We spend a lot of time fretting about baseball. Baseball games take too long; teams use too many pitchers and make too many visits to the mound. There are too many strikeouts; there aren’t enough balls put in play. These complaints are dressed up in anxiety over the game’s future, but I think the real worry is closer to home. It’s about us. I think what’s really at the center of it is a gnawing concern that these slowdowns will make us want to watch something else entirely, that we might come to find baseball boring.

But there are worse things than being bored. Wednesday night, in the fourth inning of the Dodgers-Rangers game, Adrian Beltre scored on a close play. It appeared that Austin Barnes had tagged him out, but home-plate umpire Sean Barber disagreed. A man in the crowd was inspired to make a face.

Dave Roberts challenged and it went to a replay, which began at 2:02:25. The home broadcast showed some slo-mo.

https://gfycat.com/GloriousDearestClam

The broadcast was confident the replay would go the Dodgers’ way. Enrique Hernandez, whose throw looked like it had nabbed Beltre, seemed confident. Beltre looks pretty out.

But at 2:05:00, the call on the field was upheld. The crowd booed. They’d spent more than two-and-a-half minutes waiting around — only to lose out. It didn’t end up mattering: the Dodgers won in the 11th inning after Hernandez evaded a tag of his own. But for those few minutes in the fourth, Dodger fans were something worse than bored. They were bored and angry. It’s a terrible combination of things to feel, and one that replay seems to inspire often, which is understandable, though I’ll admit it makes me worry about how passionate we are for justice. And so, in all our fretting about the game, I thought I’d check in on replay and see how it is going so far this season.

Baseball Savant maintains a handy replay database, but it doesn’t include 2018 replays yet, so it’s Retrosheet to the rescue. Retrosheet’s data also includes the duration of each replay — an indispensable data point for those concerned with the dull and enraging. They update their data every two weeks; the replays I’m analyzing are through May 31.

Two quick notes. First, the time listed for each replay is from the beginning of the review until New York’s decision is announced. That might seem like an obvious point, but it may, in some cases, undersell the length of the delay on the field. Last year, I wrote about an 18-minute long replay at Dodger Stadium. It was a rules check and the longest replay of 2017. Retrosheet has it taking 8:34. So there’s a bit of squishiness here.

Second, in case you’ve forgotten (and honestly, why would you remember?), before the 2017 season, MLB released new guidance that, with a few exceptions, the Replay Operations Center in New York has two minutes to render a decision on a play. That’s what they’re driving toward. It’s part of keeping us from feeling bored and angry.

Now, some observations.

You might ask, “When is replay most likely to occur?” Maybe you’re naturally curious about things. As you might imagine, challenges become more common the later into a game a team gets.

Through May 31, managers initiated 436 challenges, a full half of which have came between the sixth and ninth innings; indeed, since replay expanded in 2014, close to 49% of the replays in nine inning games have come between the sixth and ninth innings. The eighth inning saw the greatest number of challenges, but also the lowest success rate, among non-extra innings frames. That makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. Late in games, I would imagine, managers are more inclined to challenge borderline calls, both because the stakes are higher and because why the heck not? You can’t take those challenges with you. More borderline calls also means more calls on the field that stand or are confirmed, but why not try? Maybe that runner in scoring position is actually out on the tag!

And speaking of tags, you might also wonder, “What is getting reviewed, and for how long?” The below table shows all 2018 replays by type, along with the average and median duration of the replay in minutes, and the success rate for challenges of each type.

Fans have, for the most part, stayed out of the way. Despite recent dustups, the slide rule that caused so much controversy in years past hasn’t been much of an issue, or at least has merited little investigation. Umpires mostly know what a catch is. Force plays seem a bit trickier, though they didn’t take long on average to sort out. Stadium boundary replays took the longest, both by average and median length in minutes, though there weren’t many of them. With the exception of the boundary plays, replay officials are, on average, adhering to their two-minute guidance. Of the 490 total calls, 377 have been two minutes or under in length.

But I think the most common category of replay underscores the enterprise’s greatest challenge (no pun intended). Now, I haven’t watched all 197 tag replays, but I would hazard a guess that some portion of them — perhaps a significant portion — involve runners coming off a base ever so slightly for just a teeny tiny touch of time. We’ve seen this sort of replay play out, sometimes in big moments of important games, resulting in a guy who would have been safe for the 100 years prior suddenly being out. We can’t exactly blame managers for asking that tags be reviewed; we’ve told them there might be an out hiding in there. And some portion of these allow us to examine swim moves and close plays, and that isn’t a terrible use of time. But we’ve spent some part of 288 minutes peaking under guys’ fingers and toes. Avengers: Infinity Wars, for sake of comparison, was only 160 minutes and involved a bunch more people. I submit that this is when we are at our most bored, and certainly our most angry.

And of course, fans of some teams should be angrier and perhaps more bored than others.

None of these samples are large enough to tell anything definitive, but as an indication of efficacy so far, we can learn a few things. The Royals, Phillies, and Yankees have fared the best in their challenges. The Braves have challenged more times than any other team, but have a middling success rate. They are still doing better than the Padres, who (in admittedly fewer attempts) have a league-worst success rate. The Orioles fare only marginally better.

Baltimore did initiate the longest challenge of the year, a review of a fair/foul call that lasted 4:32 they ultimately won.

Everyone looked thrilled as they waited.

Just a great day at the office.

We can also see something interesting when we look at the distributions of how long reviews take, grouped by their result.

The graph isolating 2018 is a bit rougher, but retains the same general shape.

From 2014 to -18, a “stands” call took about 40 seconds longer than “confirmed” or “overruled” calls did, which I think shows that replay is generally working how you would want it to when you consider that the standard for overturning calls made on the field is having “clear and convincing evidence” that the call was incorrect. One would hope that if a call were obviously right or obviously wrong, it wouldn’t take very long to reach that conclusion. Absent some bit of striking evidence, best to leave it be.

I think it is worth adding a small bit of perspective to this analysis. We’ve all had the experience of seeing a replay go the “wrong” way. We’ve all felt like our boys have gotten jobbed. We’ve been Wednesday night’s Dodgers’ fans. We begin to question the whole endeavor.

But we might benefit from recalling how frustrating it was, in the era of slo-mo and hi-def, to know that a call on the field was wrong, to be able to see it right there, and then have to watch as a baserunner trudged back to the dugout when he should have been on base, or as a pitcher was left to contend with a runner who should have been erased by a tag. It felt unfair. It felt silly. It felt like an injustice. We’re sometimes bored and angry now, but we were also bored and angry then! And it isn’t costing us that much. The season isn’t done, but so far, 2018 is following a trend of replay times decreasing as the years go on.

These aren’t huge numbers to begin with; I doubt even a close observers could perceive the difference between 2015’s average replay time of 1.85 minutes and 2017’s 1.46. But it isn’t ballooning out the other way, either. Through May 31, MLB was on pace for 1,285 replays, which would be the lowest number since replay was expanded in 2014. That could change, of course, but it hasn’t been so bad so far. It’s an attempt to get things more right more often.

I calculated how much time each team had spent under replay review, including both those reviews they had initiated and those initiated by their opponents or by umpires, and compared that time to their total game minutes in 2018. I’ll spare you another long table, but the team that has spent the most time in replay as a percentage of their total playing time is the Blue Jays at… 0.57%. That’s a little more than 58 minutes across all their games, and theirs is the worst of it.

That isn’t so bad. Replay gets things wrong from time to time; we all have bad days at work, after all, and humans remain fallible, even with slo-mo. But I’m not sure the game is well served by putting too strict a clock on justice. Not even when we’re bored and angry.

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The Orioles’ season as a whole has been a bleak one. They’ve got the majors’ lowest-scoring offense at 3.49 runs per game, and the third-worst run prevention at 5.22 runs per game — yes, they’re being outscored by nearly two runs every time they take the field. Halfway through June, they’re already 27 games out of first place, and on a 46-116 pace.

If you think that’s bad, pour yourself a stiff drink and then barrel headlong into the heart of darkness by considering the performance of Chris Davis.

In the annals of baguiseball history, you can find bad seasons by garden-variety players who weren’t making much money. You can find terrible seasons by highly paid players who quite reasonably could have been expected to perform better; Albert Pujols finishing with -1.9 WAR last year at a price of $26 million is just the most recent example. And then there is whatever is going on with Davis. The 32-year-old Orioles slugger, who’s in the third year of a seven-year, $161 million deal, is threatening to produce the least valuable season of all time in terms of WAR. Through the Orioles’ 67 games (of which he’s played just 57), he’s at -1.9 WAR, which projects to somewhere between -4.6 and -4.7 over a 162-game season. (Depending on the rounding: his WAR actually rose overnight while the Orioles were inactive.)

As Dan Szymborski put it the other day:

Here is the leaderboard of the damned:

That list includes some familiar names of relatively recent vintage, glove men (by reputation, if not metrics) with woefully inadequate bats such as Perez and Guzman, a big lug who could no longer even fake defensive responsibilities (Dunn), a former MVP on his last legs (McGee), a future legend in the scouting and player-development realm (Thompson), some commons from my first couple sets of Topps baseball cards (Royster, Rockett, Meyer, and just outside the frame at -2.5 WAR, 1977-model Doug Flynn), a guy who played like he was the 148-year-old former shortstop of the pioneering Boston Red Stockings (Wright), the shortstop on the team with the most runs allowed in a single season since 1901 (Thevenow, whose Phillies yielded 7.79 runs per game; the aforementioned Thompson was his double-play partner), and a woefully overmatched shortstop for some particularly crummy Browns teams who also played in the NFL (Levey). Davis could top — or out-bottom — them all.

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Rob Manfred, MLB owners, players: we have a problem. Some of your ticket buyers are missing. In fact, nearly two million of them.

As we approach the official beginning of summer and the midpoint of the baseball season, attendance is down by about 2,000 per game, or 6.7%, relative to a year ago.

MLB attendance has generally and gradually been declining since its peak of 79.48 million fans in 2007. That was 32,696 per contest. The average per-game figure fell below 30,000 last year for the first time since 2003.

Of course, this year’s numbers were deflated early in the season, when April brought brutally cold weather to much of the country. Through the first two-plus weeks of the campaign, baseball was drawing about 2,700 fewer fans per game — or about 8.9% compared to the previous April, as noted by Jeff Passan.

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There are a lot of strikeouts in today’s game. The most ever, in fact. If the season were to end today, the league’s 22.4% strikeout rate would represent an all-time high, eclipsing the record set in 2017. That record from 2017 surpassed the one set in 2016, which itself surpassed the one set in 2015, which surpassed the one set in 2014. Ever since 2008, actually, baseball has produced a new strikeout record, and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious end in sight.

With all those strikeouts come a lot of opinions on how to reduce strikeouts. The latest set of proposals come from Tom Veducci at Sports Illustrated. Verducci correctly places blame/credit for the strikeouts with the pitchers, where it belongs, and he suggests a few solutions: lowering the mound, limiting the number of pitchers on an active roster, and introducing a pitch clock.

I find it curious that Verducci omits any mention of the strike zone itself. I have previously proposed raising the bottom of the strike zone to put more balls in play, but there are others — including at least one MLB manager — who believe that a larger strike zone might increase the number of balls in play.

The possibility of this effect is one I’ve heard mentioned on broadcasts before, so it isn’t without precedent. The theory goes like this: an expanded strike zone will force batters to exercise less patience and, as a result, swing at more pitches. More swings, and perhaps more emphasis on contact, means more balls in play.

Fortuitously, this is a theory we can test, because the strike zone actually hasn’t remained static in recent years. In fact, thanks to great research by Jon Roegele, we know exactly where the strike zone has gotten bigger. The very bottom of the strike zone has increased considerably over the last decade, and although it got slightly smaller the last couple seasons, the trend has reversed itself this year. Even if there wasn’t an increase this year, the strike zone would still be substantially larger at the bottom of the zone than it was a decade ago.

Episode 819
Jake Mailhot is a staff editor at Mariners blog Lookout Landing. Even more relevant to this episode, he also served as FanGraphs’ resident for the month of May. On this edition of the program, he discusses the lengthy correspondence between his Chinese grandparents, the ancient correspondence between Paul and the Ephesians, and Edwin Diaz as religious experience.

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 2 min play time.)

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Darick Hall was leading the Florida State League with 11 home runs when he was promoted to Double-A Reading on the first of June. That should come as no surprise. One year ago, the 22-year-old first baseman led the South Atlantic League with 27 bombs in first full professional season. In 2016, he went deep 20 times at Dallas Baptist University prior to being drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies in the 14th round.

Hall, who was slashing .277/.367/.538 at the time of his promotion, began thriving after he adopted a high-launch-angle swing in his final collegiate season. And he’s certainly not turning back. While the 6-foot-4, 240-pound left-handed hitter is off to a slow start in the Eastern League — a .497 OPS and a pair of home runs in 12 games — he profiles as one of the best young power hitters in the Phillies system.

Hall talked about his game, including his power stroke and improved plate discipline, shortly before moving up to Double-A.

———

Hall on becoming a more complete hitter: “Any time you’re labelled a power hitter, your power tool is kind of what shines. But you always want to be a complete hitter. You don’t want to sacrifice at-bats just to hit home runs. Your goal is to hit the ball square as many times as you can, and you definitely want to walk. Power hitters sometimes have a high strikeout rate, a low walk rate, and a low average. That’s not something you aspire to. You obviously want the home runs, but you also want to get on base.

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Leading off the bottom of the first inning on Wednesday, Harrison Bader worked a full count against Eric Lauer and hit a single up the middle. In a matchup between two promising National League rookies, Bader appeared to have the upper hand. Tommy Pham stepped in and saw a first-pitch strike, and then the Cardinals TV broadcast said the following:

One thing to keep in mind — Lauer has a tremendous pickoff move. He has picked off four in four consecutive games.
[pause]
Now five.

That quickly, Bader was erased. Eric Lauer has picked off a runner five games in a row. This is just the fifth time that’s known to have happened in major-league history, and this active streak is a Padres franchise record. The major-league leader in pickoffs in 2016 had six. The major-league leader in pickoffs in 2017 had seven. Lauer already has seven in 2018. He’s two ahead of anyone else, even though he’s thrown just 45 innings. Sure, if you wanted to be critical, you could say that Lauer has given himself plenty of pickoff opportunities. But he’s been a baserunner-erasing machine. When Lauer is on the mound, every runner has to be careful.

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Juan Soto is 19 years old and has hit 19 home runs this season. Of those 19 dingers, 14 happened before Soto reached the majors, but two of the MLB homers were hit last night. Through 76 plate appearances, Soto is putting up a Mike Trout-like .344/.447/.641 slash line good for a 192 wRC+ and an intriguing nickname. Hitting so well for a month is great, but it isn’t out of this world. So far this season, there have been 12 players who have put up a monthly split worth a 190 wRC+ or higher. That list includes names like Trout, Mookie Betts, Jose Ramirez, Francisco Lindor, and Manny Machado, but it also includes names like Daniel Robertson, Christian Villanueva, Brandon Crawford, and Scooter Gennett. What that hot start has done is changed Soto’s outlook both for this season and his career.

Soto has already drastically changed his projections for the year. Here are the top 30 hitters in baseball going forward according to our Depth Chart projections.

The projections say that at 19 years old, Juan Soto is one of the top 15 hitters in the game. The list above is an impressive one. Look at some of the names after Soto: Jose Ramirez, Carlos Correa, Jose Altuve. These are the very best hitters in baseball, and Soto looks to be their peer. Soto rose so quickly in part because of how little time he spent in the minors. As Eric Longenhagen wrote when Soto was called up, in recent history, only Alex Rodriguez had less experience in the minors than Soto. An injury last season kept his game log to a minimum, and that meant he was a bit underrated as a prospect entering the season. He was ranked No. 45 here at FanGraphs, and no major service put him among the top-20 prospects in baseball.

The recent update to the top prospects list here put Soto at No. 9, but he seems unlikely to make the list next season as he exhausts his rookie eligibility in the coming months. It’s difficult to understate how rare Soto’s performance is thus far, as his presence alone in the majors makes him a historical oddity. When Ronald Acuña was called up at just 20 years old earlier this season, Jay Jaffe conducted an analysis on debuts and the Hall of Fame. He found that of the 238 retired players to take a single plate appearance in the majors at 19 years old, 25 made the Hall of Fame, a roughly one-in-ten shot. Jaffe went a bit further and found that only 59 players in history took 100 plate appearances at Soto’s age, and of the 54 retired players, 13 went on to become Hall of Famers.

To try and put Soto’s season in context, I went back to 1905 and looked for players with at least 50 plate appearances at 19 years old or below. Soto already appears on the first page of the WAR leaderboards.

Of the 12 retired players above Soto, six are Hall of Famers. Three of the five players directly behind him are Hall of Famers, and the sixth player is Mike Trout. Also of interest, seven players have put up six-win seasons at age 20, and the only one not in the list above is Ted Williams. That list features nine of the best 13 age-20 seasons in history. Soto only has 76 plate appearances so far, but he’s also not done yet. For fun, let’s add two potential Sotos to the list above. One hypothetical Soto is completely unrealistic, but it shows what he would do with another 300 or so plate appearances if he kept up his torrid pace. The other version is more realistic, showing Soto’s rest-of-season projections combined with what he’s done so far.

Juan Soto is currently projected to have the sixth-best season by a 19-year-old since 1905 (and yes, I cherry-picked the year to get Ty Cobb in there). Of the six players to hit two wins in a season at Soto’s age, four are already in the Hall of Fame, a fifth is his teammate Bryce Harper, and the sixth, Edgar Renteria, put up 35 WAR in an underrated career. Refining the list a bit, here are the seasons of at least 300 plate appearances and a wRC+ of 100, a list Soto will crack after a couple-hundred plate appearances and a wRC+ above 70 the rest of the way.

Juan Soto’s season is special just because he made it to the major leagues. His season is spectacular due to his performance so far, and if history is any indication, he’s about to have a monstrous career.3

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