2:03	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, and welcome to my almost-Opening Day chat. As I’ll be part of a group chat later this week (Dodgers-Giants, 10 ET on Thursday night), I’m going to work a bit short here.

2:03	Jay Jaffe: First a bit of housekeeping while the queue fills…  My latest piece on the Blue Jays’ quest to find a temporary new home, is here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-blue-jays-are-in-search-of-a-temporary…

2:04	Jay Jaffe: A very cool thing that Dan wrote about the odds that somebody hits .400 in this short season is here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/toppling-ted-the-60-game-season-and-the-40…

2:04	Jay Jaffe: And a very cool thing that Sean and Dave did behind the scenes, showing the best 60-game stretches in a variety of categories since 1974, is here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/instagraphs/whats-the-best-that-could-happ…

2:06	Jay Jaffe: Via that last one, did you know George Brett had a 60-game stretch in 1980 when he hit .473/.522/.751 (the record for batting average in that span)? You do now. Some guy named Barry holds the records for the other two metrics.

2:06	Jay Jaffe: and now, onward…

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One of the ways that the baseball of yesteryear was different from baseball today was the importance of batting average. With a pitching philosophy that envisioned lots and lots of balls being hit into play and no gauntlet of modern relief pitchers to face, far more at-bats ended with a ball being handled by a defensive player. In 2019, 63% of plate appearances ended with a ball being hit into play. In 1919, that figure was 81%. With half as many fieldable balls, it’s hardly a shock that league batting averages have declined. The effect would be even larger, too, but batting average on balls hit into play was higher in 2019 (.298) than in 1919 (.282).

Hitting .400 was never an easy feat, but it wasn’t some wild, once-in-a-lifetime occurrence when it did happen. The .400 mark has been eclipsed 34 times in major league history, give or take (the number varies depending on just what you consider a major league team in the wild world of 1870s baseball). Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941 and that was it, the last time a major leaguer hit .400 over a season. It’s more than just the lower league batting averages. Baseball’s .252 batting average in 2019 was still higher than in 17 seasons before 1941. Baseball has trended in a more competitive direction and as a league becomes more competitive, you generally expect the differences between players to shrink. That’s true for batting average, too. Just look at the simplest measure of dispersion, standard deviation:

The standard deviation has gotten smaller as time has progressed. Using this simple method, Ted Williams’s .406 in 1941 was 4.46 standard deviations better than the mean batting average of .262 (z-score). A z-score of 4.46 in 2019 only represents a .370 batting average. Nobody’s hit that mark recently, either, but .370 certainly doesn’t feel like anywhere near the same hurdle.

Since it’s the obvious next question, here are the best batting averages by Z-Score. Again, there are more robust ways to look at this, but we’re scrawling on envelope-backs, not landing astronauts on the moon:

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This is the eighth 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 difference between context-neutral stats and context-specific stats. Both tell us very different things about what happens on the field. What’s the difference between them and how do we use them?

Learning Objectives:

• Identify and apply a run-expectancy matrix.
• Explain the difference between context-specific and context-neutral statistics.
• Evaluate which type of statistic to use in a given situation.

Target Grade-Level: 9-10

Daily Activities:

Day 1

At the end of 2019, Pete Alonso led all of baseball with 53 home runs. But all those home runs weren’t created equally. Thirty-one of them came with no runners on, while the remaining 22 were hit with at least one runner on base. Should those two- and three-run home runs count for more than all those solo shots? That’s the question at the center of our lesson today: Should we take the game context into account when evaluating players? Not to spoil anything, but the answer is both yes and no. Read the rest of this entry »

Deadline deals, streaking Pirates, and more — it’s time to decide where to improve the team in this week’s look at the OOTP Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, Jason Martinez took us through the back-end of the bullpen rankings. Now, we conclude the player rankings (a summary will run tomorrow) the same way most great baseball games do: with elite bullpens.

A substantial caveat for readers: There are some positions for which there is a cleaner, wider gap between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, it’s clear the best center field situation belongs to the Angels because of Mike Trout, and that Cleveland belongs at or near the top of the shortstop hierarchy because of Francisco Lindor. Relief pitching is not one of these positions. Sure, we have the bullpens ranked, and you can see their statistical projections above and below, but notice the margins here, and that they’re even thinner than usual because of a shortened season, and recall how volatile relievers are generally. Winning a single, close, coin-flip game is more significant this year than ever before, which means bullpen performance will simultaneously be as meaningful and as volatile as ever.

I’m interested in the benefits of stocking bullpens with pitchers who have varied release points, as well as mechanical looks and repertoire shapes that are different from one another, so I’ve included rudimentary overlays of some of each team’s reliever release points to hopefully give visual learners a more concrete idea of what I’m talking about, while also highlighting which teams seem to care more about having varied looks than others. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we covered the good and the bad of the league’s rotations. Today, we turn our attention to the relievers.

Between the piggybacking, the Opener, and whatever other new strategies managers decide to test out, the 2020 version of the bullpen likely won’t be quite the same as in years past. But it will probably still feature a lot of good comeback stories, a fair number of injuries (and disappointments), and pitchers you’ve never heard of who can throw the baseball very, very hard. One of the things that makes baseball so interesting is that new talents and triumphs emerge every year, especially in a place as volatile as the bullpen.

You should take that into account, then, when assessing these rankings. Every bullpen can be good; every bullpen can be bad. And the gaps this year are sometimes rather narrow — the Reds (a contending team) and the Orioles (a… not contending team) are projected for basically the same WAR from their relievers. Things widen out at the extremes, with the Rays and Yankees both forecast to be worth about 2.0 WAR, while the Royals are due for just 0.3, but it isn’t hard to imagine some bad injury luck or a hot run shaking things up before the season’s done. Of course, some teams need a lot more things to go right than others, and those teams tend to reside here. If a squad finds itself wistfully hoping for an oft-injured closer to stay healthy, or a rookie’s surprisingly good season to repeat, or for a few too many guys to take a step forward, or pitch like they did when they were young, then it’s probably a bullpen ranked in the bottom half of the league. Unless, somehow, it proves not to be. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Mets had quite a scare last week when Jacob deGrom left Tuesday’s intrasquad game after just one inning due to back tightness. Thankfully, an MRI taken on Thursday came back clean, and upon being cleared, the two-time reigning Cy Young winner threw a bullpen session on Friday, followed by a 60-pitch simulated game on Sunday. At this writing, he’s on track to make his Opening Day start against the Braves on July 24 in Queens, albeit with his targeted pitch count reduced from 100 to 85, but this close shave underscores the fact that there may be no ppitcher who’s more crucial to his teams chances for contention this season.

Intuitively, that makes sense. The 32-year-old deGrom is coming off of a season during which he led the NL in WAR (7.0) and strikeouts (255), ranked second in both ERA (2.43) and FIP (2.67), and third in innings (204). By the numbers, it may not have been as strong as his 2018 season, in which he led in ERA, FIP, and WAR, but for the second straight year, he ran away with the Cy Young, netting 29 out of 30 first-place votes. He’s projected to provide the Mets 2.1 WAR in this abbreviated season, a total 0.1 ahead of Max Scherzer in three more innings (76 to 73), and one surpassed by only the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole (2.4 in 79 innings). Here it should be noted that our innings projections are subject to manual adjustments based upon injury reports, and the news with regards to deGrom’s back was positive enough that we did not dial his total back.

Both Cole’s Yankees and deGrom’s Mets lost their respective rotation’s second-best pitchers — namely Luis Severino and Noah Syndergaard — to Tommy John surgery this spring, though the Yankees’ rotation still projects as the deeper one, with James Paxton (1.5 projected WAR) ahead of Marcus Stroman (1.1) among the remaining number two starters, and likewise Masahiro Tanaka (1.0) ahead of Rick Porcello or Steven Matz (both 0.7). In fact, the Yankees’ rotation’s 6.7 WAR tops our Depth Charts and thus our Positional Power Rankings, though they’re in a virtual tie with the Nationals and a hair ahead of the Rays (6.6). The Mets (5.5) rank ninth, 0.1 behind the Indians and 0.2 behind the Reds. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Paul Sporer took you through baseball’s 16th-to-30th ranked rotations. Now, we get to the good stuff.

What is a starting pitcher? While baseball’s rules have been relatively stable throughout the game’s history, being a starter in 2020 means something very different than it did in 1870, 1920, or even 1970. A starting pitcher in the 1800s was frequently the pitcher in any given game. When Hall of Fame pitcher (and later, Twitter superstar), Old Hoss Radbourn pitched for the 1884 Providence Grays, he started 75 of the team’s 114 games, completing 73 of them.

Being a starter meant something else in the early 20th century. They were still workhorses expected to finish a large percentage of their games, but they were part of a pitching staff, not lone wolves. Jack Chesbro was the last 50-game starter, in 1904. Four-man rotations became the standard and league leaders in games-started ranged from the high 30s to the low 40s. The only exception was one last surge in the early 70s from rubber-armed knuckleballers Wilbur Wood and Phil Niekro. The four-man rotation then became a five-man affair, and it’s now been 33 years since a pitcher started 40 games (Charlie Hough, 1987) and 40 years since one threw 300 innings (Steve Carlton, 1980). Read the rest of this entry »