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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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

After last year’s shutout ended a remarkable run of 22 candidates elected over a seven-year span, this year the BBWAA got back to the business of electing players — or player, singular, given that David Ortiz was the 2022 cycle’s sole honoree. Even with Ortiz’s election, it seems clear that the upcoming years for the writers’ ballot will produce far fewer honorees than this recent stretch, which set all kinds of records even without Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa gaining entry due to the controversies attached to their respective candidacies.

Even setting the issue of performance-enhancing drugs aside for the moment, the past decade has amply illustrated that the dynamics of a Hall of Fame candidacy have changed. As I noted last year, from 1966 to 2005, only three candidates recovered from debuts below 25% and eventually reached 75%, even with 15 years of eligibility: Duke Snider (17.0% in 1970, elected in 1981), Don Drysdale (21.0% in 1975, elected in ’84) and Billy Williams (23.4% in 1982, elected in ’87). Since then, we’ve seen five players elected despite such slow starts, including three from 2017-20. From the 15-year eligibility period came Bruce Sutter (23.9% in 1994, elected in 2006) and Bert Blyleven (17.5% in ’98, elected in 2011), and then once the Hall unilaterally cut eligibility to 10 years — less to clean up the ballots than to move the intractable debate over PED-related candidates out of the spotlight, and give voters less time to soften their attitudes — Tim Raines (24.3% in 2008, elected in ’17), Mike Mussina (20.3% in 2014, elected in ’19), and Larry Walker (20.3% in 2011, elected in ’20). Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Wells is well-regarded, albeit with a lot to prove on the defensive side of the ball. There’s little doubt that he can mash. No. 15 on our recently-released New York Yankees Top Prospects list, Wells went deep 16 times in 469 plate appearances last year between Low-A Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley. His left-handed stroke produced a solid .264/.390/.476 slash line, while his wRC+ was an every-bit-as-sturdy 135.

Wells is built to bash — he packs 220 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame — and his size is also befits a backstop. That’s what he wants to be. Asked about his positional future during his stint in the Arizona Fall League, Wells shared that he’s caught since he was six years old, and plans to continue doing so. Since being drafted 28th-overall in 2020 out of the University of Arizona, all 70 of his defensive games have been spent behind behind the dish. Moreover, “there haven’t been any conversations about playing anywhere else.”

Wells was preparing to play in the Fall Stars Game when I caught up to him, and the first thing I wanted to address were the nuances of his craft. I began by asking what role analytics play for a young, minor-league catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about one of Ben’s most laborious baseball-writing experiences, answer listener emails about playing MLB games at minor league affiliates’ parks, how scouting reports affect the times-through-the-order penalty, and what they would do if they discovered that Roberto Clemente had been credited with one hit too many, share a Stat Blast (36:20) about times when the best hitters in each league (and best pitchers in each league) played in the same city, and then (46:24) talk to Aidan Gruber about his website, MLB Trade Trees, which tracks and displays trade/transaction trees for every trade in AL/NL history.

Audio intro: Still Corners, “Into the Trees”
Audio interstitial: David Duchovny, “3000”
Audio outro: Pulp, “The Trees”

Link to FanGraphs redesign
Link to Ben’s trade trees article
Link to Ben Clemens on fastballs
Link to article on old stat changes
Link to article on Wilson’s RBI
Link to Craig on artificial scarcity
Link to video of Clemente’s hit
Link to Stat Blast hitter data
Link to Stat Blast pitcher data
Link to episode on lopsided trades
Link to Ben on Schilling trades
Link to Aidan’s Dybzinski post
Link to Dybzinski trade tree
Link to Stephens trade tree
Link to players traded for themselves
Link to Baseball Trade Values site
Link to Aidan’s code on GitHub
Link to contact Aidan
Link to MLB Trade Trees

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The Twins starting rotation is a clear area of weakness for the team as they head into the 2022 season. The departures of José Berríos, J.A. Happ, and Michael Pineda, plus Kenta Maeda’s elbow injury, drained the group of some serious talent. Before the lockout, Minnesota’s only move to address this concern was to add Dylan Bundy on a one-year deal. For all sorts of reasons, it seems clear the team just isn’t likely to bring in another quality starter from outside the organization. Instead, I suspect the Twins are hoping some of their young starters will take a significant step forward in 2022.

Bailey Ober, Joe Ryan, and Randy Dobnak have fewer than 50 career starts between them but each is likely to hold down a significant role this year. Earlier this week, I examined Ober’s deep arsenal and the path he could take toward a breakout sophomore season. Despite being injured for most of 2021, the five-year extension Dobnak signed before the season should give him a long leash to prove he can be a successful major league starter. Luke Hooper already investigated the intriguing addition of Jharel Cotton to the pitching staff (though his role is far from defined at this point). As for Ryan, he has a fascinating profile that has the potential to be the best of the bunch.

Ryan was a seventh round pick in the 2018 draft out of Cal State Stanislaus. He was assigned to Low-A that same year and started racking up tons of strikeouts. After blowing through three levels of the minors in 2019, he started appearing on Rays prospect lists, debuting at 13th on the 2020 list as a 45 FV. In all, he compiled a 36.7% career strikeout rate as a member of Tampa Bay’s farm system. Questions about his fastball, which sat around 90-94 mph, and a lack of quality secondary stuff held him back from rising any higher on our prospect lists despite the elite results he was putting up at each level.

Eventually, Ryan was traded to the Twins in the Nelson Cruz deal and made his major league debut on September 1. The strikeouts continued to come in the big leagues, as he sent down 30% of the batters he faced on strikes. He wound up with a 3.43 FIP and a phenomenal 6.00 strikeout-to-walk ratio across his five starts during the final month of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

A fact: Among the 157 pitchers with a minimum of 400 innings pitched since 2016, Dodgers southpaw Julio Urías has the lowest home run per fly ball rate (HR/FB) at 8.4%. The distance between him and second-place Brad Keller (10.1%) is the same as the distance between Keller and 20th-place Rich Hill (11.8%). It’s no wonder that Urías has been terrific so far in his career – he’s controlled the contact he allows like no other.

Also a fact: The reason why xFIP still holds up as a decent ERA estimator is because most pitchers, regardless of their talent level, tend to drift towards a league-average HR/FB rate. Yet here’s Urías, resisting the inevitable pull of regression before our very eyes. Does he have a secret? Or is he merely running from the grim reaper, time ticking with each step? I’m still not sure! But if you’ll allow, here are a few educated guesses that hopefully make sense.

First things first, I need to address a common possibility. As Jeff Zimmerman demonstrated years ago, pitchers with higher fly ball rates also have lower HR/FB rates. That’s because they also get their fair share of popups, so the denominator ends up outpacing the numerator. But even though Urías isn’t a groundball pitcher, he isn’t a notable fly ball pitcher, either. He’s 37th among the aforementioned 157 in terms of fly ball rate – above-average, sure, but not extreme enough to explain his deflated career HR/FB mark. Our answers, if any, lie elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

If you wanted to design a puzzle to attract my interest, you couldn’t do much better than pitchers who throw both sinkers and four-seamers. I love thinking about pitching. I love thinking about fastball spin, and I’ve been having a blast looking at approach angle recently. Want to kick it into overdrive, though? Add in platoon splits, and we’re really cooking with gas.

One of those weird, of-course-this-exists-but-we-don’t-talk-about-it splits is groundball pitchers against flyball hitters and vice versa. I first learned about this split in The Book, and while it’s always made sense, Alex Chamberlain put it into a pretty picture recently that brought it back to mind for me:

fly ball hitters perform better against ground ball pitchers, and ground ball hitters perform better against fly ball pitchers

(y-axis: pitcher influence on launch angle
x-axis: hitter LA, absent pitcher influence
colors: hitter wOBAcon bins) pic.twitter.com/K43Kj868T5

— Alex "Oxlade" Chamberlain (@DolphHauldhagen) January 21, 2022

There are some terms you might not know on there, like pitcher influence on launch angle. For that, you should read Alex’s work on launch angle here. Honestly, you should probably just read all of Alex’s stuff anyway – but particularly for this, his work is invaluable.

The key takeaway here? Against groundball hitters, sinkers are an excellent choice of pitch. The hitter tends to hit the ball into the ground and sinkers generally influence launch angles downward. The result is frequently a grounder, which is great for the defense. Similarly, if you’re facing a fly ball hitter, you want them to hit it even higher into the air, which means a four-seamer with solid rise is the ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s another episode of Chin Music, the number one baseball podcast in Ecuador and Hungary! This week’s episode features the return Eric Longenhagen for plenty of prospect talk and other stuff. We begin by discussing this week’s mess of a Hall of Fame vote, which leads us into the mess of the labor negotiations, including why using public-facing statistics to calculate player compensation is a bad idea. From there we move into the meat of the show as we dive into the recently published prospect rankings of the Yankees, Phillies and Diamondbacks systems. Then it’s your emails on the inner workings of the CBA negotiations and arbitration, as well as players with weird first names, followed by some high-brow Moments Of Culture from the world of television and sports. As always, we hope you enjoy, and thank you for listening.

Music by Weakened Friends.

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Warning One: While ostensibly a podcast about baseball, these conversations often veer into other subjects.

Warning Two: There is explicit language.

Run Time: 2:08:49.

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Episode 959

On this episode of FanGraphs Audio, David Laurila welcomes Blake Butera, the manager of the Charleston RiverDogs, Low-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays.

Butera, who is just 29 years old, shares his journey from playing at Boston College to being drafted by the Rays to becoming a key part of their player development system. We get stories about players such as Brendan McKay, Tommy Pham, Curtis Mead, Colby White, Cole Wilcox, Taj Bradley (a guest on episode 937), and more. Butera also offers some insights into what makes the Rays system so special and how the team is capable of consistently producing major-league talent.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 30 minute play time.)

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