Archive for Daily Graphings

Before examining Mookie Betts and Mookie Betts’ excellent 2018 season in earnest, allow me first to address some claims I have no intention of making in what follows. I will not, for example, state definitively that Mookie Betts is the most talented player in the majors. I will not suggest that Betts ought obviously to be the MVP of the American League. I will not argue that Wins Above Replacement is an infallible measure of player value. I will also not contend that FanGraphs’ version of WAR is necessarily superior to others that exist.

What I will say is that WAR is a metric designed to account for the ways in which a player contributes on the field and to translate those various contributions into wins. While the methodology employed by FanGraphs differs slightly from the one used by Baseball-Reference, for instance, both are constructed with the same end in mind — namely, to estimate the value of a ballplayer relative to freely available talent. Each represents an attempt to answer a good question in a responsible way.

According to the version of WAR presented at this site, Betts was the major leagues’ most valuable player this year. By FanGraphs’ calculations, he was worth just over 10 wins relative to a replacement player. As Craig Edwards recently noted, that 10-win threshold is pretty significant: the “worst” player to reach it since the beginning of last century is Norm Cash. Cash, according to Jay Jaffe’s JAWS metric, was more or less his era’s Mark Teixeira. Whatever one’s opinion of Mark Teixeira, it’s encouraging if he represents the floor for a player’s career projection. It’s difficult to record a 10-win season by accident. Mookie Betts is very good.

What follows is an account of how Betts produced those 10 wins — an anatomy, as it were, of a historically great season. By examining the constituent elements of WAR — and Betts’ performance in each category — it’s possible perhaps to arrive at a better sense of what is required for a player to distinguish himself amongst his peers. It might also possibly allows us to better appreciate what a special talent Betts has become.

Batting Runs: +62.2
The batting element of WAR is calculated, more or less, by translating all the hitterly events (walk, single, double, etc.) into runs. By this measure, Betts ranked second among all major leaguers behind Mike Trout — and finished just ahead of teammate J.D. Martinez.

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This year’s AL Wild Card Game will be a battle of competing philosophies, at least when it comes to the choice of starting pitchers. On Tuesday at Yankee Stadium, the opposing managers announced their picks for Wednesday night’s game. The Yankees have decided to remain old-school, with manager Aaron Boone tabbing 24-year-old righty Luis Severino, an All-Star who despite second-half struggles finished fourth in the league in WAR (5.7) and in a virtual tie for fifth in FIP (2.95) — and one whose early exit in last year’s Wild Card Game pushed the Yankees into a bullpen-oriented approach anyway. As for the A’s, a club whose rotation has has lost staff ace Sean Manaea and five other starters to season-ending surgeries, manager Bob Melvin is going the new-school route, with 29-year-old righty Liam Hendriks as his opener — a first of sorts. In eight September starts, Hendriks threw a combined 8.2 innings.

Together, the choices offer something of a callback to a year ago. Heading into the AL Wild Card game, then-manager Joe Girardi was ambivalent about the possibility of saving Severino for a potential Division Series Game One and relying upon his wealth of dominant relievers to face the Twins. “You could do that but that’s not something you’ve done during the course of the season,” Girardi told reporters. “And we have some starters who are pretty qualified to make that start… If you start doing crazy things, things guys aren’t used to, then I’m just not comfortable doing it. You want to keep it as normal as possible.”

Despite Girardi’s reservations, it was clear that the Yankees were built for such a scenario thanks to general manager Brian Cashman’s July 19 (re)acquisition of David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle to add to a bullpen that already included Aroldis Chapman and Dellin Betances. “A veritable clown car of effective righties who can miss bats and take over before Twins batters get too familiar with Severino,” is how one wag put it.

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In a very short amount of time, the 2018 MLB playoffs will commence. Some number of hours after that, we will have already observed our first advance and our first elimination. The Cubs and Rockies played for half of their lives on Monday; tonight, one will be spared, and one will be finished off. Even though it was weird to have a couple of tiebreakers, they functioned as an effective warm-up for the postseason. Yesterday, the stakes were moderate. Beginning today, the stakes are high.

So, with the playoff field set: Who looks like the best playoff team in the bunch? Who looks like the biggest underdog? This is a post I try to get up each year. Here’s last year’s edition. I thought it would be weird to publish this after someone had already been knocked out, so I’m coming in today just under the wire. It’s time to look at what the numbers can tell us.

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Before Opening Day, 40 staff writers and contributors from across our family of blogs made predictions about which teams would make the 2018 playoffs. I compiled the results, which can be found here. Some predictions were bold; others were fantastical. Many exhibited a perhaps unsurprising deference to our preseason projections. Affecting an air of clairvoyance is a rite of spring; realizing we’re a bunch of goofs is fall business. So before the playoffs begin this evening, let’s spend a moment reckoning with the fact that we’re bad at predicting things.

First, though, we should acknowledge the winners. I will not name the loser here; the world has enough cruelty in it. No one got every playoff team right — nor did anyone’s ballot perfectly mirror the order in which the field was eventually seeded — but David Laurila and Neil Weinberg each correctly predicted eight of the 10 playoff teams. David had the Twins in Oakland’s place, while Neil thought Boston would be traveling to Los Angeles for the American League Wild Card, but the rest of their AL ballots were correct. They also predicted four of the five National League teams. They both thought the Nationals would win the NL East, and they weren’t alone: 39 of 40 ballots agreed, with the final vote going to the Mets. We messed that one up, though not as badly as the Nationals did. Our full results are below.

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Jon Lester’s experience in the postseason has been marked mostly by success. He’s made 21 career playoff starts and recorded a few important relief outings, too. In those games, he’s produced a 2.55 ERA and 3.62 FIP. In five World Series starts (plus one relief outing), Lester has pitched 35.2 innings, struck out 34, walked just eight, and conceded only eight runs (seven earned). He’s what one might characterize as a “big-game pitcher.”

The thing about so-called big-game pitchers, however, isn’t so much that they rise to important occasions, but rather that they simply replicate the performances that have brought them to the big stage in the first place. For over a decade, Lester has done just that. Tonight, however, the Cubs might require a little bit more of Lester.

In 2,366 regular-season innings over more than a decade, Lester has produced a 3.61 FIP. In 148 postseason innings, the 34-year-old lefty has a 3.62 FIP. Look at some of his other stats from the regular season and playoffs over the course of his career.

The numbers for Lester are pretty much the same across the board in the regular season and playoffs. His postseason ERA is lower than his regular-season mark due mostly to the .241 BABIP he’s recorded in the former. His slightly lower strikeout and walk numbers indicate that hitters have made more contact against Lester in the postseason, although it’s quite possible that some of that contact has been of the weaker variety if batters have traded in strikeout avoidance for power.

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Monday, I wrote about why, if I had a vote, I’d select Jacob deGrom for National League MVP. I do not have a vote, though, and I doubt that my argument is sufficiently convincing. The NL MVP is almost certainly going to end up being Christian Yelich. There was a somewhat crowded field for a little while, but Yelich pulled away from his fellow position players with an impossible final month. From the start of September, Yelich batted .370, with 16 strikeouts and 18 extra-base hits. Yelich was the best overall player from start to finish on a Brewers team that won the division literally yesterday. For what the MVP has turned into, Yelich is the obvious choice. Tremendous player on a team that wouldn’t have gotten to where it did without him.

Truth be told, it also wasn’t just the last month. Yelich was baseball’s best hitter in the second half, and it wasn’t even close. After the All-Star break, he registered a wRC+ of 220. Baseball Reference doesn’t keep track of wRC+, but it does keep track of OPS+ and its splits do go back further than ours, and according to the numbers at Baseball Reference, Yelich had one of the ten or so best second halves in the last 50 years. The only players with better second-half rate stats over enough of a sample: Barry Bonds, Mike Schmidt, Hank Aaron, and Jim Thome. Bonds actually has the four best second halves, and they all happened in a row between 2001-2004, but this isn’t a Barry Bonds fun-fact article. This is a Christian Yelich fun-fact article. He did his best to carry the Brewers into the NLDS.

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To date, Josh Bard’s managerial experience consists of a single game. In early September, he assumed that role while Aaron Boone was serving a one-game suspension. Don’t expect it to represent the end of his time in that capacity for a big-league team.

Currently in his first season as Boone’s bench coach with the New York Yankees, Bard is viewed by many as a future MLB manager. And for good reason. The 40-year-old former journeyman catcher has long been lauded for his interpersonal skills, and he’s been honing his analytics chops for years. Prior to joining the Yankees, the Texas Tech product spent five seasons in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization, initially as a special assistant to the general manager. More recently, he served as the forward-thinking NL West club’s bullpen coach in 2016 and 2017.

Where will Bard be employed in the years to come and in what capacity? Multiple teams will be interviewing managerial candidates this offseason, and Bard’s name is certainly being bandied about in front offices. While he’s happy in New York, other opportunities surely await.

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Josh Bard: “My biggest role as bench coach is being a translator from the analytics group down to the dugout. I’m making sure that all the information we have is distilled down to the simplest way to understand it, not only for the staff, but also the players. My role is more pregame. It’s postgame review. What can we do better?

“Zac Fieroh is one of our analytics guys, and he’s with us every day. I give Brian Cashman and Michael Fishman, and that whole group, a lot of credit. They really pushed for him to be in there, and he’s done an awesome, awesome job.

“It’s funny. When you look at Oakland, or at L.A., or at Tampa, you think they’re these analytics juggernauts. That’s the perception. They are very good at it — don’t get me wrong — but when you look at us, that’s not really the perception. Well, when I came here from L.A., the information here is as good, if not better, than anywhere I’ve been.

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Max Muncy hit a lot of home runs this year. Including his opposite-field effort on Monday against Colorado, he hit 35 of them overall. Not only will that total rank him 14th forever among major leaguers from the 2018 campaign, it will also represent the greatest improvement for a batter between last season and this one. This year, Muncy hit 35 home runs. Last year, he hit zero of them. Arithmetic suggests that he produced a net total of +35 by this very specific measure. A perusal of the leaderboards reveals that no batter rivals him in this regard. Among the many ways in which Muncy’s 2018 season was exceptional, that’s one of them.

The purpose of this post, however, is not to catalog all the unlikely exploits of Muncy’s 2018 campaign, but rather to examine one specific way in which Muncy’s home run on Monday was different than all the others he’s ever hit. To understand the significance of that homer, though, it’s necessary first to contemplate another, different homer.

That’s footage of Muncy, tying the score against the Mariners’ Edwin Diaz in the ninth inning of an August 18th game this season. Edwin Diaz was one of the best relievers in baseball this year. Part of what makes Diaz so effective is his arm speed. Diaz threw this fastball to Muncy at 98 mph, as the hastily edited screencap below indicates.

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While the rest of the baseball world was focusing on #TeamEntropy, news broke this past weekend that Major League Baseball is currently the subject of a federal grand-jury investigation targeting the league’s business practices in Latin America. Jeff Passan’s report on the investigation is well worth the read, but this passage in particular highlights the broad scope of the probe:

A federal grand jury is looking into Major League Baseball teams’ international dealings and has issued subpoenas to club officials and other personnel involved in the transactions, three sources familiar with the probe told Yahoo Sports. Agents from the FBI have spearheaded the investigation, according to sources familiar with it, and lawyers from the Department of Justice who specialize in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases – which typically involve bribery of foreign officials – are involved as well. While the target of the inquiry could not be confirmed by Yahoo Sports, sources said investigators have subpoenaed at least one former Atlanta Braves official as well as people involved with the signing of Cuban star Hector Olivera, who agreed to a deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers before being traded to the Braves. Multiple witnesses have agreed to cooperate with the investigation, according to sources.

This has the potential to emerge as one of the more notable developments concerning Major League Baseball since the end of the Steroid Era. To understand why, let me start by discussing the significance of a grand jury. If you’ve ever served on a jury or received a summons for jury duty, odds are really good that your paperwork contained language including “petit jury.” A petit jury isn’t one that’s really tiny or consists of a dozen Jose Altuves. Instead, it’s a jury assembled to determine issues of fact at a trial. It’s also the only kind of jury with which most people are familiar.

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Before we get going, allow me to say four things:

1. This is not the official FanGraphs position. FanGraphs doesn’t have an official position on any awards. This is a company of a bunch of different writers, and any bunch of writers will possess a bunch of different opinions. These are my thoughts, and my thoughts alone.
2. My vote this year is for the AL Cy Young. I do not have a vote for the NL MVP. If I did have a vote for the NL MVP, I wouldn’t be allowed to write this right now! As far as this race is concerned, I’m an outside observer.
3. Reasonable people can conclude that Jacob deGrom shouldn’t be the NL MVP. In such an event, I imagine the support would go to Christian Yelich. Yelich has been amazing, especially of late. Every number has error bars, and Yelich has an argument. This case isn’t open and shut.
4. You’ve probably read much of my argument before, written by different people in different places. This is the “best player” argument. It’s the Mike Trout argument. I’m just going to make the argument with different words.

So we can get into it, then. Last week, I wasn’t sure who I supported. I’ve never voted for the league MVP, so I’ve never given it all that much thought. But now I’ve come around, and I can say that, if I had a vote for the NL MVP, my first-place choice would be Jacob deGrom. My second-place choice would be Christian Yelich. deGrom, of course, is done for the year, because the Mets were bad. Yelich’s Brewers are playing literally right now, and for all I know, he’ll provide the winning hit that sends the Brewers straight to the NLDS. For so many voters, that’s likely to be a factor. Perhaps that’s likely to be the factor. I don’t believe that it should be. I believe that deGrom made a winning case.

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