Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a hiking analogy, the Nationals jettisoning relievers Brandon Kintzler and Shawn Kelley, and the no-longer-so-unhittable Justin Miller, then answer listener emails about Joey Gallo’s zero sac flies, Andrew Romine, red lights, and 3-0 swings, the ideal baseball height, the value of a roster spot, where to draw the line when covering players having horrible seasons, a pitcher who always allows a run per inning, why defenders sometimes reposition themselves with two strikes, the diminishing returns of adding relievers, and teams scoring (and out-scoring their opponent) in every inning of a game, plus Stat Blasts about teams with the most and fewest major-league debuts and the historic state of league-wide shortstop offense.

Audio intro: Joel Plaskett Emergency, "Red Light"
Audio outro: Sloan, "Keep Swinging (Downtown)"

Link to Escobar’s tweet

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 826
Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen recently traveled from Phoenix to Baltimore to Washington DC to Chicago to Catasauqua to Hartford to Wilmington, not necessarily in that order. What he does in this episode of FanGraphs Audio is to recount his travels.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 11 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Back in May, the Mariners agreed to a lease deal that would keep them in Safeco Field for another 25 years. At the time, I wrote that the Mariners appeared to be bucking a trend by foregoing public money for a new stadium in favor of staying where they were.

Then, last week, things seemed to change.

Predictably, this was not well received.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Gibson turned a corner midway through last season, and an eye-opening email was a big reason why. The 30-year-old right-hander received a valuable piece of information from the Minnesota Twins brain trust, and he’s used it to his full advantage. Gibson went 7-3 with a 3.76 ERA over the second half, and this year he’s been even better. In 22 starts for Derek Falvey and Thad Levine’s ball club, he has career lows in both ERA (3.47) and FIP (3.73), and his 8.80 strikeout rate is also a personal best.

Gibson talked about his career-altering adjustment, and his overall approach to pitching, when the Twins visited Fenway Park this past weekend.

———

Kyle Gibson: “When I got sent down last year, Derek and Thad emailed me, breaking down each of my starts over the past two years. It was the percentage of time I got my fastball in the strike zone, and it was astounding. When my fastball had an in-zone percentage over 50%, I hadn’t been beaten. That really opened my eyes.

“It was at that point when I started to figure out how my four-seamer plays early in the count, and how I can use my fastball to get guys to be more aggressive. My outlook on how I use that pitch has really changed. Before, I’d been thinking about executing fastballs in the right part of the zone. I’d been overcomplicating things. Now I’m simply trying to throw more fastballs in the zone.

“It’s about attacking middle early. You can’t pitch in the middle of the zone, but you can try to pitch to thirds. It started with, ‘Get more fastballs in the zone.’ Like, OK, how can we… my sinker, right? I relied so much on chase my first two years in the league — throwing sinkers in the zone and then just out of the zone. Well, let’s figure out how to keep the sinker in the zone. Let’s figure out how the four-seamer plays, both up and down. From there, let everything else fall into place. My fastball usage hasn’t increased. I’m just more efficient with it, and it’s helped make my offspeed better.

Read the rest of this entry »

In recent years, Major League Baseball has taken steps to make its product available by means of multiple platforms. A daily broadcast, for example, is offered both on ESPN+ and MLB.TV. A weekly one is carried by Facebook. MLB Network is accessible as part of basic packages available through streaming providers like DirecTVNow, Playstation Vue, and YoutubeTV, while the league broadcasts national games on its own network, at ESPN, FOX, FS1, and TBS. The game is out there for consumers who are interested.

That said, there is still a transition to be made before baseball can fully introduce itself to a younger generation of fans. The presence of Regional Sports Networks (RSNs), however, remains an impediment to evolution. RSNs generate massive revenues for MLB teams, either through contracts or ownership, but also require exclusivity. The reason for that arrangement is pretty clear when examining the viewership numbers and ratings (recently published at Forbes) for all teams except the Blue Jays. The graph below shows the average household numbers (HH) per team.

The numbers look how you might except, with New York, Boston, and Chicago (Cubs) drawing the most viewers, while smaller markets and bad teams occupy the lower ranks. The Dodgers’ audience should hypothetically be a lot larger, but the club still hasn’t been able to reach an agreement to get on DirecTV in Los Angeles. Despite that, more than two million people are watching baseball on an almost daily basis for six months out of the year. That’s incredibly valuable.

For networks, those loyal customers help RSNs secure large carriage deals with cable providers and to appear among standard cable packages, charging several dollars per subscriber. Advertising is nice, but RSNs make a vast majority of their money from per-subscriber fees. In turn, the networks dole out large guarantees to teams. The continued high ratings tend to justify these deals. The graph below shows the ratings, which are based on viewers within a market, as opposed to the total household figures.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite post-deadline activities to do is to force ZiPS to act a bit like a time machine. Not the cool kind that goes back in history and saves James Garfield or into the future to see the dependable hoverboards that we were supposed to get in 2015, but to give a bottom-line estimate of how, based on projections, the trade deadline mixed up those playoff races.

To do this, I first start with the updated ZiPS projections as of the morning of August 1st, which includes my spin on the new depth charts. There’s some variation from the FanGraphs Depth Charts, but they tend to be in the same neighborhood given that the disagreements between playing-time predictions typically involve mostly fringe-type players; it’s not like one of us thinks Clayton Kershaw will start for the Dodgers and the other things they’ll release him or something.

Then, I “undo” every transaction made since June 15th, both reshuffling the depth charts as if the trades never happened and removing or adding the fractional wins that players have added to their new teams since those trades. Then… ZiPS-zap-zippity-zoop… out come the new projections and a bottom line of the changes in playoff odds. Let’s start with the American League with the bottom-line playoff improvements. (We’ll get into the divisions next.)

The rather prosaic results here demonstrate just how relatively set the American League is in 2018. Four of the teams are nearly guaranteed playoff appearances: Boston, Cleveland, Houston, and New York. The fifth playoff spot essentially has only two real contenders in the Seattle Mariners and Oakland A’s. There are a few additional questions here, mainly whether the Yankees can catch the Red Sox or Seattle can shock Houston, but after those six teams, the odds of a seventh team becoming playoff-relevant down the stretch are very long. Sure, the Angels and Rays aren’t mathematically out of the hunt by any means — they both have something better than a Dumb and Dumber “So you’re saying there’s a chance?” probability — but even those two teams didn’t act like they believed it was anything more than pure moon shot.

If you haven’t figured it out from the context, “PrePlayoff” represents the team’s playoff probability without any of the trades of the last six weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan break down (almost) all the trade-deadline deals by (almost) every team, with special attention to the Chris Archer trade between the Pirates and Rays, the Nationals’ non-trades and their competitors’ improvements, the Orioles’ many moves, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers, the Brewers’ remade infield, the Astros and Roberto Osuna, and much, much more.

Audio intro: Badfinger, "It’s Over"
Audio outro: Arkells, "Deadlines"

Link to Ben’s post on the combined Orioles and Royals
Link to Ben’s post the busy, reliever-centric deadline
Link to Doolittle’s tweets

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

For as pitching-rich as the Braves may be, they could not afford to stand pat at the non-waiver trade deadline, particularly given the recent struggles of their rotation, the uncharted territory towards which their top starters are heading innings-wise, and a 31-games-in-31-days stretch that has only just begun. On Tuesday afternoon, they dealt four prospects and $2.5 million in international signing bonus slot money to the Orioles in exchange for 27-year-old righty starter Kevin Gausman and 35-year-old righty reliever Darren O’Day It’s the second deal in three days between the two teams, following Atlanta’s acquisition of 32-year-old righty reliever Brad Brach, also in exchange for slot money.

At 56-47, the Braves entered Tuesday half a game back in both the NL East (behind the Phillies) and the Wild Card races (behind the D-backs, .001 ahead of the Rockies). They’ve generally gotten good work from their starters this year, at least in terms of ERA, as the rotation ranks third in the NL (3.68). They’re a shakier eighth in FIP (4.19), with a gaudy 9.8% walk rate, the league’s second-worst. The team’s 9-13 record this month owes plenty to the unit’s recent struggles; their 4.90 ERA and 4.95 FIP in July both rank in the bottom third of the league.

All of that has been a problem, but if the Braves stay In This Thing, they’ll have another:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers have seemingly courted Brian Dozier for years. Last offseason, they seemed to settle for Logan Forsythe to fill their second-base needs. But the desire lingered and, in the final hour leading up to Tuesday’s 4 p.m. non-waiver trade deadline, the Dodgers and Dozier finally got together.

The price of Dozier on Tuesday was cheaper than it was two years ago when the Twins refused an offer of Jose De Leon, who was later shipped to the Rays for Forsythe. To acquire Dozier, the Dodgers sent Forsythe and minor-league pitcher Devin Smeltzer and corner bat Luke Raley to the Twins. Neither was ranked by FanGraphs among the Dodgers’ top 21 prospects in the spring.

While the cost came down, Dozier, 31, is nearly two years older and perhaps not the same player. He’s also headed to free agency after the season. Still, this is a trade about today for the Dodgers. Second base is a real need for Los Angeles, and even a subpar Dozier, whose 91 wRC+ represents a six-year low, is a real upgrade.

Dodgers second basemen have produced an anemic .213/.303/.287 slash line to date, ranking 28th in the majors in wRC+ (66) and 27th in second base WAR (-0.3). Forsythe (55 wRC+), Chase Utley (84 wRC+), and company were just not getting the job done, producing a drag effect on the lineup.

The Dodgers have ridden the game’s macro-level trends about as well as any team in recent years. They’ve manipulated the 10-day DL, have employed an opener, limited pitchers’ trips through lineups, and were willing to give more dollars and years than any other club to Rich Hill’s unconventional pitch mix two winters ago. (Hill’s usage is now becoming more and more conventional.) Justin Turner has preached the power of the air ball to teammates like Chris Taylor. In Dozier, they get another hitter with natural loft and pull-side power.

Read the rest of this entry »