Anyone who has ever studied statistics generally, and sabermetrics or other analytics specifically, will have at least a passing familiarity with the idea of sample sizes. I’m not a sabermetrician – nor do I play one on TV – but you can’t be a good trial lawyer without at least a decent understanding of statistics. And regardless of the statistic, it’s generally true that one game isn’t really all that useful. I mean, it’s useful in the sense that being entertained is useful, but it’s usually not useful in the sense that you can determine talent levels from it.

Enter the Nationals and Mets. They are both, in theory, Major League Baseball teams. They both play on the East Coast. And on July 31, as major league teams are wont to do, they played a baseball game. And when they were done, this had happened.

And as you might expect for a team that scored 25 runs, a lot went right for the Nationals. Daniel Murphy had three hits, hit two homers, and drove in six, yet had just a 0.10 WPA, because that’s what happens when your team scores 25 times. Tanner Roark, the Nationals’ starting pitcher, tossed seven innings of one-run ball and had two hits, including a bases-clearing double. Matt Adams and Mark Reynolds both homered for Washington, and neither of them even started the game. The Nationals walked eight times, had a hit batsman, racked up 26 hits and, as a team, hit .520/.593/1.000, which, in case you were wondering, comes out to a 311 wRC+ and a .646 wOBA. In other words, the Mets’ pitching staff allowed eleven more batters to reach base (35) than they got outs (24).

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On Sunday, I asked a few friends a question: what is your favorite sort of baseball play? One said a well-placed bunt for a hit on the third-base line. Another, preferring defensive highlights, elected for a smartly turned 6-4-3 double play with the shortstop going to his backhand, or else a home run robbed. One described the thrill of watching a pitcher who, after finding himself facing a bases-loaded, no-outs situation, manages to wiggle off the hook. Strikeouts swinging on a 100 mph fastball, and long balls that thump the batter’s eye, and outfield dances and coy smiles at a job well done, each answer was different, making up a tableau of the game’s joys.

For my part, I tend to be drawn to the interstitials between plate appearances, the little bits of tragedy or humor that bring alive the stats and those who make them, the funny faces that suggest a favorite passage from a book or that the pitcher has pooped himself. We can like so many different things, and baseball has room for all of them, the whimsy and rigor, the skill and struggle. It is your most compelling friend, your most interesting hang, a great, hard puzzle. It’s the best meal you’ve ever eaten, hearty and surprising. This is baseball’s greatest strength. It has so much to offer. But it also has some grumps.

…

I think we sometimes make the mistake of paying grumps too much attention. They’re so obviously grumps after all. When good fights present themselves, we should fight those good fights, but much of the grump’s grumping is so clearly just dumb, so plainly wrong, as to be beneath our sustained notice. This past Saturday, Braves broadcasters Joe Simpson and Chip Caray engaged in a bit of silly fuss over what the Dodgers wore during batting practice. They grumped. We chirped and rolled our eyes. We moved past it.

But on Monday, as we sifted through Sean Newcomb and Trea Turner’s tweets and subsequent apologies, and grappled with the Astros trade for Roberto Osuna, I kept thinking about Simpson and Caray. I thought about baseball, with all its room for what we like, also having room for hurt and pain. I kept thinking about how brittle our affection can be. I thought about that and those grumps, and I worried.

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Less than three weeks ago, in the context of a July 11 game that featured the longest pitching appearance by a position player since 1988, the earliest mound entry by one since 1979, and the first instance of multiple position players tossing multiple innings in the same game since 1956, I noted that the count of such instances for this season had already reached 29 (not including those of Shohei Ohtani), essentially guaranteeing a smashing of the single-season record of 36 (or 32, depending upon how you feel about Christian Bethancourt, whose conversion to the mound didn’t take), set just last year. In the 21 days since then — four of which were part of the All-Star break — an additional 17 non-pitchers have taken the hill, an average of one per day. On Tuesday night, we saw the worst of them, and perhaps the nadir of the entire genre, when the Mets’ Jose Reyes was battered for six runs by the Nationals while throwing 48 pitches in a single inning of work.

Reyes, who already has little business being on a major-league roster given his ineptitude as a position player (.182/.254/.240, -1.1 WAR entering Wednesday, when of course he homered twice!), entered a game in which the Mets trailed 19-1 in the eighth inning. Working with a fastball that averaged 81.5 mph and topped out at 86.9, and a curve that averaged 63.5, he retired Ryan Zimmerman on a fly ball, and then proceeded to allow the next six batters to reach safely: Juan Soto won a 10-pitch encounter with a double to rightfield, Matt Adams followed with a two-run homer to right-center (21-1), Michael Taylor and Matt Wieters both walked, pinch-hitter Mark Reynolds followed with a three-run homer (24-1), and then Trea Turner singled. Reyes got Anthony Rendon to fly out, but then Wilmer Difo tripled (25-1). Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Reyes then hit Zimmerman with a 54-mph curveball, after which Zimmerman pretended as though he might charge the mount. Finally, Soto flied out to end the debacle.

While a position-player pitching appearance is supposed to be either a break-glass-in-emergency desperation move (generally in extra innings) or a lighthearted farce that draws attention away from an otherwise unpleasant blowout, this was unpleasantness itself. In all, Reyes’s 48 pitches were three more than Jacob deGrom threw in a single inning on June 17 before being pulled out of concern for his health. Regardless of Reyes’s current playing ability or his status as a pariah in the wake of his 2016 domestic violence suspension, manager Mickey Callaway allowing him to toil that long was irresponsible, though it was at worst the second-most irresponsible act of the night following a dead-armed Steven Matz being torched for seven first-inning runs and then later examined for complaints of forearm tightness. Chalk it up as the umpteenth data point illustrating the team’s incompetence and lack of accountability when it comes to protecting its players.

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Yesterday, we cranked the ZiPS projection system through the American League standings in the wake of the trade deadline, churning out new AL playoff odds from the gears and turbines. Now, it’s the National League’s turn — and, this year at least, the best has been saved for second. The methodology is the same as for the American League yesterday. For those who purposely ignored that piece, regarding baseball’s junior circuit as a bunch of filthy upstarts, allow me to repeat it here.

To arrive at the standings forecasts below, I first began 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.

After that, I “undid” 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 came the new projections and a bottom line of the changes in playoff odds.

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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

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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