There has been a lot of discussion of shortstops in 2021 and rightfully so. Fernando Tatis Jr. is must see TV and currently third among qualified position players in WAR. During the offseason Francisco Lindor was traded to the Mets, who quickly signed him to a 10-year, $341 million extension. That deal set the stage for rampant conjecture as to the ceiling for possible contracts for the remaining top shortstops under 30 who look like they will test the free agent market for the first time this winter: Javier Báez, Carlos Correa, Corey Seager and Trevor Story. As if that wasn’t enough drama, two of those players (Báez and Story) are currently playing on teams that will be sellers over the next week and a half, adding an element of trade speculation to a conversation that was already quite compelling. But as these louder storylines dominate the conversation this season, Trea Turner is quietly building on his improvements from the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign. The 28-year-old looks like he may be putting together a career year. Turner won’t be a free agent until 2023 and the fourth-place Nationals don’t look like contenders this season, but it’s still worth taking a closer look at how Turner is putting it all together in 2021.

Turner celebrated his birthday three weeks ago by hitting for the third cycle of his career. As I was working on this piece, he started another game with a triple and a home run before being pulled in the later innings when it was clear the Nationals did not need him to finish their 18-1 rout of the Marlins. He had to settle for a 2-for-4 night with four RBI. Read the rest of this entry »

The players selected in the 2021 Draft have now been moved to their teams’ prospect lists on The Board. So if you want to know where Marcelo Mayer or Kumar Rocker falls on the Top 100, or where the Pirates’ picks fall on their team’s list, it’s now easy to do so. More players than were originally ranked on the Draft Board have been added to the pro lists and also now have a presence on the 2021 Draft Board; we ranked about 80 players before the draft, but another 80 or so who were picked felt as though they required immediate inclusion on the pro lists. I assumed anyone picked in the first 11 rounds will sign because, historically, they do. If a player who has been added to the pro side of The Board does not sign, I’ll remove them from the pro side and move them to the appropriate Draft year once the signing deadline passes. At most, that might be a couple of players.

Kevin Goldstein and I also took a “low-hanging fruit” pass at the Top 100 list and I took one, on my own, at most of the team-specific lists. Anyone whose FV on the team lists changed has an “up” or “down” arrow in the trend column. You can filter for those by clicking that column. There are some players within the 50 FV tier whose grades didn’t change but whose ranking did. Jasson Dominguez didn’t look great at Futures Game (he has swing path issues and close to average raw power with zero physical projection) but he’s still a teenage switch-hitter with good power for his age and a chance to stay up the middle. He’s a 50 FV prospect but didn’t look like a fast-rising, transcendent star, so he slid in the rankings though his FV is the same. I’m going to run through why those prospects changed (or were added) now.

Adley Rutschman’s rank didn’t change but he moved from the 65 FV tier to the 70 FV tier on the strength of his Futures Game look. He is not normal. A switch-hitter his size, with his kind of rotational explosion, who has the bat-to-ball feel to switch which side of the cage he’s hitting in mid-batting practice session and just keep hitting bombs is not normal, and this is also an elite defensive catcher and locker room guy. He’s now in the FV tier Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Ronald Acuña Jr., and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. were in as prospects. Read the rest of this entry »

It isn’t easy to make it to the Olympics. The backstories of Olympians often inspire awe (and trepidation): athletes, sometimes quite young, dedicating more time to their sport than many adults do to their careers, sacrificing life’s frivolities for the sake of representing their country on a global stage, potentially to the long-term detriment of the young bodies they’re pushing to their limits in order to get there. And that’s before adhering to often-antiquated rules for participation that could see them unfairly removed from eligibility for reasons completely unrelated to their sport. Of course this year, beyond the hurdles of human achievement that always stand between athletes and the Olympics, there’s an unprecedented existential threat looming over the Games and indeed the world.

The Olympic trials and other qualifiers leading up to the Tokyo Games were minor skirmishes compared to the fight against COVID-19. Of course, the recent resurgence of the global pandemic has already made its impact known. Back in March, it was announced that international fans would be prohibited from attending; stadium capacities would be limited to 50% and a maximum of 10,000 fans would be permitted for any given event. But earlier this month that was walked back, with Olympic organizers deciding that Japanese fans would also be barred from attending Olympic events, an announcement that simultaneously discouraged excited potential spectators, added a significant amount to the overall cost of hosting this year’s Games, and caused would-be Olympic viewers worldwide to question how much sense it made to proceed with the Summer Games at all, given the state of the world.

The impact that COVID has had on the much anticipated (albeit fleeting) return of baseball to the Olympics predates this most recent audience restriction by well over a year. As I mentioned when I previewed Team USA’s roster, the qualifying tournaments began in 2019, with four of the six teams earning their Olympic spots at the end of that year before most of us had even heard whispers of a potential pandemic. Japan had an automatic spot in the Games thanks to Tokyo’s role as host city. Israel won the Africa/Europe Qualifying Event. The 2019 Premier12 Tournament saw the addition of two more teams: Mexico, which narrowly edged out the US to earn its spot as the tournament’s top finisher from the Americas, and South Korea, which finished second behind Japan, whose spot was already secured. Read the rest of this entry »

For the full introduction to the Replacement-Level Killers series, follow the link above. While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a closer look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I don’t expect every team to go out and track down an upgrade before the July 30 deadline, but particularly for these two positions — where pending free agents Javier Báez, Kris Bryant, and Trevor Story rate among the best players available and are toiling for teams who can’t be considered contenders — I’d be surprised if there isn’t some movement, even beyond the teams that make the cut for these lists. As with previous entries in this series, won-loss records and Playoff Odds are through yesterday (July 20, in this case), but statistics through the day before (July 19).

Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball’s sticky stuff crackdown is working. Since the June 3 warning that increased enforcement of the foreign substance rule was coming, spin rates have fallen league-wide. The league-average spin-to-velocity ratio on four-seam fastballs, which sat comfortably above 24.5 rpm/mph for the entirety of the 2020 season and the beginning of the ’21 season, has fallen to under 24 rpm/mph for the first time since the beginning of ’19. This is what that enormous drop looks like visually:

The crackdown has had plenty of consequences, all of which have theoretically had a significant impact on the game. I touched a little bit on one of these outcomes — whether it was fair to ask pitchers to alter their stuff dramatically in the middle of a season — in a July 2 article on Garrett Richards, who claimed that he needed to try “to figure out how to pitch again” post-enforcement. But there has been one outstanding question all along: How will this impact offense? In a year that started with some of the lowest batting averages in baseball history and with run scoring heavily concentrated in home runs, that was of the utmost importance in the minds of baseball-followers, including those who work for the league and for teams. Cubs president Jed Hoyer, for example, called the impact of the sticky substance enforcement “a huge variable” in determining which players Chicago could target at the July 30 trade deadline.

In an article leading up to the changes in enforcement, I covered the potential impact the crackdown would have on offense with a focus on the effect of spin rates on batter performance. The trend was clear: Batters hit much better on four-seam fastballs with less velocity-adjusted spin, and in a world in which fewer pitches are thrown with elite spin, they should have an easier time at the plate. One executive even told Stephanie Apstein and Alex Prewitt of Sports Illustrated that he thought better enforcement of Rule 6.02(c) could actually have an outsized impact on reviving offense around the league, potentially lessening the pressure on baseball to institute rule changes to create more balls in play, higher batting averages, and more non-homer scoring overall. “I think people would be absolutely shocked if they actually enforced this, how much you’ll start to normalize things without rule changes,” they said. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past few days, I’d been searching for a baseball topic to write about. It usually takes less time, but we’re in that calm (if not monotonous) period between the All-Star break and the trade deadline. Ideas are scarcer. Maybe I’d settle on an article with a simple premise?

So I committed myself to tackling pitcher BABIP. (Good going, Justin!)

The notion that pitchers have no control over what happens to a ball in play ushered in a golden age of baseball research, and findings from back then still influence how we view the game today. But over time, we realized that exceptions do exist; for example, Clayton Kershaw consistently allows a below-average BABIP, most likely because he’s a phenomenal pitcher. In addition, certain pitchers have a knack for inducing weak contact in the form of pop-ups or grounders. Exactly how those batted balls impacted BABIP remained a mystery, but you could no longer brush off the metric as total noise.

Years later, Statcast data became available for public use. Even so, research on pitcher BABIP remained far and few between; it’s a daunting subject! I did use two articles as inspiration, however. The first is from FanGraphs user rplunkett97 on our community research page. Dating back to 2017, it mainly discusses a linear model with several variables (BB/9, GB%, Team UZR, and more) used to produce an expected BABIP for each pitcher. The second is courtesy of Alex Chamberlain, also from the same year, who used a mixture of Hard-hit and Barrel rate to create his own version of xBABIP.

Read the rest of this entry »

As is the annual tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the week after the All-Star Game to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value in anticipation of next week’s trade deadline. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at those players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.

For those who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2022-2026, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2026, if the player is under contract or team control for those seasons. Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2020 post. One note on the rankings: particularly at the bottom of the list, there’s not a lot of room between players. The ordinal rankings clearly matter, and we put players where they are for a reason, but there’s not much room between, say, 35 and 60. The magnitude of the differences in this part of the list is quite small. Several talent evaluators we talked to might prefer a player in the Honorable Mentions section to one on the back end of the list, or vice versa. We think the broad strokes are correct — but with so many players carrying roughly equivalent value, disagreements abounded. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his help in creating the tables in these posts. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all the players who have been ranked up to this point.

And now, to the next group of players. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the length of the baseball season (and postseason) compared to other sports’, whether Shohei Ohtani ever grows frustrated with his mere-mortal teammates, the prolific predictions of the Rockies’ Mike Redmond, a possible modification to the zombie-runner rule, an update on the Marlins’ run differential, a story about a broadcaster bet gone wrong, a listener report on Tony La Russa, Willie Stargell’s stars, an Ohtani playing-time fun fact, the AL MVP race, the Blue Jays returning to Toronto (and a hat tip to John McDonald), a few potential variations on the cycle, and when MLB will welcome its first active, openly gay player, then close with a discussion of MLB’s first month sans sticky stuff, focusing on the offensive effects and whether cheating is overrated.

Audio intro: Vetiver, "Been So Long"
Audio outro: The Posies, "Flavor of the Month"

Link to study on postseason randomness
Link to Neil Paine on MLB vs. the NBA
Link to Ohtani’s postgame comments
Link to The Onion on Ohtani
Link to Ohtani Week intro
Link to Redmond predictions story
Link to Nightengale on the zombie-runner rule
Link to The Athletic on the zombie-runner rule
Link to Jim Rooker story
Link to Jake Mintz’s ride
Link to Buster Olney on Stargell’s stars
Link to Engadget on Stargell’s stars
Link to cycle tweet
Link to story on Ron Wright
Link to story on the “Saint Cycle”
Link to Ben on sticky-stuff effects

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