One of the most commonly cited sabermetric statistics for hitters and pitchers is Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) and our Library entry on BABIP is newly renovated. Not only does the entry now contain the BABIP equation, which was previously absent (oops!), but it walks you through a more nuanced explanation of why we care about BABIP and how to use it responsibly.

We have a BABIP entry in the Offense and Pitching sections of the Library but the entries are the same, so clicking to either will do.

Click over to the Library for a full breakdown, but feel free to post questions about BABIP here. We also have a post going up in the Library blog today that illustrates the importance of BABIP and the concept of luck, so feel free to post questions there as well. You can also reach out to me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44 or stop by our weekly Q&A chat Wednesdays at 3pm eastern to ask questions about advanced stats or the site’s features.

A fight between the Orioles and Nationals over MASN’s television rights fees has been brewing for years. MASN (Mid-Atlantic Sports Network) was created as a form of financial compensation to the Orioles when MLB moved the Expos from Montreal to Washington, D.C. to become the Nationals. MASN is majority owned by the Orioles but has exclusive rights to broadcast Orioles and Nationals games. The agreement establishing MASN set a floor for the Nationals’ TV rights fees and a formula for how those rights fees would increase on an annual basis. After five years, the Nationals had the right to petition to reset the formula, and if the parties couldn’t agree, the matter would be taken to arbitration before a panel established by MLB. For more than two years, the teams have been fighting over this new formula. We learned and reported last week that the dispute did go to arbitration and that the MLB-established panel issued a decision in June in favor of the Nationals. The Orioles then filed a lawsuit in New York state court to overturn the arbitration decision and in an initial victory, convinced the court to stay enforcement of the decision until the merits of its claims can be fully explored. A stay order means that the status quo that existed prior to the arbitration decision — with MASN paying the Nationals only $33 million per year in rights fees — will continue for the time being. The court also rejected MLB’s request to keep all documents in the case under seal. MASN’s petition to undo the arbitration decision charges the arbitration panel with a conflict of interest, because it is comprised of representatives of three other MLB teams who would benefit financially if the Nationals receive a larger rights fee, via the league’s revenue sharing system. MASN and the Orioles also claim that the arbitration panel ignored the formula used by MLB for years to determine how to divide a team-owned RSN’s revenues into rights fees (which are contributed to the revenue-sharing system) and profits (which are not). By ignoring that formula, the Orioles, contend, the arbitration decision will leave MASN with very little in the way of profits — in direct contravention to the agreement that created MASN in the first place. You can read MASN’s petition to vacate the arbitration decision here. The court has scheduled a hearing for later this month on whether to permanently enjoin the arbitration decision.

One of the reasons I really like having InstaGraphs is that it gives us a more natural place to link out to other good stuff around the web. It’s more natural to have a link in a blog designed for several hundred word posts than it is to have one where we’ve trained you to expect 1,000 words. And often times, the article I’m linking to doesn’t really need supporting commentary.

Like this one, for instance. Ben Lindbergh tackles the question of the advantage of having elite starting pitching in the postseason. These kinds of studies have been done before, and the conclusion isn’t revolutionary, but there are still a lot of people who think that you can dramatically skew the odds in October by loading up on high quality pitching, but the data keeps pushing back against that idea.

The home run paragraph of Ben’s piece:

So why doesn’t the quality of a team’s top three starters or its ace register as significant? For one thing, the differences between teams are compressed in the playoffs, relative to the regular season: Teams with terrible staffs don’t make it to October, so the gulf between the best- and worst-pitching playoff teams isn’t as stark as we’re used to seeing during the season’s first six months. Perhaps more importantly, there’s more than one way to win baseball games, and even under an expanded playoff format, teams don’t get to October without doing something well. A team with an inferior pitching staff often makes up for its weakness on the mound by being better on offense.

Read the whole thing, and keep the takeaway in mind, because you’re going to be inundated with “pitching wins championships” cliches for the next few months, even though the reality is that good baseball teams win championships.

Pedro Alvarez isn’t incapable of making a good defensive play. Here is one from not long ago!

Unfortunately, this sort of thing has been far too common:

The Pirates are trying to figure out what to do with Alvarez, because they’re in the middle of a pennant race and his throwing errors are piling up. It helps for them to have Josh Harrison available, but then they also just lost Andrew McCutchen, and Alvarez might not be suited to move to first base anyhow. Alvarez has never been a total stranger to throwing errors, but, we have such data going back to 2002. Here are the highest single-season throwing-error totals over that span:

(1) 23, Pedro Alvarez (2014)
(2) 18, Mark Reynolds (2008)
(3t) 16, Julio Lugo (2004)
(3t) 16, Chad Tracy (2004)
(3t) 16, Edwin Encarnacion (2006)
(3t) 16, Edwin Encarnacion (2008)
(3t) 16, Ryan Braun (2007)
(3t) 16, Starlin Castro (2011)
(3t) 16, Pedro Alvarez (2012)

Already, Alvarez has the highest total by five, and the Pirates have another 51 games left to play. It remains to be seen how many games Pedro Alvarez has left to play, but the Pirates are trying like hell to get to the bottom of this because this isn’t only important for the short-term — the state of Alvarez’s defense could determine whether or not he’s tendered a contract for next year. He’ll be up for about $5.5 million – $6 million in arbitration, and his WAR right now stands at 0.0. It’s hard to imagine that Alvarez could be non-tendered, but it’s also hard to imagine setting a recent high for throwing errors before the regular season’s trade deadline.

The quirk of it: a year ago, Alvarez finished with 12 throwing errors and 15 fielding errors. This year, he’s at 23 throwing errors and one fielding error. So Alvarez improved in one area and got worse in another, not unlike how he’s reduced his strikeouts but also reduced his power. It’s been an eventful season for Pedro Alvarez. It’s also been a much worse season, but I wanted to be nice. Not a lot of people out there right now being nice to Pedro Alvarez.

It’s an August tradition; the Yankees flex their financial muscle to claim some overpriced player on waivers in order to add him for the last few months of the season. Only this time, the tradition has been turned on its head, as the Nationals claimed Matt Thornton, and the Yankees decided to let them have him.

Thornton move saves #Yankees about $4.5M. Rest of ’14 salary, plus $3.5M in ’15. NYY working on other things, could redirect money.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) August 5, 2014

That’s right; the Yankees just let a quality left-handed reliever go for nothing but cash savings because they are working on directing that money somewhere else. It’s interesting to see the Yankees dumping salary here, when they spent the last few weeks taking on money to add the likes of Chase Headley, Brandon McCarthy, Martin Prado, and Stephen Drew. Perhaps more interesting will be what deal that are working on that would consume the money they just saved on Thornton, as it has been publicly reported that the Phillies just placed a bunch of their expensive players on waivers yesterday.

For the Nationals, they get a decent lefty specialist who isn’t atrocious against right-handers for $1 million over the rest of this season and $3.5 million next year, and don’t have to give up any talent in exchange. For a team in their position, this is a nice little addition, and gives their bullpen another solid arm for October.

After a couple of years of intense debate, the 2014 AL MVP race looks like it’s not going to be much of a race at all. Mike Trout is unquestionably the best player in the league, is in the midst of a typically awesome Mike Trout season, and his team is basically guaranteed a postseason berth this year. Miguel Cabrera, while still a pretty great hitter, isn’t really in the picture this year, and the rest of the would-be contenders don’t really stack up against Trout, even by traditional voting standards.

Jose Abreu has the offensive numbers, but his team is bad, and the BBWAA just spent two years telling everyone that great seasons on non-winning teams aren’t to be rewarded with MVP trophies. If they give the award to Abreu over Trout this year, they might as well have a public bonfire for the remains of their credibility.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, we announced that we were proud to be partnering with the guys who put together the annual Saber Seminar in Boston, and as always, the event ended up selling out. With a line-up that includes Ben Cherington, Jeff Luhnow, John Farrell, and a long list of some of the smartest people involved with baseball, that wasn’t a big surprise. However, the demand for tickets was so high that the event has actually had to change buildings, and the move has allowed them to free up a few more tickets for those who procrastinated and missed out.

So, here’s the deal; in a week and a half, a couple hundred devoted baseball nerds will be descending upon Boston for a weekend of insightful talks, entertaining conversations, and general enjoyment of the game. I’ll be there — along with Tony Blengino, Paul Swydan, and David Appelman — representing FanGraphs, and it’s always one of my favorite weekends of the year. If you are going to be in Boston on August 16th and 17th, you should absolutely come to the event.

Tickets, which gets you into both days, are $140, and 100% of the proceeds go to The Jimmy Fund. The entire event is fantastic, and it raises money for cancer research, which makes it about as easy an organization to support as there is.

And don’t forget that we’re hosting a big get together the night before, so if you’re more interested in the drinking and hanging out part of things, you can come do that on Friday night, August 15th as well. The whole weekend is a lot of fun, and you should come.

While it’s really only fair to base one’s assessment of a trade on the information available at the time of said trade, that doesn’t preclude one from also exhibiting some interest in how the various traded parties end up performing with their new respective clubs.

What follows are two links designed to monitor that kind of performance — each to a leaderboard featuring players traded both (a) during the month of July and (b) to a contending club, where contending is defined, in this case, as a club that possessed better than 10% odds of qualifying for the divisional series as of July 31st.

Here are the relevant links: Traded Batters / Traded Pitchers.

Please note that:

• Leaderboards are set to the “August” split; and
• It’s entirely possible that the author has omitted a name or two, nor should readers hesitate to leave a comment to that effect; and
• Through Sunday, at least, Justin Masterson has recorded the highest park-adjusted batting line (tied with Jonny Gomes) of all players traded to a contending team.

CK One is a unisex fragrance released originally by Calvin Klein in 1994 and worn around that same time by an awkward, teenaged version of the present author with a view towards attracting the attention of less awkward, but equally teenaged, young women.

Under different, but similarly embarrassing, circumstances is how that same author has decided to utilize CK One today — not the actual fragrance itself, but at least the brand name, as a succinct means by which to identify publicly which of two pitchers, Clayton Kershaw and Corey Kluber, produced the better figures in July. Because their initials are C and K, is why. And then the one indicates which of them was the best pitcher with C and K for initials.

These painful explications aside, here are those same pitchers’ respective totals and rates from the past month:

The exact same strikeout and walk rates, is what Kershaw and Kluber produced last month — plus a collection of other, very similar figures, as well. Even as Kershaw finds himself in the midst of a historically great season, the right-handed Kluber — commonly referred to as the People’s Champion — matched the Dodgers lefty in all the most relevant categories. Which, if I’m being honest, to write that last sentence is why I’ve bothered to write every other sentence in this post. That having been accomplished, then, this addition to InstaGraphs is complete.

Yesterday, FanGraphs set some traffic records that we might not break for a very long time. It turns out that having like 15 trades go down in the span of six hours is good business for a site that specializes in transaction analysis. Who knew, right?

But maybe the most fun thing wasn’t that David Price and Jon Lester generated a lot of interest, because that was always going to happen, but that the activity allowed a guy like Sam Fuld to take the spotlight for a little while. How much did people care about Sam Fuld yesterday compared to prior days? Well, here’s a graph of the page views for his player page this year.

Sam Fuld, this is what it looks like to be internet famous for a day.