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.
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.
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.
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 »
Update: Sold out again.
Three weeks ago, we announced a FanGraphs Live event in Washington DC on July 5th, and the response was enthusiastic; you guys sold out in the event in just a few days after just that one announcement. However, after the event was announced, ESPN promoted the Nationals game to the Sunday Night telecast, moving the time of their game from 1 pm to 8 pm, so we had to adjust the time of our event as well; it will now be held from 4 pm to 7 pm so as to not conflict with the Nationals game that night.
Due to this time change, four people who were going to previously attend have had to cancel, and we are now making their tickets available for purchase. These are likely the last four tickets we’ll sell, so if you wanted to go but didn’t get tickets last time, this is going to be your best shot.
The cost of the event is $10, and that includes one drink from the bar. For more detailed information, you can visit the event page. I would imagine these four tickets won’t last long, though, so if you want to hang out and talk baseball with us, maybe just hit that big button down below and get your tickets while they last.
Location: Detroit
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