This is Matthew’s first post as a FanGraphs contributor. Matthew is a staff writer and podcast host at Lookout Landing, where he ponders great existential questions like, “Why would anyone be a Seattle Mariners fan?” and, “What dark curse did the Mariners conjure to make Mark Canha such an annoyance in their life?” He has written about the lack of Black players in Major League Baseball, recorded parody songs about the Astros’ banging scheme, and interviewed several minor leaguers. In addition to his current role at Lookout Landing, Matthew was previously a writer for Baseball Prospectus and a marginally successful open mic comedian. After a public school and Subaru childhood, Matthew attended the University of San Diego before bravely becoming the first FanGraphs writer to ever live in Seattle.

The first full week of the 2021 season is upon us. To avoid getting trampled in the avalanche of games, let’s focus in on the ones with the juiciest matchups, funniest storylines, and richest histories of batter vs. pitcher ownage. Here are the best pitching matchups in the week’s early going.

Monday, April 5, 7 PM ET: Jacob deGrom vs. Matt Moore

A team’s first game of the season almost always pairs their best starter versus the top of the other team’s rotation. But with a COVID-19 postponement pushing the Mets’ opener back, they get to unleash Jacob deGrom’s fury against a Philadelphia reclamation project. This NL East showdown sets the game’s most dominant pitcher against a guy who hasn’t pitched stateside in two years.

Unable to convince an MLB team to give him a job after knee surgery ended his 2019 renaissance, Matt Moore signed in Japan with the Fukuoka Soft Bank Hawks. He’s back after posting a 2.65 ERA in Nippon Professional Baseball. That’s certainly impressive, but Moore’s ERA in NPB was still not as good as the 2.38 deGrom ran last season (his 2.26 FIP was somehow better), or his 2.43 before that, and especially not the 1.70 from the year before that. Monday’s tilt is a classic story of an established, hegemonic force meeting a redemptive arc on its final curve. Read the rest of this entry »

I come here not to bury MLB, and not really to praise it, but to wonder what else it could have done. On Friday, the league announced that it would be pulling this summer’s All-Star Game from Atlanta in the wake of Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature passing a law that would, among other things, impose burdensome new ID requirements on voters, limit absentee voting, and give the legislature wide latitude to intervene on state and county election boards. It was a move both correct and frustratingly limited, a multi-billion-dollar enterprise both doing the least and also the most it realistically could in the moment.

Argue if you’d like that MLB’s decision is as much about optics as doing the right thing. (You’d be correct.) Feel free to think that, regardless of the reasoning, a good decision remains a good decision. (You’d once again be right.) MLB had no choice here; holding a marquee, vote-driven event in a state where voting itself is under attack would be tone deaf and wrong. Nor should a league set to celebrate the life and career of Henry Aaron at the Midsummer Classic do so in a state whose new voter law disproportionately affects Black voters. That’s how you look both stupid and wrong, and for as much as MLB has been both in the past, stepping in this particular mess was a mistake easily avoided.

The Braves, meanwhile, put out a statement saying they were “deeply disappointed” in MLB’s decision, claiming that by moving the game, it was robbing the team of a chance to “use this event as a platform to enhance the discussion.” Before we examine the league’s actions further, it’s perhaps worth digging into that particular nugget of PR babble for a second. How exactly does an All-Star Game lead to a “discussion” about voter suppression? What is there even to discuss? Were the Braves planning on turning the home run derby into a TED talk about whether it’s bad when a state decides to make it harder for people of color to exercise their rights? The whole thing reads rather callously coming from a team that abandoned a perfectly functional stadium in a majority-Black city for a brand-new one, built at great expense to local taxpayers in one of Atlanta’s white suburbs, and yet claims that Atlanta is “our city.” It’s worth mentioning that the Braves didn’t make a statement about SB 202, as this Jim Crow-aping bill is called, when it was conceived, debated or passed. It all suggests that fans in Atlanta and Georgia can count on their baseball team speaking out only when it is directly impacted. Read the rest of this entry »

In January, we at FanGraphs put out a call for radio broadcast ratings. Over the past few days, we’ve released a compilation of those rankings, as well as selected commentary from each team’s responses. This is the last installment of that compilation.

As a refresher, our survey asked for scores in four areas. If you’d like a thorough explanation of them, you can read the introductory article, but I’ll also recap them briefly here. If you’d like to see the rest of our results, those can be found here and here.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. This isn’t limited to statistical analysis, and many of the booths that scored best excelled at explaining technical details of playing. This score represents how much listeners feel they learn about baseball by listening.

“Charisma” covers the amount of enjoyment voters derive from listening to the broadcasters fill space, which takes on many forms. The booths that scored best on charisma varied wildly, from former players recounting stories of their glory days to unintentional comedy and playful banter between long-term broadcast partners. Read the rest of this entry »

For fans of dominant pitching, Saturday evening’s Twins-Brewers contest set a high bar for the season. At American Family Field (ugh), Minnesota’s José Berríos and Milwaukee’s Corbin Burnes both turned in electrifying performances, each pitching six complete innings of no-hit ball and reaching double digits in strikeouts. At one point, the pair combined to strike out 10 batters in a row. Burnes carried his no-hit bid deeper into the game, getting one out in the seventh before serving up a solo homer to Byron Buxton and departing. Berríos, meanwhile, became the latest pitcher to be removed with his no-hitter intact. Twins reliever Tyler Duffey finally gave up a hit to Omar Narváez in the eighth, but Minnesota held on to win 2-0.

The two 26-year-old righties offered contrasting styles for their dominance. Berríos, the more established of the pair, averaged 95.3 mph with his four-seam fastball and went as high as 96.9 mph, but racked up strikeouts largely by getting hitters to chase low curveballs. Burnes, the harder thrower and the better hurler last year — his 2.4 WAR tied for sixth among all starters — overpowered hitters with a befuddling cutter that averaged 96.3 mph (3.2 mph faster than last season, when only Dustin May outdid him) and reached 97.9 mph. He paired that with a sinker that averaged 98.0 mph and maxed out at 98.8.

The tone for the matchup was set on the first batter of the game. Burnes, whose 36.7% strikeout rate last year was the majors’ fourth-highest among pitchers with at least 50 innings, struck out Twins leadoff hitter Luis Arraez swinging at a 97.6 mph cutter in the middle of the zone — no small matter given how tough he is to punch out. Last year, Arraez had the majors’ fourth-lowest swinging-strike rate among batters with at least 100 PA last year (3.5%) and the third-lowest strikeout rate (9.1%).

That was the only batter Burnes struck out in a 10-pitch first. Berríos notched his first strikeout by getting Christian Yelich to chase a low curveball to close the first inning, which started the two pitchers’ streak. Burnes returned to strike out Max Kepler, Miguel Sanó, and Jake Cave in the second, with Berríos doing the same to Keston Hiura, Jackie Bradley Jr., and Lorenzo Cain. Then Burnes mowed down Ryan Jeffers, Andrelton Simmons, and Berríos himself, batting under National League rules. The stretch of 10 straight strikeouts finally came to an end when Narváez, who would do double duty in his spoiler role, grounded to third base to start the third inning.

Berríos went on to strike out the side (Kolten Wong, Travis Shaw, and Yelich again) in the fourth. No batter reached base for either side until the fifth inning, when Burnes hit Cave and Berríos hit Hiura in their respective halves. Still, neither team had a hit (or a walk) through six innings, with a 103-mph third-inning flyout by Orlando Arcia to the deepest part of center field the only batted ball with an expected batting average higher than .240 (it was .790). Here’s the highlight reel from the first six innings:

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Ashley’s first post as a FanGraphs contributor. Ashley has spent the last several years writing for various SB Nation sites, including Bless You Boys, DRaysBay, and Bleed Cubbie Blue. Her bylines have appeared here at FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, Baseball Prospectus and more. She hosts a baseball YouTube channel called 90 Feet From Home and co-hosts the baseball podcast Who’s On Worst.

There is no magic quite like that of Opening Day. It’s hard to explain the sensation of being part of a crowd of like-minded baseball fans, brimming with enthusiasm over the return of the game after a long, cold winter. It will make otherwise rational people gather en masse in 20-degree weather in the hopes of seeing their beloved team get the first win of the long 162-game season.

It’s a unique level of fervor, one that draws us like moths to the porch light that is the ballpark.

For fans of the Toronto Blue Jays, though, it has been two years of Opening Days without baseball close to home, and the absence of their team north of the border has at times made it difficult to feel connected to the sport they love. To make it worse, blackout restrictions and the elimination of a dedicated Blue Jays radio broadcast (the audio from the television broadcast will be simulcast to radio listeners) have further limited access to the only Canadian major league team. Read the rest of this entry »

Working in a baseball front office is a 365-days-a-year gig, but April is a relatively slow month if your focus is on roster construction. Opening weekend is a chance to take a breath after a very long, very repetitive month and a half of spring training. It’s also an opportunity to see how your squad looks, as barring something unexpected, it’s the team you are stuck with, at least for the next two months or so. There’s much to be done to prepare for the various storms ahead. Here are just some of the tasks teams have in store this month.

How Do We Look?

This is no time to over-react. One game is 0.6% of a club’s season. One three-game series? Less than 2%. Still, one time through the rotation and the bullpen can help answer a lot of questions. How do guys look? Are the changes we saw (or didn’t see) in spring training carrying over now that the games matter? How is a starter’s velocity in full starts? How does that ‘pen arm look in back-to-back outings? And, most importantly, are guys healthy? Whether it’s the result of performance, concerning underlying metrics, or just being a bit banged up, every team has plenty of questions to answer, and how concerned they need to be about the state of their roster becomes much clearer once the real action gets going.

Minor Depth Moves

No team is satisfied with its depth. Not one! There is virtually no trade market this time of year but there are still some second-level big league free agents and a handful of minor league free agents available. And with injuries sometimes forcing roster crunch decisions, teams also eagerly await the daily transaction email to see if a player who can help make them a little bit deeper suddenly appears on the waiver wire. At the same time, teams have to weigh the value of that improvement against the cost of a roster spot. They’re in tweak mode, but those tweaks can pay big dividends later in the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Collin McHugh is cerebral both on and away from the diamond, and that attribute was on full display in a recent Zoom call with reporters. The Tampa Bay Rays right-hander fielded questions on multiple topics, most notably his craft and the possibility of MLB’s moving this summer’s All-Star Game from Atlanta to another locale. I asked McHugh how his new team compares to one of his old ones in terms of pitching analytics.

“The behind-the-scenes things are a little different,” responded McHugh, referring to his tenure with the Houston Astros from 2014-2019. “I think they probably have a more well-versed staff over here, in total, of being able to communicate the advanced information to guys. I worked a lot with [Brent Strom] in Houston, and Strommy and I got to know each other really well. He was kind of my guru, or whatever you want to call it. If I had questions, I went to him.

“Here, it feels, at least to this point, like there is a more holistic approach,” continued McHugh. “From [pitching coach] Kyle Snyder — starting with him — and the pitchers, to Stan [Borowski] in the bullpen, all the way through the data-analytics system, then all the way up the ladder. I’ve had conversations with [General Manager] Eric Neander about these things, and have since we were in negotiations. So it feels like a very top-to-bottom system over here.”

McHugh signed a free-agent contract with the Rays in late February. Asked if he was approached about the possibility of tweaking any facet of his game, he said that wasn’t the case at all. Read the rest of this entry »

The Angels locked up their second baseman on Opening Day, inking David Fletcher to a five-year contract that will keep him in Anaheim through at least the 2025 season. In addition to the baseline guaranteed money ($24.5 million), there are two club option years at $8 million and $8.5 million. Both option years have buyouts for $1.5 million, the first one bringing the contract to the headline figure of $26 million.

Fletcher has been a find for the Angels, and I daresay that he’s outperformed the original expectations for him. Drafted as a shortstop out of Loyola Marymount, he avoided the wacky error totals that many middle infield prospects put up in the low minors. Still, his offensive profile wasn’t seen as having enough upside to propel him to the top of the team’s prospect lists. The consensus going into 2018 was generally that he would be a utility infielder, though a dependable one.

Notably, even the lukewarm evaluations had nuggets of Fletcher’s later success. John Sickels gave Fletcher a C+, but praised his reliability and noted him as a player who could surprise.

David Fletcher, SS, Grade C+: Age 23, a sixth-round pick in 2015 from Loyola Marymount, hit .266/.316/.339 with 20 doubles, three homers, 20 steals, 27 walks, 55 strikeouts in 448 at-bats between Double-A and Triple-A; easy to under-estimate, old-time scouts would have called him an “intangibles” player; runs well, but throwing arm is nothing special and hitting power is below average; all that said, he is a very reliable defensive shortstop how outplays his mediocre defensive tools with positioning, instincts, and impressive reliability: has a .982 career fielding percentage at short; most likely a utilityman but might surprise eventually; ETA 2018.

Here at FanGraphs, Eric Longenhagen gave Fletcher a 40-grade in 2017 but had praise for his contact skills.

A draft-eligible sophomore at Loyola Marymount, Fletcher projects to carve out a big-league job as a utility man capable of competently playing both middle-infield positions, a terrific outcome for a sixth-round pick.

Fletcher is an above-average straight-line runner but not an especially twitchy athlete, and he’s able to play short despite fringey range and an average arm because of polished but unspectacular actions, hands, and good instincts. His bat is quick, his stroke short but effortful. Fletcher projects as a fringe hitter with 40 raw power and less than that in games.

As for ZiPS, it saw Fletcher as merely a .237/.276/.304 hitter with above-average defense at second in the majors in 2018, so I cannot claim that my work nailed his rise either! ZiPS didn’t really start getting interested until after 2018 when it translated his full season at .274/.314/.394 but at 13 runs better than average at second.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first-pitch temperature for Opening Day in Detroit was a frosty 32 degrees, and what’s more, snow was falling. Amid those decidedly baseball-unfriendly conditions, the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera launched the first home run of the 2021 season, and off reigning AL Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, to boot. It was a sight to behold, yet it wasn’t easy to see. Launched off Cabrera’s bat at 101.8 mph, the ball caromed off the railing atop the outfield wall and back towards the field of play. Given the limited visibility, Cabrera didn’t believe he had homered, and slid into second before realizing the ball had gone out.

The two-run shot not only helped power Detroit to a 3-2 win over Cleveland, it was the opening salvo in what has the potential to be a milestone-laden season for the slugger, who tuns 38 on April 18. That was Cabrera’s 488th career homer, and his 350th as a Tiger; it was also his 2,867th hit. For as modest as his preseason projections are — I’ll get to the full lines, but 21 homers and 139 hits are the numbers to start with — he projects not only to become the seventh player to attain those twin milestones but the first to reach both in the same season:

Mind you, Cabrera doesn’t have much margin for error with the hit count if he’s going to do it this year while puttering along at the .261/.332/.418 clip from our Depth Charts projections, which take the average of his separate Steamer and ZiPS projections. Opening Day is a time for optimism, however, and in this case that optimism resides in the fact that until Thursday, he hadn’t hit an Opening Day homer since 2009. The reality, on the other hand, is that even when he’s homered early in the other seasons of what we might call his wilderness years — such as in the third game of 2018 and the second game of last season — his production was meager.

Indeed, over the past four seasons, Cabrera’s age-34 to age-37 campaigns, he hit just .267/.342/.406 for a 99 wRC+. Injuries played a part in that decline, particularly a pair of herniated discs that caused lingering pain throughout the 2017 season, and a ruptured left biceps tendon that ended his ’18 season — in which he’d gotten off to a strong start — after just 38 games. He did play 57 out of the Tigers’ 60 games last year, and his 102 wRC+ (.250/.329/.417) outdid both his 2017 and ’19 showings, as did his 0.3 WAR, but for a two-time MVP and 11-time All-Star making $31 million annually (before proration), that’s nothing to write home about.

If there was good news to be found in Cabrera’s 2020 numbers beyond his ability to DH nearly every day, it’s that he hit the ball hard. Leaving the small sample of 2018 aside, his 9.7% barrel rate matched his high for the past four season, while his 49.7% hard-hit rate was a high for that span, with the latter just a hair below his 50% in 2016, his last excellent season. Even given the fact that he’s hitting too many groundballs (1.33 GB/FB ratio, a bit better than his 1.41 from 2017-19), his .375 xwOBA placed in the 86th percentile. The problem is that given his first-percentile sprint speed — “slower than a Molina dragging a Molina with another Molina on his back” is the phrase that I have used for such measures — he managed just a .323 wOBA. His 52-point underperformance placed him in the second percentile from among the 252 players who faced at least 500 pitches last year, and this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon; his 33-point underperformance over the past four seasons (.354 xwOBA, .321 wOBA) placed him in the first percentile. Sticking to last year’s numbers, his expected batting average of .285 was 35 points higher than his actual one, and his expected slugging percentage of .514 was 97 points higher than his actual mark. If not for some combination of bad luck and bad wheels, he’d be even closer to the aforementioned milestones; based on his 35-point batting average underperformance over the past four seasons, he’d have another 46 hits even before accounting for injuries.

If Cabrera’s Depth Charts projection is underwhelming, his ZiPS projection is even more so. Dan Szymborski provided me with a percentile breakdown:

There’s quite a gap between that 50th percentile ZiPS projection and the one from Steamer (where he’s forecast for a .266/.343/.440 line) due to their different ways of weighing past performance. The eagle-eyed reader will also note that there’s a gap between the WAR associated with that 50th percentile and the ZiPS line on his player page (-0.4), owing to the fact that FanGraphs applies a heavier positional adjustment factor to DHs (-17.5 runs per year) than Baseball-Reference (-15 runs), and that the park factors may differ as well. Still, we’re talking about a player whose median projection is in the ballpark of replacement level, and expected to get worse over the next two seasons, though the same caveats apply to Cabrera’s three-year ZiPS projections, which on his player page forecast seasons of -0.9 WAR (2022) and -1.4 WAR (2023). You can mentally add maybe half a win to each of those figures but that’s just putting a bit of Chapstick on a pig, which won’t make it any prettier.

Most teams will curb the playing time of somebody whose production has fallen off to that degree — that is the concept of replacement level, after all — but as we’ve seen in relation to the Angels and Albert Pujols, the big contract of a future Hall of Famer can get in the way of things. As Dan noted last year, because of his contract, we’ve seen Pujols at his worst for longer than any other great hitter; he’s “produced” -0.6 fWAR over the course of 3,153 PA from his age-35 season onward, which takes a bit of the shine off his astounding totals of 662 home runs, 3,153 hits, and 80.9 JAWS, which ranks second among first baseman even with that arid stretch, behind only Lou Gehrig.

Sticking with fWAR for the moment, among Hall of Famers only Willie Keeler (1,291 PA, -0.8 WAR) and Jim Bottomley (1,146 PA, -1.2 WAR) have surpassed 1,000 PA from 35 onward while festering below replacement level. Based on that three-year ZiPS projection, Cabrera is a very real threat to join their company, as he’s managed only 0.6 WAR in 941 PA from his age-35 season onward. By Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR, Cabrera has produced 0.4 WAR from age-35 onward, but even with that minimal production, his career WAR (69.3), peak WAR (44.8) and JAWS (57.0) are all solidly above the standards at first base (66.9/42.7/54.8), and with the pending milestones and already-acquired hardware, he figures to be a lock for Cooperstown.

Tangential to that subject, I often get asked in my FanGraphs chats a variant of the question of whether there are examples of players who have hung on too long and played their way out of a Hall berth. It’s a difficult question to answer, though we’ve certainly seen future Hall of Famers deliver sub-replacement level work as they’ve slogged past milestones. Craig Biggio‘s -2.1 WAR in 2007 as he surpassed 3,000 hits, comes to mind, and likewise Lou Brock‘s -2.0 WAR over his final three seasons as he surpassed both Ty Cobb’s career record for stolen bases (then believed to be 892, currently 897 at B-Ref) and the 3,000-hit mark. Wade Boggs had -0.3 WAR in 1999 as he went over the 3,000 line, and given time I’m sure I could come up with a few more.

Keeping with an age-35 season as the dividing line, here are the non-Hall of Famers with at least 500 PA from that point onward who have produced the lowest bWARs:

I don’t think we could say definitively that any of those players were derailed en route to enshrinement, though in his 1994 book The Politics of Glory, Bill James predicted that Parker, an MVP and two-time batting champion, would be elected by the BBWAA in 2003, and likewise for Murphy, a two-time MVP, in 2008. Then again, from that vantage he also had Pete Rose, Joe Carter, Jack McDowell, and Ruben Sierra — among others — eventually getting the nod.

Among the players above who escaped James’ cloudy crystal ball, Bando and Bell might have helped to flesh out the dearth of Hall of Fame third basemen had they stuck around longer. Williams felt like he had a shot as a pivotal player in the Yankees’ turn-of-the-millennium dynasty, at least until advanced fielding metrics — and perhaps his disinterest in anything besides starting in center field — squashed his hopes like a bug. Miñoso’s actual birthdate is unclear; B-Ref uses 1925, the youngest of the four apparent options according to various sources, which would have placed his debut at age 23 and meant that his age-35 season was still a productive one (2.0 WAR in 1961).

Mauer and Votto are of particular interest to statheads, as we fret over whether the general BBWAA electorate will appreciate their charms, statistical and otherwise, as much as we do. Mauer is seventh in JAWS among catchers and above all three standards (his seven peak seasons all took place while catching, it’s worth noting), while Votto, whose contract situation makes him an analogue to Cabrera and Pujols, albeit without the milestones, is 15th among first basemen, above the peak standard (46.9 vs. 42.7) and 0.9 shy in JAWS (53.9 vs. 54.8).

Of course, there’s nothing set in stone about 45.0 WAR, age-35 seasons, and 500 PA as cutoffs; my qualifications above notably omit both Tony Oliva (43.1 WAR through his age-34 season, -0.1 thereafter) and Dave Parker (40.5 WAR through his age-35 season, -0.4 thereafter), two other Era Committee candidate of note. This seems like a topic worthy of further exploration.

As for Cabrera, who’s making $31 million annually this year and each of the next two, the Tigers can only hope he’s about to find his way out of the doldrums. If they’re to turn the corner on their rebuilding effort, they may face the type of hard choice that the Angels have been unwilling to make when it comes to Pujols. In the meantime, until Spencer Torkelson arrives and the likes of Casey Mize, Tarik Skubal and Matt Manning carve their places (knock on wood), we can hope that Cabrera hits well enough to avoid such awkwardness.

In January, we at FanGraphs put out a call for radio broadcast ratings. The votes are now all in, and this week, we are releasing a compilation of those rankings, as well as selected commentary from each team’s responses.

As a refresher, our survey asked for scores in four areas. If you’d like a thorough explanation of them, you can read the introductory article, but I’ll also recap them briefly here. If you’d like to see the first chunk of ratings, those can be found here.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. This isn’t limited to statistical analysis, and many of the booths that scored best excelled at explaining technical details of playing. This score represents how much listeners feel they learn about baseball by listening.

“Charisma” covers the amount of enjoyment voters derive from listening to the broadcasters fill space, which takes on many forms. The booths that scored best on charisma varied wildly, from former players recounting stories of their glory days to unintentional comedy and playful banter between long-term broadcast partners. Read the rest of this entry »