Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Edwin Díaz’s season-ending injury at the WBC and the anti-WBC sentiment it engendered, then (20:39) bring on top-tier Patreon supporter Michael Eisen to discuss his history with Effectively Wild and baseball and how his scientific research is analogous to baseball research, before answering listener emails (31:29) about the best way to use an ambidextrous pitcher, reenacting a specific baseball game, what it would be like if baseball players were worse than they used to be, mutual pitch-calling, a league with only hitters or pitchers, a possible upside of cheating, the pitch clock and the hidden-ball trick, whether MLB games used to be closer, ending the Yankees’ facial-hair policy, a “pitch jingle,” and even bigger bases, plus a Past Blast (1:48:06) from 1981.

Audio intro: Andy Ellison, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Jeff Eliassen, “Michael”

Link to “arrow in the knee” wiki
Link to Baumann on Díaz
Link to Jon Tayler on the Díaz game
Link to Díaz injury video
Link to MLBTR on Díaz injury
Link to Mets spring celebration video
Link to Olbermann comments
Link to Ohtani throwing 102
Link to story on upcoming WBCs
Link to Michael’s UC Berkeley page
Link to Michael’s blog
Link to Michael’s wiki
Link to “The Impossible Dream” video
Link to FG pitcher stuff stats
Link to Cijntje story
Link to Cijntje video
Link to Ben on baseball talent
Link to EW about baseball talent
Link to Ben on hitters and pitchers
Link to so-called hidden ball trick
Link to Sam on close games
Link to Rob Mains on comebacks
Link to Rob Arthur on mismatches
Link to 1999 story on Vaughn and Reds
Link to retrospective on Vaughn
Link to Yankees policy history
Link to Rodón shaving story
Link to story about policy’s legality
Link to more on policy’s legality
Link to more on the legality
Link to Wilson story
Link to McCutchen’s comments
Link to just-noticeable difference wiki
Link to Dick Trueman episode
Link to listener emails database
Link to 1981 Past Blast source
Link to 2019 Visalia article
Link to 1995 Harrisburg article
Link to Harrisburg Senators wiki
Link to fan-owned baseball teams
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to Saber Seminar scholarships
Link to Saber Seminar submissions
Link to Andy Ellison’s website

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Ian Anderson played a major part in the Braves’ success when they came within one win of a trip to the World Series in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and then won it all the following year. But after struggling for the first four months of the 2022 season, he was optioned to Triple-A Gwinnett and made just one appearance for Atlanta as it won the NL East but was upset by the Phillies in the Division Series. While Anderson had a shot to reclaim a rotation spot this spring, on Tuesday he was optioned once again, both due to his control problems and to other pitchers making stronger cases for the fifth starter role.

I wrote about Anderson’s demotion last August, but a recap is in order. The third pick of the 2016 draft burst upon the major league scene in late 2020, pitching to a 3.28 ERA and 3.80 FIP in 30 starts totaling 160.2 innings during the ’20 and ’21 regular seasons. He added some stellar postseason work in that span, going 4–0 with a 1.26 ERA in eight starts totaling 35.2 innings; he was kept on a short leash, most notably departing Game 3 of the 2021 World Series after throwing five no-hit innings.

Last year was a different story, as Anderson was lit up for a 5.00 ERA and 4.25 FIP in 111.2 innings across 22 starts. His FIP barely budged relative to 2021 (4.12), but his 1.42 runs per nine rise in ERA from that his previous mark of 3.58 ranked fifth in the majors among pitchers with at least 100 innings in both seasons. Meanwhile, his strikeout and walk rates continued a two-year trend of creeping in the wrong directions, with the former down to 19.7% and the latter up to 11.0%.

Exacerbating Anderson’s problems was a 54-point rise in BABIP, from .259 to .313, the majors’ fifth largest among the aforementioned qualifiers. He decreased his barrel rate from 9.5% to 6.2%, but that was offset by slight increases in his average exit velocity and hard-hit rate, not to mention his pull rate; his xERA went from from 4.27 to 4.37. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Dan Szymborski: It is time. A time for chats.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I’m not super concerned, his strikeout rates aren’t really a problem in the minors, and for a prospect, I think passivity is even more dangerous than aggressiveness

12:05

Dan Szymborski: It’s an argument I had with people who were angry that Kris Bryant got like a three WAR projection his rookie season

12:05

Dan Szymborski: It was all “but minor league strikeout rate”

12:05

Dan Szymborski: But when a guy has a 1.000 OPS or something, they’re *incentivized* to be aggressive.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Kiri’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. She lives in the Pacific Northwest while contributing part-time to FanGraphs and working full-time as a data scientist. She spent five years working as an analyst for multiple MLB organizations.

By this point, you’ve undoubtedly consumed considerable content regarding the rule changes arriving in the majors for the upcoming season. You know all about the pitch clock dictating when hitters must ready themselves in the box and when pitchers must start their deliveries, as well as the wrinkle this introduces to pickoff attempts. You’ve also heard about the bigger bases and the limits on defensive shifting. Analysts have projected which players stand to be impacted most by the changes, while players who feel the changes make their jobs more difficult have voiced their concerns, and early spring training action has showcased the growing pains of adoption. With much of the existing commentary zooming in on the micro effects for particular players and game situations, let’s take some time to zoom out and ponder the macro effect on the game as a whole. More specifically, let’s ruminate on what makes a game or sport objectively appealing and how the rules — and subsequent changes to them — influence the appeal of a game.

At the most basic level, games are defined by rules dictating play. For those of us who struggle with authority, rules often feel restrictive. It’s no wonder, since rules come across as real haters, with all their “Don’t do this,” and “Don’t do that,” and “You can do this, but no, no, not like that.” That said, we needn’t have such an adversarial relationship with rules. In his book exploring the game of basketball, Nick Greene notes, “Games are peculiar. They are the only pursuit in which rules are used to facilitate fun.” To better understand the dynamic between rules and fun, Greene interviews a game design professor, Eric Zimmerman, who explains, “One of the paradoxes of game design is that the creativity of play is made possible by play’s opposite, which are rules. Rules are in essence constraints, but games don’t feel that way. […] When the rules are activated, what follows is fluid, unpredictable magic.” The rules of any game are finite, but the universe is infinite, implying that infinitely many possibilities exist in the space not covered by the defined rules. The fun in any game lies in the creativity used to explore the infinite space outside the boundaries set forth by the rules. Read the rest of this entry »

Every time a young star signs a contract extension, we all breathlessly mention the total guarantee. Did you hear Corbin Carroll is getting one hundred and ten million dollars? You could buy a pretty nice house with that, or several nice houses, or live comfortably for the rest of your life and set your kids up to succeed in the bargain. It’s natural to focus on something like that. It is, after all, the main part of the deal.

In almost every one of these extensions, there’s an additional feature: one or more years of team options tacked on to the end of the contract. Our collective analytical view of those tends to be more or less a shrug. “Oh, yeah, and two team options, so that’s nice,” we say, or “well, that makes sense.” I wouldn’t call our evaluations of these options particularly nuanced.

I don’t think that’s going to change on the whole, but the Carroll extension spurred me to at least delve a little deeper into the dollars and cents side of those team options. I’ve already done some work on opt outs from the player perspective, and conveniently enough, I can lift a lot of the mathematical methods from that treatment and use them to evaluate things from the team side. Read the rest of this entry »

MIAMI – You could hear the airhorns blocks away from LoanDepot Park, and the music, too: salsa, bachata, reggaeton, merengue — all blasting at artillery strike volume, echoing down the nearby residential streets lined with two-story pastel-colored houses and under the soft gray skies of a rainy Wednesday in south Florida. Small throngs of fans — women with their hair colored electric blue and cherry red, men with platinum blond dye jobs to mimic the stars of Team Rubio — became bigger clusters, all pooling around the stadium, taking over adjacent parking lots for impromptu tailgates. Everyone’s back bore the name of an icon of Caribbean baseball: CLEMENTE, GUERRERO, MARTINEZ, MACHADO, BÁEZ, SOTO, LINDOR. Tens of thousands of fans, some of whom had paid up to $400 per ticket on the secondary market just to get in the door, were here for the main event of Pool D in this World Baseball Classic: the win-or-go-home group stage finale between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

A clarification, first: It’s not accurate to call this event the World Baseball Classic — not here, at least, in Miami, where Latin American teams made up 80% of the pool’s members. (Team Israel probably picked up plenty of excellent Spanish slang in its week-long stay.) No, this was el Mundial, because all week, this hasn’t been a baseball tournament; it’s been a beisbol tournament. Every day featured a good-sized chunk of this city’s large Dominican and Puerto Rican populations setting up shop at the park and spending close to a dozen hours partying and dancing and playing panderetas and güiros and tamboras and those ubiquitous horns. Throughout the week, the west plaza of LoanDepot Park has functioned as a fanfest space, complete with a DJ on a giant stage and access to a team store stocked full of PR and DR shirts and a beer vendor seemingly every 10 feet. Long before each game every day and well past the final out each night, this is where Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Venezuelan fans (and a handful of Nicaraguans, supporting their country that had qualified for the WBC for the first time) met, laughed, crushed 20-ounce Heineken and Stella Artois cans, and celebrated together. This was their tournament, and Wednesday night’s heavyweight prize fight between Pool D’s superpowers was as close as they could get to their own Super Bowl. Read the rest of this entry »

PHOENIX – It was a nervy affair from start to finish, but Team USA is through to the knockout stage of the World Baseball Classic. Short on big league pitchers and star power, Colombia nevertheless hung in against the U.S. thanks to excellent defense and shrewd plate discipline. But American stars Mike Trout and Mookie Betts, whose quiet tournament-opening weekend had been the source of some consternation, showed up in force when the tournament was on the line, leading the way in a 3–2 victory.

The U.S. advances as the no. 2 seed in Pool C and will face Venezuela on Friday in the quarterfinals in Miami. Colombia, who upset Julio Urías and group winner Mexico in the first game of pool play, could not make good on its early promise after losses to Canada and Great Britain. After entering Thursday with a realistic chance of advancing, Colombia not only goes home early but also finished last in the pool and will be relegated to the qualification tournament for the next WBC. Read the rest of this entry »

When Edwin Díaz fell to the LoanDepot Park turf on Wednesday night, moments after closing out one of the most exciting and important contests of the WBC so far, his injury immediately overshadowed the immense gravity of the game that had preceded it.

As with any injury to any star player, the overriding reaction was one of concern. Concern for Díaz, for his home island’s team, and for the Mets, who could be without the best relief pitcher in baseball for a long time. As of Wednesday evening, there’s little information about the severity of Díaz’s injury (per the Mets, he’ll undergo imaging tomorrow), but given the mood of his teammates and the fact that he left the field in a wheelchair, it’s understandable to fear the worst.

Mixed in with concern for the player, however, is concern for the future of the World Baseball Classic itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Before Miguel Vargas doubled in his first plate appearance of the day last Thursday, he hadn’t lifted the bat off his shoulder his first 12 times up. Nursing a pinky fracture, he was just there to track pitches. Yet initially, this “strategy” paid unanticipated dividends: through seven looks, he walked four times and struck out three times, good for a .571 OBP (albeit with a 42.9% K-rate). However, pitchers ultimately adjusted, sending Vargas back to the dugout the next five times.

Apparently, opposing managers were made privy to his no-swing approach before each game. But even if Dave Roberts didn’t tell them about it, it was in the press as early as the morning of February 27, after which three of Vargas’ walks came. My colleague Davy Andrews, recounting this misadventure, posited that some of the pitchers treated Vargas like any other foe because they were just trying to get into regular-season shape.

But Davy also suggested pitchers may have been a bit incredulous that Vargas wouldn’t swing, up there with his batting gloves on and in his crouch. The incredulity slipped away, though, in those last five looks. Zack Greinke even toyed with Vargas, tossing him a pair of eephuses (eephi?) sandwiched by two full-strength heaters (thanks to Davy for doing the GIF work so I didn’t have to):

Read the rest of this entry »