FanGraphs Baseball

The Blue Jays acquired David Price expecting him to be an ace, and to this point he’s been exactly as advertised. While teams elsewhere are struggling to straighten out their deadline acquisitions, Price has allowed just 15 runs in 10 starts with Toronto. His surface numbers are terrific, and his more advanced numbers are terrific, and when everything agrees that a guy is terrific, he’s probably terrific. The Blue Jays are getting what they paid for.

Significantly, in just over a month and a half, Price has already pitched against the Yankees four times. Three of those games he won, and in the one he didn’t, he left with a 3-1 lead. Monday was Price’s latest win over New York, and he found himself in the most trouble in the third inning. With one out and the bases loaded, Price began his highest-leverage plate appearance of the evening, opposite Alex Rodriguez.

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Here’s a statement I think most people would agree with: Bryce Harper has been the best player in baseball this year.

Harper leads the majors in batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage, so naturally, he also leads in wOBA, wRC+, and just about any other offensive metric you can find here on FanGraphs. In most cases, it isn’t even close; his 205 wRC+ is 30 points better than the next best hitter (Joey Votto), and no one is within +1.5 WAR of his current total (+9.7, with Josh Donaldson’s +8.1 coming in second). Harper is having one of the best offensive seasons of all time, and while some other guys are having excellent years as well, no one is really performing at Harper’s level this year.

Now here’s a statement that I’m guessing would be a bit more controversial: the Washington Nationals are having the best season in the National League East.

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Suppose the amount of human knowledge in the universe is finite. And suppose we happen to have reached the limit; we have acquired as much as we can. And suppose further that this applies to baseball, as well. What if we have learned as much as we can about pitching, for example, and there is no more knowledge we can gain, try as we might? It’s a silly supposition, of course: there’s lots more to study and learn and there always will be until we crash into the sun. But I present this thought experiment to you because it’s as close to a real explanation for Rich Hill’s recent dominance as I can get.

There’s a very real chance you have no idea what or who I’m talking about at this point, so please, let me back up. Rich Hill the pitcher is who, and his two starts wherein he’s recorded 20 total strikeouts, a single walk, and given up all of three runs in 14 innings is what. The what is brought up because it’s odd. How odd? There have been 97 games this year in which a starting pitcher went at least seven innings with at least 10 strikeouts and walked at most one batter. There have been 2,235 games played this season, so 97 represents just 4% of the total games. The fact that Hill did it once is interesting. The fact that he did it twice is just bizarre.

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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
New York AL at Toronto | 19:07 ET
Severino (43.1 IP, 92 xFIP-) vs. Estrada (160.1 IP, 123 xFIP-)
By the methodology typically employed by the author to produce these dumb NERD scores, tonight’s Yankees-Blue Jays game is not the most highly rated. That largely fictional distinction belongs to the Angels-Astros encounter in Houston. And, indeed, that game could very possibly offer a relentless barrage of thrill and delight. One variable omitted from the haphazardly derived algorithm, however — and perhaps especially relevant during the postseason stretch drive — is the influence of the crowd on the game-as-spectacle. For while fan involvement during last night’s Houston game was relatively subdued, that was very much the opposite case in Toronto. Indeed, the numbers support that observation.

Attendance Relative to Capacity, 9/21/2015

Game	Stadium	Capacity	Attendance	% of Capacity
NYA @ TOR	Rogers Centre	54,000*	47,648	88.2%
LAA @ HOU	Minute Maid Park	41,574	25,318	60.9%

SOURCE: Baseball Reference

The Rogers Centre, which is capable of holding about 12,000 more people than Minute Maid Park, was also nearly 30 percentage points closer to capacity last night. The result: a greater sense of urgency for the observer. Reason dictates that tonight’s games will offer a similar set of conditions.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

*As multiple concerned internet citizens note, Rogers Centre capacity has actually decreased in recent years. The website for the venue itself now reports capacities of 47,000-49,000.

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The Fans Scouting Report is back for 2015 — the 13th edition of this project — and is now open for your consideration. Rather than add too much of my own commentary, I’ll just quote Tom Tango.

Baseball’s fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

There is an enormous amount of untapped knowledge here. There are 70 million fans at MLB parks every year, and a whole lot more watching the games on television. When I was a teenager, I had no problem picking out Tim Wallach as a great fielding 3B, a few years before MLB coaches did so. And, judging by the quantity of non-stop standing ovations Wallach received, I wasn’t the only one in Montreal whose eyes did not deceive him. Rondell White, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Andre Dawson, Hubie Brooks, Ellis Valentine. We don’t need stats to tell us which of these does not belong.

The Project

What I would like to do now is tap that pool of talent. I want you to tell me what your eyes see. I want you to tell me how good or bad a fielder is. Go down, and start selecting the team(s) that you watch all the time. For any player that you’ve seen play in at least 10 games in 2014, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.

Try to judge ‘average’ not as an average player at that position, but an average player at any position. If you think that Ben Zobrist has an average arm, then mark him as average, regardless if you’ve seen him play 2B, SS, LF or RF.

Crowdsourcing has proven to be quite useful in many endeavors, and this is one of the best uses of crowdsourcing in a baseball environment. So, go take part; the FanGraphs crowd is particularly important to the success of this project, so let’s help Tango collect some useful data for the rest of us to enjoy and be informed by.

“I don’t care about hitting home runs, I don’t care about any of that sort of stuff,” Joey Votto told me when I mentioned the stat. “I care about improving all of the facets of my game that can be repeatable and that age well.” And really, as great as his season has been this year, no quote better sums up the strides he’s made.

One things we know that ages terribly is contact on pitches outside of the zone (O-Contact%). It drops off the table quickly after 29.

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Ben and Sam banter about a Sandy Alderson story, then compare what PECOTA and the sportsbooks say about the likely winners of the World Series.

Do you remember last offseason? Last offseason, it seemed like Major League Baseball had two primary goals. One, it wanted to make the game move faster. And two, it wanted to do something about the ongoing drop in run-scoring. They didn’t really have a plan in mind, but they said it was a thing they were going to monitor. Last September, runs scored per nine innings dropped below 4 for the first time this millennium. And last year, also for the first time this millennium, there was a month with a league-wide OPS below .700. Actually, there were three of those months, in just a four-month span. Offense was going down; everyone was aware. Baseball needs a certain minimum level of offense to survive.

There’s your setup. This year, to some extent, baseball has succeeded in trimming unnecessary delays. The game does go faster, even if it’ll never go fast. And then there’s the matter of run-scoring. Here’s one plot, of year-to-year R/9 averages:

Hey, look, a little rebound. Relative to last year, this year is up 0.21 runs per nine, getting back closer to 2012 levels. That’s interesting on its own. But this gets more interesting the closer you look.

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The crux of my duties here at FanGraphs is to project prospects who happen to be in the news. In most cases, this involves writing about highly touted minor league players as they’re called up to the big leagues for the first time. There’s certainly been no shortage of players from that phylum in 2015. This year has often been labeled the “The Year of the Prospect,” and rightly so. From Kris Bryant to Carlos Correa to Noah Syndergaard to Lance McCullers, we’ve experienced a historic wave of young talent matriculating to the big leagues. Top prospects often turn into productive big leaguers, so nobody would be surprised if several of this year’s crop of rookies went on to be perennial All-Stars.

But not all impact major leaguers come out of this mold. As Jeff Sullivan uncovered this past February, about one-third of the players who produce three wins in any given season never even cracked a Baseball America’s Top 100 list. The purpose of this post is to analyze, or at least call attention to, a few rookie hitters on contending teams who weren’t ballyhooed as prospects, but have still acquitted themselves well in the big leagues. The four hitters below came to the big leagues with little fanfare, but have already made an impact on the division races this year, and more importantly, stand a good chance of remaining productive.

*****
Randal Grichuk, OF, St. Louis

Although he was a first round pick, Randal Grichuk underwhelmed throughout his minor league career. His 113 wRC+ as a minor leaguer was more good than great, especially for a future corner outfielder. And up until this season, he was best known as the guy the Angels selected before Mike Trout. Grichuk’s put together an excellent performance for the Cardinals this year, however, belting 16 home runs in 92 games on his way to a 142 wRC+. Grichuk’s had some trouble making contact, but has made up for it by being extremely productive in those plate appearances that haven’t resulted in a strikeout.

Grichuk didn’t crack any top-100 lists heading into the year, but KATOH still thought he was an interesting prospect based on his minor league numbers. Although his overall .259/.311/.493 batting line was nothing special, especially for the Pacific Coast League, KATOH was still impressed by the power he demonstrated as a 22-year-old in Triple-A. My system projected him for 4.4 WAR through age 28, making him the 81st highest-ranked prospect. It’s no secret the Cardinals have a good team this year, and Grichuk has been a big part of that success. The one obstacle for the 23-year-old is an elbow injury, which has limited him to pinch-hitting duties of late. If healthy, though, Grichuk’s pop should continue to power the Cardinals lineup this October, even if his batting average comes back to earth a bit.

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