Episode 733
Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and the author of an eponymous Baseball Newsletter. He’s also (a) FanGraphs’ writer-in-residence for the month of April and (b) the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 56 min play time.)

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Note: this week’s edition of Best Of has been published on Sunday instead of Saturday because (a) Paul Swydan is away and (b) he asked an irresponsible colleague to take his place.

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.

MONDAY
Eric Thames Is Still Mashing by Nick Stellini
What was true when Stellini published this on Monday remains true today.

Starting Pitcher Pitch Mix Changes by Mike Podhorzer
Danny Salazar’s throwing more changeups, Kendall Graveman more fastballs. Podhorzer’s on the case.

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Chase Whitley grew up playing good old country hardball in Alabama. More specifically, he played it in rural Alabama. The Tampa Bay Rays right-hander hails from Ranburne, which he affectionately described as “a small town with zero stoplights.” Fewer than 500 people call it home, so it’s no wonder he knows “literally every person there.”

In Hoosiers-like fashion, the close-knit community has captured sports glory.

“Growing up, my teams consisted of a bunch of close friends,” related Whitley. “There were 13 of us, and we played together from Little League and Dixie Youth all the way through high school. My junior year, we won the state championship.”

Whitley also played on some “really good” basketball teams, and he spent time on the gridiron as well. Kids in Ranburne are expected to participate in multiple sports because, well, it’s what you do in that neck of the woods. As for their athletic accomplishments, Whitley views them mostly as a byproduct of “buddies who hang out and play some pretty good ball.”

That’s when they’re not working. Growing up where they did, you earn your keep. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Ichiro’s home run in his return to Seattle, the feasibility of intentionally allowing dingers, a John Jaso quote, and manager bobbleheads, then discuss the present and future use, abuse, and presentation of Statcast data.

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It’s not a shock that Madison Bumgarner has never been on the disabled list before now. He’s a big horse of a man, made purely of muscle and tree sap. The only thing that’s prevented him from being sidelined is Bruce Bochy not letting him throw 400 innings in a year and, apparently, that he’s been steady on a dirt bike until now.

Bumgarner is on the DL after a dirt bike accident. He has bruised ribs and a Grade One or Two Strain of his shoulder AC joint. #SFGiants

— Henry Schulman BLUE CHECK MARK (@hankschulman) April 21, 2017

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A tough thing about analyzing pitching is that it’s a moving target. You can get a decent sense of what a pitcher is like right now, and then he can completely change his approach over the next month and become a different pitcher. There’s evidence of this in the data: a pitcher’s exit velocity becomes stable relatively quickly, but then that stat’s predictability doesn’t actually improve as the sample increases. In other words, you can see what the pitcher’s got now, but what about tomorrow? Ask us then.

This is all relevant to Tyler Chatwood. You might have thought you had an idea of who he was as a pitcher — great sinker, uses his four-seamer for whiffs, and doesn’t have great secondary stuff, so it’s all about the ground balls. That’s who he was! It isn’t who he is right now, though. I had to ask him about who he is right now when I had the chance.

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Eric Hosmer is a free agent after this season. Maybe the most interesting free agent of the upcoming winter. If you are an unnamed scout who talked to Jon Heyman back in spring training, you think Hosmer should get far more than the 5 years/$73 million Brandon Belt got as an extension from the Giants, because anyone who thinks Belt is better than Hosmer should “get a grip”. The old $200 million rumor is so ridiculous we don’t even need to bother addressing it, but as Jeff wrote in February, it wouldn’t be that hard for a team to rationalize their way into a deal for more than $100 million if they believed a few things that aren’t entirely unbelievable.

But, as a counterpoint to Jeff’s perfectly reasonable post, I’d like to present a leaderboard that offers another perfectly reasonable position; the one that just acknowledges that Eric Hosmer isn’t very good.

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Hyun Soo Kim posted a .382 on-base percentage last season. He was one of just 20 players to post a .380 OBP or better (min. 300 plate appearances). As I’m sure you’re aware, that’s a pretty great mark. As I detailed a little in the positional power rankings for left field, Kim had a rocky start with the Orioles, who generally seemed not to like him very much. But by the end of the season, he was the club’s starting left fielder. He started only 78 of the team’s 162 games in left field, but he did start 40 of their final 64 there. And yet, despite ending the season as the team’s main left fielder and despite recorded a .382 OBP, he’s been buried on the bench to begin the 2017 season.

Let’s go back a second to that .382 OBP. That’s getting hard to pull off these days.

OBP is the heartbeat of an offense. So long as a club is avoiding outs, good things can happen. But it’s been a lot harder to find high-OBP figures over the past 10 years. Two years ago, for example, just eight players produced an OBP of .380 or better. It was the third-lowest total (after 1968 and 1963) since baseball integrated in 1947. Last year, only 20 batters reached that mark, which was tied for the 22nd-lowest total since Integration. The last few years, it has been very tough to find hitters who are really good at not making outs. And when teams find them, they cherish them. Here’s the list of the 20 players who pulled it off last season, and how much they’ve played this season. You’ll see one outlier.

Well, OK: two outliers, I guess. But David Ortiz voluntarily stopped playing games. Kim, on the other hand, hasn’t walked away from the sport. The Orioles simply aren’t playing him. His plate-appearance total is less than half of every other active player except Donaldson, whose total would be higher if he were healthy. They have a lot of other players to whom they’d rather give time, it seems. Joey Rickard was the favorite at this time last season, and remains on the team, despite a career .312 OBP and a negative career DRS and UZR. He’s a candidate to be the next Willie Bloomquist.

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