Defensive statistics have been open to debate since they were first created. This back and forth probably will continue on for years to come, even with some new technologies offering the promise of better data.  One limitation with giving individual players values for their defensive metrics is positioning. The player’s coaches may have them completely out of position for a seemingly routine play and zone based metrics are going to downgrade the player because they didn’t make the play. While it may be impossible to know the correct player position before each play, the chances of a defender making a play knowing their initial position can be estimated with Inside Edge’s fielding data. By using their Plays Made information, I will add another stat to the defensive mix: Plays Made Ratio.

The concept is fairly simple. Inside Edge provides FanGraphs with the number of plays a defender should make given a range of possible chances. Inside Edge watches each play multiple times and grades the difficulty of the play. Here is their explanation for how they collect the data.

Inside Edge’s baseball experts include many former professional and college players. Every play is carefully reviewed, often more than once. It is not uncommon for IE scouts to review certain plays together in order to reach a consensus on the defensive play rating. IE also performs a thorough post game scrubbing process before the data is made official.

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There is one pitcher out there that throws his changeup over 30% of the time and calls it a ‘heavy sinker.’ Alex Cobb aside, though, we traditionally lump the changeup in with the slider, the curve, the splitter — it’s not a fastball.

And yet, in some really important ways that go beyond movement and leak into usage, the change works like a sinker. In a league where strikeouts rule, the change actually has a strikeout problem.

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A little while ago, I wrote an article for the Community Research blog about projecting plate appearances before they happen based on the batter and the pitcher. It was pretty well received (which was nice, because I put some serious work into that thing), and apparently it was good enough for Dave Cameron to foolishly kindly decide to call me up to the big leagues.

If you read through the comments there (or if you left a comment!) you probably realized that no, the Outcome Machine — as the tool was dubbed — was not perfect. There were flaws in the way I conducted my research, and some of the assertions I made probably weren’t 100% true. So in this article, I am going to follow up on that first one and hopefully remedy any errors. Those include:

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It’s easy to see that baseball has changed over the last couple of decades. Walks, strikeouts, homers, and stolen bases have all seen their ups and downs, and we’re currently experiencing a valley in terms of offense. Games are longer. There’s instant replay.

But there’s evidence that players are getting similarly better and worse at these things — the distribution hasn’t changed, the graph has just been shifted. It’s possible that the relative value of certain events in baseball as a whole could still be about the same. A stolen base’s relationship to a win could be unchanged if the distribution of stolen bases is similar, and there are just fewer of them.

Is that what you find when you look back empirically? If you relate strikeouts, walks, stolen bases, and home runs to winning, is that relationship steady over these turbulent times?

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Madison Bumgarner pitched quite a bit this past season. Including the regular and post season, he threw a total of 4,074 pitches, which wasn’t even the season’s top total; James Shields bested him by throwing six more, for a total of 4,080 pitches in 2014, not including spring training. So with all of the pitches thrown this season (and one month less of rest), how should we expect these two to produce next season? Let’s look at some comparable pitchers.

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Void of any analysis, this post is!

Full of fun GIFs, also, this post is!

Because baseball is still just a game. Despite all the number-crunching, data-mining, spreadsheet-making, question-asking, answer-seeking, conclusion-drawing and soul-sucking we do here at FanGraphs, it’s important every once in a while to just sit back and soak up what it is that keeps us coming back and makes baseball so fun and interesting: Weird things happening all the time. And dingers. One must always remember to appreciate the dingers.

We’re about halfway through the 2014 season now (!), so it’s time for everyone to start doing best first-half this’ and worst first-half thats. Or, in this case, the most extreme first-half homers.
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Last summer, I saw Joey Votto pop out.

I traveled to Chicago, as I do every summer, to enjoy the city and catch a couple Cubs games at Wrigley Field. The Cincinnati Reds were in town and Jeff Samardzija was pitching for the Cubs. In Votto’s first at-bat against Samardzija, he doubled. In his second at-bat, Votto walked. But in the fourth inning, Samardzija got Votto to pop out to third base. I immediately recognized what had happened. Nobody I was with quite understood why I was so excited. I explained to them how Joey Votto doesn’t pop out to the infield. It ended up being his only infield fly of 2013. He did it one time in 2012. He did it one time in 2011. He didn’t do it at all in 2010.

I’ve been to a ton of baseball games. I’ve never seen a pitcher throw a perfect game, or even a no-hitter. I’ve never seen a batter hit for the cycle. But I have seen Joey Votto pop out. And as lame as it may sound, I contend that pop out is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen at a baseball game in person, alongside Greg Maddux’s 3,000th strikeout, Manny Ramirez hitting three homers and Lou Pineilla kicking his hat all over the infield.

After attending Monday’s game in Cleveland between the Indians and the Boston Red Sox, I can add another statistical quirk to the list of coolest things I’ve seen in person at a baseball game: an Immaculate Inning.
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To begin:

Wow. That’s a pretty boring GIF, huh? J.A. Happ threw that pitch and Omar Infante fouled it off. Nothing to see here.

Unless, that is, you already know what happened in this at bat. The Omar Infante in this GIF doesn’t know it quite yet, but something terrible is about to happen to him.
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After writing some good posts for the Community Blog, August Fagerstrom got our attention, and is now joining the staff of FanGraphs. He will be contributing regularly here. If you want to follow in his footsteps, the Community Blog is a great place to get noticed.

Late Tuesday evening, Kurt Suzuki hit an inside-the-park home run off San Diego Padres reliever Nick Vincent. As you likely know: Kurt Suzuki is a catcher. Another thing you likely know: catchers, generally speaking, are not fast baseball players. Kurt Suzuki is no exception to that rule. A third thing you likely know: inside-the-park home runs are generally reserved for fast baseball players. Kurt Suzuki is an exception to that rule. Here’s how it happened:

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You’ll often hear of a pitcher “wasting” a pitch. Up 0-2 in a count, for example, the pitcher fires off something well out of the zone, hoping the defensive hitter will hack at it, missing or putting the ball in play weakly. The cost here is minimal – the cost of that pitcher having thrown an extra pitch and the change in count from 0-2 to 1-2.

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