FanGraphs Baseball

Episode 595
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he discusses Angels left-hander Andrew Heaney‘s decision to offer a stake in his future earnings, St. Louis third baseman Matt Carpenter’s efforts sacrifice contact in favor of power, and also Ruben Amaro’s (now complete) tenure as general manager of the Phillies.

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 51 min play time.)

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Ben and Sam discuss Yoenis Cespedes’ MVP case and contract, then talk about why bad teams don’t try to lose in September.

In a very short while, the Rangers and the Astros will kick off a crucial four-game series, with the AL West up for grabs. There will be three more meetings between the teams after this series is complete, so any mistakes can be made up for, but this race is coming down to the wire. It’s currently the closest race of the divisions, and while the Rangers are already close at 1.5 games back, they were literally inches away from an even smaller deficit before the Astros rallied past the Angels on Sunday. The Astros know they can lose their position. The Rangers know it’s theirs for the taking.

In a lot of ways, this isn’t what people expected. Even just several weeks ago, by which point we’d come to believe in the Astros, the Rangers didn’t look like a threat. After the games on July 31, the Astros were up two games on the Angels, and seven games on the Rangers. The Rangers’ odds of winning the division were a hair below 2%. Now they’re a little above 22%, gaining about a game on the Astros a week. Since the beginning of August, the Rangers have gone 25-15, second-best in the AL. Since the same point, the Astros have gone 19-20, sandwiched between the Yankees and the Rays. What’s happened to cause the Astros to lose much of their advantage?

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Ben and Sam discuss David Ortiz’s Hall of Fame candidacy and Angels starter Andrew Heaney’s decision to sell stock in himself.

The Nationals aren’t mathematically dead, and there are several reasons for why they’re so far behind the Mets, but if you want to say the Nationals’ season died one day, you could point to the game they lost to the Mets after leading 7-1. Here’s that win expectancy graph, and you can see that, for Washington, it topped out at 99.2%. That game was absolutely devastating. That game all but sealed the dueling narratives. It can also get worse.

Source: FanGraphs

Sunday, Astros, Angels. The lead was three, not six. It was a game between first and third place, not first and second. But the Angels’ win expectancy topped out at 99.7%. They had the Astros down to their last strike. The Angels find themselves now behind 4.5 games, not 2.5. And the rally itself was almost inconceivable, even independent of the context. This would’ve been a dramatic conclusion in a game between the Braves and an area college. Let’s watch the meat of the top of the ninth inning. Some of you already know everything that happened, but those who don’t really need to.

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At the end of May, David Ortiz was posting a .309 OBP with just six home runs. The idea of Big Papi joining the 500 home run club this season was a pipe dream. Around that time, we heard an idea that had circulated many times in seasons past: Ortiz was done, kaput, finished. He was too old, his bat was too slow, and this time — really — he’d fallen off the cliff. There were articles about what was wrong with him, and for good reason.

Then Ortiz fixed those problems. From June 1st until today, he has put up a .389 OBP with 28 homers, good for a wRC+ of 172 (meaning he’s been 72% better than the average offensive player in the league). He’s put up an uncannily similar batting line to the one he posted last year. Take a look:

2015 Ortiz is 2014 Ortiz in terms of performance (he’s pretty much 2013 Ortiz too, for that matter). The walk and strikeout rates are especially remarkable in their consistency. So how did he get here? We’ve heard about Big Papi having issues in the early stages of the season before; what did he fix this time around to be able to reach the 500 home run milestone during 2015?

First, let’s go over what was wrong. Matthew Kory explained the issues with Ortiz’ approach in an early-June article: Ortiz was hitting too many ground balls, and both his average grounder and fly ball was more weakly-hit than his career-norm. That’s an issue when you’re a slow power hitter who is shifted by defenses at one of the highest rates in the major leagues, because those weak grounders almost always turn into outs.

Ortiz also faced a disproportionate share of left-handed pitchers in the first two months of the season. His career splits for lefties vs. righties are pretty stark (he owns a career 110 wRC+ vs. lefties and a 159 career wRC+ vs. righties), so it’s understandable that he couldn’t find his usual level of production out of the gate. Hitting a lot of weak grounders and facing a ton of lefties when you’re a left-handed hitter is a recipe for a slump.

Then the end of May rolled around. Ortiz sat on the bench for two days, studying tape of himself and most likely hoping that a mental break might turn things around. It worked: the time off marked the turning point of his season. Quite simply, Ortiz started hitting more fly balls after his short break, and he started hitting everything harder.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been kicking around a few thoughts in my head, and so today, I’m going to try and turn them into a cohesive post. I can’t guarantee I’m going to succeed, given that I’m writing these sentences before I write the rest of them, but after pondering these in my head for a while, it’s probably time to put them down on virtual paper and get some feedback on the ideas presented.

The primary genesis of these thoughts are spurred by the fact that, with three weeks left in the season, the battle for the second AL Wild Card is being contested by the Twins and Rangers. Entering the year, our Playoff Odds gave the Twins a 4.6% chance of making the postseason (based on a 74-88 projected record), and the Rangers a 3.5% chance (with a 73-89 projected finish), and now it seems quite likely that one of the two is going to end up playing the Yankees in the Wild Card play-in game. The American League as a whole has been pretty weird this year, or if you take a different perspective, our preseason projections have performed poorly in forecasting AL team records this season.

Rangers fans — or a segment of their fanbase who use Twitter, anyway — have been particularly loud in their objections to our evaluation of their team, and understandably, 140 games of their team winning games at a .525 clip has reinforced their belief that our methodology of team evaluation is incorrect. Or that I personally have a bias against their team. Or some combination of the two.

From my perspective, though, the disconnect is mostly just a philosophical choice, and is the same choice that drives a lot of the disagreement around many of our less popular evaluations. Primarily, we evaluate players and teams by their inputs, not their outputs.

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Fans of Major League Baseball have long held an emotional investment in favorite players and teams, spending time and money on the sport and receiving widely varying emotional returns depending on results. If Fantex and Los Angeles Angels starter Andrew Heaney get their way, fans and investors will soon be able to invest in the future earnings of the Angels left-hander. Heaney and Fantex, a company that has previously struck similar deals with multiple NFL players, have agreed to a contract that will pay Heaney $3.34 million in exchange for “10 percent of all future earnings related to his brand, including player contracts, corporate endorsements and appearance fees,” according to Ken Rosenthal. A deal like this will attempt to provide pre-arbitration players like Heaney a form of insurance against future injury or a downgrade in performance without signing a team-friendly contract that keeps players from free agency. While this concept has been around for quite some time, in practice, these deals are still in their infancy and come with some drawbacks.

Almost two years ago, Fantex made news by announcing an agreement with star running back Arian Foster of the Houston Texans. The deal, similar to the one for Heaney, would have paid Foster $10 million in exchange for 20% of Foster’s future earnings. Before the parties could follow through on the deal, Foster was injured and the IPO never got off the ground. The deals with Fantex are subject to getting enough investors to pay for the initial guarantee to the players. For Heaney to get paid, enough investors must first meet the IPO amount, in this case $3.34 million.

In some ways, this model may look like a long-term version of daily fantasy games, where fans can put forth a relatively small sum of money in the hopes that a player will play well and provide a return on the money they have deposited. I spoke with Fantex co-founder and CEO Buck French about the potential comparisons and he was quick to refute them, stating that they do not consider themselves in the same market. “[Daily fantasy sports] is totally different. It’s not investing. Either you win or you lose… A single game outcome will determine whether you win or lose.” French cited a Wall Street Journal article stating that 1.3% of daily fantasy players win 91% of the profits in the first half of the MLB season. French said that, in Fantex, people “invest in future cash flow stream and collect dividends. They aren’t trying to beat out a whole bunch of people.”

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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
Houston at Texas | 20:05 ET
Kazmir (164.1 IP, 96 xFIP-) vs. Hamels (177.1 IP, 86 xFIP-)
What this game represents is an encounter between the two clubs in all of baseball most closely situated atop their respective division’s standings. Had the pair met a month ago, meanwhile, that’s not at all what this game would have represented — owing, that is, to how Texas was five games behind Houston and the Los Angeles Angels were also in second place. What one learns is that circumstances can change dramatically in a month. Like how they can change dramatically for an animal which endures a gestation period of a month or less. Or like how they can change for someone who has a single life-changing day, but for some reason — due probably to a neurological disorder about which Oliver Sacks has written — experiences time at roughly 1/30th the rate of the typical human.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Texas Radio.

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