12:02

Dan Szymborski: Greetings all! So begins another Chatxperience!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I don’t feel comfortable making those kinds of evaluations. I’m very qualified to evaluate players at playing baseball. I have no such qualifications at determing quality of a person.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: When we do the chapter BBWAA awards for the local team (Reds in my case), I always abstain from the Good Guy award.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Well, there’s a raging epidemic going on, so no matter how great a job MLB does, there’s always significant risk.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s article is about a form of baseball that doesn’t exist in real life. Let that be a disclaimer upfront — if you’re looking for an interesting middle reliever or 10 reasons why Christian Yelich is great against fastballs (number six will shock you!), this isn’t the article for you. That’s not to say those don’t exist — I wrote about Miguel Castro literally yesterday, for example. But today’s piece simply won’t be one of them.

With that out of the way, let’s set the stage. I’ve been playing a lot of Out Of The Park Baseball 21 lately. Some of that is for an article series, but some of it is because I want baseball in my life, and the game absolutely delivers. One mode in particular has been a great avenue for the analytical rabbit holes I love diving down: tournaments.

Without going into the specifics of the way the game is built, I’ll give a rough outline of the problem that first interested me. The standard tournament format is a 32-team bracket that plays best-of-seven series in each round. There’s no reseeding, no fancy gadgets; just 16 seven-game series, followed by eight, then four, then two, and then the finals.

In almost all other ways, the game approximates baseball. You field a 26-man roster, players need rest, and starters and relievers have realistic stamina. There are all kinds of fun roster choices to make — mid-career Tony Gwynn or young Pete Rose in right field, peak Ichiro or 1997 Bernie Williams in center, to name two — but for the most part, it’s a faithful simulation of baseball.

There is, however, one very specific wrinkle. In these tournaments, there are no off days. The first set of series takes place over seven consecutive days. As soon as the last series is decided, the next round begins the following day. You could, in theory, win the first round in seven games, win the second round in seven games, and end up playing on at least 18 straight days even if you sweep or get swept in the third round. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the seventh in a series of baseball-themed lessons we’re calling FanGraphs Prep. In light of so many parents suddenly having their school-aged kids learning from home, we hope is that these units offer a thoughtfully designed, baseball-themed supplement to the school work your student might already be doing. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth units can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Overview: A short unit centered on calculating rolling averages. Calculating the mean, median, and mode are fundamental concepts in math. But when we’re dealing with a dataset spread out over weeks, months, or years, simply calculating the average value for the entire dataset hides the data’s peaks and valleys. For a baseball player, those are the hot and cold streaks that everyone goes through during the season.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify and apply a rolling average.
• Explain how changing an interval affects interpretation.
• Consider the potential uses of a rolling average in baseball.

Target Grade-Level: 9-10

Daily Activities:
Day 1
Khris Davis famously hit .247 four seasons in a row from 2015–2018. If we take his total hits and total at-bats over those four seasons, it’s no surprise that his combined batting average is .247.

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With baseball scheduled to return in a couple of weeks, I wanted to give everyone an update on how FanGraphs is doing business-wise. For those of you who are returning to the site for the first time since the season was postponed, a lot has happened since you last visited.

You can read all about what’s been going on here, here, and here, but the quick recap is this: When the season was postponed, our traffic decreased by over 70% and ad rates declined by as much as 45%, causing an 80% decrease in ad revenue, which is far and away our largest source of site revenue.

We asked you for help in sustaining the site and you’ve come through in overwhelming fashion over the past four months, giving us some breathing room to try to weather the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were also able to secure funding through the second round of the Paycheck Protection Program, which was another boon to our short-term viability. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who helped keep the site alive. We would not be here today without you.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t still need your support and assistance. We still have a long way to go. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the defining features of late 1990s baseball was the battle between three young, superstar shortstops: Alex Rodriguez of the Seattle Mariners, Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees, and Nomar Garciaparra of the Boston Red Sox. There were the occasional interlopers, such as Barry Larkin in his late-career surge and Jay Bell with the Diamondbacks in the midst of his second wind, but A-Rod, Jeter, and Garciaparra were the big three at the top of the leaderboards. The debate surrounding these three shortstops was very much in the public eye, with the trio at the top of the sport in terms of both name recognition and performance.

We’ve been blessed with a flurry of phenom shortstops since then, but having three multi-talented players at the position who were also elite offensive performers was rather novel at the time. Cal Ripken Jr., Alan Trammell, and Robin Yount came the closest in living memory, but that fight was short-lived as Yount eventually moved to the outfield. To find another three this good, you’d have to jump back 60 years to the days of Lou Boudreau, Luke Appling, and Arky Vaughan. Read the rest of this entry »

Darren O’Day isn’t your typical submariner. While most pitchers with down-under arm angles live down in the zone, O’Day features a lot of four-seamers up, and he’s thrived while doing so. Over his 12 big-league seasons, the 37-year-old right-hander has logged a 2.55 ERA and fanned better than a batter per nine innings. Since the start of the 2015 season, his K/9 is an eye-opening 13.1.

O’Day, whose best seasons have come with the Baltimore Orioles, is currently with the Atlanta Braves. He discussed his pitching M.O., and explained why his “Jenny Finch” is such an effective weapon, in a recent phone conversation.

———

David Laurila: You’re atypical in that you work up in the zone from a low arm angle. How did that come to be?

Darren O’Day: “When I was a rookie — kind of a scared rookie — I did what the team told me to do. My short time with the Mets, as well. I pitched down in the zone, because I’m a sidearmer, a submariner, and they wanted groundballs. They didn’t care about strikeouts as much back then; they just wanted quick outs, which was kind of the philosophy of the game.

“Then I bounced to my third team, the Rangers, about a year after [breaking into the big leagues]. I kind of said, ‘Forget about that. I’m going to pitch the way I want and figure out if I’m good enough to be here.’ That’s when I started pitching up in the zone, in 2009, and you saw the strikeout numbers go up a little bit.

“That’s really been the big paradigm shift in baseball, and it’s kind of ‘the chicken or the egg’ — did the high damage come first, or did the need for the swing-and-miss come first? But that’s what everybody wants, even if it costs you a couple more pitches per inning.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a little while since we checked in on the Korean Baseball Organization. During Major League Baseball’s struggle to resume play in 2020 — both with fair compensation for players and proper health and safety precautions taken — entire seasons are well underway overseas, not only in South Korea but also in Japan and Taiwan. The KBO was the second to get started after the CPBL and thanks to an effective government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has had its teams play well over 50 games already, or about three-eights of their regular season. Back when the season was just two weeks old, my colleague Jay Jaffe wrote about a league the NC Dinos were already starting to dominate. Six weeks later, very little has changed.

After storming out of the gates with an 11-1 start, the Dinos have yet to relinquish first place, with the team still yet to hit any kind of a real rough patch. Their .685 winning percentage would set them on pace for about a 111-win season in MLB. Even if you strip away their 11-1 start — a run that even a team like, say, the early-season 2019 Mariners can approximate — their record since is still a sparkling 26-16, which equates to about 100 wins in a typical MLB season.

When the Dinos were covered here in May, they were said to be wearing teams out with power and patience. A few weeks later, the patience has diminished, but the intimidating power remains very much alive. The team leads the KBO in slugging (.487) by a good margin, and has hit the most homers in the league with 79. They’ve dropped to fifth in walks drawn, but their power has been enough to keep them the top-scoring team in the league at 6.52 runs per game.

As Jay mentioned, this kind of success for the Dinos has come as a surprise to KBO fans. They haven’t advanced to the Korean Series since 2016, and last year, they finished fifth with a record of 73-69-2; Dan Szymborski’s projections gave them just an 11.6% chance to win the league this year, forecasting them to finish fourth. They’ve surpassed those expectations, though, by having out-of-nowhere breakouts from a number of now-key players.

The Dinos’ lineup is positively relentless. Eight qualified hitters have a wRC+ of at least 110, and four of those rank in the top 10 hitters in the entire league. Jin-sung Kang 강진성 is the best of the bunch, hitting .365/.403/.623 for a 163 wRC+ that ranks third in the KBO. Hui-dong Kwon 권희동 (.312/.425/.558, 158 wRC+), Sung-bum Na 나성범 (.310/.378/.614, 154 wRC+), and Aaron Altherr 알테어 (.307/.380/.615, 154 wRC+), meanwhile, rank seventh, ninth and 10th in the KBO in wRC+, respectively. Each of these guys contributes to the team’s explosive pop — Na ranks second in the league with 15 homers, and Altherr is tied for third with 14.

That group of hitters is a great example of how the Dinos have blossomed. Of those four hitters, only Na had previously established a believable track record of success in the KBO. He entered the season coming off six consecutive seasons with a wRC+ of at least 120, and at 30 years old, he’s still in the prime of his career. It was always likely he’d mash this season — it was less clear whether he’d have much company. Kang, 26, had been a part-time player before this season, posting a wRC+ of 84 last season and 37 the year before. Kwon, 29, had already played six seasons in the KBO, and was above average at the plate in just two of them. Finally, there was Altherr, who as a foreign-born player had some expectations he would perform well, but was still new to the league.

All of those players have broken out in huge ways for the Dinos, and they aren’t alone. On the pitching side, I wrote about the brilliance of Chang-mo Koo 구창모 in the first month of the season and, well, it’s hard to say he’s gotten worse.

Both Statiz and KBO Fancy Stats give Koo the highest WAR of any player in the league this season, despite being a 23-year-old who first managed a FIP under 5.00 just last year. Alongside him in the rotation is Drew Rucinski 루친스키, another first-year KBO player from the U.S. whose 2.30 ERA ranks third in the league, and Mike Wright 라이트, who has outperformed an underwhelming FIP all season long, clocking in with a 3.63 ERA.

The rotation is brilliant at the top, but somewhat suspect at the bottom. If the Dinos have a weakness, it is that the back of their rotation has yet to really crystallize, with Jae-hak Lee 이재학, Sung-young Choi 최성영 and Young-kyu Kim 김영규 all carrying ERAs over 5.00. The story is similar in the bullpen, where Jong-hyun Won 원종현 (2.92 ERA in 24.2 innings) and Jae-whan Bae 배재환 (3.80 ERA in 23.2 innings) have been anchors, but everyone else has gotten hit very hard. It’s an unbalanced pitching staff, but because the offense is so deep — I haven’t even talked about former MVP catcher Euiji Yang 양의지 or longtime KBO stud Sok Min Park 박석민, both of whom are also in the league’s top 20 in wRC+ — that it just hasn’t mattered.

The Dinos aren’t without competition going forward, but no other team has posed a credible threat to their place at the top thus far. The second-place Heroes are sort of a portrait of dull competency — they rank fourth in scoring, on-base percentage, and slugging, and third in team ERA. Their pitching has been led more by finesse than power, as they rank first in BB/9 and eighth in K/9. The Bears, meanwhile, are more of a lesson in extremes. Their offense leads the KBO in OBP and SLG while running second in scoring, but their pitching staff is responsible for the second-highest ERA in the league. Both have had a few cracks at the Dinos this season, but so far, they’ve gone a combined 5-10. Their head-to-head matchups have only widened the gap between them.

All of this places the Dinos in a very good position to take the regular season, and if you need a reminder, that is a very big deal. The KBO playoff format rewards the regular season champion by giving it a bye directly to the Korean Series, with the next four teams having a progressively longer route to face them. The fourth and fifth seeds face each other in a best-of-five wild card round, the winner of that series faces the third seed in the quarterfinals, and so on.

Unlike the top spot, the remaining seeds ought to be highly contested all season. Part of that is due to the fact that the bottom of the league is so clearly defined — the SK Wyverns have gone through a poor enough stretch to nearly catch the Hanwha Eagles, who devoted a chunk of their season to perhaps the worst three-week run in baseball history. With a fifth of the league roughly 10 games behind everyone else, the clubs in front of them have gotten a boost.

Most of those teams have a significant enough strength that it’s easy to imagine them piecing together a hot streak that defines their season. The Kia Tigers, currently in sixth place in the standings, own the league’s best ERA. The seventh-place KT Wiz have scored the third-most runs per game. The road will be quite crowded for some time. But even with much of the season remaining, it seems clear that one team is in the fast lane.

Do you know who throws the fastest fastball in all of baseball? Almost certainly! Maybe you don’t know it exactly — maybe you’re not sure whether Jordan Hicks counts while he’s recovering from Tommy John surgery, so you give it to Aroldis Chapman. Maybe you differentiate between starters and relievers and want to put Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, and Gerrit Cole in the conversation. For the most part, though, you know these names.

Let’s change it up slightly. Do you know who throws the hardest cutter? Again, there’s a decent chance you know that it’s Emmanuel Clase, though he, too, will miss the 2020 season. The second name on that list, though, is Michael Lorenzen, and even if you didn’t know he threw that particular pitch, you almost certainly knew that he throws hard and is good.

Why am I asking this? Because I’m setting up for a far stupider question: who throws the hardest changeup in baseball? Frustratingly, it’s also Syndergaard (minimum 100 changeups thrown). But he’s out for the season — the fastest active changeup in baseball, then! I can tell you with near-certainty that you didn’t guess it. Maybe you got the second-fastest — Jacob deGrom. Heck, maybe you got number four, Tommy Kahnle. I’m fairly confident, however, that you didn’t get number one: Orioles reliever Miguel Castro.

Now that I’ve told you that factoid, it’s time to anticipate your next question: so what? Why do we care who throws the fastest changeup in baseball? The fastest fastball is visceral; it’s as fast as anyone can make a baseball go, which is pretty clearly awesome. You can watch the fastest fastball and be impressed without caring about context. It’s just fast!

The fastest cutter isn’t quite the same, but a near-100 mph pitch with cut looks like witchcraft. Clase isn’t even that great, and he’s still a joy to watch. The fastest changeup, on the other hand, looks like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about baseball dreams and a holiday weekend in MLB marred by testing delays, canceled practices, concerned players, and other impediments to a safe and smooth season, then pick up where they left off four months ago in their season preview series by previewing the 2020 Tampa Bay Rays (16:05) with The Athletic’s Josh Tolentino and the 2020 Miami Marlins (57:10) with the Miami Herald’s Jordan McPherson.

Audio intro: Warren Zevon, "Disorder in the House"
Audio interstitial 1: Superchunk, "Florida’s on Fire"
Audio interstitial 2: Modest Mouse, "Florida"
Audio outro: Mac DeMarco, "Dreams From Yesterday"

Link to Jay Jaffe’s summary of MLB’s testing mess
Link to story on Chaim Bloom’s cardigan
Link to Yandy Díaz workout
Link to story on Jonathan Erlichman
Link to Josh’s Rays return-to-play guide
Link to Josh on the Rays’ farm system
Link to FanGraphs’ Rays prospect rankings
Link to Jordan on the Marlins’ furloughs
Link to Jordan on the Marlins’ COVID-19 concerns
Link to Jordan on Marlins roster decisions
Link to FanGraphs’ Marlins prospect rankings
Link to Roster Resource Team Info Tracker

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Below is another installment of my series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. If you missed the first piece, you’re going to want to take a peek at its four-paragraph intro for some background, then hop back here once you’ve been briefed.

Updating the East

Because our world is a roil of chaos in which people often drop the ball when the stakes are high, there have been a few roster changes in the Eastern divisions, mostly related to COVID-19’s spread or the reasonable fear of it. My initial thoughts on the AL East are linked above, while the NL East is here.

Atlanta’s positive tests during intake included Freddie Freeman, Touki Toussaint, Pete Kozma, and Will Smith, while Felix Hernandez and Nick Markakis opted out. The combination of Markakis’ opt out and Freeman’s delay (Markakis cited a discussion with Freeman as part of his reason for opting out) makes it much more likely that Yonder Alonso breaks camp with the big league club because he plays first base and hits left-handed, the latter of which the Braves’ major league roster sorely lacks. The Markakis opt out also means one of the dominoes leading to a slightly premature Cristian Pache and/or Drew Waters debut has fallen.

The bullpen is thinner without Touki and Smith but still strong because of all the talented youngsters, while Felix’s opt out makes it more likely that one of young arms, most likely Kyle Wright or Bryse Wilson, ends up in the Opening Day rotation.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s COVID situation is already so dire that it seems likely they’ll qualify for the “extenuating circumstances” clause in Section 6 of Major League Baseball’s 2020 Operations manual:

In the event that a Club experiences a significant number of COVID-19 Related IL placements at the Alternate Training Site at any one time (i.e., three or more players), and the Club chooses to substitute those players from within the Club’s organization, MLB reserves the right to allow that Club to remove those substitute players from the Club Player Pool without requiring a release.

Read the rest of this entry »