Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Bryce Harper’s clutchness and how he’s perceived by fans, Clayton Kershaw’s resurgence, and Mickey Callaway’s comments about analytics, then answer listener emails about the same player batting twice and playing two positions, whether Byron Buxton’s defense has hidden value, career WAR vs. career counting stats, whether players could call balls and strikes better than umpires, and the umpire replacement level in the age of computer-called strike zones, plus Stat Blasts about pitchers whom Mike Trout has faced only once and the Cubs’ extreme home/road split, and a postscript about the Angels’ historic .500-ness and how hitter aging curves have changed.

Audio intro: Courtney Barnett, "Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence"
Audio outro: Dave Mason, "We Just Disagree"

Link to Sam on Harper
Link to Craig on Harper
Link to Ben Clemens on Kershaw
Link to Callaway’s comments
Link to story on the Metrodome’s ventilation system
Link to Chuck Klosterman basketball story
Link to player eyesight story
Link to Ben on young hitters
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Last night, the Cubs entered the bottom the ninth inning with a 5-1 lead and a 98.3% chance of winning the game according to our Play Logs. After recording the first out, the win probability moved up to 99.4%, but after an error, three singles, and a hit batter, the Cubs’ lead was cut to 5-3 and Bryce Harper stepped up to the plate against Derek Holland with the bases loaded, and the Phillies’ win expectancy had moved up to 32.3%. Then it moved up to 100% when this happened:

As far as pitches go, it wasn’t necessarily a bad one. There have been over 500 pitches this season of at least 94 mph in a left-on-left matchup where the pitcher hit the inside corner or further inside. Only 35 such pitches resulted in base hits, with a .276 BABIP and .143 ISO. There were only four homers on pitches like that, and after last night, Harper has two of them, with another coming in June off Max Fried.

Harper’s homer last night took a long time to land. Read the rest of this entry »

We have a sizable collection of players to talk about this week because the two of us have been busy wrapping up our summer looks at the 2020 Draft class over the last couple weeks. This equates to every prospect added to or moved on THE BOARD since the Trade Deadline.

Top 100 Changes
We had two players enter the 50 FV tier in Diamondbacks SS Geraldo Perdomo and Padres C Luis Campusano. Perdomo is in the “Advanced Baseball Skills” player bucket with players like Vidal Brujan, Brayan Rocchio and Xavier Edwards. He’s added visible power since first arriving in the States and had as many walks as strikeouts at Low-A before he was promoted to the Cal League, which has been Campusano’s stomping ground all summer. He’s still not a great catcher but he does have an impact arm, big power, and he’s a good enough athlete that we’re optimistic he’ll both catch and make the necessary adjustments to get to his power in games down the line.

We also moved a D-back and a Padre down in RHP Taylor Widener and 1B Tirso Ornelas. Widener has been very homer prone at Triple-A a year after leading the minors in K’s. His fastball has natural cut rather than ride and while we still like him as a rotation piece, there’s a chance he continues to be very susceptible to the long ball. Ornelas has dealt with injury and swing issues.

On Aristides Aquino
Aristides Aquino was a 50 FV on the 2017 Reds list; at the time, he was a traditional right field profile with big power undermined by the strikeout issues that would eventually cause his performance to tank so badly that he became a minor league free agent. A swing change visually similar to the one Justin Turner made before his breakout (Reds hitting coach Turner Ward comes from the Dodgers) is evident here, so we’re cautiously optimistic Aquino will be a productive role player, but we don’t think he’ll keep up a star’s pace. Read the rest of this entry »

50 games into his major league career, Yordan Alvarez has a 183 wRC+ and has been worth 2.3 WAR. Let’s take a look at what we might be able to reasonably expect from the 22-year-old slugger moving forward. Here is how Alvarez compares to the rest of the league:

When you hit the ball hard and at a good launch angle often, and draw walks often, good things generally happen in the batter’s box. This has been true for Alvarez thus far. According to Statcast’s Erdős number calculations, among the most similar hitters to Alvarez this year are Christian Yelich, Pete Alonso, and Jorge Soler.

Of course, most of the hitters on the major league leaderboards are several years older than Alvarez. At just 22-years-old, he is currently sixth in the major leagues in barrels per plate appearance, behind such hitters as Mike Trout and Joey Gallo, and ahead of hitters like Yelich and Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger. In barrels per batted ball event, he is ninth. No one above him on either list is his age. Alvarez’s xwOBA (.420) is sixth in baseball and also better than two other young bat-first prospects with above average batted ball profiles. Juan Soto, last year’s offensive wunderkind, currently sits at .410, while Keston Hiura is at .365. Soto, who is younger than Alvarez, doesn’t hit the ball quite as hard or do so as often as Alvarez, but he draws more walks. Hiura, who about 10 months older, hits the ball harder more often, but also draws fewer walks and swings and misses more. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Mike Trout celebrated his 28th birthday, and here at FanGraphs, Craig Edwards baked a cake, so to speak, by using some yardsticks to measure Trout’s career to date without considering Wins Above Replacement. As Craig noted here, and as Ben Lindbergh said similarly at The Ringer, WAR and Trout have become rather inextricably linked during the span of his career. The metric’s ability to estimate value in the field and on the bases as well as at the plate has helped us appreciate the completeness of Trout’s game and accelerated our understanding of the breakneck pace at which he has carved out a spot among the very best in history.

With roughly six weeks to go in his age-27 season, Trout already has the highest WAR of any player at that stage. By FanGraphs’ version, his 72.9 WAR is 4.1 ahead of Ty Cobb, while by Baseball-Reference’s version, his 72.1 WAR is 3.1 ahead. Trout has done this despite having reached 120 games played in just six seasons thus far, though by this time next week, he’ll have reached that modest plateau a seventh time.

Less than 15 months ago, before Trout had even turned 27, I noted that he had matched the bWAR-based JAWS standard among center fielders — the average of the Hall of Famers at the position — moving into eighth place in those rankings. Since then, he’s climbed up to sixth, with a clear shot to surpass Ken Griffey Jr. for fifth before the month ends. Perhaps more impressively, this week he climbed past Mickey Mantle — Extra! Extra! Millville Meteor Overtakes Commerce Comet! — to take over sole possession of third place in seven-year peak (65.2), with Thursday night’s 4-for-4 showing against the White Sox, featuring his 40th homer of the season (one short of his career high, set in 2015) breaking what had been a tie that had lingered for a few days. Here, have a dinger:

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in April, I wrote about how the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) had de-juiced their baseballs, and how the offensive environment in the league appeared to be reflecting that change. If you remember from the piece, in March, the KBO conducted a test on a batch of new baseballs to test their coefficient of restitution (COR). It was supposedly reduced from a range of .4123-.4374 to .4034-.4234, while the ball size was increased by 1 millimeter and 1 gram. However, the test brought out some interesting results, as they found several defective balls with a COR more in line with the 2018 baseballs mixed in with the new, less-lively ball.

It doesn’t mean that this season has looked like 2018, though. In fact, the changes became clear in a month’s worth of games, but now that it’s mid-August, I thought I’d give you an update with a bigger sample size. I also thought it would be interesting to see how the de-juiced balls interact with Korea’s warm summer weather. The 2019 KBO regular season is about two-thirds of the way through, and league-wide temperatures have risen enough to see if hotter temperatures have caused an uptick in power that might counteract the effects of the new ball.

Here is how the overall league offensive numbers look this year, compared to those of last year:

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last decade, we’ve seen a change in the demographics of baseball, with playing time shifting away from older, declining veterans toward younger players still in their prime. There’s a good reason for that, as each new generation of player entering the majors has been getting better and better relative to their older peers. Baseball’s owners have capitalized on this development — those younger, better players are also much cheaper. And teams have not reinvested those gains elsewhere on their rosters, as major league payrolls have stagnated the last few seasons while amateur talent expenditures have become hard-capped. Given the emphasis on younger players, it might be reasonable to believe that when it comes to fielding a winning team, payroll matters less than ever. But that hasn’t been the case this season.

This piece marks the fifth season during which I’ve taken a look at the standings in August and compared them to Opening Day payrolls (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018) and for the most part, the relationship between Opening Day payrolls and wins has been relatively low. I’ve used the Pearson correlation coefficient “r” to track the strength of the relationship between the two and from the end of the strike through 2011, the average correlation per year was .45. In the last seven seasons heading into this season, though, the correlation coefficient between the two was higher than .31 only once, when it was a high .62 back in 2016.

In past years, I’ve noted that while individual season correlations have remained low, looking at either sustained spending or using Forbes franchise valuations to gauge a team’s overall financial might tends to show that the relationship between spending, wealth, and winning remains strong. That logic remains for this season, and indeed, the relationship between wins and payroll trails only that of 2016 season this decade:

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 867

I welcome FanGraphs writer Craig Edwards back to the program to detail the current playoff landscape, check in on some tight (and not-so-tight) division races, and assess the October chances of Craig’s beloved St. Louis Cardinals. We also, though neither of us were aware of it at the time, engage in a series of reverse jinxes, before I force Craig to make several too-early predictions concerning year-end award recipients.

Be sure to read Craig’s recent pieces on José Altuve and José Ramírez, and to follow him on twitter.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @megrowler on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 43 min play time.)

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Over the past few seasons, fans of the Cincinnati Reds have gotten used to watching third baseman Eugenio Suárez improve year after year. When he was acquired from the Detroit Tigers in December 2014 with former first-round pick Jonathon Crawford in exchange for Alfredo Simon, he was a glove-first shortstop who had a decent track record of hitting in the minors but lacked any loud offensive tools. After arriving in Cincinnati, he began to piece his game together one season at a time.

In 2015, he showed modest power but walked just 4.3% of the time and was a liability in the field. In 2016, he kept that power but improved his glove and doubled his walk rate, finishing with a 93 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR. In 2017, he boosted his power as well as his ability to walk while becoming a plus defensive third baseman, and he finished with a 116 wRC+ and 3.9 WAR. Last year, his power once again took a great step forward, and his wRC+ swelled to 135 while his WAR stayed at 3.9.

That kind of exponential growth was exciting to see out of Suárez, who signed a 7-year, $66-million extension before the 2018 season. He clocked in at No. 32 on our Trade Value rankings last year, and he appeared to be just a step away from the game’s elite third basemen. This season, however, the 28-year-old hasn’t provided quite the same value.

At 33 homers, he’s one away from tying a career high with six weeks left on the schedule. But aside from another precipitous increase in power, his numbers elsewhere have deteriorated from where they stood last year. His wRC+ is down 16 points, and his typically consistent strikeout rate is up four points. Those aren’t concerning figures on their face — he’s still well above average in terms of cumulative offensive production thanks to a 10% walk rate in addition to his power — but it’s his underlying contact stats that tell an unpleasant tale. Read the rest of this entry »