Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat — 7/9/24
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.
RE: Julio Rodriguez, I swear I saw a video detailing his swing mechanics changes going back to post-ASB last season, where he’s lifted his elbow more in his load. Obviously, we don’t have swing speed for 2022-2023, but his swing speed is 95th percentile in 2024, alongside drops in max and average exit velocity, hard hit%, and xwOBA, xSLG, etc., and a near-identical xBA. I wonder if he’s swinging harder to make up for the load change, and counterintuitively losing power.
EDIT: His barrel% has dropped from 90% to 77% to ~66% from 2022-2024.
The Jose Abreu hall of fame argument is asinine. Ichiro deserves the hall regardless, but if you look at all players stats from age 28 on, he is up there with the very best of the last 40 years, and really stands out if you exclude steroid users.
Jose Abreu came to MLB at age 27. Looking only at players age 27+ seasons, here are a few with more career WAR than Abreu: Melvin Mora, Alex Gordon, Randy Winn.
OK, you want to just look at offensive value; here are some players who outperformed him just looking at offense, and again, only age 27 onward: Derrek Lee, Travis Hafner, Mark Teixiera.
Abreu deserves to be on the ballot and maybe a token vote of appreciation from a Chicago writer he was nice to. That’s it.
Some thoughts on Altuve consistently outperforming his “expected” numbers:
His size makes him a unicorn at this level so it’s not surprising that the models have trouble with him
He bunts for hits regularly which forces the defense to honor that possibility which grants him more favorable defensive alignments to hit into. More grounders and line drives sneak by the drawn in 3Bman and the”no man’s land” between LF, SS, and 3B is expanded by the drawn in infielders so more bloops/jam shots become singles and doubles
He’s much faster than his listed sprint speed of 27 FT/S; was clocked at 31FT/S this year when he was busting it down the line. Basically he picks his spots more because he’s older and trying to stay healthy but when he smells hit, he still has difference making wheels and I’m not sure the models account for that
Defenders know that Altuve is fast and that knowledge puts more stress on them which leads to more mistakes that aren’t classified as errors
That’s all I got. Ultimately I think most of the answer is that Altuve is a unicorn who plays his home games in a park that is a good match for him
I think it’s pretty clear that his recent (2021-current) overperformance is mostly a result of x stats not accounting for horizontal launch angle (i.e. pull percentage). His pull rate spiked to 50% in 2019, dropped in the shortened 2021 season (which was not a good one for him) and has been over 50% since 2021. I also don’t see any mention of park factors in the xSLG calculation and Houston is very favorable to RHHs for HRs. So the combination of these two is giving him a big boost.
His early career overperformance got a boost from juiced balls benefiting hitters like Altuve more, along with the park factors.
I’d also agree with you that speed and savvy baserunning help to boost his stats over expected as well. xBA and xSLG largely ignore sprint speed or baserunning ability. Since 2019 they do include it for ‘topped’ and ‘weakly’ hit balls but I have to wonder if guys like Altuve and Betts see outsized benefits from speed on other batted ball types.
Definitely agree about his pull rate being a factor and I should have mentioned it.
His pull rate also means that he’s hitting into those more favorable defensive alignments that I referenced above, at a higher rate than most(and most players don’t have the speed+bunting skills to force the defense into those unfavorable alignments in the first place)
I’ve watched Altuve use his speed to stretch many singles into doubles, often times on balls that weren’t hit like a conventional double. So I think you’re onto something there as the hitters who would most outperform the “expected” numbers on balls in play would be players with speed and contact skills like Altuve and Betts
I hate people who love to exhibit their moral virtue by slapping a racist tag on someone.Who knows but stick to the baseball which your good at
From what I understand it’s not so much that he was just personally racist, which I guess is fine with some people. But it seems he played a fairly significant role in delaying the Red Sox from integrating. That seems worse than a dude who’s just a little loose with the N-word in traffic
Complaining about racism is the real racism!
I did not know there’d be Pinky Higgins defenders out there, but my dude, there is an entire Wikipedia subsection devoted to Higgins being a racist POS, this isn’t really that subjective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinky_Higgins#Racism
In the face of your hatred, I’d like to offer some light reading, since my perhaps-charitable assumption is that you simply haven’t done your homework. https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/10993/you-can-blog-it-up-dpotd-pinky-higgins-sick-bastard/
On Morel – yes, he was the worst third baseman in the majors by a wide margin in April and May (using Outs Above Average as the metric). But in July he was solidly average – worth exactly zero OAA, not positive or negative. If that means he is serviceable in the field, maybe he can focus on being serviceable at the plate again!
Please convert to printable transcript, thanks! Like to print out the chats.