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, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the giant and large 2015-16 free-agent market.
Below are links to ballots for five of this year’s free agents, including the four main center fielders and first of many corner outfielders.
Other Players: Alex Avila / Asdrubal Cabrera / Chris Davis / Ian Desmond / Stephen Drew / David Freese / Chris Iannetta / Kelly Johnson / Howie Kendrick / Justin Morneau / Daniel Murphy / Mike Napoli / Dioner Navarro / Alexei Ramirez / Jimmy Rollins / Geovany Soto / Juan Uribe / Chase Utley / Matt Wieters / Ben Zobrist.
Dexter Fowler (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Fowler:
*That is, a roughly average number of plate appearances for a starting player.
**Prorated version of final updated 2015 Steamer projections available here.
The mission for the Royals is actually complicated. They need to be able to score, of course, which means they’ll need to score against pitchers like David Price and Marcus Stroman. They’ll need to contain every member of the Blue Jays lineup, because it’s not like you can ever afford to take a hitter off in the playoffs. But let’s be real — as far as the focus is concerned, many eyes are going to be on how Royals pitchers deal with Toronto’s offensive core. While it won’t be everything about the series, the Jays have grown accustomed to watching the same sluggers blast through all their opponents. The Royals are going to want to stop that.
Toronto had the best offense in baseball, in largest part because they had three of the best hitters in baseball. According to the FanGraphs leaderboards, among qualified hitters, Josh Donaldson ranked seventh-best in the majors. Edwin Encarnacion ranked eighth, and Jose Bautista ranked ninth. Bautista was tied with someone named Chris Davis, just ahead of one Andrew McCutchen. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and just to maximize the terror, the Blue Jays bat the three back-to-back-to-back. It’s on the Royals to figure out how to get them out. And I can offer a little bit of advice, although it’s less helpful than it might appear.
If you somehow missed the seventh inning of Wednesday’s ALDS Game 5 and now somehow find yourself here at this website, do yourself a favor: go watch it. On the days following games like that, after we’ve been through something as grand, troubling, exultant, and trying as that seventh inning, we spend most of our time trying to make sense of it all: not only the fact that what we witnessed could only happen in this singular game of baseball, but that we’ve never seen anything like it before. Just think: there are more games like that in the future. How crazy is that knowledge? How will we possibly survive all of them?
Even though many of you, like me, are probably still dealing with the fallout of increased blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and psychological trauma, we all have a job to do, and mine is to somehow analyze a piece of what went on Wednesday. We already had Jeff breaking it down with his usual aplomb. We had Eno looking into the rules associated with the plays in question. And, perhaps most pertinent to this article, Dave weighed in on the line between emotion and sportsmanship.
There’s a part of that final subject that we’re going to key in on: emotion. We try, in many ways, to capture how players perform in different situations. We can look at dozens of splits on our player pages. Leverage is the situation that immediately comes to mind when we’re talking about intangible forces that can impact performance. The closest we get to measuring an emotional response is how players perform under pressure — how clutch they are.
But what about anger? We don’t measure that, and it’s understandable why we don’t — measuring anger is impossible or impractical with the tools we have right now. It would also be a pretty strange thing to measure, but we also measure plenty of strange things.
That brings us to what happened on Wednesday in the bottom of the seventh inning. By this point, the top half of the inning had already included the go-ahead run scoring on a deflected ball being thrown back to the pitcher, multiple instances of fans throwing objects onto the field, and the Blue Jays playing the game under protest. To say that tensions were running high would be a gross understatement, especially for the Blue Jays.
So, when Bautista stepped to the plate in the bottom of the inning during a tie game that hung in the balance, it’s not a stretch to say he was probably feeling a bit of frustration, maybe even anger. Then he did this:
For an athlete, a constant struggle in decision-making exists between the body and mind. When presented with a choice, there are two routes a person can take. The most informed route, typically, is to hand over the keys to the mind. The mind can think logically and, with ample time and preparation — sometimes just a few extra seconds — the mind can parse out a number of options, choose what it believes to the best one, and send the correct signal to the body.
But the body reacts faster. Under pressure, when an instantaneous decision is required, the decision-making process defaults to the body’s reaction, because it gets to skip the step of the mind parsing information and sending a signal. This is an involuntary response. The mind still parses, and still sends its signal, it’s just, sometimes, the body beats it to the punch. So it’s hard to fault someone when they choose the body’s reaction over the mind’s conclusion, because all that means is that the mind didn’t have enough time, in the moment, to trump the body’s reaction. Yet, here we are.
Before you can question Andre Ethier for his choices in Thursday’s fourth-inning sacrifice fly that scored Daniel Murphy and tied Game 5 of the Dodgers-Mets NLDS at 2-2, you’ve got to take a step back and examine how we got there.
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Ben, Craig Goldstein, and Matt Trueblood banter about Mets-Dodgers Game 5, then preview the NLCS and ALCS.
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During the postseason, Win Expectancy charts become ubiquitous, because each play, misplay, decision and comeback is magnified in its importance in front of a national TV audience. While Win Expectancy (WE) and Win Probability Added (WPA) aren’t great stats to evaluate players, they are a tool to understand how the dynamics of how a game changes from the first pitch to the last out.
For those not all too familiar with Win Expectancy, our library has a good entry and the interpretation can be boiled down to
If a team is losing and has a 24% win expectancy, only 24% of teams in similar situations in the past have ever come back to win.
So using historical data and the current inning, score, outs and runners on base, WE tells you what percentage of teams have won given those circumstances. These numbers aren’t a prognostication, since anything can still happen, but they give an estimate of what you might expect from the situation.
Win Probability Added is derived from Win Expectancy — being the difference from one play to the next. For example, The batter/runner is given credit for a hit, while the pitcher on the mound will be debited an equal amount for that hit. Plays that dramatically swing the score late in the game with two outs in the inning generally have the highest WPA. WPA is written out like batting average (.000), but it should be interpreted in the same way as win expectancy (0.0%). A play with a .360 WPA increases the WE +36.0%.
Below is our standard WE chart combined with the signed* WPA chart. The WE chart is the running total of the WPA chart. The top chart shows the sum of all the plays until a certain point in the game, and the bottom chart shows the change in WE for each play, which is also the signed WPA.
Now with the basics out of the way, we can make some WPA leaderboards for this postseason. First, batters through the end of the LDS.
| 9:09 |
: Hello friends
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| 9:09 |
: Welcome to baseball chat
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| 9:10 |
: As expected since February, today’s ALCS Game 1 will be started by Marco Estrada and Edinson Volquez.
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| 9:10 |
Can we appreciate for a moment that literally 1/3 of Canada watched game 5 of the ALDS? |
| 9:11 |
: I love that one team unites a whole country, that a few weeks from now will revert to a sort of hockey-based tribalism
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| 9:12 |
: The other day, in Toronto, I heard the “ole” chant. The Montreal Canadiens chant. The Blue Jays allow for all of Canada to temporarily set aside its many differences
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That a starting pitcher in Major League Baseball gains velocity as he heads to the bullpen is not a new phenomenon. At this point, it is a strategy. When a pitcher cannot last five innings consistently or fails to develop a necessary off-speed pitch, the pitcher is sent to the bullpen to see if his stuff will “play up” in shorter outings, allowing him to air out the fastball. It is rare, however, to see a pitcher who can go five innings, who has the off-speed stuff to stick as a starter, and already has elite bullpen-ready velocity as a starter. With Noah Syndergaard last night, we were able to witness exactly what that is like. For one night, Syndergaard turned himself into Aroldis Chapman.
There were few doubts that Syndergaard could hit 100 mph as a reliever. Syndergaard’s velocity has been with him all season. He throws two fastballs, a four-seamer and a two-seamer, and both of them have averaged close to 98 mph this season, according to Brooks Baseball. He hit 100 mph twice during the season as a starter, joining only Gerrit Cole, Nathan Eovaldi, Carlos Martinez, and Rubby de la Rosa as starters to reach that mark, per Baseball Savant. Also according to Baseball Savant, only 24 pitchers total in the majors this season have hit 100 mph. Only a few days ago, Syndergaard hit 100 mph at the end of his outing in Game 2 of the National League Division Series against the Dodgers.
If throwing fast gained a pitcher sainthood, Aroldis Chapman would have been canonized a while ago. The Reds left-hander threw more balls over 100 mph than the rest of MLB combined this year. Nearly 30% of all of Chapman’s pitches this season reached triple digits and, for one night, Syndergaard was Chapman’s equal.
A few minutes ago, we announced that Dan Farnsworth was going to be taking over as our new Lead Prospect Analyst. Because I know he wouldn’t, I brought up some of his previous excellent work published here as a part-time contributor, and explained why we are excited to offer Dan this opportunity. If you haven’t already, go read that post. Now, we’ll allow him to introduce himself.
As Dave noted this morning, today is my first official day as the Lead Prospect Analyst for FanGraphs. It is an unbelievable honor, and I cannot wait to start discussing a wide range of players with you, our readers. Though you may have read some of my previous work, this is a new role for me, and I know the site has grown tremendously over the last few years. In that light, I wanted to introduce myself more fully, as well as provide you with some ideas I have for projecting players and how I will be presenting that information. Kiley McDaniel really stepped up the game for publicly available scouting data, and I hope to continue that standard of quality going forward.
First, a little about me personally and professionally. I graduated from Franklin & Marshall College in 2008 with a Bachelor or Arts in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History — I’m coming for your title of weirdest baseball writing background, Cistulli — where I played Division III baseball as a catcher. At the time, I was interested in the medical field, and I applied and was accepted to Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York City. While I enjoyed the coursework, it became clear that becoming a doctor was not for me. I left school in 2011 to dedicate myself to working in baseball, and started coaching and teaching lessons at a baseball facility in Pennsylvania. Since then, I moved to Los Angeles to work with hitters in one of the best baseball regions in the country. At the beginning of the 2015 season, I moved back to New York City and worked as a Remote Scout for Inside Edge, mainly focusing on pitch charting and sequencing. Along the ride, I have met and learned from a lot of great baseball people.
