While some people take for granted the ability to comprehend and decode signifiers of nonverbal communication, there’s a not insubstantial segment of the population who, for any numbers of reasons, lack those particular skills. The purpose of this post at FanGraphs.com is to provide an example of how a human might exhibit intense pleasure by means only of physical cues.

What one finds here is footage of Toronto right-hander Liam Hendriks from like five minutes ago, striking out Yankees batter Alex Rodriguez in an important moment during tonight’s game between the two relevant clubs. Hendriks, relieved to have escaped a perilous situation, first pumps his fists and then straightens out his left leg as though he were about to embark upon a sort of inspired triumphal march. Whatever the physiognomic antecedents for such a gesture, the meaning is clear: Hendriks is pleased. Specifically, he’s experiencing the sort of pleasure one feels by means of averting a more disagreeable outcome.

For further study, here’s the most relevant portion of the footage slowed down to 1/8th speed:

The Fans Scouting Report is back for 2015 — the 13th edition of this project — and is now open for your consideration. Rather than add too much of my own commentary, I’ll just quote Tom Tango.

Baseball’s fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

There is an enormous amount of untapped knowledge here. There are 70 million fans at MLB parks every year, and a whole lot more watching the games on television. When I was a teenager, I had no problem picking out Tim Wallach as a great fielding 3B, a few years before MLB coaches did so. And, judging by the quantity of non-stop standing ovations Wallach received, I wasn’t the only one in Montreal whose eyes did not deceive him. Rondell White, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Andre Dawson, Hubie Brooks, Ellis Valentine. We don’t need stats to tell us which of these does not belong.

The Project

What I would like to do now is tap that pool of talent. I want you to tell me what your eyes see. I want you to tell me how good or bad a fielder is. Go down, and start selecting the team(s) that you watch all the time. For any player that you’ve seen play in at least 10 games in 2014, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.

Try to judge ‘average’ not as an average player at that position, but an average player at any position. If you think that Ben Zobrist has an average arm, then mark him as average, regardless if you’ve seen him play 2B, SS, LF or RF.

Crowdsourcing has proven to be quite useful in many endeavors, and this is one of the best uses of crowdsourcing in a baseball environment. So, go take part; the FanGraphs crowd is particularly important to the success of this project, so let’s help Tango collect some useful data for the rest of us to enjoy and be informed by.

A pivotal series in the National League playoff race got underway today, with the Pittsburgh Pirates hosting the Chicago Cubs in the first of a four-game set. The two clubs play again tonight, with the home team now holding a five-game lead over the visitors for the top wild card spot. The St. Louis Cardinals are currently two up on the Bucs for the Central Division lead.

Theo Epstein fielded questions from the Chicago media prior to this afternoon’s affair. The subjects of chemistry and character came up, and – despite his saber chops – the Cubs president of baseball operations didn’t downplay their value. In his opinion, the youthful club he oversees is ahead of the curve when it comes to both.

“It’s impressive that they’re unfazed by the length of the season and the fact that they’re in a pennant race,” Epstein told the throng. “It’s a testament to their character. The norm is that young players — no matter how talented, no matter how great a start they get off to — tend to wither and just fade away,”

The Cubs haven’t faded away – at least not yet. Despite dropping a 5-4 decision this afternoon, they’re well-positioned for a wild card berth, Not that Epstein wants to hear it. When I brought up their proximity to the teams they’re chasing, Epstein told me and Peter Gammons that he’s more concerned about the team 6.5 games in their rear-view, the San Francisco Giants. As he echoed to the beat writers a few minutes later, “Until you get the little “C” next to your name in the standings, nothing is assured.”

He spoke from experience. In 2011, when he was the general manager in Boston, Epstein saw his team blow a nine-game lead in the final month and miss the playoffs.

As for troubled waters that may lay ahead for his current club, Epstein said that having players of high character pays dividends. In his words,“There’s going to be a time when they face adversity and have to rely on that character.”

Epstein’s concern is justified. The Cubs have lost three straight, and they play the Pirates and Cardinals – the teams with the best records in baseball – 10 more times. The Giants play 12 of their final 18 at home, all but three against teams with losing records.

What does Pittsburgh manager Clint Hurdle think about chemistry and how it applies to the teams in the playoff chase?

“At the end of the day, the chemistry – the men coming together and willing to push everything in with one common goal and not caring who gets the credit – that’s what becomes special,” Hurdle said after the game. “That’s the situation we have here and it’s the situation they have over there (with) the Cardinals. You can’t quantify how important it can be.”

What about the Cubs?

“They’re going to figure it out,” said Hurdle. “That’s the beauty of where we were a few years ago… They’ve got a really good leadership group over there that has a lot of experience in these situations, and provides direction. This is the fun part of the year for everybody. You learn every day.”

We’ll soon learn if Epstein’s Cubs have what it takes to stay the course. As for the role chemistry will play, as Hurdle alluded to, it will be hard to quantify.

The playoff odds graphs that we’ve been tweeting out all season are now available on the site thanks to our resident visualization guru, Sean Dolinar!

Is there a better pitch than a pitch that can get great whiffs per swing inside the zone? If they don’t swing, it’s a strike anyway.

To that end, and also in order to supplement my work in trying to identify pitches that would be better used as strike-stealing pitches (in the mode of Erasmo Ramirez and his slider), I ran a few leaderboards that might be interesting to you, the reader.

Here are league average in-zone and overall whiff rates by pitch type. Obviously, breaking balls have the biggest difference, since many in-zone breaking balls are ‘hung’ pitches that failed to break like they should have.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a move that has been widely expected for months, the Phillies announced today that they’re not going to extend Ruben Amaro’s contract, ending his tenure as general manager of the club.

Full release from #Phillies on Amaro: pic.twitter.com/8PZPRC664T

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) September 10, 2015

Amaro has been the Phillies GM since November of 2008. The Phillies won the division each of his first three years in charge, including making it to the World Series in 2009, but have struggled as their core aged and the team was unable to restock the talent pool around their former stars. Amaro was also one of the last holdouts against the move towards analytics, and the Phillies fell behind the rest of the league by resisting the trends toward data-inclusive decision making.

New team president Andy MacPhail will likely look outside the organization for the team’s next GM, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the team went with a younger assistant GM from a team with an analytical bent. Given the Phillies payroll and market size, this is the kind of position that will appeal to a wide variety of candidates, and the Phillies should be able to interview just about anyone they want for the position.

Although I write about prospects on a regular basis, it’s not often I get to see the players I write about in action. However, this year’s 16th-overall pick, UCLA right-hander James Kaprielian, happened to be pitching for the Yankees’ New York-Penn League affiliate in Staten Island, which is just a short boat ride from my office. So I decided I’d get out from behind my computer screen to actually watch some of the players who fill up my hard drive. Luckily for me, the Yankees’ second-round pick, Indiana State left-hander Jeffrey Degano, pitched in relief, giving me plenty of solid pitching to observe. If I had a penchant for scouting, I’d be able to provide you with grades for each of his pitches and command — much like Kiley McDaniel does on the player pages. Unfortunately, my untrained eyes aren’t capable of grading pitches with that type of precision. So instead, I’ll just describe what I saw as best I can, and supplement it with some low-quality video courtesy of my iPhone.

Kaprielian sat 91-94 mph with his fastball, and dialed it up as high as 96 with two strikes. Observe this 93 mph two-strike offering to Bobby Wernes, who had struck out in just 12% of his plate appearances headed into play.

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According to Statcast, this past Saturday Kris Bryant hit the longest home run in Major League Baseball this year. The home run traveled 495 feet with a batted-ball speed of 111 mph and an angle of 33 degrees. The ball careened off the newly installed scoreboard in left field.

Aside from watching the replay, to put the home run into context, I created a hexbin plot that shows Bryant’s home run as an outlier. This graph includes only home runs for which Statcast has published batted-ball data and also were recorded as featuring a distance of 300 feet or greater. (This data set contains only about 75% of total home runs in 2015.) Each hexagon is a bin consisting of a batted-ball speed range and a batted-ball distance range. The color represents how many home runs fall into that bin; the more blue a bin is, the more home runs fall into it. The lack of the bin indicates no home runs for those data points.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Buster Olney noted on Twitter that the Braves are now pulling up the rear in terms of run differential:

The Braves surpassed the Phillies for the worst run differential in the majors — ATL now -164, PHI -163.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) September 4, 2015

It got me to thinking — a dangerous pastime, I know — that it must be rare that two teams in the same division suck this much at the same time. Turns out, there’s something to that notion. Over at ESPN, we can easily find the run differentials back to 2002. Let’s take a look. Teams in bold are/were in the same division:

Teams With -150 Run Differential Or Worse, 2002-2015

Year	Team 1	RD	Team 2	RD	Team 3	RD	Team 4	RD	Team 5	RD
2015	PHI	-163	ATL	-164
2014
2013	MIN	-174	HOU	-238
2012	CLE	-178	HOU	-211
2011	BAL	-152	MIN	-185	HOU	-181
2010	BAL	-172	KC	-169	SEA	-185	PIT	-279
2009	KC	-156	WAS	-164
2008	WAS	-184
2007	TB	-162
2006	TB	-167	KC	-214
2005	TB	-186	KC	-233	ARI	-160
2004	KC	-185	CIN	-157	ARI	-284
2003	DET	-337	MIL	-159	CIN	-191	SD	-160
2002	TB	-245	KC	-154	DET	-289	MIL	-194	SD	-153

SOURCE: ESPN – http://espn.go.com/mlb/standings/_/sort/pointdifferential/season/2002

A couple of things to note. First, last season was pretty cool, because no one was super awful. That doesn’t happen all that often. But two teams being this bad at the same time in the same division hasn’t happened since 2003. Brewers fans will remember 2003 as the year before Ben Sheets was awesome. Reds fans will remember 2003 as the year when Ken Griffey Jr. was awesome but frequently injured. Well, I guess that was most years Griffey was in Cincy. In any case, things weren’t pretty in either city. Adam Dunn rankled old school devotees with a .215 batting average, Wayne Franklin started 34 games and (I’m just guessing here) a lot of brain cells were murdered with alcohol.

Things haven’t been much better in Atlanta and Philly this season. They’re the first two teams to be this bad in the same division in over a decade. That’s rare. But at least they can take comfort in a couple of things. First, they’re not the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked — do you see that 2003 Tigers run differential? Woof! Second, at least they know that they are not alone. And that’s something. After all, misery needs company.

Since players acquired on or after September 1 are not eligible for their new team’s playoff roster, we saw a small flurry of trades come down the pike last night. The Cubs traded for Austin Jackson, the Royals landed Jonny Gomes, the Giants swung a deal for Alejandro De Aza and the Dodgers acquired Justin Ruggiano and Chris Heisey in separate deals. The Jackson, Ruggiano and Heisey deals all involve the infamous player to be named later, meaning we don’t yet know who’s headed in the other direction. However, the Gomes and De Aza deals both included players who will join their new organizations immediately. Here’s a glimpse at what we might expect from these two players down the road. (Note: WAR figures, unless otherwise specified, indicate total WAR through age-28 season.)

Luis Valenzuela, Atlanta Braves, 5.3 WAR

The Royals sent 22-year-old infielder Luis Valenzuela to Atlanta in the Jonny Gomes deal. After hitting a weak .234/.289/.338 in Rookie-level ball from 2012 to 2014, it appears as though something may have clicked for Valenzuela this year. In 56 games, with all but eight of them coming in Low-A, Valenzuela’s hit .358/.380/.495. His lofty .404 BABIP surely explains much of this success, but his combination of contact (14% strikeout rate), power (.137 ISO) and speed (nine steals in 11 attempts) makes him mildly interesting.

KATOH really likes what Valenzuela’s done this year, and as a result, projects him for 5.3 WAR through age 28, which would have put him 54th on KATOH’s list. (At the time, he did not hit my admittedly arbitrary 200-plate-appearance threshold). Despite the optimism, though, my system gives him just a 56% chance of making the majors, suggesting that there’s a very strong chance he flames out completely. In sum, Valenzuela’s done some impressive things this year, but the onus will be on him next year to prove it’s not a fluke. Here are his top Mahalanobis comps, which include notable middle infielders Ronnie Belliard and Scooter Gennett.

*****

Luis Ysla, Boston Red Sox, 0.4 WAR

In exchange for De Aza, the Giants sent hard-throwing lefty Luis Ysla to Boston. Ysla spent all of 2015 pitching at the High-A level, where he’s split time between the rotation and the bullpen. On the surface, Ysla’s 2015 numbers look pretty poor: 6.21 ERA and 4.52 FIP. But it’s worth noting that he’s performed noticeably better out of the bullpen than as a starter (4.50 ERA vs. 8.81 ERA). Furthermore, since a pitcher’s strikeout rate is the most predictive metric for pitchers in the low minors, Ysla’s 25% strikeout rate (27% as a reliever) makes him somewhat intriguing. However, as a 23-year-old who’s yet to master A-ball, Ysla is extremely fringy.

KATOH pegs Ysla for 0.4 WAR through age 28, with just a 19% chance of even making it to the big leagues. His 2014 numbers from Low-A yielded a similar forecast of 0.8 WAR. His Mahalanobis comps also leave a lot to be desired. Basically, its Brandon Medders, a future backup NFL quarterback and very little else.