For nearly a decade, you couldn’t go a week in the offseason without seeing an article about the American League’s dominance over the National League in interleague play. I know – I was already a rabid consumer of Hot Online Baseball Takes™ at the time and drove myself to distraction trying to find reasons to believe or disbelieve it. But it was interesting! The AL and NL split World Series roughly down the middle, but the AL kept winning interleague play and World Series games. Was it just a better league?

In 2018 and ’19, the trend flipped. The NL won the interleague season series in both of those years, which marked their first victories in that theoretical season-long series since 2002 and ’03. It had been quite a while, in other words.

By 2020, “who’s winning the interleague series” didn’t feel as interesting, and the unique pandemic-shortened schedule drove that point home even more surely. Due to geographically-divided schedules, there were nearly as many interleague games in 2020 as there were in ’19 (298 league-wide as compared to the standard 300 on the schedule every year since 2013), despite playing a 60-game season rather than 162. Not only that, but there wasn’t the usual rotation of opponents and rivalries. Instead, each division played its opposite-league counterpart. 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 Toronto Blue Jays.

Batters

If you start with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, it’s hard for your offense to do too poorly without major malpractice. And no malpractice is present here, as George Springer projects to (hopefully) have a healthier season while the Jays’ confusing, Cerberus-like catching situation should be adequate whatever configuration they go with. Teoscar Hernández projects to regress a bit BABIP-wise, but his power still makes him a comfortable plug-and-play cleanup hitter, though I’d personally prefer that he hit third since that’s the lineup spot that leads off the fewest innings. ZiPS doesn’t see Cavan Biggio being as much of a chip off the old block as Bichette or Guerrero, but it does expect a great deal of improvement from his sub-replacement 2021 season.

There are still places where the Jays can make improvements. Santiago Espinal was a nice little surprise and hit very well in the majors in 2021, but the projections are unimpressed with a minor league record that screams complementary talent. Kevin Smith projects to hit for power but with a low BA/OBP, and he’ll probably struggle to be valuable at third unless he turns out to be extremely adept at playing the hot corner. Another spare outfielder would also be helpful; ZiPS isn’t crazy about Randal Grichuk as the main fallback option. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Like his longtime teammate Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau won an MVP award, spent a stretch as a perennial All-Star, helped the Twins to a handful of division titles and all-too-brief playoff appearances — and had his career indelibly altered by a series of concussions. Though neither player was stopped in his tracks to the extent of former teammate Corey Koskie, who never again played in the majors after sustaining a severe concussion in 2006, both players suffered the lingering effects of multiple traumatic brain injuries, which compromised their performances but also helped to raise awareness within the sport.

Unlike Mauer, Morneau — a Canadian who grew up playing hockey, where he likely suffered the first of his several concussions — wasn’t on a Hall of Fame path when he got injured, and he actually recovered to win a batting title later in his career. Yet his career can be divided into everything that came before the July 7, 2010 collision of his head with the knee of Blue Jays second baseman John McDonald during a routine takeout slide, and what came after. Morneau hit for a 138 OPS+ from 2006 to the point of the injury while averaging 4.3 WAR over those 4 1/2 seasons. He managed just a 106 OPS+ over his six final seasons while totaling 5.5 WAR, only once topping 1.3, and not all of that can be chalked up to age-related decline.

“It’s something that will always be with me,” Morneau told ESPN’s Jim Caple in the spring of 2015. “I look at it like a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery — every time he throws or his elbow gets sore or something happens, you’re going to go back to that.” 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 San Diego Padres.

Batters

There’s no lying: 2021 was a tough year for the Padres, at least the last six weeks or so. As late as August 10, they were firmly in control of a playoff spot and, at 67–49, on pace for a 94-win season. The rest of the year was as brutal a run as I can remember for any team, certainly for one that had legitimate playoff hopes beforehand. Over the last 46 games of the season, San Diego went 12–34, the worst in baseball, even worse than the Orioles, who were nearly at the level of dragooning fans into throwing mop-up innings. Before the Friars, only one team, the 1986 Orioles, ever finished the season this poorly while winning at least 70 games. That was a team I remember well, being an eight-year-old in Baltimore at the time; it basically sent Earl Weaver back to retirement at a relatively young 56.

The good news is that the best reasons for liking the Padres before 2021 remain on the team. Fernando Tatis Jr. has the best projection for any player on a team run so far, by a two-win cushion, though this is partially thanks to ZiPS having anxiety about Mike Trout’s injury record in recent seasons and will change when the ZiPS for the Nats go public, but he is the foundation of this team, even if he eventually has to move to another position because of shoulder problems. Manny Machado is still in his 20s, Jake Cronenworth had a star-level season, and ZiPS thinks Trent Grisham will have a better 2022.

The bad news is that outside of Tatis, Cronenworth and Joe Musgrove, there are precious few Padres to feel clearly more confident about this time around, and they don’t have enough wiggle room to justify scraping by with holes at three of the four corner positions. San Diego appeared, late in the season, to realize finally that the Eric Hosmer situation wasn’t going to work itself out magically but still hasn’t committed to doing anything significant at first other than “insert coin to try again” like it’s 1993 and it just lost to M. Bison in Street Fighter II. That Nomar Mazara might be part of the left field mess if the season started today is not something a fan should be excited about. Wil Myers reverting to non-2020 form leaves right field as another weak spot, though it may be tough for the Padres to do anything here while also fixing first and left. And ZiPS sees no in-house saviors on the short-term horizon; ask me next year about Robert Hassell III.
Read the rest of this entry »

I hope you’ll indulge me in a small bit of personal venting as a setup for this article. Over the holidays, my wife and I traveled to see family. This being 2021 (well, at the time), she caught COVID. We’ve been isolating at home ever since – I haven’t tested positive, but given that I’m being exposed every day, what can you do?

Why tell this story? To some extent, I want to complain. I’m only human, after all, and venting is one way to feel a bit better about the week I’ve spent sitting at home reading, cooking, and taking care of a sick person without being in the same room as them. More importantly, though, I’ve had a bit of free time, and I spent it the way that anyone would: watching an absurd number of videos of pitches in the strike zone that were called balls.

What’s that? You’d do something else with your time? I did some cooking and such too, but seriously: plenty of videos of balls called strikes. Why? I wanted to write an article about them, and when your free time stretches out infinitely, you might as well get a firm grasp of the genre first. Anyway! I’ve found what I would consider to be an exhaustive account of the ways that pitches very clearly in the strike zone get called balls. I’m going to use the worst missed calls of the 2021 season to show the ways a perfectly placed pitch can turn into a ball. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Fanatics purchasing Topps and MLB Network reportedly parting ways with Ken Rosenthal because of his criticism of Rob Manfred. Then (27:36) they kick off a series of episodes about measuring difficult-to-quantify aspects of the sport by talking to Cameron Grove about translating his study of astrophysics into baseball research, assessing pitchers’ stuff, the cause of the time through the order penalty, pitcher deception, catcher game-calling, tracking and analyzing pitchers’ motions from video, proprietary data he wishes he had, the behavior of the ball, and his baseball ambitions. Finally (1:12:00), they bring on Eric Chalek to explain how he developed Major League Equivalencies (MLEs) for Negro Leaguers and other pre-integration Black baseball players, how his MLEs help put those players’ careers in context, the challenge of assessing league quality, Josh Gibson’s and Satchel Paige’s MLEs, Cooperstown implications, and missing data.

Audio intro: Robert Plant, “Network News”
Audio interstitial 1: Jimi Hendrix, “Astro Man”
Audio interstitial 2: The New Pornographers, “Loose Translation”
Audio outro: The Delgados, “Ballad of Accounting”

Link to WSJ report on Fanatics/Topps
Link to EW episode about Fanatics/Topps
Link to report about Rosenthal and Manfred
Link to 2020 Rosenthal column
Link to Rosenthal tweet
Link to Cameron’s website
Link to DESI’s Wikipedia page
Link to Cameron’s pitch quality app
Link to Cameron’s TTOP tweet
Link to Cameron’s other TTOP tweet
Link to previous familiarity/fatigue research
Link to Cameron on pitcher workloads
Link to Ben on playoff familiarity
Link to Cameron on over/underperformers
Link to Cameron’s motion data
Link to Ben on pitching deception
Link to Cameron on game-calling
Link to Cameron on game-calling leaders
Link to Cameron on the ball’s behavior
Link to Alan Nathan on fly ball variation
Link to Cameron on umpiring difficulty
Link to Adam Darowski EW interview episode
Link to Adam’s interview with Eric
Link to 42 for 21 EW interview episode
Link to Eric’s 42 for 21 ballot
Link to Adam on post-integration stars
Link to Hall of Stats MLEs announcement
Link to Eric’s website
Link to Eric’s MLE method for hitters
Link to Eric’s MLE methods for pitchers

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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 son of three-time All-Star and two-time American League home run leader Cecil Fielder, Prince Fielder was practically bred for the major league spotlight. He grew up as his father’s baseball sidekick, memorably photographed as a six-year-old holding up one of the home run balls from the night that his father hit his 50th and 51st shots of the 1990 season, and then filmed striking out dad in a McDonalds commercial as an eight-year-old, and receiving tips on the finer points of baseball superstitions — and gravy — at age 11. The food-related photo opportunities lent themselves to easy potshots given the bulky physiques of both father and son, but when 12-year-old Prince used a wooden bat to hit upper deck home runs in batting practice at Tiger Stadium, served up by Detroit third base coach Terry Francona and witnessed by legendary broadcaster Ernie Harwell and Hall of Famers Alan Trammell and Al Kaline, his royal lineage as a slugger came into focus.

“You can’t ever say that you look at a kid that age and say that you know he’s going to hit 40 or 50 home runs someday, but Prince was unbelievable,” said Kaline years later. “Here’s a 12-year-old kid commonly hitting homers at a big league ballpark.”

In a 12-year career cut short by recurring neck problems, the younger Fielder made six All-Star teams, finished in the top five of MVP voting three times, and won a home run title himself. Not only are he and his father the only such combination to win home run titles, but each slugger ended his career with exactly 319 homers. Along the way, the younger Fielder played a major part in turning the Brewers into contenders, landed one of the largest contracts in major league history, and proved to be quite the entertainer. 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 New York Yankees.

Batters

The offense is a relatively stable group, especially with the addition of Joey Gallo for a season, but some of the shine has come off the team’s upside here. Giancarlo Stanton was healthy and solid in 2021, but the year largely served to narrow his range of outcomes in ZiPS rather than change its trajectory; a year older and farther away, ZiPS sees it as less likely that another 2017 is lurking in there somewhere. It’s also less likely that DJ LeMahieu turns in another elite season, and center field is in a tough spot given how much of the depth chart is tied up in the frequently-injured Aaron Hicks. We can’t skip over Gleyber Torres, either; for a player who hit 38 homers as a 22-year-old shortstop just two years ago, his career is in a precarious position now. Read the rest of this entry »