Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Ford… Don Larsen did not have a career that placed him among the pantheon of great Yankees. Indeed, he was quite the journeyman, a league-average righty who toiled for seven teams during his 14-year major league career (1953-65, ’67) without making a single All-Star team. Yet on October 8, 1956, Larsen captured lightning in a bottle, assuring himself a permanent welcome among pinstriped legends and throughout baseball by throwing the only perfect game in World Series history. Larsen, who became a regular at Old Timers’ Day celebrations alongside more decorated Yankees, died of esophageal cancer on Wednesday in Hayden, Idaho at the age of 90.

In front of 64,519 fans at Yankee Stadium, facing the defending champion Dodgers — who sported a lineup that featured future Hall of Famers Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, and Duke Snider — the 26-year-old Larsen retired all 27 batters he faced, seven by strikeout. The last of those was Dale Mitchell, pinch-hitting for pitcher Sal Maglie, who had held the Yankees to two hits and five runs. On Larsen’s 97th pitch of the afternoon, Mitchell checked his swing on a pitch on the outside corner. “Got him!” exclaimed Vin Scully, who had taken the baton from Mel Allen in calling the game for NBC. “The greatest game ever pitched in baseball history by Don Larsen, a no-hitter, a perfect game in a World Series… When you put it in a World Series, you set the biggest diamond in the biggest ring.”

Note that Scully erred in referring to “only the second time in baseball history” where such a feat had happened. To that point, it had been over 34 years since the previous perfect game, and there had been just five in major league history: two in 1880, then ones by Boston’s Cy Young (May 5, 1904), Cleveland’s Addie Joss (October 2, 1908), and Chicago’s Charlie Robertson (April 30, 1922). Read the rest of this entry »

In the final (for now) installment of a special, seven-episode series on the past, present, and future of advanced analysis in non-baseball sports, Ben Lindbergh talks to sabermetric pioneer Sherri Nichols about her trailblazing work in baseball analysis and then data scientist and sports entrepreneur Tiffany Kelly (41:02) about her experience in the sports analytics field, touching on their contributions to rec.sport.baseball, Retrosheet, and ESPN and the need for greater diversity and representation in the industry (plus a postscript from Ben on Scott Boras and insights and takeaways from the entire Multisport Sabermetrics Exchange series).

Audio intro: Tegan and Sara, "Come On"
Audio interstitial: The Sensations, "Let Me In"
Audio outro: Nas, "Represent"

Link to Ben’s article on Sherri
Link to story on Sherri on the CMU site
Link to story on Sherri in the CMU magazine
Link to Sherri writing about Defensive Average in 1990
Link to rec.sport.baseball archive
Link to story on the Andrew File System
Link to Tiffany on her career in sports analytics
Link to Tiffany on the Sports Analytics Club Program
Link to the SACP’s site
Link to article about Rachel Balkovec
Link to Jalen Rose’s comments about analytics
Link to Jalen Rose’s follow-up comments
Link to ESPN report about the MLB Racial and Gender Report Card
Link to past MLB report cards
Link to MLB Diversity Fellowship Program
Link to Boras prediction
Link to order The MVP Machine

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This year’s free agent market provided few options for teams seeking center fielders. Only 36-year-old Brett Gardner made our Top 50 Free Agents list, and he’s played a significant number of innings in the corners. The non-tendering of Kevin Pillar added another option, but he’s a slightly below-average performer and forecasts to be the same this season. None of the other major league free agents projects for even a win above replacement next season. All of that combined to make Shogo Akiyama potentially the best — and possibly the only — full-time starting center fielder available for a team hoping to contend. The Reds have been very clear about their wish to contend in 2020 and with multiple question marks in their outfield, Akiyama and Cincinnati have reportedly agreed on a three-year deal. The cost isn’t yet known, but reports have thrown out figures in the $15 million to $20 million range.

Akiyama comes to the Reds without a posting fee due to his tenure in Japan. He will be 32 years old in April, though he’s been incredibly durable the last five years, playing in the maximum 143 games each year and averaging 674 plate appearances per season during that time. He’s put up at least 20 homers in each of the last three seasons, though his isolated slugging percentage dropped by about 50 points in 2019 compared to the 2017 and 2018 seasons. Scouting reports are mixed on Akiyama’s present skillset. At Sports Info Solutions, Wil Hoefer wrote the following as part of his scouting report:

The good news on that front is that Akiyama has starting outfielder tools right now. His quick hands and good bat speed give him above-average game power and hit tools, albeit with some concerns about rigidity in his wrists and his occasional issues falling out of the batter’s box on contact. He’s an above-average runner in his early 30s, and while he does show good range and jumps in center, advanced defensive metrics–which should be taken with a grain of salt since they are a fairly new phenomenon in evaluating NPB players–are lukewarm at best and show a decline in Runs Saved from his earlier years in center field.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Marlins have spent this offseason quietly adding a number of high-upside veterans on the cheap. They’ve traded for Jonathan Villar after Baltimore unceremoniously dumped him, claimed Jesús Aguilar on waivers, and added Francisco Cervelli on a one-year contract worth just $2 million. They continued to upgrade their roster just after Christmas, signing Corey Dickerson to a two-year deal worth $17.5 million.

The left-handed outfielder fills a big need on the Marlins roster. In 2019, Miami utilized the uninspiring trio of Harold Ramirez, Curtis Granderson, and Austin Dean for the lion’s share of the innings in left field. They collectively cost the Marlins 1.7 wins, with just Ramirez rating above replacement level. For a rebuilding club, this isn’t necessarily concerning or surprising. In Dean and Ramirez, the Marlins were simply looking to see if either minor league veteran could make it in the big leagues, and Granderson was a classic clubhouse veteran playing out the last days of a long career.

But with the Marlins looking to break free from their endless rebuilding phase, adding Dickerson is a savvy move. He immediately upgrades their outfield and provides the club with a much-needed left-handed bat in the lineup. Since his debut in 2013 for the Rockies, he’s posted a 117 wRC+ and 11.5 WAR. After a good start to his career in Colorado, a strikeout problem and getting traded away from the Rays forced him to make some changes to his approach in 2018. In Pittsburgh, he started choking up regularly in an effort to make much more contact. The adjustments worked and he cut his strikeout rate by almost 10 points. Read the rest of this entry »

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.” – Molière

Injuries are one of baseball’s most common complaints. If there has ever been a contender that fell short without blaming injuries as one of the reasons, I certainly don’t remember them. What’s rarely admitted to is the fact that almost every team suffers these setbacks, and that it’s the teams that get to play with their entire on-paper roster from the preseason that are the extreme outliers.

The 2019 Yankees didn’t need many excuses for their final results. Despite losing most of the desired starting lineup and their best pitcher from 2018, the team won 103 games, three more than the previous year. As an Oriole fan who grew up in Baltimore, the Yankees being so darn good despite all of their setbacks is irksome. As a baseball analyst, I can’t help but admire what they accomplished. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Batch two of my completist series features a pair of 400-homer sluggers who spent their final four years as teammates on the South Side of Chicago, that after having briefly crossed paths — in an organizational sense, at least — in Cincinnati in 1998. While both routinely put up big home run and RBI totals — reaching 40 homers eight times between them, and driving in 100 runs 12 times — their lack of speed and subpar defense made for surprisingly low WAR totals that quashed any real debate about Hallworthiness. Which isn’t to say that they didn’t have their moments during compelling careers…

Adam Dunn

At 6-foot-6, 240 pounds, Adam Dunn was built like a football player — and he was, to the point of signing a letter of intent to play for the University of Texas — but he could pulverize a baseball as well. In a 14-year career (2001-14), “The Big Donkey” reached 40 homers in a season six times, and 30 in a season another three times; he homered with a frequency topped by just a dozen players in baseball history. An exceptionally disciplined hitter, Dunn wore pitchers out, walking at least 100 times in a season eight times. He racked up his share of strikeouts as well, at one point breaking Bobby Bonds‘ single-season record, and in fact retired as the King of the Three True Outcomes — the player who either homered, walked, or struck out in the highest share of plate appearances of anybody with at least 4,000 career plate appearances, and the exemplar of a set of trends that for better or worse has come to define 21st century baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.” – Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

There is only one truly poor team in Major League Baseball, and 29 others that just cosplay as Dickensian street urchins. When the Chicago Cubs weep about how there’s just no money in this baseball thing, it’s impossible to take their statements at face value. When the Tampa Bay Rays do it, I take it a lot more seriously.

“Build it, and nobody will come.” Unlike their cross-state rivals, the Miami Marlins, the Rays have been able to build teams that win consistently. They drew moderately well in their debut season, but a decade of losing, in large part due to an incompetent Chuck LaMar-led front office, got things off to a rocky start. Winning 97 games and an AL pennant in 2008 couldn’t raise the team’s attendance to two million, and winning at least 90 games in five of six years appeared to do nearly nothing to bring fans to the ballpark. Tampa Bay drew fewer fans in 2018 and 2019 than they did in their 68-94, last-place 2016, the team’s worst year since they exorcised the Devil from their nickname. Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Twins had a tremendous 2019 regular season. They set a franchise record for wins, set a major league record for home runs, and did it all with a core of exciting hitters who will be back in 2020. If every season could go like the 2019 regular season, the Twins would be sitting pretty.

Of course, it wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops. A midseason swoon briefly dropped them behind the Cleveland Indians, who remain their biggest intradivision competition heading into 2020. Their starting rotation, so solid top to bottom in 2019, wasn’t as locked up as the hitters — four of the five pitchers who made the most starts either reached free agency or had contract options declined. And of course, they got drummed out of the playoffs in three nasty, brutish, but most definitely not short games with the Yankees.

Earlier this week, the Twins made two moves that help address those three areas of concern from the 2019 season. They signed Rich Hill and Homer Bailey to one year contracts totaling $10 million ($3 million for Hill, $7 million for Bailey), though Hill’s contract has reachable playing time incentives that could see it reach $9.5 million. Let’s cover the way these moves helped through the lens of the three areas that felled them last year. Read the rest of this entry »

In the sixth installment of a special, seven-episode series on the past, present, and future of advanced analysis in non-baseball sports, Ben Lindbergh talks to Motorsports Analytics founder and The Athletic writer David Smith about NASCAR and then former Garmin-Sharp and Team Sky analyst Robby Ketchell about cycling (47:48), touching on the origins of sabermetrics-style analysis in each sport, the major challenges, big breakthroughs, and overturned misconceptions, the early adopters, the cutting-edge stats and tech, the level of acceptance within the game, the effects on the spectator experience, the parallels with baseball, and more, plus a postscript on Bucky Dent, Rich Hill, the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, and ESPN Bat Track.

Audio intro: Grateful Dead, "The Race is On"
Audio interstitial: Yo La Tengo, "The Race is on Again"
Audio outro: George Harrison, "Faster"

Link to David Smith’s archive at The Athletic
Link to Motorsports Analytics site
Link to Positive Regression Podcast
Link to David’s 2019 analytical takeaways
Link to David on Erik Jones
Link to David on driver stat darlings
Link to David on crew chief stat darlings
Link to David on metrics that do or don’t matter
Link to article on Andrew Maness and NASCAR
Link to article about Robby and Team Sky
Link to article on Team Sky’s use of data
Link to article on big data in racing
Link to article about technology in racing
Link to article about Chris Froome’s power data
Link to article about technology in racing
Link to article about using power data to detect doping
Link to article about Team Sky and doping
Link to another article about Team Sky and doping
Link to article about Robby and Kipchoge
Link to Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method Wiki
Link to ESPN broadcast featuring Bat Track
Link to story about Bat Track
Link to order The MVP Machine

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