FanGraphs Baseball

My step-sister and I were sharing a bottle of wine on the balcony of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship this winter when I saw my first shooting star. It was bright green, and it was glorious. I allowed myself to become irrationally excited, for the shooting star is a somewhat common natural phenomena that had somehow avoided my person for nearly two-and-a-half decades. Over the course of the next 45 minutes or so, we saw about a dozen more regular shooting stars. I suppose they’re a bit easier to spot when you’re in the middle of the sea, free from the light pollution of civilization, and also the regular old chemical pollution, too. A few weeks back, I saw another shooting star while driving home from work. In the middle of Ohio. Sometimes, that thing you perceive to be special turns out to be not so special after all.

But that’s not the case for this triple play turned by the White Sox last week! No sirree!

That’s the ol’ 9-3-2-6-2-5 triple play. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn it’s the first of its type in recorded history. And when I say “recorded history,” both now and throughout the rest of this post, I’m talking about since 1974, the furthest date back for which we have complete event data.

And so down I went, into the rabbit hole. With data provided by Jeff Zimmerman and independently verified and updated by yours truly with the help of the Baseball Reference Play Index and SABR’s triple-play database, I found myself with a spreadsheet of all 161 recorded triple plays since 1974 and each putout, in order. The first question I asked myself after “Was that White Sox triple play the first 9-3-2 triple play ever?” (answer: yes) was, “Well then, smarty pants, what’s the frequency of all the different triple-play combinations?”

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Corey Dickerson has always hit. The 26-year-old outfielder slashed .321/.379/.596 in the minors, and then .299/.345/.534 in parts of three seasons with the Rockies. He doesn’t expect a move from Colorado to Tampa Bay to derail his production.

Maintaining lofty numbers will nonetheless be a challenge. Coors Field is a hitter’s paradise, and Dickerson certainly took advantage. In 122 games at his former home park, he slashed .355/.410/.675. Tropicana Field represents a whole new kettle of fish. Along with catwalks and a “touch tank,” it is among the most pitcher-friendly venues in MLB.

Dickerson’s slow start at the Trop — a .564 OPS — doesn’t mean much. Ten games is ten games. Far more meaningful is the fact that he’s undaunted by his new hitting environment. And don’t expect to hear him complain about inter-division road trips. Compared to the NL West, the AL East is bandbox city.

Dickerson talked about his hitting approach, and acclimating to a new league, on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

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Dickerson on sticking with his aggressive approach: “If I deviate from what I do, at all, it messes with me both mentally and physically. You get to the major leagues doing what you do best. That’s what you have to stick to: being the best version of you. You might change the way you attack the baseball — you might channel your aggressiveness — but you have to stay true to yourself.

“When I first got called up… everybody tries to help you out. I heard, ‘You have to hit the fastball’ and ‘You have to be a little more patient at the plate; try to see a few more pitches and work better counts.’ But nobody has really ever messed with me. No one has messed with my swing or my stance, or anything like that. They’ve mostly just said, ‘You can hit, so keep doing what you’re doing.’”

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The purpose of this post is to announce the availability — literally starting this exact minute — of tickets to a sabermetrics-themed event to be hosted by the Staten Island Yankees on June 19. The event will feature a number of your favorite baseball writers and also Dave Cameron.

From the club’s expertly composed press release:
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Blake Snell is already back in the minor leagues, but he probably shouldn’t be there for long. All the Rays need is an opening, and over the weekend Snell made his big-league debut in a spot start in Yankee Stadium. Everyone understood it would be a one-shot deal, but Snell got to get his feet wet. That counts for something. And we got enough data for a deep dive. That also counts for something.

Most of you probably learned about Snell for the first time last season. He got himself onto the radar for something extreme, which is to say, he made his 2015 debut on April 9, and he allowed his first run on May 23. Snell is forever going to have his scoreless streak, but what he did in the minors isn’t what’ll allow him to succeed in the majors. No — he needs to keep on performing, and in support of that, we can look to something else extreme. Snell’s a pitcher, so he throws a fastball. The fastball he throws is unlike almost any other.

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Click here to cast ballot for television broadcast teams.

Recently, the present author began the process of process of reproducing the broadcaster rankings which appeared on this site roughly four years ago. The purpose of those rankings? To place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams — a grade intended to represent not necessarily the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather the appeal those announcers might have to the readers of this site. By way of MLB.TV feeds, the typical major-league telecast 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 to consume a telecast.

Below are the first six ballots for radio broadcast teams.

For each broadcasting team, the reader is asked to supply a grade on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 representing the highest mark) according to the following criteria: Charisma, Analysis, and then Overall.

Charisma is, essentially, the personal charm of the announcers in question. Are they actively entertaining? Do they possess real camaraderie? Would you — as is frequently the case with Vin Scully — would you willingly exchange one of your living grandfathers in order to spend time with one of these announcers? The Analysis provided by a broadcast team could skew more towards the sabermetric or more towards the scouting side of things. In either case, is it grounded in reason? The Overall rating is the overall quality of the broadcast team — nor need this be a mere average of the previous two ratings. Bob Uecker, for example, provides very little in the way of analysis, and yet certainly rates well overall, merely by force of personality. Finally, there’s a box of text in which readers can elaborate upon their grades, if so compelled.

Arizona Diamondbacks

Some relevant information regarding Arizona’s broadcast:

• Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Greg Schulte.
• Color analysis is typically provided by Tom Candiotti.
• Mike Ferrin and Mike Fetters also appear sometimes, per the Internet.

Click here to grade Arizona’s radio broadcast team.

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Back when the Rays finally got around to trading David Price, they took an awful lot of heat for the return. It’s not that the package was bad — it was that it appeared insufficient, to many observers. The argument in support of the Rays focused on the idea of surplus value. Willy Adames looked like a promising low-level prospect. Nick Franklin seemed useful, and Drew Smyly was a league-average starter. You can get plenty of value from a league-average starter in his team-control years. It wasn’t sexy, and it was hardly a blockbuster of the type that people imagined, but the Rays were going to be okay. The return was a little dull, but fair.

If you want to spin things in a negative way, you could observe that Franklin has more or less busted. Adames is still talented and still young, but he’s just getting accustomed to Double-A. And Smyly missed months with a labrum problem, while Price signed a massive free-agent contract he earned with his performance. There’s another way to spin things. Since that deadline deal a couple summers ago, Price has posted a 3.23 ERA, with 26% strikeouts. Smyly, meanwhile, has posted a 2.52 ERA, with 28% strikeouts.

No, Smyly hasn’t yet been durable. But Drew Smyly has whiffed more hitters, rate-wise, than the ace for whom he was traded. I don’t think even the Rays expected Smyly to develop into a strikeout machine.

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The negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) will feature considerable back-and-forth between the players’ union and the league’s various ownership groups. This is only natural: those are the two parties which must ultimately agree upon the terms of a new deal. But it’s also not an entirely aimless point to make, because those negotiations won’t be the only ones taking place. The owners themselves could have some fairly contentious discussions in deciding their own strategy, particularly when it comes to sharing revenue among the teams. Big-market teams have long gained an advantage on revenues at the gate, but increasingly, the advantage has come from television revenue from local cable networks. Teams continue to sign billion-dollar deals that include an ownership stake, and determining how to divide that money could prove difficult.

Over the last few years, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Philadelphia Phillies, and St. Louis Cardinals have all agreed to new long-term local television deals with Regional Sports Networks (RSNs). It has been a few years at FanGraphs since Wendy Thurm documented the local cable television deals for all MLB teams, and this post aims to provide an update. The work she did helped inform this post as well as a few others to provide a base for research.

When we hear about television deals, we often think of them in terms of the average annual value they provide. That’s a familiar term in baseball, as most player contracts are structured to be paid evenly over the course of the contract. That practice is less common under other circumstances, however, with deals often paying a smaller sum at the beginning of a contract and increasing over time. Television contracts are often structured in this second way. To account for that practice, I have estimated 2016 television money by assuming a yearly 4% increase in money paid to teams in order to find a (hopefully) realistic estimate for how much teams are receiving this year. For example, the Phillies currently possess a 25-year, $2.5 billion dollar deal that begins this year. Instead of assuming they will receive $100 million every year, I am assuming they will receive around $60 million this year with 4% yearly increases over the course of the contract.

There is a full chart below with all the relevant information, but let’s focus on 2016 money first in the graph below.

I did my best to include only contracted revenue — i.e. to omit revenue generated from an ownership stake in a network. However, due to the lack of publicly available information, it’s best to regard these numbers as estimates. Note that, particularly with respect to the Chicago teams, as well as the Los Angeles Angels and Boston Red Sox, that the revenue estimates actually might include money from network ownership. It was difficult to parse those figures.

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You know about the Cubs. It’s the team that entered spring training as the consensus World Series favorite. It’s the team with the already impressive collection of young stars who tacked on with a splashy offseason. It’s the team that already threw a no-hitter. The team with the potentially historic blend of discipline and power. Maybe you’re tired of hearing about the Cubs already. Maybe you think the coverage and attention has been overkill. Or maybe you think they’re deserving of more coverage, and more attention, considering they’re 14-5 with a run differential (+64) nearly as large as the next two best teams by that measure combined (Cardinals and Nationals, +74).

Whatever your stance, you’re getting one more Cubs post for the time being, because for all the attention the lineup and rotation has received, there’s another area in which they’re deserving of attention, an area that often goes overlooked but that can very much matter. In addition to the lineup having a top-five adjusted batting line with the most runs scored, the rotation being the best in baseball by ERA and second-best by FIP, and the defense leading everyone in Defensive Runs Saved, the Cubs have also been the best base-running team in the sport. Not only is it a continuation of last year’s success in that department, but it’s something that was seemingly improved by one offseason acquisition, and perhaps more importantly, amplified by another.

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