FanGraphs Baseball

Commissioner Manfred’s ballpark tour took him to Texas yesterday, where he got to witness one potential solution to baseball’s run scoring problem: clone Samuel Deduno. I’m guessing that probably won’t be on the table when the next CBA negotiations come around, but it would bring offense roaring back to life, probably.

My mediocre attempt at humor aside, Manfred did talk about another issue that might become a discussion point in the next CBA, however; the length of the Major League season.

Manfred said reducing the number of games in a season would have economic and competitive ramifications, but the idea of giving players more off days is receiving more attention than ever.

“One hundred and sixty-two games in 183 days, and a lot of those 21 days consumed by travel, is a pretty demanding schedule,” he said. “By reputation I work pretty hard, and I don’t think I work 162 days out of 183. It’s a tough schedule.”

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Player salaries keep increasing, but at a pace much slower than total Major League Baseball revenue. There is little the players can do about the gap right now, but when the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in 2016, the Major League Baseball Players’ Association will have the opportunity to gain a greater share of revenues in the future. The players have a lot of options: increased minimum salaries, earlier free agency, earlier arbitration, and removal of the luxury tax are all monetary changes that would transfer more money from owners to players and have little to no effect on the play on the field. Two other options, a universal designated hitter and a 26th roster spot, would affect the play on the field, but would not provide the players with significant gains off the field.

As Nathaniel Grow wrote recently, the MLBPA has a problem. In his piece, Grow discussed the growing chasm between player salaries and MLB revenues.

After peaking at a little more than 56% in 2002, today MLB player salaries account for less than 40% of league revenues, a decline of nearly 33% in just 12 years. As a result, player payroll today accounts for just over 38% of MLB’s total revenues, a figure that just ten years ago would have been unimaginably low.

Grow’s piece included the following chart (Payroll data from Cot’s Contracts and USA Today; MLB league revenue data from The Biz of Baseball):

Owners are pocketing more and more money from revenues and have thus far refused to share their increased wealth. The owners and players last shared a roughly fifty-fifty split of revenues in 2005. Since that time, players have received less than one-third of all additional revenue.
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It seems like it should matter how hard you hit the baseball. That statement probably seems self-evident, but until this year we haven’t really had a whole lot of evidence to demonstrate whether that’s true. We have an old month of HITf/x data from 2009 and there’s non-public data about exit velocity, but until StatCast data arrived this year, we didn’t really have the tools to determine how much quality of contact matters.

Last week, FanGraphs launched quality of contact statistics courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions to add to this effort. The methodology isn’t based solely on a raw exit velocity, but the data stretches back to 2002 and it’s publicly available now and easy to manage. As soon as people realized the data was available, the sabermetric masses went to work to run preliminary tests on the data. One of the interesting things that showed up right away was that the data didn’t do a great job predicting itself in the future and things like Hard% didn’t correlate with stats like BABIP or LD% as well as we might have otherwise thought.

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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
Los Angeles NL at Milwaukee | 13:40 ET
Frias (7.2 IP, 87 xFIP-) vs. Fiers (24.2 IP, 82 xFIP-)
Three years ago, following the completion of that season in which Michael Pineda had produced three-plus wins with Seattle despite almost the complete absence of a third pitch, the author endeavored to identify the next Michael Pineda. The idea: to find a pitcher in the high minors who threw roughly 95 mph (like Pineda) and also featured above-average control (like Pineda). The result: Garrett Richards. Richards’ success wasn’t immediate — he didn’t record his first signature season until last year — but he’s retained that pairing of skills and they continue to benefit him. This most recent offseason, the author endeavored to find the next next Michael Pineda (or simply the next Garrett Richards, perhaps). The result of that second effort: Carlos Frias. Frias exhibited both of the relevant skills in his first start of the season last Friday, sitting at just under 96 mph while recording just a single walk over 5.1 innings (box).

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Milwaukee Radio.

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This is the second in a series of pieces on the emergence of batted-ball data into the mainstream. Earlier this week, we covered the basics in a fair amount of detail. Today, we’re going to drill down a bit into arguably the most important piece of information discussed in that article; the fine line between the most and least productive fly balls, where we will quickly discover that not all hard fly balls are created equal. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper went and had himself a game Wednesday afternoon, and now, we can say these things, and not be lying: Harper is sitting on a career-high wRC+. He’s sitting on a career-high isolated power, and a career-high walk rate. Harper, by the way, is still 22 years old. It’s always mandatory to put that in somewhere. It’s a pretty big part of the picture.

It makes sense, then, to talk about what’s going on with Harper’s development. The world’s been waiting to see if he can ever try to catch up to Mike Trout. Ben Lindbergh has written about what seems to be a gain regarding Harper’s eye. Harper, also, has worked to calm down his swing a little bit, at the suggestion of his hitting coach and his manager. Back in April, Matt Williams said this:

Williams said the single to left was a particularly important example of what Harper needs to do to be successful and hit for a high average.

Williams liked to see Harper shooting balls the other way. Harper has long been personally obsessed with shooting balls the other way. Wednesday, the first of Harper’s three homers was slugged the other way. What you’d think is, maybe, Harper’s getting even better at using all fields. Truth be told, at least to this point, Harper’s gotten better at using just one of the fields.

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Early 19th century French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord argued — according to late Romanian aphorist Emil Cioran, at least — argued that it’s preferable “to follow one’s inclination rather than to make one’s way.”

Having pointed his internet browser to this site, the reader has already exhibited a willingness — in part, at least — a willingness to follow his inclination. What follows, however, represents an opportunity for that same reader to indulge his inclination to an even larger and more substantial degree.

As of press time, talented Cleveland starter Carlos Carrasco had struck out talented Kansas City outfielder Alex Gordon in each of the latter’s four plate appearances tonight (box). What the footage below documents are two pitches from the second of those plate appearances — both swinging strikes and both a result of Carrasco’s changeup.

The reader will find that his or her inclination is to meditate upon these animated GIFs for an extended period of time, committing them to what may or may not be called “spiritual memory.” Is that a real term or one just invented by the author right now? It neither matters nor does anyone care.

Moving on, here’s the first of those changeups to Gordon, in real time:

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It’s an easy-enough list to sort. You go to the leaderboard for pitch types and you select the fastball column. There, at the very top, is Bartolo Colon, the only starter in baseball throwing heaters more than 80% of the time. From there, you get to build the narrative, that Colon is extraordinarily weird. He doesn’t look the part of an athlete. He’s 41 years old, and 42 later this month. His average fastball has dropped into the 80s, approaching his rate of contact allowed. And he throws as many pitches as he has walks issued (one). The overall profile doesn’t make a lot of sense — it doesn’t feel like this kind of pitcher ought to be able to succeed.

And, yeah, Colon is weird. It looked like his career was over until it wasn’t, and other pitchers don’t share his current approach. It’s an unusual strategy with which Colon so routinely manages to get hitters out, but the reality isn’t as simple as him getting by with weak fastball after weak fastball. Reality is — guess what! — more complicated than that. Reality is always more complicated. Maybe especially with the freaks.

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With our new probable starters leaderboard, you no longer need to manually enter in all of the day’s starting pitchers yourself.

This particular leaderboard will also auto-populate all of the batters from the day’s lineups as they are announced.

You’ll always be able to access the current day’s probables from the link on our live scoreboard.