The regular season is over. While that is sad in many ways, it’s also exciting in a few other ways. One of those ways: We have postseason baseball! That’s the best kind of baseball. Another lame, nerdy way: We have complete data sets! Yes, this is something I actually get excited about. Leading up to the conclusion of a regular season, everything is “projected,” “on pace,” or “so far for the season.” Now, everything is final. While, at the All-Star Break, I could only give you the Most Extreme Home Runs of the First Half, now I can replace “first half” with a definitive “2014.”

Before we begin, I’d like to give a shoutout to both ESPN’s Home Run Tracker and, of course, BaseballSavant, for making this glorious research possible.
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On Sunday, Adrian Gonzalez had two hits, including his 27th homer of the season, and drove in three runs in the Dodgers’ season-ending 10-5 win over Colorado. Already all but guaranteed to lead the NL in runs batted in, the three he brought in yesterday ensured that he’d top Mike Trout and lead all of baseball for RBI for the first time.

Before you wonder why FanGraphs is suddenly acting as though RBI is a real stat that means anything, worry not. I think it’s useless. You, most likely, do too, and we all already know why, because it’s largely based on opportunity and teammate performance, and that adds far too much noise to consider it useful as an individual stat. If you’re not an everyday player, you won’t have an impressive RBI total. If your teammates don’t get on base ahead of you, you won’t have enough chances to rack up those RBIs. Relying on it as an indicator of talent can cause more harm than good, too, like when Brandon Phillips was seen as having a great 2013 last year in the midst of his decline because the Reds offense was lucky enough to have Shin-Soo Choo leading off rather than Drew Stubbs (2012) or Billy Hamilton (2014).

It’s barely been one paragraph, and I’ve already probably spent far too much time even talking about why this is a flawed stat. You already know this. Unfortunately, we can probably agree that the majority of general baseball fans don’t quite agree with that, if only based on how many references to “RBI” I saw regarding Gonzalez on Twitter. Gonzalez himself, more understandably, took note as well: Read the rest of this entry »

The end of the season means it’s time for the playoffs, of course. But it also means that it’s time to vote on awards that reward regular season work. The players also vote on awards — and since they’re voting on their peers, they have a unique perspective on the exercise.

The players vote on something called the Player’s Choice award. And since I’m tasked with voting for the Player of the Year at FanGraphs, I thought it would make sense to ask the players for advice.

I asked two questions of a wide variety of players. The first was about their general process in deciding on their vote. I wanted to know what stats they looked at how they made their decision. The second was whether or not they thought a starting pitcher could rival a position player as the best player in baseball.

Let’s take the questions, one at a time, and see what the players said.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

The postseason begins tomorrow, and we have our 10 contenders for the crown: Anaheim, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, and Kansas City in the AL, and Los Angeles, St. Louis, Washington, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco in the NL.

Two of these teams will be eliminated by the end of the day on Wednesday. Let’s take a look at the early odds for the Wild Card games, based on our depth charts model and the season-to-date stats model.

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With the regular season coming to a close – man, did that go fast — it’s time to take stock of what I predicted prior to opening day. As one might expect, there were both hits and misses. Such was the case for all FanGraphs writers, who shared their prognostications here and here. This week’s Sunday Notes column begins with a look at what my often-cloudy crystal ball told me in late March.

AL East: Tampa Bay Rays: I whiffed on this one. The perennial overachievers underachieved despite their pitchers’ striking out a big-league-record 1,430 batters [through last night]. The Indians, with 1,442, also broke the mark set last year by the Tigers [1,428]. Rays batters fanned 1,116 times, third least of the 30 teams.

AL Central: Detroit Tigers: This was supposed to be easy. Instead, the team Brad Ausmus inherited from Jim Leyland has a tenuous grasp on first place on the season’s final day. Those abandoned lots dotting Detroit? There’s a bullpen analogy there if things fall apart in October – assuming the Tigers actually make it to October.

AL West: Oakland A’s: For a long time, this looked like a smart pick. Fortunately for Bob Melvin’s team, the collapse was short of calamitous – assuming they win today [or Seattle loses] and again on Tuesday to advance to the ALDS. I have no plausible explanation for not picking the Angels to make the postseason. Read the rest of this entry »

How many players per team would you say you know? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Even if you can easily rattle off 20 players per team, 600 of the 750 players on a normal active roster, the last five that you couldn’t name would probably include some relief pitchers. Unless you’re a first-round draft pick (like the Royals’ Brandon Finnegan) or the team’s closer, it’s hard for a reliever to gain much notierity — they’re rarely voted to All-Star teams, and very few people like the Hold statistic (I like Shutdowns and Meltdowns, but they’re not universally accepted stats). So, rookie relievers can sneak up on you when the postseason starts, just like Francisco Rodriguez did in 2002.

In case you’re too young to remember 2002, or are conversely too old to remember things that happened way back in 2002, Rodriguez came up as a 20-year-old on Sept. 18. In his five games, his leverage increased, until his pLI hit 1.54 in his final regular-season appearance, when he struck out five batters of the seven Mariners’ batters he faced across 2.1 innings on Sept. 27. Overall, he struck out 13 batters and walked two in 5.2 scoreless innings, which was good for a FIP- of 1. As in, 99 percent better than league average. A tiny sample, no doubt, and not even worth paying attention to. That is, until the now-famous loophole came into play.
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A friend of mine who dropped out of a chemistry PhD program would describe the experience as getting to know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. There’s a lesson in there about the nature of limits, but there’s also the comparison between general knowledge and specialization. I feel like my writing has taken me on something of a PhD course, where I used to write about simpler things, and now I have to keep digging deeper and deeper to find new deposits worth mining. One of my current fascinations is the interplay between pitcher and batter, the strategy of sequencing, and I just wrote about that for Fox. In that piece, I talk about players who’ve been pitched differently in 2014, relative to 2013.

As a natural follow-up, I figured I’d look at players who’ve been pitched differently within 2014, say, splitting the first and the second halves. I did all the research and I generated all my numbers, but when I evaluated them, I decided I’d focus on one player in particular. You’re already aware that Matt Kemp is experiencing a major resurgence at the plate. Mike Petriello wrote about him earlier this very month. And how have pitchers responded to Kemp’s incredible rebound? Relative to the season’s first half, no player in baseball has had a bigger drop in his rate of fastballs seen in the vicinity of the strike zone.

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As far as very good Major League outfielders go, Matt Holliday is probably among the most anonymous. Despite owning a career 139 wRC+ and signing a $120 million dollar contract in 2010, he’s probably best known for getting hit in the beans that one time and not touching home plate with the winning run that other time.

But year after year, Holliday methodically bangs out .300/.390/.500 seasons. He hits enough home runs to be a power threat but not enough to elicit “oohs” and/or “ahhhs” from visiting fans. He looks enough like The Thing to keep from holding the casual fan’s gaze for too long. He just sort of exists, a very productive presence on the outside of the collective unconscious.

In his own way, Holliday is the physical embodiment of the team he plays for, the St. Louis Cardinals. Unsettlingly consistent, easy to overlook but difficult to beat, and extremely annoying for opposing fans and players. Like the villain in a really boring horror film.

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This article originally ran in February, and is now being re-posted on account of Derek Jeter.

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Run a Google search for “Derek Jeter” and “defense” and you get almost 700,000 results. Run a Google search for “Chipper Jones” and you get fewer than 450,000 results. I suppose now you can bump each of those up by one. The matter of Jeter’s defense is a tired, tired topic, and it was a tired, tired topic years ago. Personally, I try to avoid tired topics. But in this instance, I think there’s something; something not enough attention has been paid to on account of the raging argument elsewhere. People have argued about only part of the story.

You all should be familiar with the position of the advanced defensive metrics like DRS and UZR. It’s because of those metrics that an argument exists in the first place. Jeter loyalists have continued to insist he was at least a solid defensive shortstop in the past. UZR has disagreed, and DRS has more extremely disagreed, as they’ve both evaluated Jeter as subpar for the position. On the occasion of Jeter’s retirement announcement, there were people who couldn’t help but make fun of his defensive ability, and he’s been the butt of such jokes for much of his career. Jeter’s often been described as an awful defensive shortstop, or as something along those lines. While there’s been some basis for this, though, one of the key words in that description is “shortstop.”

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One of the beauties of baseball as an analytical pursuit is that there’s a record kept of pretty much everything. What we’ve all been familiar with from our young ages are the records of results, or statistics, like dingers or ERA. What we’ve only more recently gained access to, though, are records of processes, the factors that to some extent determine or respond to the results. Considering the processes opens up a whole new layer of potential analysis, as you can see not just what happened, but why it happened, and what has or hasn’t been done about it.

Myself, I like to look at how players get pitched. I’m still getting used to the fact that I can look at this at all, and I think it’s fascinating to basically see evidence of the scouting reports. It’s readily evident that, say, pitchers don’t want to throw Josh Hamilton fastballs in the zone, because they don’t need to. It’s readily evident, as well, that pitchers are perfectly happy to be aggressive with Ben Revere, because, why not? Certain guys get pitched in certain ways, and there’s a broad spread between the extremes. And more often than not, scouting reports and approaches will hold consistent from year to year. Weaknesses tend to stay weaknesses, and strengths tend to stay strengths.

So given the consistency of this kind of data, it’s interesting to look at the cases where the numbers change. If the changes are big enough, it stands to reason the changes aren’t accidental. This all builds to the question: who’s been pitched the most differently in 2014, relative to 2013? This isn’t something we could’ve easily played with in 2004. In 2014, the information’s out there for anyone.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.