Archive for Daily Graphings

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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The Yankees have called up 23-year-old Dominican-born catching prospect Gary Sanchez from the minor leagues. Sanchez was off to an excellent start in Triple-A this year, slashing .288/.336/.541 in 27 games. Heading into the year, he ranked 21st on KATOH’s top 100 list, second to only Chance Sisco among catchers. Sanchez’s 2016-to-date performance has only served to improve his prospect stock. He figures to serve as New York’s designated hitter for the time being with Alex Rodriguez on the shelf. Read the rest of this entry »

Do hitters focus better in the late innings of close games? Once the eighth and ninth roll around, does their mental acuity shift into a new gear?

Human nature suggests it happens. Faced with an impending work deadline, most of us will see our mindset kick into now-or-never mode. On the other hand, we routinely hear players say that every plate appearance matters. If you’re a professional, you’re going to take pride in never giving away an at bat.

I recently ask a cross section of players, managers and coaches — and one mental skills coordinator — for their opinions on the subject. Here is what they had to say. Read the rest of this entry »

Recording 20 strikeouts is an amazing feat — and a rare one, too: this past Wednesday, Max Scherzer joined Roger Clemens, Kerry Wood, and Randy Johnson as the only players ever to accomplish it in nine innings. What they’ve done is exceptional and, naturally, separates them from other pitchers. And while similar, each performance occurred in the context of different variables which made it distinct: era, opponent, ballpark, etc. No one is required to decide which pitcher faced the most challenging set of circumstances among those five games (Clemens did it twice). Yet, I’ve elected to make an attempt, anyway.

When first trying to understand which game posed the most difficultly, we immediately turn to the opponent. Roger Clemens, for example, achieved both of his 20-strikeout games with the designated hitter in play. Striking out 20 players of major-league caliber — regardless of how low they are on that particular scale — is still incredibly difficult. It’s more difficult to record 20 strikeouts against good hitters. The Detroit Tigers lineup Scherzer faced, meanwhile, is a top-heavy one. But solid overall, even if it didn’t feature a DH.

The table below depicts the lineup the Tigers deployed against Scherzer as well as each respective hitter’s rest-of-season projected numbers for wRC+ and strikeout percentage. (Jordan Zimmermann‘s career numbers were used, and his strikeout percentage and wRC+ were combined proportionally with pinch-hitter Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s. Weighted average accounts for the top of the order getting more plate appearances than the bottom)

Tigers Lineup Against Max Scherzer

Player	wRC+
Ian Kinsler	101
J.D. Martinez	124
Miguel Cabrera	145
Victor Martinez	119
Justin Upton	118
James McCann	71
Anthony Gose	80
Jose Iglesias	84
Jordan Zimmermann	33
AVERAGE	97
Weighted AVG	100

*Zimmerman’s wRC+ averaged proportionally with pinch-hitter Jarrod Saltalamacchia.

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The Boston Red Sox played the first game of a series versus the Houston Astros last night, and they scored 11 runs, eight of which came against Houston starter Dallas Keuchel. The day before that, they played the Oakland A’s, and they scored 13 runs. The two days prior to that — also against the A’s — they scored 13 and 14 runs, respectively, with one of those games coming against Oakland starter Sonny Gray. In the span of four days, Boston torched last year’s Cy Young Award-winner and the third place runner-up for a combined 15 earned runs. Pitching in the major leagues tends to be a matter of razor-thin margins, and that margin is made even more razor-thin in the pitcher-unfriendly confines of Fenway Park; regardless of that fact, the Red Sox offense is currently in the equivalent of a brightly-colored baseball fever dream, going berserk on anything and everything in its path.

We’ve seen a couple articles about this offense in the past few days. The sheer number of offensive categories they currently lead in baseball is wildly impressive. We’re going to dig a little deeper today, however, and get a little historical perspective before trying to pin down the processes this offense has taken to cause such an incredible run of form.

First, let’s take a look at where this offense would rank if it finished the season with this type of production. Let’s compare the 2016 Red Sox to every team since the start of the live ball era (1920) by wRC+. wRC+ is adjusted for parks and leagues, so it allows us to easily compare offenses from different years to one another. Take a look at the top 10 teams of all time by wRC+ — with each point above 100 representing a percentage point above league average:

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Here’s a thing: last year, Clayton Kershaw was tied for baseball’s fifth-lowest walk rate by a starting pitcher, out of 78 pitchers. Then, this year, only one guy (Mike Fiers) has dropped his walk rate more substantially than Kershaw. That’s the nerdy and complicated way of saying that Clayton Kershaw has walked four batters this season. He’s made eight starts, he’s completed 62 innings, he’s faced 225 (!) batters, and he’s walked four of them. Four. He’s also struck out 77. And you know how many he’s walked? He’s walked four. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Is Clayton Kershaw actually getting better? It’s a scary thought. It’s one that’s hard to fathom. I also wouldn’t put it past him. For what it’s worth, Kershaw’s past the point in the season in which walk rate becomes a reliable indicator of past performance, and these eight games are a level of walk stinginess that we’ve never seen from him before:

Following every valley, of course, comes a peak, and Kershaw probably isn’t going to run a 1.8% walk rate the entire season. But given the relatively acceptable sample, the career-high zone rate, and the extent to which Kershaw has avoided the free pass, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that he may be (somehow) demonstrating an even more improved control of the strike zone.

Anyway. Four walks, yeah? That’s not too many. That’s enough to take a good look at them all in a blog post and see if there’s anything going on. This was a pretty poor segue. It’s Friday.

Walk No. 1

• Date: 4/4/16
• Batter: Yangervis Solarte
• Projected BB%: 7.1
• Sequence:

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