Position: Atlanta Braves Baseball Operations Analyst

Location: Atlanta

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Last night, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale made some pretty big waves with his report that the Tigers are preparing to become sellers, making David Price and Yoenis Cespedes available to teams looking to upgrade their rosters for the stretch run.

It’s going to be awfully painful, and the Detroit Tigers sure hate to do this, but for the good of the organization, they simply have no choice.

The Tigers, barring a veto from owner Mike Ilitch, are going to surrender and be sellers within the next 10 days at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.

For the first time since 2008, the Tigers have no choice but to inform teams that two of their marquee commodities will be dealt by the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.

That’s some pretty strong language, and given that “they simply have no choice”, you’d think the Tigers were in the midst of a total meltdown, or had squandered any chance they had of reaching the postseason. But while Nightengale may be right in his reporting, his editorializing isn’t really all that rooted in factual basis. Consider, for instance this graph of the projected final standings in the American League, based on our depth charts forecasts.

The Royals, Yankees, and Angels have put themselves in strong positions to win their divisions, and the Astros remain the most likely Wild Card team, with a real shot at the AL West themselves. Those four teams are each more likely to make the postseason than not.

But look at the drop-off after Houston. The Blue Jays, Twins, Orioles, and Indians are in a virtual tie with the Tigers for fifth place, with none of them expected to finish with more than 82 wins. Someone will break out from the pack and likely win 85-87 games and capture that second Wild Card spot, but the Tigers are just as likely to be that team as any of the other four, and in no way are they in a position where 2015 is a total write-off. In fact, the Tigers have better odds now than the 1997 White Sox did when they initiated the infamous White Flag Trade.

The Tigers should probably be listening mode, as it’s possible a team will make them an offer that justifies giving up their estimated 26.5% playoff odds; if you can flip Price for a guy who can step right in to the big leagues and is under control for next year as well — similar to last year’s Jon Lester for Yoenis Cespedes trade — then it could be worth downgrading this year’s chances to upgrade next year’s shot. I wouldn’t say that the Tigers odds are so strong that they shouldn’t even consider moving Price or Cespedes.

But I just don’t see how we can look at the landscape in the American League and determine that the Tigers have to move Price and Cespedes for whatever they can get. The Tigers season is far from over, and there are plenty of reasons to keep this group together and try to make a run. If someone makes a crazy offer that you just can’t turn down, okay, but the Tigers shouldn’t be throwing away legitimate playoff odds just because they aren’t as good as they’re used to.

Update: Everything should currently be up and running!

Due to scheduled maintenance, FanGraphs will be unavailable tonight between 11:30pm and 2:30 am ET. We’ll try and get things back up and running as quickly as possible and hopefully won’t need the entire 3 hour window.

Before this season began, I wrote at The Hardball Times about the best modern triple-hitters (a.k.a. triplers), or the active players who have the best shot at challenging the post-war record, Roberto Clemente’s 161 career triples.

What I learned is: it’s basically impossible. (As is, arguably, the pursuit of just about any other counting-stat record.) In order to have a shot, the player must begin their major league career early as an everyday player, and average a triple once every 50-60 plate appearances throughout their twenties, followed by a graceful decline of a triple once every 60-70 plate appearances throughout their thirties. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll apologize in advance, because I don’t draw any stunning conclusions from this post. I am, however, going to present the data from my most recent toilings with baseball data. I was reading Wendy Thurm’s most recent article, and I noticed a commenter that pointed out the positions’ offensive output was more similar and closer to overall league average in the last few years compared to the past 20 years. My immediate reaction was to blame or credit the low run environment. My thoughts are that a higher run environment would produce more random variation for each player, which in turn would produce more variance in the entire league.

There are a multitude of factors that affect the talent distribution aside from the possibility of run environment such as training, performance-enhancing drugs, expansion, wars, and talent evaluation. With my quick exploration, I was not able to take these into account, so the following data visualizations serve as more exploratory analysis than any conclusive analysis.

I found the variance of a handful of offensive stats among players with more than 500 PA and plotted them against the run environment. I included the seasons from 1900 to 2014 for NL and 1901 to 2014 for AL, but I removed the 1981 and -94 season owing to the strikes in those particular years. You can change the stat and the league. I also included a histogram to show the shape of the distribution of the stat for a particular year.

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I’m in the Red Sox clubhouse for the vast majority of their home games, so I could easily write about the team on a regular basis. I choose not to. They get plenty of coverage as it is, and there are 29 other clubs. For the most part, I keep my Boston content to a minimum.

Brock Holt being named to the American League All-Star team is something I can’t refrain from penning (to use an archaic term) a few words on. After all, I’ve been banging the Holt drum since early in the current campaign.

Holt is a throwback, the type of player who provides value beyond his raw numbers. And his numbers aren’t chicken soup. Playing every position on the field besides pitcher and catcher, Holt is hitting .295/.383/.424. On a team of underachievers, he’s anything but.

This past weekend, I asked A.J. Hinch about Holt. The Houston Astros manager described him perfectly, saying Holt “does everything pretty well, maybe without dominating any one particular part of the game.” He called Holt “a tough out” and “a very impressive player.” As you might expect, he lauded his versatility.

A few weeks earlier, another manager expressed even more admiration. Holt hit for the cycle against the Atlanta Braves at Fenway Park, and after the game I spoke to Fredi Gonzalez. As I was exiting his office, he stopped me with a tongue-in-cheek request.

“Can you do me a favor?” asked Gonzalez. “Go over there and tell (Holt), ‘If they don’t want him, we’ll take him.’ I’ve always loved that (expletive). He’s a nice player to have, because he can play all over the field and he gives you a helluva an at bat.”

Brock Holt – essentially a throw-in in the December 2012 Joel Hanrahan–Mark Melancon deal – is the lone All-Star representative for a team with a payroll pushing $200 million. That’s a story well worth writing about.

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Addendum per Red Sox media relations: Holt is the first player ever to be named an All-Star after appearing at 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, and RF prior to the All-Star break.

One particularly appealing quality of European football for people like the author who are desperate to exude an air of worldliness, is the lack of official club nicknames. Manchester United, for example, are known popularly as the Red Devils*, Southampton as the Saints, and Everton as the Toffees. In none of those instances, however, does the nickname appear either on the club’s uniform or its official crest. Rather, the nicknames are largely — or, at least, more largely than in the States — the province of supporters and journalists, lending some (perhaps illusory) sense of the communal to the wildly capitalist affair of spectator sports.

*A devil actually does appear on the current iteration of Man U’s crest, but was added nearly a hundred years after the original formation of the club.

Nor is this sort of arrangement entirely alien to American baseball. The Brooklyn Base Ball Club was known alternately as the Grays, the Grooms, the Bridegrooms, the Superbas, and the Robins, before officially adopting the (Trolley) Dodgers nickname in 1933. And even despite the ubiquity of official nicknames in the modern version of the game, there are still unofficial ones used with considerable frequency — as in the instance of the Pittsburgh Pirates, for instance, known popularly as the Buccos; the Los Angeles Angels, known as the Halos; or the San Diego Padres, known as the Friars.

This post is designed to serve as an appeal to readers to supply those commonly used nicknames (like Buccos and Friars and Halos) which are distinct from the official one used by the club itself. Readers are invited to err on the side of the obvious. (So, even suggesting the O’s for the Baltimore Orioles is still of some benefit.)

With a reasonably complete list assembled, writer/grapher/researcher Sean Dolinar will attempt to discover which of these unofficial nicknames is currently in greatest use among fans and journalists. The results, one supposes, will be useless and fascinating.

Bryce Harper is having a career year emerging as one of baseball’s elite players. He leads all qualified batters in Major League Baseball in wins above replacement (WAR), weighted on-base average (wOBA), isolated power (ISO), and weighted runs created (wRC+). Harper has a wRC+ of 223, which means he’s created 2.23 times as many runs as the league average. wRC+ compares players to the rest of the league, because the stat is calculated relative to the league average.

I created a few interactive histograms to place a few of Harper’s stats in more context. For those who are not entirely familiar with histograms, they show the distribution of a particular stat. A narrow distribution has individuals clustered closer together, while a wide distribution has individuals that differ more. You might be familiar with the ubiquitous bell curve – the normal distribution. Histograms are important because they can provide a lot of information about the league quickly. While the wRC+ stat tells you how much better than league average the player is, it doesn’t tell you how many other players did as well.

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If you enjoyed the previous diagrams for position player WAR and offensive stats, then you’ll enjoy the diagrams for pitching stats. Just like the previous two diagram posts, the best instructions on how to precisely calculate the stats are in our library. However, the diagrams provide a visual conceptual overview of what affects the different pitcher stats.

The first set of stats are divided into three subcategories, based on denominator. The first is balls in play (BIP) and the pitcher batting average on balls in play (BABIP) stat. This is the same as batter BABIP except it’s calculated from the pitcher’s perspective. Total batters faced (TBF) is the second subcategory, where there are two stats: K% and BB%. These again mirror the batter’s version.

The innings pitched (IP) is the subcategory with the most familiar pitching stats. Innings pitched effectively counts every out the pitch has made, divides that by three to get IP. The most basic stats IP-based stats are K/9, BB/9, and HR/9. Walks plus hits per inning pitched (WHIP), a stat we don’t use a lot at FanGraphs, divides the total number of hits and walks by the number of innings pitched. Earned run average (ERA) does the same thing but also scales it to a full, 9-inning game. Fielding independent pitching (FIP) and expected FIP (xFIP) both use defensive-independent outcomes to estimate ERA. The FIP constant scales the stat to be comparable to ERA. xFIP is the same as FIP except for the HR input is change to fly balls (FB) and converted to HRs by multiplying FB by the league average HR/FB ratio.

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If one were to go to Minor League Central, navigate to the 2013 High-A pitching stats against lefty batters, and sort by SIERA with a minimum of 30 innings (against lefties), Taylor Rogers — a pitcher in the Twins organization — ranks first. If one were to repeat this exercise for Double-A in 2014, using a minimum of 35 innings, Rogers also rises to the top. For Triple-A in 2015 with a minimum of 25 innings? Rogers again!

I’ll admit I chose those innings limits somewhat arbitrarily to make sure Rogers’ name was at the tippy-top, but you get the idea: Rogers has baffled minor league lefties. Since he began his pro career back in 2012, Rogers has spun an excellent 2.01 SIERA against southpaws. Read the rest of this entry »