Attaboys and Get ‘Em Next Times: Reviewing My Preseason Predictions

Riley Greene
Detroit Free Press

I’ll level with you, FanGraphs reader: I can’t imagine that FanGraphs analysis is exactly what you’re most interested in right now, baseball-wise. The exciting things going on are the games on the field as they happen. These playoff races are amazing. The schedule sets up with a wonderful mix of both-teams-in games and rivals playing spoiler. In that context, I can’t imagine that many people are dying to read about Tommy Kahnle’s changeup-heavy arsenal, just to pick on a random article I recently wrote.

That’s never stopped me from writing about whatever random thing caught my eye, but I thought I’d take advantage of a slow week (again, just in my kind of baseball analysis, not in actual baseball) to go over some predictions I made before the season. I like to look back on my own work for a few reasons — not just to bask in successes, but that’s certainly part of it. It’s also useful to talk process and separate bad outcomes from bad ex-ante decisions, though to be honest, that’s really hard, so I’m not certain I’ll get it right today.

I’ve named the column after one of my favorite weird sports things. I always knew this, but I’ve noticed it more since I started playing in a recreational softball league. After you return to the dugout, there’s a pretty good chance someone will slap your butt with their glove. It doesn’t matter what you did, there’s always a reason to. Did you score a run or make a great defensive play? It often comes with an “attaboy” or “way to go.” Did you make an out or embarrass yourself in the field? “Get ‘em next time” is nearly guaranteed. The butt slap? That’s a constant. The words that go with it? They’re versatile. Without further ado, let’s figure out whether my hypothetical dugout should be congratulating or consoling me. Read the rest of this entry »


Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 9/28/23

12:03
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Sorry, was busy talking about the Springfield Bear Patrol

12:03
Andrew: Which minor leaguer improved their projections the most this year?

12:03
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Dangit, why do you guys always ask questions there’s no way I can answer on the fly! lol

12:04
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Hold on, let me call up the September update and the preseason and see if I can crunch this super quick

12:06
Avatar Dan Szymborski: OK, the minor leaguers whose 2024 projections have gone up the most (hitter)

12:08
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Colt Keith, Justyn-Henry Malloy, Tyler Black, Masyn Winn, Luisangel Acuna,

Read the rest of this entry »


The Dogpile, From Across the Fence

Kyle Ross-USA TODAY Sports

On Tuesday night, Johan Rojas knocked a single up the middle off Pirates closer David Bednar. Cristian Pache, who’d just entered the game as a pinch runner to start the 10th inning, came around to score easily. When he crossed home plate, the Phillies were guaranteed a playoff spot for the second straight year, and by night’s end they were locked in as hosts of one of the NL Wild Card series.

Typical scenes ensued. In college baseball, where budgets are smaller and buying alcohol for the freshmen and sophomores can get a little dicey from a legal standpoint, this kind of celebration takes the form of a dogpile. In fact, “dogpile” has become the accepted shorthand for a victory that either secures or advances a team toward a championship. You’ll hear “two dogpiles to Omaha,” and the like.

Big leaguers don’t dogpile, or rather, they don’t only dogpile. And the Phillies, having developed a reputation over the past 18 months as baseball’s lascivious chaos agents, know the post-dogpile rigmarole by heart. Champagne and beer were sprayed around the clubhouse, cigars handed out, and Garrett Stubbs procured a set of overalls. Read the rest of this entry »


Mike Trout Is Probably Staying in Anaheim

Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports

After Anthony Rendon revealed that he had indeed suffered a fractured tibia and not a bone bruise, and after Shohei Ohtani cleared out his locker to undergo surgery to repair his torn ulnar collateral ligament, there really was only one more insult to add to the injuries that have defined the Angels’ 2023 season. On Sunday, the team transferred Mike Trout to the 60-day injured list due to continued setbacks in his recovery from wrist surgery, officially ending his season and opening the door to questions about his future with the franchise.

Trout fractured his left hamate while fouling off a pitch on July 3. He had surgery to remove the bone — a treatment that’s supposed to accelerate a return to play — two days later, and was expected to be sidelined for four to eight weeks. He returned on August 22, about seven weeks after surgery, but while going 1-for-4 with an infield single, he felt significant pain in his left hand when hitting and returned to the IL. Though he still hoped to play this season, he ran out of time.

“It’s frustrating,” a visibly emotional Trout told reporters in a media session on Sunday. “It’s been hard on me… It kills me not being out there. I’ve got a lot left in my career, and I can’t just sit around here and mope around. I’ve got to have that positive mindset.” Read the rest of this entry »


Harold Ramírez Is Good in the Weirdest Ways

Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports

In many aspects of the game, Harold Ramírez simply doesn’t look like a big leaguer. His 47.5% chase rate ranks 193rd out of the 194 hitters with at least 400 plate appearances this year. Among that same population, his line drive rate ranks in the 14th percentile. Ramírez hits twice as many groundballs as fly balls and has homered in just 2% of his plate appearances, worse than league average. As a DH, he doesn’t provide value with his glove, and in his first two full seasons with Miami and Cleveland, he was worse than replacement level.

Now let’s talk about how good Ramírez is. He has some of the best raw power in the game, once hitting a ball 114.8 mph, something the likes of Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and José Ramírez have never accomplished. He avoids strikeouts at an above-average clip and can make the most of the balls he puts in play as a 64th-percentile runner. Ramírez is one of just three hitters with a batting average above .300 in each of the past two seasons, along with Freeman and Luis Arraez. Read the rest of this entry »


Let’s Listen to Some Sad Announcers

Jake Burger
Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

The regular season ends this week, which means we’ve only got a few games left with our local broadcast crews. In the playoffs, every game is a nationally televised game. Regardless of how you feel about Joe Davis and John Smoltz, it’s a bummer that you don’t get to hear your local broadcast team in the game’s biggest moments. Not just because they know the club better than whichever national crew is parachuting in to cover the series, but because their voices shape your baseball experience all year long.

The other reason national crews aren’t the same is that they’re neutral arbiters. Baseball is a zero-sum game. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose, and one team’s joy is another team’s sadness. For six months, our local broadcasters feel that joy and sadness along with us, and then, when the games matter the most, they’re replaced by people who don’t. A national broadcaster’s job is to call the game right down the middle; the words And there’s a long fly ball just don’t have the same heft when they’re spoken by someone whose emotional wellbeing isn’t dependent on where that long fly ball lands. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

So before we say goodbye to our regional sports networks for the season (or forever), let’s take a moment to appreciate the apotheosis of the hometown call: the walk-off home run. A walk-off homer can make you feel many things. It can take you from an anxious mess to being of pure ecstatic light in a matter of seconds. Read the rest of this entry »


Everything Is Bigger in Texas, Except Adolis García’s Concept of the Strike Zone

Adolis Garcia
Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

Back in February, I took a look at Adolis García, a player who had long vexed me. Here was one of the few remaining survivors of the Rangers’ late-2010s rebuild, coming off back-to-back three-win seasons just as his club was swinging back into contention.

García may have been an above-average all-around right fielder, but he got there creatively: Good defense, aggressive baserunning, and hard contact when he got wood on the ball. But because he swung the bat more or less indiscriminately, he never walked and contact was hard to come by.

I try not to be too much of a sabermetrics 2.0 stick-in-the-mud, but OBP is really important, particularly at a position like right field, which comes with high offensive expectations. The ability to get on base might be the single thing I’d value most in a corner player, and García just wasn’t good at it. Read the rest of this entry »


Let’s Check In on the Odds on Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball Broadcasts

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Last year, I looked into the odds displayed on Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball broadcasts. I found them to not be very good. Then I stopped paying attention; there are a ton of baseball games on every week, most of which Apple does not broadcast, and even when I did watch an Apple game, I basically ignored the odds. I knew they were silly, after all – why distract myself by looking at them?

Of course, I didn’t really expect that to keep going indefinitely. Apple is a massive company. They have more than 150,000 full-time employees, and a ridiculous proportion of that group knows how to code. At its core, this is a data problem. There are companies I’d trust over Apple to solve a data problem, but there aren’t a lot of companies, you know? Sure, they outsourced their predictions to nVenue, a sports analytics company, but they’re Apple. Surely they’d find a way to make this all work. I noted their relative inaccuracy in my head as a temporary curiosity and moved on.

Last month, I started compiling data for an update. It’s all well and good to assume things have changed, but at some point, you have to go verify it. I decided to wait for the back half of the season because of the way I designed my test, which I’ll now explain. Similar to last time, I started by watching a bunch of games. This time, I got data from the 12 Apple TV+ games played between August 18 and September 22. I watched the entirety of those broadcasts and noted the last probability, if any, displayed before every pitch. Read the rest of this entry »


Job Posting: Cleveland Guardians – Senior Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer (Full-Stack / DevOps), Baseball Systems

Are you interested in joining the Cleveland Guardians’ thriving Baseball Systems team? We are an expanding department focused on creating innovative software tools and data solutions that directly impact the organization’s ability to acquire players, develop their skills, and optimize their performance. The products we build facilitate operations and enhance decision-making across all areas of the organization, and help answer questions such as “Which trades should we execute?”, “Who should we select with our next pick in the draft?”, and “How can we help players use data from yesterday’s game to improve?” If you enjoy working on large-scale data products, developing high-impact tools, and collaborating with talented individuals, we want to hear from you.

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will maintain and improve the organization’s software development, deployment, and infrastructure processes, and support the development of user-facing products. This role requires strong DevOps and Full-Stack experience: you will leverage DevOps best practices, cloud technologies, Terraform, and container orchestration to ensure the team’s projects and systems run smoothly, and you will develop tooling, platform components, and user-facing products to improve our software solutions. We anticipate that, once DevOps processes are developed and established, this role will shift to have more of a focus on Full-Stack Development.

This is an exciting opportunity to join the Cleveland Guardians as a Senior Platform Engineer and contribute to the success of our organization by implementing efficient DevOps practices, managing cloud infrastructure, and ensuring reliable software delivery. Your technical expertise and passion for automation will play a vital role in maintaining a seamless experience for our Baseball Systems team and helping the Cleveland Guardians accomplish their ultimate mission of winning the World Series.

We prefer our employees (or teammates) reside in Cleveland, Ohio, but we will consider and discuss the possibility of remote work.

Key Responsibilities:

  1. DevOps Implementation: Collaborate with the development team to implement and evangelize efficient DevOps practices and workflows, including continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), and automated testing.
  2. Cloud Infrastructure Architecture: Design, automate, deploy, and monitor infrastructure and cloud management using tools like Terraform.
  3. Software Development: Build software for developers that will accelerate the development of cutting-edge baseball products and enable end users to make better, faster decisions that come with the day-to-day operations of running an MLB team.
  4. Deployment and Orchestration: Implement and manage deployment pipelines to automate software releases. Define best practices for containerizing and orchestrating applications for efficient and scalable deployments.
  5. Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Set up monitoring and alerting systems to proactively identify and resolve issues in the infrastructure and applications.
  6. Collaboration and Communication: Work closely with cross-functional teams, including developers, testers, information systems, and product managers, to ensure smooth collaboration and effective communication. Participate in team meetings and contribute to agile development practices.

Required Skills and Qualifications:

  • Experience in DevOps practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, and infrastructure as code
  • Full Stack Development experience with proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, JavaScript, C#, etc.)
  • Experience in building and deploying cloud technologies (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure, etc.)
  • Hands-on experience with infrastructure provisioning and management using Terraform or similar tools
  • Familiarity with containerization technologies (e.g., Docker)and orchestration frameworks (e.g., Kubernetes)

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Proficiency in more than one development language
  • Proficiency in CI/CD design and processes
  • Experience with Terragrunt
  • Experience in Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Organizational Requirements:

  • Reads, speaks, comprehends, and communicates English effectively
  • Represents the Cleveland Guardians in a positive fashion to all business partners and the general public
  • Ability to develop and maintain successful working relationship with members of the Front Office
  • Ability to act according to the organizational values and service excellence at all times
  • Ability to work with diverse populations and have a demonstrated commitment to social justice
  • Ability to work extended days and hours, including holidays and weekends
  • Ability to work in a complex and changing environment

The Cleveland Guardians are committed to developing and maintaining an environment that embraces all forms of diversity to enrich our core values, enhance our competitive position, strengthen our impact within our community, and foster a greater sense of belonging for our employees.

In this spirit, we know studies have shown that people from historically underserved groups – including women and people of color – are less likely to apply for jobs unless they believe they meet every one of the qualifications as described in a job description. We are most interested in finding the best candidate for the job and understand that candidate may bring certain skills and experiences to the role that are not listed in our job description, but that would add tremendous value to our organization. We would encourage you to apply, even if you don’t believe you meet every one of our qualifications described.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Cleveland Guardians.


Job Posting: Boston Red Sox – Multiple Associate Openings

2024 Baseball Operations Associate

Location: Boston, MA
Department: Baseball Operations

Position Overview:
The Baseball Operations Associate will support all areas of the Baseball Operations Department, while primarily focusing on one or two areas (Amateur Scouting, International Scouting, Professional Scouting, Major League Strategic Information, Baseball Strategy & Personnel) with day-to-day administrative and office management duties.

Timeline: January 2024 – December 2024

Responsibilities:

  • Assist with day-to-day operations for assigned department.
  • Assist with research projects.
  • Creatively pursue ways to improve internal processes.
  • Organize and maintain information from non-office personnel.
  • Manage video database including tagging & editing.
  • Prepare information and logistics for meetings.
  • Assist with various administrative and research projects.
  • Operate various technology during home games.

Characteristics / Qualifications:

  • Strong administrative skills.
  • Ability to multitask in stressful situations.
  • Strategic thinking & planning.
  • Organized, proactive, and strong communicative skills.
  • Proficient in Microsoft Office.
  • Experience with SQL, R, Python is a plus, not required.
  • Fluency in Spanish is a plus, but not required.
  • Willing to work nights, weekends, and holidays.
  • Prior softball or baseball experience is preferred.
  • Valid Driver’s License.

Prospective employees will receive consideration without discrimination based on race, religious creed, color, sex, age, national origin, handicap, disability, military/veteran status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or protected genetic information.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.


2024 Player Development Associate

Location: Fort Myers, FL
Department: Baseball Operations

Department Overview:
The Player Development Staff is dedicated to cultivating impact talent from around the globe utilizing best-in-class practices for mental, physical, and fundamental progression. Utilizing innovative technology, dynamic training, and modern facilities, we provide our staff with growth opportunities throughout various industry paths.

Position Overview:
The Player Development Associate will be a member of the Player Development team, and is responsible for assisting with baseball operations at our complex in Fort Myers, FL. This individual will collaborate closely with Player Development front office personnel, coordinators, and coaches.

Timeline: February 2024-October 2024

Responsibilities:

  • Assist with day-to-day logistics for Minor League Spring Training, Extended Spring Training, Florida Complex League, and Instructional League.
  • Assist with daily administrative operations.
  • Organize and distribute game video in a timely and quality manner.
  • Manage video database to ensure it is readily available for staff and players to view.
  • Collect non-game video proactively and at the request of staff.
  • Operate and maintain various technology such as Blast, Rapsodo, Trackman, and Edgertronic cameras.
  • Distribute analytical information to PD staff in collaboration our Analytics department.
  • Assist with various administrative projects as assigned by coaching staff and Front Office.

Characteristics / Qualifications:

  • Strong administrative skills.
  • Organized, proactive, and strong communicative skills.
  • Proficient in Microsoft Office.
  • Willing to work nights, weekends, and holidays.
  • Prior softball or baseball experience.
  • Prior video experience (BATS, Synergy, Edgertronic).
  • Prior technology experience with one or more of the following: Trackman, Blast, Rapsodo, HitTrax.
  • Fluency in Spanish is a plus, but not required.

Prospective employees will receive consideration without discrimination based on race, religious creed, color, sex, age, national origin, handicap, disability, military/veteran status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or protected genetic information.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.


2024 Minor League Video & Technology Associate

Location: Multiple Locations
Department: Baseball Operations

Department Overview:
Members of the Baseball Systems Team at the Boston Red Sox are focused on designing, building, and refining the software and data pipelines used within Baseball Operations. These tools and applications are an integral part of the decision-making process, are directly integrated in the workflows of all departments within Baseball Operations, and provide an efficient, consistent, and accessible experience when interacting with our internal data sources and applications.

Position Overview:
The Minor League Video & Technology Associate will be a member of the Player Development team, and is responsible for managing video and data collection at their assigned affiliate. This individual will collaborate closely with the coaching staff, coordinators, Player Development, Baseball Systems, and Analytics front office members.

Timeline: February 2024 – October 2024

Responsibilities:

  • Collect video by setting up multiple cameras and using BATS video software.
  • Organize and distribute game video in a timely and quality manner.
  • Manage video database to ensure it is readily available for staff and players to view.
  • Manage all video equipment and computers making sure it is properly cared for and working effectively.
  • Collect non-game video proactively and at the request of staff.
  • Operate and maintain various technology used at affiliate such as Blast, Rapsodo, Trackman, Hawkeye, Kinatrax, and Edgertronic cameras.
  • Distribute analytical information to coaching staff produced by our Analytics department.
  • Assist with various administrative projects as assigned by coaching staff and Front Office.
  • Assist in video collection and technology implementation during Spring Training.

Prospective employees will receive consideration without discrimination based on race, religious creed, color, sex, age, national origin, handicap, disability, military/veteran status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or protected genetic information.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Boston Red Sox.