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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Batch two of my completist series features a pair of 400-homer sluggers who spent their final four years as teammates on the South Side of Chicago, that after having briefly crossed paths — in an organizational sense, at least — in Cincinnati in 1998. While both routinely put up big home run and RBI totals — reaching 40 homers eight times between them, and driving in 100 runs 12 times — their lack of speed and subpar defense made for surprisingly low WAR totals that quashed any real debate about Hallworthiness. Which isn’t to say that they didn’t have their moments during compelling careers…

Adam Dunn

At 6-foot-6, 240 pounds, Adam Dunn was built like a football player — and he was, to the point of signing a letter of intent to play for the University of Texas — but he could pulverize a baseball as well. In a 14-year career (2001-14), “The Big Donkey” reached 40 homers in a season six times, and 30 in a season another three times; he homered with a frequency topped by just a dozen players in baseball history. An exceptionally disciplined hitter, Dunn wore pitchers out, walking at least 100 times in a season eight times. He racked up his share of strikeouts as well, at one point breaking Bobby Bonds‘ single-season record, and in fact retired as the King of the Three True Outcomes — the player who either homered, walked, or struck out in the highest share of plate appearances of anybody with at least 4,000 career plate appearances, and the exemplar of a set of trends that for better or worse has come to define 21st century baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.” – Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

There is only one truly poor team in Major League Baseball, and 29 others that just cosplay as Dickensian street urchins. When the Chicago Cubs weep about how there’s just no money in this baseball thing, it’s impossible to take their statements at face value. When the Tampa Bay Rays do it, I take it a lot more seriously.

“Build it, and nobody will come.” Unlike their cross-state rivals, the Miami Marlins, the Rays have been able to build teams that win consistently. They drew moderately well in their debut season, but a decade of losing, in large part due to an incompetent Chuck LaMar-led front office, got things off to a rocky start. Winning 97 games and an AL pennant in 2008 couldn’t raise the team’s attendance to two million, and winning at least 90 games in five of six years appeared to do nearly nothing to bring fans to the ballpark. Tampa Bay drew fewer fans in 2018 and 2019 than they did in their 68-94, last-place 2016, the team’s worst year since they exorcised the Devil from their nickname. Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Twins had a tremendous 2019 regular season. They set a franchise record for wins, set a major league record for home runs, and did it all with a core of exciting hitters who will be back in 2020. If every season could go like the 2019 regular season, the Twins would be sitting pretty.

Of course, it wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops. A midseason swoon briefly dropped them behind the Cleveland Indians, who remain their biggest intradivision competition heading into 2020. Their starting rotation, so solid top to bottom in 2019, wasn’t as locked up as the hitters — four of the five pitchers who made the most starts either reached free agency or had contract options declined. And of course, they got drummed out of the playoffs in three nasty, brutish, but most definitely not short games with the Yankees.

Earlier this week, the Twins made two moves that help address those three areas of concern from the 2019 season. They signed Rich Hill and Homer Bailey to one year contracts totaling $10 million ($3 million for Hill, $7 million for Bailey), though Hill’s contract has reachable playing time incentives that could see it reach $9.5 million. Let’s cover the way these moves helped through the lens of the three areas that felled them last year. Read the rest of this entry »

In the sixth installment of a special, seven-episode series on the past, present, and future of advanced analysis in non-baseball sports, Ben Lindbergh talks to Motorsports Analytics founder and The Athletic writer David Smith about NASCAR and then former Garmin-Sharp and Team Sky analyst Robby Ketchell about cycling (47:48), touching on the origins of sabermetrics-style analysis in each sport, the major challenges, big breakthroughs, and overturned misconceptions, the early adopters, the cutting-edge stats and tech, the level of acceptance within the game, the effects on the spectator experience, the parallels with baseball, and more, plus a postscript on Bucky Dent, Rich Hill, the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, and ESPN Bat Track.

Audio intro: Grateful Dead, "The Race is On"
Audio interstitial: Yo La Tengo, "The Race is on Again"
Audio outro: George Harrison, "Faster"

Link to David Smith’s archive at The Athletic
Link to Motorsports Analytics site
Link to Positive Regression Podcast
Link to David’s 2019 analytical takeaways
Link to David on Erik Jones
Link to David on driver stat darlings
Link to David on crew chief stat darlings
Link to David on metrics that do or don’t matter
Link to article on Andrew Maness and NASCAR
Link to article about Robby and Team Sky
Link to article on Team Sky’s use of data
Link to article on big data in racing
Link to article about technology in racing
Link to article about Chris Froome’s power data
Link to article about technology in racing
Link to article about using power data to detect doping
Link to article about Team Sky and doping
Link to another article about Team Sky and doping
Link to article about Robby and Kipchoge
Link to Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method Wiki
Link to ESPN broadcast featuring Bat Track
Link to story about Bat Track
Link to order The MVP Machine

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In 2019, I once again had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the FanGraphs Q&A series, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series, the Talks Hitting series, and a smattering of feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

——

“I think Abner [Doubleday] when he set this game up a long time ago, he set it up the right way. Boom, boom, boom… Let’s try to keep it normal here. I was a shortstop. If you stuck me on the other side, then I became a second baseman. I played shortstop as a second baseman. That’s confusing. That’s Laurel and Hardy stuff.” — Ron Gardenhire, Detroit Tigers manager, January 2019

“[Gaylord] Perry threw a spitter. He wasn’t going to share that. Not unless I brought $3,000 to the park. That’s how much he said he’d charge to teach me the spitter. I was taking home $8,500. I didn’t want to give him 40% of my yearly take-home pay to try to learn a pitch that very few people can master.” — Steve Stone, Chicago White Sox broadcaster, January 2019 Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter about Kohl Stewart signing with the Orioles, another convoluted Scott Boras quote, and a few of the things Sam learned in 2019 (including Candlestick Park’s “Cardiac Hill,” the sound of Hideki Matsui’s swing, and the disturbing story of “Toothpick” Sam Jones), then discuss what the most defining/enduring baseball memory of 2019 will be.

Audio intro: The Proper Ornaments, "Memories"
Audio outro: Uncle Tupelo, "That Year"

Link to Sam on what he learned in 2019
Link to Death at the Ballpark book
Link to SABR bio for Sam Jones
Link to Sam on the defining baseball memory of 2019
Link to Sam on the defining baseball memories of previous years
Link to Zach Kram on the baseball as an unreliable narrator
Link to Craig Edwards on MLB’s 2019 competitive balance problem
Link to video of Hal Smith homer
Link to order The MVP Machine

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In the fifth installment of a special, seven-episode series on the past, present, and future of advanced analysis in non-baseball sports, Ben Lindbergh talks to ESports One Head of Esports Data Science Tim Sevenhuysen about esports and then Volleymetrics founder Giuseppe Vinci about volleyball (43:25), touching on the origins of sabermetrics-style analysis in each sport, the major challenges, big breakthroughs, and overturned misconceptions, the early adopters, the cutting-edge stats and tech, the level of acceptance within the game, the effects on the spectator experience, the parallels with baseball, and more.

Audio intro: Wild Fire, "Video Warrior"
Audio interstitial: Of Montreal, "Spike the Senses"
Audio outro: Guided By Voices, "The Rally Boys"

Link to Ben on the Wild West of esports stats
Link to Ben on the Overwatch meta
Link to Ben on the Player Impact Rating in Overwatch
Link to Compete on big data in esports
Link to Vice article on Tim
Link to VentureBeat article on Tim
Link to Blitz Esports article on Tim
Link to Tim on founding Shadow
Link to Oracle’s Elixir
Link to Part 1 of Tim’s LCS 2020 power rankings
Link to Part 2 of Tim’s LCS 2020 power rankings
Link to Ben on the origins of StarCraft
Link to Volleymetrics page at Hudl
Link to SportTechie on volleyball analytics
Link to FiveThirtyEight on volleyball metrics
Link to article about BYU volleyball
Link to order The MVP Machine

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In an article that ran here 10 days ago, Chicago White Sox GM Rick Hahn was quoted as saying that people in his role tend to “spend a lot more time trying to unpack what goes wrong, as opposed to examining all the things that may have gone right.”

Danny Mendick fits firmly in the ‘right’ category. Unheralded coming into the 2019 season — he ranked No. 26 on our White Sox Top Prospects list — the 26-year-old infielder earned a September call-up and proceeded to slash .308/.325/.462 in 40 plate appearances. As the season came to a close, Sunday Notes devoted a handful of paragraphs to his Cinderella-like story.

Mendick’s story deserves more than a handful of paragraphs. With the calendar about to flip to 2020, let’s take a longer look at where he came from. We’ll start with words from Hahn.

“When we took him in the 22nd round, as a senior [in 2015], I think we all knew he’d play in the big leagues,” the ChiSox exec said when I inquired about Mendick at the GM Meetings. “OK, no. I’m messing with you. We didn’t know.”

Continuing in a serious vein, Hahn added that the White Sox routinely ask their area scouts to identify “one or two guys they have a gut feel on.” These are draft-eligible players who “maybe don’t stand out from a tools standpoint, or from a notoriety standpoint, but are true baseball players; they play the game the right way and have a positive influence on others.”

In other words, organizational depth. And maybe — just maybe — they will overachieve and one day earn an opportunity at the highest level. Read the rest of this entry »