Ben Lindbergh and outgoing FanGraphs Managing Editor Dave Cameron review Dave’s decision to retire from writing to take a job as an analyst in the San Diego Padres’ front office, discussing his personal and professional past and future and the past, present, and future of public and private baseball analysis.
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I wrote my first post for FanGraphs on April 14th, 2008. It was about Gabe Kapler’s return from managing to be a productive big leaguer. It referenced WPA/LI as our version of a modern statistic and talked unironically about how Kapler was keeping up with Casey Kotchman. It wasn’t great.
Since then, I’ve published 3,501 other posts (or chats). Hopefully, most of them were better than that first one. In these last 10 years, the site has changed a lot. In 2010, I went from a freelancer to the company’s first full-time employee, then was joined by a host of absurdly talented coworkers, many of whom now also get to do this for a living. FanGraphs went from a niche site into the mainstream, and along the way, I’ve seen our little corner of the baseball world help change the language of baseball fans.
It’s been a remarkable run. But for me, it comes to an end today. This will be my last post at FanGraphs.
Late in the 2017 season, I approached Sergio Romo to ask about backup sliders. More specifically, I wanted to know if he’s ever thrown one intentionally. A handful of pitchers to whom I’ve spoken have experimented with doing so. It can be an effective pitch when well located; hitters recognize and react to a slider, only to have it break differently than a slider. As a result, they either jam themselves or are frozen.
Romo, of course, has one of the best sliders in the game. The 34-year-old right-hander has lived and died with the pitch for 10 big-league seasons, throwing his signature offering 52.4% of the time. Among relievers with at least 250 innings, only Carlos Marmol (55.5%) and Luke Gregerson (52.7%) have thrown a slider more frequently over that span.
What I anticipated being a short conversation on a narrow subject turned into wider-ranging, and often entertaining, meditation on his slider (with a look at Zach Britton’s sinker thrown in for good measure). It turns out that Romo’s backups are all accidental — the exact mechanics behind them remain a mystery to him — but he does know how to manipulate the ones that break. He’s also knowledgeable about his spin rate, thanks to his “player-profile thingy.”
Instead of covering free-agent signings like usual, members of baseball’s media have been forced to address the conspicuous lack of them this offseason. Dave outlined another possible explanation for the dearth of activity, noting that neither the Haves nor Have Nots are incentivized to spend money on a marginal win or two. There simply aren’t enough teams in the middle ground for whom a move might change their fortunes. There’s increasing speculation on and discussion about whether clubs might be colluding, as Zack Moser argues at BP Wrigleyville.
Wrote Moser:
“Free agency is the most important mechanism by which players can actually earn what they are due—after years of minor league, pre-arbitration, and arbitration salary suppression—and to argue for its obsolescence is to argue against the rights of labor in general.”
More than anything, I suspect the quiet offseason is a product of more clubs thinking alike and increasingly acting rationally. Emotion has largely been stripped out of the market (unless you can negotiate directly with an owner).
The other issue is the more potent luxury tax in the new CBA, which has essentially created a more rigid soft cap. There is an argument to be made that the players did this to themselves by focusing on issues like the qualifying offer instead of selecting bigger fights in the most recent round of bargaining.
While next year’s free-agent class — which features a rare wealth of young and talented players likely to be compensated handsomely — might give the impression that the system is operating in the players’ interest, it might just represent a temporary reprieve from the larger downward trajectory of the value of free agency. This is arguably the most important issue facing the MLBPA.
I don’t watch a lot of hockey, but when I do, my favorite part of the game is when grown men sit in timeout. They have an angry little fracas and then are asked to cool down. In-game punishment is a tricky business: too light a touch, and violating rules risks becomes acceptable, too worth it. But go too strong, and the game becomes about the penalty; it’s not just an ump show but worse, a slog.
That’s part of the genius of the penalty box, the Sin Bin: removing one player from the ice spurs action. Your favorite team might score a goal. Perhaps you’ll be gifted a defensive highlight, made all the more impressive for playing down a man. But the true insight of the penalty box is a more basic one: we only ever stay really mad at things for a few minutes at a time.
There are exceptions, of course. Grudge holders, deviants. Last spring, we learned that Hunter Strickland carried his rage toward Bryce Harper through three years and a World Series parade. Some guys are just grumps. But most aren’t. Think about being a kid and playing in the yard with your cousin. Your cousin throws mud at you. Startled and angry, you throw grass back. You’re separated and sent to your corners to think about what you’ve done, but once you do, you’re ready to play again. How big a deal is mud anyway? You were dirty anyhow. Perhaps you should go eat worms together.
In the aftermath of the Strickland-Harper brawl, Sam Miller speculated on Effectively Wild that perhaps Harper would have better served by taking off his shoe and throwing it rather than chucking his batting helmet. He might have looked like less of a doofus, but the moment Harper bent down to undo his laces, it would have been over. The fight doesn’t happen. Reason returns. “Wait, what am I doing?” Bryce stops being entirely mad and starts being partially embarrassed. He remembers he’s a homeowner. He just needed a little timeout to change the whole afternoon.
Episode 794
A cafe in downtown Bath, Maine, that’s typically crowded on Saturday mornings was almost entirely empty this past Saturday. The sub-zero temperatures were to blame, almost certainly. But why did almost no one venture into town, as opposed to just slightly fewer people? Dave Cameron has an answer — and thinks it probably informs how we ought to think about the last year or two of a large free-agent contract.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 39 min play time.)
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Let’s begin by considering the experience of today’s top amateur pitchers. Each time a coveted prospect at the prep level begins his delivery to the plate, he’s confronted by the same vision: a crowd of radar guns raised in unison by the scouts looming just beyond the chain-link fence behind home plate. For them, the radar gun is the objective, truth-telling scouting tool, one that often decides draft-day fortunes.
One of the most notable features on a player’s Perfect Game profile page is not a pitchability score or makeup grade, but rather his top velocity reading. Riley Pint was a top-five overall pick in 2016 because he could hit triple digits in high school. And while the Rockies aren’t particularly worried, he’s demonstrated little command or feel for pitching thus far in his pro career.
It’s not that velocity does not matter. Velocity matters a great deal. It creates margin for error, reduces batters’ timing, and enhances the effects of breaking pitches and off-speed offerings.
There has been considerable handwringing this offseason about the way the new Marlins ownership group has gone about dismantling any hopes of a competitive club the near future. The front office inherited a borderline playoff contender — one featuring the reigning NL MVP, as well as multiple young, talented, and cost-controlled players — and made no attempt to build a winner in what should be a wide-open Wild Card race in 2018 as well as a wide-open National League East at the start of the following season.
That the Marlins chose a different path is unfortunate for baseball and unfortunate for long-suffering Marlins fans — not to mention the potential Marlins fans who could have been cultivated with a commitment to winning in the long term.
Now that it’s clear that the Marlins have chosen not to field a competitive team in the near term, it is time to examine their current options with J.T. Realmuto and Christian Yelich and begin to analyze their decisions up to this point. As Dave Cameron noted in the aftermath of the Giancarlo Stanton trade to the Yankees, the Marlins did okay with their market value salary dumps.
“Scouts vs. stats” is an expression that boils a complex, gray issue into clear black-and-white sides,in a way that’s familiar to those who follow political media. In the reality of front-office decision-making, however, this “debate” has been settled for years and the obvious answer was always “both.”
In fact, the issue has moved past simply using both. Until recently, if one suggested that a club should move further toward one side at the expense of the other, anyone could shoot back with a counter example of recent success from the other end of the spectrum. That’s a bit harder do now: two years removed from the Royals’ latest World Series appearance and three years out from the 2010-2014 Giants run, there isn’t a current standard bearer for the traditional point of view, even if that’s just cyclical and I’m using a somewhat subjective label.
The final four clubs standing in each of 2016 and 2017 — the Astros, Blue Jays, Cubs, Dodgers, Indians, and Yankees — would all rank among the top 10 of any industry poll of the league’s most progressive clubs. If you want to argue that their success is the result of variance, a blip, or mere coincidence, this development isn’t just the product of randomness. There’s an actual explanation. In these last two seasons, we’ve seen a fundamental change in the style of play (a greater emphasis on the air ball, quick hooks on starters, more aggressive bullpen usage, etc.) — particularly in the postseason. A progressive club, by definition, will adapt more quickly to such changes.
