Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 6/6/23

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first chat of June and my last one before embarking upon the annual family trip to Cape Cod

Jay Jaffe: I am battling my way through back spasms that began when I was warming up my daughter for her last Little League game (of the season for sure, of her “career” possibly)

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I took a look at Fernando Tatis Jr’s return from his injuries and suspension https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fernando-tatis-jr-s-uneven-return-from-a-l…

Jay Jaffe: Tomorrow I’ll have a tribute to Roger Craig, whose greatest contribution to baseball was in teaching the split-fingered fastball to a generation of pitchers, to such an extent that it became “The Pitch of the ’80s”

Guest: Manoah?

Jay Jaffe: he’s got minor league options, time to shuffle off to Buffalo.

Farhandrew Zaidman: DeGrom is the modern day Dwight Gooden? Absurd peak, unquestionably the best in his day, not a HOF.

Jay Jaffe: He’s closer to the modern-day Koufax, but Johan Santana or Cliff Lee are more apt comparisons. Gooden had a lengthy back end to his career and did reach 194 wins and 2,800 innings. deGrom is 35 and has 84 wins and 1,356 innings, which is closer to Santana and Lee.

Isaac Huey: If you had to guess, how many current Braves are HOFers?

Jay Jaffe: the only one I’d put money on would be Ronald Acuña Jr., who… (fans self)

Isaac: What is your mount Rushmore at each position?

Jay Jaffe: Good lord, leaving aside the fact that i *hate* the Rushmore configuration (top four), you’re asking me to spend time coming up with a list of 36 or more players in the middle of a chat.

Jay Jaffe: that could be a week of articles

Jay Jaffe: not that i’m inclined

Isaac Huey: Who do you think is better at the same age, Acuna or Aaron?

Jay Jaffe: Aaron and it’s not even close, in part due to the playing time gap. 151-135 edge in OPS+, 38.7 to 20.9 in bWAR, plus two pennants (one WS win) and an MVP

Isaac Huey: If all teams perished tomorrow except the Oakland A’s, what are their chances of climbing out of the cellar?

Jay Jaffe: I think they could win the Triple-A championship.

Chip: Is Father Time finally catching up to Justin Verlander?

Jay Jaffe: maybe. He’s had three good starts, one so-so one, and two bad ones, one of which was at Coors, but beyond that the velo and strikeout rate are down, xERA is up. Stuff+ sees serious declines in both his fastball and changeup.

Jay Jaffe:

Jay Jaffe: I wouldn’t count him out just yet. A few weeks ago I started raking the dirt for a spot to begin the burial proceedings for Scherzer and he’s really gotten it together.

Brian C.: In the event that Judge’s stubbed toe requires the full amputation of his leg, will our insurance policy require that we seek compensation from the Dodgers for their malicious failure to Judge-proof their stadium infrastructure?

Jay Jaffe: it’s been 10 years since Bryce Harper concussed himself by running into the outfield wall in Dodger Stadium. It is more than goddamn time for the Dodgers to make it safer

Fishersniffshisfarts: NV leg failed to take up ballpark bill in regular session, D-controlled leg will not put bill on agenda for special session and Gov can’t do anything about it … I should just sell and hope everyone forgets about me, right?

Jay Jaffe: without knowing much about Nevada politics, I wouldn’t read a ton into the lack of a special session just yet. I imagine that this is less a principled opposition to the A’s moving to Las Vegas than a means of getting Fisher to lower his ask before a bill can be considered. Which, good on LV and LOLA’s

Jason: Where would you rank Corbin Carroll in terms of early season MVP candidates? I imagine he’s behind Acuña and Freeman for sure, but after that it seems like he has an outside shot if he/the team continue to perform.

Jay Jaffe: I think you’d have to put Sean Murphy and Mookie Betts into the conversation as well, and Arraez is going to get support if he’s chasing .400. But right now Carroll looks like he belongs in the discussion

Fletcher: Does the tightening of the range of framing impact in recent years affect how you consider the massive framing values that Posey, Lucroy, Molina, etc put up in ’08-14ish? Should they be getting credited that much for being good framers in an era when teams were playing Ryan Doumit and other atrocious framers generating historic negative value that had to be offset leaguewide?

Jay Jaffe: it’s context to be aware of, not unlike how Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner and even Willie Mays dominated their leagues in WAR. you’re measuring a player’s distance from the group, and the decreasing extremes are evidence of the quality of play rising over time.

Jasper: More probable: Rays 10-game losing streak or A’s 10-game winning streak?

Jay Jaffe: The former. Even very good teams have bad luck and slumps sometimes

Las Vegas A’s: Hey, the Nevada legislative session ended without a ballpark bill for Las Vegas, and governor and speaker of the House are at odds over whether a stadium bill will be considered in special session. Think maybe the A’s organization screwed themselves over? (Am I wrong to be enjoying this?)

Jay Jaffe: I’m not sure whether the A’s actually screwed themselves over yet, but you should buy the biggest spoon you can to eat this up for the moment.

Farhandrew Zaidman: There is a stirring discussion on Sporer’s discord on whether DeGrom is HOF worthy or not, and it’s…uhh…pretty divided lol.

Jay Jaffe: In the spring of 2021 I made a case that he could be a Koufaxian exception (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jacob-degrom-might-be-blazing-his-way-to-c…). That owed a lot to his ZiPS projections for his ages 33-41 seasons: 76-44, 3.25 ERA, 182 starts, 28.7 WAR. Since then — 2 1/3 seasons later — he’s made 32 starts and added 6.7 WAR and the remaining career projections have come down.

Jay Jaffe:

Jay Jaffe: That’s from May 1 https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-ferrari-that-is-jacob-degrom-is-once-a…

Jay Jaffe: and he … doesn’t have 20 remaining starts anymore.

Jay Jaffe: i don’t think i’d vote for the “current career projection” line above

Guest: what is your mount rushmore of bad ranking configurations?

Jay Jaffe: occupying the first head on Mount Rushmore would be “My Hanukkah Menorah of Great ______”

Jay Jaffe: next to that “A Baker’s Dozen of the Best _______”

Jay Jaffe: In honor of Abe Lincolns’ spot on the actual Rushmore, here’s “Four Score and Seven of the Best ________”

Jay Jaffe: and finally a Rushmore on Rushmore, because why do we need to confine ourselves to four if we have five fingers? I may be an old man yelling at clouds, but this ain’t Springfield.

Guest: Why don’t major league schedulers make some effort to reduce the number of extra miles the Mariners and a few other outliers must travel every year?

Jay Jaffe: You know, the added travel burden on west coast teams is my biggest beef about the new schedule. IIRC, the so-called balanced schedule added  about 7% to the total number of air miles traveled by the 30 teams, with the Mariners more or less in line with that and the A’s increasing by like 20%. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/visuals/map?team=&year=2023

Jay Jaffe: Given all that we’ve learned about travel’s effect on the body and sleep, you’d think we should be trying to minimize this stuff. And maybe there are fewer times where players have to jump from Pacific to Eastern (the big one) that offset this, i don’t know, but I think the players have legitimate beef here

Erik: Combining your specialty with the big news of the day: Elly de la Cruz, surefire inner-circle Hall of Famer or even better than that?

Jay Jaffe: a ton of Elly questions in the queue. I’m excited for his debut, too! But I won’t pretend to know whether he’s going to light it up initially. I will say that debuting at 21 doesn’t give the player as good odds of reaching the Hall as debuting at 20 or 19. This is a couple years old but is more or less good enough:

Jay Jaffe:

Jay Jaffe: I’m just full of screenshots to old tables today

RA Niekro: Where do the Mets go from here?  Just hope the old guys perform better going forward?

Jay Jaffe: DH is a trade deadline solution and perhaps one outfield spot as well, but they’ve brought up the kids (Alvarez, Baty, Vientos) and need McNeil and Lindor to hit like they did last year, at the very least, and  getting Canha and/or Marte going would be helpful too

Alex: In light of the PGA Tour/LIV golf merger, when are you going to announce that you will be collaborating with Jack Morris on his new as-told-to autobiography “Hall-of-Famer”?

Jay Jaffe: LOL. Morris does feature in my Roger Craig tribute, as he was an early adopter who found great success with the splitter, though Sparky Anderson thought that messing with the splitter caused his other pitches to deteriorate

lee_rumbah: Favorite rookie pitcher thus far? I didn’t catch the Abbot start but Bobby Miller has the looks of a frontliner.

Jay Jaffe: I can’t claim anything close to a comprehensive view of all the folks people might name but I’ve been very impressed by Bobby Miller and Yennier Cano

Anon21: Such sad news about Strasburg’s continued setbacks and daily pain. I hate the Nationals and am glad in general that they’ve fallen apart, but I find it hard to fault their decisionmaking in choosing to build around him, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Jay Jaffe: They were a bit too giddy in re-signing him after he opted out, but damn did he come up huge in 2019. He’ll be fine financially, obv, but it is heartbreaking to see a pitcher with Hall-caliber talent fall apart like this and not even get the chance to pitch

Joe: Is Mike Trout’s peak over? Obviously still great player but this is the first year where he looks mortal

Jay Jaffe: yes, this may be true. We’re off by a few days that have lowered his wRC+ to 133, but his 144 through the end of May was his lowest:

Jay Jaffe:

Jay Jaffe: i only see a small handful of two-month spans where he had a lower wRC+ than that — though this is abiding by a strict calendar month structure, and I imagine we can find some less flattering 60-game spans as well by moving the endpoints

Guest: As HOF guru, help me get past two travesties. Pete Rose was one of the greatest players of all time.  His gambling came well after he retired as a player.  The hypocrisy of MLB now embracing gambling sites should be the tipping point for Rose to get in.  On the flip side, I can’t get past the Harold Baines induction. There must be 50 guys more deserving that got left out. How can you help prevent that from happening again?

Jay Jaffe: Rose was found to have gambled as a player. Players have been prohibited from gambling on baseball, with knowledge that the would be banned for life for doing so, since Landis handed down his ban on the Black Sox more than a century ago. Nothing MLB does with regards to getting into bed with gambling companies mitigates that one iota.

Farhandrew Zaidman: Is “WAR/GS” a stat that currently exists for SP, and if not, would it be helpful at all for the future of SP in the HOF (in the context of declining innings pitched)?

Jay Jaffe: I sometimes poke around with a WAR/200 (innings) as a cross-era comparative device. It’s worth keeping an eye on

Marshall: In a recent chat you made a couple references to a player having some number of “HoF seasons” vs (I think) “good” seasons. What is your cutoff for a HoF season, and how many do you view as necessary for enshrinement?

Jay Jaffe: when I say “HOF seasons” I mean “useful in building a foundation of a Hall of Fame case,” which isn’t to say that they need be elite seasons. Generally that starts around 4.5 WAR. You’re not getting in if those are your best years, or even your average across a 7-year peak, but if those are the worst of your 7-year peak (or won’t even fit into it) then you’re probably getting to the point of a reasonable case.

Jay Jaffe: this is while acknowledging that one player’s 4.5 season might look a whole lot better than another player’s 5.0 WAR season once we bring additional context into it (he won awards, led league in something, All-Star, did it in compressed amount of time)

Pixley: In or out on Casas? I feel like a team that thinks they can make the playoffs cant deal with this all season. Is there any hope for him? plate discipline only counts for so much , if there’s nothing else there

Jay Jaffe: The Red Sox really do need to send him down for a few weeks and get a reset. He’s lagging relative to his Statcast expected numbers but  -0.3 WAR ain’t cutting it.

Sammy So-so: I get the feeling that Volpe’s not going to make it to the All-Star break without a return trip to the minors. Is it clear to you what’s particularly ailing him as a hitter? Thanks, Jay.

Jay Jaffe: Volpe’s lagging too, by a similar margin (34 points of wOBA), but the difference is that his speed and defense have him worth 0.4 WAR. he’s really struggling with contact at the bottom of the zone, especially sinkers for some reason. Not sure what’s up there.

Jay Jaffe: But I don’t see the Yankees in a rush to send him down now that they’re playing well

RAndoM121: Would a borderline HOF player get a bump in voting had they played their whole career with a single team?

Jay Jaffe: it would probably help a little.

Joe Randa: Assuming he gets closer his previous form, what would you think Tatis HOF chances are? He seems like an interesting case study given his trajectory prior to 2022 and his ability to “redeem” himself after the suspension.

Jay Jaffe: We’re in uncharted territory here. If Tatis is a model citizen for the rest of his career — by which I mean no PED issues or other icky stuff, not suddenly becoming some boring normal button-down dude — I would think he’ll get a shot at the “redemption” angle in a way that others haven’t but we’re a good 20 years away from that, and he’s got a whole lot of ground to cover between now and then

Jay Jaffe: I didn’t bring it up in writing yesterday’s piece because the last Tatis HOF thing I did didn’t age too well (that’s where the HOF by age table comes from ) https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fernando-tatis-jr-has-a-clear-shot-at-coop…

v2micca: Given Soroka’s demotion to AAA, are the Braves possibly going to give Smith-Shawver a shot at the rotation?

Jay Jaffe: looks like they’re doing exactly that https://www.mlb.com/news/aj-smith-shawver-likely-set-to-make-first-mlb…

Babipski: Something I’ve been thinking about recently, and wanted to see if you know of anyone who has seriously pondered it: is there a quantifiable change in league-wide babip that happened as many teams moved away from the incredibly bouncy turf of the concrete donut stadiums in the 90’s?

Jay Jaffe: yes. it rose pretty quickly. .281 in 1992, .294 in 1995, after expansion into Miami and Colorado and the start of the big building boom

Guest: Masa Yoshida is currently slashing .312/.389/.495. Has any rookie ever slashed .300/.400/.500 before? Mike Trout was at a .399 OBP in 2012

Jay Jaffe: Yordan Alvarez hit .313/.412/.655 in 369 PA in 2019. Pujols, Fred Lynn, Ted Williams, Paul Waner among the others

https://stathead.com/tiny/pFA1V

A Boy Named Yu: Is Mervis going to start mashing anytime soon?

Jay Jaffe: i love the nickname but the scouting grades always suggested he was more of a project than a true prospect. His xSLG and xBA are better than his actual numbers but he’s going to have to make bigger advances

Jason: Is there a stats like Wins Above Average Player? Only asking because wRC+, OPS+, ERA-/+ all adjust to league average, yet the most common valuation of a player is WAR. Would it not make sense to have that stat? Is an average player at 1 WAR? So we can just adjust the scale of WAR to get that value?

Jay Jaffe: First off, 2 WAR is about average for a full season of playing time.

B-Ref tracks WAA on its player pages. WAA is useful but it doesn’t convey volume, and volume matters. if a guy is 1 WAA, we don’t know whether that’s in 100 PA or 600. If he’s 3 WAR we at least know he got a subtantial amount of playing time to build to that number

Jay Jaffe: Volume especially matters when it comes to Hall stuff since there are thresholds below which players don’t get considered. Ichiro and Bryce Harper have roughly the same WAA (0.1 difference) but one has over 3,000 hits (automatic) and the other 1,412 (not enough to get elected).

Ben: Do you have a general rule/thought on when to let a young player struggle v sending him down to work it out not in the spotlight?  Is it about the team’s goal (meaning how the team is doing) v. something else?

Jay Jaffe: We can look at indicators of controlling the strike zone and actual vs expected outcomes but honestly I think there are a lot of soft factors that can and should go into the decision. Is this guy spiraling when he’s got bad results? Is he having competitive at-bats? is there something going on injury or mechanic-wise that we’re not aware of? There’s a lot only a team can answer, which again is why i don’t think the Yankees are inclined to send Volpe down, because they rave about the kid’s makeup and adjustments and poise, et.c

Jason: As someone who hasn’t been to Cooperstown since 2013, have there been noticeable changes in the past decade that warrant a new visit?

Jay Jaffe: Yes. Very, very much yes. The “A Whole New Ballgame” exhibit,” which was installed in 2015, is vibrant and brought the museum in to the 21st century, and more recently, I LOVE the baseball card exhibit. They’ve expanded the women in baseball exhibit, and more. Get thee to Cooperstown if you can!

Chichikov: Theoretically  small HOF would have __ players born per decade and a big HOF would have __ players born per decade.

Jay Jaffe: I think of it more in terms of HOFers per team-season, with 1.0 too low and 2.0 maybe a bit high but reflective of actual membership in some eras.

Jay Jaffe: see https://blogs.fangraphs.com/cooperstown-notebook-insights-from-the-spr…

Jason N: Great Tatis article.  In your opinion, which of these are the primary drivers for his uneven performance 1) Rust. 2) No more roids. 3) Shoulder surgery. 4) Normal year-to-year performance variance?

Jay Jaffe: I think the big thing is the shoulder and the rust. He never tested positive while putting up major league numbers so I don’t think it’s right to attribute his fall-off to that when more obvious explanations exist.

Duff’s or Anchor Bar?: Manoah optioned to Buffalo!

Jay Jaffe: They’re reading my chat!

Jay Jaffe: Ok folks, thanks for all of the great q today, those two hours went quickly. Next time I rap at ya it will be from the field office in Wellfleet, Massachusetts!

Guest: If Elvis Andrus hypothetically played another ten seasons to age 44, averaged 100 hits per season and got to 3,000 hits, would he be a Hall of Famer?

Jay Jaffe: Hall of Nick Markakis.