Josh Donaldson is one of the game’s elite two-way players, but like the late Ernie Lombardi, he received rude treatment when it came to Baseball-Reference’s latest update to its version of WAR. Last week I began a breakdown of B-Ref’s influx of new data, which resulted in alterations to five different areas of its version of WAR, some aspects of which affect players as far back as 1904 and others as recent as last season. The introduction of detailed play-by-play baserunning and caught stealing data from the 1930s and ’40s, for example, cost Lombardi — a heavy-hitting Hall of Fame catcher who played from 1934-47 — a whopping 7.3 WAR. Donaldson took the largest hit among contemporary players, losing 3.8 WAR via changes in the way Defensive Run Saved is calculated. For the 34-year-old third baseman, the loss adds a bit of insult to the injury of this delayed season, which won’t make it any easier for him to build what is admittedly a long-shot case for the Hall of Fame.

B-Ref’s version of WAR is different from that of FanGraphs, but as bWAR is the currency for JAWS, it’s of particular interest to me. While the Hall of Fame itself is as closed right now as any museum due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hall arguments are never out of season, nor is taking stock of greatness, particularly when it provides a diversion from considering stockpiles of toilet paper and shortages of N95 masks. B-Ref’s adjustments are hardly unprecedented for the site, which adds new data annually. The earliest boundaries for game logs and play-by-play data have moved backwards by decades over the years, for example, and last year’s big-ticket addition was a major update to catchers’ defensive statistics for the 1890-1952 period.

Reordered for their chronological effect, this year’s update has incorporated the following:

• New Retrosheet Game Logs (1904-07)
• Caught Stealing Totals from Game Logs (1926-40)
• Baserunning and Double Plays from play-by-play data (1931-47)
• Defensive Runs Saved changes (2013-19)
• Park factor changes (2018)

As I noted last week, the career WAR totals of 11 Hall of Fame position players swung by at least 2.5 WAR, some positive and others negative. Where Lombardi was the biggest loser in that update, shortstop Arky Vaughan was the biggest gainer from among the enshrined; his 5.1-WAR gain was the second-largest swing overall, 0.1 less than that of three-time All-Star Lonny Frey (a teammate of Lombardi’s with the Reds from 1938-41). Because nobody needed 3,000 words from me in the first installment of a series as we await the green light on the 2020 season, I didn’t publish the table of the position-by-position changes or delve into the effects on other groups of players, such as Donaldson and his contemporaries. This time around, we’ll do just that. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no baseball right now. Heck, there’s no anything right now; Joe Buck is offering to do play-by-play of domestic chores:

I have good news for you –
While we’re all quarantined right now without any sports, I’d love to get some practice reps in. Send me videos of what you’re doing at home and I’ll work on my play-by-play. Seriously! https://t.co/txAGBLPBGz

— Joe Buck (@Buck) March 22, 2020

But if you’re in the mood for some baseball, you’re in luck. Brad Johnson of RotoGraphs has organized a 30-person Out Of The Park league with human managers for every team. Partially, some of the fun will be providing updates and talking about team strategy. Candidly, we’re all looking for something to write about, and describing the machinations of our very own team is too good to pass up.

But we can do more. I’m managing the Milwaukee Brewers. Rather than simply tell readers what my team is doing, I’m opening it up to the crowd. We, as a FanGraphs community, will be running the Brewers. Maybe it will work well. Maybe it’ll be a disaster. Either way, though, I think it’ll be a lot of fun.

I’m going to lay out a few ground rules. You’re not getting to vote on whether we should trade Christian Yelich for a bag of nickels. We shouldn’t. There’s no point in taking a vote on that. And we’re not going to legislate the overall direction of the team — we, the Brewers front office, are going to operate under budget constraints while attempting to make the playoffs in a competitive NL Central. Read the rest of this entry »

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

This is the beginning of our second week of daily updates on the COVID-19 pandemic, and around the world things have only continued to escalate. Just on Sunday, it was reported that Rand Paul became the first United States senator to test positive for the virus, news he apparently received just after going to the gym while awaiting test results; four other Republican senators, including Mitt Romney, were forced to self-isolate because of recent contact with Senator Paul. Later in the day, a $1.8 trillion stimulus bill stalled in the Senate, pushing back any action until early this week. Meanwhile, according to The Washington Post, cases in the United States jumped by 38% on Sunday, with the new total exceeding more than 34,000 positive tests and 470 deaths nationwide.

Inside the baseball world, however, it was a strangely quiet weekend. After last week saw a steady flow of news regarding how teams will compensate the most vulnerable people in their employ during the outbreak — that is, stadium workers and minor league players — the weekend was one largely spent watching the dust settle. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t take the time to speculate a bit more about the consequences of what’s to come in the baseball world, as well as some developments on sports overseas.

Without Update on Scheduled Start to Season, Service Time Concerns Increase

Crises such as this one render most other things insignificant. Someone you know or a famous face you recognize gets sick, and suddenly a mortality rate that once seemed low to you is now made real. Big words like “recession” start getting tossed around as even the healthy among us begin losing their jobs en masse. We refresh our news source of choice even more frantically than we already had been, looking for any sign of hope, but every update carries with it more uncertainty, a reminder that the place we’ve wound up in is one we have never been before. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, thank you for continuing to make FanGraphs a part of your day in this difficult time. In an ideal world, or really just a normal one, you’d be diving into a Positional Power Rankings post, or reading a few notes from the field, or perusing something else to get you jazzed for would have been Opening Day on Thursday. Eleven days ago, I had plenty of ideas for that type of content. Suffice it to say, an article about an old ballgame I found on YouTube wasn’t one of them. Still, you’re here, and you’re probably seeking some small semblance of normalcy; I want nothing more than to do the sorts of routine, mundane things I normally wouldn’t have given a second thought. Something like a mid-June baseball game between the Colorado Rockies and the Miami Marlins. That’s some normal, forgettable stuff right there.

So let’s make the best of it. Let’s climb on the way-back machine and travel to a simpler time: June 11, 2015. You remember all the way back then? The ball hadn’t yet been juiced. The Royals were the best team in the American League. Donald Trump was still a few days away from riding down his golden escalator. Matt Harvey was one of the best pitchers in baseball. An age, and just five years, ago.

On that night, the Rockies visited the Marlins. There is nothing remarkable about this game. These were two bad teams already buried in the standings. David Phelps and Chris Rusin were the starting pitchers. There were something like 500 people in the crowd, each going through the motions of a typical early summer evening at the park.

A big part of the fun when you watch an old game is the disorienting collision between what we know now and what we knew then. This game was played the year after Giancarlo Stanton had his face fractured by an up and in fastball. I remember the incident well, as you might. I also knew, but had totally forgotten, that for a time, he wore a personalized helmet with a wire flap in the shape of a “G” meant to protect his jaw. A very slim fraction of the baseball-playing population could pull that off without looking like a dork, but Stanton happens to be just such a player. Read the rest of this entry »

At first you might think baseball is the safest place to be right now. The game is defined by distance: The 90 feet of chalk to first base, the fluctuating placement of an Atlantic League pitchers mound, the 500 feet between Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and a poorly located fastball.

On the field, everybody’s standing far more than six feet apart. But inevitably, distance closes as players congregate at home after a dinger or outfielders perform a choreographed jumping move following a win. Or, most obviously problematic, fans cluster together in the heat of summer, soaking in fluids, inhaling each other’s breath, and scraping against each other’s knees as they make their way to their seats, stepping in puddles of spilled beer and peeled-off band-aids. Really, it’s kind of surprising baseball wasn’t the epicenter of a global pandemic rather than a victim of its cultural impact.

Humans are drawn to each other. Not always, and not everybody, but before, during, and at the end of the game, we come together to celebrate or commiserate or get on the subway. In times like these, in which the future of baseball is left ambiguous given the alarming and very real nature of a planet-wide crisis, it becomes clear that on occasion, distance can be the best thing for us.

As common a tactic as the mound visit is, not having one can be just as valuable. Baseball is full of pitchers who understood the value of distance, and their instinct to maintain it has allowed them to find great success. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things you have to get used to when you work with projections is being wrong. Like, All. Of. The. Time. While I’d like to believe that the projections are accurate and it’s just real life that mucked things up, that isn’t quite how they work. There are always events you didn’t see coming, assumptions you made erroneously, and just plain old irreducible error, all of which are going to thwart you.

On a basic level, you’re supposed to be wrong. Imagine a world in which you knew, for an exact fact, that every team was a coin flip to win every game. With this perfect knowledge, you’d still expect nearly a quarter of the league to win either 73 games or fewer, or 89 games or more, through nothing but luck. For the math-inclined, this is a hypergeometric distribution, not a binomial one; the coin flips are not independent because the win totals will still add up to 2,430 and one team’s win invariably is another team’s loss. Here’s a quick table for some of the win totals, showing the probability of a team winning exactly X games and how many of the teams you’d expect to have won up to X games:

As an example, you’d expect 3.4% of those coin flip teams to win exactly 74 games, with 15% of all teams winning up to 74 games.

But we don’t have anywhere near perfect knowledge about how good a team will be. We’re not even in the same zip code as “near perfect”; we just hope to be on the right continent. As a result, our error bars are going to be significantly larger than even the rather erroneous results you still get with omniscient projections. Read the rest of this entry »

Jarred Kelenic is No. 11 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list, and his bat is the main reason why. As Eric Longenhagen wrote in the 20-year-old outfielder’s scouting profile, “[H]e’s been one of the — if not the — best hitters his age from the time scouts began to see him.” The New York Mets selected Kelenic sixth overall in the 2018 draft out of a Waukesha, Wisconsin high school, then shipped him to the Seattle Mariners in the seven-player mega-deal headlined by Robinson Cano.

Kelenic possesses marquee potential. In 500 plate appearances last year, split between three levels, he slashed a healthy .291/.364/.540, with 23 home runs. Moreover, Kelenic spent the final three weeks in Double-A, a heady accomplishment for a prep-draftee playing in his first full professional season.

I caught up to the fast-tracking youngster two weekends ago as he was taking part in big-league camp. Our conversation began with one of my favorite ice-breaker questions: Do you view hitting as more of an art, or more of a science?

“I think it’s an art,” answered Kellenic. “It’s something that’s developed over time. Kind of like a painting. It takes time to get all of the detail. Hitting is the same way.”

Kelenic credits much of his development to his father, Tom, and to a former minor-league catcher who throws him batting practice back home in Wisconsin. The latter owns STIKS Academy and Sports Training, and according to Kelenic, Sean Smith knows his swing just as well as he does.

Longenhagen called Kelenic’s left-handed stroke “short to the ball,” and the player himself had much the same description when asked to describe his M.O. at the dish. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about advice for working from home, Chris Sale’s Tommy John surgery, concerns about pitcher health in a shortened season, the possibility of playing more doubleheaders when baseball comes back, how late would be too late for the season to start, the overuse, injury, and treatment of pitcher Wes Ferrell, how COVID-19 could affect MLB service time, rewatching old games and FOX Sports Detroit re-airing 2019 Tigers games, and baseball coming back in Japan and South Korea, then (39:58) talk to former minor league pitcher-turned-attorney Garrett Broshuis about the ongoing legal fight for improved pay for minor leaguers, how the pandemic has impacted minor leaguers, grassroots efforts to support temporarily unemployed players, the effect of public pressure on teams and MLB, the potential for a future minor league union, and his new organization, Advocates for Minor Leaguers (plus a postscript on two sets of same-named players).

Audio intro: Mapache, "Life on Fire"
Audio interstitial: Margo Price, "Pay Gap"
Audio outro: Smoke N Bones, "Nobody Knows"

Link to latest FG COVID-19 roundup
Link to Eno on injury spikes
Link to Pages From Baseball’s Past
Link to Wes Ferrell story
Link to article about MLB and ballpark workers
Link to article about lost service time
Link to story about re-airing Tigers games
Link to info on MLB games on YouTube
Link to FG games to rewatch, Part 1
Link to FG games to rewatch, Part 2
Link to article about doubleheaders
Link to article about baseball in Japan and South Korea
Link to Advocates for Minor Leaguers site
Link to Advocates for Minor Leaguers press release
Link to MLB press release about minor league pay
Link to ESPN article on minor league pay
Link to NYT article on Advocates for Minor Leaguers
Link to LAT article on Advocates for Minor Leaguers
Link to Adopt a Minor Leaguer
Link to More Than Baseball
Link to story on the two Mike Smiths
Link to order The MVP Machine

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A day after the Boston Globe reported that Chris Sale had resumed throwing following a shutdown, and two weeks after he was diagnosed with a flexor tendon strain but no new damage to his ulnar collateral ligament, the Red Sox have announced that he’ll undergo Tommy John surgery. The going-on-31-year-old lefty joins the Yankees’ Luis Severino on the short list of star pitchers who will miss all of the 2020 season — however long it may be — following UCL reconstruction, and the Astros’ Justin Verlander among players whose decisions to undergo surgery make more sense in light of the delayed opening to the season.

As I detailed three weeks ago, Sale made just 25 starts amid an uneven season last year; he was fantastic in May and June (2.78 ERA, 1.98 FIP in 71.1 innings) but bad or worse on either side of that stretch before being shut down on August 13 due to elbow inflammation. Though he set career worsts in ERA (4.40) and home run rate (1.47 per nine) — both more than double his 2018 rates — his strikeout rate still ranked second in the majors among pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 29.6% K-BB% fourth, and his 75 FIP- 14th. His 3.6 WAR, despite being his lowest mark since 2011, was more than respectable. That said, Statcast data showed that he had the largest year-to-year dropoff in four-seam fastball velocity of any pitcher from 2018 to ’19, 1.8 mph (from 95.2 mph to 93.4), and the second-largest increase in exit velocity, 3.4 mph (from 84.7 to 87.0).

While Sale paid a visit to Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion last August, he avoided surgery, though he did receive a platelet-rich plasma injection. Although many within the industry have been predicting that the wiry lefty would someday blow out his elbow given his violent delivery — you can find armchair pitching coaches calling him “a ticking time bomb” as far back as 2012, if not earlier — there was no public indication at the time that his injection or his injury were related to his ulnar collateral ligament. This spring, the Red Sox continued to give reassurances that his elbow was fine, even as Sale began spring training behind schedule due to a bout of pneumonia. Read the rest of this entry »