I’ve been thinking about distance a lot lately. The space we must keep from each other, the proximity of the most turbulent election of our lifetimes, and how the former often exacerbates the stress of the latter.

Baseball cannot provide a complete escape, of course, and the specter of distance loomed again prior to the start of Game 3. Just before first pitch, I couldn’t help but wince as the camera panned around a not particularly distanced crowd under the roof of Globe Life Field. Responsible countries with far fewer cases have maintained much stricter attendance measures at sporting events. Here in the U.S., there may be good reasons to allow 11,447 people into a big league ballpark right now, but they evade me.

To add another uncomfortable variable, a rainy forecast prompted the powers that be to close Globe Life Park’s retractable roof. I’m not really sure whether the closure made the stadium any more dangerous, but it certainly couldn’t have helped. At least one writer stayed away from the pressbox, though the roof did nothing to diminish gatherings down the first and third base lines. With cases spiking around the country — up 21% in Texas over the past week — Tom Verducci’s hasty declaration that the league had concluded fans were no less safe with the roof closed didn’t inspire much confidence. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the groundswell of support for Mookie Betts as the best player in baseball, stand up for Mike Trout, and explain why Betts and Trout make an ideal duo as faces of the sport, then examine Yadier Molina’s frustration with Gold Glove voting, the sabermetric reappraisal of Yadi’s Hall of Fame case, and Jeff Luhnow’s latest attempt to proclaim his ignorance of the Astros’ sign-stealing operation before answering a listener email about playing a best-of-seven series continuously (with no breaks between games) and discussing which World Series team has the brighter long-term outlook, the Dodgers or Rays.

Audio intro: Cotton Mather, "The Gold Gone Days"
Audio outro: The Resonars, "Invisible Gold"

Link to Joe Posnanski on Mookie
Link to article about Yelich being better than Trout
Link to Luhnow’s interview
Link to Evan Drellich on Luhnow
Link to story about Molina’s Gold Glove complaint
Link to Bradley’s Gold Glove-related tweet
Link to Ben on catchers’ Cooperstown cases
Link to Ben on Yadi’s secret sauce
Link to SABR Defensive Index details
Link to study on Gold Gloves and defensive stats
Link to Sam on a 50-inning game
Link to Ben on the Dodgers’ blueprint
Link to FanGraphs’ farm rankings
Link to FanGraphs playoff coverage

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8:02	Jay Jaffe: Good evening and welcome to the chat! I’m popping in for a few minutes here but i’ll have to duck out soon t help put the kiddo to bed.

8:03	Jay Jaffe: It’s an odd coincidence that one of those Astros is again facing the Dodgers in the World Series. Morton was the guy who closed out Game 7 with four innings of one-run ball. He obviously wasn’t hitting but he’s said he was aware of the trash can banging

8:04	Jay Jaffe: https://www.mlb.com/news/charlie-morton-on-astros-sign-stealing

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2020-21 free-agent market.

This year, we’ve added a few new features to the ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor-league contract, or won’t receive one at all. We’ve elected to show averages from the 2017-2019 seasons so that this year’s shortened slate doesn’t skew the numbers, but we’ve also included 2020 stats as a point of recent reference. 2020 salary figures represent players’ pre-pandemic contract amounts. Statistics are prorated to full season where noted; the projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2021 Steamer600 projections.

Below are ballots for eight of this year’s free agents — in this case, yet another group of pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

While there’s still a bit of baseball left to be played, this is always the time of the year when I dissect the current season’s ZiPS projections. Baseball history is not so long that we suffer from a surfeit of data, and another season wrapped means more for ZiPS to work with. ZiPS is mature enough at this point that (sadly) the major sources of systematic error have been largely ironed out, but that doesn’t mean that the model doesn’t learn new things from the results.

2020 was a highly unusual season (for very unfortunate reasons); its shortness will hopefully provide us some insight into baseball played in a truncated format. In terms of projections, I tend to have a conservative bent, and I like to be very careful about making sure I know which things have predictive value before I integrate them into the myriad models that make up the various ZiPS projections. A lot of my assumptions going into this season required far more guesswork than usual; I had no idea how teams would actually use prospects in a shorter season, what the injury rates would look like once we brought COVID-19 into the mix, or if we would even complete a 60-game slate.

In light of the risks involved, I kept player totals in the playing time model lower than I would have in a normal season, but I had little clarity into what the league’s COVID-19 case rate would be over the course of the season. Even the way-smarter-than-me epidemiologists didn’t know and I, alas, didn’t major in mathemagical science. With more volatility in projected roster construction, the ZiPS standings gave larger error bars than I’d expect over a “normal” 60-game season, but I wasn’t really sure if that was right.

In the end, the strangest thing to me was just how normal everything turned out being. After an inauspicious start to the season — with testing delays the first weekend of summer camp, early outbreaks on the Marlins and Cardinals, and poor team communication as to just what the rules were — I wasn’t optimistic. But in the end, 28 of the 30 teams played all 60 games, and the two teams that didn’t, the Tigers and Cardinals, were ready and able to play their missing games if they were needed to decided the standings. Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2020-21 free-agent market.

This year, we’ve added a few new features to the ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor-league contract, or won’t receive one at all. We’ve elected to show averages from the 2017-2019 seasons so that this year’s shortened slate doesn’t skew the numbers, but we’ve also included 2020 stats as a point of recent reference. 2020 salary figures represent players’ pre-pandemic contract amounts. Statistics are prorated to full season where noted; the projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2021 Steamer600 projections.

Below are ballots for eight of this year’s free agents — in this case, yet another group of starting pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom House doesn’t need an introduction within baseball circles, and that’s especially true when it comes to pitching. His credentials are impeccable. A big-league reliever throughout the 1970s, the now-73-year-old went on to have an extensive coaching career, not only in MLB, but also in NPB and at the amateur level. A co-founder of the National Pitching Association, and the author of several books, House has been referred to as “the father of modern pitching mechanics.”

House addressed a variety of pitching topics — and shared a handful of interesting anecdotes — earlier this week.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with pitch counts. Atlanta manager Brian Snitker said during an NLCS media session that he was “blown away” to learn that Max Fried had never thrown more than 109 pitches in a game, adding that a career-high should be closer to 140. He also suggested that once Fried got into his rhythm he might have been able to throw 200 pitches. What are your thoughts on that?

Tom House: “From research, there are three things that keep a pitcher’s arm healthy: workloads, number of pitches, [and] his functional strength and mechanical efficiency. The research goes all the way back to Paul Richards, who was the general manager of the Orioles. Richards was the first guy, when he had ‘the baby birds,’ the four 20-game winners. He intuited that 100 pitches was about when most pitchers start getting into muscle failure — this assuming they have pretty solid mechanics and some functional strength. The 100-pitch idea grew from there, and has kind of become the standard.

“What it boils down to is, if you can pitch… I’m going to give you a resource. If you go to ASMI.org and look for age-specific pitch totals, Glenn Fleisig and a bunch of us did the research. I know for a fact that Nolan Ryan had a 260-pitch outing one time, and came back four days later and threw a two-hitter. He was with the Angels, and I think threw 14 or 15 innings. But with pitch totals, a blanket 100-pitch per game is kind of the standard right now. Everybody works forward and backwards from there. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 893

With the 2020 Fall Classic between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays knotted up at 1-1, the FanGraphs crew spends some time analyzing the state of each pennant-winning club.

• In the first half of the show, Ben Clemens and Tony Wolfe try to figure out the Dodgers. Corey Seager is absolutely en fuego, but what exactly is going on with the pitching plan? And is Dustin May as good as his stuff? The National League champions are as full of talent as they are questions. [1:39]
• In the back half of the episode, Jay Jaffe and Eric Longenhagen discuss the Rays and the legend of Randy Arozarena. While some folks were a bit ahead of the curve on his potential, nobody expected him to do what he has done this postseason. Is this legit? What exactly happened to turn him into Randy Arozarena? And how does Tampa Bay look two games into the World Series? [28:10]

Read the rest of this entry »

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Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2020-21 free-agent market.

This year, we’ve added a few new features to the ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor-league contract, or won’t receive one at all. We’ve elected to show averages from the 2017-2019 seasons so that this year’s shortened slate doesn’t skew the numbers, but we’ve also included 2020 stats as a point of recent reference. 2020 salary figures represent players’ pre-pandemic contract amounts. Statistics are prorated to full season where noted; the projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2021 Steamer600 projections.

Below are ballots for seven of this year’s free agents — in this case, another group of starting pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, Nick Anderson hung a curveball. Will Smith greeted it rudely:

Two batters later, Anderson faced Edwin Ríos with a chance to get out of the inning. As Eric Longenhagen noted on our Twitch stream at the time, Anderson hung another one:

Luckily for the Rays, Ríos didn’t quite time that one up. Anderson followed it up with another curve, which bounced, and he escaped the inning. Things could have gone much worse, however, and Eric and I mused that Anderson might want to take a look at what was causing his pitches to float in like that.

It seems pretty obvious that Anderson’s breaking ball, a biting snapdragon that seems to pack two inches of horizontal break into the last 10 feet of its homeward path, is at its best when it drops most. There’s only one problem with that theory: the data. Take a look at Anderson’s curve in 2019, broken up into quartiles based on vertical break:

Read the rest of this entry »