The Cincinnati Reds haven’t yet had the breakout season than many — myself included — predicted, but one player who need not shoulder any of the blame for their 8-9 start is Trevor Bauer. His first three outings hint at a repeat of his 2018 All-Star season, and he seems to be on more solid ground than he was back then.

But let’s go back. In one of the more surprising moves of the 2019 trade deadline, the fourth-place Reds (49-56) decided to flip the usual script for teams in their position. The result was a three-way trade with the Padres and Indians that brought Bauer to Cincinnati for Taylor Trammell, Yasiel Puig, and Scott Moss.

The initial returns were…not great. In 10 starts with Cincinnati in 2019, Bauer posted a 6.39 ERA with 12 homers allowed in 56.1 innings. His 4.85 FIP told a more positive tale, but even that mark was well below the team’s expectations. But the Bauer trade was never about 2019. The NL Central didn’t appear to have any juggernauts looming and the potential benefits of having Trammell on the roster were years away; a pitcher like Bauer, meanwhile, could have a meaningful effect on a pennant race now. Bringing in the often-controversial pitcher was always about the 2020 season, and Bauer’s first three starts have been nearly spotless. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about whether the idea of sports as a distraction from the pandemic has panned out, whether unexpectedly hot-starting teams like the Rockies and Tigers should “go for it” (and what that would entail), and what, if anything, MLB should do to address the curious case of Trevor Bauer’s spiking spin rates, then answer listener emails about the ideal balance between chaos and predictability, why lower pitch counts haven’t kept pitchers healthy, a clever solution for preserving extra-long games in the era of the automatic-runner rule, and pitchers calling their own pitches, plus a Stat Blast about how many more homers some of history’s greatest sluggers would have hit if they’d batted higher in the order.

Audio intro: L.E.O., "Distracted"
Audio outro: The Go-Betweens, "Your Turn My Turn"

Link to Will Leitch on how it feels to watch sports now
Link to story about streaking Tigers
Link to Ben Clemens on the hot Rockies
Link to playoff odds changes since Opening Day
Link to Ben on foreign substances and Bauer’s spin rates
Link to Jeff Passan on foreign substances and Bauer’s spin rates
Link to article about projections and the 2015 season
Link to Phil Birnbaum on the limits of predictions
Link to Ben on 2020’s injured pitchers
Link to Neil Paine on the unsolved injured-pitcher problem
Link to Russ Hull’s Stat Blast Song cover
Link to Michael Baumann on the odds of anyone reaching 700 homers
Link to Aaron Gleeman on the new no. 2 hitter
Link to video of Greinke calling his own pitches
Link to story about Maddux calling his own pitches
Link to Ben Gibbard’s “Centerfield”

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Before you start reading this article, you should know that the conclusion stinks. This isn’t one of those articles where facts stack neatly upon facts, revealing a hidden truth of baseball at the eleventh hour. It’s the opposite of that, essentially. Sometimes the hidden truth doesn’t reveal itself. Sometimes the stack of facts collapses, and you’re left trying to put the pieces back together. Anyway, I warned you.

The story starts with promise. Howie Kendrick, a 15-year veteran with a swing-first-and-ask-questions-later game, was doing something weird. Take a look at an extremely specific statistic, current as of August 9 — first-pitch balls in play, by year:

Of note, I’m only going back to 2008, because that’s the first year of pitch tracking data — Kendrick started in 2006, but those two missing years don’t really change the narrative here. That zero in 2020 doesn’t look all that suspicious — the Nats had only played 10 games — but it looks a little suspicious. It might not be holding a match, but there are burn marks on its fingers. Could Kendrick be changing something on the fly? Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of my weekly chat. First off, here’s my piece from today about Fernando Tatis Jr.’s statistical dominance and the joy he’s bringing https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fernando-tatis-jr-enters-the-stratosphere/

2:02	Jay Jaffe: And here’s yesterday’s dispatch about the Marlins’ unlikely — and likely unsustainable — success amid a massive coronavirus outbreak https://blogs.fangraphs.com/despite-outbreak-marlins-skate-to-the-top-…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: And now, on with the show

2:04

Jay Jaffe: I took a stab in a 3-part series here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/missed-time-and-the-hall-of-fame-part-1/ (change the last digit in the URL) I have a couple stray thoughts that might lead me to revisit that down the road. It’s also worth noting that old friend Travis Sawchik did some of the heavy lifting for a piece on players missing time for WWII https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-year-off-might-do-to-baseb…

Read the rest of this entry »

Three 19-year-old pitchers rank prominently on our Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list. Simeon Woods Richardson is most notable, at No. 2, while Adam Kloffenstein and Kendall Williams are 12th and 13th respectively. Right-handers all, each possesses a high ceiling, yet is years away from progressing to the big-league level.

Their developmental situations are currently quite different. Woods Richardson is in Toronto’s 60-man player pool, and thus is at the club’s alternative training site. Kloffenstein is playing independent ball back home in Texas. Williams is also home, but doing the bulk of his throwing in side sessions, relying on a Rapsodo rather than the reactions of opposing hitters to gauge his progress.

I recently asked Blue Jays farm director Gil Kim how the organization is handling player development sans a minor-league season. Prefacing his answer by saying the top priority is ensuring the health and safety of all involved, he said there are a lot of Zoom calls, and that each player has a small support staff that checks in on a regular basis. A show-your-work component exists within many of the exchanges. Player plans being paramount, videos of the work being done are being shared. As Kim explained, “There’s more of a technical and mechanical focus for a lot of those players, especially the younger guys who are not at the alternate training site right now.”

In that respect, Woods Richardson is fortunate. Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Tatis Jr. is the superstar baseball needs in 2020. Countering the multitude of anxieties that come with enjoying baseball amid the coronavirus pandemic, his towering home runs, bat flips, and celebratory dancing are as pure a distillation of the joy and excitement as the game can provide right now. Limited to 84 games in his rookie season due to injuries, the buoyant 21-year-old shortstop is off to a red-hot start, propelling an engaging Padres team to a 10-7 record while lighting up social media along the way. Unless you’re an opposing pitcher, it’s nearly impossible not to break out in a smile watching Tatis play.

On Sunday, Tatis crossed paths with a hanging curveball from the Diamondbacks’ Madison Bumgarner. Left fielder David Peralta couldn’t even be bothered to turn around to view the damage:

Admittedly, it wasn’t Bumgarner’s day — he served up a career-high four home runs in just two innings before departing due to back spasms — but it ran Tatis’ streak of consecutive games with a homer to four. The streak ended on Monday night at the hands of the Dodgers, who held him to 1-for-4 with an infield single, but the Padres’ 2-1 victory pulled them within 1 1/2 games of the NL West lead. Read the rest of this entry »

McBride, British Columbia, population 616, is a town that has lived and died by the railway. Nestled in the Robson Valley, in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies’ highest point, it is a town that draws life from the railway. And when I stopped there, as I did last week on my way home from the wilderness, it was the features of the railway that immediately drew my focus. There was the train station, which was also the cafe, which was also the gift shop. An antique caboose with a bright new red coat of paint sat outside — a plaque from the person who donated it, a longtime railway worker, described the caboose as the subject of a lifelong dream. There were the train tracks, and on them, the trains, all ringing bells and screeching wheels, thousands of gallons of gas in tanks heading south.

But just across the street from all of that, something else caught my eye: a ballpark. Of all things for there to be in this town, there was a ballpark.

The grass was dry and weedy, and a lone crow picked at the infield dirt. Tall, shiny fences loomed along the outfield, and along the baselines were two wooden dugouts for the absent teams to shelter in, blue-roofed and mesh-windowed. Behind home was a small set of wooden bleachers, the same chipping blue as the roofs of the dugouts. A sign with the flags of B.C. and Canada, rippling in the alpine wind, announced: BILL CLARK MEMORIAL PARK.

I stood there under the sign for quite a while, just me and the crow and the memory of Bill Clark. A thousand kilometers away from home with no one else in sight, baseball can still find you in the form of a field and an arrangement of dirt.

***

The blog Ballparks Around the World posted its first image in July of 2016, a picture of Dodger Stadium. Since then, it has accumulated 202 pages of content. Essentially all of the blog’s posts follow the same format: an unsourced image of a ballpark, followed by a caption including only the ballpark’s name and its location. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about a realization about fake crowd noise discomfort, a disastrous start to a Derek Holland outing that recalled an earlier podcast discussion, whether Fernando Tatís Jr. will ever have a moment as remarkable as Fernando Tatís’s two-grand-slam inning, outfielders showing up pitchers, and more, then bring back the “Is This Guy Good?” Game, in which they attempt to guess whether randomly drawn relievers are having good seasons so far.

Audio intro: Boat, "Be As Good As You Want to Be"
Audio outro: The Hold Steady, "You Did Good Kid"

Link to Adell video
Link to episode with interview about fake crowd noise
Link to story about drone delay
Link to episode with home runs hypothetical
Link to Holland game play-by-play
Link to Tatís’s two-grand-slam inning
Link to Bumgarner/Tatís home run video
Link to first “Is This Guy Good?” Game episode
Link to Is This Guy Good? website
Link to Ben on the low BABIP mystery

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 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

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Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into this season, the NL West looked like a three-team race. That’s not completely fair — it looked like a one-team race for first with two other solid teams — but with a 16-team playoff field, somewhere between two and three teams from each division are headed to the playoffs, leaving it a three-team race for either two or three playoff spots.

Fifteen-ish games later, there are indeed three NL West teams in playoff position. The Dodgers are there, of course, and the Padres — no surprises here. But then there are the Colorado Rockies, 11-4 and leading the National League. It’s early — although with a quarter of the season already in the books for many teams, how early is up for debate. But regardless of the time of year, the Rockies are in first place, and I wanted to learn more.

One thing I could do to learn more is look at the Rockies’ individual performances, particularly on the pitching side. Charlie Blackmon is off to a hot start, though looking at a player with a .500 BABIP is rarely compelling 15 games into his season. For whatever reason, neither of those paths grabbed me. I thought I’d take a look at whether we could have expected this, and how surprised we should be. Read the rest of this entry »