Wednesday evening in Flushing, Jacob deGrom put a bow on another superlative season. For seven innings, he flummoxed the Marlins, striking out seven while only allowing two hits. It wasn’t surprising, exactly — deGrom is one of the best few pitchers in baseball and the Marlins are, well, the Marlins. For once, the Mets provided deGrom with copious run support — the three they scored in the first would have been enough, but they added six more runs over the next two innings.

With 32 starts in the books, deGrom looks to have handily lapped the field in the Cy Young race. If FIP-based WAR is your preferred metric, he ranks second in the majors, behind only Gerrit Cole and half a win clear of Max Scherzer. By RA9-WAR, he’s also second in the majors, this time behind Justin Verlander, and miles ahead of NL runner up Jack Flaherty.

Craig Edwards published a Cy Young tracker last week if you’d prefer to dig even deeper into the minutiae, but deGrom was already in the lead, and his two most recent starts (14 innings, 16 strikeouts, one walk, and no runs) only widened the gap. There probably won’t be much surprise come awards season.

But while there isn’t much suspense when it comes to ranking deGrom’s preeminence in the National League this year, his two-year run has vaulted him into select historical territory. His ERA-, which controls for scoring environment, works out to 51 over the last two years, which means he allows about half as many runs as a league average pitcher.

That 51 ERA-, ludicrous as it is, can’t compete with the best seasons of all time — Pedro Martinez’s preposterous 2000 worked out to a 35 ERA- (1.74 ERA in Fenway in the heart of the steroids era, goodness gracious), and there have been 42 qualifying seasons with an ERA- of 50 or lower since 1901. Even if we limit ourselves to 1949 and beyond, there have been 24 of those seasons. There are plenty of Hall of Famers on the list, but also Kevin Brown, Dean Chance, and Trevor Bauer. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, while I was doing my usual perusal of the FanGraphs’ Season Stat Grid, I came across an interesting find. Orioles pitcher Dylan Bundy had seen the largest year-over-year decrease in home runs allowed per nine of any pitcher in baseball.

This was particularly interesting for a plethora of reasons, none less important than the fact that we’re currently witnessing baseball in its most homer-happy era ever. We all know this, Rob Manfred knows this, and the Orioles certainly know this, having set the record for most home runs allowed in a single season all the way back on August 22. Thus, there is a certain irony here; of all teams, the Orioles currently employ the pitcher who has witnessed the largest year-over-year decrease in home runs per nine.

Bundy’s career has followed an interesting arc. He was the fourth pick of the 2011 draft, with a four-seam fastball that touched 100 mph. He made his major league debut the following year, becoming the first Oriole to debut before his 20th birthday since Mike Adamson in 1967. Bundy only pitched 1.2 scoreless innings, all out of relief, but the excitement in Baltimore for their top pitching prospect was understandably palpable.

Tommy John surgery ended Bundy’s 2013 before it began, and in the process of rehab, he had to be shut down indefinitely due to shoulder issues. Long story short, Bundy didn’t return to the majors until 2016, making his season debut on April 7, a grand total of 1,290 days after his last major league outing.

Bundy is now concluding his third full season in Baltimore’s rotation, and though 2019 did not produce his best results, he certainly wasn’t bad. Over 161.2 innings, Bundy posted a 4.79 ERA, a 4.74 FIP, and 2.5 WAR. But, as noted above, he also posted the largest year-over-year decrease in home runs per nine. Here are the leaders in that statistic: Read the rest of this entry »

Last Night, Félix Hernández made his final start as a Seattle Mariner, and baseball is a little different for me now. Dimmer, further away. It has been on the road to different for a while, I suppose; it is not an original idea to note how one’s hobby becoming one’s job alters our relationship to our devotions, nor is it novel for a baseball fan or writer to have a guy. You know, your guy? The one who, among all the others, rendered the sport in its most vivid colors, made your appetite for it insatiable, transformed you into a lifer. Your guy. You love your guy! My guy is gone now; I wonder if I’ll ever have another.

To expect that his last outing would mirror his halcyon days would have been to miss the point. Félix is altered, worn. He threw 106 pitches; at times he labored. When the time came, he wept, and the tears marked a father’s face, a man’s; and he had been so young when we came to know him. He added three strikeouts to his career total, which now stands at 2,524, but there were three runs, too. He pitched into the sixth; he never saw October. He may yet pitch again, decamping to some other city after having stayed all of these years, but it won’t be the same. He isn’t their guy. How could he be? He’s ours.

…

It’s such a funny thing, fandom. It houses within it theft; we make symbols of human beings, transfigure persons so as to serve the function of a satisfyingly smooth stone we transfer from pants pocket to pants pocket. We carry them around with our memories and sadness, spirit them into our bits of kindness paid and received. The special ones, the ones who stick with us, who become our guys, are both magical and not so dissimilar from the restaurant where we paused and realized we were in love, or the couch where we sat and learned that our grandma was sick, the familiar street corner in our hometown where we first thought, I need to go away for a while, and go see things. They become guideposts, markers in our memories for both what they are on the field, and who we were.

To imbue these strangers with so much is a bit silly, and I wonder if it isn’t also a bit rude. I have to imagine that franchise cornerstones know that fans will come to adore and scorn them, but Félix never asked to mean this to me; to be burdened with these expectations. He doesn’t know my name, but I call him by his first, casual. Familiar. He never meant to be a lesson; in patience; in greatness; in decline; in things left undone. In still being young; in being finished. To make of these guys what we do, to make them our guys, is to see them at once as they are and as we are. True to themselves but also infected with our own picayune trials.

When Félix debuted, I was distant; from Detroit, where he recorded his first four strikeouts, from home, where the faithful watched and waited for his promise to be fulfilled, from baseball, difficult as it was to make time for amidst school and laundry and finding my way. I grew up a baseball fan, and still observed its rituals, but the sport was now rendered in unfamiliar hues. Not the cool blues and greens I knew, but in a vibrant Phillies red, and later, as I navigated the post-college world of full-time work and financial crisis, a stately pinstripe, a garish Queens orange. Seattle baseball was a long ways off, removed from the normal evening hours it had once occupied, and relegated to a twilight time.

I don’t remember when I first read one more article at Lookout Landing than my lunch break comfortably fit; I don’t know that the first time was that remarkable. It was probably some dumb thing that Jeff wrote, to fill all the dumb, meaningless days when the Mariners still, somehow, had to play baseball. But soon, it was a place I toggled to without thinking, the destination of idle wanderings between meetings and during conference calls. I couldn’t watch Félix at home — home was so far, and not where I lived anymore — but I would watch him in the Bronx, trudge to 161st Street armed with my fellow expats and homemade K cards and a sense that this was time well spent even when it was dumb; even though it was meaningless. Because Félix made it mean something.

The day the Mariners announced Félix’s extension, I remember turning to my coworkers, many of whom were Yankees fans smugly convinced that our King was soon to establish a new court out East, and saying with all the defiance I could muster: Félix is ours, and you can’t have him. Later that evening, I spoke with the professor who would become my graduate school advisor. Félix had declared his home, and I was about to declare what I thought was mine. Félix was to me a connection to both to where I’d been and where I might go, a reminder of what I liked and who I wanted to be at a time when I was struggling to know myself, caught in a job that so often took me into the twilight hours where Félix would wait. To appreciate him for staying was to christen this place, my place, worthy of staying in, and more importantly, of getting back to. But it was more than that. It meant more than that.

Perhaps then it is less a theft and more a drawing of loans one can never fully repay. I cheered for Félix, sure, was one of his court, but I didn’t inspire him to a career. I loved to watch him play, celebrated his day, christened him My Guy, but the people he loves he came to know through other means. And yet Félix is why I am here; the stirring his pitches caused, a warmth that radiated into the tips of my fingers and into the space behind my eyes when that cambio flew shifted things around. The desire to know more, to understand the how of this man, even as he, with tears and yelps and a commitment to stay traced over too many innings, articulated his why, made up a pledge to write things down so as to pick them apart. I sought rigor to explain why he meant so much and how good he was; I embraced whimsy to do justice to all he made me feel. I wrote and wrote until all I wanted to do was write more, and then finally, I got to. And the road to being here is why I’ve collected the people I have, friends I love, and can’t imagine my life without, all new lines of credit, charged against this man. My guy.

…

My guy is gone, bound for other places, returned to a life peopled with his people, rather than one serving as a marker for mine, folks who I don’t know and in whose story I play no part, even as so many of those in whose lives I am firmly planted are there because of the years, and turns, and miseries he spent in this place that for so long, I couldn’t get back to. This guy, whose permission to mean all this I was never able to ask for but who has given me so much, by deciding to stay. He is gone, but the memory of him — perfect, resplendent, royal, wrecked, but importantly ours — will persist. Baseball is a little different now; my life unrecognizable. I am here now. The debt remains, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever be able to pay it back.

It’s tempting to look at Eduardo Rodriguez’s 3.94 FIP in 2019, nearly identical the 3.97 FIP he has for his career, and think that nothing has substantively changed. His strikeout, walk, and homer numbers are all similarly in line with his career rates too, while his BABIP allowed and HR/FB rates are actually up a tick or two from what you’d typically expect from him. Pick a surface stat, any surface stat, and you’ll say, “yep, that sure is an Eduardo Rodriguez season, alright.” And yet, it’s not a typical Eduardo Rodriguez season. It’s something better.

Now, I’ll confess, my timing for this story is a little off. Rodriguez’s most recent game line is an ugly one, as he allowed the Rangers to score seven runs on 11 hits against him on Tuesday. The seven runs allowed were his most since giving up seven runs to the Orioles on June 1, 2017, and the 11 hits allowed were a career high. That’s a bad outing by any measure, but it was severely exacerbated by some goofy BABIP luck. In five innings, Rodriguez struck out six and walked three while allowing one homer — not great, but not necessarily numbers that would make you think he was about to give up seven runs. Opponents hit .556 on balls in play, however, which is how he ultimately ended up with a line as bad as this.

Why am I bothering to try and meekly defend an unarguably terrible outing in a game played by two teams out of the playoff race in the final week of the season? Because I need you to believe me when I tell you that before Tuesday’s debacle, Rodgriguez had been very, very good over this final quarter of the season. In his previous seven starts, he had allowed a mere five earned runs in 45 innings, striking out 54 while walking 14 and allowing just one home run. His 1.00 ERA in that stretch led all of MLB, while his 2.24 FIP ranked fourth. After Tuesday, his ERA dropped to the 11th best in baseball since August 17, but his FIP remains seventh. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherever you sit along the spectrum of baseball observers, from newcomer through casual fan, diehard, junkie, nerd and professional, you are by no means obligated to care about Statcast. Publicly available numbers quantifying three-dimensional coordinates, velocity, spin rate, and more are now attached to everything this side of how often the third baseman adjusts his cup between pitches, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessary for you even to acknowledge their existence in order to enjoy what you’re watching. Nevertheless, some of us do get a kick out of the occasional peek at those numbers, not for their own sake but because they increase our understanding of the game — and of ourselves.

Somewhere along the way — in fact, even before Statcast itself arrived — I realized that I have a particular appreciation for what I have termed “launch angle porn.”

I’ll allow you that nervous giggle before you get your mind out of the gutter. This is, after all, a family site, and while others have gone down the road of documenting bodily functions within the national pastime, that’s not where I’m heading. The trajectories to which I refer concern the flight of baseballs, and more specifically, the visceral thrill of watching the beginning of a towering home run even amid the unending barrage of such hits and their resultant highlights. In that instant of contact between ball and bat, particularly when viewed on a two-dimensional screen of whatever size, we have no idea of the final distance that struck sphere will travel, and we can only infer its exit velocity in the roughest sense. After the sight and sound of contact — and particularly, the mellifluous melody of a ball hitting the sweet spot of a wooden bat — launch angle is the first feedback we get, quickly followed by a very excited play-by-play announcer and a slugger admiring his own handiwork. Consider these three examples, classics from the late 20th century by three of the most prolific home run hitters ever.

Here’s Reggie Jackson at the 1971 All-Star Game, hitting one off the Tiger Stadium transformer on the roof:

Read the rest of this entry »

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra

In 2017 and ’18, for the first time in franchise history, the Colorado Rockies made the playoffs in consecutive seasons. The team didn’t play deep into October in either season, but for an organization that hadn’t even had back-to-back winning seasons since the mid-90s, it was a wonderful result. Problem is, the team gave little thought as to how they got there or the weaknesses that could prevent them from doing so again in the future. The strengths Colorado rode in 2017 and 2018 were absent in 2019, and left the team high-and-dry with no real Plan B.

The Setup

The Rockies clearly believed that 2019 would be another year of contendership. But I’m not sure they realized how dependent they had been on the production of a few stars every season. 91 wins are nothing to scoff at, but to get to the point of barely making the playoffs, the Rockies had to have two legitimate MVP contenders and two legitimate Cy Young candidates. All told, Colorado received 19 WAR from their top four players in 2018, an identical sum as in 2017. In both years, that figure represented more than half the team’s value, a ratio far worse than every other postseason team from 2017, 2018, and now 2019.

In 2017, the Rockies made the playoffs despite an offense that ranked 26th in the league in wRC+. To fix this lack of run-scoring — the team ranked third in baseball in runs scored, but a good offense in Colorado should be crushing the league in runs, even given the most generous application of the Coors Field Hangover — the Rockies did, well, not much. They signed a 35-year-old catcher and given the opportunity to upgrade from fading veteran Carlos González, he of an 85 wRC+ and 0 WAR, decided to upgrade to…Carlos González. Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Baseball Operations Analyst

Location: Detroit, MI

Job Description:
The Detroit Tigers are currently seeking a full-time Analyst in the Baseball Operations Department. This role will be responsible for managing analytics and research within Baseball Operations. This position will report to the Director, Baseball Analytics.

Key Responsibilities:

• Perform advanced quantitative analysis to improve Baseball Operations decision-making, including predictive modeling and player projection systems.
• Complete ad hoc data queries and effectively present analysis through the use of written reports and data visualizations.
• Assist with the integration of baseball analysis into the Tigers’ proprietary tools and applications.
• Contribute to baseball decision-making by generating ideas for player acquisition, roster construction and in-game strategies.
• Support the current data warehousing process within Baseball Operations.
• Monitor, identify and recommend new or emerging techniques, technologies, models and algorithms.
• Meet with vendors and make recommendations for investment in new data and technology resources.
• Other projects as directed by Baseball Operations leadership team.

Minimum Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Demonstrated expert-level knowledge of baseball-specific data, modern statistical techniques, and sabermetric analysis.
• Expertise with SQL and relational databases is required.
• Relevant work experience with statistical software (R, STATA, SPSS, SAS, or similar) and scripting languages such as Python.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate difficult and complex concepts to colleagues possessing a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives.
• Degree or equivalent experience in statistics, mathematics, computer science, or a related quantitative field.
• Self-starter.
• Team player.
• Ability to work evenings, weekends and holidays as dictated by the baseball calendar.
• Willing and able to relocate to the Detroit metro area.

To Apply:
To apply, please complete the application that can be found here.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Detroit Tigers.

No team in baseball has been hotter in September than the Brewers. They’ve lost just four games this month and that hot streak has them on the verge of clinching a playoff berth. That they’ve continued to win so many games without their superstar, MVP candidate Christian Yelich, makes their success all the more impressive. But while their offense has managed to find ways to score enough runs without Yelich in the lineup, their pitching staff has been simply dominant.

The Brewers have allowed just 66 runs to score this month, an average of three per game. That’s the fewest runs allowed in the majors and includes a 10-0 drubbing by the Cardinals on September 13. Their team ERA has easily been the best in baseball during this stretch. By park- and league-adjusted FIP, they’ve only been the fourth-best team in the majors, but still the best in the National League.

Surprisingly, their starting rotation has been led by Jordan Lyles. In four September starts, he’s allowed a total of six runs — four of them earned — giving him the lowest ERA of the Brewers regular starters (Brandon Woodruff hasn’t allowed a run in his two starts where he acted as the opener). This string of strong outings stretches back to late July when he joined the Brewers in a trade from Pittsburgh. Since being acquired, he’s been their most reliable starter, allowing two or fewer runs in eight of his 10 starts. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Rendon and Ketel Marte have both had very good seasons, but all year long they’ve been a few beats behind Christian Yelich and Cody Bellinger. With only a few days left in the regular season, Marte has already been shut down and Rendon would need a historic week to match the two favorites. While Yelich’s season is unfortunately over, his work already done clearly puts him, along with Bellinger, in the top two for the MVP. With the numbers on offense creating a substantial edge for Yelich, who deserves MVP comes down to a question nobody really likes answering: How much better is Cody Bellinger on defense than Christian Yelich?

It’s possible some voters will ding Yelich for his injuries and playing time lost, though it didn’t stop Mookie Betts and Mike Trout from finishing 1-2 in the AL MVP last year, or keep Josh Hamilton from winning in 2010 when he missed almost all of September. Historically, there haven’t been very many MVPs with around 130 games and 600 PAs, though that likely has less to do with voters being unwilling to vote for players who have missed some of the season and more to do with it just being incredibly difficult to be the best player in the league when other candidates have an extra three weeks to compile numbers.

Since 1931, there have only been 22 position player seasons of at least 7.5 WAR and fewer than 600 plate appearances. Of those 22 seasons, only 10 topped the league in WAR. Six of those 10 players won the MVP that season. In 2009, the under-appreciated Ben Zobrist topped the league in WAR, but Joe Mauer, behind by 0.3 WAR, won the trophy. In 1989, Lonnie Smith played in 134 games and tied Will Clark for the league lead in WAR at 8.1, but it was Clark’s teammate Kevin Mitchell and his 49 homers that took home the MVP. In 1985, Pedro Guerrero topped the NL in WAR at 7.8, but Willie McGee’s 7.1 WAR won him the award thanks in no small part to a .353 batting average. Finally, way back in 1954, Ted Williams topped the AL in WAR, but the Yankees’ Yogi Berra won the vote. Yelich’s situation isn’t unprecedented, but it is fairly rare; players in his position have won MVP around half the time. Read the rest of this entry »

The retooling of the Toronto Blue Jays hasn’t gone quite as planned. While the team won’t say so in such explicit terms, I believe that the original plan was to keep the basic core of the team together just long enough that reinforcements would arrive and save the team from a more painful long-term rebuild. Toronto’s stable of All-Star relatives has started to arrive — possibly the most impressive such group in baseball history — but the MLB roster is in a worse state than I imagine the team had hoped.

The Setup

The 2017 Toronto Blue Jays could point to a run of bad luck as the possible culprit for dropping from 89 to 76 wins, but the 2018 Blue Jays probably ought to have let go of those hopes. The post-2018 offseason didn’t feature much that would change the trajectory of the team, and the transactions were consistent with a plan of trying to simply stay relevant before players like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, and Cavan Biggio started hitting the major leagues. Moves were made but generally featured the supporting cast. In a perfect world, a healthy Matt Shoemaker and the resurgent Clay Buchholz could fill out the rotation, making up for the losses of J.A. Happ by trade and Marco Estrada by decline and then free agency. The thin bullpen that finished 21st in ERA and 23rd in WAR in 2018 before losing its top two pitchers by WAR, Seunghwan Oh and Tyler Clippard, could hopefully be buttressed with veteran free agents Bud Norris, David Phelps, Daniel Hudson, and John Axford.

As the team attempted to keep a skeleton crew together, the need to simultaneously add minor-league talent was obvious. The Jays traded off some of the players that were perceived to be surplus talent in an attempt to add to the team’s depth. Russell Martin could be replaced by Danny Jansen, Aledmys Diaz didn’t bring much that Lourdes Gurriel Jr. or Richard Urena couldn’t, and Kendrys Morales’s 2018 production could be replicated by Rowdy Tellez.

With just enough luck, the winter pickups would be enough when combined with the existing core (Marcus Stroman, Justin Smoak, Aaron Sanchez, Ken Giles, Teoscar Hernandez, Randal Grichuk) to make the Blue Jays a .500 team, or even a skosh better. Then the fun would start. The Jays later made the public argument that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was not one of the best 25 players in the organization, but I don’t imagine that a single person that heard that either believed it or even thought that Toronto actually believed it. Vladito and Bichette would be the latest on baseball’s list of exciting phenoms starring quickly in the majors (with more on the way!) and help get the Blue Jays to at least the mid-80s in wins. And in a bifurcated American League, with a few great teams and several that looked like spring training B-squads, that might be enough to make a serious playoff run. Read the rest of this entry »