are hitters lagging behind pitchers due to an irregular spring training? Is the ball not traveling like it once did because it’s been replaced yet again, or is the mass introduction of humidors to blame? Or worse, has MLB introduced multiple balls into the game, some of which are being used in certain games to boost action or influence outcomes?

That last theory has been floating around my Twitter feed for a while now. I’m not going to discuss whether it’s true, but I brought it up because supporters of the multiple ball theory will often compare two batted balls with near-identical exit velocities and launch angles. One ends up traveling more than the other, despite all the indications that it should not. Aha! Something must be up.

In response, a lot of people have suggested batted ball spin as an explanation. Maybe one ball came off the bat with backspin and the other came off with topspin, which would drag the ball down as it traveled through the air. Unfortunately, since data on batted ball spin isn’t available on Baseball Savant, this might seem like a dead end. Don’t worry, though: I had some leftover Trackman data on 2021 NCAA Division I baseball games from a piece that Eric Longenhagen and I collaborated on during last year’s Draft Week, and they contain mostly complete readings on the spin of a batted ball. Could we use collegiate baseball to learn about the odds and ends of batted ball spin, and what it tells us about hitting? Read the rest of this entry »

Winning a batting title was long a prestigious accomplishment. If you led your league in hitting, you were generally viewed as one of the best in the game for that reason alone. That’s no longer the case, though, and while batting average still has meaning — like every other stat, it paints part of the picture — it only tells you so much. Metrics such as wOBA and wRC+ provide far better snapshots of a hitter’s value.

Which isn’t to say that hitting for a high average, particularly the highest average among your peers, doesn’t matter to many players. Ditto to others who make baseball their profession. As Minnesota Twins manager Rocco Baldelli put it, “I think it does matter, and it should matter. If you have a player who is getting a crap ton of hits, that’s a nice way to bring value. I’ll take a bunch of guys with a .320 batting average… who are getting on base all the time.”

Luis Arraez is that type of player. Since he debuted in 2019, no one on Baldelli’s club boasts a higher batting average, and only the now-departed Nelson Cruz has a higher OBP. A .312/.374/.400 hitter in 1,048 big-league plate appearances, Arraez profiles as a potential batting champion.

“Luis Arraez” was Jayce Tingler’s immediate response when I asked Minnesota’s bench coach which Twins player would be most likely to capture a batting title. “He’s got great judgment of the strike zone, great hand-eye [coordination], he hits the ball from chalk line to chalk line. He’s one of the best line-drive hitters in the game.” Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, Byron Buxton seems to find another gear. With the exception of his abbreviated 2018 (94 plate appearances in the majors), Buxton’s OPS has increased every single season compared to the year before. In 2022, partly thanks to becoming a fastball-crushing machine since the start of last year, he’s continued this pattern, hitting .278/.342/.722 in 79 plate appearances (all stats are through Monday’s action). He’s even tied for the league lead in home runs with nine, especially impressive given that he’s missed more than a third of Minnesota’s games.

It’s that last fact that is troubling, as Buxton’s career has been hampered by an unfortunate inability to stay healthy. And it hasn’t been one, consistent problem that keeps him out of games but rather a succession of nagging ones, with each season bringing a mystery grab bag of misfortune. This year, it’s been a sore knee from a slide, a hand contusion, and a hip problem. Last year, it was a hip, a hamstring, and a broken hand. Before 2021, he missed time due to a concussion, a sore left shoulder, a sprained left foot, a torn labrum, another concussion, a hit by a pitch to the wrist, a different strain to the same wrist, a broken toe, serious migraines after an outfield wall collision, a strained groin, and a sprained knee — and that doesn’t count the myriad day-to-day issues.

The last time Buxton played even 100 games in a season was in 2017 (while there were only 60 games in 2020, he still missed a third of them). I was born in 1978; growing up, Eric Davis was the five-tool, mega-skilled exemplar of the dynamic superstar who couldn’t stay healthy, but even he still managed to get into 130 games a year during his 1986–90 peak. Buxton debuted almost seven years ago, in June 2015, and barely has three years’ worth of playing time in the majors to go along with another half-season in the minors due to Minnesota’s early proclivity for demoting him every time he fell into a slump. Read the rest of this entry »

Shelley Duncan has a job befitting a longtime FanGraphs reader with deeps roots in the game. A big league outfielder/first baseman from 2007-13, the 42-year-old son of legendary pitching coach Dave Duncan is the Analytics Coordinator for the Chicago White Sox. Hired for the in-uniform position in November 2020, Duncan previously managed in the Arizona Diamondbacks system and served as both a field coordinator and a special assistant of baseball operations with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Duncan discussed his current role, and the way analytics are changing the way teams game plan, when the White Sox visited Fenway Park over the weekend.

———

David Laurila: Your title is Analytics Coordinator. What does the role entail?

Shelley Duncan: “It’s a position that is starting to become more popular with some teams, to have somebody in the dugout that can help other staff members, and players, with information. You can translate information and be an intermediary between them and the analytics part of the front office. You’re not replacing any of the relationships, or any of the jobs, just being a source for everyone.

“There are so many areas of focus on a baseball field that involve information. Whether it’s players knowing stuff about themselves, about the opponent, decision-making during games, advance work… half of the advance work is digging into numbers and information, and then blending video. One guy can’t do all that — I can’t do all that — but what I can do is support everybody with my experience and knowledge, including the work I do with the analytics department.”

Laurila: I assume you’re consulting with the analytics department on a regular basis… Read the rest of this entry »

Flipping through the slate of big league games over the past week has felt a bit like walking through the halls of my high school on the first day of a new school year, quietly taking stock of what and who had changed since I was last there. Who is suddenly wearing colors I’ve never seen them in before? Who’s hanging with a new crowd, or won’t shut up about their camp friends? Who spent time in summer school, and was that stint enough for them to keep up with the rest of their class? And of course: Who’s the new kid?

Last week, the Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr., the Mariners’ Julio Rodríguez, and the Tigers’ Spencer Torkelson, all of whom rank within the top five of our preseason Top 100 Prospects list, made much-anticipated major league debuts, with each player surrounded by their own specific brand of pre-show buzz. And while it would be foolish to draw sweeping conclusions from a player’s performance in any one game or series, a big league debut seems as good a time as any to take a snapshot.

When Witt stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the eighth inning of the Royals’ home opener to face the Guardians’ Triston McKenzie, he’d yet to record a hit in the game, having flied out once and grounded out twice. He took McKenzie’s first offering – a 93 mph fastball, low and away – for a ball, then smashed the second pitch of the at-bat into left for a double, scoring Michael A. Taylor from second, a go-ahead run that would later become the game-winner:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorites paintings is René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. Basically, it’s a painting of the pipe with “this is not a pipe” written on it in French. While interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, one can argue that it makes two points. First, there’s the wordplay; a painting is not a pipe. But there’s a double-meaning you can take, too: the frequent incongruity between what a word says and what a word actually is. (If you’d like to read a lot more about this painting, Michel Foucault has just what you need!)

MLB’s competitive balance tax has a lot in common with Magritte’s pipe. It says it’s about competition, but without any mechanism to ensure that the proceeds improve competition. It says it’s about balance, but it has no way to ensure that balance. It’s described widely as a luxury tax, but it’s not that either. Luxury taxes, historically, have been directed at what economist Fred Hirsch termed “positional goods,” or goods that are highly prized based on their scarcity and prestige value. Labor costs in a labor-intensive field, though, aren’t really a luxury good, and MLB’s business is mainly putting teams of baseball players on the field. Everything MLB does stems from those games; if the teams didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be as much clamor for t-shirts with cardinals sitting on a wooden stick or ice cream served in a small plastic helmet with a creatively spelled abbreviation of “stockings” on it. Players are no more luxuries for a baseball team than leather is for a shoe company.

But let’s get to the competitive balance side of things. MLB’s argument is that the CBT is needed to increase competitive balance. Yet there’s very little evidence that it actually has increased competitive balance, and if anything, teams are farther apart since the CBT was implemented, not closer together. From 1984 to 2001, leaving out shortened seasons, the standard deviation of winning percentage was about 67 points. From 2002, the first year of MLB’s modern CBT, to ’21 (excluding the shortened 2020 season), that increases to 74 points; since the start of 2016, when salaries have been static, it’s 80 points. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past several years, we’ve typically had about 1,500 players on The Board at any given time once all the org lists are done, spread across the tool’s pro, draft, and international sections. Heuristics play an important role in enabling us get a grip on such a large pool of players, especially when we are considering individuals for the first time, or trying to assess disparate players on the same FV scale.

For example, we felt comfortable absolutely stuffing Rockies right-handed pitcher Jordy Vargas near the top of their organizational prospect list in large part because of a key heuristic. I have not seen Vargas in person. He spent all of 2021 in the DSL, and didn’t come stateside for instructional league. Because the Rockies have struggled at the big league level and are therefore unlikely to be motivated to trade prospects, other teams have had little reason to thoroughly scout their DSL club, which makes sourcing detailed scout opinions about a player like Vargas difficult. Sometimes, a scout will come across a player like this at random and provide an in-person opinion that makes up the lion’s share of what we impart to readers, but in Vargas’ case, all we had was pitch data (which was how he got on our radar in the first place) and video we sought out from the 2021 DSL.

It can be challenging to drop Vargas right into the Rockies list for initial consideration, since he and someone like Ryan Vilade are apples-and-oranges in the extreme. It’s much cleaner to step back and compare Vargas, apples-to-apples, with same-aged pitching prospects across the global baseball landscape to get a sense of where he fits among that sub-group, assign him a FV grade in that context, and then move him onto the Rockies list. In Vargas’ case, his skill set is very similar to that of high school pitchers taken in the mid-to-late first round of a given draft (projectable 6-foot-3, gorgeous delivery, already throwing in the mid-90s, an excellent curveball), so we can use our heuristic FV for that type of player (in this case a 45) to get an initial sense of where he should be on the Rockies list even though I haven’t seen him, and then try to polish his grade from there. The foundations of most players’ evaluations on our site are built on heuristics like this and then augmented by other, more granular details. Read the rest of this entry »

As I was thinking of a title for this piece, it struck me how many puns and turns of phrase related to catching exist in the American lexicon. “Catch as catch can” and some version of “catching catch-all” flitted through my mind, as did “Catchers on the Rise,” an overwrought hat tip to the literary canon. Ultimately, though, a nod to Joseph Heller’s 1961 classic Catch-22 seemed the most fitting. Not just because of the basic facts – conveniently, it’s 2022 and I’m writing about catchers – but also because there’s something paradoxically funny about of one of the greatest catching classes in recent memory coming of age at a time when the role of the catcher seems to be on the brink of fundamental change. Read the rest of this entry »