Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about “Babe Ruth’s Legs,” then talk to researcher and statistician David Neft about how he rebuilt baseball’s historical record to create the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, or “Big Mac,” which provided the most comprehensive and accurate account of the sport’s statistical past when it was published in 1969, and which made baseball’s sabermetric revolution possible.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Subscribe: RSS

Half a dozen years after Pittsburgh drafted him out of a Dallas, Texas high school, Josh Bell’s power game has finally emerged. After going deep just 47 times in his first five professional seasons, the switch-hitting first baseman has 20 home runs for the Pirates in 448 plate appearances. Augmenting those numbers are 21 doubles, four triples, and a .257/.333/.486 slash line.

When I talked to the then-21-year-old old Bell in August 2013, he told me that his “power is going to come, just from maturity; I can’t really change my swing.” Two years later, at the Double-A All-Star game, he told me he had made an adjustment to where he felt he could “power through the ball while still making consistent contact.”

On Wednesday, I asked him what’s changed since our 2015 conversation.

“In Double-A, I was (batting) average first with a low number of strikeouts,” answered Bell. “Last year. I started focusing on driving the ball more — more doubles and homers. That’s carried over into this year. I’ve kind of morphed from what I was then to what I am now.”

The launch-angle approach espoused by an increasing number of hitters wasn’t the impetus. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan talk to 17-year-old Jack Dumoulin, the first American winner of the Microsoft Excel World Championship, about how baseball stats helped him get good at spreadsheets, his high-school baseball career, how he won the championship, and his dream of working for an MLB team. Then Ben and Jeff answer listener emails about overlooked players near the top of the WAR leaderboard (with a focus on Tommy Pham), Joe Sewell on bat boning, player injury-prone-ness, whether sac bunts should be counted as outs, Leo Mazzone and a velocity mismatch, whether defense is underrated, and what would happen if two fielders had to touch a ball before one of them threw it to first.
Read the rest of this entry »

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

Subscribe: RSS

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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.
Read the rest of this entry »

We’re at a point in the season when you can reasonably split the data into two halves. In terms of reliability for batted-ball metrics, 50 balls in play is a good sample, and the majority of regular position players have produced that many since the first of July, more or less. If you look at exit velocity in two halves, Miguel Sano’s name jumps off the list. In a bad way. But why?

Read the rest of this entry »

Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels*, and (most importantly) lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated list — such as the revised and midseason lists released by Baseball America or BP’s recent midseason top-50 list — will also be excluded from eligibility.

*All 200 names!

In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Ryan Helsley, RHP, St. Louis (Profile)
The right-handed Helsley has appeared among the Five with some frequency this season. Recently, he’s begun appearing in Double-A games, as well. The 23-year-old recorded his Texas League debut on August 1st and has produced a 28.6% strikeout rate over two starts and 10.2 innings with Springfield.

The advantage of Helsley’s promotion is that it facilitates an opportunity for impostor scouts like the present author to observe him by way of a minor-league broadcast. A couple of sequences from the right-hander’s most recent start reveal those qualities which have facilitated Helsley’s success this year.

First, there’s his fastball, a pitch that has (notably) touched 100 mph. Helsley had the opportunity to throw it to a real major leaguer, the rehabbing Paulo Orlando, in his most recent start. In at least two instances, the results were positive:

So that’s the fastball, but what about secondary pitches? Helsley appears to throw a curve and changeup. From what I’ve seen, the former has its uses — especially against same-handed batters — but it’s the latter that appears to offer considerable promise. Here, by way of example, are consecutive changeups from Helsley’s most recent start, each pitch exhibiting excellent depth:

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

 
This is Ashley MacLennan’s second piece as part of her August residency at FanGraphs. Ashley is a staff writer for Bless You Boys, the SB Nation blog dedicated to the Detroit Tigers, and runs her own site at 90 Feet From Home. She can also be found on Twitter. She’ll be contributing regularly here over the next month. Read the work of all our residents here.

For a team that seemed poised to begin the rebuild process, the Detroit Tigers managed to coast through the trade deadline doing very little. They’ve been promising since the offseason that their goal is to become leaner and younger, but when July 31st had passed, they’d only moved three players. Observers are left asking themselves: have the Tigers done enough to craft a contending team for the future?

The short answer? No.

The more complicated answer is that the team may not have been able to make the moves they wanted, thanks to a market that favored relief pitching over everything else.

Read the rest of this entry »