Episode 711
Travis Sawchik is a former beat reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and author of the book Big Data Baseball. He’s recently become a full-time employee of FanGraphs.com. He’s also the guest on this edition of the program.

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 58 min play time.)

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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.
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The primary focus this week might be on the Hall of Fame results, but our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality rolls on. Earlier this week, we reviewed American League center fielders; today, we turn to their National League counterparts. As a reminder, we are using granular exit-speed and launch-angle data to determine how 2016 regulars “should have” performed.

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Back in 1947, nine players received at least 50% of the Hall of Fame vote. That’s the last time so many players have appeared on at least half the voters’ ballots. Until this year, that is. Three players were elected this time around (Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, and Ivan Rodriguez.) Another six received more than 50% of the vote.

Generally speaking, breaking the 50% mark is a pretty good indication that a player is going to make it at some point. Jack Morris didn’t make it, Lee Smith barely got over 50% one year and now he’s been removed from the ballot. Gil Hodges never made it. But they’re in the definite minority.

So how does the future look for the six candidates who crossed the 50% threshold but failed to reach the 75% mark? And what about players who’ll become eligible in the near future? Trying to predict the fate of those holdovers three, four, five years from now presents challenges, but we can see who will have a shot. Below, I’ve attempted to do just that.

Names of candidates through 2021 from Baseball-Reference.

*****

2018

For a more detailed look at next year’s ballot, check out my piece on it here, but the list below contains the notable new players.

First-ballot no-doubters: Chipper Jones.

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Larry Andersen is famous for being traded for Jeff Bagwell. Phillies fans know him for his fine work on the club’s radio broadcasts. In terms of his playing career — he pitched in the big leagues from 1975 to 1994 — Andersen is known for having one of the best sliders in the game.

His best years were with the Astros when he was in his mid- to late 30s. From 1986 to -90, the right-handed setup man appeared in 293 games and fashioned a 2.55 ERA and a 2.53 FIP. His 445 innings over the stretch were sixth-most among relievers.

His signature pitch was elite. As Rob Neyer wrote at ESPN back in 2004, “Larry Andersen perfected his slider to the point where he rarely bothered throwing anything else.” In the Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers, Larry Dierker was quoted as saying his former teammate had the best slider he’d ever seen.

Anderson told me about his slider midway through the 2015 season.

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Andersen on why his slider was so effective: “The way I threw it — this is from talking to guys I faced, and ended up playing with — it looked like a fastball. A number of them told me: ‘I swear it’s a fastball; it looks like a fast one.’ That’s the key. Hitters aren’t committing to hit the ball when it’s three feet in front of the plate, they’re committing to the ball when it’s halfway there. The best hitters obviously pick up the spin, but if they see fastball and commit, and it’s not a fastball, they’re not going to have much luck.

“I basically tried to throw my slider how I would grip a four-seam fastball. I would kind of just rotate my fingers to the side of the ball a little more. That was probably more my cutter. I really had three pitches with one grip. It was essentially more pressure, and where my fingers were placed on the ball.

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We tend to form memories poorly. In middle school, my band teacher was fond of telling us that if you only played two parts of the song correctly, to make it the beginning and the end, because most people wouldn’t remember anything else.

So it may be with Andruw Jones. If you pressed most people on what they remember most about Jones, there’s a decent chance that they’d recall him as the 19-year-old who homered twice in the 1996 World Series and also as a really fat guy who was terrible in his 30s. In between those two endpoints, though, he had a Hall of Fame career.

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Baseball will grow again.

In the modern era, there never has been a longer expansion drought.

Perhaps once the stadium situations involving Oakland and Tampa Bay are settled, baseball will consider expanding for the first time since admitting the Diamondbacks and Rays in 1998. (It’s possible that teams like Tampa or Oakland would relocate, but research by Craig Edwards earlier this week revealed how infrequently MLB teams change addresses.) Perhaps now that baseball owners have cashed in some of their investment in MLB Advanced Media, expansion talk will become more serious in the coming years. Having a new CBA agreement could also help.

Wherever, whenever baseball expands, at some point, every business seeks new markets to enter.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred expressed interest in expansion last year and is in favor of targeting international markets like Mexico City and Montreal . There are also domestic contenders often cited like Charlotte, Las Vegas, Portland, San Antonio. Some believe a third team would do well in the NYC market, though territorial rights – among other issues – complicate matters. Back in 2012 for Baseball Prospectus, Maury Brown used a thorough methodology to rank expansion candidates.

Given the game’s history in Montreal (the Expos drew 2.1 million or more fans four times in five years from 1979 to -83), and the recent successful exhibition games there, I suspect Montreal is a favorite to land a team. Who wouldn’t love to hear more of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e3ZUN-kSGA

Assuming the sport reaches 32 teams in the not-too-distant future, assuming one team is placed in each league for an even 16-16 split, MLB then would be met with interesting logistical issues. Baseball could perhaps remain with the status quo of three divisions in each league, but having unbalanced divisions seems awkward and unfair to teams in those divisions. Asked about division setup, Manfred indicated it’s unlikely the sport would remain with the three-division setup following expansion.

“From a technical perspective it would be easier to divide the schedule up by four. Having five teams in the divisions is problematic from a scheduling perspective.”

So with expansion, baseball will have have to redraw its maps, and there would be some interesting issues to work through.

Issue No. 1
Are four-team divisions in each league optimal or two eight-team groupings?

Issue No. 2
Should MLB expand the playoffs to six teams per league, or keep the field at five?

Issue No. 3
Should MLB realign teams by geography, or try and preserve as many of the rivalries and division arrangements as possible?

Issue No. 4
Should MLB keep interleague play or abolish it? (With teams evenly distributed in leagues, interleague play is no longer a scheduling necessity.)

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Baltimore Orioles. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / Miami / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
A few years ago, I experimented idly with a toy stat called Reckless Power (RECK, for short), calculated by dividing isolated slugging (SLG – AVG) by what’s sometimes called isolated patience (OBP – AVG). It identifies players whose power on contact far exceeds their selectivity. To get a sense of the scale, here’s a collection of the top 10 batters by RECK from 2016:

League average is about 2.5. A score of 5.0 or higher typically earns a player a spot among the league’s top 10. Baltimore, one finds, placed two batters in the top 10 this past season. Another, Mark Trumbo, was 16th of 146 qualifiers. The Orioles, as a club, produced the highest RECK score in the majors, at 3.0.

The projections from Dan Szymborski’s computer suggest that Baltimore is likely to compete for that distinction again in 2017. Adam Jones (635 PA, .267/.304/.450, 5.0 RECK) and Jonathan Schoop (530, .264/.297.453, 5.8) are both forecast, essentially, to produce top-10 figures. Manny Machado (646, .289/.349/.511, 3.7) and Mark Trumbo (557, .251/.307/.491, 4.3) would both finish above the 75th percentile given their respective numbers.

In terms of wins and losses, this isn’t particularly illuminating. What it does illustrate, though, is how the Orioles have gone about scoring runs — and how they’ll score runs in 2017. By virtue largely of power on contact, is how.

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Imagine how Jason Heyward would feel if the Cubs didn’t win the World Series. On one side of the coin, any non-championship season falls short because of countless different reasons, and on the other side of the coin, Heyward still has to care the most about his own performance. But for as bad as he was, at least the title took the edge off. He remained an outstanding defender. And the team around him literally won everything you could win. Bad, though. Jason Heyward’s hitting was bad. Maybe worse than you thought. Maybe exactly as bad as you thought.

Here are three numbers:

• BA: .255
• OBP: .306
• SLG: .336

Pretty bad performance from Jason Heyward, you’d say. You’d be right! But you’d also be wrong, because those three numbers were posted by Jose Iglesias. Heyward’s hitting was even worse. He wasn’t supposed to become an outfield version of the no-hit shortstoppy whiz.

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