Page 46 - Baseball Analysis News Today

May 4, 2021 Throughout the season, most teams hold weekly meetings with their baseball leadership group, usually involving those at a director level or higher. These are often done via conference call or Zoom, as sometimes there is an executive with the team on a road trip and various scouting officials can be spread across the country (or even internationally) checking out players. Sometimes it’s a brief check-in just to see what everyone is up to, but around once a month, it’s time to dig...

May 4, 2021 Yesterday, I identified and discussed the hitters who have underperformed their xwOBA marks by the most significant margin. The list made for a good initial group of potential “buy at a discount” candidates. Today, we flip to the other end, those hitters most overperforming their xwOBA marks. The gaps here are much smaller than on the underperformer list. Once again, it is important to remember that xwOBA isn’t meant to be predictive, so don’t automatically assume these hitt...

Sporer’s Sandlot. Tonight at 5:30 PM PT/8:30 PM ET, Paul and I will each build teams to enter it and compete, live on Twitch. What lies in store for our heroes? And who will we choose to represent us on the field? You’ll have to watch to find out, but Otis Nixon and 2016 Daniel Murphy are nearly certain to make appearances. Want to remember some old players, learn about some players you’ve never heard of before, and hopefully secure new players as prizes? Join us on the FanGraphs homepage...

We will always include a link to the full Closer Depth Chart at the bottom of the Bullpen Report each day. It’s also accessible from the RosterResource drop-down menu and from any RosterResource page. Please let us know what you think. Notable Workloads: Primary closers or valuable members of a closer committee who have been deemed unavailable or likely unavailable for the current day due to recent workload. Injury News Outlier Saves: Explanation for a non-closer earning a save during the pr...

May 3, 2021 This is the last day to get your pre-orders in for new and classic FanGraphs merchandise! All orders will start shipping May 21. First, there’s the FanGraphs Scorebook T-Shirt, featuring a modern, Statcast-y twist on classic scorekeeping: Then there’s the FanGraphs All-Time WAR Leaders T-Shirt (available in white and vintage black), which uses the names of the all-time FanGraphs batting and pitching WAR leaders as of the start of the 2021 season to construct the FanGraphs logo: ...

May 3, 2021 One month down, five more to go! The final week in April saw the top teams in the American League and National League fall back towards the pack. The standings are pretty compact around the middle, which is as much an indicator of parity as it is a reflection of a wild month of baseball. Scoring is down. Pitching is dominant. Here’s the third week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings. A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (...

May 3, 2021 Seemingly in the blink of an eye, a month of baseball is behind us. With nearly 30,000 plate appearances taken and more than 18,000 batted balls put into play, a month of data is plenty to begin examining league-wide trends and to make some predictions for the rest of 2021. One big question going into this season — and a topic already examined here by both Ben Clemens and Justin Choi — was what the impact of the new baseball would be on the overall offensive environment. As bot...

7:32 1st in hitting, last in pitching: FAAB recommendations for Daniel Lynch and McClanahan? 10 team AL only 7:33 7:33 7:34 Jeff Zimmerman: I was looking for comps on Lynch and had Matz and Rogers. 95 mph fastball with decent non-fastballs and average command. 7:34 Guest: How much should we bid for Daniel Lynch? Do we think he’s here to stay or just a one time start? 7:35 Jeff Zimmerman: In one of the recent Mining the News/Lineups, Moore mentions that the Royals are only calling up guys to s...

May 3, 2021 We’re about one sixth of the way through the season now, so while the sample sizes of performance and advanced underlying metrics remain small, they aren’t completely meaningless like they were a week or two into the season. So let’s begin evaluating surface results on the hitting side by looking at Statcast’s xwOBA and comparing it to actual wOBA. As a reminder, xwOBA is not a predictive metric. It’s backwards looking and should be used the same way you might use SIERA f...

Quick Hits Travis d’Arnaud and Alex Jackson were placed on the IL by the Braves. d’Arnaud was placed on the 60-IL with a torn ligament in his thumb and is expected to miss a large part of the rest of the season. William Contreras was recalled and looks like he will be in line for a starting role moving forward.  Luis Robert was removed from the game on Sunday due to a hip flexor injury. He is expected to hit the IL and be out for an extended period of time.  Jesus Luzardo was placed on th...