FanGraphs Baseball

“Was it Karl Marx,” one might ask drunkenly at a party, “or Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis who memorably declared that ‘The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people’?”

The answer, technically: Karl Marx, in his text Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

The answer, metaphorically: Chris Davis, actually, by means of a foul-ball protest against Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce in the first inning of tonight’s game versus Kansas City.

Hello and welcome to a relatively easy post to generate on the other side of a week off. You might already be familiar with the idea, so if that’s the case, then once again, you’re invited to just skip ahead to the table and move on from there, after having interpreted it yourself. You are your own boss; you read however many words you choose.

This is the third post in what I guess is a four-post series. The first one came when the regular season was about one-quarter old. At the very beginning of July, I did this again, when the season was about one-half old. Now the season is about three-quarters old, so we can check in one more time. Which teams have benefited the most from favorable strike zones? Which teams have paid the greatest penalty, on the other hand? If you accept that all the information comes with some error bars, this is simple. Increasingly simple, as I run these numbers more and more.

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This past weekend, the Toronto Blue Jays swept the Los Angeles Angels in a three-game series, dominating the Halos by a combined score of 36-10. The series represented a few important points: not only did the three wins vault the Jays over the New York Yankees for sole possession of first place in the AL East, but it also featured a matchup of the current favorites in the AL MVP race, Mike Trout and Josh Donaldson. While Trout went 3-10 during the series (all three hits coming in the series finale), Donaldson showed why he is beginning to be viewed as a possible contender for the league’s MVP, going 8 for 13 with a home run, four doubles and nine RBI.

Up until this season — even up until a month ago, in fact — the idea of Donaldson being a serious front-runner in an MVP race would have been viewed as very optimistic. He’s been in the conversation as one of the best overall position players in baseball since his breakout in 2013 (his 21.2 Wins Above Replacement since the start of the 2013 season is second only to Trout’s 25.2), but a strict comparison with Trout in the past probably would have been seen as a reach. That has little to do with Donaldson: Trout is the best player in baseball, and a normal year for Trout would be the best year of basically anyone else’s career.

Then this past offseason’s trade from Oakland to Toronto occurred, and Donaldson showed that the move to the Rogers Centre was most likely going to pay serious dividends for his statistics. Early on in this season, it became evident he might be tailoring his swing to pull more fly balls when he was playing at home, resulting in an astounding power increase that has showed no signs of slowing down in the ensuing months. His home/road splits are more pronounced than they ever have been, showing the influence of his home park’s friendliness to hitters — and his ability to exploit it:

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When you think pitching and greatness it’s unlikely you think of Mike Fiers. Well Friday, Mike Fiers threw a no-hitter against the Los Angeles Dodgers, so in your face. Of course, I’m kidding. No-hitters are fluky events by nature, and though the game’s greats have thrown them, so have many of the game’s not-so-greats. For example, the list of pitchers who have thrown no-hitters includes Joe Cowley, Mike Warren, and Jim Colborn, and excludes Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez*, Curt Schilling, Greg Maddux, and Robin Roberts. But still, pitching nine innings of baseball without giving up a single hit is a feat worthy of recognition and by golly we sure are recognizing it.

*Martinez threw nine perfect innings on June 3, 1995, but allowed a lead-off double in the 10th inning.

But there is controversy! You may have heard that Fiers has been accused of cheating while throwing his no-no. Who has made these accusations? The world’s morality police, also known as the internet, of course! So what “evidence” is there that Fiers cheated?

https://twitter.com/CaseyySheehann/status/634919577567100928

Oh. Whoops.

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Ben and Sam banter about Joc Pederson and answer emails about Madison Bumgarner, on-field celebrations, the Triple Crown, holding runners, and more.

For his career, Nathan Eovaldi has a below-average strikeout rate. He’s been a little bit worse than league average by ERA, and a little bit better than league average by FIP, but even average is a strange outcome for a guy with a top-ten fastball by velocity.

Take a look at how much of an outlier Eovaldi is in graphical form. That’s him highlighted, against all starters that have thrown at least 1000 fastballs since 2007.

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10 days ago, I was informed that I will be voting for the National League Cy Young Award this year. This will be my first time voting on the pitcher awards — last year, I was tasked with voting for Manager of the Year and MVP — and so I’ve spent the last week and a half trying to work through what kind of factors I’m going to want to consider in putting my ballot together. And as I work through the process, I’ve come to realize that there’s one potentially significant factor that I’m not sure whether to consider or not; a pitcher’s performance while batting.

My initial reaction to the idea of using a pitcher’s batting line as a variable was to reject the notion, considering that it’s an award designed to honor the best pitcher of the season, and a pitcher’s job is to prevent runs. What a pitcher does at the plate can be rewarded when they vote on the Silver Slugger Award. I think that’s generally the commonly accepted approach, and when I broached this topic with a few people at Saber Seminar this weekend, most of them — even Brian Bannister, the former MLB pitcher who posted a career .276/.300/.414 batting line — suggested that a pitcher’s hitting performance shouldn’t be a factor in the Cy Young voting.

But I guess I’m still not convinced. I certainly haven’t made up my mind to definitely include a pitcher’s batting performance as a factor in my vote, but I don’t know that I can accept the idea that we should only be evaluating a pitcher’s contribution to run prevention, when National League pitchers are also required to hit as a function of their jobs. It’s a smaller part of their job, certainly, but it is something they have to do, much like big lumbering sluggers who are selected for their ability to hit the ball a long way still have to run the bases, even though that is definitely not the skill they are being paid for.

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As the Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates race toward the playoffs with payrolls in the bottom 20% of Major League Baseball and the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers falter with top-five payrolls, we are reminded that money cannot buy success in all cases. The Dodgers, with their $300-plus million payroll and a luxury tax bill that will add on another $40 to $50 million, have not guaranteed themselves a berth in the playoffs. We have seen billion-dollar television deals grant enormous benefits to large-market clubs and teams like the New York Yankees and the Red Sox have long wielded their financial might to buy wins. Financial parity does not exist in baseball, but even without it, single-season payroll has played a lesser role in team success over the past few years compared to a decade ago. However, payroll does become a factor when it comes to sustained success.

Over the last three seasons, here is the amount every team has spent per win, using the Opening Day payroll for each of the three seasons and about one-quarter of the season to go this year.

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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
Cleveland at Chicago NL | 14:05 ET
Kluber (186.2 IP, 74 xFIP-) vs. Lester (148.1 IP, 81 xFIP-)
With hardly any pomp and even less circumstance, what the author has done for this edition of the daily NERD game scores is — instead of the season-to-date-stats playoff odds — is to use the coin-flip playoffs odds as the playoff-type input for the team NERD scores below. The logic behind the move: the coin-flip mode probably reflects more accurately how the human brain perceives the drama of the playoff race. The actual difference produced by the change: hardly any. In either case, the Cubs are among those clubs which feature divisional-series odds closest to 50% — which is to say, furthest from certainty. As of Sunday night, the probability of the Cubs reaching the divisional series, according to the season-to-date-stats model, was 44.8%; by the coin-flip model, 51.3%.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Chicago NL Television.

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