FanGraphs Baseball

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 Boston | 13:05 ET
Mitchell (7.1 IP, 99 xFIP-) vs. Price (205.2 IP, 79 xFIP-)
Two days ago, with a Cy Young candidate in Masahiro Tanaka scheduled to face the struggling Eduardo Rodriguez, it seemed reasonable to think that the Yankees had some cause for optimism with regard to the short-term fate of their postseason odds. A ninth-inning loss on Thursday, however — followed by a more pedestrian sort of defeat last night — has rendered their improbable claim to the division something more like impossible.

Nor is the prognosis for this afternoon particularly good for New York: the Red Sox feature nearly a 70% probability of winning that contest according to this site’s methodology.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Boston Radio.

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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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Episode 682
Dave Cameron is the managing editor of FanGraphs. Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at that same site. They both appear on this edition of FanGraphs Audio, live on tape from a weird hotel in Colorado or something.

This episode of the program either is or isn’t sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

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 51 min play time.)

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In 2013, Hanley Ramirez tore the cover off of many a baseball. He was the Dodgers’ best position player, and their second-best player overall after Clayton Kershaw. During that season, which was abbreviated due both to thumb and hamstring injuries, he put up a .293 ISO in 336 plate appearances. The Dodgers offense had a hard time producing without him, particularly in the National League Championship Series. After Ramirez had two ribs fractured by a Joe Kelly fastball that had lost its way in its journey to the strike zone, the Dodgers would score just 13 runs in six NLCS games, with six of those runs clustered in Game 5.

Now, Kelly and Ramirez are teammates (I wonder if Kelly ever apologized for that hit by pitch) and Ramirez really hadn’t hit like that for an extended period of time since. He showed signs of it in April of 2015 but then ran into a wall down the left-field line at Fenway, and wasn’t the same afterward. He had been a good hitter in 2014, but not a power hitter. The same seemed true at the start of this season. He was getting on base at a decent clip — .367 was his on-base percentage — but the power wasn’t there.

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The transition from the minors to the majors is a difficult one for all players, but sometimes pitchers can make it look easier than it really is. Noah Syndergaard comes to mind from last year. Michael Fulmer put on a really good run at the start of the season this year. However, pitchers generally experience some rough patches as they transition to the majors, and that has been more true this season than in any year in the past decade. Despite contributions from players like Fulmer, Jon Gray and Steven Matz — and debuts by more high-end talent than we have seen in two decades, including players like Lucas Giolito, Alex Reyes, Blake Snell, and Julio Urias — this year’s class of rookie starters looks to be the worst-performing class of the last decade, and this year’s increase in offense might be behind those struggles.

Back in 2012, in a class led by Yu Darvish and featuring Mike Fiers, Lance Lynn, Wade Miley, Matt Moore, and Jarrod Parker, rookie starting pitchers produced a collection 53.7 WAR, the most in major-league history. The class wasn’t just about quantity, either: the group averaged 2.2 WAR per 200 innings pitched, itself one of the higher figures in history. The 2013 class produced just 35.3 WAR, averaging 1.8 WAR/200 IP, while the 2014 class — headed by Jacob deGrom, Collin McHugh, Marcus Stroman, and Masahiro Tanaka matched the 2012 group with 2.2 WAR/200 IP, and produced 44.4 WAR in fewer innings. Last year’s group was solid in quantity, recording 40.4 WAR as a group, but only a 1.7 WAR/200 IP. This year’s class has produced just 27.4 WAR in total and 1.5 WAR per 200 innings. The graph below documents total WAR by rookie pitching classes since the 1986 season.

The 2004 season, which marked the first year of penalties for steroid testing, wasn’t a great year for rookie pitchers, and it was actually pretty poor year for rookie hitters, as well. Why? Perhaps teams wanted to see what their current players would do under the new testing rules. Perhaps mere randomness is the cause. Elsewhere on the graph, we find a low point during the 1994 strike, which is unsurprising given the relative lack of games that season. Even with 10% of the season left, 2016 isn’t going to shape up as a banner one for rookie starting pitchers. After the introduction of steroid testing, there looks to be a not-so-steady, but evident incline in the contributions of rookies.

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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
St. Louis at San Francisco | 22:15 ET
Weaver (31.0 IP, 67 xFIP-) vs. Moore (176.2 IP, 110 xFIP-)
While members of different divisions, the Cardinals and Giants are very much involved in a zero-sum game (or nearly zero-sum game) at the moment where the 2016 postseason is concerned. Owing to a Mets club that has insisted on winning more than its fair share of games, there’s a distinct probability that only one of St. Louis and San Francisco will qualify for a wild-card spot. The Giants are the more likely of those two at this point according to the numbers. But, as a member of your local zoo-crew radio team might say, “Numbers ain’t nothin’ but a… number, I guess. Uh. Here’s the latest traffic report.” Toilet-flush sound effect. “Kapowie!” sound effect. Local auto-body commercial.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: San Francisco Radio or Television.

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Yesterday, following a league investigation into claims that the Padres withheld pertinent medical information from other teams with whom they were discussing trades, MLB suspended Padres GM A.J. Preller for 30 days. The Padres admit that they screwed up and vow to change their “medical administration and record keeping,” but in their statement about the suspension, claim to have done so unintentionally.

Obviously, as outsiders without knowledge of what the league found in their investigation, we can’t make any definitive claims about what is true and what isn’t, but the idea that the Padres accidentally kept two sets of medical records — one for their internal use and one to be fed into the centralized league database — is absurd. You don’t unintentionally create more work for your medical staff without knowing exactly why you’re doing so, and it’s not like everyone in the Padres organization hasn’t previously worked with other organizations; they all knew the standard protocol for reporting health information in trade discussions, and they knew this wasn’t how everyone else does things. The idea that this was an accident, and that no one in the organization realized what the team was doing, is laughably unbelievable absent a compelling explanation, which the Padres did not provide.

As best as we can tell, the Padres lied (by omitting pertinent information) to other teams about the health of their players in order to try and complete trades and secure returns that they might not be able to otherwise if the full scale of medical information was disclosed. And it worked. They made the Andrew Cashner deal with the Marlins by also including Colin Rea, a young starter the Marlins thought they were getting to bolster their rotation; when it turned out that Rea got to Miami and admitted that his elbow hurt and had been hurting for some time, the Marlins went nuts and the Padres had to agree to rework the deal, taking Rea back and sending one of the prospects they got in the deal back to Miami.

Unlike the Rodney/Rea deal, the Red Sox didn’t force the Padres to rework the Drew Pomeranz/Anderson Espinoza swap, but it is fair to wonder if they would have surrendered their top pitching prospect had they known that Pomeranz had been taking anti-inflammatory medications at the time of the deal. We’ll never know, of course, but it’s at least reasonable to think that the Padres believed there was some benefit to their trade discussions by withholding that information from the Red Sox, or else they wouldn’t have bothered to omit that information in the first place.

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Live from wherever we live: it’s FanGraphs Live (on Facebook)!

New to our chat lineup will be video chats via Facebook Live. Various writers will pop our Facebook page to recap or preview games, answer your question or talk about events with which we’re involved in video form. Want to ask a question? Just comment on the video and we’ll see it.

Hang tight with us as we work out some the kinks in the system. As we get going, we might run into some technology struggles, such as not being able to see the comments. Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan figured that one out last time though while on the road!

Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen will pop in to give updates and thoughts on various players he’s seen recently, as well.

Keep an eye on our Twitter for alerts on when we’ll have a new Live chat and be sure to follow our Facebook page to be able to tune in.

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Hopefully there aren’t too many of you out there suffering from Zach Britton fatigue. Last month, our own Corinne Landrey wrote about his potential for an all-time great season, and then shortly thereafter the baseball-writing community collectively began taking turns crafting the individual arguments for his Cy Young — and even MVP — candidacy, before the pushback began. We had our Zach Britton week, and all was good and fun. In reality, however, the chances of him winning — or even making a serious run at — the Cy Young Award seems highly unlikely.

But the first inaugural Zach Britton Cy Young Discussion Week still provided the framework for a few days of thought-provoking arguments and gave us something interesting to ponder. Now, here’s something else to think about: what if, in Zach Britton’s already potentially all-time great season, he’s actually been unlucky?

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