Archive for Daily Graphings

It’s one thing to join a club, but it’s another thing to start your own club entirely. That goes doubly so when the requirements to enter your club are harder to obtain than a liquor license in 1928. Ronald Acuña Jr. had already earned his 40–40 membership last Friday. That was the hot club in town back in 1988 when Jose Canseco started it up, but with five members now, it’s not quite as exclusive as it once was. So Acuña started up his 40–70 club, and he gets the prime parking space. And still not quite 26, there’s more time to start up some new clubs.

I tend to have mixed feelings about these clubs in baseball. They’re undeniably cool, in the way we’re all attracted to round numbers, and the key clubs and milestones give us an underpinning to compare accomplishments across baseball history. There’s something satisfying about experiencing the game in a similar fashion to someone 30 or 50 or 75 years ago as a shared cultural event, and these number-based chases are a big part of that. On the other hand, they also tend to be somewhat arbitrary in their construction and focus on a different direction than the one I’m interested in: what numbers mean rather than what they are.

When I’m not thinking about how fun something like a 40–70 club is or a 50–50 club would be, I can’t help but ask myself, “Hey, wouldn’t the 46–68 club have been a lot more meaningful than 40–70?” And the HR–SB club, unlike hitting 400 homers, has the added baggage of comparing two very different things with very different values. At least the Triple Crown isn’t a bad model of offense if you don’t have OBP and SLG; homers, batting average, and RBI cover most offensive contributions, even if the weighting is rather inaccurate.

The 40–70 club isn’t something I’d give extra credit for in an MVP vote; Acuña’s homers and stolen bases are already part of his statistical record. But thankfully, I’m not an MVP voter this year, so trying to separate Acuña and Mookie Betts is a problem I’m relieved to not have to unwind. My colleague Jay Jaffe made an excellent case for why he might break the tie in Betts’ favor. I’ll give a counterpoint in Acuña’s favor, but it has little to do with club membership and more about defense. While there’s some additional value to Betts’ flexibility, at the same time, there’s simply far more uncertainty around defensive numbers than offensive ones.

But if you’re not tired already of the MVP arguments, I guarantee you’ll be exhausted with it nearly two months from now when the award is announced. So let’s talk about something more fun, like the chance that Acuña can manage to top himself in the future with more than a full healthy season back under his belt. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you, FanGraphs reader: I can’t imagine that FanGraphs analysis is exactly what you’re most interested in right now, baseball-wise. The exciting things going on are the games on the field as they happen. These playoff races are amazing. The schedule sets up with a wonderful mix of both-teams-in games and rivals playing spoiler. In that context, I can’t imagine that many people are dying to read about Tommy Kahnle’s changeup-heavy arsenal, just to pick on a random article I recently wrote.

That’s never stopped me from writing about whatever random thing caught my eye, but I thought I’d take advantage of a slow week (again, just in my kind of baseball analysis, not in actual baseball) to go over some predictions I made before the season. I like to look back on my own work for a few reasons — not just to bask in successes, but that’s certainly part of it. It’s also useful to talk process and separate bad outcomes from bad ex-ante decisions, though to be honest, that’s really hard, so I’m not certain I’ll get it right today.

I’ve named the column after one of my favorite weird sports things. I always knew this, but I’ve noticed it more since I started playing in a recreational softball league. After you return to the dugout, there’s a pretty good chance someone will slap your butt with their glove. It doesn’t matter what you did, there’s always a reason to. Did you score a run or make a great defensive play? It often comes with an “attaboy” or “way to go.” Did you make an out or embarrass yourself in the field? “Get ‘em next time” is nearly guaranteed. The butt slap? That’s a constant. The words that go with it? They’re versatile. Without further ado, let’s figure out whether my hypothetical dugout should be congratulating or consoling me. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, Johan Rojas knocked a single up the middle off Pirates closer David Bednar. Cristian Pache, who’d just entered the game as a pinch runner to start the 10th inning, came around to score easily. When he crossed home plate, the Phillies were guaranteed a playoff spot for the second straight year, and by night’s end they were locked in as hosts of one of the NL Wild Card series.

Typical scenes ensued. In college baseball, where budgets are smaller and buying alcohol for the freshmen and sophomores can get a little dicey from a legal standpoint, this kind of celebration takes the form of a dogpile. In fact, “dogpile” has become the accepted shorthand for a victory that either secures or advances a team toward a championship. You’ll hear “two dogpiles to Omaha,” and the like.

Big leaguers don’t dogpile, or rather, they don’t only dogpile. And the Phillies, having developed a reputation over the past 18 months as baseball’s lascivious chaos agents, know the post-dogpile rigmarole by heart. Champagne and beer were sprayed around the clubhouse, cigars handed out, and Garrett Stubbs procured a set of overalls. Read the rest of this entry »

After Anthony Rendon revealed that he had indeed suffered a fractured tibia and not a bone bruise, and after Shohei Ohtani cleared out his locker to undergo surgery to repair his torn ulnar collateral ligament, there really was only one more insult to add to the injuries that have defined the Angels’ 2023 season. On Sunday, the team transferred Mike Trout to the 60-day injured list due to continued setbacks in his recovery from wrist surgery, officially ending his season and opening the door to questions about his future with the franchise.

Trout fractured his left hamate while fouling off a pitch on July 3. He had surgery to remove the bone — a treatment that’s supposed to accelerate a return to play — two days later, and was expected to be sidelined for four to eight weeks. He returned on August 22, about seven weeks after surgery, but while going 1-for-4 with an infield single, he felt significant pain in his left hand when hitting and returned to the IL. Though he still hoped to play this season, he ran out of time.

“It’s frustrating,” a visibly emotional Trout told reporters in a media session on Sunday. “It’s been hard on me… It kills me not being out there. I’ve got a lot left in my career, and I can’t just sit around here and mope around. I’ve got to have that positive mindset.” Read the rest of this entry »

In many aspects of the game, Harold Ramírez simply doesn’t look like a big leaguer. His 47.5% chase rate ranks 193rd out of the 194 hitters with at least 400 plate appearances this year. Among that same population, his line drive rate ranks in the 14th percentile. Ramírez hits twice as many groundballs as fly balls and has homered in just 2% of his plate appearances, worse than league average. As a DH, he doesn’t provide value with his glove, and in his first two full seasons with Miami and Cleveland, he was worse than replacement level.

Now let’s talk about how good Ramírez is. He has some of the best raw power in the game, once hitting a ball 114.8 mph, something the likes of Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and José Ramírez have never accomplished. He avoids strikeouts at an above-average clip and can make the most of the balls he puts in play as a 64th-percentile runner. Ramírez is one of just three hitters with a batting average above .300 in each of the past two seasons, along with Freeman and Luis Arraez. Read the rest of this entry »

The regular season ends this week, which means we’ve only got a few games left with our local broadcast crews. In the playoffs, every game is a nationally televised game. Regardless of how you feel about Joe Davis and John Smoltz, it’s a bummer that you don’t get to hear your local broadcast team in the game’s biggest moments. Not just because they know the club better than whichever national crew is parachuting in to cover the series, but because their voices shape your baseball experience all year long.

The other reason national crews aren’t the same is that they’re neutral arbiters. Baseball is a zero-sum game. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose, and one team’s joy is another team’s sadness. For six months, our local broadcasters feel that joy and sadness along with us, and then, when the games matter the most, they’re replaced by people who don’t. A national broadcaster’s job is to call the game right down the middle; the words And there’s a long fly ball just don’t have the same heft when they’re spoken by someone whose emotional wellbeing isn’t dependent on where that long fly ball lands. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

So before we say goodbye to our regional sports networks for the season (or forever), let’s take a moment to appreciate the apotheosis of the hometown call: the walk-off home run. A walk-off homer can make you feel many things. It can take you from an anxious mess to being of pure ecstatic light in a matter of seconds. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I looked into the odds displayed on Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball broadcasts. I found them to not be very good. Then I stopped paying attention; there are a ton of baseball games on every week, most of which Apple does not broadcast, and even when I did watch an Apple game, I basically ignored the odds. I knew they were silly, after all – why distract myself by looking at them?

Of course, I didn’t really expect that to keep going indefinitely. Apple is a massive company. They have more than 150,000 full-time employees, and a ridiculous proportion of that group knows how to code. At its core, this is a data problem. There are companies I’d trust over Apple to solve a data problem, but there aren’t a lot of companies, you know? Sure, they outsourced their predictions to nVenue, a sports analytics company, but they’re Apple. Surely they’d find a way to make this all work. I noted their relative inaccuracy in my head as a temporary curiosity and moved on.

Last month, I started compiling data for an update. It’s all well and good to assume things have changed, but at some point, you have to go verify it. I decided to wait for the back half of the season because of the way I designed my test, which I’ll now explain. Similar to last time, I started by watching a bunch of games. This time, I got data from the 12 Apple TV+ games played between August 18 and September 22. I watched the entirety of those broadcasts and noted the last probability, if any, displayed before every pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

What causes teams to succeed in the playoffs? This is one of the debates in baseball most ridden with conventional wisdom, folksy tales, and grand assertions. Some claim that teams need to have playoff experience. Others focus on clutch performance, which usually coincides with whatever the person wishes to argue. A common argument, more cloaked in the language of reasonableness, is that teams that are more reliant on home runs than other ways of scoring underperform in the postseason. There are myriad reasons given for why some teams end up winning October, and most of them can tested for accuracy based on baseball history. I did a piece last year that looked at dozens of different team variables, and most of the explanations meant bupkis.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we throw our hands in the air and just assume teams are equally as good as they are in the regular season and go with that. There are significant structural differences between postseason and regular-season play simply due to the number of games and the increased number of off-days. Regular-season winning percentage is one of the few good predictors of postseason success; projections do even better. When I change the methodology in the ZiPS projections to focus more on a team’s frontline talent and the exact matchups and less on important regular-season things like depth, team strength becomes significantly more predictive of postseason success.

One of the best recent examples of this is the Nationals in 2019. Despite the 13-win regular-season advantage of the Dodgers, ZiPS projected their NLDS as a coin flip on the strength of the Nats being able to stuff so much of their team’s value into players who would be on the field. That was a projection that got a lot of pushback, but in the end, Washington won the World Series, basically riding the top of the rotation, a few really good hitters, and the two or three relievers that Dave Martinez could actually trust. Read the rest of this entry »

If Houston has a problem, that notion was put on hold for at least one night. Having lost four straight three-game series, three to lousy teams, the Astros arrived in Seattle sporting just a half-game lead over the Mariners for the third AL Wild Card spot, 2.5 games behind the Rangers. Fortunately for the Astros — for whom quality starting pitching has suddenly been in short supply this month — Justin Verlander played the stopper, shutting out the Mariners on two hits over his first eight innings in a 5-1 win.

Facing a team that owns the majors’ second-highest wOBA against four-seamers (.377), the 40-year-old Verlander dialed down his fastball usage in favor of his curve, and retired the Mariners in order in seven of his innings. He struck out the side in the second and fourth innings, and got into trouble only in the third, when Dominic Canzone and Josh Rojas hit back-to-back singles and J.P. Crawford followed with a walk. Verlander escaped that jam by inducing Julio Rodríguez to ground into a double play.

By that point, the Astros led 4-0, having banged out three second-inning runs against Luis Castillo via a trio of hard-hit balls from Mauricio Dubón, Martín Maldonado, and Jose Altuve, with Yordan Alvarez adding a fourth-inning homer. From the double-play ball through the end of the eighth, Verlander retired 16 straight Mariners. Given the intact shutout and a pitch count of just 91, manager Dusty Baker sent him out to start the ninth, but Rojas’ double into the right field corner ended Verlander’s night, and Bryan Abreu closed things out, though Rojas came around to score. Verlander struck out eight, benefited from a pair of diving stops by first baseman José Abreu, and allowed just six hard-hit balls out of 18 in play, none of them barrels. Read the rest of this entry »

Kenta Maeda has had a stellar career on two continents. Now in his seventh big league season — three with the Minnesota Twins preceded by four with the Los Angeles Dodgers — the 35-year-old erstwhile Hiroshima Carp has a 2.95 ERA and a 162-115 won-lost record between NPB and MLB. He’s been as good as ever in September. The Osaka native has been credited with a win in each of his last three decisions while allowing just four runs over 17-and-two-thirds innings. When he next takes the mound it will be with a 4.28 ERA and a 3.96 FIP on the year.

Maeda discussed his evolution as a pitcher, and offered some thoughts on NPB, when the postseason-bound Twins visited Cleveland earlier this month. Daichi Sekizaki served as an interpreter for the interview.

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David Laurila: How much have you changed as a pitcher since coming over from Japan?

Kenta Maeda: “The first couple of years I was pretty much just myself; I was the same pitcher that I was in Japan. After pitching here for several years, I know what the different hitters’ weaknesses are and when they are getting on to me. I ironed some things out and made adjustments to become better, to become the pitcher that I am today.” Read the rest of this entry »