Wins across the National League and American League aren’t distributed equally. Looking at both current wins and our projected expected wins, the NL has more teams at the extreme ends of the wins spectrum, while the AL is more tightly grouped. The shape of the win distribution is useful because it can create a picture of the league. The AL has 20 more interleague wins than the NL due to the 140-120 AL-NL interleague record, so the AL’s distribution is shifted slightly higher than the NL’s. But the NL’s distribution is more spread out with more teams having either really good records or really poor records. Interestingly enough, one division, the National League Central, has the top three teams, Cardinals, Pirates and Cubs, in its league.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Was it Karl Marx,” one might ask drunkenly at a party, “or Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis who memorably declared that ‘The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people’?”

The answer, technically: Karl Marx, in his text Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

The answer, metaphorically: Chris Davis, actually, by means of a foul-ball protest against Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce in the first inning of tonight’s game versus Kansas City.

If you frequent these internet pages, you may have seen the announcement last month that we are hosting a Meetup tonight at Mead Hall in Cambridge in advance of this weekend’s Saber Seminar. In case you didn’t, I’m reminding you again so that you’re all out of excuses. Here’s the pertinent paragraph:

We’ll be getting started right at 7 pm, at Mead Hall’s upstairs bar, just in time to watch the first pitch of the Royals v. Red Sox tilt at Fenway Park. Generally, there are all sorts of writers from the FanGraphs family of blogs at the Meetup, and this year should be no different. Dave Cameron, David Laurila, Jeff Zimmerman, Chris Mitchell, Bryan Cole, Peter Bonney and myself will be on the premises for sure, as will Saber Seminar co-organizer Chuck Korb.

There will be plenty of your other favorite baseball analysts there as well. Oh, and beer. Did I mention beer? So much beer. (Reminder: You’re supposed to be 21 to attend.) So come join us tonight, it’s going to be a marvelous time!

The video here depicts the last pitch of Wednesday night’s game between Kansas City and Cincinnati, a contest won 4-3 by the Royals. What else the video depicts is a cutter thrown by Wade Davis at 96 mph — for a swinging strike to one of the major leagues’ most talented hitters. Though the author failed to seek Votto’s opinion of the pitch, the following image might provide some insight:

This is the expression a man makes whilst another man relates an anecdote about the time he suffered some manner of testicular injury. It’s also the expression Joey Votto makes, apparently, when he’s just witnessed a pitch featuring an unusual blend of velocity and movement.

The curious reader — and even the dumb author — are both compelled to ask in such an instance: is Davis’s the fastest sort of cutter? And also: if Davis’s isn’t the fastest, then whose is?

Read the rest of this entry »

After 13 productive years in a Phillies uniform, Chase Utley is headed to Los Angeles, where he’ll help solidify the Dodgers’ second-base situation. In exchange for Utley’s services, the Dodgers sent a couple of minor leaguers to the Phillies: utility player Darnell Sweeney and right-handed pitcher John Richy. Here’s my statistical breakdown of these two prospects.

Darnell Sweeney, 2.3 WAR

Sweeney, 24, has spent the 2015 season at a Triple-A Oklahoma City, where he’s hit .271/.332/.409 in 116 games. He also runs very well, as evidenced by his 32 steals this year. Aside from the steals, though, Sweeney has been an average Triple-A hitter across the board. He’s seen action at second base, third base, shortstop, left field and center field in the minor leagues.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, the Texas Rangers swung a deal to acquire Will Venable from the San Diego Padres. In return for Venable, the Rangers sent catcher/outfielder Marcus Greene to San Diego, along with a player to be named later. Here’s what my fancy computer math has to say about Greene and his future outlook.

Greene has played exclusively in Low-A Hickory this season, where he logged 25 games before he underwent Tommy John Surgery in June. The 20-year-old hit a strong .218/.365/.500, thanks to an impressive combination of power (.282 ISO) and walks (17% walk rate). On the downside, he struck out in a concerning 24% of his trips to the plate in Hickory. This performance yielded a KATOH forecast of 1.9 WAR through age 28, with a 54% chance of cracking the majors. Due to Greene’s increased strikeout rate, this is a sizable step down from the 4.7 WAR forecast yielded by his 2014 numbers, which primarily took place in the Northwest League.

Read the rest of this entry »

On August 4, the Detroit Tigers “released Dave Dombrowski from his contract,” as owner Mike Ilitch decided to promote assistant general manager Al Avila to take the team in a somewhat different direction. While Avila worked closely with Dombrowski, he did make it clear that he intended to modernize the team’s front office a bit more, promoting analyst Sam Menzin to a more prominent role and noting that they’d be expanding the department under him. Dombrowski had a successful run as the Tigers GM, but is one of the more traditional executives still running teams in this age of increasing information.

And now, two weeks later, Dombrowski has landed a new position, taking the title of president of baseball operations with the Boston Red Sox. As part of the transition, GM Ben Cherington will be leaving the organization, and Bob Nightengale reports that former Braves GM Frank Wren is the most likely candidate to replace Cherington. Wren was ousted in Atlanta in part because the team had fallen behind the curve analytically, so a Dombrowski-Wren combination would make for one of the more old-school front office tandems in baseball.

Given that the Red Sox have been among the most aggressive teams in terms of implementing analytics and using data to drive their decision making, this looks like a pretty monumental shift in organizational philosophy. Given that nearly every move Cherington and his staff made last winter has turned out as poorly as possible, it’s not a huge shock that he’s taking the fall for the team’s second consecutive losing season. But it is a bit surprising to see the team apparently change course so aggressively. Dombrowski certainly has a strong track record of building contenders, but it looks like the Red Sox may be pivoting away from data and more towards scouting in response to their recent failures.

One thing’s for sure: This weekend’s Saber Seminar — held in Boston, and with a schedule that was to include a large number of Red Sox front office officials, Cherington included — just got way more interesting.

Position: Baseball Info Solutions, Research & Development Associate

Location: ~ Allentown, Pa.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Saber Seminar — my favorite baseball conference of the year — takes place in Boston next weekend. Ticket sales end Monday, so this is your last chance to get in on the action. If you’re on the fence about attending, perhaps this recently released schedule will help:

Saturday:

Presentations by FG/BP writers:

Jonah Pemstein, Bill Petti, Jeff Zimmerman, Bryan Cole, Harry Pavlidis, Rob Arthur, Jonathan Judge, and Dan Brooks.

Four separate Q&As with Red Sox staff:

Ben Cherington, John Farrell, Tom Tippett, Jared Porter

Other neat stuff!

Sunday:

Presentations by cool people:

Wendy Thurm, Alan Nathan, and a series of abstracts that are always really interesting.

Q&As with members of the Royals front office, plus a player development panel with Red Sox personnel.

Media panel with some great writers and myself.

And if you stick around to the bitter end, I take questions and make jokes.

Seriously, it’s a packed schedule, and you won’t regret attending. A ticket is just $140, or $65 if you’re a student, and every dime received goes to The Jimmy Fund, so you’re not only getting a deal, you’re getting a deal and supporting cancer research at the same time.

If you’re in Boston next weekend, this is a no-brainer. If you’re anywhere near Boston, you should strongly consider making the trip in. If you’re nowhere near Boston, it’s probably still worth getting on a plane. If you’re reading FanGraphs, you like baseball, and if you like baseball, you’ll really enjoy this conference. Come hang out with us next weekend.

The best part of writing about baseball? First, you get to watch baseball. Then you get to write about it. That’s how it works. The worst part? The worst part is that you can’t watch it all. No way. There’s like — add the two, carry the one — well, I’m no sabermetrician, but there’s like a lot of baseball to watch, way too much for the average human even if that human owns some sort of picture-in-picture-in-picture technology by which to watch, say, the trinitarian terror of Trout and McCutchen and Harper wreak simultaneous havoc.

What is this a long way of saying? This is a long way of saying that until Monday night, I had not personally witnessed (nor even been impersonally aware of) Johnny Cueto’s revolutionary wiggle. Have you seen this thing? The Detroit Tigers sure have. And so have fans of the Royals, at least those lucky enough to have witnessed the dominant shutout — four hits allowed, zero walks given, many wiggles supplied — that the newly acquired Cueto provided in his Kauffmann Stadium debut.

A trip through the archives reveals that Cueto introduced his wiggle-icious windup against the Nationals on July 7, rendering Ian Desmond but a helpless bystander. Watch the scene and realize that Desmond, poor Desmond, has just witnessed the dawn of a new age. Watch it and realize that Desmond just got Cueto’d!

It’s just crazy amounts of awesome, is it not? It’s as if Luis Tiant and Gale Sayers — well, that would be a biologic impossibility — as if Luis Tiant and whoever is the Lingerie League’s most evasive tailback spawned a super-incredible love child who boasts an outstanding four-seamer/changeup combo and who suddenly belongs on So You Think You Can Dance. Cueto thinks he can dance, and does. Taking the Tiantian pause to a delightful extreme, he turns his back to the hitter and promptly stops — so dramatically that you think you hit the pause button — and then shimmies like he’s trying to evade the Lingerie League’s leading tackler. You half expect — no, fully expect! — Cueto to add the terpsichorean equivalent of a triple Salchow, even if, were a runner on base, the umps would be like, “Um… balk?”

For his part, Tigers manager Brad Ausmus thinks the windup is illegal, as if Cueto should be ticketed and forced to attend Defensive Pitching School this weekend. Indeed, after watching the righty go all Dirty Dancing on a ninth-inning whiff of Ian Kinsler, Ausmus told the Associated Press: “Really, the way the rule reads, you’re not supposed to even alter your motion. That’s the way the rule reads.”

Well, boo you, Brad Ausmus!

Remember: We watch baseball. A lot of it. And watching baseball is supposed to be fun. Seriously, does this look like someone who’s busy reading the rulebook?