Last week, the Astros’ Dallas Keuchel and the Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka faced off on Opening Day in New York. The first Opening Day was pushed back a day because of wintry weather. This day was no different, with a 36-degree first-pitch temperature and 18 mph wind. The next day, I ran my daily velocity report and both of the above names were on the list of starters who’d exhibited huge velocity drops. Keuchel was down 2.5 mph and Tanaka was down 2.3 mph. By running a quick study, I found that colder weather does have a fairly dramatic effect on pitcher velocity.

To find the data, I ran a query using the PITCHf/x database. For the years 2008 to 2015, I compared average velocity from a game which started at 40 degrees or less and the average from the rest of their games. The average change in velocity was -0.95 mph, with a median value of -0.92 mph. A pitcher throwing in a cold game should expect some velocity decline.

Note: Reader yaboynate quickly pointed out that the drop because it is early in the season. I change the query around a bit, and found the average and median change to -0.58 mph. Now the rest of April would be colder and the whole month is lower to start with.

Here are how the velocity changes were distributed.

Cold-Weather Effects, 2008-15

Velocity Change	# of Pitchers	% Change
> 2 mph	3	0.7%
1 to 2 mph	17	3.7%
-1 to 1 mph	221	48.3%
-2 to -1 mph	136	30.0%
< -2 mph	81	17.7%
Total	458	100%

Well, the cold weather definitely limits any upside and almost half the pitchers in the sample experienced a 1 mph loss — with one in every eight experiencing a 2 mph loss relative to the rest of the season. The differences shrink as the games warm up. From 40 to 50 degrees, the gap is around -0.6 mph; from 50 to 60 degrees, around -0.4 mph.

So, it’s simple: when looking at early season velocity declines, look at game temperatures. Part of the reason for the decline could be attributed to the cold weather.

Note: it’s quite possible that the player depicted in this video — identified by the Cubs broadcast team as Eugenio Suarez — is actually Ivan DeJesus. It’s also quite possible that the precise identity of the player is totally immaterial to how life is both hopeless and without hope.

For much of Monday evening, the Cincinnati Reds led the Chicago Cubs at the latter’s home park in the city of broad shoulders. Reds left-handed starter Brandon Finnegan didn’t concede his first hit until the seventh inning — and, even after a series of unconvincing appearances by a collection of Cincinnati relievers, that club still held a 3-2 lead heading into the bottom of the eighth.

With one out and men on first and second in that same inning, very large Cincinnati right-hander Jumbo Diaz entered the game — with the intent, one assumes, of preserving the Reds’ slim lead. What he did instead was to allow a first-pitch home run to Cubs shortstop Addison Russell.

What this post doesn’t include is footage of Russell himself recording that home run against Cincinnati’s Diaz. Imagine any of the myriad home runs you’ve ever witnessed in your life and you get the idea. What it does include, however, is video footage of Reds third baseman Eugenio Suarez observing Russell’s home run — and providing, at the same time, a dramatic interpretation of the entire human experience, beginning (at first) with hope and ending (at last) with the certain knowledge that all things end horribly.

Should this video constitute required reading for all America’s youth? Logic dictates that it certainly shouldn’t not be that.

Roughly four years ago now, the present author facilitated a crowdsourcing project designed to place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams. The results weren’t intended to represent the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather to provide a clue as to which broadcast teams are likely to appeal most (or least) to the readers of this site. Consider: the average telecast of a major-league game offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how they consume a telecast.

The results of that original exercise have been useful as a complement to the dumb NERD scores published by the author in these pages. Four years later, however, they’ve become much less useful. In the meantime, a number of the broadcast teams cited in that original effort have changed personnel. It’s possible that the tastes of this site’s readers have changed, also.

As such, what this post represents is the start of another of those crowdsourcing efforts. The first step: to arrive at some understanding of whom, exactly, we’re grading. The names below are intended to represent the main television broadcast teams for each of the league’s 30 clubs. (The radio broadcast teams will be addressed in a future post.) The information here is taken from a combination of Wikipedia and MLB.com, but would benefit from readers who possess a more intimate knowledge of how each club’s broadcasts are executed.

Again, the idea here is to identify the broadcasters most frequently found in each team’s booth. Many clubs have occasional color commentators and guest announcers, but isolating the most regular contributors will make this process more efficient, if slightly less nuanced.

Note that, where a slash (/) divides multiple names, the suggestion is that the relevant announcers are participating in a fairly even timeshare. Note also that — incorrectly or not — both the Chicago White Sox’ and Los Angeles Dodgers’ broadcasters have been split into home and away teams, creating 32 total entries.

Please offer any relevant clarifications or corrections in the comment section.

Arizona: Steve Berthiaume, Bob Brenly

Atlanta: Chip Caray, Joe Simpson

Baltimore: Gary Thorne, Jim Palmer

Boston: Dave O’Brien, Jerry Remy

Chicago (AL) Home: Jason Benetti, Steve Stone

Read the rest of this entry »

A new version of Game Score, (Game Score version 2.0) is now available on the pitcher game log pages. It is listed under the heading GSv2 and is baselined to both season and league.

Thirty years ago, Bill James introduced us to Game Score, which he described as:

…a kind of garbage stat that I present not because it helps us understand anything in particular but because it is fun to play around with

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. When you look at the original point system Bill devised, it all seemed reasonable enough. Give positive points for outs (innings) and a bonus for strikeouts, and negative points for hits, runs, and walks, with hits having more impact than walks. And start everyone at 50, since on a scale of 0 to 100, 50 is average.

A sidebar to the strikeout: also around thirty years ago, Bill introduced DER, defensive efficiency record, which is outs per ball in play, or the flip side of hits per ball in play, which is the foundation of DIPS. Bill therefore (almost) discovered the concept of DIPS but he didn’t realize it. It took Voros for the saber-world to notice, and for Bill to thank Voros publicly for the discovery. You can see in Game Score how the idea of DIPS was in Bill’s head, by the giving of the bonus point for the strikeout, over and above the regular out. We’ll get back to this in a second.

I think the reason that Bill considered this a “garbage” stat is that it wasn’t developed with a question in mind. It’s a way to organize a pitcher’s stat line so we can list things in an easy to list and understand manner. From that standpoint, it was likely an underdeveloped concept, a presentation that satisfied Bill’s needs at the time.

Adopting Orphans

If you try to use Game Score and understand its components, you will see it breaks down in a few cases. Not enough to throw Game Score into the scrap heap, but just enough that for the stat to graduate from the garbage to the toolshed, it should be refined.

A few years ago, Bill emailed me that when he publishes his ideas, they are now orphans. It’s up to the rest of the world to adopt them… or not. Whether it’s David Smyth using Runs Created as an inspiration to launch Base Runs, or Bill’s one article discussion on comparing Clemens to Mattingly and Rice to Guidry that formed the eventual basis of WAR, Bill has given the world plenty of ideas that have been essentially Open Sourced.

Fixing the Gaps

That’s where I come in. Game Score has never been modified. I love the basic concept of Game Score, its simple presentation, and powerful message. We just need to make sure that it can hold up to scrutiny. Bill used Game Score for an article a couple of years back where he realized he needed to make adjustments for his particular research. You can read more about it in this piece I wrote, but the basic idea that starting everyone at 50 doesn’t work for starting pitchers who get knocked out early in the game for reasons of non-performance. Bill kept the core of Game Score but added adjustments which ended up making it messy. I offered a very clean and simple solution. And its genesis is replacement level: rather than starting everyone at 50, we start everyone at 40. You can read the article to learn more.

The other gap relates to the walk. I noted earlier how Bill gave a bonus point to strikeouts relative to the out, which is actually in keeping with DIPS. But the flip side of that is the walk, and how its value should actually not be half the value of a hit, but equal to the value of a non-HR hit. Now, to be fair, this idea only works if we consider the third gap: the non-use of a HR.

Bill’s original idea was based on using the traditional pitcher line. But if we deviate that in the slightest, and just include the HR, this allows us to better compare the walk and the non-HR hit.

Game Score 2.0

The end result is this simple formula:

40
+2 outs
+1 K
-2 walks
-2 hits
-3 runs
-6 HR

(Note: The K is double-counted, 2 points for the out, and 1 extra. The HR is double-counted, 2 for the hit, and the 6 extra.)

It’s pretty straightforward, owing a great deal to Bill James, but shaped by Pete Palmer and Voros McCracken. You can read the link for more background. The three main areas of improvement is how it starts off each start at 40, not 50, how it better handles the walk, and that it uses the HR.

You can also align it to exactly 50 as league average by setting the constant for each year. In 2015, you’d use 38 instead of 40. Here are therefore the 10 best starts of 2015:

109 Max Scherzer 2015-10-03
104 Max Scherzer 2015-06-14
103 Chris Heston 2015-06-09
102 Max Scherzer 2015-06-20
102 Jake Arrieta 2015-08-30
102 Corey Kluber 2015-05-13
101 Clayton Kershaw 2015-09-29
101 Carlos Carrasco 2015-09-25
101 Cole Hamels 2015-07-25
99 Madison Bumgarner 2015-09-12

Game Scores actually have a fairly linear relationship to wins. Obviously, at the most extreme it’ll breakdown, but it does a pretty good job overall to represent a pitcher that averages a Game Score of 65 will win 65% of the time.

David has implemented Game Score on the individual pitcher pages, which is a terrific addition to the site.

Over the past few weeks, we have received a number of complaints about the site being slow or unresponsive, mainly due to various ads that appear on the site.

This is of course, not intentional. At FanGraphs we rely on a combination of advertising, and now membership to support our efforts. It is our goal to have ads that do not hamper the user experience, and may even be of interest to you.

We use a number of advertising networks to provide us with our advertisements, and when there is a rogue ad, sometimes it can be extremely difficult to track down. Ads do not always impact all machines, operating systems, browsers, etc… in the same way, so reproducing errors, and even finding the offending ad can be very tricky.

When we hear about problem ads, we always try and be proactive in getting rid of them. We struggled to track down iOS (iPhone / iPad) App Store redirects for quite a long time (along with much of the publishing industry). This past month, we believe to have finally solved the problem and hope these should no longer be an issue for FanGraphs visitors.

With the current issue, we are going to toggle some advertising switches and we’d like you to tell us if things improved. Generally we only hear if things are broken, but in this case we would like to hear if things are either still broken, or if they have improved.

If today you are still experiencing major issues with FanGraphs on your desktop browser, please post a comment with the browser, how old your machine is, your operating system, and exactly what the problem is. If things have improved, please do the same. You can also fill out the below poll.

Thanks for your help on this!

We now have data on Shifts dating back to 2010, courtesy of our friends over at Baseball Info Solutions. All the shift data is now available in the leaderboards, and splits pages.

There are currently four splits available for Shifts and the data includes Balls in Play Only:

Shift – All : This breaks out all shifts, traditional or non-traditional.

No Shift : This breaks out all non-shifted plays.

Shift – Traditional : This breaks out all plays where a traditional shift is employed.

Shift – Non Traditional : This breaks out all plays which would not be considered a traditional shift.

Traditional / Non Traditional shifts are classified as follows by Baseball Info Solutions:

Traditional Shifts:

1) If there are 3 infielders playing on one side of the infield, we consider that a Full Ted Williams Shift.

2) If two players are positioned significantly out of their normal position, we consider that a Partial Ted Williams Shift.

3) If one infielder is playing deep into the outfield (Usually the 2B 10+ feet out into right field), we consider that a Partial Ted Williams Shift. If the 2B is only a few steps into the outfield, that does not count.

Non-traditional shifts are situational shifts not covered under the definition of traditional shifts.

To view which team has employed the shift most frequently, you should look at the pitcher leaderboards by team.

If you look at the batting leaderboards by team, you will see which team has been shifted against the most.

Last week, Jeff Sullivan wrote a post for FanGraphs within which he examined the changeup upon which Garrett Richards had been working throughout spring training — a changeup notable both (a) for its velocity and also (b) for how Richards had rarely ever thrown the pitch in the past. Indeed, a brief inspection of Richards’ pitch-type data at the site reveals that changeups represent 1% of all pitches he’s thrown over the course of his major-league career.

As Sullivan notes, however, Richards appeared this spring to become more comfortable with a change. And as the present author is noting right now, Richards appears to have become sufficiently comfortable with the change to throw it not only to Cubs second baseman Ben Zobrist, but also by that same Cubs second baseman.

Proof of same, is what one finds here. Video proof. Which, like, that’s probably the second- or third-best kind of proof there is.

Since it’s been 154 days since the end of the 2015 season, you may have forgotten about all the great live and pre-game and post-game features that we have on FanGraphs. Here’s a quick refersher:

Before the Game

Lineups: On our live scoreboard page, we always have up to date lineups for each and every game of the season. These are typically updated as soon as they become available.

Game Odds: Prior to each game we try to predict the chance of each team winning. These are based on our depth chart projections and take into account the starting lineup and starting pitcher. If there is no starting lineup yet, we try and do our best to predict the chances of each team winning anyway.

Probable Starter / Lineup Leaderboards: Want all the probable pitchers and lineups entered into a custom leaderboard for you? We do it for you!

Daily Fantasy Projections: Each day we have daily fantasy projections from our friends at SaberSim.

During the Game

Live Win Probability Charts: Check out our live win probability charts, detailed box scores, pitch chart, and play-by-play data. These are all updated in real time.

Live Leaderboards: You can see live leaderboards for either today’s stats or updated full season stats in real time.

Live Player Page Stats: If a player is playing today, you’ll see his updated live stats on his player page.

After the Game

Playoff Probabilities: When a game ends, we do our best to quickly update our playoff probabilities.

We’re 48 hours away from real baseball! On Sunday, the 2016 season kicks off with three games: STL-PIT at 1 pm, TOR-TB at 4 pm, and KC-NYM at 8:30 pm, rather than just having the one Sunday night game like they’ve done the past few years. Traditionally, we’ve done our Opening Day Live Blog on first Monday of the season, but since MLB is giving us a full day of games on Sunday, we’re going to do two Opening Day Live Blogs this year.

August Fagerstrom will here for the early game on Sunday, Paul Swydan will be here for the second game, and I’ll be your host for the night game. Then on Monday, we’ll have a continuous live blog for the 1 pm, 4 pm, and 7 pm games, with Jeff Sullivan, Owen Watson, Craig Edwards, Sean Dolinar, and others hanging out while we have our first full-ish slate of games.

So come celebrate the return of baseball with us this weekend, and then again on Monday, as we watch the 2016 season kick off together. Welcome back, baseball!

There was a time when Cory Luebke seemed to be on the cusp of stardom. That was back in 2011, when he was still a member of the San Diego Padres. The following season, he pitched just 31 innings before falling down a rabbit hole of injury. He has re-emerged this spring, and today we received word that he made the Pirates’ Opening Day roster. That has to feel pretty spectacular.

In 2011, Luebke, then 26, embarked on his second season in the majors. His previous experience coming solely in September 2010, this would be his rookie season. He didn’t disappoint. He would pitch out of the bullpen for the first three months of the season before getting the call to start on June 26th against the Braves. Here are the lines from his first three starts:

• 6/26/11, vs. ATL: 5 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 6 SO
• 7/2/11, @ SEA: 6 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 7 SO
• 7/7/11, @ SF: 6 IP, 5 H, 2 R, 1 BB, 8 SO

Hell of a way to start a career as a starting pitcher, don’t you think? While the strikeout totals wouldn’t be as robust in his next few outings, Luebke was pretty consistent for the remainder of the season. He never allowed more than five runs in a start, and in his 17 games started, he struck out at least seven batters in eight of them. Here are the K% leaders for that season:

2011 Starting Pitcher K% Leaders

Name	K%
Brandon Beachy	28.6%
Zack Greinke	28.1%
Cory Luebke	27.3%
Clayton Kershaw	27.2%
Tommy Hanson	26.3%
Brandon Morrow	26.1%
Cliff Lee	25.9%
Justin Verlander	25.8%
Michael Pineda	24.9%
Tim Lincecum	24.4%

Minimum 100 IP as a starting pitcher; 137 pitchers in sample

This table is both impressive and a cautionary tale. Neither Beachy, Morrow, Lee or Lincecum finds themselves at the top of their games any longer, and unfortunately Tommy Hanson has passed away. That all sucks. Until recently, we would have included Luebke in this category. But perhaps now we won’t have to.

Perhaps the guy who had a better K% than Clayton Kershaw in 2011 can find his way back to the mound on a regular basis, back in the bullpen once again (though his role hardly matters). That is the victory we should be hoping to see this year from Cory Luebke. If he does so, and is also good as a member of the Pirates’ bullpen, well that would be doubly awesome. But just seeing him take the mound and throw a baseball — after nearly four years remove from a major league mound — that’ll be a beautiful thing.