On last Monday’s episode of the Rates and Barrels podcast, Derek VanRiper raised a curious contradiction. “[Riley Greene is] first percentile in squared-up percentage, but 97th percentile in barrel rate, which — I’m sure there’s an explanation, I don’t know what it is just yet.” In response, Eno Sarris asked, “How can he barrel it without squaring it up?” It was a great question. In colloquial use, a squared-up ball is synonymous with a barreled ball. So what’s going on here, exactly?

The first thing to know: A squared-up ball is not necessarily a well-hit ball, as Davy Andrews highlighted when these stats were first made public last June. To understand why, one must first become acquainted with the Statcast definition of squared up. The MLB glossary entry for squared-up rate defines it thusly: “A swing’s squared-up rate tells us how much of the highest possible exit velocity available (based on the physics related to the swing speed and pitch speed) a batter was able to obtain – it is, at its simplest, how much exit velocity did you get as a share of how much exit velocity was possible based on your swing speed and the speed of the pitch.” If a hitter generates 80% of their possible exit velocity on a given swing and the ball is put in play, the batted ball is considered squared up.

We might quibble over the simplicity of that definition. In any case, as Davy showed, squared-up balls can be hit at super low speeds — if all it means is that a hitter channelled 80% of the potential exit velocity, then 80% of a half-swing is not very much exit velocity.

It’s also possible to do damage without making frequent flush contact; Greene shows us how. As Ben Clemens wrote just a couple of weeks ago, Greene is posting yet another excellent offensive campaign despite one of the higher strikeout rates among qualified hitters. He’s doing it unconventionally, swinging a ton in early counts to maximize damage. He’s also unconventional in another sense: He barrels the ball a ton while hardly ever squaring it up.

Part of the explanation for how this works is tied to the nature of swinging hard. When the bat speed statistics first dropped, it immediately became clear that there is a strong negative relationship between bat speed and the ability to square the ball up, at least by the Statcast definition. Click over to the bat tracking leaderboard, and the first thing you’ll see is this image, which shows the negative correlation between these two variables:

That’s no surprise. By the Statcast definition of a squared-up ball, slow swingers will always come out on top, because swinging slower allows for greater barrel accuracy. But it’s not all bad news for hard swingers. They also tend to produce the most valuable type of batted ball: a barrel.

Naturally, bat speed is correlated — positively — with barrel rate. A barrel, by the Statcast definition, is any type of batted ball where the expected batting average is at least .500 and the expected slugging percentage is at least 1.500. Barrels tend to be clustered in a pretty narrow exit velocity/launch angle range, somewhere north of 100 mph in terms of exit velocity and between 15 and 40 degrees or so of launch angle:

As the scatterplot below shows, the relationship between bat speed and barrel rate is extremely tight:

Greene’s average bat speed — 75.2 mph — is in the 91st percentile, so on some level, a high barrel rate and a low squared-up rate is to be expected. Even so, the spread between these two metrics is striking. His barrel rate is higher than his squared-up rate! Only one other hitter has a lower squared-up-minus-barrel rate — Aaron Judge. And that gives a hint into how, exactly, Greene is pulling this off.

Judge racks up an obscene number of barrels. Already, he’s mashed 60 this year, good for a 25.9% barrel rate. Like Greene, his squared-up rate is low — not as low, but comfortably a standard deviation below the mean. But also like Greene, Judge is amazing at converting his squared-up balls into barrels.

Nobody comes particularly close to Judge in this metric. Nearly 40% of his squared-up balls are converted into barrels, by far the highest rate in the league. (The league average is 13.6%.) As you might have guessed, Greene also excels here, ranking fifth among all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances:

So that’s the first part of this equation. Greene might not square the ball up that often, but when he does, it’s frequently crushed. The other part of the equation? Greene hits a ton of foul balls.

Greene’s 315 foul balls rank fifth among all hitters. When Greene makes contact with the ball, it goes foul 56% of the time. That mark ranks 11th out of all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances; besides Cal Raleigh, nobody else in Greene’s squared-up-to-barrel cohort fouls off nearly as many balls:

All of those foul balls — in addition to his seventh percentile whiff rate — contribute to the squared-up percentage denominator, sinking Greene’s squared-up rate to the very bottom of qualified hitters. Importantly, foul balls are not part of the barrel rate denominator. The barrel rate that shows up on the Savant player page popsicles is a measure of barrels per batted ball event. A bunch of foul balls do nothing to affect a hitter’s barrel rate, but they’ll go a long way toward tanking a squared-up rate.

It isn’t necessarily intuitive to think that a hitter could be so good at barreling the ball and so bad at squaring it up. But breaking it down in this fashion, I think it starts to clarify this ostensible conundrum. Barrels are hard to come by. Even Judge, the barrel GOAT, hits one just over a quarter of the time he puts a ball in play. To be a barrel king like Judge or Greene, you don’t need to crush that many baseballs, at least on an absolute basis. But you better make sure that when the ball is in play, it gets smushed.

More than anything, I think these two data points paint a compelling picture of the modern hitter. Greene, perhaps more than any other hitter, goes for broke, almost like the anti-Luis Arraez. His swing tilt is the steepest in the sport. He mishits a bunch of pitches. He whiffs a ton. But when he connects, he does damage. And even though those damage events are relatively infrequent, they’re valuable enough to make him one of the better hitters in baseball.

Last night, exactly one week before they’re slated to make the first overall pick in the 2025 draft, the Nationals fired president of baseball operations Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez. After ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news, the team announced assistant general manager Mike DeBartolo will serve as interim GM. Bench coach Miguel Cairo was named interim manager this afternoon.

Rumors that Rizzo and Martinez might finally be on the hot seat had made the rounds over the past several weeks, but the timing is less than ideal. According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the last time a team fired its GM before the trade deadline was when the Twins got rid of Terry Ryan on July 18, 2016. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale provided an explanation, reporting that both Rizzo and Martinez had contract options for 2026, with mid-July deadlines for those decisions. Even for a franchise that just fired its POBO and manager, it’s a bad look to let money dictate the timing of the decision when so much is at stake. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s never a good time to lose a starting pitcher, but doing so when you’ve lost six of your last seven games and have relinquished first place in your division is an especially unwelcome happenstance. This is what the New York Yankees are currently experiencing, as Clarke Schmidt, who was placed on the injured list due to forearm tightness after an early exit from his Thursday start, will likely undergo Tommy John surgery. With a 3.32 ERA, 3.90 FIP, and 1.2 WAR in 14 starts, Schmidt appeared to be headed towards his best season in the majors, but short of a miracle, he’ll now be out until well into the 2026 season at least. Coming just as the offense appeared to be recovering from its June swoon, the Yankees’ trade deadline to-do list may have just gotten a bit longer.

Six weeks ago, the Yankees were in a strong, though not insurmountable, position at the top of the AL East. No fan should start making travel plans based on a seven-game divisional lead in late May, but it’s about as strong a position as a team can hope to have in a good division. In his May 28 start, Schmidt threw six shutout innings en route to a 1-0 victory over the Angels, giving the Yankees that a seven-game lead (their seasonal high-water mark) and a 35-20 overall record. Since then, the Yankees have gone 14-21, losing 11 games in the standings relative to the current first-place team, the Blue Jays.

The disappearance of the offense was a big part of the Yankees’ slump, at least until the last week or so. On the whole, the offense dropped to a .718 OPS in June after posting an .812 OPS through the end of May, a mark that was second only to the Dodgers. Half of the team’s plate appearances in June were made by players with a wRC+ under 90 for the month, including key early-season performers Paul Goldschmidt and Ben Rice, as well as a returning Giancarlo Stanton. The pitching remained solid despite the team’s 13-14 month, with the rotation combining for a 3.19 ERA and a slightly less exciting 3.79 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2021, Ke’Bryan Hayes is the leader in OAA among all infielders. As one of the best defenders in the sport, his floor is very high. Even with his career 87 wRC+, he has still been worth about 3 WAR per 162 games. If he could be a consistently average offensive player, he’d be one of the most valuable players at his position. This is a story we all know. With his name swirling in trade rumors, you have to imagine other teams are thinking about the possibility more so now than in the past. His issues stem from his suboptimal swing path, and if he’s traded, that will be what his new hitting coach tries to fix.

In the last calendar year (459 plate appearances), Hayes has a 60 wRC+. That is bad! But despite those struggles, it’s not like he is completely lacking offensive ability. His bat speed is only a little below average. His strikeout and whiff rates are better than league average over the past three seasons. He hits the ball hard more often than not, and he chases at about an average rate. Those are all things you could work with if you’re trying to manufacture a league average hitter. But if you’re doing all this and your path is rarely working in an ideal direction, you’ll always have limitations on what you do when you actually make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

A piece that ran here at FanGraphs just over a week ago elicited a good suggestion. Commenting on A Conversation With Max Scherzer on the Importance of Conviction, reader muenstertruck wrote the following:

“If you’re taking follow up questions, I’d like to hear how he differentiates intention and conviction from physical effort. How difficult is it to mentally commit to the pitch but only give it 90% so you keep some gas in the tank? Is it even possible to do so?”

Fortuitously, an opportunity to circle back with the future Hall of Famer came just a few days later when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park for a weekend series. As expected — Scherzer likes talking ball — he was amenable to addressing said followup.

“Effort level and conviction are different,” Scherzer answered. “You can throw a pitch at 100% effort and still be mentally indecisive about it. You can also put out less than 100% effort and be mentally convicted in what you’re doing. Can things go hand-in-hand? Yes, but it’s not ‘more effort means more conviction.’ You can just be more mentally convicted.”

Scherzer had opined in our earlier conversation that you’re more likely to miss your spot when not fully convicted. What about throwing with full conviction at a 90% effort level? Does that make it easier to pinpoint your command? Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve now passed the mathematical halfway point of the 2025 season, which serves as a good time to check in on the ZiPS projected standings and analyze the ways in which reality has torn the preseason prognostications to shreds. While our depth charts utilize the ZiPS projections in the daily standings, this full ZiPS run utilizes the most robust methodology that I can assemble without pulling out what’s left of my increasingly dwindling supply of hair.

The ZiPS projected standings are the product of a million seasonal simulations. In order to get a better estimate of the upside and downside of the team, ZiPS takes an important additional step in simulating the roster itself before it ever considers a single game on the schedule. For example, in most of the New York Yankees’ simulations, Aaron Judge continues destroying pitchers on his merry way to what ZiPS projects will be an 11-WAR season, playing somewhere between 80% and 95% of the remaining games. Sometimes he regresses less from his current 13-WAR pace; other times, he drops off the pace a little bit more. Sometimes he’s dinged up a bit and misses time, and once in a while, he misses the rest of the season due to a serious injury. After an injury simulation, ZiPS fills in the depth charts in each sim based on who is available. When Judge is injured, the Yankees roster strength is typically made with more Jasson Domínguez, sometimes more Everson Pereira or Bryan De La Cruz, maybe some Spencer Jones, or as in simulation no. 111,535, a whole lot of Brennen Davis and Duke Ellis somehow. There’s a lot of PC power (I made an upgrade in May!) and a distressing amount of linear algebra involved.

Once ZiPS has a simulated distribution of a team’s roster strength, it then simulates the results of the rest of the season a million times. (Here I’ll note that a million simulations was not enough to get the Rockies into the playoffs.)

Below are the updated ZiPS projected standings through the games played on July 2. We’ll start our look with the AL East:

The Yankees offense slowed down considerably in June, which if you believe parts of Reddit, is somehow due to too much analytics. The more likely cause is that the Yankees are extremely reliant on Judge playing like a demigod, and when he has an ordinary month — a 157 wRC+ qualifies by his standards — the lineup has trouble absorbing what were down stretches for other key parts of the offense. ZiPS still sees the Yankees as the AL East team with the fewest potential problems over the next three months, even if it doesn’t think that Max Fried and Carlos Rodón will keep up their blistering pace.

The Blue Jays’ improvements this year should serve as a reminder (though they probably won’t), that people are too wedded to recent terrible/great performances. Coming off a 74-88 season in 2024, the Jays didn’t do a whole lot to really change the nature of their team, and the biggest thing they did do — signing Anthony Santander — hasn’t worked out yet. Sometimes gravity takes care of things!

The Rays have done their usual excellent patchwork job, but ZiPS isn’t really sold on the lineup maintaining wRC+ of 109 over the rest of the season. The computer is optimistic about Boston’s pitching staff, but the divisional math is getting difficult, and this is a team that didn’t really aggressively chase the playoffs when similarly situated in the race the last few years. ZiPS still thinks the O’s are a good team, albeit one with serious rotation issues, but they’ve banked so many losses that it’s getting hard to say that their current long shot odds are enough to keep 2025 a going concern.

Turning to the AL Central:

The Tigers have pretty much ended this race, and with an excellent rotation headed by the best pitcher in baseball right now, Tarik Skubal, this is an extremely dangerous playoff team. Detroit’s projected final win total has increased more than any other team in the baseball, jumping from 81 wins to 93.

ZiPS still sees the Guardians and Twins as legitimate playoff contenders, though it doesn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for their rosters. I don’t expect either team to be particularly aggressive at the trade deadline.

Jac Caglianone has struggled in the majors so far, and while I fully expect him to overcome his growing pains, it also means that he hasn’t done much to resuscitate an abysmal offense. Kansas City’s pitching has been excellent, but it’s simply not enough. The White Sox are projected to finish with a 12-win improvement compared to 2024! That’s… something, I guess. Somehow, the pitching has been approximately league average, and if they can actually finish the season that way, maybe pitching coach Ethan Katz deserves the Cy Young award.

Looking to the AL West:

The Astros’ penchant for middling starts showed itself again this year, but as has been the case in the past, no other AL West team took the opportunity to build up a big cushion in the division. A seven-game lead at this point of the season isn’t an insurmountable one, but most teams with that kind of lead end up finishing with it. That’s especially the case when the team holding the comfortable lead is also likely the “true” best team in the division. The Astros are no juggernaut, but they can ride Hunter Brown and Framber Valdez, and the offense has been better than it had any right to be given the de facto loss of Yordan Alvarez and the de jure one of Kyle Tucker.

The Mariners have been surprising in that their offense has been a lot better than their pitching, and while ZiPS sees that flipping to a degree, they have enough holes that they still look like a .530-.540 team; that won’t be enough in most situations unless the Astros collapse. ZiPS is projecting a lot more Jacob deGrom innings these days than it was in March, but the holes in the lineup and at the back end of the rotation and bullpen leave Texas projected as merely a second-tier Wild Card contender.

Despite a near .500 record, ZiPS is still bearish on the Los Angeles Angels. Elsewhere, ZiPS thought the A’s had a pitching problem, and that’s basically what has transpired; the team’s early contention was a mirage.

Shifting to the National League, staring with the East:

The Phillies have been tested by Aaron Nola’s poor start and subsequent injury, but this was always a compelling unit and they’ve carried on without serious trouble. They do need to score more runs to keep holding off the Mets, and Bryce Harper’s injury highlighted the fact that he, Kyle Schwarber, and Trea Turner have been holding up the lineup.

The Mets have cobbled together an impressive rotation seemingly from spare parts, and ZiPS is actually fairly confident they’ll be fine after a rather gloomy June. ZiPS sees the Mets as being as strong as the Phillies, but the Phillies get a projected edge by virtue of an easier schedule (ZiPS says .497 vs. .505 for the Mets) and the two-game “head start” on the second half.

ZiPS still thinks Atlanta is a very competent team, but even if you assume that there aren’t more nasty pitching injury surprises waiting and that there’s nothing fundamentally broken about Ozzie Albies or Michael Harris II, the team has a 39-46 record, and is at the point where they have to consider short-term retooling.

The computer thinks the Nationals are better than the Marlins, but are now too far behind to be a factor in the playoff race.

Moving to the NL Central:

ZiPS was a massive believer in the Cubs in the preseason, being head-over-transistors in love with the team’s offense and defense, and not absolutely hating the pitching staff. That’s about how the team has played, so the projections naturally haven’t changed too much. ZiPS also saw the Brewers as the biggest danger to the Cubs, and again, it hasn’t moved off that position.

St. Louis and Cincinnati are both above .500, but the computer still sees the Cards as too broadly mediocre and the Reds as having too many positions that have been chasms for either to be a divisional threat without some things going their way. Both are plausible Wild Card teams.

The projections are actually bullish on the Pirates scoring more runs in the second half, with much of the lineup underperforming their peripheral numbers, but it’s largely in the category of “too little, too late.”

Lastly, let’s look at the NL West:

ZiPS was always skeptical of the notion that the Dodgers ought to be projected for a crazy number of wins, with the preseason projections thinking that the biggest benefit to come from the team’s offseason was protecting itself from injury downside. I don’t always agree with my creation, but I did in this case. That’s sort of how things have played out; the injuries hit the pitching as hard as they usually have, but the high-end offensive talent has compensated, and team is on a 102-win pace. I’ll note that this ZiPS run was a late-night one, and does give a pretty big hit to Max Muncy’s playing time after the grisly injury he sustained in yesterday’s game. In reality, the Dodgers have a large enough lead that his exact timetable shouldn’t change the projections significantly.

The Padres have been solid and are a first-tier Wild Card candidate, but they’ve probably fallen too far behind to scare the Dodgers. It doesn’t help that they’ve gotten basically no offense out of left field and designated hitter this year. The Giants are hitting their projections after falling short the last few years, but they have a similar problem to the Padres and have gotten sub-.700 OPS performances at prime offensive positions (first base, right field, and DH).

The Diamondbacks have disappointed, in large part due to a number of serious injuries, and the team, seeing the writing on the wall, has been hinting about being short-term sellers this summer. If they aren’t, however, ZiPS still thinks that they’re good enough to end up with a Wild Card spot without anything ridiculous happening.

For their part, the Rockies can be content with the fact that they’re one of the 30 best teams in the majors.

It was ugly, it was labor-intensive, it was sobering — and probably humbling. Clayton Kershaw entered Wednesday night’s start in Los Angeles needing just three strikeouts to reach 3,000 for his career. Facing the White Sox, a team with the American League’s worst record (28-57) and the majors’ second-highest strikeout rate against lefties (26.6%), the 37-year-old southpaw repeatedly struggled to get from strike two to strike three, and only reached the milestone on his 100th and final pitch of the night. By the time he caught Vinny Capra looking at a slider on the outside edge of the plate, the Dodgers trailed 4-2, and Max Muncy had just departed with a serious knee injury while applying the tag on an attempted steal of third base. It took a textbook ninth-inning rally for the Dodgers to salvage a victory.

Here’s the big moment:

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Wednesday, July 2. Major league teams will play 19 games today. That’s 11 regular games, plus three doubleheaders and one more doubleheader that isn’t technically a doubleheader because the first half is the resumption of a game that got suspended due to rain yesterday. For the first time in human history, it is quite possibly enough baseball. On the off chance that you weren’t able to catch all 19 games, you can get caught up here.

Athletics at Rays, 12:10 PM Eastern
It’s the bottom of the fourth inning and Yandy Díaz, as is his wont, smashes a groundball. The Other Max Muncy, who started the game at third base and then shifted over to shortstop, fields it deep in the hole, but the ball finds yet another hole. It bursts the webbing in Muncy’s glove, lodging itself deep in the leather. Muncy reaches into his glove as he leaps into the air for a jump throw. His hand is still in the glove when he lands.

Cardinals at Pirates, 12:35 PM Eastern
It’s the top of the third in Pittsburgh, and this time it’s Thomas Saggese who smashes a grounder deep into the hole. The ball just bounces past a diving Ke’Bryan Hayes, but Isiah Kiner-Falefa makes a beautiful sliding stop on one knee and comes up firing. Well, he almost comes up firing. Right as he pulls the ball from his glove, there’s a split second where he looks like he’s going to double clutch. Maybe he’s just finding the seams, but the momentary hitch breaks up what could have been a play so smooth that it would have stuck in your mind forever as an archetype. Read the rest of this entry »

Chase Burns doesn’t need much of an introduction. The 22-year-old right-hander was featured here at FanGraphs prior to his much-anticipated June 24 major league debut, and when our Cincinnati Reds Top Prospects list was published in early May, he came in at no. 1, this after checking in at no. 28 overall as a 55 FV prospect on the offseason Top 100. And then there was the debut itself. With the eyes of the baseball world upon him, the second overall pick in last year’s draft fanned the first five New York Yankees batters he faced. With a fastball reaching triple digits and a razor-sharp slider to augment it, Burns has quickly established himself as one of the game’s most promising young arms.

Those things said, the flame-throwing Wake Forest University product is still a work in progress. Burns threw just 66 minor league innings before receiving his call-up, and while his initial frames were scintillating, he soon learned how challenging it is to face big league hitters. Not only did the Yankees go on to tag him for three runs, he failed to get out of the first inning in his second start, that against the Red Sox at Fenway Park.

How does Burns approach his craft, and what has he learned coming through not only Wake Forest’s pitching program, but also Cincinnati’s, which is likewise highly regarded? One day after his rocky outing in Boston, I sat down with Burns to find out.

———

David Laurila: What do you know now that you didn’t know when you were coming out of high school?

Chase Burns: “It’s kind of a growing process, really. You’re learning as you go. There is a lot I’ve learned about, including analytics, going from high school to college — and even now — about how can I make my stuff better, about what plays in the game today.”

Laurila: Pitching analytics and optimizing your stuff is important, but more than that goes into succeeding at this level…

Burns: “Yes. I was fortunate to go to Wake Forest, where we had the pitching lab, but the pitching coach there, Corey Muscara, kind of talked about that. He talked about how you don’t want to dive too deep into the analytics, because at the end of the day, you’ve got to go out there and get outs. That’s the biggest thing.”

Laurila: Is there any one thing you learned about yourself as a pitcher at Wake Forest that you feel is especially important?

Burns: “I think I figured out that I was more of a north-to-south pitcher, as opposed to an east-to-west pitcher. I kind of throw the ball middle and let my stuff move how it’s intended, instead of trying to make this big sweep right to left. I think that helps me a lot.”

Laurila: That wasn’t until you got to Wake Forest?

Burns: “Yes. When I was at Tennessee [where Burns spent his first two collegiate seasons], I was trying to go in and out more, rather than up and down with all my stuff.”

Laurila: I assume you know your pitch metrics?

Burns: “I do. I’m a cut-ride guy, and I feel like my vertical is pretty good. I’ve been up to 20-21 inches [with the fastball], but it averages around 18. When I was at Tennessee, the vertical was pretty low, and I realized that I could get more, so that was something I went after. Now I don’t really worry about it too much; I kind of just play into the cut-ride profile. I think that’s kind of another weapon for me.

“Nowadays a lot of people are chasing vertical and spin rate — stuff like that — and I think it could be a good thing, but at the same time, it could be bad with the amount of injuries that we have today.”

Laurila: The slider is your best secondary pitch. Has that always been the case?

Burns: “Yeah. It’s a pitch I’ve always had feel for, even when I was younger. Over the years, it’s kind of just progressed naturally.”

Laurila: You also have a curveball and a changeup…

Burns: “The curveball is something I’ve had since college, but I didn’t really have times where I needed to use it as much. But at this level, you’re going to have to use it. It’s still developing, but it’s been a weapon for me.

“My changeup isn’t very conventional. It’s the kick-change that everybody’s been talking about. I’m a supinator, so it’s kind of hard for me to throw a changeup. I started kicking it, and have had some success doing that.”

Laurila: When did you start throwing the kick-change?

Burns: “I starting kicking it this year, right before spring training. Some guys at Wake Forest helped me develop it. I told [the Reds] that I’ve been working on it, I threw it a lot, and they were pretty happy with it.”

Laurila: Your fastball and slider are plus-plus pitches, while the other two aren’t at that same level. How are you approaching pitch usage in terms of using your entire repertoire versus mostly just going with your best weapons?

Burns: “I mean, two pitches at this level can be hard. A hitter can eliminate one, and that makes it a lot easier for them, so having four is huge for me. That’s something I’ve been working on in my recent outing. My changeup has been a really good pitch for me, especially against lefties.”

Laurila: You’re a power pitcher. Is that accurate?

Burns: “Yes.”

Laurila: In a perfect world, a pitcher is more than just power. Along with having nasty stuff, he knows how to “pitch.”

Burns: “I mean, that’s the end goal. When you can match those two together, being a power pitcher who throws hard, but also be able to use finesse — go up and down, in and out, be able to paint the corners — that’s what makes a pitcher really dangerous.”

Laurila: Going from being more of a thrower to more of a pitcher is an important evolution. As young as you are, do you feel you’ve turned that corner?

Burns: “I think so. Maybe some people don’t agree with that, but I feel I’ve made huge improvements from being just a guy that just tries to throw it hard to a guy that actually goes out there and pitches. But like I said earlier, it’s a growing process.”

Last week, I began a series of pieces about team win-loss totals as estimated by BaseRuns, first by taking a broad look at the methodology and its limitations, then by zooming in on the offenses that deviate most notably from their BaseRuns assessment in the run scoring department. Let’s wrap up with a look at the defenses that sit furthest from their runs allowed approximation.

In the offense edition, I used a game show format to evaluate whether the perspective offered by BaseRuns has a point, or if there’s something its methodology is overlooking. We’ll keep that framework going for the defenses as well. Here’s a reminder of how it works:

To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle.

Read the rest of this entry »