RIP Vida Blue. No-hitter at 21, MVP/CY at 22, 3x World Series winner 22-24, 6x All-Star
7 May 2023
2:07
Yeah Well Hiura Towel: What are the chances Manfred & the other owners will get sick of the Athletics stadium search clown show and force Fisher to sell?
2:11
Jay Jaffe: Slim to none. Manfred has cast his lot by choosing to enable them, which reflects other owners’ willingness to do so as well, in part because many of them want their own nefarious schemes enabled down the road.
But, uh, maybe they jumped the gun on that “binding agreement” in Vegas, huh? Wondering about the park factors of the Circus Circus parking lot.
2:12
Ben: For Hall of Fame purposes, are deGrom and Johan Santana pretty fair comps? Who else are guys that burned bright but just not long enough that you like?
2:14
Jay Jaffe: They’re vaguely similar in that both are two-time Cy Young winners who spent a good chunk of their careers with the Mets and have/had trouble staying healthy.
2:17
Jay Jaffe: But Santana piled up a lot more innings, 2025.2 to deGrom’s 1356.1; the former had almost as many from 2004-09 alone. He also had three other top-five finishes in the Cy Young voting in that stretch, and was robbed in 2005, where deGrom has one other top-five finish.
2:19
Jay Jaffe: Santana is 69th in S-JAWS with a much higher peak (51.7/45.0/48.3), while deGrom is 111th (44.7/39.8/42.2). I wouldn’t put him ahead of guys like 2x CY winner Bret Saberhagen, or David Cone, or Dave Stieb, to focus on guys who didn’t reach 3,000 innings.
2:20
Justin: Just wanted to say how fun it has been to have a healthy Ronald Acuna back in the game. So nice to have him back!
2:22
Jay Jaffe: Man, he’s been great, .338/.431/.551 with 6 HR and 15 steals; his 165 wRC+ is eight points higher than before he got hurt in 2021. I still wonder about his sprint speed (81st percentile, compared to 97th pre-injury), but maybe he’s just choosing not to go all out as often.
2:22
Dan: Are the Rays more good for baseball because hey everyone can be successful or bad because they are cover for teams not to spend when they really should be?
2:23
Jay Jaffe: As Abe Simpson would say, a little from Column A and a little from Column B.
2:23
Jay Jaffe:
2:26
Jay Jaffe: On the one hand, it’s great that they can compete with and sometimes beat the bigger spenders in their division. They do so many things well when it comes to talent evaluation and deployment. On the other hand, they do provide an excuse for some teams not to spend and to hope they can have a Rays-like season with their pittance of a payroll and then think that’s enough to satiate fans.
2:27
Oaktown Blues: How much of Brent Rooker’s breakout is real?
2:30
Jay Jaffe: That’s a really good question as the guy’s hitting .319/.441/.681. Most of the indicators I check when it comes to early-season breakouts, ones involving better swing decisions and better contact, suggest there’s something very real about it, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on his maintaining a 206 wRC+.
I believe that Esteban Rivera, our in-house swing king, is going to take a look at his mechanical adjustments soon.
2:33
Guest: Saw an article projecting Nola and Bieber to sign extensions worth about $100 mil? Is this an accurate reflection of their markets? I expected twice as much as a starting point
2:39
Jay Jaffe: $100 million-ish (which I assume you’re getting from Dan Szymborski’s extensions piece here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/whose-contract-extensions-should-teams-tac…) does seem a bit low but for one, but as Dan noted, both have been knocked down a bit by mediocre performances so far. Bieber additionally missed half a season due to a right shoulder injury and has another year of club control after this one, depriving him of a peak earning season.
I don’t think either of them is a $200 million pitcher or even a deGrom-esque $185-million one, but i’d bet both could be around $150M if they hit the market at the right time, off strong performances and clear of health issues.
2:39
>this guy<: So, are the Cardinals players going to trust this F.O. ever again or will the decsion makers have to go? Is Willson just a bad guy or something?
2:42
Jay Jaffe: I think the obvious route here is Mozeliak firing Marmol if they don’t turn it around, but if I’m DeWitt I think the former should be heading that direction too. Between this clown show and the O’Neill incident it appears that not everybody is on the same page, and if it’s true that some of their already crummy pitchers don’t like throwing to Contreras, then letting it play out publicly like this is letting the inmates run the asylum.
2:44
Guest: It’s not in the Cardinals nature or history to re-tool. What would a mid-year re-tool look like at this point? Trade Goldschmidt for prospects and play Yepez/Baker at 1st? Trade Montgomery as a rental elsewhere? Looks like they held too long on their glut of good, but not great outfielders (other than Nootbar, who does look special).
2:46
Jay Jaffe: I don’t see that kind of housecleaning; Goldschmidt isn’t going anywhere, and neither is Arenado assuming he eventually rebounds. More likely is an increased investment in starting pitching keyed by trading some of their young/controlled players, not all of whom can be the underperformers (so… Gorman? Nootbar?)
2:46
Alby: Charlie Finley ruined Vida Blue.
2:48
Jay Jaffe: That’s overly simplistic, but he certainly played a role. The game’s salary structure and the crush of attention that comes with being a young superstar were also major factors that keyed Blue’s dissatisfaction and discomfort, but he’s responsible for his own behavior and its consequences.
2:52
Mr Met: How would you explain Scherzer’s struggles? A mix of nagging injuries/old age?
2:56
Jay Jaffe: Right now it looks that way; he’s lost about one mile per hour on the fastball and slider and both are getting hit. It’s probably a minor mechanical thing, maybe owing to a minor health issue, but also — the drama is exhausting. Between the clock stuff and the sticky stuff ejection/suspension, he can’t seem to have a normal start. He has 11.1 innings over the last calendar month, and it has to be hard to work out issues on the mound when you can’t get into a prolonged rhythm.
2:56
Jason N: Who do the other owners probably hate more: Fisher (A’s) or Cohen/Seidler (Mets/Padres)?
2:56
Jay Jaffe: the latter pair for exposing their own unwillingness to spend.
2:57
mmddyyyy: Once one of the Oakland or Tampa stadium situations actually resolve, will that put more pressure on the folks in the other?
2:58
Jay Jaffe: I would think s, though as it is, Stuart Sternberg sounds as though he either expects to have some kind of deal by the end of the year or is going to look to move.
3:00
Warren: Just moved to bedstuy, any food, drink or otherwise you would recommend exploring? Happy to see the Judge back and hopefully healthy
3:01
Jay Jaffe: I don’t know Bed Stuy very well, alas, but I do know that Peaches HotHouse has some outstanding hot chicken and other fare, and i am brokenhearted that the branch in Fort Greene closed.
3:03
mmddyyyy: The KBO talent level is below MLB, but is it closer to MLB or something like AA?
3:05
Jay Jaffe: I think it’s much closer to Triple-A than Double-A; we quite often see guys who have tasted MLB but been up and down to the minors having a great deal of success there.
3:05
Dan Szymborski: Where has he gone? No chat in a month? Were they giving away free seafood down at the Harbor every Thursday?
3:06
Jay Jaffe: You’d have to ask Dan but I do know he’s been busy with in-season ZiPS stuff and recently had some vacation.
3:07
Guest: With Kyle Wright and Max Fried on the shelf and limited resources to make a move, what options do the Braves have to keep their rotation afloat? Mike Soroka has been up and down in AAA and Dodd/Shuster aren’t that caliber.
3:08
Jay Jaffe: Oy, I had not seen the news about Fried
Fried’s MRI didn’t create any concern about possibly needing a second TJ surgery. He will be shut down from throwing until his forearm heals. He’ll then have to build back up and basically go through Spring Training again. So, timetable is TBD. But this won’t be a short-term IL
9 May 2023
3:12
Jay Jaffe: They’ve lost Ian Anderson (who was in the weeds, admittedly) to Tommy John surgery, and just lost Kyle Wright to a shoulder strain as well. it’s not going great. I do think they believe enough in Dodd and Shuster that both will get longer looks, and likewise Soroka if he’s healthy. For the most part, teams in this position at this time of year are basically trying to muddle through with internal options until they get past the draft and then trade stuff starts to heat up.
3:13
Jay Jaffe: They may well wind up doing the Jesse Chavez opener dance for a bit
3:14
Nervous Flyball Pitcher: [sorry, hit enter too soon]
I’ve thought a lot about how the pitch clock is potentially causing pitchers to let innings run away from them due to momentum and inability to reset without a mound visit. How could we look through the data to prove whether this is the case? We can’t necessarily point to only pitch tempo, but unless there’s a way to look at inning by inning data and get a frequency on “meltdown” / “blow up” innings, I’m not sure you can even start to point at momentum without devolving to a qualitative assessment.
3:16
Jay Jaffe: If there’s a quantitative way to address it, it’s not occurring to me in the course of staring at your question in the chat sidebar. i do wonder if the Stuff+/Location+ model can tell us anything, but I’m a novice with that… stuff.
3:16
Jason N: What does Darvish need to accomplish to be in the HoF discussion? Your guess at the odds he does it?
3:19
Jay Jaffe: I don’t see it happening, much as I love Yu. He’s never won a Cy Young, had five years of single-digit win totals, and has just one season above 5.0 bWAR. If he gets to 200 wins and 3,000 strikeouts by pitching until age 42, maybe that changes but it’s not like BBWAA voters are going to add his NPB numbers to his MLB ones to give him full credit – if they did, Hideki Matsui would be in Cooperstown.
3:20
Traumatized Mets Fan: Anything you can say that will reassure me?
3:23
Jay Jaffe: Justin Verlander will improve upon his 7.15 FIP, at some point they’ll use a guy with a positive wRC+ as their starting catcher, and Eduardo Escobar won’t make it through the season as the regular third baseman.
3:24
Tony: If this is the beginning of Arenado’s decline phase and he ends up aging like Longoria, does he end up in the Hall? The two have nearly identical bWAR through age-31 (51.2 for Longo v. 52 for Arenado) and fWAR actually puts Longo a bit ahead through the same age
3:25
Jay Jaffe:
3:25
Jay Jaffe: Arenado is just 1.8 points of JAWS behind Longoria and is five years younger and with a stronger peak score.
3:26
Jay Jaffe: I think Arenado will be a Hall of Famer and Longoria will join the long line of near-HOF third basemen.
3:29
At least we got one: Anthony Rendon – leading the league in BBK with an ISO less than half of what we should reasonably expect. A barrel rate of less than 4% but a EV of 91 and an LA of 17. xWOBA 30 pts above the actual stat. What do you expect ROS and would you trade for him if the Angels fall out of contention and you miss out in the Ohtani sweepstakes?
3:31
Jay Jaffe: Rendon is making $38 million annually through 2026 and is currently carrying an xSLG of .364. I expect better from him but I don’t see nearly enough to justify trading for him at that price; you’d have to eat over half of that to convince most teams, I think
3:32
Tampa Bay to Stay?: Is Tampa the only example in the history of sports/baseball of a currently successful team that ownership has considered moving. Usually we only see bad teams with apathetic fan bases after attrition and periods of losing move (albeit the A’s were good not that long ago, but are most certainly not now)
3:34
Jay Jaffe: The Dodgers were incredibly successful just before moving from Brooklyn, the Giants were successful in the 1950s as well (and much more successful than the Dodgers pre-integration), and the Braves were wildly successful in Milwaukee, at least initially (6 straight years of league-leading attendance capped by back-to-back pennants with one championship).
3:35
Walla Walla Ron Washington: People were being a bit rude to Ben in here yesterday, and it seemed to bum him out. I hope it’s really clear that the vast majority of readers and chatters have nothing but respect and admiration for y’all’s work and work effort. Sorry for the handful of loudmouth knuckleheads.
3:36
Jay Jaffe: I didn’t see what happened in here yesterday, but thank you.
3:37
Yolanda: Have you looked into doing era adjusted innings totals? Rather than cutting people off at 250, giving then an IP+ metric scaled off the top X % of pitchers in a given year and scaling their WAR from there
3:39
Jay Jaffe: i futzed around by trying to look at league leaderboards a bit, but didn’t get to a plus-stat before choosing to go the route that I did. Not ruling out looking at it all again at some point.
3:39
ChicagoDan: Is there a chance that Sal Bando gets elected via a committee? How about Buddy Bell? I think they both deserve at least some consideration.
Jay Jaffe: At this juncture I don’t see either getting in because of the bottleneck created for pre-1980 players, who have to vie for space on the ballot with Negro Leagues/pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball players as well as non-playing candidates (those have their own track but only for post-1980).
3:41
Discreet proofreader: No question, just an FYI, your post on Bellinger the other day (excellent by the way), has a grammar typo. The word “be” is missing from the beginning of the last sentence in the first paragraph: “He may not all the way back…….” LOVE YOUR WORK JAY thank you
3:41
Jay Jaffe: I’ll accept the proofreading when it’s accompanied by lavish praise, thanks for reading!
3:42
Sonny: What’s the most exciting thing you’ve seen in the 2023 season so far?
3:43
Jay Jaffe: The Rays (Wander Franco and Randy Arozarena especially), Acuña’s rebound, Ohtani
3:45
Jay Jaffe: ok folks, so many good questions in here but I have to go get back to Vida Blue. Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing your afternoon with me.
Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
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idliaminMember since 2024
1 year ago
The problem with Jay’s answer to Traumatized Mets Fan is that Eduardo Escobar isn’t the Mets’ regular third baseman anymore. I had very low expectations for this team, and they’re managing to be even worse. This is easily a 90-loss team, maybe 95. By adjusted (third-order) Pythag, I believe they are now the worst team in the NL, after their loss to the Reds tonight. They are 2-8 against the Nats, Tigers, Rockies (at home!), and Reds. This is a bad team with truly atrocious pitching.
You are really twisting yourself into knots trying to justify your pessimism. Their baseruns record is 16-20, nowhere near worst in the NL. Verlander has made 1 start and Scherzer probably isn’t actually completely cooked. It isn’t hard to squint and see a playoff team here.
I realize NY fans love to act like the sky is falling at all times (see Yankees fans in a panic over their 20-17 start), but believe it or not your $300M star studded team isn’t one of the worst in the league.
I don’t know why you bothered to chime in, but to my knowledge, BaseRuns doesn’t account for quality of competition/strength of schedule, whereas third-order Pythag does, so I don’t see how I’m twisting myself any more than you are. (Turns out the Mets still only have the 2nd-worst 3rd-order Pythag W/L in the NL—I guess scoring six runs vs. the Reds—and still losing—was good enough to stay ahead of them.)
I’m not actually panicking because, as I said, I didn’t expect the Mets to be all that good. I thought they had the same year last year that the Giants had in 2021, and that running it back would yield a similar result. Anyway, no one’s going to convince anyone of anything, so I’ve deleted the rest of what I originally wrote.
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to my first chat of the month — apologies, as I had to punt last week’s due to other responsibilities.
The problem with Jay’s answer to Traumatized Mets Fan is that Eduardo Escobar isn’t the Mets’ regular third baseman anymore. I had very low expectations for this team, and they’re managing to be even worse. This is easily a 90-loss team, maybe 95. By adjusted (third-order) Pythag, I believe they are now the worst team in the NL, after their loss to the Reds tonight. They are 2-8 against the Nats, Tigers, Rockies (at home!), and Reds. This is a bad team with truly atrocious pitching.
You are really twisting yourself into knots trying to justify your pessimism. Their baseruns record is 16-20, nowhere near worst in the NL. Verlander has made 1 start and Scherzer probably isn’t actually completely cooked. It isn’t hard to squint and see a playoff team here.
I realize NY fans love to act like the sky is falling at all times (see Yankees fans in a panic over their 20-17 start), but believe it or not your $300M star studded team isn’t one of the worst in the league.
I don’t know why you bothered to chime in, but to my knowledge, BaseRuns doesn’t account for quality of competition/strength of schedule, whereas third-order Pythag does, so I don’t see how I’m twisting myself any more than you are. (Turns out the Mets still only have the 2nd-worst 3rd-order Pythag W/L in the NL—I guess scoring six runs vs. the Reds—and still losing—was good enough to stay ahead of them.)
I’m not actually panicking because, as I said, I didn’t expect the Mets to be all that good. I thought they had the same year last year that the Giants had in 2021, and that running it back would yield a similar result. Anyway, no one’s going to convince anyone of anything, so I’ve deleted the rest of what I originally wrote.