Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 6/11/21

Jay Jaffe: Hey folks, good afternoon and welcome to my first chat of June! I’m on something of a working vacation with my family’s annual trip to Cape Cod. Got a bit of sand between my toes, a bit of fried seafood in my stomach, and some local craft beers as well.

Jay Jaffe: (not yet today, last night that is)

ChuckNChino: Missed you last week — hope all is well.

Jay Jaffe: Thanks. Missed last week due to festivities for the end of my daughter’s school year and thus her preschool experience. It was pretty emotional but in a positive way

Slapshot: I saw your retweet yesterday of MLBN’s question about who is leading for AL MVP between Vlad and Ohtani.  Assuming they keep up their current pace (Vlad for hitting, Ohtani for both sides) with fairly close WAR, who do you see getting the title between those two at the end of the day?  Also, do you see writers giving Vlad more of an edge if he somehow nabs the AL Triple Crown along the way?

Jay Jaffe: The MLB Network screenshot was incredibly inane

Jay Jaffe: relying on Triple Crown stats in an MVP argument is a totally outdated paradigm, and reducing Ohtani’s pitching performance to an afterthought equally so

Jay Jaffe: Might as well add the wins and the RBI and call that “analysis”

Jay Jaffe: Which isn’t to say that voters shouldn’t consider Vlad Jr.’s MVP case if he wins the Triple Crown, but any analysis of his candidacy’s merits should consider more than that, and likewise Ohtani. What he’s doing is something that hasn’t been seen since Babe Ruth’s 1918-1919 transitional stage, and damn, that’s just incredibly cool.

Jay Jaffe: As to how the voters will handle either case, I’m just gad we’re not in 2012, with supposed adults hurling “nerd” insults at those of us using advanced statistics in our arguments.

Curtis: Other than DH…why is there such imbalance in the HOF (NFL too FWIW) position by position?

Jay Jaffe: This mainly concerns catchers and third basemen, plus center fielders as well. The short answer is that I don’t think there’s been a full appreciation of the value of defense at those positions, or the injury risks and constraints placed on catchers’ playing time. Likewise, I think that third basemen suffer because people don’t appreciate the balance of offensive and defensive expectations there, an issue I wrote about at length in the Ron Santo chapter of The Cooperstown Casebook.

Fat Spielberg: Did the sand turn your feet black? Like in Maine?

Jay Jaffe: No, it was a bit orangey because of the underlying clay I think

copecru: Are you (or any Fangraphs writer) doing a piece on Mike Marshall? from a Seattle Pilots fan…

Jay Jaffe: I debated whether to do a Marshall piece and ultimately passed on it, mainly because I just didn’t have the bandwidth to pull off something at the level of my other tributes. I kind of regret that, in that he was a fascinating individual, a true iconoclast, but doing him justice would have meant spending only so much time on his playing career while going a lot further afield in some areas than I had time to do properly.

Ben Cherington: Do you have a Mitch Keller theory? I’m all out of ideas with this kid. Is there any chance he performs well without me having to trade him and Oneil Cruz to TB for Chris Archer?

Jay Jaffe: Ben Clemens and I talked a bit about him on yesterday’s Twitch stream of the Dodgers-Pirates game. Ben is much more well-versed in Keller than I am but he had come up in my Snell piece. The short answer is that based on the prospect reports it seems like he should have the stuff to be a competent starter but he’s walking too many, not striking out enough, and has a batted ball profile that can’t withstand that. As to the underlying why, I’ll leave that to people more familiar with his mechanics and scouting report.

Derek: Bigger surprise so far: Cedric Mullins II’s 2.9 WAR or Buster Posey’s and Brandon Crawford’s matching 2.3 WARs?

Jay Jaffe: Good question. From an odds standpoint, two aging players at key defensive positions BOTH having All-Star caliber first halves on the basis of their two-way work might be higher (imagine each player having like an 80th percentile season so maybe a 1-in-5 chance at this level) versus a breakout for a youngish player who’s never demonstrated this level in MLB, that while giving up switch hitting. I think I’d go with Mullins as the bigger surprise just because we’ve never seen him do the stuff he’s doing in the majors.

Ironcurtin: Kelenic was sent down to AAA after going 0-39.  First two games at AAA?  0-8 with 5 strikeouts.

Jay Jaffe: Whether it’s mechanical, mental, or physical, or some combination of those factors, Kelenic has landed in a bad spot after the Mariners did their worst to ensure he was under an incredibly powerful microscope. This isn’t his failure so much as it’s an organizational failure. I hope he gets right and comes back and kicks ass.

Pat: With Kimbrel back dominating, he’s pretty close to becoming borderline HOF level, no? With 363 saves, he’s about 2-3 months from being 8th all time in saves & of those above 8th not in the HOF (Wagner, Franco, K-Rod), he is much more dominant than Franco & K-Rod & Wagner is possibly on pace to make the HOF himself.

Jay Jaffe: I wrote a bit about Kimbrel’s rebound and the revival of his HOF chances on April 13 (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/craig-kimbrel-is-dominant-once-again/) and he’s continued to kick ass. If he can maintain some level of dominance beyond these first two months he has a fighting chance at a Hall spot but I think we need to see a couple seasons of above-average work. It looks like he has it in him but he’ll need health and consistency

Curtis: .330 this year is like .370?    If DeGrom beats Gibson’s ERA mark, does he win MVP + CY?

Jay Jaffe: very possibly

Fat Spielberg: Why do pitchers have such high WARs on bbref as compared to FG? Is it because FG attributes some of their success to pitch-framing catchers?

Jay Jaffe: Yes, that has a lot to do with it. B-Ref bases its WAR on actual runs allowed with adjustments for a team’s defense whereas FanGraphs’ WAR is based on FIP components (plus popups IIRC) and so the two values might wind up very different even without the framing stuff.

Fat Spielberg: How long after Robo-Umps start calling balls and strkes do we have our first MLB game cancelled because of a software glitch? Or a ransomware attack?

Jay Jaffe: Haha that’s a question I haven’t seen before but I would imagine that if there were such an occasion, the game would go on with umpires calling balls and strikes as usual

Derek: Lol that is some lazy data presentation/graphic design by MLBN

Jay Jaffe: To be fair, there’s always something lost in showing only the visual without hearing what’s been said about it and the players involved; I’ve done enough MLB Now to know that the graphics are a supplement to what’s being said, and that it doesn’t always line up because people may have talking points but they’re not going to be able to go as in depth as, say, a FG article

bxchief: Salutations Jay, my questions is regarding the Steamer charts; what’s the difference between the Steamer RoS and depth charts RoS, the numbers are slightly different in terms of games and ABs projected? which one should one use going forward when making decisions..thank you beforehand..

Jay Jaffe: the Depth Charts use an average of Steamer and ZiPS, which sometimes offer contrasting projections, especially on players who are either early or later in their careers (young players, old players, guys coming back from injuries). I usually look at the Depth Charts ones first, and consider the individual systems as kind of bracketing expectations for the most likely outcomes.

Matt V: This gets a little circular, as postseason success becomes part of the case, but very few teams win a World Series without a future Hall of Famer on board. (I’m guessing the most recent one would be the 2015 Royals.) Do you think there might be an admittedly arduous blueprint for doing that, or are these occasions just a bit of noise riding the signal?

Jay Jaffe: Postseason success has always played a role in HOF selection, and perhaps moreso in bygone eras when it was 8 teams in each league vying to go to the World Series with no other rounds. Go back and look at some of the pitchers in the Hall whose cases don’t measure up in either wins or WAR to the long-term workhorse aces (300-game winners) and you’ll inevitably find guys like Chief Bender and Lefty Gomez and Jesse Haines and Rube Marquard who had a couple of brilliant World Series to go with some good regular season work

Jay Jaffe: Having a HOFer isn’t a prerequisite for a championship team by any means. Great players help teams win but not every great player sustains that greatness long enough to get serious HOF consideration, and it’s in the winning that guys boost their chances for the Hall but only if they have careers of substantial length and quality

Mike: Thoughts on Kyle Tucker? 3 OAA and 6 DRS defensively, 5 SB, and .408 xwOBA and 123 wRC+ offensively. I feel like he’s on the path to superstardom, but I don’t think enough people know his name to realize that.

Jay Jaffe: I woudn’t call a 123 wRC+ (or a .323 OBP) superstardom, but he’s more or less replicated what he did in the short season, and seems to be fulfilling the projection that he’d be a 60 FV player — an All-Star type.

Sloan: Has the Pujols long decline made you or anyone else think about negative value differently? It seems like currently it’s more of a non-entity than an actual negative. Like if a standard hall player ended his career with like 3 seasons totalling -15 WAR or something, should they be taken out of consideration?

Jay Jaffe: It’s so rare for a player to get such an extended chance to be as bad as Pujols has been for the past half-decade, and I think what we’re seeing is that most teams are quicker to understand when a cost is sunk than the Angels were. They (Artie Moreno at least) had reasons to keep him around that maybe went beyond the mere numbers but those reasons inhibited their on-field success, and you don’t have to have Ted Williams’ eyesight to take home that lesson.

In other words I think it would be rare to see a guy rack up even -5 WAR over 3 seasons and keep playing, and even that wouldn’t totally erase the accomplishments that a carer WAR total doesn’t necessarily capture.

Farhandrew Zaidman: Given the changes to the ball (COR, lighter weight, more drag, higher seams), don’t we need to change all the formulas for statcast expected batting statistics? It seems like every batter right now is “overperforming” their stats, which obviously can’t be true. I feel like a crazy person shouting this from the rooftops.

Jay Jaffe: I’d guess that at some point we’ll see some kind of recalibration for xwOBA and other x-stats based on this year’s data but you’d have to ask Tom Tango and friends if/when that will happen. One thing that we can do, and that I try to do when I’m performing such analyses is not only illustrate the individual gap between x and actual but also the leaguewide gap and the individual extremes. Just to use a hypothetical example, if Player X is 60 points under his xSLG, that’s interesting, but we learn far more by presenting it in the context of the league being 20 points under as well, and of his 60-point gap being only the 15th-largest among qualifiers.

Jay Jaffe: Worth noting that warmer weather and the crackdown on spin-inducing substances might change the profile of what we’re seeing, too.

Marty: Maybe this is just ridiculous, but do you think Trea Turner has even the slimmest, realistic chance at the hall? I realize people in the industry and other committed types know his value, but he always seems like maybe the most underrated and under spoken of players to me (understandable with some of the stars he plays/has played with). His injury history concerns me a bit, but if I squint I can see him as a player that could age gracefully. Thoughts?

Jay Jaffe: you’re right in that he doesn’t get much talk of that type, and health has a lot to do with it; he’s played 100 games only twice in parts of seven seasons, and one of those years was just 122 games. He’s produced 5.0 bWAR per 162 games, while Seager has 4.9 and Lindor 5.1; Correa at 6.8 blows the doors off all of them but he has similar problems in staying on the field even before we start talking about the Astro-specific aspects of his career.

Jay Jaffe: If Turner stays healthy and puts up seasons of the caliber that he’s shown he can manage over shorter stints, yeah, he’s a guy who will have a shot. But that’s a very, very big if given his career to date

The Stranger: I’d guess pitcher bWAR is more prone to exceptional seasons because a pitcher who beats his peripherals gets full credit for it. The guys with the best ERA almost always beat their FIP to get there so WAR based on ERA will be higher.

Jay Jaffe: There’s that but the pitchers who beat their peripherals do share some of the credit with the defense behind them. Two guys allowing 2.00 runs per nine, but one striking out 12 per nine and the other striking out 8 per nine will have some daylight between them. Likewise, ballpark adjustments and opponent quality adjustments may provide further separation or convergence

Guest: Wouldn’t it have been more accurate to credit Ke’Bryan Hayes with a HR in his stats but -1 base running runs?

Jay Jaffe: Not when the basic rule says that by failing to touch first base he was out, but you’re free to do the mental math accordingly.

Guest: Who is most likely to get traded at the deadline when the Twins finally give up on this year?

Jay Jaffe: Cruz, Simmons, Pineda, and Robles are pending free agents who are performing at levels that would appeal to contending teams, so they’re the most likely to move. Whether they’d weigh moving somebody with longer-term cost certainty (Polanco) or club control (Berrios and Rogers) is another story but if the price in terms of the return is right, I suppose it could happen.

Bo Jackson: What are the chances the Royals can get back into the AL Central race?

Jay Jaffe: I wouldn’t hold my breath. 7.5 back at the 61-game mark, looking up at a team that has lost two of its key players in Jimenez and Robert, does not give much hope and in fact the Royals’ Playoff Odds (4.9%) are just over half of what they were on Opening Day (8.9%), with their division-title odds falling from 4.7% to 2.6%.

Estevão: What do you think about Christian Walker to Cle. He is not doing anything but we’ve seen something and Cle has nothing there. Honestly they have to address it

Jay Jaffe: Not unless he gets hot. a guy hitting .198/.241/.307 is nobody’s solution.

John b: If wainwright magically got to 200 wins and/or saw his team get to another series, what are his Hal chances.  Seems like 200 is the new 300

Jay Jaffe: 200 may be the new 300 but only if it’s accompanied by some pretty zesty achievements and peripherals. Yes, Wainwright has a championship ring and a better postseason resume than his 4-5 W-L suggests, but his innings and strikeout totals are too low for a non-Koufax type Hall candidate, as is his WAR (40.8 including offense), and with only three All-Star appearances and no Cy Young (even with four top-three finishes) he just doesn’t have a case that suggests voters will take him seriously.

John b: whenever I look at whether someone is eligible for the Hall, there’s always some early (pre 1920 ) players that completely skew the averages.

John b: shouldn’t you consider removing them for JAWS7?  Baseball was a very different game then.

Jay Jaffe: There’s no one player, even a pre-1920 player ,who skews the averages so much as to make them useless in a HOF comparison. I have considered moving the high-volume pitchers from the pre-1893 distance change — Galvin, Clarkson, Keefe, Welch, and Old Hoss — out of JAWS but the most that it does is lower the standard by 0.8, which shouldn’t really be  a difference-maker in any Hall argument. A guy 0.8 below or a guy 0.8 above is a guy who’s basically in line with the standards, and there are very few guys for whom that makes much of a difference.

Which isn’t to say that I haven’t considered some level of workload adjustment to pitcher JAWS; I have, albeit not to the point that I’m ready to show the world anything.

Derek: Re: Kyle Tucker, it’s almost a common refrain at this point, but I really do think guys like Soto, Acuna, and Tatis who came up and are instantly elite have spoiled us some. Even Vlad Jr. had seen some of his prospect shine wear off after a couple of merely good seasons at an *extremely* young age. Tucker (along with Vlad) just seems to be taking the “normal” development path of a top prospect-turned-top MLB-er!

Jay Jaffe: There’s some truth to this

BettsBellingerCaruso: It’s kind of hilarious how some Dodger fans have been saying Mookie’s slumping badly yet he’s putting up a 130 wRC+ season.

And also hilarious – it’s almost sthe same as his 2019 line yet the triple slash in 2021 looks so much worse:

2019 Mookie w/ Boston: .295/.391/.527 135 wRC+

2021 Mookie: .255/.366/.447 130 wRC+

The league offense just got worse significantly and he went to a pitchers’ park and he’s in the NL

Jay Jaffe: I’m gonna write about Mookie next week, I think.

Cube Jockey: Pardon my science ignorance, but does using foreign substances on ball, negatively affect velocity?  Shouldn’t it reduce the force the pitcher is able to transfer to the ball, or does the increased spin rate make up for that?

Jay Jaffe: IANAP (I am not a physicist) but it probably does cost velocity to a small degree, small enough to be offset by the gains in movement, spin, and unpredictability.

Jay Jaffe: (had to edit that one)

Estevão: If I were to tell you three years ago that the Angels would keep Trout and add the most exciting player in the history of the sport and a top 5 3B in Anthony Rendon and it’d do nothing to change the status quo what would you have said

Jay Jaffe: I’d have guessed we might see Trout in the playoffs again at least once, but (sigh)

Billy Beane: Should I stick with a surging Elvis or trade the farm for Story?

Jay Jaffe: I think you should see how long Elvis keeps surging and whether Story really is healthy. You’ve got about a month to get serious about it, so use that time

Guest: When will Wander be called up? Do you have any idea Jason Dominguez will start playing in the minors?

Jay Jaffe: These are questions you should be asking Eric Longenhagen or Kevin Goldstein.

Fat Spielberg: I never hear any mention of Jerry Koosman as a possible HoFer, but he did finish with 60+ FGWAR. It was hard for him to get out of Seaver’s shadow, but I think he has a stronger case that many other names I see thrown around.

Jay Jaffe: He’s better than his 222-209 record would suggest but still only 104th in JAWS, and 137th in peak. 2 All-Star appearances, 1 top-5 Cy finish… .He’s not among the top 20 starting pitchers I’d consider for a spot.

t68: Jesus Luzardo….bust?….can he at least turn out to be a #3 starter?

Jay Jaffe: labeling a 23-year-old a bust is asinine. Young pitcher development isn’t linear to begin with, and injuries can further stall that development, but I think it would be foolish to give up on him on the basis of a bad-35 inning stretch or abandon hope that he fulfills his 60 FV projection.

Guest: If he continues on this pace, would Yasmany Grandal’s season be the single most productive sub-.200 batting season in MLB history?

Jay Jaffe: Good question. It certainly seems possible

Josiah: Please tell my delusional giants friends that Brandon Crawford isn’t a hall of famer. Thank you.

Jay Jaffe: Hey, friends of Josiah! I’m sure you’re all very nice people but you’re delusional if you think Brandon Crawford is a Hall of Famer. He’s had a very solid career but a guy with 26.6 bWAR partway into his age-34 season isn’t a serious Hall candidate no matter how many championship rings he has.

Max: To your knowledge, have there been adjustments to the positional values that take into account the fact the shifting often leaves the corner infielders more ground to cover than is traditional and the middle infielders cover less?

Jay Jaffe: I think it’s been a few years since we’ve seen positional values adjusted either in FG WAR or B-Ref WAR. I’d defer to the people who handle the builds of WAR to discuss whether that’s necessary but you may be onto something

Guest: The Reds and Braves are both 29-31 but are in winnable divisions.  How do you see them approaching the deadline?

Jay Jaffe: Teams in the middle have to plan for multiple contingencies based on how they fare over the next 4-5 weeks — buy/sell/hold. Kevin has some insights into the questions they’ll have to ask themselves https://blogs.fangraphs.com/scripting-the-reach-out-calls-national-lea…

Jay Jaffe: Wow, the time has flown, and so must I. Thanks so much for stopping by on this Friday afternoon. I’m not sure whether I’ll pull off another chat next week as Im supposed to get some time away from computer screens, but I may dip in if events warrant. In the meantime, enjoy the baseball and (hopefully) the nice June weather!