We’re back, with another one of these! Previous community polling topics have included front offices, ownerships, pitching coaches, general enthusiasm, and so on. Now I’m here to ask you about team chemistry. You know, that thing that’s impossible to measure, that thing that continues to be debated as if nothing has ever been settled, because nothing has ever been settled. That thing that exists — or doesn’t exist — mostly within a community that does not include yourself, because you yourself are not a major-league baseball player. How does your favorite baseball team get along? You don’t know. How do you think your favorite baseball team gets along?

I don’t know why I’m asking this now, exactly. It’s just coming out of curiosity, and I wouldn’t be any less curious tomorrow, or a week from now. But the timing, I suppose, isn’t bad — we’re deep enough into the season that teams should have personalities, but we’re not so deep everything will just be colored by wins and losses. Braves and Twins aside, everyone still gets to think they have a chance, so nothing has totally gone off the rails.

I do know I’ve been reading the Ben Lindbergh/Sam Miller book, and they’ve discussed chemistry prioritization and observation. I also read this post by Kate Preusser last week, and while that was specifically about the Mariners, it must’ve cemented the topic in my mind. I don’t want to talk about any particular team up front because I don’t want to bias any of the voting down below. But for something that gets talked about so often, I’m a little surprised we haven’t tried this before.

Don’t get me wrong — none of us actually know anything about team chemistry, for sure. I don’t think there’s even an agreed-upon definition. But we do get to observe how players interact, some of the time, and we get to read about more. So I think fans can get a certain sense of how the roster fits together. Whether there’s adequate leadership, whether there’s adequate support, whether there’s adequate interaction between all groups. What idea do you have about your favorite baseball team? Your idea might be wrong, but you might’ve also been wrong about the pitching coach, and I doubt that stopped you from voting back whenever that poll post went up. I’m just hunting for informed opinions. There’s information within informed opinions.

What I love about these poll posts is that they allow us to establish a context. Instead of saying, oh, this team seems to get along, or this team seems unhappy, we have an average, we have comparisons. It’s only by seeing the whole landscape that you can try to identify the standouts. This is why I could use your help! I sure as shoot couldn’t generate this data by myself. I need help from the community, so I can come back and analyze the voting a day or three from now.

You probably have a favorite team, or a couple favorite teams. You probably have some kind of mental definition of team chemistry. How good do you think is the chemistry of your favorite team? We can probably learn something from this. Even if we can’t, at least this is a few minutes you can distract yourself from thinking about the roiling sea of horrors that threatens to drown us all every day that we breathe.

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Sunday, in what was undoubtedly one of the coolest moments of his career that no one remembers, Ian Desmond slugged a lead-changing and eventually game-winning home run. Desmond homered off of a horrible pitch, and then he flipped his bat, which is funnier now.

I’m not convinced there’s anything to learn there. Most hitters would be able to punish a hanging two-strike curveball. Desmond last year probably would’ve been able to punish a hanging two-strike curveball. That being said, Desmond only saw a hanging two-strike curveball because he’d stayed alive in the at-bat. The previous pitch:

One pitch is one pitch, no more and no less. In isolation, it’s a normal-looking foul ball, and maybe Desmond fouls off the same ball a year ago. But a year ago, and even before, Desmond struggled against high fastballs. A year ago in particular, Desmond struggled against plenty of things. That’s why he wound up signing a one-year pillow contract toward the end of the offseason, but a month and a half in, now, Desmond is looking like a total success. Ian Desmond has helped the Rangers scoot back into first place.

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With Starling Marte away on paternity leave, the Pittsburgh Pirates have called up prospect Alen Hanson from the minor leagues. Hanson was off to a fine start in Triple-A, slashing .288/.309/.398 with seven steals. He spent all of last season at the Triple-A level, too, and hit similarly well: .263/.313/.387 with 35 steals. Throw in that he’s primarily a middle infielder, and it’s clear Hanson had little left to prove in the minors.

If it feels like Hanson’s been on the prospect radar for ages, it’s because he has. Originally signed out of the Dominican way back in 2009, he began gracing top-100 lists after a .309/.381/.528 showing in Low-A back in 2012. Despite his lengthy minor-league tenure, Hanson still has youth on his side. He’ll will play the entire 2016 season as a 23-year-old. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last couple of years, we’ve talked a lot about the Kansas City Royals and the ability of certain teams to sustainably beat estimates like the BaseRuns expected records we publish on our standings page. Famously, the Royals have won far more games than our numbers thought they would — over the last three years, they’ve won 25 more games than their BaseRuns Win% would suggest — making two straight World Series appearances and winning last year’s fall classic along the way.

Interestingly, though, with less fan fare, Missouri’s other team has also been winning far more often than BaseRuns suggested was likely. Over the last three years, they’ve won 23 more games than their BaseRuns expected record, nearly as many as the Royals. Last year, they won 11 more games than expected on the strength of an historic clutch performance. As Ben Lindbergh noted in a Grantland piece last summer, the Cardinals pitching staff was insanely good at stranding runners last year, so their run prevention ended up being fantastic even as their pitchers routinely danced with danger.

Six weeks into 2016, however, the tables have turned. The Cardinals are just 20-18, already finding themselves eight games back of the Cubs in the NL Central, except BaseRuns thinks they should actually be 25-13, which would give them the second best record in all of baseball. A year after posting one of the largest positive differences between expected record and actual record, the Cardinals have already won five fewer games than expected, and if they continued at this pace, they’d post the largest negative differential for any team in a single season.

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We have a number of great ERA estimators on this site. FIP, xFIP, SIERA: choose your favorite, because they all have a place in attempting to better describe outcomes closer to a pitcher’s true talent over a given timeframe. Maybe you’re lazy, or maybe you’re different, but it can also be nice to have a dead simple one — which is where K-BB% comes in. If a pitcher is striking guys out and limiting walks, that’s a fundamentally positive thing, and it turns out K-BB% is actually the best in-season predictor of future performance out of all the ERA estimators on the site (though it’s still not a great predictor, to be honest). Unless a pitcher possesses a signature batted-ball profile, K-BB% represents a nice, handy way of feeling a little better about a guy if his ERA hasn’t been quite up to expectations. Or, you know, feeling worse about a guy whose ERA has been lower than what his peripherals seem to say it should be.

Which brings us to the current K-BB% leaderboard. A casual perusal yields these top-five worst K-BB% rates among qualified starters in the major leagues:

Negative? Negative! These guys all have pretty middling strikeout rates, and the top few have some serious control problems. Just in case you were wondering, no one ran a negative K-BB% among qualified starters last season. It makes sense, given that it’s a hard thing to do while still being allowed to pitch a lot of meaningful innings in majo- league baseball games. But Ventura is currently doing it, and his ERA is “just” 4.62! And yet this next table, of Ventura’s current FIP and xFIP ranks among qualified starters, seems relevant, given his current standing with strikeouts and walks: Read the rest of this entry »

We are thrilled to announce that Eric Longenhagen is re-joining the FanGraphs staff and will serve as our lead prospect analyst going forward. Eric brings experience, insight, and determination into this job, and we’re excited to see what he’ll be able to do with our prospect coverage both now and in the future.

I’m Eric Longenhagen, and I’m very excited to be joining the FanGraphs staff and seizing the reins of full-scale prospect coverage here. I’ve been ramping up toward a role like this for eight years, and am looking forward to wrestling with the enormity of this job’s scope and the processes that must be built and polished to do it well. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of writing, in lieu of working for a Major League team, is the boundless diversity of baseball at your fingertips. I hope to cover and share with you the entire spectrum, from the rapidly approaching international signing period, to the draft and, of course, off-season analysis of each club’s farm system.

If you’re interested in my work history and in inferring my credentials therefrom, this paragraph is for you. I spent my college summers interning for the Phillies’ Triple-A affiliate. My duties were expansive and mostly menial, which is why I often skirted them in favor of slipping into the scout section to watch, listen and learn. I then spent two seasons doing video scouting at Baseball Info Solutions. During that time I began scouting and reporting on the Phillies farm system for Crashburn Alley. When I left Pennsylvania for Arizona’s oppressive heat in 2014, and could no longer properly scout the Phillies system, I bounced around. My work appeared at Sports on Earth, Jason Churchill’s Prospect Insider and then here at FanGraphs as part of the staff assembled by Kiley McDaniel. Early in the spring of 2015, ESPN brought me on to supplement its scouting and prospect content with a focus on the draft, and gave me the keys to their International coverage as well.

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A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

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Roughly four years ago now, the present author facilitated a crowdsourcing project designed to place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams. The results weren’t intended to represent the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather to provide a clue as to which broadcast teams are likely to appeal most (or least) to the readers of this site. Consider: the average telecast of a major-league game offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how they consume a telecast.

The results of that original exercise have been useful as a complement to the dumb NERD scores published by the author in these pages. Four years later, however, they’ve become much less useful. In the meantime, a number of the broadcast teams cited in that original effort have changed personnel. It’s possible that the tastes of this site’s readers have changed, also.

About a month ago, the present author began the process of reproducing that original crowdsourcing effort, facilitating a ballots for this site’s readers. This post represents the first installment of the corresponding results.

Before examining the rankings in earnest, three observations of varying merit:

Broadcasting Is Difficult
Assuming a roughly average time of game (about three hours each) and full major-league season (162 games), it’s probably not incorrect to say that a club typically plays about 500 hours of baseball each year. Broadcasters are tasked with providing some manner of spoken content for the duration of those 500 hours. Radio announcers are compelled to relay the sport’s sometimes complex machinations in real time — while also supplementing their narratives with analysis. Television commentary might actually pose a greater challenge. As the well-respected radio voice of the Rangers, Eric Nadel, suggested on this site’s podcast, the relative freedom provided by video — which renders much descriptive activity moot — conspires only to facilitate more opportunities for a broadcaster to embarrass himself. For the endurance required of the job alone, broadcasting is difficult.

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Sean Manaea got shelled at Fenway Park on Tuesday night. Making just his third big-league appearance, the Oakland A’s southpaw allowed eight runs on 10 hits in just two-and-two-third innings.

The following day, I asked the promising young hurler what it feels like to stand on the mound in front of 35,000 people and get hit as hard as he did.

“It’s… I’ve never been in this situation before,” responded Manaea. “I had a really bad game n Myrtle Beach two years ago, but there were only a couple thousand people in the stands. To be here at Fenway and do that bad, and hear the hometown crowd as I walked off the field… it sucked. But it is what it is. All I can do is acknowledge that it happened and move on.”

Acknowledging what happened used to be an issue. Back when he allowed seven runs over two innings against Myrtle Beach — “The worst I’d done up until last night” — Manaea had trouble owning up to adversity. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Fangraphs community,

This will be the last post I write for Fangraphs. I am stepping aside to let someone else have the same wonderful exposure I was given, where you readers are hungry for information and willing to debate. I’ve enjoyed the feedback and getting to meet and talk to a great many new people, both in baseball and in the blogosphere. I hope you as the recipients have gotten at least a bit of the same enjoyment out of the content I have written over the past seven months.

When I took this job at the beginning of the offseason, I saw it as a unique opportunity to see a ton of players and become better as a scout, and I feel I have accomplished that. I have a lot of ideas and research interests that spawned out of this experience, and some that have been waiting a few years for my full attention. With all my time going into doing the best I could for this space, many of my other projects have been put on the back burner, and now it’s time I branch out in the interest of some new endeavors.

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