Sunday, in what was undoubtedly one of the coolest moments of his career that no one remembers, Ian Desmond slugged a lead-changing and eventually game-winning home run. Desmond homered off of a horrible pitch, and then he flipped his bat, which is funnier now.

I’m not convinced there’s anything to learn there. Most hitters would be able to punish a hanging two-strike curveball. Desmond last year probably would’ve been able to punish a hanging two-strike curveball. That being said, Desmond only saw a hanging two-strike curveball because he’d stayed alive in the at-bat. The previous pitch:

One pitch is one pitch, no more and no less. In isolation, it’s a normal-looking foul ball, and maybe Desmond fouls off the same ball a year ago. But a year ago, and even before, Desmond struggled against high fastballs. A year ago in particular, Desmond struggled against plenty of things. That’s why he wound up signing a one-year pillow contract toward the end of the offseason, but a month and a half in, now, Desmond is looking like a total success. Ian Desmond has helped the Rangers scoot back into first place.

Read the rest of this entry »

With Starling Marte away on paternity leave, the Pittsburgh Pirates have called up prospect Alen Hanson from the minor leagues. Hanson was off to a fine start in Triple-A, slashing .288/.309/.398 with seven steals. He spent all of last season at the Triple-A level, too, and hit similarly well: .263/.313/.387 with 35 steals. Throw in that he’s primarily a middle infielder, and it’s clear Hanson had little left to prove in the minors.

If it feels like Hanson’s been on the prospect radar for ages, it’s because he has. Originally signed out of the Dominican way back in 2009, he began gracing top-100 lists after a .309/.381/.528 showing in Low-A back in 2012. Despite his lengthy minor-league tenure, Hanson still has youth on his side. He’ll will play the entire 2016 season as a 23-year-old. Read the rest of this entry »

If you look at Nick Castellanos‘ traditional statistics, you obviously will notice that something is different. His OPS is nearing 1.000 after messing around in the 700 level before. This was the kind of improvement we were hoping for! The wait is over!

If you look at the next level, things begin to muddy. Basically 40% of the third baseman’s balls in play have fallen for hits, compared to 33% in the past. His walks and strikeouts are about the same as his previously established levels, and his batted-ball spray, in terms of pulling versus going oppo, remain roughly the same, too. He’s added a few fly balls, as he’s cut his grounder rate nearly 40%, so we could call it a little bit of power growth plus a lot of luck, and call it a day.

But we’ve got another level of statistics now, and if we look into those numbers, we see the type of growth that seems sustainable, and points to a small step in approach that may lead to a giant leap in production — even if projection systems usually call for restraint in such situations, even for a 24-year-old.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last couple of years, we’ve talked a lot about the Kansas City Royals and the ability of certain teams to sustainably beat estimates like the BaseRuns expected records we publish on our standings page. Famously, the Royals have won far more games than our numbers thought they would — over the last three years, they’ve won 25 more games than their BaseRuns Win% would suggest — making two straight World Series appearances and winning last year’s fall classic along the way.

Interestingly, though, with less fan fare, Missouri’s other team has also been winning far more often than BaseRuns suggested was likely. Over the last three years, they’ve won 23 more games than their BaseRuns expected record, nearly as many as the Royals. Last year, they won 11 more games than expected on the strength of an historic clutch performance. As Ben Lindbergh noted in a Grantland piece last summer, the Cardinals pitching staff was insanely good at stranding runners last year, so their run prevention ended up being fantastic even as their pitchers routinely danced with danger.

Six weeks into 2016, however, the tables have turned. The Cardinals are just 20-18, already finding themselves eight games back of the Cubs in the NL Central, except BaseRuns thinks they should actually be 25-13, which would give them the second best record in all of baseball. A year after posting one of the largest positive differences between expected record and actual record, the Cardinals have already won five fewer games than expected, and if they continued at this pace, they’d post the largest negative differential for any team in a single season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam banter about a bad fun fact, David Ortiz, and retirement tours, then draft noteworthy moments from Sunday’s Rangers-Blue Jays brawl.

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

Subscribe: RSS

We have a number of great ERA estimators on this site. FIP, xFIP, SIERA: choose your favorite, because they all have a place in attempting to better describe outcomes closer to a pitcher’s true talent over a given timeframe. Maybe you’re lazy, or maybe you’re different, but it can also be nice to have a dead simple one — which is where K-BB% comes in. If a pitcher is striking guys out and limiting walks, that’s a fundamentally positive thing, and it turns out K-BB% is actually the best in-season predictor of future performance out of all the ERA estimators on the site (though it’s still not a great predictor, to be honest). Unless a pitcher possesses a signature batted-ball profile, K-BB% represents a nice, handy way of feeling a little better about a guy if his ERA hasn’t been quite up to expectations. Or, you know, feeling worse about a guy whose ERA has been lower than what his peripherals seem to say it should be.

Which brings us to the current K-BB% leaderboard. A casual perusal yields these top-five worst K-BB% rates among qualified starters in the major leagues:

Negative? Negative! These guys all have pretty middling strikeout rates, and the top few have some serious control problems. Just in case you were wondering, no one ran a negative K-BB% among qualified starters last season. It makes sense, given that it’s a hard thing to do while still being allowed to pitch a lot of meaningful innings in majo- league baseball games. But Ventura is currently doing it, and his ERA is “just” 4.62! And yet this next table, of Ventura’s current FIP and xFIP ranks among qualified starters, seems relevant, given his current standing with strikeouts and walks: Read the rest of this entry »

We are thrilled to announce that Eric Longenhagen is re-joining the FanGraphs staff and will serve as our lead prospect analyst going forward. Eric brings experience, insight, and determination into this job, and we’re excited to see what he’ll be able to do with our prospect coverage both now and in the future.

I’m Eric Longenhagen, and I’m very excited to be joining the FanGraphs staff and seizing the reins of full-scale prospect coverage here. I’ve been ramping up toward a role like this for eight years, and am looking forward to wrestling with the enormity of this job’s scope and the processes that must be built and polished to do it well. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of writing, in lieu of working for a Major League team, is the boundless diversity of baseball at your fingertips. I hope to cover and share with you the entire spectrum, from the rapidly approaching international signing period, to the draft and, of course, off-season analysis of each club’s farm system.

If you’re interested in my work history and in inferring my credentials therefrom, this paragraph is for you. I spent my college summers interning for the Phillies’ Triple-A affiliate. My duties were expansive and mostly menial, which is why I often skirted them in favor of slipping into the scout section to watch, listen and learn. I then spent two seasons doing video scouting at Baseball Info Solutions. During that time I began scouting and reporting on the Phillies farm system for Crashburn Alley. When I left Pennsylvania for Arizona’s oppressive heat in 2014, and could no longer properly scout the Phillies system, I bounced around. My work appeared at Sports on Earth, Jason Churchill’s Prospect Insider and then here at FanGraphs as part of the staff assembled by Kiley McDaniel. Early in the spring of 2015, ESPN brought me on to supplement its scouting and prospect content with a focus on the draft, and gave me the keys to their International coverage as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
New York AL at Arizona | 21:40 ET
Green (MLB Debut) vs. Ray (35.1 IP, 100 xFIP-)
“Who is Chad Green?” is a question likely being asked today by the American public and also periodically by Chad Green himself. The deeper, ontological implications of the question reside outside the scope of this brief entry. What follows, however, are five statements regarding who Chad Green is.

• An 11th-round selection (in 2013) by the Tigers out of Louisville.
• A piece in the trade that sent Justin Wilson to Detroit in December.
• The author of impressive strikeout and walk rates as a professional.
• The owner of a fastball that reaches the mid-90s.
• The owner of maybe less impressive secondary pitches.

Read the rest of this entry »