Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 4/11/23

Jay Jaffe: Hey folks, welcome to my weekly chat. We had a bit of a glitch on our end in publishing this so I’m going to give it a few minutes for the queue to fill. In the meantime, here’s my piece on Adam Duvall’s wrist injury, which has interrupted one of the majors’ hottest starts https://blogs.fangraphs.com/red-sox-lose-red-hot-adam-duvall-to-a-brok…

Jay Jaffe: And here’s yesterday’s piece on the Rays’ hot start (now 10-0) https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-rays-are-steamrolling-opponents-at-a-r…

The guy who asks the lunch question: What’s for lunch?

Jay Jaffe: A turkey reuben and potato salad from Mile End Deli. Yes, i’d love to have their corned beef reuben or the smoked meat sandwich, but I gotta keep the red meat under control and this is still a 95th percentile sandwich

Theo Epstein Truther: Seeing that the Cardinals might be the worst team in baseball this year makes my heart so happy. Is their offense as bad as their rotation?

Jay Jaffe: I don’t think anybody believes the Cardinals will be the worst team in baseball this year; even in the NL four teams have worse run differentials than their -9. That said, Marmol’s handling of the Tyler O’Neill baserunning thing was a red flag that made me wonder if he needed a sour hardass show of authoritah because he’s losing the clubhouse. That was totally horseshit. We’ll see if it fits a pattern.

Mike M: How many PAs do you see James Outman getting by the end of the season for LAD?  And is he a sneaky all-star candidate?

Jay Jaffe: if he stays healthy, at this point I don’t see how he doesn’t get at least 500 PA. the early success is impressive and the Dodgers don’t have enough of a margin to sit productive players even if they don’t fit neatly into platoons.

Skip: I have a friend going through some serious medical issues; can you recommend a light-hearted or emotionally positive baseball book I can bring him?

Jay Jaffe: I’m sorry to hear that. Especially if your friend has some knowledge of baseball history, I’d suggest The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubblegum Book, whose authors (Fred C. Harris and Brendan C. Boyd) just won SABR’s Jefferson Burdick Award for their contributions to baseball card collecting. https://sabrbaseballcards.blog/2023/04/10/2023-sabr-jefferson-burdick-…

Th book is about far more than collecting, though — its combination of reverence and irreverence is a forerunner to 21st century baseball blogs and alternative media. I had the pleasure of chatting with Fred Harris about it in 2021 https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fangraphs-audio-fred-harris-chats-baseball…

Jay Jaffe: A more recent one and close to home, The Only Rule is It Has to Work by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, about their running a low-level indy team, was fun

Bobby Cox: Is Orlando Arcia actually average to above average now? After all those poor to middling years?

Jay Jaffe: It looks that way, and from the outside I’m surprised, but he’s been hitting the ball much harder and showing better plate discipline. Remarkably, he’s still just 28. Jake Mailhot had a look at him when he beat out Grissom for the job https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/making-sense-of-the-braves-shortstop-s…

Urban Shocker’s Jockstrap: Predict ATL’s top 5 starters by inning pitched at the end of the year given recent injuries, debuts, and past injury histories! Go! (also please and thank you)

Jay Jaffe: Maddux, Glavine, Fried, Niekro…. wait wait wait

Jay Jaffe: I’d go Morton, Strider, Fried, Dodd, and Soroka but wow does that picture keep shifting.

Inaccessible Rail: The Mets have several players who will definitely be out at least 60 days, but they only have two players on the 60 Day IL. I notice that all teams do this every year. Is there some benefit I’m not understanding to keeping players off the 60 Day IL?

Jay Jaffe: Something I learned only this year is that you can’t move a guy onto the 60-day IL unless you need to add somebody to the 40-man roster. Of course, there may be other reasons not to move a guy on there, such as the hope that he’ll be back inside of 60, but this is the Mets we’re talking about so maybe that doesn’t apply

Mike M: This is the year for the Angels, right?  RIGHT!?

Jay Jaffe: I hope they make the playoffs this year, particularly after seeing how much fun both Ohtani and Trout had during the WBC.

I did not, however, go so far as to pick them in the staff predictions https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fangraphs-2023-staff-predictions/

Ross: I heard spin rate is down….

Jay Jaffe: That’s what Rob Arthur’s latest dispatch says https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/81832/moonshot-mlbs-cr…

TomBruno23: So, the Cardinals’ starting pitching…

Jay Jaffe: It’s not great — we had them 20th in our Preseason Positional Power Rankings — but it’s not as bad as it’s looked so far; note that Miles Mikolas’ ERA begins with a 9 and his FIP with a 1 (and not a 10). Three of their five guys (counting Jake Woodward, Wainwright’s fill-in) have at least a strikeout per inning.

Rick: On a scale from 1 to panic, how worrying is the most recent Rodon setback (back soreness)?

Jay Jaffe: 2-3. if it’s really just tightness in his back and not something worse it probably affects him by at most another week, and that can be clawed back by bringing him up from rehab for a 75-80 pitch start instead of a 90ish one

Summerland: My reco for a fun baseball book. It’s a fantasy novel that revolves around baseball

Jay Jaffe: For the person above looking for a baseball book for their friend. Haven’t read this one myself

Strosfan: Is there anyone you’d trade Yordan Alvarez for one-for-one considering current contractual/free agent status? Maybe Julio R? Enormous surplus value, considering the deal he signed last year.

Jay Jaffe: Wander Franco comes to mind. Probably Adley Rutschman too

Inaccessible Rail: I’m a little confused about Noah Song’s status. I see he’s still listed as a Phillie, but doesn’t he have to be returned to the BoSox?

Jay Jaffe: No, a Rule 5 pick can go on the IL without being offered back to his original team. That’s where Song is right now, throwing bullpens as he works his way back from a back problem (“tightness”). He can do a rehab assignment but once that expires he has to be on the 26-man roster; he can’t be optioned.

Yeah Well Hiura Towel: As Dan Szymborski has pointed out, now that the games are way shorter, can we get rid of the zombie runner? (I know it’s not gonna happen)

Jay Jaffe: Sigh. No, it’s not going to happen.

Insert Witty Name Here: Kelenic has a high K rate but is hitting the ball hard. Still optimistic?

Jay Jaffe: Reasonably. .300/.344/.500 so far. Just one barrel (5%) but a 60% hard-hit rate and .524 xSLG. I *think* he’s on his way

Inaccessible Rail: Kodai Senga for ROY?

Jay Jaffe: I picked Corbin Carroll and tend to lean towards the true rookies rather than the foreign league imports. I don’t think Senga’s a bad pick though

Inaccessible Rail: I was surprised that the Padres let Seth Lugo throw 109 pitches in his last outing. But then I remembered that he’ll get extra rest because of the six-man rotation. Is there any evidence that longer outings with more rest between is better for arms than shorter outings with less rest?

Jay Jaffe: I don’t know that anybody’s got evidence on the controlled experiment level but that’s true for about a thousand different things that happen in baseball, because players aren’t lab rats and there is only so much one can control for. The six-man rotation is an attempt to give pitchers more rest between starts but I don’t think we’ve seen teams try to push harder to get more out of those starts in terms of pitch counts, innings, or batters faced per start

Inaccessible Rail: If the Mets are going to have Alvarez on the active roster, can you explain to me why he isn’t starting most games? Is Tomas Nido batting .150 even?

Jay Jaffe: I can’t say I have a great understanding of how the Mets are handling Alvarez in the grand scheme but he started Sunday paired with Carlos Carrasco, and then on Monday Nido caught Max Scherzer — that might just have been the rotation’s ace getting his choice of catchers. Let’s see how this plays out over more than two days

slew(Seattle): Not sure if you were a Mad magazine guy as a kid, but your namesake Al Jaffe passed away at age 102. RIP

Jay Jaffe: oh yes I am well aware of it, tweeted about it several times yesterday and wrote this on Facebook:

RIP to my not-quite-namesake. My classmates always asked if we were related, and while I was initially exasperated, I later came to appreciate what a mensch he was. I’ll do my best to uphold his legacy by providing snappy answers to stupid questions.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/arts/al-jaffee-dead.html

Guest: Are the Stuff+ numbers accurate for Matt Bush’s slider and Cutter. His cutter is -30 and his slider is 33. That seem off to me.

Jay Jaffe: That -33 is for his sinker, not his slider, and he’s thrown like nine of them. Might be a glitch but on Statcast those sinkers are 35% below average in terms of vertical drop so maybe he’s just… not throwing good ones? working on something else? I don’t know. Worth asking Eno Sarris about.

Inaccessible Rail: I saw in the chat yesterday that Ben Clemens is pro-Zombie. Is this confined to baseball, or will he be on the other side when the zombie apocalypse arrives?

Jay Jaffe: I hope not; we can’t afford to lose a smart guy like Ben to the other side.

Eric: Aroldis (regardless of him as a person) looks like a steal of a signing for the Royals. What kind of trade bait will he be this summer if he even continues at an above avg pace? I feel like the RP market went crazy a few years ago but has calmed down significantly.

Jay Jaffe: I don’t think he’s gonna generate more than one or two lottery tickets. Teams have seen how he’s fallen apart in recent years and how he conducted himself with the Yankees last year and while somebody will trade for him, nobody is going to put themselves in a position where they might look foolish if he burns them.

Zach: RE: Outman
How legit do you think this is? Obviously he’s not going to keep up his Babe Ruth slashline, but his peripherals look pretty damn good so far. Lots of red on that savant page.

Jay Jaffe: I don’t think he’s gonna slug .800. In my piece on the Dodgers’ surprising outfield last week (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-dodgers-new-look-outfield-has-been-a-h…), Dan Szymborski supplied me with ZiPS percentile projections for Outman (and Heyward and Thompson). His 80th percentile projection is .252/.329/.487 (120 OPS+) and 3.5 WAR. Maybe that’s a bit more likely to happen than we thought, but i’d still be shocked if he blows through that line.

Guest: Thoughts on the DBacks hot start? It’s early but young players like Alek Thomas and Geraldo Perdomo seem to have figured something out at the plate over the offseason. Obviously there are holes on the roster but do you see a scenario where they sneak into the WC?

Jay Jaffe: My main thought about them is that they should move on from Bumgarner with one of their young arms in his rotation spot. Right now we have them ninth in the NL in terms of overall playoff odds at 20.9%, half of the 8th-running team, the Giants. So realistically they need three teams above them to falter in a big way, and one probably has to be either the Dodgers or Giants. It’s going to take a lot of breakouts and collapses to get there

Inaccessible Rail: Are steals and injuries correlated? Will we see more injuries this year because SBs are up?

Jay Jaffe: There’s added risk in steals — limbs getting hurt sliding, maybe a few hammys and calf strains.

Baseball Fan: If Degrom wins the Cy this year, is he guaranteed in the HOF?

Jay Jaffe: I’d like his odds a lot more if he had 3 Cys than 2 — Clemens is the only eligible 3-timer outside the Hall — but I think the lack of bulk on his resumé is a liability until he at least gets to 150 wins and 60 WAR.

Jeff: how bullish are you on McCormick vs. Meyers for CF job?

Jay Jaffe: I really don’t see why it’s a question as McCormick has clearly outplayed Meyers since the start of last season.

Volpe: How long do the Yankees let him flail around out there?

Jay Jaffe: I think they’ll give him until the end of the month. Donaldson being injured and Peraza (hamstring) too limits their flexibility. if they sed him down now it looks like a panic move and becomes A Thing for the kid.

Byron Denniston: Wow, it’s going to be a looooong season in Oakland. Are they the worst team in years?

Jay Jaffe: I don’t think they’re worse than the 2019 Tigers, who lost 114 games with an organization that at times felt like it was 20 years behind the times.

Sanford: Whose HOF case would benefit the most from winning an MVP this year, à la Goldschmidt in ’22? Mostly thinking of veterans here and not early-career/arb guys who have plenty left to write (e.g. Julio). Another win for Trout wouldn’t do much for his case except bring him even further into the inner circle, but I feel like José Ramírez or Lindor finally breaking through and winning one would position them well. (Despite finishing as runner-ups last year, seems like Machado and Arenado are on their way regardless.)

Jay Jaffe: I think the four guys you all name (Ramirez, Lindor, Machado, Arenado) are on their way but an MVP would certainly help. Trea Turner, who’s a couple of paces behind in terms of age and WAR, would be especially helped by winning.

Isolated Thinker: Going from 19 games vs a division rival down to 13 seems a bit extreme, no?  You’re fighting for a division title, yet only 52/162 games are now interdivision.  Is this nonsense here to stay or just a one year experiment?

Jay Jaffe: it’s here to stay for the duration of the new CBA and I don’t love it, but I seem to be in the minority

Zack Attack: Given his K-rate and general rotation filler status (and HoF worthy career if he retired today), does Greinke stick around another year to chase 3,000 K’s? Doesn’t really seem like the type of guy who puts stock in milestones like that, but on the other hand, I won’t be the one to try and predict that man’s behavior…

Jay Jaffe: Greinke is so inscrutable. I don’t think that he cares about the number at all, or at least won’t admit to caring. He has 2,893 K right now, and if he could continue his current pace (6.1 per nine) he would need another ~161 innings to get there. Which could happen this year if he stays very healthy.

Byron Denniston: Swanson K rate <20% through 40 PAs. What does it *mean?*

Jay Jaffe: it’s interesting and worth keeping an eye on. Strikeout rate stabilizes around 60 PA. his swinging strike rate is down as well, so that’s usually a sign that a K% rate is real (pitches is a larger data set than plate appearances). Not as drastic as Adam Duvall but something to check back on in a week or so

Jay Jaffe: BtW we’re having some site issues

Jay Jaffe:

Ben: Regarding whose HoF case would be helped by an MVP, I know none of these are realistic, but if Longoria, Donaldson, or McCutchen somehow revived their careers with an MVP season, wouldn’t they automatically jump from Hall of Very Good to Hall of Fame candidates?

Jay Jaffe: Donaldson and McCutchen have won before but even some two-time winners are on the outside such as Juan Gonzalez (OK, he’s got PEDs in his resumé), Roger Maris, and Dale Murphy, and I don’t see where either would have a better case than the Murph — certainly not Donaldson if we’re counting character.

Jake S: Hey Jay. If you could be a fly on the wall for a truth-serum induced conversation between any two baseball people, who would it be? Could be player-to-player, execs, etc. High on my list would be Tony Clark and Manfred.

Jay Jaffe: I’d love to know if Judge Landis and/or Ford Frick did anything to prevent Bill Veeck from buying the Phillies and stocking them with Negro Leagues players c. 1943. See https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-veracity-of-veeck/

Jay Jaffe: OK folks, the site is having issues and my time is just about up anyway, so I’ll bring the curtain down here. thanks so much for stopping by today