Episode 914

On this week’s episode, we welcome a pair of renowned writers to discuss the baseball landscape before digging into the latest projection highlights.

• To begin the program, David Laurila is joined by Jayson Stark of The Athletic and the Starkville podcast and Tyler Kepner of The New York Times. The trio talk about how covering the sport has changed both in the face of the pandemic and naturally over the years, and how baseball writers have needed to adapt to their audiences. They also discuss the underrated Trea Turner, the legacies of Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols, the promise of Fernando Tatis Jr. and Juan Soto, and some of their other favorite players in the game right now. Finally, Jayson offers some trivia and a few stories of strange spring training injuries. [2:16]
• In the second half, Dan Szymborski and Tony Wolfe discuss Dan’s preseason breakout and bust candidates. Is Dan tempting fate, and Yankees Twitter, by predicting Gary Sánchez to have a good year? Dan also has questions about Charlie Blackmon’s low exit velocity as well as the potential of beard physics. And is calling for a Vladimiro Guerrero Jr. breakout a cowardly move at this point? [38:55]

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley attempt to make sense of unsightly spring training uniforms, then preview the 2021 Braves (08:42) with Grant McAuley of From The Diamond and the 2021 Mariners (45:27) with Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times.

Audio intro: Ken Stringfellow, "Uniforms"
Audio interstitial: Anti-Flag, "20 Years of Hell"
Audio outro: Jethro Tull, "Uniform"

Link to Meg’s tweet about the Padres’ uniforms
Link to Uni Watch on the St. Patrick’s Day unis
Link to Mike Petriello on the Braves’ projections
Link to Petriello on Tatis/Acuña/Soto
Link to Craig Goldstein on Fried
Link to study on Cobb County
Link to Neil deMause on the Cobb County study
Link to From The Diamond
Link to BP Mariners preview
Link to Rodríguez homer video
Link to Ryan on the Rodríguez homer
Link to Ryan on Kelenic and Mather
Link to Ryan on Kelenic’s injury
Link to Ryan on Dunn and spring training clichés
Link to Dan Szymborski’s hitter bust candidates
Link to Ryan on Kikuchi
Link to Ryan on the pandemic and the M’s rebuild

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

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

Subscribe: RSS

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And greeting! Sorry about no chat last week, but I was not feeling well!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: He’s certainly played well! I haven’t seen him play though, so I can’t say much for the change. Spring stats are *slightly* meaningful, but it’s smart to be careful about excitement.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Yo!

Read the rest of this entry »

Hot takes are famously a huge part of the sports industrial complex, but here at FanGraphs, we’re not very good at them. I took a crack at some American League bold predictions yesterday, but honestly, they were pretty bland. Picking the relative fortunes of a bunch of good-but-not-great teams? Boring. A top prospect might be Rookie of the Year? Boring.

Today, I’m going a little further. If the last takes were jalapeños with some seeds removed, these are serrano peppers. I said I’d be ecstatic hitting half of my predictions from yesterday; today I’d be pleased with one in the first three (the fourth one is relatively unadventurous). As always, these aren’t my median predictions, merely corner cases that I think are being undervalued. Will they happen? Probably not. But they could, and I don’t think people are giving them enough credence. Onward! Read the rest of this entry »

Stetson Allie was undergoing a transformation when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in April 2013. A second-round pick by the Pittsburgh Pirates three years earlier, the burly right-hander was being converting from a pitcher to a position player. Initially, that went well. Allie raked in A-ball, prompting us to feature him again, this time in interview form, in February 2014. As noted in the introduction, he’d morphed into “a corner infielder with plus raw power and a lot of swing-and-miss.”

The pendulum wasn’t done swinging. Much as Allie’s high-octane fastball had been erratic, his ability to make consistent contact was found wanting as he climbed the minor-league ladder. Midway through the 2017 season, Allie — by then in the Los Angeles Dodgers system — was moved back to the mound.

Fast forward to the present day, and Allie is in camp with the Tampa Bay Rays, looking every bit like a viable arm out of a big-league bullpen. In five spring-training appearances, the 6-foot-2, 245-pound flamethrower has tossed five hitless innings, with six punch-outs. The only blemish on his stat line is five free passes. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Paddack, Emilio Pagán, and Drew Pomeranz are all a big part of the Padres’ plans this season. The latter two promise to play prominent roles in the San Diego bullpen, while Paddack will be counted on to bounce back and further fortify what looks to be a fearsome starting rotation. Here are snapshots from recent conversations with all three, the first of which was prompted by a question from a member of the San Diego media (apologies for not recalling who posed it), and the others coming via inquiries by yours truly.

———

Chris Paddack took a step backwards in 2020. Coming off a rookie campaign that saw him log a 3.33 ERA over 26 starts, the 6-foot-4 right-hander struggled to the tune of a 4.73 ERA, and an even-uglier 5.02 FIP. He threw plenty of strikes, issuing just 12 walks over 58 innings, but all too often they got whacked. Looking back, Paddack has a pretty good idea of what led to the crooked numbers.

“Being a taller pitcher on the mound, my biggest success is when I’m north to south,” Paddack said earlier this spring. “Last year I was east to west. I was pulling off. My spin direction was outside of one, for y’all that know the baseball term of that. The axis of the baseball… I was getting two-seam run on my four-seam fastball… So, I [looked at] a lot of video from 2019, and well as 2018 in the minor leagues, really breaking down some of my mechanics on my front side. The term I use is ‘staying grounded as long as I can with my legs,’ and letting my upper body pinpoint a strong direction to whoever it is I’m throwing to that day.”

Per StatCast, Paddack’s four-seam spin rate was 2170 rpm last year, versus 2230 in 2019. His vertical ride decreased by 2.1 inches, while his horizontal increased by 2.2 inches. Velocity-wise, he threw two ticks harder, going from 93.9 mph to 94.1 mph. The 25-year-old Austin, Texas native doesn’t profess to be a pitching-analytics nerd, but he’s clearly begun dipping his feet into those waters. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a race that currently means nothing because it hasn’t actually begun, but at this writing, the Brewers have inched ahead of the Cardinals in our projected NL Central standings, albeit by a whopping 1.3 wins, 82.1 to 80.9. It’s the kind of thing that happens as we tweak the playing time inputs based upon spring training-related news and updated assumptions, but it’s a reminder that the gap between the two teams — or really, the Central’s top four, including the Cubs (projected for 79.5 wins) and Reds (78.1 wins) — is very small. Any edge could be the difference between snagging a division title or sitting at home in October, particularly given the unlikelihood of the division generating a Wild Card participant.

In that light, the Cardinals’ rotation rates as a moderate concern, at the very least. Last year, the unit entered the season projected as the majors’ 16th best in terms of WAR, but St. Louis soon took significant hits. Just before the pandemic-delayed season got underway, the team lost Miles Mikolas for the year due to a flexor tendon strain that required surgery and Carlos Martinez to a COVID-19 diagnosis after one turn amid a season-halting outbreak, then wound up losing Dakota Hudson to Tommy John surgery late in the year. The Cardinals made the expanded playoffs in spite of their rotation, which tied for 19th in the majors (and placed 11th in the NL) with 3.1 WAR and delivered a 3.86 ERA and 4.55 FIP, with Adam Wainwright as their only starter to deliver more than 0.6 WAR, and that in his age-38 season.

Like the vast majority of teams, the Cardinals appeared as though they would benefit from a dip into the free-agent market for some rotation fortification. Yet they sat on their hands for most of the winter before re-signing Wainwright to a one-year, $8 million deal, and otherwise eschewed any outside help. They kicked the tires on James Paxton, Taijuan Walker, and Jake Odorizzi, but despite saving money elsewhere — particularly by declining Kolten Wong‘s $12.5 million option, cutting Yadier Molina’s salary (from $20 million to $9 million via his new one-year deal), and flat-out stealing Nolan Arenado from the Rockies in exchange for five bodies of varying warmth while getting Colorado to pay the entirety of his $35 million 2021 salary ($20 million of it deferred) — they watched each of those starters sign elsewhere.

And so the Cardinals head into battle with basically the same rotation as before, minus Hudson. The unit is again projected to rank in the middle of the pack, 14th in our Depth Charts at 11.3 WAR. Yet already two starters are dealing with minor injury issues, and it’s tough to ignore all of the various question marks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, I don’t like to make predictions. For one thing, they’re hard! The amount of public information out there is borderline overwhelming. Beating the wisdom of the crowd isn’t easy, particularly when the crowd is using fancy models and copious batted ball data to be wise.

The other big problem with making predictions is that they’re usually wrong if they’re bold. That’s the nature of the game — a bold prediction can’t be the majority of the probability mass, or it wouldn’t be bold. How fun can it possibly be to read a list of things that probably won’t happen?

Well, hopefully very fun, because I’m going to make some this week. These aren’t going to be completely wild guesses, of course, because I do have some idea what I’m doing, but I’m not expecting to go 100% on these. If I go two for four, I’ll definitely call that a win. These are merely the synthesis of some observations that I’ve made over the past year or so, sprinkled with a little bit of boldness dust where necessary to make them exciting instead of milquetoast. Read the rest of this entry »

How do projected wins translate into salaries in free agency? That’s a fundamental question that front offices have to answer and, in fact, have had to answer ever since free agency opened up baseball’s labor market after the 1976 season. No, no GM back then was using Wins Above Replacement or fancy-pants computers spitting out ZoRPs or Stonker projections. But decisions are always based on some kind of projection, whether that exercise is explicit or not. When Grizzled Greg the GM went after a player for X hundreds of thousands of dollars after the 1976 season, he was still estimating how the player would play in the future and whether that benefit was worth the cost. Heck, I’ve never made a taco-based projection system. Still, when I see a taco, I’m projecting whether or not the DAR (Deliciousness Above Refrigerator) is worth the dollars that will be debited from my bank account.

Naturally, one of the ways we estimate player salaries has been a linear relationship between dollars and wins above replacement. There’s still a debate over whether player salaries should be treated in this way. Many analysts have argued that the price of wins should not be linear because of the efficiency of getting a lot of wins from a single player. After all, there’s a limit on roster size and utilization; you can’t just sign five one-win first basemen and combined them into a horrifying amalgamation whose twisted, fear-inducing form approximates a Freddie Freeman season. And even if you could, I wager that the MLBPA would file some kind of grievance about players being used for twisted medical experimentation. Well, at least players on the 40-man roster.

Matt Swartz is probably the most prominent advocate for the opposite view, that worrying about whether to add a four-win player instead of a pair of two-win players don’t really come up in the real world all that often. I’ve come to side more strongly with the majority in recent years than I used to, simply because I believe — though I can’t prove it conclusively — that good teams are becoming better at not leaving as many obvious holes. For teams like the Rays, Dodgers, and Padres, as well as other teams that prize serious depth, replacement level is probably higher than replacement level. Read the rest of this entry »