FanGraphs Baseball

Don’t feel bad if you somehow missed Joe Musgrove getting called up to the Astros this past Monday. After all, only like a billion other transactions took place that day, many of which involved established big leaguers and/or prospects more highly touted than Musgrove. But now that the deadline-related madness has come and gone, I’d like to direct your attention to Mr. Musgrove. He’ll be joining the Astros’ rotation this Sunday in place of the injured Lance McCullers, and there’s reason to think he’ll be a very good pitcher.

Two years ago, Musgrove wasn’t on anyone’s prospect radar. Though he was drafted way back in 2011, it took him until 2014 to make it out of Rookie ball — and until 2015 to make it into the full-season levels. But when finally given the opportunity to last year, he broke out in a big way. He shot from Low-A to Double-A, putting up a dazzling 1.88 ERA in just over 100 innings. Perhaps even more impressive were his strikeout and walk numbers: he struck out 99, while walking only eight, giving him rates of 25% and 2%, respectively.

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Pitcher wins are a silly statistic, for all the reasons you know, and additional reasons you don’t. So we pretty much never talk about them — there was a time, once, when the analysts would rail against wins, but that battle is over. The analysts won. Wins carry less value than they ever have, and there’s a part of me that wonders why I’m even bothering to write this post in the first place.

But I just can’t not do it. For one thing, it’s Friday. Leave me alone. It’s August, and the trade deadline just passed, so, again, leave me alone. And even though we don’t talk about them, wins do still exist. Somebody hands them out, and they remain a part of the official records. So I want to take a few minutes of your time to discuss really dumb wins. Sergio Romo just got one Thursday. It was one of the very dumbest.

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Ben talks to FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan and FiveThirtyEight writer Rob Arthur about Bryce Harper’s extended slump and their surprising (and somewhat dismaying) findings about his great 2015.

Today, our analysis of granular team ball-in-play data continues. Last time, we examined AL West clubs. Today, we take a macro-type view of the plate appearance frequency and BIP exit speed/angle detail for NL West clubs.

About 90 games’ worth of balls in play is a fairly substantial sample size, one that enables us to make fairly educated guesses about the true talent level of each team. Let’s use this information to project true-talent team won-lost records and compare them to their actual marks at the break, examining the reasons for material variation along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper was as good as Mike Trout, until he wasn’t. It hasn’t yet been that big of a deal, with the Nationals up in first place, but Harper has been slumping, and the slump hasn’t been short. For weeks on end, he’s hit barely .200, and though the walks have still been there, Harper’s supposed to be better than this. He’s supposed to be one of the best, actually. That’s what he just looked like, at 22 years old, and instead now he’s a 23-year-old in a lineup being carried by Daniel Murphy and Wilson Ramos. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being on track for a four-win season. It’s just not how you want to follow a nine-win season.

There are plenty of indicators to point to. What happened to Harper’s numbers? His BABIP is a lousy .237. That’s guaranteed to come up. More discouragingly, he’s making more contact against pitches out of the zone. Last year, 70% of Harper’s batted balls came against pitches within the strike zone. That ranked him in the 67th percentile. This year he ranks in the 18th percentile. That partially explains why Harper’s exit velocity has dropped — and it has indeed dropped. That’s another thing. Harper so far has lost a tick or two on average.

Yet there’s still more. We all figured that Harper’s 2015 dramatically changed his own baseline. What if it shouldn’t have?

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Seemingly every season, a baseball team scores noticeably more runs that we think they should. I’m not talking about teams that perform better than their preseason projections, but rather the teams that manage to score a lot more runs than their actual in-season numbers suggest they should. If we’re using the shorthand, I’m talking about teams who score more runs than their BaseRuns calculation supports.

Whenever you point this out regarding a specific team, you’re likely going to be met with skepticism. Some of that skepticism is very justified, as no single model (such as BaseRuns) can explain the real world perfectly. But some of the skepticism is less justified and devolves merely into a group of local fans suggesting that you don’t respect their team. At its core, this is usually going to be an argument about sequencing — or, as it’s sometimes known, clutch hitting. Is the team in question simply having a string of good timing or are they actually doing something to impact the order of their events?

History tells us that the answer is usually the former, but alternative hypotheses are always worth exploring. One of this season’s examples, the Reds, break the mold a bit. Instead of being a decent offense that’s scoring more than a decent number of runs, this year’s clutch kings are one of the worst offenses in baseball but are managing to look respectable given excellent timing.

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Try to imagine the ideal sinker. What do you see? Probably a pitch that sits in the high 90s, right? And features tremendous sink and fade. And induces ground ball after ground ball. And, because it’s being thrown with max effort, probably one coming out of a reliever’s hand, right?

If you’re imagining a pitch that meets all four of those criteria, you probably see Blake Treinen throwing it. Or Sam Dyson. Or Zach Britton. If not, you should be.

If you limit the pool of commonly used sinkers to those which average 94 or more mph and then sort for sink, those three names soar to the top. And each gets to that movement in a different way.

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The 2016 trade deadline season culminated with 18 trades on Monday, wrapping a month that saw 45 different deals struck over the course of the month. We wrote about basically every trade, often from multiple angles, and attempted to break down each team’s expected return for each deal. Now, as a bit of a recap, I’m going to look at my favorite acquisitions over the last month. Today, we’ll focus on the buyer side of things, looking at the teams that I think did the best in upgrading their roster for the stretch run. Tomorrow, we’ll tackle the seller side of things, looking at who looks to have gotten the most future value, relative to what we expected, by moving veterans for younger talent.

Keep in mind that I’m not just looking at the teams that improved themselves the most, but also at the acquisition cost; you can make a big splash and add a few wins to your roster while still hurting your franchise long-term. Of course, it’s also easy to make a minor deal that doesn’t cost you much and doesn’t improve your chances of winning all that much either, so while there were some smaller deals that I liked, I gave preference to the deals that I think could have a real impact on the playoff races. These are the deals that I think helped contenders upgrade in a significant way without sacrificing too much long-term value in order to do so.

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Recently, we started running out of t-shirts. As such, we thought it was high time to design some new ones. And design them we did. But we didn’t just stop at t-shirts. Oh no, constant reader, we went the extra mile this time. In addition to t-shirts, which now are available in both men’s and women’s sizes, we now have raglan t-shirts (again, both men’s and woman’s kinds), zip hoodie sweatshirts, baby onesies and hats. You might think of this as the holiday season come many months earlier than normal. And you’d be right.

The person we have to thank for all of this shiny new garb is Aaron Gershman of Creative Sentencing, who you should absolutely hire for your next design project.

Let’s take a look at the designs, which are available for purchase at this very moment.

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