It’s May 19th, and the Phillies are in first second place in the National League East. Yes, the Phillies. The team that generated a 1,000 “tanking is ruining the sport” articles this winter has, six weeks into the season, the third-best record in the National League. As Jeff Sullivan noted this morning, their remarkably excellent bullpen has been one of the primary drivers of the early success, with David Hernandez and Hector Neris surprisingly emerging as dominant forces in the middle innings, and Jeanmar Gomez driving another nail into the coffin of the necessity of a “proven closer”. And yet, despite being in second place at this point, if you look at our current playoff odds, you wouldn’t actually know that the Phillies are off to a great start.

See that flat line across the bottom? That’s the Phillies. Their 24-17 start hasn’t moved the needle, at all, on our forecasts expectations for their chances of reaching the postseason. Okay, that’s not exactly true; they’ve gone from a 0.1% chance of winning one of the two Wild Card spots in our preseason forecast all the way up to a 0.3% chance of getting to the play-in game now. But their odds of hanging on to the NL East? Still close enough zero to round down when displaying one decimal point.

This is, to some, puzzling. A question in my chat yesterday brought up the point that our system is far more bearish on the Phillies hot start leading to postseason success than others; Baseball Prospectus gives them a 2.3% chance of winning the division and a 7.6% chance of getting a Wild Card spot, for 10% overall odds of reaching the playoffs. FiveThirtyEight is even more bullish than that, putting them at 4% to win the NL East and 13% to reach the postseason. So why is our system so stubborn relative to others attempting to look into the same crystal ball in order to see what the final standings will look like in October?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you were looking to rank early-season National League storylines, the Pirates playing at an 87-win pace probably wouldn’t be near the top of the list. As a narrative, it doesn’t compete with the scorching-hot Cubs, the surprising Phillies, a team that can’t win home games in Atlanta, and plenty of exciting individual players. Our preseason projections had the Pirates finishing the year with 83 wins, so it’s not all that interesting to point out that they’re playing slightly ahead of that pace. And that’s before acknowledging that most people thought the model was a little light on the National League’s eternal Wild Card.

So, you might be asking, why would the author call attention to the Pirates performance to date if it’s essentially what a reasonable person would have expected from them seven short weeks ago?

While the Pirates are winning baseball games at roughly the expected rate, they are not doing so in the manner we expected. Observe:

The Pirates average run differential in 2016 is similar to the expectation (+0.05 vs +0.11), but they are essentially scoring and allowing a full run more per game. Of course, we’re only 39 games into the season, so this isn’t to say that the projections were wrong and we should disregard them, but rather that the Pirates have looked different than we expected for the first quarter of the year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the wealth of new Statcast data that’s entered the public sphere over the last two seasons — including information on batted-ball exit velocity, direction, and location, as well as this year’s rollout of previously unavailable launch-angle data — the metrics we currently use to evaluate hitters are not the same metrics we’ll be using to evaluate hitters, say, 10 years from now. We’ll need several years of complete Statcast data, at least, before people much smarter than myself can start devising these metrics with any sort of confidence, but that won’t stop us from playing make believe until we have them.

The more I thought about the idea behind this post, which was originally intended to be trivial in nature — just looking at some of the season’s more unique singles — the more I realized there was to it. That’s not to say this is any sort of groundbreaking work — there are no major findings in what’s to follow, and in fact there aren’t any findings at all. But a simple base hit recently reminded me of how close we are to the next leap of better understanding the game. In the time it takes to get through this post, we’re just going to watch some clips, and think about those clips and what they may mean, and dream on the future. Nothing wrong with any of that.

I was watching a baseball game the other night and a player hit a baseball with a bat. That’s gonna happen. The player was Yan Gomes, and he hit the baseball like this:

Now, that type of hit is called a single. It’s been called a single for more than 100 years, and it’s still called a single now. It’s a single according to batting average, it’s a single according to total bases, it’s a single according to OPS, it’s a single according to wOBA and wRC+, it’s a single according to WAR. A single. No more, no less.

Y’know what else is a single? This is a single:

Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction and #31-32
#30 – #21
#20 – #11

Roughly four years ago now, the present author facilitated a crowdsourcing project designed to place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams. The results weren’t intended to represent the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather to provide a clue as to which broadcast teams are likely to appeal most (or least) to the readers of this site.

The results of that original exercise have been useful as a complement to the dumb NERD scores published by the author in these pages. Four years later, however, they’ve become much less useful. In the meantime, a number of the broadcast teams cited in that original effort have changed personnel. It’s possible that the tastes of this site’s readers have changed, also.

About a month ago, the present author began the process of reproducing that original crowdsourcing effort, facilitating a ballots for this site’s readers. This post represents the final installment of the corresponding results for the television side of things.

Below are the 10th- through 1st-ranked television broadcast teams, per the FanGraphs readership.

But first, three notes:

• Teams are ranked in ascending order of Overall rating. Overall ratings are not merely averages of Charisma and Analysis.
• The author has attempted to choose reader comments that are either (a) illustrative of the team’s place in the rankings or (b) conspicuously amusing.
• A complete table of ratings cast will appear in these pages Friday.

10. San Diego Padres
Main Broadcasters: Dick Enberg/Don Orsillo and Mark Grant
Ratings (Charisma/Analysis/Overall): 3.8, 3.1, 3.5

Three Reader Comments
• “Enberg is the best broadcaster no one talks about.”
• “Mark Grant… is funny and brings the knowledge and humor of a journeyman player.”
• “I want everyone to understand just how good Don Orsillo is at calling a game. Very. Very good, is the amount of good he is.”

Notes
A number of respondents cite similarities between Enberg in San Diego and Vin Scully up the coast in Los Angeles — not necessarily for the length of their tenure or prominence in the game (by which criteria Scully is unparalleled) but for their affability and comfort with the leisurely pace at which a baseball game is played. Grant, for his part, has the bearing of a “typical ex-player,” but does seem to offer a measure of playfulness and good humor to which readers respond well. As for Orsillo, he was largely adored by Boston fans.

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
Washington at New York NL | 19:10 ET
Strasburg (55.0 IP, 73 xFIP-) vs. Harvey (45.2 IP, 95 xFIP-)
What one finds here is a game with considerable promise. Two elite pitcher with easy plus velocity. Two strong clubs, each of which currently possess greater than a 45% chance of winning the division. “Garden-variety excellence,” one might be inclined to call it. Unless, that is, the garden has been started by the author. In which case, the garden is much less impressive. Because the tomato seedlings haven’t even sprouted their true leaves yet. Even though it’s been, like, three weeks. Because he used these peat pots from Agway instead of a plastic starter tray. Even though the gardening book was pretty explicit about don’t use peat pots.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies won again on Wednesday. So this is already off to a silly start, but anyhow, here’s more or less how they did it.

When you allow two runs, you don’t have to do much at the plate to win, and though the Phillies never do much at the plate, they did enough against Tom Koehler to make a winner out of Jeremy Hellickson. Hellickson gave way to David Hernandez, who turned in a scoreless inning. Hernandez gave way to Hector Neris, who turned in a scoreless inning. And Neris gave way to Jeanmar Gomez, who turned in the final scoreless inning necessary. Sometimes good teams are said to have bullpen formulas. This is the Phillies’ formula, and it’s helped propel them into a wild-card spot. The Phillies are in a wild-card spot. You know who’s in a wild-card spot? The Phillies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam talk to Tadeo Varela, sabermetric analyst for the Toros de Tijuana of the Mexican League, about the team’s pursuit of a statistical advantage.

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

Subscribe: RSS

You know who’s figuring it out? Christian Yelich! Not that Yelich ever didn’t have it figured out — his big-league career began with three consecutive 117 wRC+ seasons. He was as steady as anyone you could find, but he kept on occasionally hinting at more, and now he’s showing more more often. He’s 24, and he’s being coached by Barry Bonds. People everywhere kind of saw this coming. Yet it was never going to be automatic. Yelich has put in the work to get to where he is.

This is where he is:

Yelich hasn’t been constantly hitting home runs or anything. You would’ve heard about that. He has five, which isn’t that many, but then his career high is nine. His slugging is way up, and his walks are way up, and his strikeouts are down. Christian Yelich seems to be moving into a higher tier, and he’s among the reasons why the Marlins are hanging around the early playoff race.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at ESPN, Jayson Stark talked to Rob Manfred about the fact that, a year after chopping six minutes off the length of the average Major League game, those gains have been almost entirely lost in the first six weeks of 2016. Included in that piece was this chart, which shows the trend over the last 11 years.

Average Time Of Game

SEASON	TIME OF GAME
2006	2:48:11
2007	2:51:13
2008	2:50:38
2009	2:51:47
2010	2:50:46
2011	2:51:57
2012	2:55:58
2013	2:58:51
2014	3:02:21
2015	2:56:14
2016	3:00:26

SOURCE: ESPN.com

The four minute and 12 second gain from last year to this year is actually larger than any of the per-season gains made during the 2011-2014 stretch when MLB games lengthened quickly; that kind of rise in game length is clearly frustrating to Manfred, especially after the gains they made last year. As the commissioner notes to Stark in the piece, MLB believes there are a variety of factors contributing to the longer games, with players not taking the pace-of-play initiatives as seriously this year, cold weather, and simply the structural change in results all contributing. Stark points out that walks and strikeouts are both up again, so overall pitches are up, and more pitches equals more time. But let’s try to go beyond that and look and see if we can quantify the differences in game length this year.

Read the rest of this entry »