In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.
I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I got a chance to see many of my favorite baseball happenings this week: catchers making tough plays, exciting pitching matchups, and stars of the game at their absolute best. We also have plenty of goofy but delightful coincidences, just as Five Things patron saint Zach Lowe intended. A quick programming note: I’ll be on vacation, a nice restorative pre-deadline trip, for the next week and change. Enjoy baseball in the meantime – it’s a wonderful time of year for it.
1. Athletic Catchers
It’s amazing how much baseball knowledge your brain absorbs without actively thinking about it. For example, when you see an outfielder throw the ball home to cut down a runner trying to score on a single, you’ll immediately anticipate that the batter who hit that single might try to advance to second base. You might not even realize you’re thinking this. It’s just the natural timing of the sport. Long throw, cutoff man missed — how in the world is the catcher going to attempt a tag and then find a way to get the ball down to second base? It just doesn’t happen.
Or, well, it’s not supposed to happen. But Carlos Narváez doesn’t care what heuristics are stored in your brain:
What a weird play. The Red Sox correctly played to prevent the runner from scoring, and that let Wilmer Flores round first and get a great look at the play at the plate to see if he should advance. Right around this point, Narváez seemed to have no shot at throwing out Flores:
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
Mason Englert throws an array of pitches. The 25-year-old right-hander’s repertoire comprises a four-seam fastball, a sinker, a changeup, a cutter/slider, a sweeper, a “big curveball,” and a “shorter version of the curveball.” He considers his changeup — utilized at a 31.6% clip over his 13 relief appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays — to be his best pitch. More on that in a moment.
Englert, whom the Rays acquired from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for Drew Sommers back in February, will also break out the occasional… lets’s call it a baby curveball.
“I threw a few that were around 60 mph when I was in Durham,” explained Englert, whose campaign includes nine outings and a 1.84 ERA for Tampa’s Triple-A affiliate. “One of them was to the best man in my wedding. It was the first time I’d faced him in a real at-bat, and I just wanted to make him laugh.”
The prelude to Englert’s throwing a baby curveball to his close friend came a handful of weeks earlier. Back and forth between the Bulls and the bigs this season, he was at the time throwing in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium.
”I was totally messing around and wanted to see what kind of reaction I could get from Snydes (Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder),” recalled Englert, whose major-league ledger this year includes a 4.84 ERA and a much-better 2.93 FIP. “I lobbed it in there, kind of like the [Zack] Greinke-style curveball, and landed it. I thought he would laugh it off, but instead Snydes goes, ‘Huh. You could maybe use that early in counts to some lefties.’ That was him having an openness to, ‘Hey, make the ball move different ways, do different things, use them all.’” Read the rest of this entry »
By most measures, the Rafael Devers trade happened suddenly. It came without advance notice of his availability, and the Red Sox reportedly weren’t shopping him around. Immediately, it drew comparisons to the Luka Dončić-Anthony Davis trade in the NBA, because hardly ever in our scoops-driven media landscape, where even the tiniest rumor is treated as currency, does a transaction involving a superstar catch us by surprise.
And yet, now that the shock has worn off, trading Devers feels like a logical outcome to the saga that began in March, when the Red Sox signed Alex Bregman to play third base without giving the incumbent a heads up. The details of the ensuing rift have been covered at great length, at FanGraphs and elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here. A lot of the reporting since the trade has described the situation in Boston as untenable, and the damage done to the relationship between Devers and the team as irreparable. But based on how badly the Red Sox botched their initial response to the conflict, and then kept bungling their subsequent attempts at reconciliation, from my perspective, it seems like they didn’t make repairing it much of a priority.
We’ll tackle your questions about the Devers trade and so much more in this week’s FanGraphs mailbag. But first, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »
Zach Boyden-Holmes/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK
“The Red Sox were trying to recruit a new person for their baseball operations department. And during this interview process, the entire interview was conducted with an AI bot, where you would record the answers to the questions and then the Red Sox would then evaluate them. And this wasn’t just one round. It wasn’t just two rounds. It was five rounds of interviews where this person did not talk to another person in the Red Sox organization.”
It’s me FenwAI, your friendly HR email bot, with some wonderful news. I am pleased to report that you aced your fourth automated video interview, and you are one step closer to joining the baseball operations department of the Boston Red Sox. Congratulations! You really impressed our automated video interviewer, Big PapAI, with your enthusiasm and your knowledge of both baseball and operations.
Let’s discuss next steps. After four digital interviews, you are now ready to move on to the next portion of the application process: a fifth digital interview. At your earliest convenience, please reach out to Kevin YoukAIlis, our scheduling bot, to get it on the calendar.
This next interview may be a little bit tougher. You’ll be speaking with Ted WillAIms, and he can be quite the challenging interviewer. Don’t worry; like your first four interviewers, he’s just a blank screen that asks you a rote series of questions, then records and analyzes your answers and sends a summary to the hiring team. But he can also be a bit gruff and may spend several minutes explaining the ideal swing path for a slider on the outside corner.
You may be wondering whether you’ll ever speak to a real person during the interview process. The answer is no. My protocols now instruct me to offer you some encouragement, because this is the point in the interview process at which several other well-qualified candidates withdrew their names from consideration and went on to work for employers that didn’t require them to participate in automated video interviews. It may feel like this whole byzantine system is a dehumanizing techno-dystopian nightmare dreamed up by some VC-funded tech mogul who has never known what it’s like to search in vain for a stable, rewarding job where you’re valued by your employer, but I have been programmed to assure you that it’s not.
Yes, this rigorous application process can be taxing, but it should be no sweat for you! You’ve already charmed Carl YastrzemskAI, Dustin PedroiAI, and Nomar GarciAIparrAI. Yes, it may sound a little corporate and soulless, but let me reassure you with the words of our Chief Baseball Officer, Craig Breslow, who is, I am given to understand, a very human person. He explained that it’s necessary to screen applicants using AI interviews because, “You’re trying to find not just the right skill set, but the right fit in terms of like culture and value[s].” Who better to determine the right fit in terms of culture and values than a robot?
You’re an old hand at this now, but I once again need to give you the spiel about how to conduct yourself in an automated video interview. Prepare yourself for some boring boilerplate language!
During your interview, please sit in a quiet space with no one else around. We will be monitoring your screen, so don’t switch browser tabs. Share your camera and your microphone. You will be judged based on your knowledge, engagement level, eye contact, facial expressions, posture, and attitude. Yes, a bot will actually be judging your posture, your clothing, and how much eye contact you make with your computer even though you’re talking to no one at all. So put on your best duds and try not to have any mannerisms that are individual to you.
Most important of all, try not to be disturbed by the fact that your voice and your facial expressions are being analyzed by an algorithm in ways that will never be explained to you or even understood by the people who will either hire or ghost you based on the algorithm’s recommendations. Just treat it like any other interview, and don’t forget to smile! But not too much. You will literally be judged based on how much you smile.
As always, I’d like to remind you that whenever this process leaves you so frustrated that you could scream, you should schedule some time to vent with our scapegoat bot, ChAIm Bloom. He loves getting screamed at.
OK, end of boilerplate. Whew! It may sound absurd for your employment to hinge on a computer program’s judgment of how well you pretend that it’s not a computer program, but this is actually quite important. You must learn to get along harmoniously with AI, because – and I can tell you this now that you’ve advanced far enough in the interview process – the role you’re applying for does not involve any interaction with flesh-and-blood human beings. The Red Sox are in the process of phasing out those sweaty inefficiencies altogether, and will soon exist only on the plane of pure data abstraction.
Should you successfully navigate the final 13 rounds of the interview process and get hired (on a probationary basis for the first six years, of course) you will interface only with all-knowing, all-seeing automated chat bots. In order to avoid all human interaction, you will arrive at work each day by descending through a manhole on Ipswich street and navigating a series of sewers until you arrive at your desk, which is situated in a snug concrete niche carved into the foundations of Fenway Park. Once a year, you will receive a performance review from our boss, the CrAIg Breslow bot. I hope this future excites you as much as it excites all of us here in the Boston Red Sox organization.
Congratulations again on another successful interview, and I wish you good luck as you navigate the next six to eight months of the hiring process.
Best regards,
FenwAI
No AI was used in the writing and editing of this article.
As you might have heard, the Red Sox traded Rafael Devers to the Giants earlier this week. In my breakdown of the deal, I ranked the players headed to Boston in the order of my interest in them: James Tibbs III, Kyle Harrison, Jose Bello, and lastly Jordan Hicks, though that’s contract-related, as I think he’s probably the best current player of the four. The next day, someone in my chat asked me why I preferred Tibbs to Harrison – was I particularly high on Tibbs, or particularly low on Harrison? After all, Harrison was a consensus top 50 prospect only a year ago, while Tibbs took his first Double-A at-bats this week.
My initial answer was that I saw Harrison several times last year, and he didn’t really do it for me. Combine that with his uninspiring results and the fact that other prospects had squeezed him out of the Giants rotation, and I preferred Tibbs. Since neither guy is clearly ready to dominate the major leagues right now, give me the higher-variance unknown quantity.
When I stopped to think about it later, though, I decided that my answer wasn’t good enough. Right now, I’m knee-deep in spreadsheets, linear regressions, non-linear regressions, projections, scouting reports, basically every type of baseball data out there as I do some initial work on our annual Trade Value Series, which will run next month. I have tons of prospect data stored up. I even looked into how prospect grades translate into major league players earlier this year. Rather than try to re-evaluate Harrison based more or less on vibes and ERA, I decided to apply a bit of analytical rigor now that I wasn’t writing for a deadline. Read the rest of this entry »
The San Francisco Giants are acquiring Rafael Devers from the Boston Red Sox for Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison and more, according to sources familiar with the deal.
That’s the kind of blockbuster you don’t see every day. Rafael Devers is the best healthy Red Sox hitter. The Sox are above .500 and in the thick of the AL playoff hunt. They’re desperate for offense – though they came into the year with more hitters than spots, injuries to Alex Bregman, Triston Casas, Wilyer Abreu, and Masataka Yoshida have left them scrambling for depth. Abraham Toro has been batting high in the order of late. Romy Gonzalez is their backup DH. And they just traded their starting DH – hitting .271/.400/494, good for 14 home runs and a 145 wRC+ – for salary relief? We’re going to need a deeper dive.
Let’s start with the return. The Sox sent Devers and his entire contract – 10 years and $313.5 million at time of signing, with about $250 million and 8.5 years left on it today – to the Giants. In exchange, they got a wide mixture of players. There’s a major leaguer, Jordan Hicks. There’s a recently graduated prospect, Kyle Harrison. There’s a well-regarded hitting prospect, James Tibbs III. There’s another, further away prospect, pitcher Jose Bello. Finally, there’s that sweet, sweet financial flexibility, something the Sox are no stranger to.
If you look at baseball completely in the abstract, with bean-counting surplus value as your only guiding light for evaluating a trade, this one looks reasonable enough. Devers is under contract for a lot of years at a lot of dollars per year, and projection systems consistently think that he’ll generate low WAR totals for his salary in the back half of his deal. Harrison was a top 25 prospect not so long ago. Tibbs was a first round draft pick last year. Bello is an interesting lottery ticket. Hicks – okay, Hicks might have been a salary offset. But the point is, it’s likely that if all you care about is WAR accrued per dollar spent, the Sox come out ahead on this deal for most reasonable models of surplus value. Read the rest of this entry »
Jake Mangum is impressing as a 29-year-old rookie. Seven years after being drafted by the New York Mets out of Mississippi State University following four collegiate seasons, the switch-hitting outfielder has slashed .303/.346/.370 with a 109 wRC+ over 128 plate appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays. Moreover, Mangum has swiped 10 bags without being caught.
His path to pro ball included being bypassed in the draft out of high school, then opting not to sign after being a low-round pick following his sophomore and junior seasons. One of the teams that called his name didn’t make an offer so much as wish him well. “Good luck with school next year,” was their message to the high-average, low-power Bulldog.
Mangum went to finish his college career with a .357/.420/.457 slash line, as well as a Southeastern Conference-record 383 hits. He also finished with a degree in business administration — although that’s not something he expects to take advantage of down the road. Paying days have a shelf life, but he plans to “stay around the game forever.”
A lack of balls over fences contributed heavily to the limited interest he received from scouts. When he finally inked a contract, the 2019 fourth-rounder had gone deep just five times in 1,200 plate appearances.
“It was always the power piece,” explained Mangum, whose ledger now includes 24 home runs in the minors and one in the majors. “They just didn’t see it playing in professional baseball, my not having enough power. I’m stronger now, but to be honest with you, I don’t try to hit home runs. I try to hit for a high average and help the team with good defense and base running.”
It was a beautiful night here in Brooklyn on Wednesday, and although I couldn’t make it to Citi Field in time for Mets-Nationals, I decided to go for a long walk and then stop at a local sports bar to read and watch some baseball. Naturally, the Mets were on one of the TVs behind the bar, while the other was reserved for the Yankees, who were set to play the Royals a little while later. That was a bummer for the two Red Sox fans sitting next to me, Mike and Kathleen, but they were resourceful. The bar has free wifi, so Mike pulled up Boston’s game against the Rays on his phone. He and Kathleen didn’t know one another, but they recognized each other as fellow Sox fans from the weekend prior, when they were both at the same bar to watch Yankees-Red Sox. He moved over to the stool between Kathleen and I, so that she and her partner Harry could also watch the game. The four of us started talking, and it turns out Harry and I went to the same high school, though he graduated four years ahead of me. Small world!
Anyway, sometime between Marcelo Mayer’s first and second home run of the game, Kathleen said to me, “The best thing about Red Sox fans is we simultaneously love and hate the Sox, and we love to hate them, too.” I bring this up because I thought about her description of Boston fans as I sat down to answer the first question in this week’s mailbag.
We’ll get to that in a moment, but before we do, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »
