10 days ago, I was informed that I will be voting for the National League Cy Young Award this year. This will be my first time voting on the pitcher awards — last year, I was tasked with voting for Manager of the Year and MVP — and so I’ve spent the last week and a half trying to work through what kind of factors I’m going to want to consider in putting my ballot together. And as I work through the process, I’ve come to realize that there’s one potentially significant factor that I’m not sure whether to consider or not; a pitcher’s performance while batting.

My initial reaction to the idea of using a pitcher’s batting line as a variable was to reject the notion, considering that it’s an award designed to honor the best pitcher of the season, and a pitcher’s job is to prevent runs. What a pitcher does at the plate can be rewarded when they vote on the Silver Slugger Award. I think that’s generally the commonly accepted approach, and when I broached this topic with a few people at Saber Seminar this weekend, most of them — even Brian Bannister, the former MLB pitcher who posted a career .276/.300/.414 batting line — suggested that a pitcher’s hitting performance shouldn’t be a factor in the Cy Young voting.

But I guess I’m still not convinced. I certainly haven’t made up my mind to definitely include a pitcher’s batting performance as a factor in my vote, but I don’t know that I can accept the idea that we should only be evaluating a pitcher’s contribution to run prevention, when National League pitchers are also required to hit as a function of their jobs. It’s a smaller part of their job, certainly, but it is something they have to do, much like big lumbering sluggers who are selected for their ability to hit the ball a long way still have to run the bases, even though that is definitely not the skill they are being paid for.

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As the Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates race toward the playoffs with payrolls in the bottom 20% of Major League Baseball and the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers falter with top-five payrolls, we are reminded that money cannot buy success in all cases. The Dodgers, with their $300-plus million payroll and a luxury tax bill that will add on another $40 to $50 million, have not guaranteed themselves a berth in the playoffs. We have seen billion-dollar television deals grant enormous benefits to large-market clubs and teams like the New York Yankees and the Red Sox have long wielded their financial might to buy wins. Financial parity does not exist in baseball, but even without it, single-season payroll has played a lesser role in team success over the past few years compared to a decade ago. However, payroll does become a factor when it comes to sustained success.

Over the last three seasons, here is the amount every team has spent per win, using the Opening Day payroll for each of the three seasons and about one-quarter of the season to go this year.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet 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
Cleveland at Chicago NL | 14:05 ET
Kluber (186.2 IP, 74 xFIP-) vs. Lester (148.1 IP, 81 xFIP-)
With hardly any pomp and even less circumstance, what the author has done for this edition of the daily NERD game scores is — instead of the season-to-date-stats playoff odds — is to use the coin-flip playoffs odds as the playoff-type input for the team NERD scores below. The logic behind the move: the coin-flip mode probably reflects more accurately how the human brain perceives the drama of the playoff race. The actual difference produced by the change: hardly any. In either case, the Cubs are among those clubs which feature divisional-series odds closest to 50% — which is to say, furthest from certainty. As of Sunday night, the probability of the Cubs reaching the divisional series, according to the season-to-date-stats model, was 44.8%; by the coin-flip model, 51.3%.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Chicago NL Television.

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During the height of the furor over the National Football League’s mishandling of the Ray Rice case last fall, both Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed to work together to formulate a new domestic violence policy for the league. On Friday, the two sides announced that they had finally reached an agreement on a new comprehensive policy covering not only incidents of domestic violence, but cases of sexual assault and child abuse as well:

MLB and the MLBPA have announced an agreement on a Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy. pic.twitter.com/C1eTGljC6r

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) August 21, 2015

In addition to establishing new player treatment and education protocols, the policy gives the Commissioner’s Office the authority to investigate any allegation of domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse involving a major-league player. Commissioner Manfred has also been given the power to place a player under investigation on paid Administrative Leave for up to seven days, a placement that the player can immediately appeal to panel of arbitrators.

Following the completion of MLB’s investigation, the new policy gives the commissioner the power to impose whatever punishment “he believes is appropriate in light of the severity of the conduct.” In other words, the agreement does not establish any minimum or maximum penalties for domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse cases. In fact, the policy explicitly states that a player does not even need to be criminally convicted of a crime in order to be punished by the commissioner. Once again, however, the player will have the right to appeal his punishment to a panel of arbitrators.

So how does MLB’s new policy compare with the league’s prior treatment of domestic violence? And what types of penalties might players realistically face if the commissioner determines they have violated the new agreement?

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet 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
Los Angeles NL at Houston | 14:10 ET
Kershaw (169.0 IP, 56 xFIP-) vs. McCullers (76.2 IP, 89 xFIP-)
As contributor Neil Weinberg noted on Friday in these pages, left-hander Clayton Kershaw has an opportunity to produce baseball’s lowest expected fielding-independent pitching (xFIP) mark this season since 2002 — which is to say, also the earliest year for which the necessary inputs for that metric are available. While immaterial in itself, to set such a record would signify something more material — namely that, with regard to those variables over which a pitcher exacts the most control (and which are easiest measure), Kershaw has exacted terrifying and exceptional control. He is, one might say, a sort of despot, exerting a cruel power not over a tired and oppressed people but rather just the baseball strike zone.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Houston Television.

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Jason Bere had an interesting observation about Joe Borowski, who saved 45 games for the Indians in 2007. According to Bere – currently Cleveland’s bullpen coach – Borowski threw a lot of backup sliders. Contrary to what you might think, that was a good thing.

“A lot of times when he got a guy to swing and miss, it was with the one that just kind of stayed,” Bere told me. “They would react to what they were seeing out of the hand, the spin, but while it had the tightness of a true slider, it didn’t break like one.

“Hitters will tell you that something that backs up on them is hard to hit. A hanger, they’ll crush. But something that backs up – that last second it’s not going where they thought it was going to go – they”ll have trouble with it. You can see it from the swings they take.”

Intrigued by what Bere told me, I set out in search of further opinions on the effective, yet almost always unintentional, backup slider.

Alan Nathan, the man behind The Physics of Baseball, shared a scientific perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet 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
San Francisco at Pittsburgh | 16:05 ET
Leake (143.0 IP, 97 xFIP-) vs. Cole (155.1 IP, 80 xFIP-)
The relative brevity of the passage you’re reading here is correlated inversely to the length of time the author spent last night consuming various spirits with readers of FanGraphs and also the magnitude of the physical discomfort which has been produced inside the author’s body as a result of that activity. In conclusion, faux science suggests once again that the Giants and Pirates ought to offer some combination of thrill and delight.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: San Francisco Radio or Television.

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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, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet 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
San Francisco at Pittsburgh | 19:05 ET
Bumgarner (163.1 IP, 77 xFIP-) vs. Locke (129.1 IP, 104 xFIP-)
Writing about the implications of this series yesterday, the present author noted that, among all major-league clubs, the two considered here featured divisional-series playoff odds closest to 50% — which is to say, furthest from certainty. Not only does that remain the case today, but what else one finds is that, according to the numbers, this game itself is basically an exercise in uncertainty. Regard, by way of illustration, a lightly edited excerpt from today’s live scoreboard:

Afflicted by randomness, is how the Giants and Pirates currently find themselves. Afflicted by randomness, one notes, is also how any reasonably observant person describes his experience of the world. To suggest, then, that tonight’s contest represents a sort of morality play for existential angst — this would be accurate. Accurate but also overwrought. Overwrought, but not necessarily in an unpleasant way.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: San Francisco Radio or Television.

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