FanGraphs Baseball

A little over a month ago, Dave ran through his annual trade value rankings, and as he likes to do, after all the good bits, he wrote up the bad bit, addressing the game’s least-valuable players. Ranking third on his list was fallen Tigers ace Justin Verlander, whose contract is steady even when the pitching isn’t. Verlander ranked worse than Matt Kemp. Worse than Shin-Soo Choo. He’s making $28 million a year through 2019, and when Dave wrote the post up, Verlander looked like a wreck, after a season in which he also looked like a wreck. Verlander’s contract has been used as one of the reasons why the Tigers might be headed for disaster.

And, the Tigers might be headed for disaster. So might you and I be, I don’t know. Who knows anything? One thing I think I know, though — Verlander has turned things around. As the Tigers have faded out of the race, Verlander has seemingly re-emerged, and now it’s worth wondering what he actually is. Just as the world was getting used to the idea of an underwhelming, under-performing Justin Verlander, he’s showing signs that he…might…be…back? What if that were true? Are we open to the chance that that’s true?

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Episode 589
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 this past weekend’s Saberseminar in Boston, the quality and quantity of Statcast data, and one of Curt Schilling’s less horrifying — but also recent — comments.

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 39 min play time.)

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A week and a half ago, there was a remarkable home run, which I like. I’m drawn to those kinds of things, and I almost can’t help myself but write about them. I was floored by the home run itself; it was one of the most obvious subjects ever provided to me. The only problem was then I didn’t write for a week. The moment passed. Usually, these things have to be written right away, or people cease to be interested. It’s been a while since the home run, now. People are thinking about other things. The Mets. The Mets are neat.

I feel like I have to do it, though. I can’t let it fade away — FanGraphs needs to have a post dedicated to this home run. It was sufficiently incredible that we’d be doing you a disservice by not putting something together. While I know the moment is gone, this is a home run with a longer life, a home run for which you needn’t worry about context. Come with me back to Saturday, August 15. We’re going to watch the Indians and the Twins in Minnesota. We’re going to watch them because, in the fifth inning, there was Eddie Rosario.

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Around here, you know that we spend a lot of time working with metrics that attempt to strip noise out of results. Often times, we’re less concerned with what has happened and more concerned with what is going to happen, and these component metrics often do a better job of isolating either a player or a team’s overall contribution to the results, while removing some of the factors that lead to those results but aren’t likely to continue in the future.

At the team level, the most comprehensive component metric we host is called BaseRuns, which evaluates a team’s quality based on all the plays they were involved in, without regard for the sequence in which those events occurred. BaseRuns essentially gives us a context-neutral evaluation of a team’s performance, assuming that the distribution of hits and runs isn’t really something a team has a lot of control over. BaseRuns can be thought of as the spiritual successor to Bill James‘ implementation of the pythagorean theorem to baseball, as pythag strips sequencing out of the conversion of runs to wins, but doesn’t do anything to strip the sequencing effects out of turning specific plays into runs scored and runs allowed.

Historically, BaseRuns has worked really well. For the years we have historical BaseRuns data (2002 to 2014), one standard deviation was right around four wins, and the data appears to be normally distributed; 73% of team-seasons have fallen within one standard deviation, 97% of team-seasons have fallen within two standard deviations, and no team had ever exceeded three standard deviations. There have been years here and there where a team sequenced their way to an extra 11 or 12 wins, but they weren’t very common, and that was usually the only break from the norm in that season.

Until this year. Here is the year by year standard deviation in BaseRuns wins versus actual wins for every year that we have the data.

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It’s no secret that the Washington Nationals have fallen short of expectations this season. At 62-61, the unanimous NL East favorites from the preseason sit 5.5 games behind the Mets with a discouraging 19% chance of winning the NL East. Things have been particularly ugly of late, as the Nats have won just 11 of their last 30 games.

As Dave Cameron pointed out last week, several of the biggest culprits for the team’s struggles are members of the team’s offensive core. Anthony Rendon and Ryan Zimmerman have been bad. Jayson Werth’s been worse than that. But perhaps the biggest disappointment has been the team’s shortstop, Ian Desmond, who was projected for the second-highest WAR among Nationals hitters by ZiPS. Desmond’s .229/.279/.384 batting line has put him within spitting distance of replacement level — a far cry from his preseason ZiPS forecast of 4.0 WAR.

Despite his struggles, the Nationals stuck with Desmond over the season’s first four-and-a-half months, trotting him out there in 119 of their 123 games this season. But on Friday, the team began to diverge from the status quo. After weeks of speculation, the Nats finally summoned prospect Trea Turner to the big leagues to help solidify the shortstop position from here on out.

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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
Chicago NL at San Francisco | 22:15 ET
Arrieta (168.0 IP, 74 xFIP-) vs. Cain (47.2 IP, 123 xFIP-)
At some point during his 2006 conversation with Ricky Gervais — or actually maybe during another conversation with a different person in a different year — professional misanthrope Larry David claims that he regrets immediately every commitment he makes as soon has he’s made it. Every future obligation represents not an opportunity for David, but rather a looming nightmare, the prospect of which weighs heavily on his mind until it’s either fulfilled or, preferably, canceled.

David’s apprehension towards the future isn’t irrelevant to the Chicago Cubs’ current situation within the developing postseason landscape. As noted by a reader here yesterday, the club possesses simultaneously a high probability of qualifying for the postseason while, simultaneously, almost no chance of winning the NL Central. They are, in other words, almost certain to appear in the one-game wild-card playoff. So while the club’s remaining regular-season games aren’t precisely immaterial, they appear to have little consequence relative to the appointment the Cubs have made for Wednesday, October 7.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Basically All of Them?

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When faced with batters on base, Milwaukee Brewers righty Taylor Jungmann goes to his sinker more and throws lower in the zone. He hasn’t given up a home run on the sinker, and the pitch produces ground balls nearly three-quarters of the time. So why doesn’t Jungmann go to the sinker more often?

“What makes the sinker better is that I don’t throw it as much,” Jungmann told me before a game against San Francisco. “It makes it that much more effective because they aren’t looking for it. If I threw it every single pitch, my four-seamer would be better.”

Right now, Jungmann has found the right uses for his sinker. If he used it more, he’d get less value from each additional sinker. This is what makes evaluating pitches by their peripherals so difficult, especially in small samples. Sure, Mat Latos has gotten six whiffs on 24 changeups this year — for a percentage that’s almost twice the average changeup whiff rate — but that doesn’t make the pitch good.

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Ben and Sam talk to Amazin’ Avenue’s Jeff Paternostro about Mets player development and the mysterious origins of unexpected ace Jacob deGrom.