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One of the world’s strongest professional baseball leagues, the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) starts their 2020 on May 5, bringing us high-level baseball in a world that’s currently experiencing a shortage. If you haven’t watched a KBO game, it’s a different atmosphere than MLB, one I would love to see MLB take a few cues from. The fans are loud, the bat flips are fierce, and players have customized theme songs.

And thankfully, it’s looking like American fans will get to see more of it. The KBO and ESPN are apparently close to a broadcast deal to televise KBO games on this side of the Pacific. (A deal had previously been reported as close, but fell through when ESPN wanted to give KBO no money up-front.)

For fans, there are a lot of new names to know. But even without indepth knowledge of the KBO, some will be vaguely familiar already, as Korea is one of the frequent landing spots for Triple-A journeymen to get a real opportunity to play highly competitive baseball at considerably more enticing salaries. To acclimate ourselves to what the talent levels are like in KBO, I fired up the ZiPS supercomputer to get the 2019 MLB translations for KBO players. After all, many fans understand baseball relative to MLB. That’s not to suggest that the KBO shouldn’t be enjoyed on its own terms; many of its difference from MLB are what make it so engaging. Next week we’ll have ZiPS projected standings and player projections put in a KBO-context for the league’s Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the World Series started to look more like modern baseball. The best hitters batted more, the worst pitchers threw less, and there were fewer bunts than ever. Did that modernization continue into the 2000’s? Uh, nope!

2001

Here we are, at the World Series that led me to this article series in the first place. The Diamondbacks were an oddly constructed team; stars and scrubs to an extreme degree. They didn’t help things by batting Tony Womack and his 66 wRC+ in leadoff, and Mark Grace was overqualified in the seven spot, but this team simply didn’t have much offensive firepower outside of Luis Gonzalez and Reggie Sanders, who batted third and fourth respectively. Grace over Craig Counsell in the two hole would have helped, surely, but offense wasn’t this team’s calling card.

The Yankees had the same efficient lineup as always. Jeter held down the oft-misused second spot, Chuck Knoblauch remained an underqualified leadoff hitter, and everyone else was roughly where they should be. It’s still hard to know whether they got there on purpose or by accident — Knoblauch somehow got 600 PA as a no-bat left fielder/DH — but for the most part, they had good hitters batting where they should.

In Game 1, the 90’s came back in the most predictable way. Womack led off the third inning by getting hit. Counsell followed up with a sacrifice bunt — which Luis Gonzalez followed with a homer. Nice bunt! It had been a tie game, but still: third inning, no outs. That’s a pretty bad one.

Aside from that, the 9-1 blowout was more or less uninteresting. The Yankees indulged in a few intentional walks, but they were in spots that felt somewhat do-or-die; down three and four runs, to be precise. Bob Brenly pulled Curt Schilling after 102 pitches and 7 innings, and he used back-of-the-pen relievers to protect an eight run lead. By the book, as it were. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday afternoon’s FanGraphs Live stream, starting at noon ET, will feature a discussion of the OOTP Brewers, who have some crucial decisions to make.

Who should we target as a shortstop replacement? What should we offer? Should we bench Lorenzo Cain on-stream, or re-tool our pitching rotation? If you can think of something a general manager can do, we can try it. If you can think of something a manager can do, we can adjust our in-game tactics to attempt it. The Brewers sit at 14-14 in the virtual 2020 OOTP universe, and our decisions could help get them on the right track.

We don’t spend a lot of time talking about batting average at FanGraphs. While getting on base with a hit is still important in today’s game, getting on base via a walk is nearly as good as a single. Hitting doubles, triples, and homers is also very important and looking at batting average doesn’t factor in any of that production. It’s missing out on a lot of important results and thus, isn’t as useful as it was once thought to be when determining how good a hitter is at the plate. To some, this might be a slight, impugning players with great batting averages like Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn, two of the only three batters in the last 50 years with career batting averages over .320 (Rod Carew is the other). But it’s important to note that just because Boggs and Gwynn had high batting averages, doesn’t mean that they would be less valuable in today’s game.

Boggs and Gwynn both had career wRC+ marks of 132, with Boggs’ 88 WAR ranking sixth among all position players since 1969 and Gwynn’s 65 WAR making him a Hall of Famer as well. That combined the two players have fewer home runs than Ryan Zimmerman is of little concern to their overall value. The two were great hitters, though with ISO’s closer to .100 than .200, they might be referred to as singles hitters today. That’s a little unfair, and even a little inaccurate, as both rank in the top-20 of doubles-plus-triples over the last 50 years. I wondered what Gwynn and Boggs might do if placed in today’s game. The game has changed in the last few decades, with smaller parks and shrinking strike zones to go along with significant increases in average pitch velocity and many more offspeed and breaking pitches as well. Taking Boggs and Gwynn from the 80s and plopping them into today’s game wouldn’t be a fair test, but we can take a look at how they adapted to changes in their era to see how they may have adapted today. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi again. Thank you so much for the support you’ve shown the site over the past few weeks. In the spirit of continued transparency, I wanted to give everyone a fairly in-depth update on how things are going at FanGraphs. A few weeks ago, we had to change our business model from one primarily driven by ads to a one predominantly driven by site memberships because of the current COVID-19 pandemic, which postponed the start of the MLB season and caused a drastic decrease in both FanGraphs’ traffic and general advertising rates. We set a Membership goal of 40,000 Members, which in a typical year represents less than 4% of our monthly site visitors.

First, let’s look at the some of the good news, which is that Memberships are going in the right direction. Thank you to everyone who has decided to continue their Membership while baseball is on hiatus, upgraded their existing Membership, or signed up for the first time! Prior to March 30, we had 10,004 active Members; that number has increased to 14,739:

If we include merchandise sales, gift memberships, upgrades to Ad-Free, and donations (at the equivalent of the $30 annual Membership), the progress towards that 40,000-Member goal looks even better. Furthermore, our breakdown of Memberships has shifted slightly towards Ad-Free; about 5% of all Members have moved toward Ad-Free. When we include all these additional contributions, it effectively puts us at 16,244 members:

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Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Johnny Vander Meer’s ear boils and the surprisingly ancient origins of the phrase, “A walk is as good as a hit,” then answer listener emails about why some players prove to be flashes in the pan, whether a home run derby would work under current conditions, whether the pandemic makes MLB expansion more or less likely, what one would learn from watching every game from an MLB season (and how one would do it), why some prospects skip Triple-A, and why we don’t talk more about the brief baseball career of Chris Saenz, plus a Stat Blast about the highest Championship Leverage Index.

Audio intro: Paul McCartney, "Boil Crisis"
Audio outro: Paul McCartney, "Boil Crisis"

Link to free Baseball Digest archive
Link to history of “A walk is as good as a hit”
Link to study on OBP vs. batting average
Link to Sam on the home run derby
Link to Joel Sherman on the Home Run Derby
Link to first episode of 1960 home run derby
Link to Stat Blast song covers thread
Link to Theodor Bierhoff’s Stat Blast song cover
Link to list of highest-CLI plays
Link to video of highest-CLI play
Link to article on Willie McCovey and Peanuts
Link to Peanuts strips on Willie McCovey
Link to Maury Brown on expansion
Link to Ben on minor league difficulty
Link to 2013 article on skipping Triple-A
Link to 2015 article on skipping Triple-A
Link to 2016 article on skipping Triple-A
Link to order The MVP Machine

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This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Cape Cod Baseball League Cancels Season

The Cape Cod Baseball League announced Friday that its executive committee voted unanimously to cancel its 2020 season, which was originally scheduled to open on June 13.

“Following CDC guidelines and medical recommendations, the league determined it would be impossible to guarantee the safety of players, coaches, umpires, host families, volunteers and fans during this unprecedented health crisis,” the league said in its announcement.

The Cape Cod Baseball League is the second in the National Alliance of Summer College Baseball to cancel its season, following a similar decision by the Valley Baseball League in Virginia that was made earlier this month. In addition to cancelled seasons, stay-at-home mandates issued by individual states have pushed back the season-openers of the Northwoods League and the Hamptons League, while the Cal Ripken Collegiate Summer League made the proactive decision to delay the season until July 1. In the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League, there is still a plan to proceed with the season as scheduled, but three teams have already stated that they won’t be able to operate this year. Read the rest of this entry »

As baseball players continued to get bigger and stronger throughout the 1990s — by various legal and illegal means — the game was changing rapidly. Starting pitchers began throwing with ever increasing velocity. Meanwhile, a decrease in a typical starting pitcher’s innings per game, a heavier reliance on the bullpen, and a greater likelihood of injury — all trends that continue in today’s game — were all becoming part of this new era of baseball.

While the game became more favorable towards hitters, many of the best pitching performances during this era are legendary. Here’s a look back at how the AL Cy Young winners of the 1990s were acquired.

After a successful 10 year stint with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that drafted him in the first round (20th pick overall) of the 1977 amateur draft, Bob Welch was traded to the Oakland Athletics following the 1986 season in a three-team, eight-player deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets. The A’s, believing they were a team on the rise and close to playoff contention, fulfilled an offseason goal of adding a veteran starting pitcher to pair with Dave Stewart, who had just had his first of what would end up being four consecutive 20-win seasons.

In his debut season with the A’s, Welch won a career-high 17 games, helping his team capture a division title and a World Series appearance. This was followed by another 17-win season that ended with a World Series championship in 1989. While he would spend another five seasons in the majors, 1990 would be one for the ages.

With assistance from one of the best bullpens in the game and, arguably, the best offense, the 33-year-old Welch won an astounding 27 games in 35 starts. But he also had a sub-3.00 ERA and allowed two earned runs or fewer in 60% of his starts, making it easy for his teammates to finish the game with a lead.

Sure, it was clear to most observers that Roger Clemens was the best pitcher in baseball. But that was no longer a huge story. He had already won two Cy Young awards and wasn’t slowing down a bit. As can happen, even today, voters will focus on the shiny new thing. In this case, that would be the “27 wins,” which hadn’t been achieved since Steve Carlton did it in 1972 and hasn’t been accomplished since. Read the rest of this entry »