FanGraphs Baseball

It’s dark in Chicago right now. It’s especially dark at Wrigley Field, and it will remain that way until next spring. The Cubs lost to the Mets tonight by a score of 8-3 and are done for the season.

Despite their bright future, it will be a winter of discontent for the supposedly-cursed franchise. That’s always the case when you enter a league championship series with high expectations, only to fall short. It’s even worse when you’re unceremoniously swept.

The beat down was methodical and severe. To many, it was preordained. After all, these are the Cubs. As Steve Goodman sang in A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request, “You raise up a young boy’s hopes and then just crush ’em like so many paper beer cups. Year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year.”

But to be honest, that refrain has grown old. History and hexes had nothing to do with the sweep. They lost to a darn good team. In Game One, it was a Dark Night who beat the Cubs, not a black cat. In Game Two, it was a Met named Murphy who did the damage, not a goat named Murphy. Steve Bartman didn’t reach out and cause the run-scoring wild pitch that gave New York a lead they didn’t relinquish in Game 3. As for Game 4, Chicago hosts a Lebowski Fest and Lucas Duda’s nickname is The Big Lebowski. That’s ironic as hell, but it’s not a curse.

On the off chance you missed tonight’s game, Duda crushed the souls of Cubs fans with a three-run jack in the first inning. He then drilled a two-run double in the second to put the home team in a 6-0 hole.

The early onslaught that buried the Cubs was exactly what multiple Mets were looking for. Following Game 3, Michael Conforto told me his team “can’t afford to take anything off the throttle, because they’re very explosive and you don’t want to let them get anything started.” Tyler Clippard agreed, saying, “We have to keep our nose to the grindstone, because once a team starts to get a leg up on you, momentum can shift pretty quickly.”

Momentum was a foreign word for Joe Maddon’s team all week. Chicago never held a lead in the four games, largely because they didn’t have an answer for New York pitching. They certainly didn’t have one for Daniel Murphy. The Mets second baseman went an unreal 9 for 17, and homered in each game. Curse him if you want, Cubs fans, but he had an NLCS for the ages. Along with his teammates, he’s on his way to the World Series.

As for the team that calls Wrigley home, a “Let’s Go Cubbies” chant broke out as the Mets dogpiled on the mound. It was brief — much like the just-completed series — but it was heartfelt. These are, after all, the Cubs.

The purpose of this post, nominally, is to provide some manner of brief but substantive comment on the exploits of second baseman Daniel Murphy, which player just recorded his sixth home run in as many postseason games for the (likely) National League champion Mets. The purpose of this post simultaneously is to capitalize on the enthusiasm of the public for Murphy’s accomplishments by providing an internet link on which they might idly click.

For those reading these words, the second objective has been accomplished. To satisfy the terms of the first objective, the author has produced the following — namely, a table of the 16 qualified batters from 2015 (out of 141 total) who recorded fewer home runs this year over 162 games than Murphy himself has over a half-dozen of them.

Qualifiers with Fewer Homers Than Postseason D. Murphy

	Name	Team	PA	HR
1	Brock Holt	BOS	509	2
2	Ben Revere	—	634	2
3	Nick Markakis	ATL	686	3
4	Alcides Escobar	KCA	662	3
5	Erick Aybar	LAA	638	3
6	Angel Pagan	SFN	551	3
7	Dee Gordon	MIA	653	4
8	Andrelton Simmons	ATL	583	4
9	Yadier Molina	STL	530	4
10	Chris Owings	ARI	552	4
11	Billy Burns	OAK	555	5
12	Anthony Gose	DET	535	5
13	Ender Inciarte	ARI	561	6
14	DJ LeMahieu	COL	620	6
15	Jace Peterson	ATL	597	6
16	Jean Segura	MIL	584	6

Episode 604
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the thirty-something guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

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 8 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Ask Joe Maddon, and he’ll tell you what’s wrong. To this point, the Cubs have simply been out-played. The Cubs have been out-pitched, they’ve been out-hit, and they’ve been out-executed in between. The Mets have played quality baseball, not giving the Cubs very many openings of any significance, and that’s a sure-fire way to end up with a 3-0 series standing. When a team like the Mets blends ability with smarts, that makes for a hell of a foe.

Quietly, over the course of the year, the Mets were an above-average baserunning team, but they weren’t much of a stolen-base team. In the playoffs, and especially against the Cubs, the Mets have turned their aggressiveness up, responding to worse hitting conditions by trying to squeeze everything they can out of being on base. Tuesday night, a pivotal play was Yoenis Cespedes stealing third base in the sixth inning of a tie game. The Mets didn’t used to do much stealing of third, but Cespedes would come in to score on a wild third strike, and his would be the winning run. It was an important event, and somewhat stunning for the ease with which Cespedes advanced.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam banter about Ben’s endangered diner and position player pitching, then answer listener emails about shutdown innings, evaluating GMs, and more.

Cliff Pennington is known to possess many things. First, his name, a mix of post-war American automobile repair man and British countryside retreat; second, a yearly salary of no small consequence which allows him a large home and garage outfitted with fine automobiles, if he so chooses; and third, a slightly above replacement-level bat and glove that have afforded him between 200 and 300 plate appearances for each of the past three seasons.

After yesterday’s ALCS Game Four, Pennington is now known to possess a few other things, chief among them a 91 mph fastball and a 79 mph curveball. We know this, of course, because Pennington was the first-ever position player to pitch in the playoffs, the direct result of a 14-2 rout of the Toronto Blue Jays by the Kansas City Royals. It was certainly not the hope of Blue Jays manager John Gibbons to call upon Pennington as a pitcher when laying out his bullpen for the semifinals of baseball’s biggest tournament, but here we are, and the results of the forced experiment were, at the very least, interesting and entertaining for the neutral fan.

Allow us to begin with Pennington’s first pitch:

Surprising? Surprising. 91 with sinking action from a position player will do that, and it caused quite a reaction from a section of Jays players who were paying attention to the game:

Read the rest of this entry »

To think, we got to do this just over a week ago, after a Jason Heyward home run. Now we’re in a similar situation. Tuesday night, the Cubs lost a tough one to the Mets, falling behind three games to none in the NLCS. So the Cubs find themselves in the worst position possible, and they’re fully aware of the history, but for whatever it’s worth, Kyle Schwarber just became the Cubs’ all-time leader in postseason dingers, and he got there by going deep against a really outside pitch from Jacob deGrom. It’s not really much consolation. How do you feel about your accomplishment, Kyle Schwarber?

“I’m not really looking at that right now,” Schwarber said.

Right. The last thing Schwarber wants to focus on is a dinger in a loss. The last thing the Cubs overall want to focus on is a dinger in a loss. The last thing Cubs fans want to focus on is a dinger in a loss. But, look. I’m not invested in this. I don’t play for the Cubs, and while I’ve rooted for the Cubs before, they’ve never been my favorite team. I get paid to obsess over stupid little details. So, following: a whole bunch of them. Though the Cubs ultimately lost, Schwarber’s home run was remarkable, and that’s right in my wheelhouse.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pointing out that the strike zone graphic used by TBS is not representative of the actual strike zone used in MLB, and is giving fans the wrong impression of the quality of the home plate umpiring in the playoffs. After nearly every NL game, we’ve seen a cascade of calls roasting that night’s umpire for making a bunch of bad calls, but in most cases, PITCHF/x has confirmed that the umpires are calling the same pitches they always call.

Today, though, I’m not going to defend last night’s umpire. Ted Barrett worked the plate for the Cubs/Mets game, and his zone was atrocious.

Those two called strikes off the plate to left-handed batters — one against Lucas Duda, one against Curtis Granderson — are bananas. That down and away pitch that Pedro Strop threw to Kelly Johnson is almost never called a strike either.

But Mets pitchers got their own share of nutty calls as well, especially at the bottom of the zone. Anthony Rizzo, Kyle Schwarber, and Chris Denorfia all had strikes called on them on pitches so far down that they shouldn’t have been reasonably expected to swing. And Kyle Hendricks took a pitch from deGrom at the very edge of even the shifted right-handed zone, because apparently a pitcher hitting against another team’s ace also needs a huge strike zone to contend with.

Barrett’s zone went both ways, and he wasn’t favoring one team or another, but last night’s strike zone was worth complaining about. This wasn’t just TBS misleading viewers with a poorly drawn graphic. Ted Barrett’s strike zone last night really was enormous.

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 seven of this year’s free agents, a collection of all the remaining batters.

Other Players: Nori Aoki / Alex Avila / Marlon Byrd / Asdrubal Cabrera / Yoenis Cespedes / Chris Davis / Rajai Davis / Alejandro De Aza / Ian Desmond / Stephen Drew / Dexter Fowler / David Freese / Alex Gordon / Jason Heyward / Torii Hunter / Chris Iannetta / Austin Jackson / Kelly Johnson / Matt Joyce / Howie Kendrick / Justin Morneau / Daniel Murphy / David Murphy / Mike Napoli / Dioner Navarro / Gerardo Parra / Alexei Ramirez / Colby Rasmus / Jimmy Rollins / Geovany Soto / Denard Span / Juan Uribe / Chase Utley / Matt Wieters / Ben Zobrist.

Steve Pearce (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Pearce:

• Has averaged 282 PA and 2.0 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 4.3 WAR per 600 PA* over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 0.3 WAR in 325 PA in 2015.
• Is projected to record 2.2 WAR per 600 PA**.
• Is entering his age-33 season.
• Made $3.7M in 2015, as part of deal signed in January 2015.

*That is, a roughly average number of plate appearances for a starting player.
**Prorated version of final updated 2015 Steamer projections available here.

Click here to estimate years and dollars for Pearce.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »