FanGraphs Baseball

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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
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.

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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. Consider: the average telecast of a major-league game offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how they consume a telecast.

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 first installment of the corresponding results.

Before examining the rankings in earnest, three observations of varying merit:

Broadcasting Is Difficult
Assuming a roughly average time of game (about three hours each) and full major-league season (162 games), it’s probably not incorrect to say that a club typically plays about 500 hours of baseball each year. Broadcasters are tasked with providing some manner of spoken content for the duration of those 500 hours. Radio announcers are compelled to relay the sport’s sometimes complex machinations in real time — while also supplementing their narratives with analysis. Television commentary might actually pose a greater challenge. As the well-respected radio voice of the Rangers, Eric Nadel, suggested on this site’s podcast, the relative freedom provided by video — which renders much descriptive activity moot — conspires only to facilitate more opportunities for a broadcaster to embarrass himself. For the endurance required of the job alone, broadcasting is difficult.

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Episode 652
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the fetid creature on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This episode of the program is 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 1 hr 12 min play time.)

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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
Detroit at Baltimore | 13:35 ET
Fulmer (15.0 IP, 83 xFIP-) vs. Gausman (25.0 IP, 88 xFIP-)
Over the first three years and nearly 300 innings of his career, Baltimore’s Kevin Gausman produced better-than-average fielding-independent numbers while conceding actual runs at a worse-than-average rate. Over the first three starts and 15 innings of his career, Detroit’s Michael Fulmer has endured the precise same outcome. Now in his fourth season, Gausman has retained the same basic peripherals — but is preventing runs at a rate roughly 50% better than league average. Is it possible that one, observing Gausman, is observing Michael Fulmer’s future self? And if that is the case, is it dangerous for him to operate in such close proximity to Michael Fulmer’s present self? The answers are to be revealed!

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