FanGraphs Baseball

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 Tampa Bay | 16:10 ET
Keuchel (130.1 IP, 69 xFIP-) vs. Odorizzi (76.2 IP, 93 xFIP-)
It is sometimes said of certain jokes or other forms of copy that they “write themselves.” A regrettable instance of anthropomorphism, this — like all instances of anthropomorphism, that is, which don’t expressly involve a bulldog wearing a monocle and speaking in a posh British accent. Jokes and other forms of copy are incapable of writing themselves for a number of reasons, such as (one) they don’t have hands and (two) also no brain. Were text capable of writing itself, however, it would appear in this exact space and would read something to the effect of “By the methodology utilized by the author, the Houston Astros remain baseball’s most compelling and aesthetically appealing club. Indeed, in addition to their conspicuous youth and strength, the team now also possesses odds of reach the divisional series closer to 50% than any other team.”

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Tampa Bay Radio.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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The first thing you learn about following sports is that there’s nothing more important than the standings. Wins and losses are everything. They control how you feel about a team, and they control how you feel about the individual players. They determine whether a team will be in contention for a championship, and as far as people believe, when they first get into this, it’s all about titles. It’s not, but that realization comes down the road.

Something you learn later on is that, yeah, the standings are important, but they might not be predictive. It’s fun when your team has a bunch of wins, but that doesn’t guarantee a bunch of future wins to follow. Sports fans are always doing what they can to try to tell the future. No one can ever do well, but you can do better or worse.

Future-telling is the goal of projection systems. You could argue, maybe, the goal is to estimate a player or team’s true talent at a moment in time, but true talent is virtually indistinguishable from expected future performance. Projections are everywhere in baseball analysis. Even when the word itself isn’t used, observers are always making educated guesses about what’s going to happen, which is a form of projecting. Official projection systems formalize it.

People have some trust issues with projections. Humans always want to believe they’re smarter than human-designed machines or systems, and they especially distrust projections when they show something different from what’s already happened. When projections are at odds with evidence, projections are given funny looks. It’s perfectly natural, yet it leaves projections always needing to be validated. In this article, let’s consider projections. And let’s consider wins and losses. And let’s consider what matters more, if we’re trying to look ahead.

A little over a month ago, I tried a project. I had, in my possession, 10 years of preseason team projections. The season was also about two months old, so I reviewed the previous 10 years of baseball, around the two-month mark. I was curious what was a better predictor of the next four months: team performance over the first two months, or preseason team projection. As it turned out, the projections fared quite a bit better. After two months, you’re better off keeping the same opinion of a team you had in March.

Here, I want to do something similar. But there are two twists.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

On Wednesday night, Alex Gordon strained a groin muscle chasing a fly ball. If you just adjusted in your seat, I don’t blame you — it sounds painful. He’ll be out for eight weeks, which is better news than the team could have received. If the Royals can hold the fort down until then, they just may have him back in time for the stretch run. Of course, injuries don’t always follow a defined timetable, so we’ll see. Still, there’s hope Gordon can come back. That’s better than nothing. The question is, though: how will they absorb his loss?

For now, they are going to roll with Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando. This isn’t a bad plan! As I’ve discussed in the past, Dyson is worthy of a starting position. His defense is still top notch. Here’s a reminder:

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Miguel Sano is off to quite the start to his big-league career. The hulking 22-year-old is hitting .385/.500/.577 through his first eight games with Minnesota, and has reached base in all but one of those contests. His 205 wRC+ is the 11th highest in baseball in the month of July, and he’s provided a significant boost to the middle of the Twins lineup.

Sano’s major-league career may be only a week old, but he’s been in the limelight for years now. He was seen as a generational talent when the Twins signed him as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican back in 2009. And the controversy surrounding his signing inspired Peletero — one of baseball’s best and most well-known documentaries.

Once his signing was finally completed and documented, Sano proceeded to punish minor-league pitching. Between 2010 and 2013, he mashed .279/.372/.567 as an infielder, with most of his reps coming at third base. Sano had some trouble making contact, as evidenced by his 26% strikeout rate, but he more than made up for it with his mammoth power. On the strength of his 80-grade raw power, his isolated-power figures (ISOs) were consistently near or above .300, which frankly doesn’t happen all that often. All in all, Sano was always among the very best hitters in his league, despite being much younger than his competition.

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I’ll apologize in advance, because I don’t draw any stunning conclusions from this post. I am, however, going to present the data from my most recent toilings with baseball data. I was reading Wendy Thurm’s most recent article, and I noticed a commenter that pointed out the positions’ offensive output was more similar and closer to overall league average in the last few years compared to the past 20 years. My immediate reaction was to blame or credit the low run environment. My thoughts are that a higher run environment would produce more random variation for each player, which in turn would produce more variance in the entire league.

There are a multitude of factors that affect the talent distribution aside from the possibility of run environment such as training, performance-enhancing drugs, expansion, wars, and talent evaluation. With my quick exploration, I was not able to take these into account, so the following data visualizations serve as more exploratory analysis than any conclusive analysis.

I found the variance of a handful of offensive stats among players with more than 500 PA and plotted them against the run environment. I included the seasons from 1900 to 2014 for NL and 1901 to 2014 for AL, but I removed the 1981 and -94 season owing to the strikes in those particular years. You can change the stat and the league. I also included a histogram to show the shape of the distribution of the stat for a particular year.

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The funny thing about being a phenom is you don’t really have to be phenomenal. Last season Mookie Betts was both exceptional and therefore the exception to that when he put up a 130 wRC+ in 52 games for the Boston Red Sox. He stole bases, he hit home runs, and he played center field after a life spent in the middle infield. He was your basic run-of-the-mill young star. But even young stars often struggle eventually, so this season figured to be somewhat of a learning process for the 22-year-old center fielder.

Betts didn’t disappoint at being disappointing. After a solid opening week that featured him almost single-handedly beating the expected best team in baseball, the Washington Nationals, in the home opener, Betts faltered. On June 10 — exactly one month ago for those of you without calendars — he was hitting .237/.298/.368. An 0-for-3 the next day made the numbers look worse. In this run environment that could play with exceptional defense, but for Betts that type of production was a disappointment. There was reason to believe he wasn’t playing quite that badly based on batted-ball velocity and a mid-.250s BABIP, and hey, fast forward* one month and Betts has brought his OPS up 131 points to .789.

*That’s a thing old people used to have to do when watching movies on videotape.**
**Videotape is what they used to have back before DVDs.***
***DVDs were what they used to… Actually, you know what? Forget it. I’m old.

During that time he’s put up a 189 wRC+ which, as Mike Petriello notes, puts him in the company of Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Manny Machado. Here are 10 ways Mookie Betts has turned his season around.

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When Alex Gordon got injured on Wednesday night, it was a big blow to the Royals, who have lost their best player for the next two months of the season. But with Detroit struggling — and having lost Miguel Cabrera themselves just a week earlier — and the Twins probably unable to keep playing as well as they have in the first half, the Royals will probably still be able to hold on to their division lead, even with Gordon on the shelf for the next few months.

However, Gordon’s injury does create a pretty significant hole on the American League All-Star roster. No, it’s not that Gordon is really that much better than Adam Jones, who will replace Gordon in the starting line-up, but that Gordon brought one unique skill to the American League’s offense: he bats left-handed.

With Jones replacing Gordon, all nine American League starters will bat from the right side of the plate. Let’s take a guess at what Ned Yost’s starting line-up might look like.

1. Lorenzo Cain, LF
2. Jose Altuve, 2B
3. Mike Trout, CF
4. Albert Pujols, 1B
5. Josh Donaldson, 3B
6. Nelson Cruz, DH
7. Adam Jones, RF
8. Salvador Perez, C
9. Alcides Escobar, SS

There are some pretty great hitters in the middle of that line-up, and guys like Trout have historically hit right-handed pitching just fine. But at both the top and bottom of the order, you have some guys on the team primarily due to their defensive abilities, and hitting right-handed pitching isn’t really their strong suit.

And the National League has loaded up on right-handed pitching. Of the 13 pitchers already on the NL roster, 11 of them are right-handed; only Madison Bumgarner and Aroldis Chapman are lefty hurlers on the NL’s squad. Johnny Cueto is likely to join that group via the Final Vote, which would push the NL up to 12 RHPs, many of whom are death to right-handed hitting.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

One of the things I find most interesting about baseball is how often players seem to try new things and then how often those changes seem to make little to no difference in their overall productivity. Batters alter their stances and pitchers try new grips and patterns all the time, but it’s actually pretty rare that a player makes a small change and becomes significantly different. A whole lot of effort goes into small changes, but the vast majority of these changes don’t seem to make a big difference, yet everyone is always making them. It seems like a lot of wasted energy.

Except that it’s not wasted energy as much as it’s about context. One reason all of these tweaks don’t have huge impacts is that everyone else gets a chance to respond to the adjustment very quickly and make their own. There’s so much information available to players and they’re generally a perceptive bunch. If Clayton Kershaw suddenly threw Paul Goldschmidt a 50-grade knuckeball, I would wager that Goldschmidt wouldn’t do much damage against that first one. Theoretically, Kershaw spent lots of man hours working on the pitch, but most hitters have faced knuckeballs and they would very quickly figure out that Kershaw has one and when he likes to use it. A pitcher adjusts, and then the hitters adjust to that adjustment. It goes on and on forever. If you don’t constantly tinker, you might be left behind.

At the beginning of 2014, there were a lot of questions about how well Jose Abreu would perform in the major leagues because we didn’t have any information about Abreu in the context of the American professional regime. His raw tools had our attention, but until we saw him face professionals in the American context, our information was rather limittarget=”_blank”. The question at hand was how Abreu would adjust to the major leagues.

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