FanGraphs Baseball

According to Statcast, this past Saturday Kris Bryant hit the longest home run in Major League Baseball this year. The home run traveled 495 feet with a batted-ball speed of 111 mph and an angle of 33 degrees. The ball careened off the newly installed scoreboard in left field.

Aside from watching the replay, to put the home run into context, I created a hexbin plot that shows Bryant’s home run as an outlier. This graph includes only home runs for which Statcast has published batted-ball data and also were recorded as featuring a distance of 300 feet or greater. (This data set contains only about 75% of total home runs in 2015.) Each hexagon is a bin consisting of a batted-ball speed range and a batted-ball distance range. The color represents how many home runs fall into that bin; the more blue a bin is, the more home runs fall into it. The lack of the bin indicates no home runs for those data points.

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To say the Dodgers have a surplus of infielders on their roster would be an understatement. Justin Turner, Howie Kendrick, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Enrique Hernandez, Alex Guerrero and Jose Peraza all have their merits as major leaguers, and all happen to play either second base, third base or shortstop. Not all of them have had the best of seasons this year, but still: that’s seven players capable of playing the infield for just three spots.

Unfortunately for the Dodgers, the injury bug has taken a huge bite out of that infield depth. Kendrick, perhaps the team’s best infielder, has been out for nearly a month with a hamstring strain. Peraza and Hernandez, who’s been on a tear of late, also went down with hamstring strains last week. Suddenly, the Los Angeles didn’t look all that deep in the infield, especially considering how poorly Utley and Rollins have hit this year.

Enter Corey Seager. In an effort to shore up their ailing infield, the Dodgers summoned their top prospect to the big leagues last week, providing them with another option at shortstop and third base. Seager was the consensus top prospect left in the minor leagues at the time of his call-up. He topped just about every outlet’s mid-season prospect list this summer, and his .300/.346/.464 performance since August 1st certainly hasn’t diminished his case. Overall, Seager hit .293/.344/.487 in 125 minor-league games this year, with all but 20 of those games coming at the Triple-A level.

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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 NL at Washington | 19:05 ET
Harvey (166.1 IP, 87 xFIP-) vs. Zimmermann (173.0 IP, 98 xFIP-)
A lot has to happen for the Washington Nationals — which club currently possesses playoff odds somewhere between 10% and 16%, depending on methodology — a lot has to happen for the Nationals to qualify for the postseason. Roughly one-fifth of it could happen tonight, however, as those Nationals — currently trailing the Mets by five games in the NL East — are scheduled to play that same Mets club tonight along the banks of the Anacostia. The other option, of course, is that Washington loses the game, thus rendering moot all hope.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

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The Houston Astros acquired right-hander David Paulino and outfielder Danry Vasquez from the Detroit Tigers at the trade deadline in 2013 for a two-month rental of reliever Jose Veras. At the time Vasquez was a rising prospect for the Tigers and the centerpiece of the deal. Paulino was nothing more than a rail-thin project to sweeten the pot.

A lot has changed since then: Paulino has bulked up, his fastball has gained velocity and the breaking ball has taken a step forward developmentally. Across three levels of A-ball this season, the 21-year-old boasts an impressive 72:19 strikeout-to-walk ratio over 67.1 innings. Here are my notes from seeing Paulino in extended spring training this year.

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Episode 593
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses notable September call-ups (such as current Dodgers prospect Corey Seager and former Dodgers one Hector Olivera), the significance of 17-year-old Red Sox pitcher Anderson Espinoza sitting at 95-99 mph, and also curiously proportioned/offensively gifted Dodgers prospect Willie Calhoun.

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 13 min play time.)

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Ben and Sam banter about GM smack talk, then discuss the Mets, Matt Harvey, and innings limits.

With September here, it’s easy to forget about what’s going on with teams toward the bottom of the standings. The rosters have expanded, prospects are getting looks for the teams who are out of contention, and most articles are about playoff races and potential postseason happenings. There’s one issue with overlooking the cellar-dwellers, however: Joey Votto — who is on one of those dwellers — is having a historically great year, and that merits attention.

2015 could easily be the year that forgot about Votto. The Cincinnati Reds are in last place, the NL MVP conversation has been dominated by Bryce Harper since the first month of the season (for good reason), and a number of chronically unsuccessful franchises are looking like they’re headed to the playoffs. This late stage of the season provides a great opportunity to gauge the strength of the storylines during the past few months of baseball, and 2015 has been anything but a disappointment; quite the opposite, in fact.

That makes Votto’s 2015 strangely interesting. In a season that includes the Cubs and Mets succeeding, possibly the best rookie class ever, and a Bryce Harper mega-breakout, Votto is quietly having one of the best offensive seasons for a last place team since 1969, when the divisional era began.

Let’s investigate. First, it’s important to put Votto’s season in context. I’ve pulled the 25-best offensive seasons by wRC+ (a metric that captures a player’s overall offensive output compared to league average) since the year 2000; Votto’s 2015 season currently ranks 19th overall. Take a look:

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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
Baltimore at New York AL | 13:05 ET
Chen (160.2 IP, 101 xFIP-) vs. Pineda (128.1 IP, 70 xFIP-)
In addition to featuring (in the Yankees) one half of the league’s most tightly contested division — and also featuring (in Michael Pineda) the majors’ fifth-best starting pitcher by a non-negligible measure — what this game also represents is an opportunity to observe first-hand the Manny Machado Shortstop Experiment. Or, to observe it four times, at least — which is to say, the approximate number of fielding chances the average major-league shortstop receives per game.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Baltimore Radio.

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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
Minnesota at Houston | 14:10 ET
Duffey (25.2 IP, 114 xFIP-) vs. Keuchel (192.2 IP, 68 xFIP-)
The first installment in this series was a legitimately entertaining one, featuring a combined 19 strikeouts from the starters, a bases-loaded diving catch by Byron Buxton to end the game, and the highest average leverage index among all Saturday’s contests by some margin — a fact illustrated somewhat unnecessarily by the table below.

Top-Five Average Leverage Indices, 9/5/15

	Game	aLI
1	MIN @ HOU	1.74
2	TEX @ LAA	1.36
3	TBR @ NYY	1.29
4	MIL @ CIN	1.25
5	LAD @ SDP	1.23

Can one guarantee that this afternoon’s encounter will offer the same combination of thrill and delight? Of course not. Indeed, as research shows, only three things are certain in this world: death, taxes, and uncles who, upon being asked to estimate the likelihood of such-and-such an event, declare that there are only two things which are certain this world.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Houston Television.

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