Due to the COVID-19 outbreaks on both the Marlins and Cardinals over the past few weeks, 15 games have been postponed so far this season that have yet to be made up. The postponements principally affect those two clubs due to their positive tests, but also the Phillies, who played against the Marlins as the outbreak happened, and several of those teams’ other scheduled opponents, including the Brewers, Tigers, Blue Jays, Orioles, and Yankees. With the Phillies resuming play on Monday, the Marlins playing on Tuesday, and the Cardinals set to play tonight against the Cubs, the league sent out a revised schedule with plans to make up all of the missed games.

Unfortunately, that new schedule has already hit a snag, as earlier today, Mark Saxon reported (and MLB confirmed) that tonight’s Cardinals game against the Cubs will be postponed due to an additional positive COVID-19 test result. Jesse Rogers added that there was at least one positive new test. It’s possible the Cardinals schedule will require further tinkering, which would likely come in the form of more doubleheaders. With that said, the current new plan looks like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

While we’re back to watching games of actual baseball, the 2020 All-Star Game and its related festivities were cancelled. We streamed the virtual Futures Game a few weeks ago and today, it’s time for our MLB The Show Home Run Derby.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the ninth 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 that these units offer a thoughtfully designed, baseball-themed supplement to the schoolwork your student might already be doing. The previous units can be found here.

Overview: A short unit centered on understanding the concept of expected runs and sequencing. In one of our earlier lessons, we learned about the relationship between runs and wins. Now, we’ll take that concept a step further and learn about expected runs and how they can tell us more about a team’s true talent.

Learning Objectives:

• Use logic to determine all possible sequences of given events.
• Use algebra to solve multiple equations.
• Identify the effects of event sequencing in baseball.
• Identify and apply the Pythagorean Expectation.
• Explain the relationship between expected runs and wins.
• Explain the uses of the Pythagorean Expectation using different inputs.

Target Grade-Level: 9-10

Daily Activities:

Day 1
In baseball, sequencing is the concept that the order of events on the field have an effect on run scoring results. Sometimes this concept is referred to as cluster luck because teams that cluster hits together appear more “lucky” than teams who don’t. This concept is pretty easy to demonstrate. Say a team collects three singles and one home run in a given inning. The order of those events will lead to very different outcomes. If the team hits the three singles before the home run, it will likely result in four runs. But if the home run is hit first with the three singles following, the likely result is fewer runs, perhaps as few as one. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re two weeks into the long-delayed 2020 season, and one thing that sticks out thus far, beyond the schedule mayhem caused by COVID-19 outbreaks and the rule changes regarding extra innings and doubleheaders, is the plight of starting pitchers. Between the lengthy shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, during which players had no direct supervision, the abbreviated summer camp buildup, a flood of injuries, and expanded rosters, starting pitchers are pitching less than ever. Whether this is simply a continuation of a more long-term trend, an aberration founded in the unique circumstances of this season, or the start of a bigger paradigm shift, the numbers are worth tracking.

During the 2019 postseason, I noted that the period from 1998 to 2015 was fairly stable when it came to starting pitcher usage, even given a wide range in scoring environments and a whole lot of change within the game — expansion, the height of the PED scandal, the advent of PED testing, and the adoption of loose pitch count standards and innings limits on young pitchers. Since that time, we’ve seen starting pitchers throw fewer innings with each passing season, while at the same time generally improving their performance relative to the league.

Bang! Already what sticks out is that this year, for the first time, starters are averaging fewer than five innings per turn, and their per-start average is down more than one full inning since 2015. What’s more, if this trend continues, it would be the biggest year-to-year drop in innings per start in the span, more than double the drop from 2018-19, and more than triple the other year-to-year drops within that span.

Over the years, a number of factors have driven that decrease, starting with deeper pitch counts, which are a byproduct of higher strikeout rates, as you can see in the table. There’s also the increased understanding of a few sabermetric concepts: starters are generally less effective facing batters for the third time in the game than prior; relievers are generally more effective facing batters for the first time than starters are in any of those appearances; and batters are less effective when they lack the platoon advantage. As starters’ workloads have decreased to account for those factors, their run prevention relative to the league has improved ever so slightly.

The drop-off from 2019 to ’20 is even steeper by a couple other measures:

Read the rest of this entry »

As Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Why start the article with that quote? To paraphrase my junior year English teacher Ms. Woods, “Ben, Advanced Placement readers expect essays that start with a quote, so it’s a safe way to start even if you think it’s trite.” Now, this isn’t an AP essay, but it is an article about how to write an article, so I feel comfortable getting a little bit more meta than usual.

It’s also, to be clear, still an article about baseball! More specifically, it’s about Tyler Duffey. He’s “breaking out” this year, in that he’s faced 16 batters and struck out 10 of them. That sample size? It’s too small to really say anything. Take a look at our handy sample size tool, and you’ll realize it in no time. And yet, we write these articles. Maybe it’s this piece on Chaz Roe, or this one on Tommy Kahnle getting good, or this one on Nick Anderson striking everybody out — over the years, they’ve become FanGraphs staples. How?

Here’s the secret: we’re not confining ourselves to that one sample. Sometimes, the pitcher was already good. Sometimes they had some good points and some bad points, and it looks like they changed the bad points. The idea, though, is that they had something going for them already, and the article is just catching the audience up to the reality on the ground.

Tyler Duffey is a great example of this. By pretty much any conceivable measure, he’s the best reliever in baseball so far this year. FIP? Tied for first with three guys who have only thrown an inning. xFIP? Second behind Colin Rea, one of the aforementioned one-inning wonders. Strikeout rate? First? Walk rate? Well, he hasn’t walked anybody, so that’s a yes.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about their minor league free agent draft results so far and whether this season has helped or hurt minor league free agents gain playing time, the continued watchability of revamped extra innings and the possibility of bringing back traditional extra innings for one week a year, and whether this season’s early big BABIP dip indicates that players are fielding better without fans, then answer listener emails about whether players should retain their rookie eligibility in the event of a shortened season, whether giving up in-person attendance forever would be worth guaranteeing a winning team, how the 2021 amateur draft order should be determined, and whether the lineup should reset in extra innings, plus a Stat Blast about quasi-walk-off hits in rain-delayed games.

Audio intro: Paul McCartney, "Distractions"
Audio outro: Beck, "No Distraction"

Link to minor league free agent draftees
Link to Sam on the automatic-runner rule
Link to Tango tweet about fielding performance
Link to article about basketball/soccer player improvements
Link to Lucas Apostoleris’s Stat Blast song cover
Link to Lucas’s Bandcamp page

 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

Heading into 2019, opinions differed about how much of Luis Robert’s potential would manifest in games. Those opinions got considerably more uniform after a breakout season that saw Robert tap into his power. One of the top prospects heading into 2020 (he ranked seventh overall on our Top 100), Robert has helped a surging White Sox club filled with young talent get a good jump on the season. His .354/.415/.542 batting line has been good for a 177 wRC+, and he’s checking off every box on his scouting report for better or worse.

While defensive metrics don’t hold a lot of water this early in the year, the scouting reports on Robert are great. Eric Longenhagen has said Robert is a “plus-plus runner, and his instincts in center field are terrific.” Here’s a seemingly easy play Robert made early in the season:

The ball left the bat at more than 100 mph. Unless balls like that are hit right at a fielder, they’re usually a hit. Instead, Robert covered over 50 feet in under three seconds (the GIF above is 2.8 seconds long). Statcast tracks each batted ball’s hang time and the distance a player has to travel to get it. This is what Robert’s profile looks like:

The only balls Robert didn’t catch either hit the wall, or came with a 0% probability of making the play. Robert has been as advertised in the field. The same is true as a baserunner. Robert’s 29.4 feet per second sprint speed is near the top of the league, and he has four steals in five tries, finally getting caught last night. He also has three infield singles. Here’s one of those singles, where a slight hesitation on a routine ground ball allowed Robert to make it to first in under four seconds, essentially a Byron Buxton-level time:

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Manaea began his start Wednesday night by allowing a home run on his first pitch of the game, and things only briefly got better. After Shin-Soo Choo’s lead-off blast, Manaea retired nine of the next 11 hitters he faced only to have trouble return again in the fourth. He gave up a single to Todd Frazier and a walk to Robinson Chirinos, followed by run-scoring hits from Nick Solak and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, before finally getting his first out of the inning in the form of a sacrifice fly by Rob Refsnyder. With four runs already in on six hits and a walk through 3.2 innings, Oakland manager Bob Melvin moved to his bullpen early, asking right-hander Burch Smith to get his team back on track.

“If you’re Burch Smith, you would love to be able to hand the ball off to somebody in the eighth inning,” A’s analyst Dallas Braden said on the broadcast as Smith tossed his warm-up pitches. In the moment, it sounded optimistic, maybe even a tad foolhardy. Saying something like that is a nice way to remind Oakland fans watching at home that a bad start does not mean hope is lost, and that their team is very much still in the game. But expecting any reliever to go get 11 outs when the starter could only achieve 10 is a pretty tough ask, especially when it’s a 30-year-old journeyman who owns a career ERA north of 6.00.

In reality, Braden almost got it exactly right. Smith pitched two outs into the seventh inning, retiring all 10 hitters he faced on just 33 pitches before Melvin replaced him with T.J. McFarland. McFarland gave up one hit and got two more outs, then Joakim Soria came into the game and retired the final five Rangers hitters of the night. In that time, the A’s hammered a total of four homers and came back to win the game, 6-4. The bullpen was asked to do the heavy lifting, and it did a near-perfect job at it.

That kind of performance has become the norm for the A’s over the first couple weeks of the 2020 season. Here are the most valuable ‘pens in baseball through Wednesday: Read the rest of this entry »