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How is everyone dealing with the, uh, complete stoppage of major league baseball activity? Each person has a different method, I assume. As for me, I’m consuming both less and more baseball, strange as that might sound. The lockout has led me to invest energy into other hobbies, but baseball-related articles, podcasts, and videos have also been my lifeline in these trying times.

One podcast I owe much thanks to is Rates and Barrels, hosted by Eno Sarris and Derek Van Riper over at The Athletic. They’ve provided inspiration in the past, and I’m about to piggyback off of them again. In a recent episode about pitchers with bounce-back potential, Eno mentioned a quirk about Braves starter Ian Anderson that piqued my interest:

“The most interesting thing about Ian Anderson is he might be doing something with his changeup that my model can’t capture… it’s getting to the point where he’s demonstrated results on his changeup that far outweigh the grades these pitching models put on it.”

The model he’s referring to is Stuff+, which was developed in tandem with Max Bay and uses several variables to evaluate the quality of a certain pitch, or, in the aggregate, a pitcher’s entire arsenal. On the top of the Stuff+ leaderboards are names one would expect: Jacob deGrom’s four-seam fastball is otherworldly, Corbin Burnes’ cutter is unmatched, and Tyler Glasnow’s curve is as beautiful as his luscious hair. 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 Boston Red Sox.

Batters

By winning 92 games, the Red Sox comfortably exceeded most expectations for the team in 2021. How do they do it again? There’s a path available, though not all the elements are in the organization right now.

The part Boston already has sorted is the offensive players who did the most to push the team to fourth in the American League in runs scored. Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts, and Enrique Hernández are back, and there’s no reason to expect any kind of decline from the first two, while Hernández isn’t remotely in the steep decline phase yet. Alex Verdugo, J.D. Martinez, and the catcher tandem are projected to give roughly league-average performances, hardly surprising results. There may be some grumbling about JDM’s projection, but even if ZiPS can mostly overlook his mess of a 2020 — wouldn’t it be nice if we could all forget that year? — it can’t forget that he’s also a 34-year-old designated hitter. Yes, David Ortiz aged incredibly well (and ZiPS was weirdly optimistic he would), but most players of the type do not. Martinez shouldn’t be a problem in 2022, but the day when that will become likely is coming. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I ran a Twitter poll asking which of Bobby Abreu and Ichiro Suzuki had the better MLB career. The latter won in a landslide. Of the 1,183 votes cast, 86.8% went to Ichiro, while Abreu garnered just 13.2%.

The poll results don’t reflect their respective numbers:

Ichiro: .311/.355/.402, .328 wOBA, 104 wRC+, 57.8 WAR.
Abreu: .291/.395/.475, .378 wOBA, 129 wRC+, 59.8 WAR.

If you favor counting stats, here are a few of those:

Ichiro: 3.089 hits, 362 2Bs, 96 3Bs, 117 HRs, 3,994 total bases, 509 SB.
Abreu: 2,470 hits, 574 2Bs, 59 3Bs, 288 HRs, 4.026 total bases, 400 SB.

Unless you place an especially-high value on hit totals and batting averages, Abreu clearly has a career-wise statistical edge on the undoubtedly Hall-of-Fame-worthy Ichiro. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss Ben’s decision regarding his Hall of Fame ballot, and how to handle Hall of Fame voting in the future. Then (38:05) they complete their series of discussions of Korean baseball drama Stove League by breaking down the last four episodes (13-16) and reflecting on the series as a whole.

Audio intro: Blood Red Shoes, “Count Me Out”
Audio outro: Sloan, “Your Dreams Have Come True”

Link to latest HoF election projection
Link to 2016 Ortiz comments
Link to 2020 Ortiz story
Link to first EW Stove League discussion
Link to second EW Stove League discussion
Link to third EW Stove League discussion
Link to Pengsoo Wikipedia page
Link to stream Stove League via Viki

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In 2021, I once again had an opportunity to interview numerous people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the Talks Hitting series, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series, and an assortment of Q&As and feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

———

“I knew that I had a high BABIP, but I had no idea it was the highest in history. Once he told me, it wasn’t like I was coming back to the dugout thinking, ‘Man, I think I’m having some bad luck.’ It was actually on paper, as a stat.” — Mitch Keller, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher, January 2021

“Always trying to hit the ball way out in front is a recipe for a lot of strikeouts. Yeah, you’re going to hit some home runs, but you’re so susceptible to being pitched to that you limit the times in a game that you can truly do damage. You’re limited to the type of pitchers you can hit and the type of pitches you can hit.” — Dave Magadan, Colorado Rockies hitting coach, January 2021

“The guy that probably had the most power was actually Dean Palmer. He could hit a baseball a long ways. But Cecil… what he did was just incredible. And a lot of my home runs were with the bases empty, because I usually hit behind him, and he’d cleared them all. I hit with the bases empty a lot.” — Mickey Tettleton, 1980s-1990s slugger, January 2021

“An individual with a much lower spin rate, but a spin direction closer to 12:00 — high spin efficiency/active spin — can achieve significantly higher vertical break values than an individual who generates a much higher spin rate, but a spin direction further from 12:00.” — Eric Jagers, Cincinnati Reds assistant pitching coach, January 2021 Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the retirement of Kyle Seager and the lockout implications of a recent report about player payrolls, then discuss an assortment of listener-nominated, team-centric topics that they had previously overlooked on the podcast in 2021.

Audio intro: Spooky Tooth, “Kyle”
Audio outro: Hockey Dad, “I Missed Out”

Link to list of most HR in final season
Link to Seager ovation video
Link to payroll report
Link to story about Ryu and Manoah
Link to Korean story on Ryu and Manoah
Link to Blooper/Duvall video
Link to more Blooper/Duvall videos
Link to Romine/Romine story
Link to Casali story
Link to second Casali story
Link to Flexen story
Link to Lindor/McNeil report
Link to Zimmerman ovation video
Link to story on Harrison’s taunting
Link to Suárez FanGraphs post
Link to story on Cruz callup
Link to Cruz highlights video
Link to Mauer/Morneau hockey video
Link to FanGraphs post on Robert
Link to stream Stove League via Viki

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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.

The irony of graduating from being a virtual Hall of Fame voter to an actual one at this particular point in time has not been lost on me. Last year, my first as a voter but my 20th as an analyst, 18th while armed with the system that became JAWS, and 11th as a member of the BBWAA, featured a comparatively mediocre crop of first-year candidates, a few shocking discoveries about popular holdovers, and a whole lot of polarizing debate. The end result was the voters’ first shutout since the 2013 ballot. Talk about an anticlimax!

As I noted at the outset of this year’s election cycle, the possibility of another shutout has loomed large, and the arrivals of David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez just as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa reached their final year of eligibility guaranteed that everyone’s favorite topic, performance-enhancing drugs, would remain at the forefront of discussion, not only during this election cycle, but so long as A-Rod remains on the ballot. See you in 2032? Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 955

This week, we get stories from a baseball lifer before a casual chat about some teams that could use a little help.

• At the top of the show, David Laurila welcomes Manny Acta, former major league manager, current third base coach for the Mariners, and founder of the impACTA Kids charity foundation. David asks Acta about growing up in the Dominican Republic and dreaming of becoming a ballplayer, and what coming to the United States at a young age was like. We also hear personal stories about baseball greats like Billy Wagner, Tuffy Rhodes, Brad Lidge, Roy Oswalt, Tim Redding, and Frank Robinson. [2:39]
• After that, Dan Szymborski and Ben Clemens discuss the Phillies and the Angels, two clubs with promise if they can fill some holes. Dan and Ben discuss those teams’ lopsided outfields and some free agent pitchers who could help them, as well as the Cardinals’ own impressive outfield. The conversation then shifts to Tyler O’Neill hitting the ball very hard, free agent Carlos Martínez, and players who felt like they should have hit for more power than they eventually did. [36:17]

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 57 minute play time.)

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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 Los Angeles Dodgers.

Batters

What can you say about the Dodgers? Most of the lineup from last year is returning, and most of that lineup is very, very good. That a 106-win season can feel slightly disappointing comes down to how the San Francisco Giants played rather than how the Dodgers did. The projected lineup ranges from average to MVP-worthy, with no apparent holes.

Thanks to the trade that brought Trea Turner to LA, the question of what to do at shortstop over the long haul was put off for another year. The Dodgers didn’t really seem to make any kind of a big push to bring back Corey Seager, but that’s a testament to just how awesome Turner is. There are only two shortstops in baseball I’d rather have on a long-term contract: Fernando Tatis Jr., and Wander Franco. Suffice it to say, the Dodgers do not — and will not — have access to either of those two young stars. Even in the worst-case scenario, though, a Turner departure after 2022 would result in the team temporarily having a Chris Taylor–Gavin Lux middle infield. That’s still likely a roughly average pair, not a major disaster. Read the rest of this entry »