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If you’ve spent any time observing some of the nerdier battles over baseball statistics in the last decade or two, you’re probably familiar with the arguments made for and against certain metrics. Beginning with the relatively simple matter of batting average versus on-base percentage, these debates tend generally to take the same shape. And generally, one recurring blind spot of such debates is that they tend to dwell on what certain statistics don’t do instead of best identifying what they do do.*

*Author’s note: /Nailed It

The last few years has seen the release, by MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), of a flurry of new data and statistics, generally referred to as “Statcast data.” We’ve also seen advances in the measurement of catcher-framing by the people at Baseball Prospectus, who have also continued making improvements in the evaluation of pitchers in the form of Deserved Run Average (DRA). When new data and metrics emerge, there is inevitably a period of uncertainty that follows. What does this stat mean? What’s the best way to use this data set? Equally inevitable is the misapplication of new statistics. That aspect of potential statistical innovation is not really new.

Today, what is new is xwOBA — and, in part due to the wide proliferation of Statcast data by means of telecasts and MLB itself, more fans are finding and using stats like xwOBA than might have been in previous generations. As with other new metrics, we are still attempting to identify how xwOBA might best be used.

One such study into the potential utility of xwOBA was recently published by Jonathan Judge at Baseball Prospectus. The study is a good one, with Judge focusing on xwOBA against pitchers. While not ultimately his point, Judge does, along the way, object to the “x” in xwOBA, as he feels that “expected” implies predictive power. While I have always interpreted the “expected” to mean “what might have been expected to happen given neutral park and defense” — that is, without assuming a predictive measure — it does appear that reasonable people can disagree on that interpretation.

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This is Jake Mailhot’s third post as part of his May Residency at FanGraphs. A lifelong Mariners fan, Jake now lives in Bellingham, Washington, just a little too far away from Seattle to make it to games regularly, which is sometimes for the best. He is a staff editor at Mariners blog Lookout Landing. He can be found on Twitter at @jakemailhot.

Earlier this year, Jeff Sullivan wrote a pair of articles, each about a pitcher who appeared to be McCullersing. That term, of course, is a reference to Lance McCullersJr., who in 2016 began throwing his excellent curveball more often than his fastball. He’s led all of baseball in curveball usage since then. He wound up throwing his curveball an astonishing 75% of the time in Game Seven of the ALCS last postseason. That appearance was peak McCullersing.

He started off this year throwing his curveball around the same amount as last year, 48% of the time. But when the calendar flipped to May, something changed. Just look at this graph of his secondary pitch usage in 2018.

That’s… interesting. In his start last night (not included here), McCullers threw his curveball around 40% of the time. That’s pretty normal for him. But it’s been less normal for him of late. In his start against the Angels last Monday, McCullers actually threw more changeups than curveballs, the latter pitch representing just 21.4% of his total count for the night. The last time his curveball usage fell below 30% was all the way back on August 3, 2015, during his rookie year.

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Episode 814
Meg Rowley is the managing editor of The Hardball Times. She’s also the guest on this edition of the program, during which she provides an account of James Paxton’s no-hitter as seen from a pizza place in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle.

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 9 min play time.)

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Brad Keller is having an impressive rookie season with the Kansas City Royals. Pumping fastballs with a bulldog mentality, the 22-year-old right-hander has appeared in 18 games and has a 1.96 ERA. He’s not afraid to challenge big-league hitters. Substantiating KC skipper Ned Yost’s assertion that he’s “been able to come in and bang strikes on the attack,” Keller has issued just five free passes in 18-and-a-third innings of work.

His path to the Kansas City bullpen was roundabout. In retrospect, it was also only a matter of time before he got there.

Drafted out of a Flowery Beach, Georgia high school by the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2013, Keller changed addresses twice in a 15-minute stretch during December’s Rule 5 draft.

“My agent called to say, ‘Hey, the Reds picked you up in the Rule 5,’” explained Keller. “I hung up the phone, called my parents, called my brother, and as soon as I hung up my agent called again. ‘Hey, you just got traded to the Royals.’ Then I had to pick up the phone and call everybody back.”

Keller’s next conversation was with the D-Backs — “they told me everything that was going down” — and soon thereafter Royals assistant GM Scott Sharp called to welcome him to his new organization. A similar call almost came four years earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Judges love it when litigants reach a settlement. Some judges love it so much that they give each side’s lawyer a token of appreciation for finalizing a deal. I’ve been in front of judges who handed out everything from stickers to candy bars. Last week, the Arizona Diamondbacks settled a lawsuit with Maricopa County. They got themselves a baseball stadium for their efforts.

But first, let’s back up a bit. The Diamondbacks have long wanted a new ballpark. Maricopa County, which owns the current park, wouldn’t let the team leave. So the team sued the county last year.

From Rebekah Sanders of the Arizona Republic:

The Diamondbacks’ lease with the county, which owns the stadium, prevents the team from talking with outside groups until 2024, and requires the team to play in its current home until 2028.

The Maricopa County Superior Court lawsuit is the latest twist in a long-running conflict over which party is responsible for as much as $187 million in repairs and upgrades to Chase Field. The team threatened to sue last year after negotiations with the county broke down.

The county argues that a portion of the upgrades are cosmetic and the team’s financial responsibility, and that the county will have enough money over the long term to meet its share of the obligations. The Diamondbacks counter that the county-run stadium district has not set aside enough money for needed upgrades and is risking safety.

The idea of a new stadium for the Snakes might seem, on the surface, to be ridiculous. After all, Chase Field was only just built in 1998. It’s younger than both Ronald Acuna and Gleyber Torres. That being said, the Team and County have been involved in a protracted legal battle, predating even that lawsuit, over the maintenance of the stadium. That’s because the stadium has had its share of maintenance misadventures in recent history, from burst pipes to failed HVAC systems. And each side blamed the other, with the team saying MLB would require them to move unless the county agreed to pay for repairs, while Maricopa County’s attorney, Cameron Artigue, had a more colorful response.

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The Angels rotation is interesting for a number of reasons.

For starters, it houses Shohei Ohtani, who is living up to and even exceeding the unprecedented hype that surrounded his arrival to the major leagues. Then there is the six-man nature of the rotation, an experiment that is working to date — a point explored in some depth by Craig Edwards earlier this week. Angels starting pitchers rank fourth in the American League in WAR (3.5), fourth in ERA (3.77), fourth in FIP (3.90), fourth in xFIP (3.84), third in strikeout percentage (24.6%), and fifth in ERA- (90).

Along with Mike Trout and Andrelton Simmons, that rotation is a big reason why the Angels are just two games behind the Astros in the West and appear to be a Wild Card favorite at the moment, with roughly a 50% chance of reaching the postseason, a mark which trails only the three division leaders and Boston.

Ohtani has been pitching like an ace. Tyler Skaggs is giving us reasons to remember why he was a top prospect. Jaime Barria has a 51 ERA-. Garrett Richards is healthy and averaging 96 mph with his fastball. Nick Tropeano has managed to be effective with a low-strikeout, low-fly-ball approach.

And then there is the curious case of Andrew Heaney.

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Justin Verlander had himself a night in Anaheim on Wednesday, throwing his first complete-game shutout since August 26, 2015 and becoming the 33rd pitcher to notch 2,500 strikeouts. What’s more, he did it in a game where the Astros’ sole possession of first place in the AL West was on the line. It’s just the latest chapter of the now 35-year-old righty’s rebirth, one that has returned him to the upper echelon of the game’s starters and positioned him for a run at the Hall of Fame. The pitcher famous for finding another gear with his fastball late in the game has done just that with his career.

Verlander collected his milestone strikeout against none other than Shohei Ohtani, who foul-tipped a 96 mph heater in the ninth inning:

That was one of seven strikeouts Verlander notched on the night, and yes, he was still Bringing It late. He threw his six fastest four-seamers of the night, and nine of his top 11, in the eighth or ninth innings, all 97.5 mph or above according to Brooks Baseball.

Three of his strikeouts came against Ohtani (the second silver sombrero of his brief MLB career), who while avoiding a strikeout in the fourth inning — and even getting the call on this 87 mph slider — nonetheless wound up with his ankles repurposed into a pretzel, with Verlander supplying the mustard:

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