Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 5/26/20

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to the second edition of my chat in this Tuesday time slot, which thankfully is working better than Monday did in these pandemic-ridden times.

Jay Jaffe: Before I dive in, a bit of housekeeping: I’ve been very focussed on the Korea Baseball Organization lately, and at the end of today’s piece on Doosan Bears hitting machine Jose Miguel Fernandez (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/doosan-bears-fernandez-is-tearing-up-the-k…) I noted that I’ll be a guest on tomorrow’s ESPB KBO broadcast. I’ll be joining a Bears-SK Wyverns game, talking with hots Jon Sciambi and Eduardo Perez at around 7:30 AM ET. It’s my first time being part of a game broadcast, even under theses strange conditions, and it should be a lot of fun. I’ll have an Instagraphs post with further details including re-airing times.

Magic Kingdome: What is your best interaction with a Hall of Fame candidate?

Jay Jaffe: Hmmmm. I haven’t had a ton of them that particularly stand out. The first, though, was when I got Willie Mays’ autograph, which might have been 1981 or ’82. He was appearing at some grocery store expo at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, one of several players (Don Sutton was also on the list) but the one that I somehow convinced my mom to take me to. I had a 1973 Topps card of Mays as a Met, a hand-me-down from my cousin Allan. We stood in line, and he autographed the card without even making eye contact; he was bored as hell and didn’t care who knew it.

Jay Jaffe: More fun was my Vin Scully interaction, from 1989 at Vero Beach, which I wrote about as part of a 2016 Sports Illustrated piece (https://www.si.com/mlb/2016/09/30/vin-scully-tribute-dodgers-jay-jaffe). When I was a college freshman, my parents took my brother and me to Dodgertown during my spring break, and I had a chance encounter with the great announcer himself. From the piece

Jay Jaffe: En route to the concession stand before one ballgame, I crossed paths with Scully himself, decked out in a cream-colored golf sweater. I asked for an autograph, then realized I had just a scrap of paper and no pen. Seeing how flustered I was, he agreed to wait while I fetched one from my mother, who was on her way to the restroom. Somehow, I not only got the pen, but Vin waited in place, and signed what might have been a golf scorecard or a ticket stub. I’ve long since lost that piece of paper—inevitable while moving half a dozen times in four years—and I’ve never gotten to meet Scully again despite being now being armed with a credential. But I’ve never forgotten the man’s small gesture of patience and humanity toward a star-struck 19-year-old.

Mike Tyson: Designated Hitter: Very curious what you think about the changes in MILB and how that will impact talent development going forward.   Will this ultimately play a role in colleges having an even greater influence in player development closer to what it is in football.  When you are dealing with high school players, will this eliminate all but the very cream of the crop from making the minors.

Jay Jaffe: Even as somebody who’s not very involved in the amateur side of baseball, I can see that this has the potential to be catastrophic for the growth of the sport. Already the pandemic is likely to lead to budget cuts, and the specifics of this season — with the suddenly shortened draft, and college players granted an extra year of eligibility  — is going to create a cluster**** of competition for those precious scholarships. Meanwhile, there will be fewer minor league jobs going forward, and ultimately fewer kids steered towards baseball, and fewer stories of late bloomers who turned into major leaguers, whether or not they become stars. That’s the snuffing of dreams, and it’s very bad for the sport.

Curtis: In your opinion, how many HOFers SHOULD have been unanimous?

Jay Jaffe: Maybe two dozen? I can easily get to a dozen just off the top of my head, working chronologically Cobb, Ruth, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, Rogers Hornsby, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson. And I’m sure there are a dozen more.

olethros: Have you ever considered adding a standard deviation component to the JAWS system?  I feel like some positions have a much wider variance than others, usually towards the upper end, and it might be useful to have bands rather than a bright line.

Jay Jaffe: Somewhere I have those numbers, or had them at one point. Not hard to do, and possibly useful, but potentially confusing to some people who don’t like to be reminded that they’re doing math. I had given some thought to a position-by-position deep dive during pandemic times, and am not opposed to including that as part of the format, but lately my attention has been focused elsewhere.

Alex: If Statcast measures the longest modern home runs as just barely exceeding 500 feet, is there good reason to believe in reports of >550 footers?

Jay Jaffe: I’m somewhat skeptical about old time home run measurements, though the supreme talents of sluggers like Ruth, Williams, and Mantle attached to those numbers keep me from discounting them entirely.

Magic Kingdome: Does the owner-MLBPA dispute end if there is a hybrid proposal that players get a certain (high) percentage guarantee of prorated salary in exchange for some share if revenue exceed a certain threshold?

Jay Jaffe: I’m not sure where they’ll end up, but I suspect it’s some slight or modest discount on the prorated salary in exchange for some concession that may or may not specifically be revenue-related. It’s going to take compromise to pull this off.

Todd: Whatchuthinkabout Jun-Wun Seo, 19 YO sidearmer for the Lotte Giants?

Jay Jaffe: I haven’t seen him pitch in a game yet (the Giants only made their ESPN debut this morning, if I’m not mistaken, and had Josh Herzenberg on as a guest), but the clips are impressive. Here’s one of his debut via Dan Kurtz (@myKBO)

Jay Jaffe: The league does seem to have a higher complement of sidearmers than MLB, which is very cool. I’ve noticed in the splits on Statiz (which is difficult to navigate even with Chrome translation turned on) that they distinguish between “orthodox” and “under” (sidearm or submarine). Here’s the page of NC Dinos catcher Euiji Yang, for example: http://www.statiz.co.kr/player.php?opt=4&sopt=0&name=%EC%96%91%EC%9D%9…

Jay Jaffe:

Jenny ParticularDots: Do you have any go-to tiebreakers for determining whether an on-the-fence player should be in the Hall (i.e. peak seasons, historical impact, etc.)?

Jay Jaffe: I’m not sure I can point to a single factor but both of those that you mentioned are important. I tend to favor high-peak guys even if their careers were a bit short (Allen, Munson, Grich, Santo, Halladay). Historical impact should always be considered, and to be honest, it provides a fairly wide latitude for the inclusion of subjective weighting alongside the stats.

One thing: We had a baby in February, so at the least, we’ve spent a whole lot of time with him. He is listening to animal sounds now. 🙂

Jay Jaffe: I’m not exactly sure what the connection of this is to anything in specific, but congratulations. I know from personal experience that taking care of little ones while juggling work-from-home stuff is a particular challenge, so best of luck to you.

LOL: So, uh, we may well have Jeter and Schilling together in 2021, huh? Fun crowd.

Jay Jaffe: perhaps ,but it’s not like Jeter was the only member of the Class of 2020. Larry Walker and Ted Simmons are both pretty fascinating guys; the former one of the funniest ballplayers of his time and the latter a particularly cerebral one. I’m not sure what the Hall is going to do in the case of Marvin Miller given his family’s insistence on boycotting the proceedings, but any one of a number of Hall of Famers who worked with him in the union and went to free agency could be part of it. Joe Torre comes to mind in particular.

Likewise, there’s hope that between the two Era Committees (Early Baseball and Golden Days) there’s at least one honoree and perhaps more. Dick Allen, for one, is still alive and came very close last time.

amanontheriver: I’m incredibly new to the KBO (as are most new KBO fans, I’m guessing), so my eyeballs aren’t finely-tuned to see which guys, exactly, could cut it in the bigs. Do you think Dinos lefty Chang-mo Koo could be one of “those guys” who could play in MLB some day, especially since he’s only 23?

Jay Jaffe: If I’m reading it right, his average fastball velocity is only about 89 mph, but the strikeout rate and run prevention are impressive enough to suggest a guy who would definitely interest teams.

I’m not a guy whom you should trust for a scouting report, but here’s what Baseball America’s Kyle Glaser wrote recently (https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/top-10-mlb-prospects-to-know-i…)

He is a soft-tossing lefty who mixes four average pitches and has a chance to add strength and throw harder in the future. Koo’s command isn’t as sharp as [KIA lefty Hyeon Jong] Yang’s, but that’s largely a product of experience and could come in time.

Jay d: If the hall of fame was strictly based on being famous, no consideration towards stars or awards, who would be the biggest names not in the current hall of fame?

Jay Jaffe: If you’re putting aside actual eligibility concerns, Pete Rose is certainly up there, as are many other famous players whose transgressions didn’t earn them actual bans but have turned off enough voters to stall their election chances: Bonds, Clemens, Manny, A-Rod.

Kolbe: This might be out of your league (literally) but you are known for measuring greatness. Who’s the NBA’S greatest player ever?

Jay Jaffe: If you’re talking about relative to the league — as we do with WAR, etc —  I imagine Chamberlain and Russell have their claims because they were so much better than their competition, but the quality of play continues to rise, which should steer the conversation towards a more contemporary player. It still probably boils down to Michael Jordan and LeBron James for the choice of all-time great, and my visceral distaste for Jordan means you should find somebody more objective to answer that question.

Alex: In order to cause more balls to be put in play (via suppressing bat speed and encouraging a more contact oriented approach), Bill James has suggested–among other things–mandating a minimum bat thickness. If you believe this is a worthy goal, do you have any pet ideas to achieve it?

Jay Jaffe: the more I watch the contact-oriented KBO, where 95 mph fastballs are comparatively rare, the more I believe it’s the increasing pitch velocity that poses the bigger problem for MLB’s aesthetic quality. I was pretty down on the idea of moving the pitching distance back when the idea was floating around last year, but now I wonder if it makes more sense.

Sam: Idea for honoring Marvin Miller: have Andy Messersmith give the speech

Jay Jaffe: He’s definitely a player worth considering, if he’s willing to take part.

Travis: Re: relief pitcher HoF rankings. As you’ve mentioned in several of your articles, WAR rankings might not be the most accurate/insightful for evaluating a primary relief pitcher’s HoF worthiness. Any insight as to a revised ranking based upon WPA/that hybrid measure you’ve used for Rivera/Hoffman/Wagner et al that can be readily accessible? (Probably a BR question more than a FG question). Also, while the primary case for him is as a reliever, any way to exclude Eckersley from that ranking? It seems as though he’s an outlier in a way that drastically affects the standards.

Jay Jaffe: That hybrid metric is indeed on the list of JAWS-related issues I’m hoping to address before the next election; I think it’s worth considering. If you read my Wagner profile, note that in the table I break out the averages both with and without Eckersley https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jaws-and-the-2020-hall-of-fame-ballot-bill…

Guest: Why no discussion about lowering the mound?  We did it once and people are generally happy with the results.

Jay Jaffe: Sorry, I didn’t mean to exclude that from the comment above — it’s worth considering, as is tweaking the strike zone, which like adjusting the height of the mound is also a change that has some historical precedents that are more recent than 1893, the last time the pitching distance changed.

One thing: I was just spreading some cheer (re: baby). I figure we need some. As for baseball, have you seen the quotes from the players who say they can’t stop chewing tobacco or spitting? Are they going to get fined for this? (They should be. Good time to quit!)

Jay Jaffe: Got it. And now, I haven’t seen any player who’s spoken up about the chewing/spitting issues, but minor league baseball first banned chewing in 1993, and MLB in 2016. Anybody still doing it in a baseball context knows that it’s being done on borrowed time, and while I can empathize with how difficult it must be to kick the habit, that only goes so far.

Todd: Steve Rogers or Mark Langston?

Jay Jaffe: At first I thought this was a performance/career question, then I realized it must be related to Marvin Miller because both were active in the MLBPA — Rogers during Miller’s time, including the 1981 strike, and Langston later on, during the ’94 strike. The former would make more sense to me; on the latter front, I’m not sure why Langston when Tom Glavine was even higher up in the union AND is in the Hall, but there’s a lot of inside baseball I don’t know.

Mac Crashdude: I have a couple questions: 1) Is there any way to effectively calculate WAR and other sabermetrics without Statcast data? I am attempting to parlay it into the collegiate game and am unsure how 6-4-3 Charts do it. 2) Is there any effective algorithm for HOF probability since JAWS only compares players? I’ve been trying to do this for the NHL but it has an era problem Where Gretk

Jay Jaffe: WAR as it’s currently calculated doesn’t use Statcast data, though I know some have talked about using expected stats (such as xwOBA); Craig Edwards did so in the service of breaking down recent Cy Young races, for example.

I don’t have a HOF prediction algorithm related to JAWS but I know Neil Paine did one a few years ago for FiveThirtyEight.com that I’ve been meaning to ask about.

Sam: My more troll-ish idea for honoring Marvin Miller involved reanimating Bowie Kuhn and making him say nice things about Miller, but Messersmith seems more realistic

Jay Jaffe: Quoth the great Red Smith in 1981, “This strike wouldn’t have happened if Bowie Kuhn were alive today.” (Kuhn was commish until late 1984, when the somehow-even-worse Peter Ueberroth took over and led the owners into collusion)

One thing: Article today in SI including quotes from Blackmon and Tomlin re: spitting (both tobacco and otherwise), just FYI. Similarly, are we going to see some players MASH under these circumstances and others just play terribly with these routines? 70ish games is weird but it’s plenty of time for stats to be somewhat stable, but I’m thinking the creature of habit stuff will have a big impact.

Jay Jaffe: Thanks. I think we could see all kinds of weirdness in a smaller sample of baseball. Jayson Stark had a good piece at The Athletic on the topic recently https://theathletic.com/1829339/2020/05/22/stark-what-an-82-game-seaso…

The Stranger: Is a higher-contact, more balls in play aesthetic actually superior/ more popular? Or is it just appealing because that’s the game as it was played when we started watching?

Jay Jaffe: I don’t think anyone can say that one mode of play is objectively more superior, but I do think that the collection of complaints regarding the current pace of play, the long delays between pitches (the source of additional velocity as well as additional time of game), and the gradual decline of balls in play in favor of deeper counts and three true outcomes are all interconnected. As I am now officially a Cranky Old Man, I’m taking greater issue with where the game is. You, of course, are free to disagree.

Guest: Guess who’s been reading for years and just got an ad-free membership! You all support me in different ways, so the least I could do is return the favor.

Jay Jaffe: Many thanks for your support! It is much appreciated. For those of you reading this who would like to know about different ways to support FanGraphs, via membership, merchandise, or moolah, please see here https://plus.fangraphs.com/shop/

Mac Crashdude: Gretzky and Lemieux are the rule and not the exception. And 3) Any advice for those like myslel trying to break into the field? I am currently pursuing my MS in Business Analytics from Seton Hall and hold a B.A. in Intelligence Studios from Division II Mercyhurst.

Jay Jaffe: Didn’t realize the question was continued from your previous one, just thought it concluded with a typo or two.

Without meaning to poke fun at your typos (or my own, in the first attempt to answer this), I’d say that while getting your quantitative bona fides in order is certainly a key building block, working on your ability to communicate in writing is also important. There’s a reason that so many writers from FanGraphs and other outlets get pulled into front offices — they’re able to get their points across to those reading, and it can help their ideas gain acceptance.

vapodge: Didn’t mean for that to be anonymous. I’ll proudly stand behind my decision to subscribe.

Jay Jaffe: Of course, and thanks again!

The Stranger: To be clear, I’d love to see baseball become less of a TTO-fest. But I’m roughly the same age as you, and MLB doesn’t need to care what we think because we’re hooked for life anyway.

Jay Jaffe: While MLB may not need to care specifically what *I* think, the trends suggest that there are people 10, 20, 30, 40 years younger than me — as well as plenty who are older — who are even less enamored of the current product.

WinTwins0410: Jay, a quick one: Dave Concepcion and the HoF.  He never did much in 15 years on the BBWAA ballot (he was always above 5% but never above 20%) and he was on an Era Committee vets committee at least once (2014), but didn’t come close.  Was that the right call?  His WAR is low at 40.  Do you have a contrarian view on Dave?  (He wouldn’t get my vote, but I’m curious if you think the Big Red Machine halo gets him back on another Era Committee ballot at some point.)

Jay Jaffe: Concepcion’s case is very similar to that of Omar Vizquel: a flashy, well-decorated fielder who was part of several playoff teams (2x champs and 4x pennants, in his case) alongside many future Hall of Famers or HOF-caliber players. As with Omar, his defensive metrics aren’t as glowing as the reputation, so I think his being on the outside is the correct call.

Tacoby Bellsbury: Who are your favorite guilty pleasure players to watch? (Not on your favorite teams, not MVP-level players, but boatloads of fun for you.)

Jay Jaffe: I do enjoy sidearmers and submariners, even when they’re not necessarily the most effective pitchers. And I’m always going to root for Pat Venditte, the ambidextrous pitcher.

Oakland_Fan2: Do you believe that relievers should be in the Hall of Fame?

Jay Jaffe: The best of them, for sure. Aside from Billy Wagner and mayyyyybe Joe Nathan, I’m not sure there’s another one who has built up a resumé I’d consider worthy of admission right now; Kimbrel, Jansen, and Chapman all have a ways to go, to say the least.

Maladjusted Loser Freak: That Rogers/Langston answer only made me like these two seeming randoms more. They’re just pitchers I had no idea were so excellent, the union stuff just makes them more badass

Jay Jaffe: Wait, it wasn’t a Marvin Miller question? That’s funny, but I’m happy to have provided a bit of education.

Rogers I’ll always have a soft spot for, not only because he got a raw deal for giving up the pennant-winning homer to Rick Monday in 1981 but because he somehow dominated my 1977 stat-based Strategic Simulations Computer Baseball league, which I wrote about here https://oldtimefamilybaseball.com/post/73880788748/the-basement-tapes-…

FXB: Hi Jay, I have really enjoyed your KBO reporting, just as I’ve enjoyed the KBO. I’m fairly confident that I’ll still be watching a year from now. Will you? The average fan? Is there anything you think the KBO can do to establish itself in the US, or will it fall off the radar once MLB is back on our screens?

Jay Jaffe: Thanks! It’s been a lot of fun, and even if and when MLB does come back, I’m hoping to keep an eye out on the KBO for the remainder of this season thanks to the ESPN deal, which runs through the remainder of this season; that would include occasionally writing about what’s going on, of course, though not at my current frequency. Going forward, I think a lot will depend upon whether the games remain accessible to US audiences, and whether any statistical resources become more accessible as well. There does seem to be a market for KBO fantasy baseball, for one thing.

Geust: Have you put any thought into your Zoom background for the KBO drop in you’re doing?

Jay Jaffe: Yes but no final decision made. Stay tuned!

Jay Jaffe: OK, folks, thanks again for stopping by for what I hope has been an enjoyable 90 minutes of baseball chatter. Please tune in tomorrow for my ESPN/KBO debut, and look for another chat in this spot next week. In the meantime, stay safe and sane!