Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the demise of the Rays’ two-city, split-season scheme, Carlos Correa hiring Scott Boras as his agent, and Brandon Gomes of the Dodgers becoming the latest ex-player to ascend to GM, then (31:18) talk about numerous listener nominations of baseball events that predated the podcast that would have made great fodder for Effectively Wild, before closing with a Stat Blast (1:05:20) about the biggest intra-season gaps between Triple-A and MLB performance (plus a postscript about robot umps coming to Triple-A in 2022).

Audio intro: The Smiths, “I Won’t Share You”
Audio outro: Flamin’ Groovies, “Ups and Downs”

Link to news about Rays plan
Link to Sternberg quote
Link to Evan Drellich on Endeavor
Link to Drellich on Endeavor again
Link to Ben Clemens on Endeavor
Link to MLBTR on Correa
Link to Travis Sawchik on Boras
Link to Gomes profile
Link to Facebook suggestions thread
Link to story about two balls in play
Link to story about Raines and collusion
Link to Sonnanstine story
Link to Allan Travers SABR bio
Link to hitter Stat Blast data
Link to pitcher Stat Blast data
Link to Ben on experimental rules
Link to robot umps news

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley lean into the lockout by exploring two antecedents to today’s MLB labor stalemate. First, they banter with Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated about whether the Hall of Fame Vote Tracker has helped or hurt Hall of Fame conversations, then talk to Emma about the Players’ League, a short-lived but groundbreaking 19th-century rival to the National League that was founded by and for players, touching on the origins of the reserve clause, the Players’ League’s rapid rise and fall, where it went wrong, and whether a Players’ League equivalent could be created today (plus Joe Torre’s proto-keto diet and catching fly balls with one’s cap). Lastly (52:32), they bring on Dayn Perry of CBS Sports to talk about the 50th anniversary of MLB’s first work stoppage, exploring what caused the 1972 strike, how the circumstances then mirrored today’s, and how the strike was covered (plus a mustache panic, entrance songs, and other notable events from 50 years ago).

Audio intro: Al Stewart, “A League of Notions”
Audio interstitial: Eleventh Dream Day, “The People’s History”
Audio outro: The Inbreds, “Moustache”

Link to Hall of Fame Vote Tracker
Link to Emma on the Tracker
Link to Buster Olney on the Tracker
Link to Emma on the Players’ League
Link to Emma’s previous pod appearance
Link to Torre’s diet
Link to John Montgomery Ward SABR bio
Link to The Great Baseball Revolt
Link to SI Union thread
Link to story about 1940s Mexican League
Link to Federal League wiki
Link to Continental League wiki
Link to antitrust exemption post
Link to Casali facemask video
Link to EW episode on throwing gloves
Link to Drellich update
Link to Dayn’s 1972 retrospective
Link to The Infinite Inning episode
Link to The Athletic’s fan survey
Link to Rosenthal column
Link to Dayn’s website

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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

For most of the 12 years that he was in the majors, Jonathan Papelbon ranked among the game’s top closers, and its most consistent. For the first nine full seasons of his career (2006–14), he averaged 36 saves and posted a 2.35 ERA (185 ERA+), never notching fewer than 29 saves and only once turning in an ERA above 3.00.

During that time, Papelbon made six All-Star teams and helped the Red Sox to four postseason appearances. He thrived in the high-pressure ninth-inning role — sought it out, admitting that was the job he preferred when the team experimented with him as a starter in the spring of 2007. He sparkled in October, setting a major league record with 26 consecutive scoreless innings to start his career and closing out the Rockies in the 2007 World Series.

Like even the greatest of closers, Mariano Rivera, Papelbon wasn’t immune to high-profile failures; the only playoff game in which he allowed runs turned out to be a season-ender, and his tenure in Boston ended with a blown save to complete one of the most notorious collapses in recent memory. While he cashed in with a record-setting free-agent contract from the Phillies, his final years in Philadelphia and Washington were marked by two infamous incidents, one silly (his crotch-grabbing gesture to fans in 2014), the other flagrant (his choking of Bryce Harper in the Nationals’ dugout in 2015), both leading to suspensions. And by walking away from baseball at age 35 in the middle of the 2016 season, not only did he fail to undo the damage to the way he was perceived in the wake of those incidents, but from a Hall of Fame standpoint, he also left his career totals too short for many voters to give him strong consideration.
Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: The chat is now.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Yes. Adell’s projection has already rebounded from the year before! But he still needs to develop.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: As for Marsh, ZiPS is not yet enthralled by his offense

12:05

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS goes from history.

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“I have trouble sleeping,” is how the Chicago-based media producer who goes by Mr. King starts to explain his latest venture.

It’s a radio broadcast of a baseball game. It’s completely fictional. And it’s designed to put you to sleep. “I make dumb YouTube videos and now the world’s best fake baseball podcast,” Mr. King joked.

Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio: Big Rapids Timbers vs. The Cadillac Cars

“I experimented with listening to podcasts and white noise, and I found I liked to fall asleep by listening to a west coast game that I didn’t really care about,” Mr. King continued. “But I would always get jarred by the commercials suddenly yelling at you about a Ford F-150 or something.” And thus, he struck upon an idea: “What if there was a baseball game you could listen to, and there was no yelling, commercials at the same audio level, and you could actually fall asleep to it?”

“It’s a terribly weird idea, and I just went for it,” he said.

That’s how Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio was born. The domain of sleepbaseball.com was registered, and the first game was produced. As for using the name of an existing league, that was unintentional … maybe. “I did know that there was a real Northwoods League at one time, but then I forgot about it, and then realized it again when I went to register a domain,” Mr. King explained. “I’m hoping not to get sued, or maybe I am, as I can then own the real Northwoods League and that will be part of my empire.” Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Texas Rangers.

Batters

If you start by looking at the offensive comps in the chart below, you can see how quickly things go downhill in the batters’ projections. You start with two easy Hall of Famers and then about 40 seconds later, you’re reassembling the late-80s Braves. Now, the late-80s Braves eventually became the 90s Braves, something the Rangers are no doubt striving for, but getting from Point A to Point B isn’t a route you can just put into your car’s navigation system.

Signing Corey Seager and Marcus Semien is a great place to begin, though. Seager’s health record hasn’t been perfect, but it hasn’t been Eric Davis-like, either, and he still has a couple of seasons left of his 20s. Semien is a few years older, but after rightfully being a big part of the American League MVP race in two of the last three seasons, he starts off on a pretty high pedestal. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start this one with the basics. What’s a four-seamer, and what’s a sinker? At their core, they’re both fastballs; the main difference between the two is in the grip. Place the seams perpendicular to your index and middle fingers? That’s a four-seamer – each finger crosses two seams. Place the seams parallel to the fingers? It’s a two-seamer or sinker – one seam per finger.

Of course, you could also define them by their movement. Does it have a ton of tail and not much ride? It’s a sinker. Does it mainly fight gravity with backspin, paired with far less tail? It’s a four-seamer. If you think of archetypical examples of each, it’s easy to tell the difference. Think Clayton Kershaw’s four-seamer – all backspin – and Adam Wainwright’s sinker – boring in on righties’ hands and knees.

Real life doesn’t operate in archetypes, though. Real life is messy. Statcast doesn’t get to stop the game after each pitch and ask a pitcher what he threw, and not every fastball is a textbook definition of its type. Plenty of pitchers throw both varieties of fastball, and they can look extremely similar, even with the benefit of high-speed cameras and piles of pitch data.

Want a practical example? You’re in luck – or, well, not really. I’ve walked you into wanting a practical example with my introduction, and that’s on purpose, because today I want to talk about Aaron Nola’s two fastballs. Nola, like many pitchers, throws a sinker and a four-seamer. Like many pitchers, he releases them from a consistent arm slot – a remarkably consistent arm slot, in fact:
Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves.

Batters

Can the Braves win the World Series again? Yup! But it would be a lot easier to do if they could bring back Freddie Freeman. Sure, finishing his Atlanta career with a World Series trophy is a storybook ending, but that’s for a 39-year-old Freeman, so let’s can the epilogue for now. While it’s still taken as an assumption that he’ll return, the fact is he didn’t sign before the 2021 season, he didn’t sign during the 2021 season, and he didn’t sign before the lockout. Until he actually puts his pen to the dotted line, anything can happen, and until then, first base is the Braves’ biggest weakness.

ZiPS is projecting a solid return for Ronald Acuña Jr., but there’s still some danger in that outfield. It seems nearly certain that Marcell Ozuna will return, but from a baseball standpoint, he didn’t hit at all early last year. Now, imagine a scenario in which Acuña isn’t quite ready, Ozuna is struggling, and the Braves have to field a designated hitter in addition to cobbling together whatever at first. The outfield depth just isn’t that strong, especially with neither Cristian Pache nor Drew Waters having any kind of breakout years in Triple-A. There’s a reason that Alex Anthopoulos had to remake the outfield on the fly last summer, which is something that you ideally don’t have to do again in 2022.
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Ryne Nelson emerged as the top pitching prospect in the Arizona Diamondbacks system in 2021. A second-round selection in 2019 out of the University of Oregon, the 23-year-old right-hander was named the organization’s Minor League Pitcher of the Year after logging a 3.17 ERA — with 163 strikeouts in 116-and-a-third innings — between High-A Hillsboro and Double-A Amarillo. Mixing and matching a riding fastball with a trio of solid secondaries, Nelson held opposing hitters to a .206 batting average and a .644 OPS. He issued just 40 free passes.

Originally a two-way player before becoming a closer at Oregon, the 6-foot-3, 180 pound Henderson, Nevada native transitioned into a starting role upon entering pro ball. Nelson — No. 5 on our newly-released Diamondbacks Top Prospects list — discussed his development, as well as his 2020 eye surgery, via phone earlier this week.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with a self scouting report. Who are you as a pitcher?

Ryne Nelson: “I would say that I’m aggressive in the zone, and I like to change speeds and eye levels.”

Laurila: Do you identify as a power pitcher?

Nelson: “I like to think so. I mean, ‘power pitcher’ is kind of changing nowadays — you’ve got to be up in the triple digits to be a power pitcher — but I do pitch off of my fastball.” Read the rest of this entry »