At this point, it’s becoming a meme. The Orioles chug along, at or around .500, and our playoff odds continue to say that they’ll almost certainly miss postseason play. Across the internet, sites like Baseball Reference and FiveThirtyEight give them a higher chance. The headlines write themselves: “Why doesn’t FanGraphs believe in the Orioles?”

Just to give you an example, after the games of July 29, the Orioles were 51–49. Baseball Reference gave them a 34% chance of reaching the playoffs; we gave them a 4.6% chance. Ten days later, on August 8, Baseball Prospectus pegged them at 22.2% while we had them at 5.4%. On August 11, FiveThirtyEight estimated their playoff odds at 16%; we had those odds at 5.7%. Another week later, on August 19, Baseball Reference pegged them at 35.5% to reach the playoffs; we gave them a 4% chance. You can snapshot whatever day you’d like and you’d reach the same conclusion: we don’t think the Orioles are very likely to make the playoffs, while other outlets do.

Now, we’re getting down to brass tacks. The Orioles are 68–61 after Wednesday’s games. Baseball Reference thinks they are 43.6% to reach the postseason. FiveThirtyEight isn’t quite so optimistic, but still gives them 23% odds, while Baseball Prospectus has them at 29.9%. Here at FanGraphs, we’re down at 6.6%, even after they called up top prospect Gunnar Henderson. Why don’t we believe? Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’m an obnoxiously determined Devil’s advocate, one of my favorite uses of data is tackling conventional wisdom. For example, one such bit of wisdom that always bugs me is when pundits insist that the best teams are the ones that win close games. In fact, the opposite is true. The most predictive run differential comes in blowouts — the good teams are the ones that are more likely to humiliate their opponents, not squeeze out a close one. This time of year, you start to see a lot of analysis asserting that X team is definitely blessed or doomed come playoff time because of some randomly chosen factor Y. We could do a column a day on these and still have dozens of unwritten pieces by the time the actual playoffs roll around, but let’s focus on a few specific ones, concentrating on who good teams beat rather than how many games they win.

First off, do regular season head-to-head records matter in the playoffs? Since the start of divisional play in 1969, teams that face each other in the playoffs have frequently met in the regular season. Interleague play added eventual World Series matchups to the regular season, and starting in 2023, every playoff matchup will have already occurred during the regular season. Given the sample size of playoff series, if we construct a simple model of series winning percentage that only consists of a team’s regular season winning percentage and its winning percentage in head-to-head matchups, the model horribly inaccurate, with an r-squared of 0.0886 and a mean absolute error of 275 points of winning percentage.

But including head-to-head winning percentage doesn’t really even have a marginal influence on the coin flip; without the head-to-head matchups, the model’s MAE increases to 276 points of winning percentage. Now, a head-to-head record may imply something about a team’s overall strength that isn’t captured in its overall record, but rather than pick up a small sample implication, we can use strength of schedule directly, which does help the model a tiny bit (playoff series are always going to be very uncertain unless we move to best-of-75 series or something wacky). Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, MLB announced the 2023 schedule, implementing the alterations originally announced when the current collective bargaining agreement was signed back in March. The existing format, under which the 2022 season is being played, has been largely stable since 2013, the season the Houston Astros moved to the American League. That change evened out all six divisions to five teams each, making for a tidy format in which every team played their divisional opponents 19 times and the rest of the teams in their league six or seven times, with 20 interleague games against a rotating division and officially designated MLB rivals.

Before 2001, MLB’s schedule tended to be a good deal more balanced. During the divisional era before interleague play, six-team divisions typically played 18 games against their divisional opponents and 12 against non-divisional opponents; seven-team divisions had a nearly even 13/12 split (the American League did 15 vs. 10 or 11 for a couple years after the 1977 expansion). In 2001, MLB went all-in on an unbalanced schedule, with the idea being that by having teams play their divisional rivals more often, you’d create greater tension in the divisional races and more intense regional rivalries. Whether this approach actually accomplished its goals is difficult to tell. I can’t think of any new rivalries that were created simply by playing more games and tend to believe that rivalries are born from teams playing more meaningful games against each other, not simply from seeing each other more often. Red Sox and Yankees fans don’t appear to have hated each other any more in 2010 than they did in 2000, and the endless Orioles-Rays series in the days before Tampa Bay was competitive made this O’s fan click over to other games, not foster a hatred for the Rays.

Be that as it may, from a philosophical standpoint, heavily unbalanced schedules make the most sense when winning divisional races is the sole or at least primary way of making the playoffs and much less so when more Wild Card spots exist. When you have a lot of Wild Card spots, you create a fundamental bit of unfairness when the divisions are of meaningfully differing strengths; teams in weak divisions are competing directly against teams in stronger divisions for those Wild Card spots, with the former generally having easier schedules. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know what teams value most in their batters today: hard, elevated contact. It’s easy to understand why. Pitchers are getting so good at missing bats, and defenders are getting so good at converting balls in play into outs, that making the most out of your contact is imperative.

There are other ways to make the most of your contact, though. You don’t need to hit the ball hard if you hit it on a line. Low line drives are valuable whether they’re hit hard or not; a 92 mph line drive and a 105 mph screamer that both clear the infield are each clean hits every time. Sure, the harder one might split the outfielders and turn into a double more often, but the difference there is marginal. Hit the ball at the proper angle, and you can mitigate any weakness in contact quality.

If you look at the way teams construct their rosters, it might seem like they’re ignoring this fact. Does everyone just hate the Ichiro Suzukis of the world these days? Maybe there’s untapped potential in minor leaguers who generate their contact in ways that don’t jibe with the analytical trends of the day. Heck, maybe there’s untapped potential in major leaguers who do it. Read the rest of this entry »

The delayed start to the 2022 season due to the lockout has had a lot of small consequences for the structure of the season, ranging from expanded rosters to my least favorite thing, the continued use of zombie runners in extra innings. The last (we hope) of these changes is a slight alteration to the playoff schedule, which the league sees as a necessity in order to keep the postseason from straying too far into November. On Monday, MLB announced that the three-game Wild Card Series will be played without any off-days, while an off-day will be trimmed from the Divisional Series (between Games 4 and 5); teams in the ALDS get one additional off-day, without travel, between Games 1 and 2. The Championship Series will lose an off-day between Games 5 and 6). The World Series is business as usual.

While I expected this configuration for the Wild Card round (it was already accounted for in the generalized ZiPS projections for postseason performance), there are some slight tweaks that need to be made to account for the changes to the Division and Championship Series with respect to pitching. When projecting the roster strength of a team for the purposes of postseason probabilities, ZiPS weighs pitchers at the top of the rotation more heavily. That’s because historically they have gotten a larger percentage of starter innings in the playoffs than during the regular season. But losing an extra day of rest could result in teams using the pitchers after their No. 3 starters more heavily, as well as more dilemmas involving bringing back a top starter on three days rest. There are also possible consequences for the bullpens. In other words, teams will need to be slightly deeper than normal this playoff season.

So, how do we account for that? To get a rough estimate — I’m not sure there’s a methodology that will let us do any better than that — of the potential effects of the compressed schedule, I went back into the ZiPS game-by-game postseason simulations and put together a new, quick simulation for starting pitcher usage. I used projections as of Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Leiter will always have a special place in my heart. The Rangers’ top pitching prospect was the subject of the very first article I wrote for FanGraphs, which talked about, among other things, the unbelievable carry on his fastball and how it could lead him to big-league success. But we haven’t checked in on Leiter in a while, and well, his Double-A numbers have been ghastly: a 6.24 ERA in 53.1 innings pitched has somewhat muted the hype surrounding the righty. Though it doesn’t really change our outlook on Leiter, it’s still unsettling to see.

Part of that has been his inability to throw strikes, as Leiter is issuing well over five walks per nine innings. But more importantly, Leiter has lost a significant amount of his signature fastball ride in pro ball. Statcast data was available for this year’s Futures Game, during which Leiter’s dozen or so fastballs averaged 16.1 inches of vertical break – a far cry from the 19.9 inches I calculated in that debut article using TrackMan data. It could be a small sample quirk, and yet, the general industry consensus is that Leiter’s fastball is no longer transcendent. That’s a genuine problem.

What might the reason be? Maybe Vanderbilt’s TrackMan device wasn’t properly calibrated (as suggested by Mason McRae), leading to imprecise readings. But if that’s true (and maybe it isn’t), how could we verify it? What I came up with this: Using velocity, spin rate, and spin axis data from the 2021 NCAA Division-I baseball season, I built a model that estimates the vertical break of four-seam fastballs from righty pitchers. Once completed, I grouped the data by the pitcher’s team and looked at which schools over- or under-shot the model. Those with the largest residuals, in theory, are prime suspects for having miscalibrated TrackMan devices. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a question that gets asked all the time on baseball social media. The variations are endless, but essentially, it boils down to this: Would you rather have an ultra-consistent hitter in Player X, who you can count on for a daily hit, or an uneven hitter in Player Y, who oscillates between prime Barry Bonds and a benchwarmer?

Given specific numbers, you could work out whether Player X or Y is more valuable. But what if we assume they’re players of equal caliber? That’s where it gets tricky. Maybe I’m only seeing certain answers, but in such cases, it seems like people prefer the clockwork Player X. It makes sense: The prospect of guaranteed production is reassuring, as befits our risk-averse tendencies. I have a hunch that we generally overvalue consistency in baseball, but I’m not here to prove that. Instead, I wanted to find out which hitters have been steady at the plate this season, and which hitters have been mercurial.

Over on our Splits Leaderboards, you can break down hitters’ seasons into weekly chunks. They range from Isaac Paredes’ destruction of the league in mid-June (488 wRC+) to Travis Demeritte’s hit-less and walk-less stretch a month prior (-100 wRC+). From there, measuring the variance between those weeks is a fairly simple endeavor. I grouped the weeks by each player, then calculated the standard deviation in wRC+, which represents how spread apart a player’s weeks are from his overall production. The higher the standard deviation, the more variable he is; the lower the standard deviation, the more consistent. Read the rest of this entry »

I like to think that I’ve asked a lot of questions about baseball in my life. It comes with the territory: my job is to write about those exact baseball questions, which gives me plenty of incentive to come up with them. But crowdsourcing is a powerful thing, and on a recent episode of Effectively Wild, I heard a question I’d never pondered before.

The major league record for home runs in a single game by a single team is 10. It was set on September 14, 1987, by the Toronto Blue Jays. That’s not an historically powerful team, nor was it an historically powerful era. Those Jays finished the season with 215 home runs, a mark 10 teams surpassed in 2021. But it stands alone as the most prolific single-game home run outburst, and it’s part of a broad trend that doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think about it.

Home runs have exploded since the ball became livelier in 2015. Despite that, only four teams have set new single-game home run records in that time. It doesn’t add up; home runs are flying out of ballparks like never before, and yet teams are mostly looking up at records set in earlier eras.

On the podcast, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley mentioned a few hard-to-measure ideas. Maybe players are easing off the gas pedal more in blowouts, or managers are taking their best players out for rest more often. Maybe the deeper bullpens on modern teams mean fewer chances to pile on a reliever who just doesn’t have it that day.

Maybe, they also mentioned, it’s just math. After all, there might be a lot of home runs now, but there were a lot of games then. Any individual game might be less likely to result in an offensive outburst, but play enough of them, and the math starts to change. Ten games in a low-homer environment are less likely to produce a home run record than 10 games today, but what about 100 games, or 1,000 games? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking a lot about two Yankees hitters recently. That’s less common than you’d think for me; out on the west coast, the TV isn’t overrun with Yankees highlights, and there are just so many baseball teams, so many interesting players to ponder. But I heard an announcer discussing one of my favorite baseball tropes, and it brought Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo to mind.

“Hard in, soft away” is a pitching adage, and one that makes plenty of sense. There’s a mechanical aspect to it, for one: to hit an inside pitch on the barrel, a hitter has to rotate more, which naturally takes more time. On the other hand, a slow pitch has the best odds of eluding a batter’s swing, or at least the most dangerous part of the bat, if the hitter swings too quickly; in a regular swing, the barrel gets to the outside part of the plate first (on a plane to hit the ball the other way) before rotating around to the inside of the plate (on a plane to pull).

I’m not a hitting mechanics expert, and that doesn’t describe the whole story. The batter could pull his hands in to try to get the bat head through the zone more quickly, or employ different swings for differently located (or angled) pitches, or any number of counters. But the default assumption – batters want to get the bat around on inside pitches, so pitchers should give them less time to do that, and vice versa – is at least a decent approximation of the physical reality in play. Read the rest of this entry »

As you might imagine, I watch a lot of baseball for work, and one of the things that stands out to me the most this year is just how dang hard pitchers are throwing. I’m not just talking about that new hotshot reliever your team called up who’s dropping triple digits like peak Aroldis Chapman, though that’s part of it. I’m talking about existing starters, guys I’ve watched for years, adding a little oomph.

Max Fried has topped out over 100 mph this year; his teammate Kyle Wright has never thrown harder. Framber Valdez is up nearly two ticks on average. Carlos Rodón already threw hard, and now he throws even harder. You can’t walk 10 feet without tripping over a pitcher throwing harder than ever – or so it seems to me, a fairly interested observer.

But appearances can be deceiving. I can think of any number of baseball truths that were considered evidently true by observation for years, only to later be disproven. I decided to put my eyes to the test. Have pitchers learned how to throw harder from one year to the next, changing the fundamental truth of how aging works? Let’s find out.

My method is fairly simple. I took every starter who threw at least 10 innings since pitch-level data began in 2008. I took their average four-seam fastball velocity, but only in games they started; I didn’t want to have swingmen who changed roles within or between seasons in my data. From there, I looked at every pitcher to see if he’d thrown in the majors the previous year, and if so, the change in fastball velocity from one year to the next.

In this way, I got a yearly sample of how much every returning pitcher in baseball’s velocity changed, on average, every year. As a quick example, there were 176 pitchers who compiled at least 10 innings as a starter in both 2013 and ’14. On average, they threw 0.21 mph slower in 2014 than they did in ’13. I found those pairs for every year, which gave me a yearly average of velocity changes over time. Read the rest of this entry »