You’ve probably noticed that Giancarlo Stanton has been on fire lately. After hitting exactly seven home runs in each of the first three months of the season, he powered up and hit 12 in July, the most home runs anyone had hit in a month this season besides Cody Bellinger’s 13 in June. But that was just him getting warmed up, because after his home run yesterday, he’s already hit 17 in August.

Since July 1st, Stanton has hit 29 home runs. Nelson Cruz, in second place, has hit 17. Nolan Arenado and Charlie Blackmon, who are tied for sixth-most home runs hit since the beginning of July, have combined to hit 28. And they play in Colorado. Stanton is, by himself, hitting bombs at the rate of two power hitters on hot streaks who get to play at altitude.

Read the rest of this entry »

PITTSBURGH — FanGraphs alum and MLB.com analyst Mike Petriello authored the following tweet last October. The social-media missive is pinned to his Twitter profile — and rightfully so, because it’s funny, and humor is often rooted in some truth.

The truth, in this case, is that Kenley Jansen has dominated with one pitch like few before him — specifically, with a cutter that he’s thrown 86.0% of the time this year and 88.4% of the time over his carer. Jansen’s usage has invited natural comparisons to Mariano Rivera’s own approach for years. Jansen has become dominant in Rivera-like fashion and now just requires ultimate postseason success to further raise his profile.

I showed Jansen the tweet recently in the visiting clubhouse at PNC Park. To get a better look, he took my iPhone in his massive catcher’s mitt of a left hand and examined it. He could have crushed it like a soda can and returned the fragments to me. I waited in suspense for his reaction.

Read the rest of this entry »

Towards the end of last week, Maury Brown published the local television ratings for the league’s non-Canadian teams at Forbes. For the sport, the news is generally positive. Even as those in some quarters continue to perpetuate the narrative that “baseball is dying,” the data suggest otherwise.

This isn’t to say that Major League Baseball is without its flaws, of course. Greater attention ought to be paid to some areas, particularly to the matter of local youth outreach and accessibility to the sport, in general. As a business, however, baseball is booming. In terms of general popularity, attendance and television ratings suggest that MLB is a major force. An examination of the numbers reveals a series of encouraging trends. For example, we find that (a) many viewers prefer baseball to other available options and (b) winning clubs attract larger audiences than losing ones and (c) a successful Yankees club helps ratings.

Let’s take a look at some of these trends using the data from Brown’s piece, both overall and among teams. Before we begin, a note about ratings versus attendance numbers. Historically, the former respond to recent success more quickly than the latter. Team’s get a big boost after a strong season, with raised expectations for the next year. It takes some planning and expense for fans to actually attend games, though. To watch them on television, meanwhile, requires just a cable subscription and some free time. So expect these figures to be more reactive to success than similar numbers for attendance.

The chart below shows the change in winning percentage for MLB teams from 2016 to 2017 as well as the percentage change in local television ratings.

Eight of the 12 teams to have recorded at least a 20-point improvement in win percentage from last season have seen also experienced a more or less corresponding improvement in television ratings from. Of the four teams not to have benefited from a ratings bump, only the Diamondbacks have actually been good — although the Rays and Angels are each contending for a playoff spot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Danny Jansen is quietly having one of the best seasons of any player in minor league baseball. In 97 games split between three levels, the 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays catching prospect is slashing .339/.414/.510 — and he’s not slowing down. In 52 plate appearances since being promoted to Triple-A Buffalo, he’s hit a Ruthian .455/.538/.795.

When Jansen appeared in my July 1 Notes column, Blue Jays farm director Gil Kim was quoted as saying the youngster is “really opening up some eyes,” and that he is “one of the most-improved players in the system.”

Jansen’s eyes are a big reason for that improvement. Four years after being drafted out of an Appleton, Wisconsin high school, in the 16th round, he’s receiving optometrical assistance.

“Last year, I realized that things weren’t as clear anymore, so after the season I went to the eye doctor,” explained Jansen. “He told me I had astigmatism, so I got a prescription and started wearing glasses last fall. I’m seeing everything so clear now, like a normal person with good eyes would.”

The former Appleton West Terror doesn’t wear contacts, which makes him the rare backstop who dons glasses behind his mask. He sees at least one advantage to that. “Dirt doesn’t get in my eyes,” Jansen explained with a knowing nod.

Vision hasn’t been his only above-the-neck improvement. Read the rest of this entry »

If the postseason started today, five teams in the top half of major-league payrolls at the beginning of the year would qualify for the playoffs: the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, and Washington Nationals*. That means that five teams in the bottom half of Opening Day payrolls would make the playoffs as well — in this case, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies, Houston Astros, and Minnesota Twins.

*Numbers current as of yesterday.

Presenting the standings in this way might give one the impression that we remain in an age of great baseball parity. An age in which the Kansas City Royals can win the World Series, Cleveland can get there, too, and teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates can sustain multiple years of playoff contention.

That isn’t quite the case, however.

Of the clubs that feature top-six payrolls this season, three have playoff chances of at least 96% (Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs). A fourth, the Yankees, aren’t too far behind. If the Twins can’t hold on to a playoff spot and are overtaken by anyone but the Rays, the only team in the bottom 12 of payrolls this season to make the playoffs will be the Arizona Diamondbacks, and even their spot isn’t a guarantee. Money buys players, and those players rack up wins for their ball clubs. Last season, at around this time, I took a look at the relationship between payroll and wins, and noted that the relationship was one of the strongest we had seen in a while. This is what it looked like at the end of last season.

Last season saw one of the strongest relationships between payroll and wins to exist in several decades. Here’s how the relationship has developed since 1990, with help from data courtesy Brian MacPherson. 

In the early 90s, Major League Baseball was coming off an era of collusion and lack of expansion. That, combined with a new influx of talent from outside the United States, meant that simply paying for major-league talent wasn’t the only solution to winning major-league games. (To track back further, read Dave Studeman’s piece in Hardball Times on the subject.)

Read the rest of this entry »

PNC PARK — On Wednesday, I approached Yasmani Grandal on something of a covert mission in the visiting clubhouse at PNC Park. I was attempting to extract a candid answer from the Dodgers catcher.

I did not formally introduce myself, though he could surmise I was a reporter from my visible media credential, and possibly from my build and attire.

I began by asking him if he knew where he finished in NL MVP voting last season.

“I heard someone voted for me,” Grandal said.

I asked Grandal what he thought of that vote.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Ashley MacLennan’s fourth piece as part of her August residency at FanGraphs. Ashley is a staff writer for Bless You Boys, the SB Nation blog dedicated to the Detroit Tigers, and runs her own site at 90 Feet From Home. She can also be found on Twitter. She’ll be contributing regularly here over the next month. Read the work of all our residents here.

Since the beginning of his tenure as commissioner, Rob Manfred has made a concerted effort to address issues associated with pace of play and, more broadly, the appeal of the sport to fans. One of the main problems facing him? How to create a new generation of fans to keep the game alive and flourishing for years to come.

The issue, as many see it, is how to sell a game to a demographic composed largely of people who can barely look up from their phones long enough to cross the street, let alone sit in a stadium for three straight hours, watching the nuanced and, yes, sometimes slow game of baseball unfold before them?

There’s certainly an effort to connect with fans by means other than simple on-field action. Teams are attempting to tap into the younger fan base by offering promotions via the Ballpark app. Checking in at Guaranteed Rate Park for the first time? Go get yourself a free t-shirt. Visiting Camden Yards? Take a guided tour of the stadium and maybe win a commemorative print.

Gameday promotions seek to appeal to popular trends, with mixed results. The Tampa Bay Rays have recently featured a Fidget Spinner promo that was met with some sarcastic side-eyeing on Twitter, but their DJ Kitty onesie night was so popular fans around the world were begging for the item online, and those who didn’t get one of the 15,000 onesies were heartbroken, and frankly a little mad. (It’s worth noting average Rays attendance is 15,876, so this should have been enough onesies for almost the entire crowd.) That’s the sign of a popular promo — and of an organization successfully tapping into a cultural moment.

The presence of teams online is, in and of itself, an attempt to reach out to fans in this brave new digital era. The Twitter accounts of the Rays, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago Cubs, among others, frequently exchange witty banter with one another, share memes, or use gifs to start online fights. It’s engaging, entertaining, and infinitely retweetable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 2014, the average baseball team scored 4.07 runs per game. That was down only a tenth of a run from the year before, which was down only a little more than a tenth of a run from the year before that, but a definite trend was emerging. An average of 4.07 was the league’s lowest mark since 1981, and there were gathering concerns that offense was being suffocated. No one really knows how low is too low, but Rob Manfred considered various ideas that might re-inject some hitting. This is why conspiracy theories persist to this day.

Rather conveniently, see, offense bounced back in 2015. It surged again in 2016, and it’s surged only more over the past five months. The average team now is up to 4.68 runs per game, which feels more familiar. The surge has been powered by a well-publicized and well-examined home-run spike, but at the end of the day, offense is offense, right?

It is, and it’s good that hitters again have a chance. The balance of power had felt like it was shifted too far. But in a certain sense, you could argue that this offensive surge is artificial. For a variety of reasons, home runs are up, and they’ve gone up right when they needed to. But offenses now are so very home-run reliant. Everything to follow is probably obvious, but I might as well explicitly lay it out. Home runs are taking over the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, the Cubs rallied to beat the Blue Jays in 10 innings. It was the 10th inning that was the most dramatic, but the Cubs had a chance to finish things off the frame before. In a tie game in the bottom of the ninth, Kris Bryant batted with two on and one out, against Ryan Tepera. It was one of the highest-leverage plate appearances for Bryant on the year, and he quickly found himself behind 0-and-2. A borderline ball call extended the at-bat, but then Tepera threw a pitch outside. The screenshot says everything you need to know about what happened next.

Kris Bryant is one of the best players in baseball, and he might well be the best player in the National League. Of that, there’s no question, and before we get any deeper, I want to try to get one simple point across. It’s probably futile, but, anyway: There’s a difference between saying a player is unclutch, and saying a player has been unclutch. The former would be a hell of a statement. The latter is easy enough to demonstrate with evidence. Clutch performance tends to be volatile; it hasn’t been shown to be a sticky attribute. It is not my belief that Kris Bryant is actually, naturally, unclutch.

But Kris Bryant has been incredibly unclutch. Historically unclutch. It’s the one place where he’s come up short. As much as I love the things he can do, the data he’s assembled is stunning.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nicky Delmonico demands our attention, if only for a moment.

In the midst of an all-in rebuild of the Chicago White Sox, general manager Rick Hahn has focused on acquiring high-upside, high-risk assets who could help the club in future seasons. Delmonico is not that. He was signed to a minor-league deal after being released by the Brewers in 2015, having failed to reach even Double-A.

Now, three years later, Delmonico is living a charmed life. Over his first 87 career major-league plate appearances, he owns a .315/.425/.589 slash line and .427 wOBA — a figure that’s 70% better than league average. He even hit his first home run in Fenway Park, against the club for which he grew up rooting.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot to suggest the fun won’t continue — at least not to this degree. According to Baseball Savant, Delmonico has been nearly the most fortunate hitter in baseball this season among those who have seen at least 200 pitches. He’s recorded the fifth-highest wOBA relative to his xwOBA of the 474 players in that sample.

The outfielder possesses a pedestrian average exit velocity of 82.9 mph through his first 59 batted balls tracked by Statcast. He’s barreled just 5.1% of those balls in play, another pedestrian figure.

Nor are the underlying skills indicative of a future star. Delmonico was never rated as a top prospect (though he did rank 92nd on the stats-only KATOH top 100 list this year). Confined to the corner outfield, Delmonico has to hit just to be average.

But Delmonico — a former bat boy at the University of Tennessee, where his father coached — doesn’t need to be a star for this to be a success story. Steamer and ZiPS project him to be a league-average bat (99 wRC+) going forward this season.

Read the rest of this entry »