With the postseason around the corner, Meg Rowley and guest co-host Ben Clemens discuss the playoff picture, how the Seattle Mariners got where they are, which team Ben would prefer to see his Cardinals match up against in the NL Wild Card, and the biggest surprises of the season. Then they discuss Ben’s recent work assessing FanGraphs’ playoff odds, what the odds do well and less-well, what kinds of teams they tend to be too low on or overestimate, and how the model could improve. They also offer some theories about why we seem to struggle with probabilistic thinking, look back on what they’ll miss most about the 2021 regular season, and share some brief Cy Young thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

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Yesterday, I tested how well our playoff odds have predicted eventual playoff teams. Today, I’m going to slice the data a few more ways to get a more robust look at what our odds do well, and where they have fewer advantages over other models. It will be number- and picture-heavy, word-light. Without further ado, let’s get started.

A discussion with Tom Tango got me wondering about why our Depth Charts-based odds do so well early in the season relative to other systems. Their advantage is particularly strong at the beginning of the season and fades as the year goes on. For all charts in the article that are based on days into a season, I’ve excluded the 2020 season for obvious reasons. Here are the mean average errors for each of the three systems over the first 60 days of the season:

What’s driving that early outperformance? In essence, it comes down to one thing: the projection-based model is willing to give teams high or low probabilities of making the postseason right away. Our season-to-date stats mode is hesitant to do that, and the coin flip mode obviously can’t do it. Take a look at the percentage of teams that each system moves to the extremes of the distribution — either less than 5% or more than 95% to make the playoffs — by day of season:

Why does this matter? If you’re judging based on mean absolute error, making extreme predictions that turn out to be right is a huge tailwind. If you predict something as 50% likely, you’ll have an error of 0.5 no matter what. The further you predict from the center of the distribution, the more chance you have to reduce your error.

Of course, that only works if you get it right. If you simply randomly predicted either 5% or 95% chances without any information about the teams involved, you’d do just as poorly as predicting 50% for everything. Making extreme picks when you have information that suggests they’re likely to be right is the name of the game. Read the rest of this entry »

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the first Joctober edition of my chat

2:03	Jay Jaffe: It was a busy week for me here! Today I’ve got a Team Entropy update with a focus on the Mariners’ Pythagenpat-defying clutch goodness http://blogs.fangraphs.com/team-entropy-2021-dial-m-for-mariners/

2:04	Jay Jaffe: And also a podcast spot with Fred C. Harris, co-author of one of my longtime favorite baseball books, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubblegum Book http://blogs.fangraphs.com/fangraphs-audio-fred-harris-chats-baseball-…

2:05	Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I looked at Devin Williams’ ill-timed, wrong-handed punch of a wall http://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-brewers-devin-williams-has-punched-hims…

2:05	Jay Jaffe: and on Wednesday, I dug into the NL MVP race http://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-fascinating-and-still-unsettled-nl-mvp-…

Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners are entering the final weekend of the regular season with their best shot since 2016 at breaking their infamous postseason drought, having gone 18–8 in September and won 11 of their last 13 games after losing a crucial series to the Red Sox mid-month. Earlier this morning, Jay Jaffe took a look at the bigger picture for the Mariners, their negative run differential, and the historic positive turn of their playoff odds. But this climb up the standings wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for some unheralded performances by a number of players on their roster.

From a season-long perspective, the Mariners’ offense has been lackluster, with a wRC+ of 94, ranking tenth in the American League. That went up to 103 in September, but the driving force behind the improved offense has been excellent performance in tight situations. Seattle has the most clutch offense in recorded MLB history (WPA records only go back to 1974), which goes a long way toward explaining the team’s 33–18 record in one-run games this year.

Clutch hitting can take a team far, but it’s not something that can be counted on every night. Luckily, the core of the Mariners’ lineup started hitting extremely well during the final month:

After shuffling through a number of early-season contributors, the lineup stabilized after the All-Star break — something that coincided with Kelenic’s second call-up from Triple-A after his rough debut in May. The hits didn’t start falling immediately after his return to the majors; from July 16 through the end of August, he posted a .181/.263/.315 line (a 65 wRC+) with a 30.5% strikeout rate. But something clicked once the calendar turned over to September, with Kelenic hitting .242/.321/.537, good for a 135 wRC+. His strikeout rate dropped to 25.5%, he launched seven home runs, and more than half of his hits went for extra bases.

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This is the fifth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

The Mariners haven’t reached the postseason since 2001, and all season long, our Playoff Odds have strongly suggested that their drought — the majors’ longest active one — will continue. But as we head into the final weekend of the 2021 season, they’re on a 10-1 tear that has interjected them right into the thick of an American League Wild Card race with a decided East Coast bias. With the Yankees sweeping the Red Sox in Boston and then taking two out of three from the Blue Jays in Toronto while the Red Sox somehow dropped two out of three to the Orioles in Baltimore, we now have four teams separated by three games from top to bottom, with just three to play for each:

This is not a drill! I’ll get to the mechanics of how this will be sorted out soon enough, but first, I’m taking the opportunity to spotlight the Mariners’ unlikely run and the trends they’re up against. This isn’t a dive into individual performances; elsewhere on FanGraphs today, Jake Mailhot has a closer look at what’s fueled their September run. Here I’m looking at the bigger picture. But first, an illustration of the Mariners’ Playoff Odds over the course of the season:

It’s been awhile since the Mariners were anywhere close to this position. While they went 89-73 just three years ago before slipping below .500 in both 2019 (68-94) and ’20 (27-33), that ’18 squad fell eight games short in the AL Wild Card race and finished 14 games behind the Astros in the AL West race. They did finish three games back in the AL Wild Card race in 2016, going 86-76 while both the Orioles and Blue Jays went 89-73, but they were a distant nine games behind the Rangers in the AL West. Not since 2003, when they went 93-69 in Lou Piniella’s final year at the helm, have they come as close by both routes to the postseason; that year, they finished three games behind the A’s in the division race and two behind the Red Sox in the AL Wild Card. And not since that 2001 team set a modern record with 116 wins have they qualified for the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

The end of the season is rapidly approaching, so approach it in style with another episode ofChin Music. This week, I am joined by our very own Ben Clemens to chat for a couple of hours about baseball (and other things). We begin with a look at the wild Wild Card races, including tangents on Cody Bellinger’s future in Los Angeles, Devin Williams‘ wall punching incident and the Rays’ plans (or ruse) to spend their summers north of the border.

We’re then joined by special guest and life-long Mariners fan Meg Rowley of FanGraphs and Effectively Wild to discuss the team with September’s greatest fun differential. Then it’s your emails on Tyler O’Neill’s performance versus good and bad pitchers, the direction of baseball’s popularity, and The Beach Boys. We finish by catching up with Ben, and discussing board games and multiple personality disorder.

As always, we hope you enjoy, and thank you for listening.

Music by Bad Bad Hats.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

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Episode 942

This week on FanGraphs Audio, we talk to the author of one of our favorite baseball books before welcoming a big-league arm.

• At the top of the program, Jay Jaffe sits down with Fred C. Harris, co-author of The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading And Bubblegum Book, first published in 1973. Like many, Jay loved this book in his formative years, and he shares some of his favorite passages and cards. Meanwhile, Fred reflects on how the book came to be and the numerous versions that have been published over the years, many of which Jay has on his shelf. Finally, Jay shares his ode to Rocky Bridges, and we hear an anecdote about Jim Bouton’s reaction to being in the book. [2:35]
• After that, David Laurila is joined by Cole Sulser, right-hander for the Baltimore Orioles. Sulser talks about going from playing at Dartmouth with Kyle Hendricks to a pair of Tommy John surgeries to his unforgettable major league debut at age 29. David asks Sulser about playing in the Ivy League with players like Matt Bowman and Mike Ford and the Dominican Winter League with players like Fernando Tatis Jr. and Néstor Cortes Jr. Finally, we hear about Sulser’s favorite ballparks and his brother in the Pirates system. [34:10]

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