Today, the 19th of September, finds our proud site in a state of desolation. With the Chief Daily Noter still unaccountably absent — detained, as rumor has it, at some maison mal famée in the heart of Gaul — the Notes have fallen into the calloused barbarian hands of the Notgraphs staff. Like coarse-bearded Vandals they mutter and slouch amid the moldering ruins: the alabaster colonnades of Cistulli’s sortable tables, now cracked and leaning; the exquisite mosaics of his NERD scores, now reduced to a many-hued rubble; the pearlescent gleam of his Corey Kluber metaphors, strewn about like offal and soiled by brutish feet. By sundown tomorrow even these — along with what little else remains of Western civilization — will have been mangled beyond recognition, and the heathens will run orgiastic riot over what once was a temple of sober reason.

Actually now there is an editor informing me that Cistulli will be back on Monday, and that you all, being no-nonsense, numbers-driven sorts of people, would really prefer that I just shut my cake hole, and so without further ado I give you the

Table of Contents

1. Body-Switching Maniacs in Miami! Or, One Possible Reason to Continue Watching the Marlins
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Body-Switching Maniacs in Miami! Or, One Possible Reason to Continue Watching the Marlins

Scanning today’s National League schedule in your usual desultory manner, you might find it wanting in intrigue. You would be wrong. It has intrigue in spades, most of it located in the city of Washington, and most of it due to the fact that the man impersonating Henderson Alvarez is on the verge of being unmasked.

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Here’s a fun little game. Go to the top of the page and click on leaderboards, then use the league drop down box to isolate just NL players. Now, click on the advanced tab so that you can get to the two components of our baserunning metric, wSB (stolen base runs) and UBR (baserunning runs besides SB/CS). You’ll see them on the right hand side of the page, between BABIP and wRC.

Now, before you sort by wSB, go to the min PA drop down. Instead of picking a minimum, you need to set this to zero, because the hero of our story doesn’t yet meet the lowest playing time threshold on the drop down box. Now, once you’ve done that, you’ll have a leaderboard consisting of 543 names, because the lack of a minimum playing time requirement means that our net is huge and catches everyone who has appeared as a hitter or runner for an NL team this season.

Now that you’ve done that, click on wSB to make it sort in descending order. You are now looking at the NL leaders in runs added through base stealing. For those who didn’t play along with the instructions, I’ll create the table for you, just without all the other things on the advanced tab:

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I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about the other sports, so I can’t speak to situations more messed up than what we’ve got in baseball. But in baseball — little details aside — we’ve got the A’s, and we’ve got the Marlins.

The A’s consistently try really hard to win, despite the odds being stacked against them. Oakland has a brilliant front office, and they play in a ballpark plagued by sewage leaks in the clubhouse and in the dugout. The Marlins are crooks. Money-hungry crooks. They play in a brand-new ballpark they didn’t pay for — a ballpark they’ve made no effort to fill after a disappointing debut season. The Marlins did what the Marlins do: They got some people excited, then they undid the goodwill and more.

Some baseball teams have reputations. The Yankees are the big spenders. The Dodgers are the other big spenders. The Twins are lovable throwbacks. The Braves are slightly less-lovable throwbacks. The Royals are run by people who shouldn’t be running the Royals. And so on. The Marlins’ reputation is that they’re run by criminals who deceive with every word. Two offseasons ago, it looked like they were trying hard to turn the page, to create a new identity. Two offseasons ago, the Marlins tried to spend to build a powerhouse. But their identity is still their identity. You know how it went. The Marlins are as the Marlins have been.

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When writing about statistics, there’s always the matter of finding the right balance between brevity and significance. Oftentimes, you’ll want to use filters, for purposes of proper analysis, and these filters show up as written qualifiers. Too many qualifiers, though, will turn off an audience, because audiences want numbers to be pretty easily consumable. It can already be difficult to try to sell numbers to readers; there’s a responsibility on the writer’s part to keep readability in mind.

You run into this all the time in baseball analysis, because there are virtually infinite ways to whittle a sample smaller and smaller. Every split is a qualifier. But some are just necessary, and there’s no other way around it. Like, with pitchers, you just have to separate starters and relievers. Starters need to be compared only to starters, and relievers need to be compared only to relievers, because they’re entirely different jobs. You’ve got marathon runners and hurdlers. What they have in common is that they throw baseballs, but they throw baseballs in different ways, and they use their bodies in different ways, and they prepare in different ways, and so they should be treated as distinct player pools. You don’t compare Aroldis Chapman to Yu Darvish. You compare Chapman to Craig Kimbrel, and Darvish to Max Scherzer. Not separating pitchers is at best irresponsible.

Some of the focus in this post will be on starting pitchers. Much of the focus in this post will be on Yordano Ventura.

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Chris Davis hit his 51st home run of the season last night. 20 years ago, that would have been a pretty big deal, but the years around the turn of the century reset the bar for newsworthy home run totals. After having only two 60 homer seasons in the first 100+ years of baseball, we saw six such seasons in four years. 50 homer seasons used to be the stepping stone to greatness; now, Davis is still 22 home runs away from the single season record.

As we know, though, the game as its being played today doesn’t look like the game that was being played 15 years ago. The strike zone is bigger, the players are smaller, and both runs and home runs are much harder to come by these days. Chris Davis might not set any real records, but hitting 51 home runs (and counting) in this offensive context is still an accomplishment worth celebrating.

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You won’t get Mike Trout to say he should win the Most Valuable Player award this year because his Wins Above Replacement total is higher than another player’s. But if you listen closely to him describing his game, you will hear the basic constructs for the argument that can be made in his favor. It’s a simple one.

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There are a lot of different ways in which a dinger can be exceptional. It can be the fastest pitch hit for a dinger all season. It can be the slowest pitch hit for a dinger all season. It can be the longest or the fastest dinger all season. There exist plenty of exceptional dingers, and not too long ago, Miguel Cabrera hit one, against Phil Hughes. Hughes threw a pitch to Cabrera that PITCHf/x measured at almost two feet inside from the center of home plate. No matter — Cabrera hit it out, and what’s more is that it didn’t even look like it was a problem for him. The homer wowed everyone who watched, but according to Jim Leyland, that was something Cabrera could top:

What’s really stunning, [Leyland] said, is when Cabrera takes that same pitch — a pitch, by the way, that jams most right-handed hitters and results in either a foul or a weak grounder — and pounds it to the opposite field for a home run. Ponder the physics of that for a second.

According to Leyland, Cabrera has gone the other way for a homer off that inside pitch off the plate. Maybe Leyland was referring to what Cabrera has done with the team in batting practice. He hasn’t actually done what Leyland claims, at least not in a game, at least not in the PITCHf/x era. Mostly because that would be impossible. We don’t need to exaggerate Miguel Cabrera’s plate coverage; Cabrera’s true plate coverage is already an exaggeration.

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Earlier this summer, former St. Louis Cardinals right-hander Bob Tewksbury took us through his outings in 1992 against the Chicago Cubs and the Atlanta Braves. He did so with the help of his old notebook, which includes scouting reports, results of individual at bats and more.

In the third installment of Tewksbury’s Notebook, the focus isn’t on specific teams. Instead, the veteran of 13 big-league seasons discussed how he approached pitching to 10 of the best hitters of his era. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I began the first of what will be a four-part series on the final seasons of a player’s career. You can check out part one here for the back story and players with the worst final seasons among those who posted between 30 and 69 career WAR. As I was wrapping that article I thought I would split it out, partially because it was already fairly long, partially to give the absolute best players a little bit more attention and partially because when I broke things out by 70+ WAR only, none of the 100+ WAR players ended up in the bottom five. So I thought there was no harm in one additional tier.

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Back at the turn of the century, the 2000/2001 Oakland A’s were remarkably successful, and that success led Michael Lewis to write a little book called Moneyball, which you’ve probably heard of. I think everything that could possibly be said about that book and those teams has probably been said, written, and re-hashed 100 times, so don’t worry, I’m not writing this post to kick that dead horse anymore. I just want to point out that, 12 years later, the A’s have basically done the exact same thing that got the book written in the first place.

Those A’s teams won 193 out of the 323 games they played, the second best winning percentage in the game, despite the fact that they were spending a fraction of what their high revenue competitors were throwing at players. The A’s teams of last year and this year have won 182 of the 312 games they’ve played, the second best winning percentage in the game, despite the fact that they were spending a fraction of what their high revenue competitors were throwing at players. For more context, a table.

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