In the midst of what will go down as a disappointing season for the Phillies, an interesting detail about the front office’s thinking appeared. This morsel snuck into a Ken Rosenthal article: “…once the Phillies began to slump, their front office’s thinking was, ‘We don’t want to go all-out for the chance to play in the wild-card game and then face the Dodgers in the Division Series.’”

There are separate discussions to be had about whether that’s a defeatist attitude, or even whether the Phillies could have done more at the deadline. That’s for someone else to decide, though. What this statement got me, among others, wondering was: wait, would you actually rather play the Dodgers in a seven-game series than a five-game one? No one would argue that the Phillies are as good as the Dodgers — they’d clearly be underdogs no matter what. But does the extra chance of avoiding the juggernaut make up for the fact that you’re more likely to win in a shorter series?

To investigate this problem, I worked out a simplistic playoff win probability model. For each team, I took their projected rest-of-season runs scored. Then I projected a playoff rotation and how many innings each pitcher would pitch per game. Using those starters’ projected runs allowed per inning and adding in the projected runs allowed per inning by the bullpen (an admittedly inexact science that involves stripping out starters’ projections from the team’s total runs allowed projections), I was able to produce a runs allowed forecast for each starter on each team. Let’s take a look at the Phillies, for example:

Read the rest of this entry »

Please note, this posting contains two positions.

Position: Atlanta Braves R&D Developer Trainee

Location: Atlanta, GA

Description:

The R&D Developer Trainee position emphasizes software and web development as it relates to the Baseball Operations department. The trainee’s main responsibilities will be to assist the R&D department with building proprietary applications for displaying baseball information and visualizations, maintaining existing information management systems, and developing additional productivity tools to aid in Baseball Operations decision making. Candidates must have proven experience with application and/or web development, with interest in baseball and sports analytics research as a strong plus. The position will report to Assistant General Manager, Research and Development.

Note: Applicants for full-season R&D Developer Trainee positions (Jan-Nov), and summer R&D Developer Intern positions (May-Aug) will be considered.

Responsibilities:

• Assist in the development and maintenance of all proprietary software used within the Baseball Operations department.
• Work with department stakeholders to develop, deploy and test applications within IT best practice parameters.
• Build relationships, communicate effectively, and gather feedback from Baseball Operations staff to build new platforms and improve existing systems.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications:

• Past or expected BA or BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field of study or equivalent work experience.
• Demonstrated software development experience in one or more programming languages: Java, .NET, Python, JavaScript, C#, C/C++.
• Familiarity with database technologies and SQL. Microsoft SQL Server experience is a plus.
• Familiarity with using version control such as git.
• Ability to learn new technologies, including new coding languages.
• Strong work ethic, initiative, and the ability to solve technical problems.
• Ability to work flexible hours, including some nights and weekends as dictated by the Major League season.
• Must complete a successful background check.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Knowledge of current baseball statistics and analytics used in player evaluation a plus
• Experience with data visualization a plus.
• Solid fundamentals with HTML/CSS.
• Web development experience, especially with JavaScript (Node.js, Vue.js), or Python (Flask)
• Experience with big data techniques
• Demonstrated software development work product.

To Apply:
If you are interested, please email your resume and any other materials to bravesrdpositions@gmail.com.

Position: Atlanta Braves R&D Analyst Trainee

Location: Atlanta, GA

Description:
The R&D Analyst Trainee will assist Baseball Operations decision-making through the analysis and research of baseball information. The day-to-day responsibilities of this position will revolve around using data analysis to provide insight into player evaluation, performance projection, roster construction, and all other facets of baseball operations decision making, with emphasis on different sub-departments depending on the baseball calendar and needs of the department. The position will report to Assistant General Manager, Research and Development.

Note: Applicants for full-season R&D Analyst Trainee (Jan-Nov), and summer R&D Analyst Intern (May-Aug) positions will be considered.

Responsibilities:

• Perform advanced statistical analysis on large datasets in order to assist in the decision-making of the Baseball Operations department.
• Develop software, databases, models, applications, reports, and other information systems to increase efficiency of the Baseball Operations department.
• Perform ad-hoc research projects as requested and present results in a concise manner.

Required Qualifications:

• Strong foundation in the application of statistical concepts to baseball data, including familiarity with current state of baseball research.
• Experience with SQL and relational databases.
• Experience with statistical modeling software (R or Python preferred).
• Ability to communicate concepts to individuals with diverse baseball backgrounds, including coaches, scouts and executives.
• Ability to work flexible hours, including some nights and weekends as dictated by the Major League season.
• Must complete a successful background check.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Extensive experience with statistical modeling and prediction techniques, including regression, classification, and machine learning.
• Web development experience, especially with JavaScript, Vue JS, or Python Flask.
• Experience with at least one scripting language (e.g. Python, Ruby, Perl).
• Experience with big data techniques a plus
• Demonstrated baseball or other sports analytics research work product.
• Ability and desire to learn other programming languages as needed.

To Apply:
If you are interested, please email your resume and any other materials to bravesrdpositions@gmail.com.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Atlanta Braves.

Hitting a baseball comes naturally to Riley Greene. That’s not to say the fifth-overall pick in this year’s draft doesn’t work on his craft — he does— but at the same time he likes to keep any tinkering to a minimum. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Prior to the Detroit Tigers’ calling his name on June 3, Greene had been labeled “the best pure hitter in the prep class” by Baseball America.

He hit the road running in pro ball. Greene scorched the Gulf Coast League to the tune of a 1.039 OPS in nine games, quickly earning a promotion to short-season Connecticut. While not nearly as prolific against New York-Penn League pitching — a .766 OPS in 24 games — he did show enough to get moved up to low-A West Michigan in early August. Playing against much-older competition in the Midwest League, Greene slashed .219/.278/.344 in 118 plate appearances.

When I talked to the 18-year-old Oviedo, Florida native in mid-August, he made it clear that his swing is already well-established.

“My dad has been doing baseball and softball lessons for 24 or 25 years, and he taught me to hit,” said Greene. “Growing up, most of my coaches never touched my swing. It was just my dad. He’s a simple A-to-B guy, not much movement, and that’s how I try to be.”

Greene told me his front foot is his timing mechanism, and that his setup at the plate has remained essentially the same. He “might be an inch taller with his body,” but that’s a matter of feel and comfort, not because of a calculated adjustment. He’ll maybe spread out at times, but “only by a centimeter or two.” Read the rest of this entry »

There hasn’t been much to celebrate this year in Miami, but the Marlins starting rotation has been a source of a few positive developments. Caleb Smith and Pablo López started off the season strong but faded in the second half. Zac Gallen and Jordan Yamamoto both made their major league debuts, and while Gallen was shipped out at the trade deadline, Yamamoto has shown some promise as a 23-year-old rookie. But the most exciting progress has come from Sandy Alcantara.

On the surface, Alcantara’s stat line doesn’t look that impressive. His park and league adjusted FIP sits just seven percent above league average but that’s more due to some luck in keeping the ball in the ballpark. His 18% strikeout rate is one of the worst in the majors among qualified starters despite a fastball that sits in the mid-90s. The biggest question mark attached to him as a prospect was his command of his repertoire. In his 42 major league innings prior to this year, he ran a walk rate above 15%. He’s managed to drop that down to 10.7% this year, but that’s still one of the worst walk rates in the majors.

The fourth ranked prospect in the Marlins organization and 127th overall at the start of the season, there were plenty of doubts that Alcantara could stick in a major league rotation as he developed. He’s likely going to make 30 starts this year, which has to be seen as a success for the Marlins player development group, shoddy peripherals be damned. But since the start of August, Alcantara has shown flashes of brilliance, giving Marlins fans another starting pitcher to dream on for next season.

In his seven starts since the end of July, Alcantara has posted a park and league adjusted FIP 19% better than league average. More importantly, his strikeout rate has jumped up to 22.3%, a nearly six point improvement from where it sat after the first four months of the season. The highlight of this stretch came in his last start at home against the Royals. He threw a complete game, holding Kansas City scoreless while allowing just six base runners and striking out eight. That was actually the second complete game shutout he’s thrown this year, his first coming back in May against the Mets. Read the rest of this entry »

Dallas Keuchel wasn’t supposed to still be on the market when the Winter Meetings commenced in December. He certainly wasn’t supposed to still be there as the calendar turned to 2019, and it was completely unthinkable that he would still be available at the start of Spring Training. It is only through the dark alchemy of a ghoulish lack of shame and self-awareness on the part of team owners mixing with Keuchel’s demands that he was still available after the conclusion of the Amateur Player Draft, but there he was, still waiting for a phone call from his agent, telling him a professional baseball franchise had made him a reasonable contract offer. That call finally came on June 7, when the Atlanta Braves signed Keuchel to a one-year, $13-million deal, which by that point was more of a three-and-a-half-month deal. At the very start of the free agency period, Kiley McDaniel predicted Keuchel would receive four years and $84 million on the open market. Instead, he couldn’t even secure a multi-year commitment.

Keuchel wasn’t the only player who endured this kind of unexpected wait. Former Red Sox closer Craig Kimbrel signed just one day before Keuchel, inking a three-year deal with the Chicago Cubs. Kimbrel’s season has been a disaster so far, with the 31-year-old holding a 5.68 ERA and 6.63 FIP in 19 innings. Keuchel, on the other hand, hardly missed a beat. In 16 starts after getting a late start in Atlanta, Keuchel owns an ERA of 3.35, with a FIP of 4.39 and an xFIP of 3.87. He leads the majors with a 61.5% groundball rate (min. 90 IP), with second-place Dakota Hudson well behind him at 57.2%. Of those 16 starts, 13 have ended with Keuchel surrendering three earned runs or fewer. He was pretty reliable in his first few games of the season, but after a brief blow-up in Miami of all places, he’s been totally lights-out.

In a 3.2-inning appearance against the Marlins on August 8, Keuchel allowed eight runs on 10 hits, including three homers. His ERA jumped from 3.86 to 4.83 that evening, and at the time, it seemed like it might be a sign of real danger for the 31-year-old southpaw and the rest of the Braves’ pitching staff. While his ERA had been fairly solid coming into that appearance, his 4.74 FIP was still a distressing reminder of the kind of pitcher Keuchel was, and the risk he poses. He wasn’t missing a lot of bats, with his K/9 sitting at just 6.75. Meanwhile, he had a BB/9 above 3.0 for what would have been the first time since 2012, and he was allowing a career-high HR/FB rate of 24%. Keuchel has consistently overcome low strikeout totals throughout his career thanks to excellent command, but suddenly, he was throwing strikes much less often than he used to (32% zone rate in 2019 vs. 38.6% for his career), and he was much easier to leave the yard against, even if the juiced ball has made preventing homers more difficult for everybody. That night in Miami could have altered Keuchel’s entire season, and damaged his future earning potential even further.

But that isn’t what happened. Keuchel has bounced back from getting torched in Miami to post his most dominant six-game run in years. Read the rest of this entry »

Quick: Who are the best five hitters in baseball this year? Take a quick gander at the leaderboards, if you’d like, before answering. There’s the WAR leaderboard:

That’s not what you want, though, because defense gets involved there. How about a wRC+ leaderboard instead? That should keep the Xander Bogaerts’s and Marcus Semien’s of the world from intruding on our hitting party:

Trout, Yelich, Bregman, Bellinger, and Rendon. That’s a pretty solid five. It’s also missing an obvious name: Yordan Alvarez, quite possibly the best hitter in baseball this year.

Why isn’t Alvarez on the list? It comes down to the tyranny of the qualified hitter. Setting a plate appearance minimum is a reasonable idea: without it, the best wRC+ this year would belong to Oliver Drake, who singled in his only plate appearance. No one wants that, except perhaps Oliver Drake.

That doesn’t mean that it’s always right to ignore everyone who falls short of the qualification minimum, though. Alvarez has 320 plate appearances this year, a far cry from Drake territory. Because he wasn’t called up until June, he won’t qualify for the batting title this year, but that shouldn’t distract you from the fact that he’s one of the best hitters in the major leagues, full stop. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 19, 2018, Carlos Santana was in the Phillies’ lineup, playing third base. It was an experiment that sparked speculation about his role in Philadelphia going forward. After all, he had just signed a three-year, $60 million contract. But after Rhys Hoskins had one of the worst defensive seasons by a left fielder this decade, it was clear that Santana’s usage would need to be adjusted. Having him play first — thus relegating Hoskins to the outfield — would not work long term, especially for a team trying to contend.

Santana’s brief stay in Philadelphia was mixed. He drew walks in 16.2% of his plate appearances, hit for power at about his then-career-average, and was about average defensively. With that information, you’d probably think that Santana had a good year, but reality was different. He was BABIP’d to death; no qualified hitter in 2018 posted a lower BABIP than Santana’s .231. His slash sat at .229/.352/.414 with a 108 wRC+, a decent-yet-unspectacular season. He also made headlines this past March when it was reported that, near the end of the 2018 season, he had smashed a clubhouse TV after witnessing his now-former teammates playing Fortnite during games.

The Phillies went on to have a memorable offseason, to say the least. They signed Bryce Harper, Andrew McCutchen, David Robertson. They traded for J.T. Realmuto and Jean Segura. Once all of the dust settled, Carlos Santana was no longer wearing red and white pinstripes. The seemingly tumultuous relationship lasted one season. Santana was back in Cleveland, the same place where he had spent the first eight seasons of his major league career. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2017 Arizona Diamondbacks were an unexpected delight, an eventual playoff team that was projected to be near the bottom of the NL West before the season. They had star power to burn; with Paul Goldschmidt and A.J. Pollock anchoring the lineup and Zack Greinke and Robbie Ray at the front of the rotation, the team had a top four to rival any team in baseball. After that, though, the drop off was severe. Maybe you could squint and see greatness in Jake Lamb, maybe you believed in the Shelby Miller bounce back, but the depth simply wasn’t there.

Those Diamondbacks made the postseason and won the Wild Card game, fueled by a deadline trade for J.D. Martinez, but their stars-and-scrubs construction was worrisome. Pollock missed time with injury, David Peralta didn’t take a step forward, and the cupboard generally looked bare. While the team’s pitching staff looked more promising thanks to breakouts from Patrick Corbin and Zack Godley, it wasn’t built to last. Corbin was only a year from free agency, Greinke was getting older, and Godley was more league average than a star in waiting.

By the end of 2018, that iteration of the Diamondbacks was no more. Pollock and Corbin left in free agency, Goldschmidt was a Cardinal, and the team made no secret that it was shopping Greinke. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s all their stars other than Ray, and he had underperformed massively in 2018. We baseball fans are pattern matchers, and this pattern is an easy one to spot: it was time for a tank and rebuild.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the bottom of the standings. The Diamondbacks, projected for the fourth-worst record in the NL before the season, are clinging to the fringes of the playoff hunt, with a 5.3% chance of reaching the Wild Card game. They’re 75-71, on the verge of putting together their third straight winning season. Most impressively, they’re doing it with an entirely new cast of characters. Read the rest of this entry »

September has been a cruel month when it comes to contending teams losing key players. On Tuesday alone, the Twins placed Byron Buxton on the injured list with a left shoulder subluxation for which he subsequently underwent season-ending surgery, and the Brewers lost Christian Yelich for the duration due to a fractured right kneecap. The day before that, the Cubs found out that Javier Báez would not return before the end of the regular season due to the severity of the fractured left thumb he suffered on September 1, though at least the door is open for him to return at some point in the postseason. Each of those losses compound other injury woes — at this time of year, everybody hurts — but for the Cubs the loss of Báez is particularly acute, as the team has slid from first place into a tie for the second NL Wild Card spot in the span of five weeks.

On August 8, the Cubs’ season reached its high-water mark in terms of both their division lead (3 1/2 games ahead of the Cardinals) and playoff odds (90.8%). Since then, they’ve stumbled to a 14-16 record, and at 77-68, find themselves tied with the Brewers with 17 games remaining. Here’s the graph of the NL Central teams’ playoff odds over the course of the season, with the aforementioned date highlighted:

The 26-year-old Báez initially injured his thumb while sliding into second base in the third inning following a pickoff attempt by the Brewers’ Gio Gonzalez. Though visibly shaken up on the play, he did not depart until the seventh inning:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cleveland Indians front office places a high value on organizational culture. From the lowest rungs of the minors to the big leagues, they want their managers, coaches, and players to embrace both a collaborative process and a forward-thinking mindset. For that reason, they also highly value leadership skills. Luke Carlin, a 38-year-old former big-league catcher with a Bachelor of Science degree from Northeastern University, possesses those attributes in spades.

Carlin has managed in the Cleveland system for each of the past four seasons, most recently the Lake County Captains in the Low-A Midwest League. He’s viewed by many as a future major league coach or manager, and his interpersonal skills, paired with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge — analytics-based and otherwise — is a big reasons why. In a nutshell, he exemplifies what one might dub, “The Cleveland Way.”

Carlin shared his thoughts on leadership and teaching following the conclusion of the Captains’ season.

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Luke Carlin: “To me, managing and player development go hand in hand. I’m passionate about teaching, and it’s an awesome feeling when you have a clubhouse firing on all cylinders and pulling in the same direction. When you’re trying to earn the trust of the team, it’s not just interpersonal skills; it’s also a bunch of content-based stuff. Can you get the guys better? Can you help them develop? I think that really clicks within the information-rich environment that players today are coming up in.

“I’m finishing my master’s right now, at Northeastern, in organizational leadership. And it’s not just leadership theory, but also organizational-behavior theory and team dynamics. Piggyback that with what I’m learning here with the Indians. There are biomechanics, motor learning, teaching-and-coaching pedagogy… we’re basically trying to create a recipe to where we can interact with the people around us, and do a better job of developing high-performance than everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »