Archive for Daily Graphings

Each August, the best and brightest minds in the game come together in Boston for Saberseminar. Like the five conferences that preceded it, Saberseminar 6 was a fantastic weekend of friends and baseball research, and most importantly, raising money for cancer research.

We helped kick off the weekend with a Friday night event at Mead Hall in Cambridge. Anecdotally, it was the best attended pre-Saberseminar meetup yet, and it was wonderful to see so many new faces, as well as familiar ones.
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“Does Zach Britton have a shot at the Cy Young this year?”

It’s a question I didn’t take seriously at first. It’s only happened once in the last 20 years, and Eric Gagne’s 2003 season is perhaps the greatest season in the history of the modern closer. It comes complete with major league records — 55 consecutive single-season saves and 63 consecutive saves spanning multiple seasons — that helped justify the voter’s decision. There existed both the utter dominance and the storyline. But the Cy Young Award is now almost universally a starter’s award, and it’s been fair to wonder all this time whether Gagne could be the last reliever to win it, but it also might be time to start wondering whether this is the year it should happen again.

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With 117 games in the books, the Miami Marlins are one measly half-game out of wild card position. Considering they’re just five games over .500 and four teams are within 2 1/2 games of that final wild card spot, I wouldn’t exactly go printing Marlins playoff tickets yet, but it’s impossible to deny that the theoretical scenario in which they reach the postseason is becoming increasingly possible. As a result, they are now reasonably in a position where it’s in their best interest to make decisions over the next 45 games that best give their current team a chance to win. Yesterday’s announcement that Giancarlo Stanton’s season is over naturally raised the following question: “Who should the Marlins add to help replace that production?” The initial rumored answer is the hilariously unsatisfying solution of newly minted free agent, Alex Rodriguez. On a visceral, gut level, this is a horrendous idea, but let’s move beyond that immediate reaction and take stock of the pros and the cons of this pairing.
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Please welcome Michelle Jay to FanGraphs. You’ll generally find Michelle behind any type of camera lens or social media app. No matter which hat she is wearing at a particular time, we are excited to have her on board.

Dear readers, allow me to introduce you to the latest ways to find content from across FanGraphs’s family of blogs. You may already follow us on Twitter (@fangraphs) or Facebook (/fangraphs). Through those channels, we’ve been providing you a stream of nearly every single article published as they are published to the site. We’ll still continue to do that. But, now you’ll see some extra content, things you’ll get only by following us on social media.
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Christian Yelich is one of the best young hitters in baseball. He’s not one of the best when it comes to talking about his craft. Twice I’ve tried, and twice I’ve failed to draw much out of the Miami Marlins outfielder.

Yelich is unfailingly polite — this by no means a criticism of his character — but he’s swatted away my queries like errant curveballs. The 24-year-old batting-champion-in-waiting is “up there trying to hit the ball hard, and whatever happens, happens.”

One thing happening is increased power. Yelich has gone yard 12 times — he had seven long balls all of last year — and he’s slugging a robust .496. As for his home-run production going forward, that’s another subject to be sidestepped. Read the rest of this entry »

Just to be clear, there are two positions here.

Position: New York Yankees Baseball Operations Web Application Developer

Location: The Bronx

Responsibilities:

• Assist in the design and implementation of web-based tools and applications for senior baseball operations personnel.
• Migrate and adapt existing web applications for mobile devices and various hardware platforms.
• Interface with all departments within Baseball Operations (scouting, player development, coaching, analytics) to build tools and reporting capabilities to meet their needs.
• Work with major and minor league pitch, hit and player tracking datasets, college and other amateur data, international baseball data, and many other baseball data sources.

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If you’re searching for a compelling National League division race, the only place to turn is the west coast. With the Nationals currently 7-1/2 games up on the second place Marlins and the Cubs sporting an even wider 13-game lead on the Cardinals, the one game separating the Giants and Dodgers at the top of the western division makes it the only intriguing race going. Given that the Dodgers are arguably the favorites to win the division and inarguably a playoff contender, I have what should be an easy question: Which five pitchers are currently in the Dodgers rotation?

Don’t wrack your brain too hard; it’s a trick question. There are the two pitchers who have been healthy all season, Kenta Maeda and Scott Kazmir, and then there’s Brandon McCarthy who returned to the rotation in July from his Tommy John Surgery. Beyond that it gets increasingly murky.
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There was a time, not very long ago, when Andrelton Simmons mesmerized us on a regular basis. You couldn’t go more than a week without some preposterous defensive play flooding into your Twitter timelines attached to phrases like “whoa,” “wut,” and “OMG.” Yet over the last year or so, that interest in Simmons’ plays has died down.

One reason might be MLB’s stringent social media policing that has deterred sharing GIFs and Vines of baseball-related content, but it’s not like those rules have shut down our collective love fest with Giancarlo Stanton home runs or Noah Syndergaard fastballs. Perhaps there is something about good defense that requires a visual aid in a way that other things don’t, but there’s probably more to it than that.

To understand this troubling decrease in Simmons-related online joy, we first have to ask ourselves if Simmons is still the elite defender he was at the peak of his internet glory. If he is, we must then wrestle with the reasons why he no longer seems to impress us to the same degree.

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I cannot venture to say that Alex Rodriguez is a complicated individual any more than any other person, but I can fairly easily say that Alex Rodriguez the baseball player is full of complications. He’s an all-time great who has twice signed two of the most expensive contracts in baseball history, been suspended for PED use, and is currently being shoved out of the organization he has played for the past 13 seasons despite putting up colossal numbers and leading the team to a World Series championship during the 2009 season. This post is not meant to analyze Rodriguez’s career, celebrate his accomplishments or discuss his flaws. The question here is should Alex Rodriguez retire, and like most Rodriguez-related issues, it is complicated.
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Exit velocity! We love it! Sorry for shouting. But we do! We love to sort the leaderboards, and we love to write articles using the information gleaned from those leaderboards. This is one right here! Beat writers love to tweet the exit velocity when a player they cover dongs a dinger, and even the folks who don’t always love the application of exit velocity in the public sphere agree that its tracking can only mean positive things for the future of our understanding of the game. Exit velocity: it’s for the people. Can you believe just a few years ago we didn’t have this stuff?

We have it now, and for as little as we have grasped about the subject, it’s intuitive that the higher the average exit velocity, the better. Hard-hit balls can go for home runs, and home runs are the best. In first place on this year’s average exit velocity leaderboard is Nelson Cruz. Good hitter. In second place is Giancarlo Stanton. Good hitter. Third place? Mark Trumbo. I’m on a word count, so I’ll stop here. You get the point. Good hitters having good seasons are hitting the ball hard, and that should surprise no one.

There’s a flip side to that leaderboard. Some bad hitters are having bad seasons and hitting the ball not-hard. The guy with the lowest average exit velocity and more than 200 balls in play is Billy Hamilton, who’s averaged just 83.3 miles per hour on his batted balls. Hamilton’s having a fine season, overall — he’s projected to finish the year right around +3.0 WAR thanks again to his elite defense and baserunning — but we’re now nearly 1,500 plate appearances into Hamilton’s career, and it’s beginning to look like the bat might wind up being more Alcides Escobar than the league-average production we all dreamed on when Hamilton broke into the league.

But that’s not going to stop me from writing about Hamilton. Because even though we might like to see what happens were he to hit the ball harder, there’s a lesson to be learned from when he hits it softly. Kudos to you if you already see where this is going.

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