As I’m writing this on Wednesday night, the Reds are clobbering the Cardinals, 9-0. All those runs, incidentally, were charged to Adam Wainwright, which means both Wainwright and Felix Hernandez imploded on the same day. Joey Votto, so far tonight, has batted three times against St. Louis. He’s drawn three walks, as Votto is wont to do. He walked with two on in the first inning, and later scored a run. He walked with one on in the second inning, and soon thereafter scored a run. He walked again in the fourth, but the bases were empty — and that’s not what this is going to be about.

If you haven’t read the arguments, you’ve probably at least heard about them. Votto has been a polarizing player for the Reds, because he’s drawn a ton of walks in run-scoring situations. With runners in scoring position, he’s walked more than a quarter of the time. The end result is that Votto has an underwhelming RBI total, and he’s supposed to be in the lineup to produce runs. In theory, run-producers are supposed to swing the bat. Run-producers like Brandon Phillips. One’s instinct is to think this is absurd — and it is pretty silly — but we might as well dig in for a few minutes. Are people warranted to be frustrated by Joey Votto’s patient approach?

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A few weeks ago, late in July, Bryce Harper beat up on the Pirates. In a game his Nationals won 9-7, Harper finished 3-for-5 with a double and a dinger. For good measure, he reached on a hit by pitch, and his homer was a walk-off bomb. Every hit in the major leagues is difficult, but maybe in his head, Harper felt like he had more of an opportunity; Harper hasn’t been alive to see the Pirates finish with a .500 record. Two days after the Pirates were eliminated from the 1992 playoffs, Harper was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. His entire life, the Pirates have been a joke.

On Tuesday, the Pirates traded for Marlon Byrd to make themselves better, which is a sentence that makes sense in 2013. And it wasn’t an attempt to improve a lackluster on-field product — the Pirates have their eyes on the playoffs, and they’re currently in an excellent position. They’re right behind the Cardinals in the National League Central, and they’re eight up on the Diamondbacks in the wild-card standings. If and when the Pirates qualify for the postseason, it’ll be an historic moment. But there’s another historic moment they’ll probably have to pass through first: the occasion of their 81st win.

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This morning, David Appelman announced our new Playoff Odds section on FanGraphs, which provides forecasts for the rest of the season and turns those into the chances of each team advancing to each level of the postseason, whether it be capturing the wild card, advancing to the division series, or winning each round of the playoffs. It’s a pretty nifty tool, and there’s a lot to be gleaned from the data, so I wanted to use a few examples from the current playoff odds page to illustrate some of the features now included on the site.

The Importance of Remaining Schedules

Since we rolled out our new Standings page earlier this year, we’ve had expected rest-of-season winning percentage for each team all season long, which is a nice way to look at the relative strength of each team. And since we had a rest-of-season forecast and we already knew what teams had done in the past, it wasn’t that difficult to combine them into an updated final win total. However, there was a piece missing; the actual schedules each team would play over the rest of the year.

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I’m pleased to announce that earlier this year, coolstandings.com joined the FanGraphs family and we’ve now integrated their playoff odds into FanGraphs, with some additional features available here on our site as well.

I’ve always been an admirer of the work Greg Agami and Sean Walsh did at coolstandings.com, and we couldn’t be more pleased to have their product as a part of FanGraphs. And we’re excited about using some of the data available on FanGraphs to make the forecasts even better.

There are currently three different ways we simulate the season to generate the playoff odds:

FanGraphs Projections Mode – This mode uses the combination of Steamer and ZiPS projections, along with the updated FanGraphs Depth Charts, to calculate the expected winning percentage of each remaining game in the major league season. This model incorporates the latest updates to each team’s roster, including injuries, acquisitions, and adjusted playing time allocations.

Season to Date Stats Mode – This mode uses current season to date statistics, weighted more heavily towards the most recent games, to calculate the expected winning percentage of each remaining game in the major league season. (This is the old “Smart” mode on coolstandings.com)

Coin Flip Mode – This mode uses a coin flip to determine the winner of each game, giving each matchup 50/50 odds. (This is the old “Dumb” mode on coolstandings.com)

The coolstandings models incorporate actual remaining schedules into their forecasts, so in addition to the estimates of each team’s talent, the strength of their upcoming opponents is also included, and the simulations are run 10,000 times hourly.

In addition to the standard odds of winning the division or earning a place in the wild card play-in game, we also have the odds of each team winning each level of the playoffs all the way up to odds of winning the World Series.

Right now we’re showing the current playoff odds, but you can visit coolstandings.com for all the historical playoff odds. We’ll also be adding these to FanGraphs in short time. You can find a permanent link to the Playoff Odds from the Standings drop down in the toolbar at the top of the site.

Allen Craig, so far, has been one of baseball’s all-time best hitters with runners in scoring position. Yes, as in ever. This year, he’s leading the league in batting average in that split. Last year, he led the league in batting average in that split. He is the leader, all-time, in such situational batting average, and his lead isn’t small. If you sort by OPS, Craig’s near the top of the historical leaderboard — between Albert Pujols and Joey Votto. Either the man has a knack for delivering important hits, or he just makes people feel that way.

The other night, Craig batted in the bottom of the seventh in a game between the St.Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds were leading 5-4, but the Cardinals had the bases loaded with two outs. J.J. Hoover threw Craig a first-pitch fastball, up and away, and Craig swung and took it up and away for a deciding grand slam. For the Cardinals, it’s been a magical season when it comes to runners in scoring position, and no one’s had more magic than Craig. And for him, this is just more of the same. Which leads one to wonder: What’s going on with Allen Craig, anyway?

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When Bo Porter was hired to lead the Houston Astros, one of his first moves was to add Dave Trembley to his coaching staff. The hiring was more than a young, first-year manager bringing on board a mentor. It was a case of loyalty rewarded.

The 61-year-old Trembley and 41-year-old Porter go way back. And despite the difference in age and backgrounds, they share important things in common. Each is hard-nosed: Porter played football at the University of Iowa; Trembley has spent three decades in the baseball trenches. Both are good communicators, well-versed in sabermetric concepts.

They also remember where they came from. Porter, who played parts of three big-league seasons, was the Nationals third base coach before coming to Houston. Trembley, who skippered the Orioles from 2007-2010 after 20 seasons as a minor-league manager, came over from the Braves organization. Along the way, they forged a relationship that led to a late-night phone call neither will soon forget. Read the rest of this entry »

Every baseball season is crazy, and the crazy can never be completely summed up in one sentence. There’s just too much of it, in too many places, and no one wants to read that long of a sentence. But here’s a sentence that captures some of the 2013 crazy to date: on August 27, the Pittsburgh Pirates have traded for Marlon Byrd. Suggested, by that sentence, is that the Pirates are in the playoff hunt, hence their desire to make an upgrade. Suggested, also, by that sentence, is that Marlon Byrd is an upgrade, in this season. It’s been weird. It’s always weird, but it’s been weird.

If you’d like all of the details, Anthony DiComo has many of them. The Pirates are adding Byrd, John Buck, and some cash from the Mets. The Mets are adding Dilson Herrera and a player to be named player from the Pirates. The Pirates recently put Starling Marte on the disabled list, and they recently lost their backup catcher for the season. They’re still in great shape to at least play in the one-game wild-card playoff, and by making this swap in August instead of September, Byrd and Buck will be postseason-roster eligible. It’s easy to understand the Pirates’ motivation, and it’s easy to understand the Mets’ desire to get something young for a month of two veterans.

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If you use FanGraphs regularly, you’re probably aware of the WAR framework, and the general ideas behind it. Basically, WAR attempts to sum up the value of a player’s hitting, baserunning, and defense and then compare it to what a replacement level player would have done with the same amount of playing time. While WAR is certainly not perfect, it works pretty well, and it tries to answer the question that baseball fans are frequently asking.

But it doesn’t every question, of course, and sometimes, we ask questions that WAR wasn’t designed to answer. For instance, questions of context are outside the scope of the metric, as it was intentionally created to be context neutral, identifying just the number and value of positive and negative events without including the situation they occurred in. WAR considers every home run to be equally valuable, whether it comes with the bases empty in a blowout or the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth.

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Back in March, Khris Davis described his power as his secret weapon. “Me being kind of small, no one looks at me and is like, ‘He’s got power,’” Davis told Brewers.com beat writer Adam McCalvy. “I do, but it’s kind of a secret.” Now that he has mashed eight homers in his first 93 big league plate appearances, it’s safe to say that his secret is out. He’s even stole the spotlight from the other Chris Davis, which is tough since the Orioles’ Davis is still humming right along. The question is, how much longer will the Brewers’ Davis get to keep sharing his secret weapon?

These days, it’s hard to sneak onto the major league radar, and maybe Brewers fans were well aware of Davis. After all, he entered this season hitting .294/.400/.513 across four minor league seasons, the last of which concluded with a very similar line in 140 plate appearances in Triple-A. Still, Davis has always had a poor defensive reputation, and that kept him from sniffing any prospect lists heading into this season. None of the major prospect outlets — Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Bullpen Banter, ESPN or here at FanGraphs even mentioned Davis in their top 10/15 prospect lists this spring. Along with the bad defense, he may have appeared a touch old for his leagues, and he also seemingly had no opportunity in a Brewers outfield with three set starters in Ryan Braun, Carlos Gomez and Norichika Aoki.

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Yesterday, it was reported Matt Harvey may need Tommy John surgery because of a torn UCL in his right elbow. Some people may say they saw the injury coming and the Mets were crazy to let him throw over 175 innings this season, but the evidence doesn’t really support those ideas. After looking over the history of other 24-year-olds, it appears that the pitcher’s ability to throw hard and recent small velocity drop were the only identifiable injury indicators.

Myself and others have looked at many indications of a pitchers chances of getting hurt. High increase in innings for a young pitcher (Verducci Effect). Velocity and Zone% drop (PAIN Index). Inconsistency in release points and velocity late in a game. High breaking ball usage. Bad Mechanics. High fastball velocity.

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