Relievers. Who are they? What do they do? Until one bright spring day in 1993, nobody knew the answers to these simple questions. Then, MLB scientists made a breakthrough in their labs in the bowels of the Astrodome, and Mariano Rivera sprung forth from his mother’s womb fully formed and sawed off Jason Giambi. But the question they couldn’t answer is ‘what is the best season ever by a reliever?’. At the time, the technology was simply not expansive enough to begin delving into this question. Now, thanks to huge leaps in science, we can finally answer something that has plagued the minds of man since the dawn of humanity.
Now, clearly, the answer is Francisco Rodriguez, since he’s the single season save leader and that’s the best stat to measure relievers by. But let’s ignore that.
You can just look up which reliever has the most WAR in a single season, which is 1975 Goose Gossage by bWAR (8.2!?!?!) or 1977 Bruce Sutter by fWAR (5.2). The reason for this difference is because BaseballReference uses runs allowed to calculate bWAR, and FanGraphs uses FIP to calculate fWAR. Since relievers pitch such small sample sizes, there’s often a large gap between their FIP and their runs allowed (RA). Since we’re looking at the best season, and not the best player, I’m going to use bWAR (and thus RA) for this exercise.
(If you don’t know what FIP is, it stands for Fielding Independent Pitching, which looks at only the outcomes of at-bats which are solely between the pitcher and the batter - home runs, walks, and strikeouts. These stats are thrown together and then given a normalizing factor so that the average league FIP matches the average league ERA. FIP is a wonderful predictive tool, to the point where it is more predictive of a pitcher’s ERA next year than a pitcher’s ERA is. I’d rather not use it here because it doesn’t look at the actual results - if I was trying to find the best reliever, and not the best season, then I’d use FIP.)
Using a simple value added stat is incredibly biased towards 1970’s middle relievers who would throw 100+ innings in a year, though. WAR is a counting stat, so the more they pitch, the more they rack up. What about bWAIP? One BBRef search later, and I have this table.

Player	bWAR	bWA100IP	IP	Year	Tm
Ted Abernathy	6.2	5.84	106.1	1967	CIN
Steve Mingori	3.3	5.87	56.2	1971	CLE
Michael Jackson	3.8	5.94	64.0	1998	CLE
Bruce Sutter	6.5	6.07	107.1	1977	CHC
Jose Mesa	3.9	6.09	64.0	1995	CLE
Zack Britton	4.1	6.11	67.0	2016	BAL
Mariano Rivera	4.3	6.13	70.2	2008	NYY
John Hiller	7.9	6.31	125.1	1973	DET
Terry Fox	3.7	6.38	58.0	1962	DET
Jonathan Papelbon	5.0	7.34	68.1	2006	BOS

This is the top 10 relief seasons by bWA100IP, minimum 45 IP. This is a fairly tight pack all the way up until the final entry, where Papelbon’s 2006 leads by near 1bWA100IP. This seems like a good candidate for the best relief year ever.
(Interestingly enough, Bill James’ list of the 100 best reliever seasons ever, written in 2007, doesn’t include Jonathan Papelbon’s 2006 season. Joe Nathan’s 2006, where Nathan pitched the same number of innings and had a much worse ERA, made the list at #27. This is a reminder that Bill James is a fallible human being.)
So, if your criteria for best year by a reliever is bWA100IP, then the best option, by far, is Jonathan Papelbon. But before we look at the other options, here’s why Papelbon’s season was the best.
There have been nine reliever seasons (min. 40 IP) with a lower ERA than Papelbon’s 2006 0.92. Why aren’t they higher in bWAIP?

Player	WAR	IP	ERA	Year	Tm	R	ER
Zack Britton	4.1	67.0	0.54	2016	BAL	7	4
Joey Devine	1.9	45.2	0.59	2008	OAK	7	3
Fernando Rodney	3.7	74.2	0.60	2012	TBR	9	5
Dennis Eckersley	3.3	73.1	0.61	1990	OAK	9	5
Rob Murphy	2.5	50.1	0.72	1986	CIN	4	4
Rich Gossage	2.3	46.2	0.77	1981	NYY	6	4
Blake Treinen	4.1	80.1	0.78	2018	OAK	12	7
Bill Henry	2.5	52.0	0.87	1964	CIN	9	5
Dennys Reyes	2.2	50.2	0.89	2006	MIN	8	5
Jonathan Papelbon	5.0	68.1	0.92	2006	BOS	8	7

To begin with, bWAR uses RA for its calculations, which uses both earned and unearned runs. Dennys Reyes, Bill Henry, Blake Treinen, Rich Gossage, Fernando Rodney, Dennis Eckersley, and Joey Devine all had more RA/IP in their respective seasons. (The difference between their ERA and their bWAIP isn’t solely explained by this, but it’s good enough for now. We’ll get to that in a moment). This leaves 1986 Rob Murphy and 2016 Zach Britton. Why don’t they stack up?
The answer is a little thing I’d like to call ‘run environment’, which is encapsulated by BaseballReference’s stat RA9Avg. It takes what an average pitcher’s run allowed/9 innings (RA/9) was that year, and then adjusts it for park factors, for the defense, and for who that specific pitcher faced. If a pitcher had a relatively high run environment, it means he would be pitching in batter’s parks, faced tough opponents, had a bad defense behind him, etc. For a perfectly average pitcher, their RA/9 will match their run environment.
For Murphy, his run environment was 4.11. For Britton, it was 4.32. For Papelbon, it was a whopping 5.00. This makes a huge difference - Papelbon may have gotten slightly worse results, but he was starting from a much more difficult positions.
For another good way to illuminate the differences run environments can cause, I can bring up one of my favorite WAR comparisons! In 1965, Jim Maloney equalled Sandy Koufax in bWAR (and surpassed him if you count batting WAR) despite throwing 80 fewer innings with an ERA 0.50 higher. How did he do this? Simple. Sandy Koufax played in cavernous Dodger Stadium with a strong Dodger defense behind him, and so had a run environment of 3.49 RA/9. Jim Maloney, pitching at batter-friendly Crosley Stadium with a poor Reds defense behind him, had a run environment of 4.34, 0.85 more than Koufax. Since Maloney is expected to give up far more runs than Koufax and only gives up somewhat more runs, he has a large bWAIP lead.
Run environment is 99% of the explanation behind ‘why does WAR give this weird result?’ questions.
Most of the best reliever seasons by ERA have relatively a low run environment - after all, good defense and a friendly park factor really helps a reliever keep the runs down. Fernando Rodney had a run environment of 3.72 in his 0.60 ERA season, because he pitched at the Tropicana and had the Rays defense behind him. Mariano Rivera consistently had a high run environment (career average of 4.72) due to pitching in Yankee Stadium with horrible, horrible, horrible Yankees defenses behind him going against tough AL East opponents. He never had that ‘lucky’ season with a sub-1 ERA, which would likely have put him on this list. He has to live with the stigma of simply being the greatest reliever of all time, unfortunately. Papelbon had an incredible season in a run environment that was incredibly ill-suited for having an incredible season, so his bWAIP is leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else.
So is Jonathan Papelbon’s 2006 the greatest single season by a reliever ever? Well, maybe. Pound-for-pound, it certainly is. But some relievers can pound more often than others, even if they're not pounding quite as hard. Should 70’s and 80’s relievers be penalized for being slightly worse in twice as many innings as Papelbon? John Hiller’s 1973 is a good candidate if you prefer quantity over quality - 7.9 bWAR in 125 innings in relief. Of course, you can flip it around - why penalize Papelbon for pitching less when relievers of that era were expected to pitch less? With the bWAIP, it’s safe to say Papelbon was more dominant in his role than Hiller was in his.
Are there arguments for other pitchers and other seasons? Absolutely. Perhaps you prefer FIP for some reason - then you can probably give the nod to 2003 Eric Gagne, with 4.7 fWAR in 82 innings. I don’t think FIP works well for this type of analysis, because it doesn’t deal with actual results, but you do you. Perhaps you want to dive into BABIP and pick a season that wasn't as lucky - this seems like a fool's errand, since the best reliever seasons are all lucky ones.
Of course, if you believe the best ability is availability, the nod goes to Mike Marshall, who appeared in 106 (!?!) games for the 1974 Dodgers. His 2.42 ERA is tarnished somewhat by the 3.33 run environment at Dodger Stadium at the time, however. Marshall apparently still has very interesting ideas on training to be able to pitch that many innings, but no MLB training staff will let him near their pitchers for some reason.
Now, I know we’d all like someone else to have the best relief season ever in baseball - someone who didn’t attack teammates, someone who didn’t watch porn in the clubhouse, someone who doesn’t hit Manny Macha - ok, I’m fine with that one. But why couldn’t it have been someone like Eric Gagne, or Robb Nen, or Heathcliff Slocumb? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything negative about those guys. Maybe it’s just time to move on, and let bygones be bygones.
As I understand, Papelbon is just 24 hours from picking a new team, so it’ll be exciting to see him back in the league. Hopefully, he doesn’t choke his comeback.

Player of the Day (1/10/21): Aaron Judge

[OC] Why Paul Depodesta might be making the Browns the most efficient team in the league in terms of spending, talent, and wins.

We all know Paul Depodesta as the analytical "guru" that was brought in to change how the Browns process the game of football, and morph the way in which the Browns evaluate talent and success.

Depo is a pretty tight lipped executive, he likes to lurk in the shadows and does his work rather than live in the spotlight like other execs. Every indication from the team this year has pointed to Depo having a larger say in operational decisions and talent evaluation, as opposed to years past it seems (Looking at you Dorsey, Freddie, and Hue). But I really wanted to get a deeper understanding of what he was bringing to the table, so I did some research, read his quotes, watched his interviews, and gleamed what I could about his expertise and processes. I thought I’d share some of my key takeaways.
Paul learned from A’s GM Billy Beane and sabermetrics creator Bill James to challenge accepted trends and the inefficient understanding of sports. Our eyes deceive us when it comes to talent, we have inherent biases and an inaccurate understanding of what makes a team good. More specifically he challenges the notion of what makes an exceptionally talented team, and how/when/why you acquire the players that make up that team. What Depo has done in every other sporting franchise that he has been a part of, is to create and test a simple equation for wins. Actually wins added I should say. What can a team do to create wins through a player’s output? In baseball it has been relatively easy historically, more runs scored and less runs allowed = more wins. Over a long season and a large enough dataset you can almost predict these two things before you ever play a game just by looking at your players’ key sabermetrics (within a margin of error of course). Depo and Bill Beane did just that in the early 2000s and revolutionized the game of baseball. This is in my opinion Depo’s bread and better. He simplifies the grand scope of a sport into this easily digestible question. This is probably the question he posed to the Brown’s ownership on his first day. The mark for the A’s? 95 wins. That’s how many it takes to get to the playoffs on average in baseball. In the NFL it’s about 11 wins, and that’s the goal for the Browns.
The challenge for Depo back then was quantifying how runs came to be in a game. Was it RBIs? No. Was it Batting Average? Definitely No. Was it Walks? Yes, sort of. It was a combination of putting people on base in any way possible and then hitting them home consistently. Depo valued one stat over all others, OBPS (On Base Percentage Plus Slugging). It didn’t matter how the player got there as long as they put themselves in a place to score and the next person brought them home. The A’s went as far as to seek out laughably unconventional ballplayers as long as they filled this stat column (fat guys, old guys, short guys, slow guys, etc). And they told everyone from the minors up that they needed to walk more as well. The next question we might have at this point, is does a similar stat exist in football, or can we create an equation that produces a valuable football stat like OBPS to baseball? * Well no not really, at least it’s not a totally provable hypothesis as of yet. Notably because there are lot more positions in football and each position is graded on a different scale of course. Although organizations like Football Outsiders and Pro Football Focus do try their damndest to find these value stats for each position, nevertheless their methodology may still be flawed. DYAR and DVOA stats are a good jumping off point in this area as well https://www.footballoutsiders.com/info/methods.

*An educated guesser might speculate an indicator similar to OBPS for a team offense is a combination of scoring efficiency and ball control, for defense maybe a combination of turnovers created and red zone stops. But who knows honestly, smarter men than me have probably pondered this for much longer than I have and been paid very well for their thoughts. Paul has indicated in interviews though that he and the Browns front office may have found something similar to this treasured sabermetric in football but he’s very coy and hush-hush regarding tangible football stats the team looks for.

https://youtu.be/CGSDm-xQNlE?t=157 here’s just one example of him discussing draft indicators.
In football it’s increasingly more difficult to suss out indicators that player stats correlate with team success. First there's much less data to work with, the NFL has 16 games a year, college even less. The other challenge is that the game is played wholly differently depending on schemes, players, and situation. Think Air Raid vs. Power run. And thus the players in these systems must adapt to their surroundings. Lastly the talent pool is much smaller in football than in baseball, 40 rounds of drafting are more forgiving for finding talent than 7 rounds of course. Which leads to another Depo fact, Playing time and performance at the college level is much more valuable than raw potential and athleticism. He spells this out in Moneyball a lot. The A’s never drafted high school players, contrary to all other MLB teams they despised young five tool ballplayers. In fact they really only drafted college players with significant statistical output and playing time to back the data up. If you look at the Browns’ most recent drafts then you will notice this exact trend being used especially with top draft picks. Take a look:
Baker Mayfield: 4 year starter. NCAA record holder & Heisman Winner
Denzel Ward: 3 years of play, 2 years starting. All American
Nick Chubb: 4 year starter. SEC record holder
Jedrick Wills: 3 year starter. All American
Harrison Bryant: 3 year starter. All American. Mackey Award
Grant Delpit: 3 year starter. 2 x All American, Thorpe Award
Jacob Phillips: 3 year starter
Donovan Peoples Jones: 3 year starter
Outlier: Greedy Williams
These players simply produced in college and they produced over multiple years. Depodesta sees a correlation between on field production and future success for sure. Physical traits are always secondary in this regard.
I believe Depo values a few positions more than any other on the football field as well. Number one is The Quarterback (I know that’s obvious). They are the hitter in football. They control the offense, the majority of scoring, and the flow of the game. I think that Depo saw something in Baker Mayfield that lit up his talent indicator more than any other college player this decade besides maybe Mahomes and Burrow. He doesn’t just want a game manager; he wants an extra efficient game controller, somebody who puts their team in a position to score on every possible drive (similar to getting on base in baseball). College Baker is a stat nerd’s wet dream. The mixture of total yards, touchdowns, turnover efficiency, and completions is truly a sight to behold. Just take a look at these statistical comparisons before his draft https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2018/qbase-2018

Top QBASE Projections, 1997-2017

QBASE Players

Philip Rivers 1964
Carson Palmer 1916
Donovan McNabb 1799
Baker Mayfield 1480
Russell Wilson 1288
Peyton Manning 1279
Marcus Mariota 1277
Byron Leftwich 1216
Aaron Rodgers 1216
Ben Roethlisberger 1211
That’s rarified air Baker is put in there, and it was an important indicator for me to jump on his bandwagon early on. Although I will say don’t be totally surprised if the Browns move on from Baker if this year he doesn’t show better production in the second half. Billy Beane and Depo regularly traded or let walk great players if they felt they could find similar efficiency in the market or draft. Eg. Jason Giambi, Ben Grieve, Carlos Pena to name a few.
^Side ^note: Screw Freddie Kitchens and the rest of the former offensive staff for setting Baker back a year by the way. In my opinion, if we had Stefanski last year then Baker most likely wouldn’t have regressed as sharply as we saw.
Another position group he most likely values significantly is the O Line. Without them the offensive efficiency grinds to a halt both throwing the ball and running the ball. Expect lots of money and draft capital to be tied up in these guys every year. Lastly I think on the defensive side he values disruptive players, guys who grind the game to a halt and create offensive opportunities through turnovers. It also gives our "hitter" aka quarterback a chance to score immediately, and damn is our turnover rate good this year. https://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/2020/opp.htm
The 49ers front office built their team around this concept as well last year. Defensive Ends and Cornerbacks come to mind immediately here as positons of importance. I don’t think the team expected Olivier Vernon and Greedy Williams to be out for as many games as they have been which may have thrown a slight wrench in the franchise’s plan sadly.
A point hammered home by Depo repeatedly this year is that Everyone in the organization from the top down has to be on the same page when it comes to macro strategies in sports. That includes the owner, GM, scouts, and coaches. Indicated by Depo here: https://youtu.be/JjFYRSikVEk?t=53 Depo expressed that's why he brought in Andrew Berry and Kevin Stefanski specifically this season. Depo and Haslam explained to them what system they were trying to build for the Browns and they needed everyone on board before signing off on their hires (Dorsey and Hue didn’t buy in totally). Billy Beane realized this organizational view early on and his disciple Paul definitely preaches this as well. Now they have a cavalcade of Ivy League economics majors running an NFL team with the same goal in mind, get more wins through any means possible.
In Oakland he was tasked with finding out how to add wins with talent that cost substantially less than his opposition. I mean we’re talking magnitudes less of capital ($40m vs $140m). It was thought impossible to compete with large team payrolls at the time. Baseball’s commissioner even put together a panel of economic experts that flat out told him that professional baseball was broken and that competitiveness relied solely on the amount of money spent on talent. Billy Beane and Depo scoffed at that conclusion and proceeded to drag a bunch of misfits and outcasts to Oakland’s best regular season ever. He also did similar with the Mets ten years later (RA Dickey anyone?).
Which brings me to the last and possibly most observable takeaway from the browns strategy this season. Homegrown talent is significantly cheaper than acquired talent and you should use that homegrown talent for as long as possible and for as little money as possible. The Browns have the lowest salary in the league right now and are the only team in the bottom 10 salaries to have 4+ wins. https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/cap/
It’s hard to say for certain if Depo is directly responsible for this but it’s safe to assume that he brought a little moneyball swagger to our beloved team.
The extensions of key players will be something to watch out for this season and next season as well (Myles is secured, Ward and Baker are next). The A’s were masters of replacing outgoing or expiring talent with cheaper players and regularly fleeced teams with trades that seemed insignificant and stupid at first glance. If the Browns make a trade this year then look for them to add a player with at least two years remaining on their contract and probably someone who isn’t flashy or raw but produces consistently in key categories.
It’s hard to tell how much of our success this year so far is due to Depodesta’s overall decision making and influence, or Dorsey’s drafting and player evaluation (mind you we have kept most of the scouting staff from the past 4 years as well). I lean towards the former personally. Really it’s the first time in forever that I’ve felt the team is in good hands and that we are working towards something exceptional with clear goals in mind. I love where the Browns stand right now in the division and I love where they could be in the next few years. I think we finally have a culture and strategy that is set to acquire and utilize talent like our franchise has never seen. Paul Depodesta might be the shadowy puppet master that some people imagine but I think simply he is man that is able to communicate clear and concise goals and make an exceptionally efficient plan on how to achieve them.
TLDR. I read Moneyball and had a wet dream about the Browns making the playoffs finally and then losing to New York.

How much (negative) WAR would a potato accrue playing centerfield for a Major League team for a full season?

This is part 2 of my "How much WAR would ________ get?" series. You can find How much (negative) WAR would I accrue playing on a Major League team for a full season? here.

So yeah. I wasn't satisfied with just knowing how much negative WAR I would get. I needed to know how much WAR an inanimate object, say, a potato, would cost a Major League team. And more importantly, am I closer in value to said potato than I am to an actual big leaguer?
Once more there are assumptions. This is a magic potato. It has everyone convinced it is actually a competent center fielder. So no rearranging the fielders to compensate for having an inanimate object on your roster. But as soon as the play starts, all involved simultaneously say "oh fuck" as they realize they have been fooled into believing this tuber can play baseball.
We will go through the components as we did last time, rearranging the order a bit.

Positional Adjustment

Tate will be manning center for a full season. 162 games of CF is worth 2.5 runs. Looking good so far!

Batting

We can discuss whether a potato (or a carrot, for that matter) even with a human-sized strike zone would pick up a couple of walks (I think so, actually), but for the purposes of this exercise, we will assume Tate will go .000/.000/.000. Which brings us to the matter of plate appearances. As everyone knows, magic potatoes will fool people into believing they are decent lead-off men. So Tate will lead off 162 games. According to Baseball Reference's batting splits page, in 2019 there were 22824 PAs from the #1 spot in the lineup. This averages to ~761 per team. However, never making it on base will seriously diminish Tater's plate appearances. In 2019, leadoff hitters had an overall OBP of .335. This comes to a total of 255 on-base events for the average leadoff hitter. So I think 1 out of every 9 of those missing on base events will cost an individual player a PA. So we can subtract 28 PA from the 761 an average leadoff hitter would have, leaving Tate with 733.
From here we convert to wOBA. It's .000. That was easy.
We then determine wRAA ((.000^{^wOBA} -.320^{^lg} ^{^wOBA} )/1.157^{^wOBA} ^{^Scale} )x733^{^PA} = -202.7 wRAA
Well there goes the positive RAR we started with. -200.2 RAR

Baserunning

Here's the thing. If you don't get on base, you don't get (or lose) baserunning WAR.
WAIT! That's not true! By never hitting into a double play, Tate can actually come out positive in this component. In 2019, there were 32598 double play situations:

	1--, 0 out	12-, 0 out	1-3, 0 out	123, 0 out	1--, 1 out	12-, 1 out	1-3, 1 out	123, 1 out
Total 2019	9974	2574	798	664	12158	2923	1864	1643
Percent of total PA	.053	.014	.004	.004	.065	.016	.010	.009
In 733 PA	39	10	3	3	48	11	7	6
Total 2019 GIDP	996	248	53	65	1326	434	185	159
GIDP Percentage	.010	.096	.066	.098	.109	.148	.099	.097
In 733 PA	3.9	1	0.2	0.3	5.2	1.7	0.7	0.6
GIDP Value	.411	.565	.777	.961	.224	.429	.478	.752
Final Value	1.608	.551	.162	.245	1.167	.732	.348	.470

Let me explain. I took all double play situations found what percentage each one was of the total season PAs. I then multiplied them by 733 to determine how many of each situation Tate would face in a season. I then took the total of double plays in each situation to average determine the likelihood of a DP in each one. I then multiply that by the number of DP situations our hypothetical potato will be in. Knowing that Tate will never make contact, we know he will also never hit into a double play. Knowing this, every double play an average player hits will add value to Tater's WAR. To determine the negative impact of a DP, you take the run expectancy of the base-out state had the player made just a plain old out (if they don't make an out it gets incorporated in the batting section), and subtract the run expectancy of the base-out state after the double play. One I get those, I multiplied that by the number of double plays Tate hypothetically saved by never making contact. The last thing to do is just add up those values. This gets us to a 5.3 RAR for baserunning!
-194.9

Replacement Level

If Replacement Level Runs = (570 x (MLB Games/2,430)) x (Runs Per Win/lgPA) x PA then 733 PA will be (570x(2430/2430))x(10.296/186516)x733 giving Tater a boost of 23.1 RAR.
-171.8 RAR

Fielding

This last category is the most difficult to determine, and thusly the most controversial. For weeks I've been thinking about how I could capture the damage done to a team by replacing their center fielder with a potato. I tried understanding UZR and DRS, but that stuff is impenetrable. Alas, I came up with an idea. I would use brute force. I will go through every ball hit to center in a team's season, and mark down what I think the outcome would have been had the center fielder vanished as the ball hit the bat. If there's another fielder there to make the play, nothing changes. If there's one not too far away, maybe it changes a little. If there's nobody else in the vicinity, it would change a lot. But first, I needed a team. I settled on the Reds because their outfield was close to average by both UZR and DRS, in 2020 and also in the span of 2018-2020. In addition, the same holds true of their center fielders. I would never have been able to do this if it were not for two things. Firstly, Baseball Savant. The ability to filter for every play to your exact specifications and have video for each of those plays in the list was essential. The second is the 2020 season. There is no way in hell I would go through a full season's worth of balls to the outfield. But in 2020, Reds centerfielders only made 227 plays out there. Much more manageable. Now, I want to warn you as I was doing the list I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being too conservative with my estimates. It felt like I was marking too many would-be-triples as doubles and too many would-be-inside-the-park-home-runs as triples. I only ended up with like four homers which is probably way too little. I tried to compensate and make up for it by stretching it here and there, but I don't think that did much. I'll post the spreadsheet HERE and the Baseball Savant page it's based on HERE, and if anyone wished to re-do the list, I'll be happy to add it in an edit. So here's what I came up with. In 2020, 227 balls were fielded by Reds center fielders. 86 of them went for singles, 22 went for doubles, 3 went for triples. There were no inside-the-park home runs. There were 109 catches made, plus 7 sac flies. This gives opponents a .490 wOBA on balls hit to Reds center fielders. I didn't check it, but I'm going to assume that's close to average. After going through each play one by one, I determined that if there were a potato in center instead of a human, they'd end up with 52 outs, 4 sac flies, 28 singles, 96 doubles, 43 triples, and 4 inside-the-park home runs. If that seems like too little, you're probably right. But this is what I came out with and we're going to go with it. If this were to happen, opposing batters would end up with a .980 wOBA. From here, we treat it the same as we would treat a hitter's wOBA. We determine the amount of opportunities a center fielder would get in a full season. In 2019, center fielders made 20962 plays. That's about 700 per team over a full season. So we'll use the same formula we use to determine batting runs.
((.980^{^wOBA} -.490^{^lg} ^{^wOBA} )/1.1857^{^wOBA} ^{^Scale} )x700^{^{Opportunities}} = 289.3 runs
-461 RAR
Hoo boy. That's quite a number. If we convert it to wins we end up with close to -45 WAR. You'd need three of me to equal the damage this guy would do. If you had Tate in center, you could replace an average right fielder with 1923 Babe Ruth, left fielder with 2002 Bonds, and first baseman with 1927 Gehrig and still come out 5 WAR behind. -45 wins turns a 100 win team into a 55 win team. It turns a .500 team into a 36 win team. Before we even start counting WAR, we assume a 48 win replacement level. This guy knocks all that out on his own, making you start from scratch.
TL;DR -45 WAR. No, don't ever do this.

How much WAR would a perfect (yet shy) leadoff man accrue in a Major League season?

This is part 3 of my "How much WAR would ________ get?" series. You can find How much (negative) WAR would I accrue playing on a Major League team for a full season? here and How much (negative) WAR would a potato accrue playing centerfield for a Major League team for a full season? here.

That's right, boys and girls. We're back with a new conundrum. Let me set the stage. Speedy McHitterson has been discovered to be a perfect leadoff hitter. He makes every play in center, he steals second at every opportunity, he has a perfect eye, and when he's thrown a strike, he gets a hit every time. However, he's incredibly shy and afraid to overstep his bounds. This means he'll never swing at a pitch outside the zone, even if he knows he can hit it. He also will never go past first base on a hit, so every his is a single. Speedy is afraid of stepping on teammates toes, literally and figuratively, so he won't make any plays in the field that weren't meant for him. He's also fearful of being perceived as too overconfident, so stealing third is out of the question, let alone stealing home. But for the things he does do, he has a 100% success rate.
To the categories!

Positional Adjustment

Speedy, like Tate, will be manning center for a full season. 162 games of CF is worth 2.5 runs.

Replacement Level

As previously established, the average leadoff hitter would have ~761 PA per 162 games. But Speedy is no average leadoff hitter. Speedy will have a 1.000 OBP. Meaning compared to the average 255 on-base events for an average leadoff man, Speedy will have 761, which is an extra 506. Following the logic from last time, getting on base an extra 506 times will result in another 56 PA (If one out of every nine extra on-base events result in an extra PA). Which, in turn, will result in an extra 4 PA (I think). So in the end of the day, Speedy will end up with 821 PA on the season.
So if Replacement Level Runs = (570 x (MLB Games/2,430)) x (Runs Per Win/lgPA) x PA then 821 PA will be (570x(2430/2430))x(10.296/186516)x821 coming out to 25.8 Runs.
28.3 Runs

Fielding

This one, it turns out, is quite simple. Similar to how we determined a potato's fielding runs, we compare this perfect player to the 2020 Cincinnati Reds centerfielders. To recap, in 2020, 227 balls were fielded by Reds center fielders. 86 of them went for singles, 22 went for doubles, 3 went for triples. There were no inside-the-park home runs. There were 109 catches made, plus 7 sac flies. This gives opponents a .490 wOBA on balls hit to Reds center fielders. Speedy, being perfect, would allow a 0 wOBA (his middle name is Fielder). Home run robberies are out of the question because, you know. So we'll compare them the same way we did last time, with the same formula we use to determine batting runs batting runs. First we determine the amount of opportunities a center fielder would get in a full season. In 2019, center fielders made 20962 plays. That's about 700 per team over a full season. So the calculation would go thusly:
((.000^{^wOBA} -.490^{^lg} ^{^wOBA} )/1.1857^{^wOBA} ^{^Scale} )x700^{^{Opportunities}} = 289.3 runs
I just realized something really cool. I actually calculated Tater to have this precise number of negative runs, because his wOBA allowed would be exactly double the average. This means if Speedy and Tate were to alternate games, they would average to a league average fielder.
317.6 Runs

Batting

We've already established a few facts. Speedy McHitterson will get about 821 PA in a season. He does not swing at balls outside the strikezone. He hits every ball in the strikezone for a single. This would result in a 1.000/1.000/1.000 slash line, but we would still need to determine how many walks and hits he'd get. So I put together a little table to figure that out.

Count	Frequency	Zone	Out of Zone	Strike odds	Ball odds	Strike overall odds	Ball overall odds
0-0	1.000	95745	89033	.518	.482	.518	.482
0-1	.518	39460	53598	.424	.576	.220	.298
0-2	.220	14985	33022	.312	.688	.069	.151
1-0	.482	37702	33833	.527	.473	.254	.228
1-1	.552	35402	38838	.477	.523	.263	.289
1-2	.415	25414	44600	.363	.637	.150	.264
2-0	.228	13872	10640	.566	.434	.129	.099
2-1	.418	21098	17739	.543	.457	.227	.191
2-2	.491	37457	33526	.528	.472	.259	.232
3-0	.099	4573	2930	.609	.391	.060	.039
3-1	.251	9652	6289	.605	.395	.152	.099
3-2	.384	21163	16146	.567	.433	.218	.166

So to explain: the "Frequency" column is the overall frequency of the count, assuming no swings (which is important, as I'll explain in a second). This was determined by the following columns. "Zone" is pitches in the strikezone on that count. "Out of zone" is pitches outside the strikezone on that count. The next two columns are the percentages of a ball/strike in each count. Knowing that, we can tell the frequency of each count, if the batter never swung. 0-1 is going to be the odds of a strike on 0-0. 0-2 is going to be the odds of a strike on 0-1, times the odds of 0-1 occurring in the first place. 1-1 is the overall odds of a ball on 0-1 plus the overall odds of a strike on 1-0. We can use this chart to work out the number of walks of Mr. McHitterson. If he swings at every ball in the zone, and they all go for hits, the only way for him to get walked is if he's thrown four straight balls. According to this chart, that only happens 3.9% of the time, which we can now use as his walk rate. A 3.9% walk rate with 821 PA comes out to 32 walks in a season. Which leaves him with 789 hits, all for singles. Let's plug that into our wOBA formula. (32^{^walks} x.69^{^walk} ^{^constant} +789^{^singles} x.870 ^{^single} ^{^constant} )/821^{^PA} =.863 wOBA
And from wOBA to wRAA: ((.863^{^wOBA} -.320^{^lg} ^{^wOBA} )/1.157^{^wOBA} ^{^Scale} )x821^{^PA} = 385.3 wRAA
702.9 Runs

Baserunning

To start, we give Speedy the same boost we gave Tate for never hitting into a double play. Over 821 PA, that comes up to 5.9 Runs. But the real value will come from stealing bases. To refresh, Speedy will steal second every time it's available. Afraid of looking like he's showing off, he will never attempt a double steal or a steal of third or home. We'll make the assumption that overall, the situations he's on base (always) will look like the league averages of occupied bases. There were 55998 plate appearances with men on first in 2019. Of those, 34240 (61%) were just a man on first. 12347 (22%) were first and second. 5026 (9%) were first and third. 4385 (8%) were bases loaded. This means that in 70% of situations with a man on first, second base was open. With a SB rate of 100% of the 70% of times on base (which is identical to the number of PAs) McHitterson had, this puts him at 575 steals for the season (that would be a record, by the way). Fangraphs gives .2 Runs per SB. This adds 115 Runs to our count, which comes out to a total of 121.8 baserunning runs. 824.7 Runs

Conclusion

824.7 is a lot of runs. If we do the 10.296 Runs/Win conversion it comes out to 80.1 WAR. As I said, that's a loooooooot. [Speedy could split time with Tate and they'd still combine for 32.5 WAR. It would take over five Taters to cancel out a Speedy.] EDIT: In my excitement, I accidentally confused myself with a potato. I'm the one who'd combine for 32.5 WAR. I'm the one who would need to be cloned five times to cancel out a Speedy. Tate and Speedy would actually combine to have a 17.6 WAR, which is still better than the best single-season WAR of all time. Two Taters would more than cancel out a Speedy. If you put Speedy on a team that literally did nothing else, he'd still make them roughly a .500 team.
TL;DR 80.1 WAR - Holy Fuck
Coming soon.....If Shohei Ohtani were actually Superman, how much WAR would he get?

A Toast to the 2020 Kansas City Royals!

A Toast to the Kansas City Royals. We welcome you to the Judgement-free Zone as there's a drive into deep left field by castellanos it will be a home run (^{^reds} ^{^didnt} ^{^do} ^{^a} ^{^post} ^{^so} ^{^it} ^{^goes} ^{^here} )
The 2020 season was going to be interesting no matter what for the Royals. The off-season saw a change of ownership, as well as a change of management that was not well-received among fans. After two consecutive seasons of 103 or more losses, largely helped by washed-up veterans and other dead end players no longer in the league, one could only hope that “up” was the only direction for us.

The Farmhands Rise Up

While the Royals farm system is not the best due to unsuccessful drafting in the middle of the decade, they made it a point to obtain every college pitcher under the sun starting in 2018. The first to be drafted was Brady Singer with the 18th overall pick, and he was (very arguably) the best pitching prospect in the organization. And he would be the first to appear on the Royals, starting just the second game of the season--a game the Royals would eventually win. He would later take a no-hitter deep into the 8th inning in September, beginning a strong finish to his season. Due to injuries, COVID, and the Royals trying to be conservative with their prospect use, Singer led the team in games started, innings pitched, strikeouts, and most other good stats excluding Brad Keller.
Kris Bubic (pronounced "boob itch") joined the team just a few days later. His lousy 1-6 record is more of an example of pitcher wins/losses being bad than anything; Bubic had a respectable rookie season that had a 4.32 ERA in 10 starts. Why bring this up? Well, Bubic hadn't even pitched above high-A ball before this season, so the fact that he was called up at all, especially within the first week of the season, shows where the team was at with its starting rotation this year.
Josh Staumont pitched a bit in 2019 to mild success, but this year was when he really turned heads, effortlessly and consistently throwing around 100 MPH. With two powerful pitches fueled by a fabulous manbun, he dazzled the Cubs announcers as he struck out the heart of the Cubs lineup. His legend would become widespread after being on the losing end of one of the worst called balls in the history of baseball, analyzed by Jomboy who was just as starstruck as those Cubs announcers.

Fine Additions

After years of signing hit-or-miss (mostly miss) players to 1-year deals, the Royals would do... the exact same thing 2020. The only notable free agent signings they would make were third baseman Maikel Franco (technically in his second year of arbitration), relief pitcher and KC native Trevor Rosenthal, and relief pitcher plus former Championship Royals closer Greg Holland. The three of them would help define the Royals in 2020. Franco's numbers don't stand out amazingly well on paper, hitting .278 with 8 home runs and a mediocre on-base percentage, but most people who watched our regular season games would agree with Fangraphs that he was the most clutch hitter on the team, leading it in RBIs. Rosenthal was beyond bad in 2019, having an ERA that nearly equaled his innings pitched. Soaked in a phoenix's ashes, he was so good in 2020 that he was considered one of the best relievers on the market, and was sent to the playoff-bound Padres for a pretty solid return. Greg Holland, the anchor of the legendary HDH combo in the Royals' crowning years, also reinvented himself in 2020. The shortened season thinned returns on sold players, so Holland remained in KC beyond the trade deadline, going on to replace Rosenthal as the team's closer with nearly as many saves, boasting a 1.91 ERA in 28 innings. While Franco was non-tendered due to a high salary demand and Rosenthal currently remaining unsigned, Holland has already returned to the Royals for 2021, signing a 1-year deal.

Padre Amigos

The Royals would make two trades with the Padres in 2020, both yielding exciting returns for both teams. In the off-season, the Royals traded reliever Tim Hill and his weird ass submarine delivery for outfielder Franchy Cordero. Although he would miss most of the season with a leg injury, it's hard not to be excited for the effortless power he contains. At the trade deadline, the Padres acquired the prized Trevor Rosenthal, sending Edward Olivares in return. Olivares immediately became a fan favorite on /KCRoyals, hitting .387 in his first week on the team and showing that he is compatible with Royals sacred, demonic base hit magic. For a team lacking in young hitters, these were great returns and defined a newfound friendship with the west coast dads.

Salvinator 2: Splashment Day

Salvador Perez is the most beloved player on the Royals for reasons that are too numerous to fit into one Reddit post. His numbers started to go downhill a few years ago, and 2019 had him sit on a bench for the entire year while recovering from Tommy John. But Salvy is no stranger to working hard, and his effort to make up for lost time would not go unnoticed. In this shortened season, he hit 11 home runs and batted .333, the highest in his career and his first time hitting over .300 since 2012. His OPS was .986, just shy of the top 10 in MLB but by far the highest of his career. This says nothing about his defense, which was great as ever. You might ask, why wasn't he considered for MVP if he was so good this year? Because this was done in less than 40 games. A baffling condition that built up fluid one of his eyes and blurred his vision kept him from playing more than 37 games this season. This still didn't stop him from leading the team in WAR, nearly matching his own totals in both 2018 and 2019. Salvy is known to go on streaks throughout normal seasons, but maybe a long break is what he needed to re-solidify himself as one of baseball's top catchers.

Mc Mc BOOM

Ryan McBroom is a handsome man and hit three pinch-hit home runs for some reason. Within one month, no less! It's actually tied for the franchise record. We're all very proud of him. Here they are in their glory: 1(Aug 11) 2 (Aug 26) 3 (Aug 29)

And the rest

Some miscellaneous bits to explain a bit more of the season; the Royals finished with a 26-34 record, which isn't ideal if you think of winning percentage converting it to about 70-92, but hey, it's an improvement over back-to-back 103+-loss seasons. Mike Matheny was crafty with his lineups and bullpen usage and ended up winning a lot of fans over despite the initial outrage of signing him. Adalberto Mondesi was really bad for a large portion of the season, going into September with a .186 average. Then he stopped being really bad and decided to be really good instead, hitting .356 for the final month. Brad Keller got corona'd and missed a couple of starts at the start of the season, then pitched a 2.47 ERA in nine starts, including a complete game shutout that was saved by our boy Oli. Holland and Staumont combined with Jesse Hahn and Kyle Zimmer for a 1.63 ERA over 94.1 innings in the pen. Ian Kennedy and Matt Harvey were on the team. Second baseman Nicky Lopez was nominated for a Gold Glove. There's a promotion for free Pepsi when Whit Merrifield gets two hits in a game, which he does quite often, so this is a call out to Whit to please change your walk-up music to Pepsiman.

4Ever Gordo

2005 was the worst season in Royals history, where they would lose 106 games. But this is where the future began; with the second overall pick, the Royals drafted Nebraska-native Alex Gordon. Being a third baseman, he was immediately imagined to be the second coming of George Brett and define a new generation of the Kansas City Royals. Eventually, he would, but not by following the blueprint. Gordo failed, giving up on the third base position entirely after his fourth season. But by failing, he succeeded, forging a new path and setting his throne elsewhere. Gordo would stand guard in left field instead, letting nothing get away from him. The outstanding was routine and ordinary for him. And no one could get past him. You can argue that left field isn't that sexy of a position, meaning that the best defensive left fielder in history is a shallow achievement. You can argue that eight Gold Gloves and two Platinum Gloves aren't that special. You can argue that, out of thousands of defensive gems, his most legendary, career-defining moment, the most legendary moment in franchise history, the moment that brought Kansas City to its feet in uproarious applause, is instead a home run, a game-tying home run in the last chances of a World Series game on home soil, with its author iconically posed over first base. What you can't argue is that Alex Gordon defined the Royals of the modern day, and saying his career is worth celebrating would be an understatement. After fourteen seasons, the guardian of Kauffman's left field has retired. Gordo was known for having the back of his jersey splatted with pine tar after a full swing of his bat. To honor him, the players wore jerseys slathered with pine tar over the letters in his final game. In other parts of the league, old friends did the same. Even a wild Moose had a pine tar-y jersey on that day, which is pretty wild I would say. There will be another left fielder for the Royals, but there will never be another number 4 for the Royals.
4Ever Royal.

Motor City Management - Detroit Tigers Report 2023 - I'm A Wild Card!

If you'd like to catch up on previous installments, you can do so here: Initial Setup, 2020 Season Report, 2021 Season Report, 2022 Season Report
Let's take a look at the award winners from 2022 to wrap that year up and then get into the moves made and the season recap for 2023!

2022 Offseason News

League News:

MAJOR NEWS: At the conclusion of the 2022 season, Major League Baseball announced the addition of two new teams to the league - the Portland Steelhounds and the El Paso Rattlers. The Steelhounds will join the AL West and the Rattlers will join the NL Central.
Edwin Diaz wins his 3rd Reliever of the Year award in the NL, continuing his every other year streak, while Austin Adams wins the award for the first time in the AL.
Jared Kelenic wins Rookie of the Year in the AL (Ryan Mountcastle and Genesis Cabrera received votes for the Tigers) and in the National League the award goes to Nick Maton.
The AL Cy Young Award goes to Shane Bieber (Manning and Mize receive votes in Detroit) while the NL award is given to Jacob DeGrom, his third.
Mike Trout repeats as MVP for the first time in his career with his fifth win as Cody Bellinger wins his 3rd in 4 years in the NL.
No one is elected to the Hall of Fame.

Offseason Transactions

We have a good financial situation heading into the offseason and our owner increased our budget by $12,000,000, with a lot of budget still set aside for scouting and development and a low payroll.
League News:

C Gary Sanchez signs with the St. Louis Cardinals for $17,200,000 a year over 5 years.
Cardinals sign SP Mike Clevinger for $120,000,000 over 6 years.
SP Aaron Nola signs with the Baltimore Orioles for 6 years at $13,700,000 a year.
3B Jose Ramirez gets $149,000,000 over the next 5 years from Cleveland.
Yankees extend Luis Severino for 7 years at $18,000,000 per year.
Nationals grab SP Carlos Martinez for one year and $19,400,000.
Marlins sign 2021 KBO MVP C Eui-Ji Yang for $22,000,000 over 3 years.
Cy Young winner Jacob DeGrom gets $20,800,000 a year for the next 4 years to head cross-town to the Yankees.
Reliever of the Year Edwin Diaz signs with the Indians for $26,500,000 over 3 years.
SP Noah Syndergaard signs with the Diamondbacks for $42,000,000 over 2 years.
Cardinals sign 1B Miguel Sano for $128,000,000 over 5 years.

Detroit Departures:

SP Spencer Turnbull - I decided not to offer him arbitration, which would've been over 3M for a guy that was out of my rotation last year.
RP Joe Jimenez - I mentioned in the report that he was a bit below average compared to the rest of my bullpen and I didn't tender him an offer.
C Christian Vazquez - He wanted 7M a year for 3 years - I may see if he has a more reasonable request in free agency, but I don't want to pay him that right now.
LF Christin Stewart - I think our outfield depth is going to be made up of new faces, so Stewart isn't tendered an offer.
CF Derek Hill - In two seasons he hasn't improved or shown us the skill necessary to stay.
RF Victor Reyes - I think he's been lucky in his career and that's made him an almost serviceable player. I think he was back to a more normal level this season and wasn't good for us. He walks without an arbitration offer.
RP Justus Sheffield - I lost Justus in the expansion draft. He was elite against lefties and bad against righties.
RP Zac Houston - Another expansion draft loss, we'll live without him and try out some guys from the minors.

Detroit Trades:
Trade #1 Detroit receives: 3B Christopher Morel, $1,500,000 cash Chicago receives: 2B Mauricio Dubon
Dubon was out of minor league options and wasn't going to quite make the roster after spring training. Morel hit well in AA for the Cubbies, so he'll have a look at AAA and we'll see if he can help us in the future - plus we grab some extra cash.
Detroit Additions:
LF Luis Matos - A Rule 5 addition, Matos looks like he can be a capable 4th outfielder right now with a really nice ceiling. I think it's a big jump for a 20 year-old to go from A to the majors, but he's been so good along the way we'll see what happens.
3B Elehuris Montero - Another Rule 5 guy, I think he can DH for me and be a better bat than Brujan, while freeing him up to be a utility guy as well.
CF Albert Almora Jr. - I signed Albert in free agency for a one year minor league deal that becomes 900k if he makes the roster. With center field as a hole on the roster, I figured I'd give him a look.
C Christian Vazquez - I let Christian walk into free agency due to his demand of $7,000,000 over 3-4 years, but his requests were more reasonable in free agency. I signed Vazquez for 2 years, with the first being for $5,380,000 and the second being a team option for $3,380,000 with a $340,000 buyout. If he repeats his performance from last year, it'll be a steal - if not, we let him go for cheap.

Spring Training

We have $11,500,000 available for free agents/trades for the season, $18,000,000 set aside for the draft and $5,300,000 set aside for international amateurs. We're spending the maximum allowed on development and scouting this year, which is a first for both.
Detroits News:
RP Alex Lange tore his bicep and will miss 3 months.

Regular Season

First Half
On Opening Day we toppled the Twins 2-0, with a team shutout. Mountcastle started the season off with a two-run homer. April isn't too kind to us though, as we get out of the gates with a 14-16 start and sit 7 games back of the Indians. Matt Manning and Mize have been solid, and Alcantara and Dunn appear to have been unlucky so far. Tarik Skubal and David McKay look like bright spots in the bullpen. Mountcastle has been on a tear at the plate, but Evan White starts off disappointingly.
May isn't much better, ending the month at 27-32 and 12 games back. It's looking like this season is going to be another down year if we don't get it turned on soon. Jake Rogers becomes the everyday catcher and Tarik Skubal replaces Cabrera in the rotation. The hitting is improving and the pitching is still decent, so we aren't panicking with a lot of season left to play.
2023 Draft
We have pick 24, our first bottom half pick of the save. It felt like a good draft to not have a high pick in, as it seemed like the weakest one yet. We grabbed some folks with a tool or two and hoped they could develop something else on their own. We grabbed SP Justin Powell, RP Mel Rodrigues, RF Milt Batista, CF Alan Eichman and C Joe Dunse with our first five picks.
Second Half
We made lots of roster moves to send down struggling players and call up some others, while riding out some unlucky hitters. It took awhile, but the team got going enough to contend for the second wildcard spot, which we eventually took and held off the Rays and Twins from taking, earning a playoff date with the Los Angeles Angels. The Angels handled Mize though, winning 5-1 with Ohtani on the mound and advancing.
Detroit Achievements

LF Sammy Siani wins Batter of the Month for April in AA.
3B Andre Lipcius wins Batter of the Month for April in AAA.
SP Casey Mize wins Pitcher of the Month for May in the MLB.
SP Casey Mize is named an AL All-Star
SP Jaime Marin, SP Kumar Rocker, RP Brett De Geus and LF Riley Greene are named to the All-Star Prospects game.
DH Joseph Kalafut wins Batter of the Month for July in A-.
RF Yaya Chentouf wins Rookie of the Month in the MLB for July and August
SP Cole Stupp wins Pitcher of the Month for August in A-.
SP Kumar Rocker wins Pitcher of the Month for August in AA.
SP Kumar Rocker wins Pitcher of the Year in AA.

Season Recap

The Atlanta Braves are finally dethroned, by the 79-83 St. Louis Cardinals, who make the World Series and then lose in 6 to the Cleveland Indians. Full playoffs.
Hitters
Starting Lineup
CF Kyle Isbel

Isbel looked pretty good before suffering a ruptured achilles tendon after 114 games. He was about league average, with a slightly low BABIP that might make him a better hitter if it comes up. He may be in a battle for the future CF position though.

3B Isaac Paredes

Paredes improved slightly on his 2022 campaign, was a 3 WAR player who hit for right around league average. His personality isn't great, but he's cheap and will continue to be with us unless something crazy comes along.

SS Willi Castro

Castro has improved in every year since his Rookie of the Year campaign in 2021. He gave us nearly 6 WAR, was a solid hitter and played the field well enough at a tough position.

1B Ryan Mountcastle

Mountcastle took the slightest of steps backward this season, but nothing I'm too worried about - the BABIP was down 30+ points so that would explain some of it. He's about an average first baseman who from time to time will get hot, we're fine with that at league minimum.

LF Evan White

White had a regression, largely fueled by a slow start to the season - but he came along nicely in the second half and salvaged it. He gave us 3 WAR, not quite the 5 from the year before, but he continues to be cheap and signed long-term.

DH Elehuris Montero

I released Montero back to the Cardinals, my Rule 5 experiment being a failure. I thought he'd hit, but he just didn't and as a DH, that isn't acceptable. The Cardinals kept him in AAA and he did fine there.

RF Yusniel Diaz

Diaz was doing okay, mostly mediocre in 50+ games so I decided to make a change and it paid off. I may look to move on from Diaz somehow as I don't see how he finds his way back into the lineup next year, despite being a decent player.

2B Ke'Bryan Hayes

Hayes was pretty much the same player once again, an almost league average hitter with good enough defense at 2B to help our pitching staff and roll to 3.7 WAR. He'll hit arbitration, but he still should be reasonably priced.

C Christian Vazquez

I just don't know what to do at catcher. Vazquez was an acceptable defender who couldn't hit once again. He played half the season and was basically as good as Rogers. I can keep Christian for 3.3M next season or I can let him walk and I'm not sure which way I'll go.

Bench/Replacements
C Jake Rogers

Rogers was actually a better fielder than Vazquez and hit the slightest bit worse. Neither were good at the plate though, so it's not worth much either way. He's on a league minimum, so he'll be back.

UTIL Vidal Brujan

I had hopes that Brujan would thrive in a super utility role and he really didn't. He was below average at the plate and didn't really give us much else either. He looks like he should be better than he is and he's pretty pissed about his usage. He'll be cheap though, so I may try to flip him.

LF Luis Matos

The Matos Rule 5 experiment also failed a bit, but he made it through the season and now can develop in the minors a bit. He was about the same quality as Brujan at the plate, but he's got a higher ceiling so we'll see if he can reach it.

CF Daz Cameron

Cameron was a serviceable 4th outfielder with solid defense at all three positions and was a better hitter than my other backups. He's on a minimum deal.

RF Yaya Chentouf

Yaya got the call-up to fill in for Diaz and he took it well. The former reliever has had a quick rise since his position switch and gave us 2.1 WAR and a 108 OPS+. He also provided some pop to the lineup with 25 homeruns, something we desperately need. I'm excited about him getting a full season next year.

CF Parker Meadows

Meadows got to come up when Isbel went down. I thought Meadows was ready last year but Isbel had been even better, and was older, so I gave him a shot. Meadows may have won the position away in a short time. I obviously need to see a larger sample size, but he hit really well and gave us solid defense in center.

LF Kody Clemens

Clemens got pulled up to DH for us after Montero left and hit very well. He also gave us some extra pop, had 1.2 WAR in only 55 games and a 123 OPS+. I think he might get a full season in the role next year.

Pitchers
Rotation
SP Casey Mize

Mize had another stellar season, putting up an AL best 5.1 WAR and 0.98 WHIP, won 18 games and had a 173 ERA+ with a 69 FIP-. He looks like a Cy Young contender, especially with his wins that voters seem to love. He's going to get a pay raise in arbitration, but I gotta keep him around.

SP Matt Manning

Manning dropped off a bit this year to a 3.2 WAR player after 2 straight 4+ WAR seasons, but was still solid. His ERA+ was better this year and his FIP- was right on par. He gave up some more homers and walks, but I think he's still gonna be fine. He'll be cheaper than Mize.

SP Sandy Alcantara

Sandy gave us almost 3 WAR again, though this time it was entirely from the rotation. He was worse on the mound this year, though he was still about league average and a solid arm in the rotation. The trouble is that he'll command a similar deal as Mize, which I may not choose to pay. He still has some room to grow though too.

SP Genesis Cabrera

Cabrera only made it 8 starts before he was sent to the pen - where he didn't fare much better. He was a solid player for us last year and this year he struggled. The FIP was near 5, although the FIP- was below 100. His walks ticked up a fair amount and that's a concern - he has top-end stuff but he needs to keep it in the zone.

SP Justin Dunn

Dunn was pretty unlucky all season with a 4.36 FIP and a 5.17 ERA. He gave us a couple of WAR and is definitely worth his minimum deal.

Bullpen
RP Tarik Skubal

Skubal gave us some starts and some decent bullpen usage to the tune of 1 WAR. It's likely that he just replaces Cabrera as far as which one will stay with the team longer.

RP Jonathan Bowlan

Bowlan didn't play much because he struggled so much early. He may spend time in AAA or get shopped next season.

RP Wyatt Short

Short was kind of lucky in his appearances, wasn't very good and may just not have it at the MLB level.

RP Junior Fernandez

Fernandez was down once again and I think the peak he had was 2 years ago and isn't coming back. He has great stuff and absolutely no control over it.

RP Drew Carlton

Drew may have been my best reliever, giving 2 WAR and 76 IP. His FIP and ERA were right on point - he was just solid this year. I like him and I think his arbitration will be worth it.

RP Bryan Garcia

Garcia was pretty lucky this year but otherwise seems like a replaceable arm. He won't be expensive, but I don't know if I want to pay him any longer. He dropped from 1 WAR to 0.

RP David McKay

McKay was solid for another season and will make less than a million - I'll pay that for a 1 WAR reliever.

RP Blake Taylor

Last season's bullpen gem was just, well, bad this year. He struck out fewer, walked more, gave up more hits - all bad signs. I'm not paying him close to two million for 0.1 WAR.

RP Kyle Dohy

Dohy came up and was decent I guess. He's a cheaper look at a similar profile as Junior Fernandez is, but the control can obviously be a huge issue.

RP Zack Hess

Hess was respectable on the mound in limited appearances and is cheap enough to keep around.

RP Alex Lange

Lange gave us a single WAR and a lot of innings logged. He was pretty solid and makes the minimum, will be back.

RP Brett De Geus

Brett was solid but we only saw him 8 times. We'll need to see more next season.

SP David Parkinson

David gave us 12 outings in the rotation replacing injury and Cabrera. He was a bit lucky and a bit mediocre. I think he's a decent enough, and cheap, 5-6th option for the rotation.

Prospect Watch

SP Kumar Rocker - Rocker won the AA Pitcher of the Year, something he has done in A- and A so far as well. His slider is elite already and his stuff and movement look ready. His control is a bit of a concern, but he's been looking solid. He's ready to be in the majors from a personality standpoint and it may be time to not make him more frustrated, but he does have a lot of room to grow and I don't want to stunt his development. I'm not sure if I should bring him up yet or start him in AAA.
LF Riley Greene - Riley tore up AAA this year to the tune of 5.2 WAR and a 146 OPS+. The BABIP was high, is it sustainable? I'm not sure - he's carried a high one all through the minors. He expects to be in the majors and I may be trying to find a place for him next season, he's proven it at AAA it's time to see it in the MLB.
SP Franklin Perez - I keep saying I need to move Perez and I haven't. Now he's had a solid AAA season and looks major league ready - but his durability is still Fragile. He's had three seasons now of stability, so maybe it's not that concerning, but it is still alarming to me. He may get a chance next year as a replacement for someone like Cabrera, or he may be moved if I get too scared of him getting hurt. It's time to do something with him.
SP Ryan Hagenow - Ryan was good in A and will go to AA, looks like he's still got a chance to be a solid starter for us in the future.
C Dale Burton - Why do I have all of these Fragile guys? He was great in rookie ball and will move to A-. He's still young, but he missed 7 weeks of the season this year and I should probably try to move him.
SS Trevor Haskins - He was decent enough in A- and will go to A or A+ next year. He's a solid fielder and I hope the bat develops some more as well.
OF Petey Halpin - Petey was good in A+ after being good in A-. He'll go to AA and we'll see if he keeps it going!
SS Owen Cobb - I don't like to have guys repeat levels, but Cobb was young enough and it seems to have paid off - he was great in A-. He'll be in A next year.
RF Roberto Campos - Campos was great in Rookie ball and will go to A-.

Future Outlook

We have some big decisions in arbitration this season and our salaries are going to go up quite a bit - we might not have one of the cheapest payrolls anymore. That means our development and scouting budgets may have to come down quite a bit.
We need to figure out what we are doing at catcher for the future, it looks bleak. I feel pretty good about most of the rest of the team, but we need players to play like they should next year.

I listened to Astros at-bats from the 2017 postseason through 2018 for whistles.

Hi everyone, I listened to a whole lot of Astros baseball to see if I could find some signs of cheating via whistling. I got my PhD in physics about a year ago and decided to take a couple months off. Unplanned by me, around the time I started seriously searching for jobs in data science/analysis Covid happened. To keep myself occupied and have a data project to show to perspective employers I did this.
If you'd prefer to read this as a pdf and look at the datasets and spectrograms I made follow this link to a google drive with all that in it. The pdf has more than what I'm posting here, because I hit the character limit for a Reddit post. the pdf has been revised a bit more, an intro that sort of sets up the whole paper (but thats what I'm doing here), a methods section that explains how I did everything, an authors note telling you I'm taking a break from this topic for a bit and encouraging other people to do their own investigations and appendices. here is the link.
Background section is more for setting up why I'm doing this. As I was telling family and friends about this project I noticed that the level of knowledge about who did what when and how was lacking. Even avid baseball fans I talked to didn't know about certain aspects of the timeline. I even learned more about the cheating then I knew originally by doing research to write this section. The Preliminary Discussion is pretty much there to explain how damning this project can be. It's not a silver bullet of proof but its a first step towards questioning the 'Astros won 2017 WS with the help of cheating, then just stopped'. Then I get into the results. I go over game 5 of the 2017 WS in particular because it shows the particular whistles that I searched the rest of the 2017 postseason and 2018 season for. Then I made some figures that show what I found. Conclusions and future wraps up all I found again and put out some ideas I (or you?) might do with the datasets or other projects.
Last before I get into this, just a personal shout out to all baseball fans to treat Astros fans nicely (I know me asking probably wont stop anyone but I just want to put it out there). I spent a week or so watching/listening through 20 second clips of 2018 Astros home games. Lots of fans of all ages innocently happy for the WS win and proud of the team and their city for bouncing back after the hurricane. Kids holding up replica WS rings, Huge moustache dude hanging out by the crawford boxes, Bobby Dynamite moving the train around, drunk guys Rick Flairing for Reddick. They didn't cheat or condone the cheating. Some vocal Houston fans will defend the team no matter what but there are a lot of people who have had good memories tarnished by all this. Blame the Astros org and MLB.

Background

On October 30th 2019, The Washington Nationals defeated the Houston Astros in game seven to win the World Series. Less than 2 weeks later, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich published an article in The Athletic titled “The Astros stole signs electronically in 2017 — part of a much broader issue for Major League Baseball” In the article it is explained that the system was conceived between a player and a manager for the Astros, Carlos Beltran and Alex Cora (Later it would be revealed that these two built up the cheating system along with Cintron in the 2017 season but the groundwork was being set earlier by the front office and Bregman. During home games, the Houston Astros used a video feed installed in a stairwell leading to their dugout, trained on the opposing catcher’s hand signals. They deciphered the signs being conveyed by the catcher and relayed the type of pitch to the Astro’s batter by banging on a trashcan with a baseball bat or massage stick. The system had no trashcan bang meaning fastball, bang meaning off-speed or breaking ball. The journalists had four sources for this information, three anonymous and Mike Fiers, a pitcher who was with the Houston Astros during the 2017 season and has since played for the Detroit Tigers and Oakland A’s. Two of the sources stated that the cheating continued into the postseason, while a third source denied this and claimed that the cheating stopped before the playoffs began.
This was a culmination of prior rumblings of the team’s shady practices. An article describing the Cleveland Indians preparation for facing the Houston Astros in the 2018 ALDS included mentioning they had planned on a complex system of signs to prevent cheating . Cleveland was destroyed by the Astros in that series, being swept out of the playoffs. The day after the final game, Cleveland put a complaint in about having to remove an Astros employee from the journalist’s section twice during game three in Cleveland. This information was passed on to the Astros’ ALCS opponent, the Boston Red Sox, who had to remove the same man during game one . MLB’s investigation into the man’s actions found no wrong doing. In the 2019 postseason the New York Yankees also put in a complaint stating that the Astro’s were conveying information about pitches via whistling, again MLB investigated the accusations and again found no wrong doing. In February of 2020, it came to light that the Oakland A’s also accused the Astros of cheating in late August of 2018. In this instance, MLB acted not by reprimanding the Astros but by placing personnel at the replay stations allegedly used by the Astros to view the signs during the 2018 postseason. These three official complaints added to a narrative of the Astros organization having an operation of pushing the limits of gamesmanship in every aspect of the game. From the personal perspective of a Cleveland fan three recent examples of headlines that call into question the Astros organization’s morals were: Accusations of using illegal substances to improve their pitchers , acquiring Roberto Osuna after his alleged Domestic Violence suspension was up , and a Cleveland reporter, Andre Knott, commenting that (paraphrasing): “Minute Maid makes me feel like one other place I’ve been to as a sports writer, Gillette Stadium, like you’re being watched.”
After the 'The Athletic' article was released, MLB announced it would be investigating the allegations (actually an expansion of an ongoing investigation into an Astros executive’s treatment of female reporters ). In the interim, baseball fans took matters into their own hands when it became clear that the trashcan bangs were readily audible during broadcasts. For example, YouTuber and Yankees fan, Jomboy, discussed a game between the White Sox and Astros that had been cited as an example of the system. Fans also dug deeper, some searched into the possibility of the Astro’s using buzzers while others looked into whistling accusations.
The commissioner’s investigation concluded and the results were published in a nine page report on January 14th 2020. The Astros were confirmed to have cheated in the 2017 regular season and Rob Manfred said signs pointed to the cheating continuing into the playoffs. However, Astros player Carlos Correa disputed this, saying that their home park was too noisy during the playoffs to hear the trashcan bangs and the teams were constantly changing signs.
Two weeks later on January 29th, 2020, Tony Adams, an Astro’s fan needing to know to what extent they were cheating, pulled every home game that was available to search for trashcan bangs and cataloged them. The cheating was extensive but Tony did observe that the banging ended abruptly in the beginning of September. The Astros clinched the division on September 17th, and then played the White Sox from September 19-21. Bangs registered in the dozens throughout this series but then stop during the following final two home series against the Angels and Red Sox. The last game where dozens of bangs are registered is the same game in which the White Sox pitcher Dan Farquhar noticed they were cheating, September 21, the same game that was named as an example of their cheating in reports and that Jomboy reported on. It has been reported that Farquhar’s recognition caused ‘panic’ in the Astros dugout and the trashcan banging stopped. The question was, did another system replace the banging.
Rafael Garcia, a software engineer and youtuber by the name of B27, posted a video linking whistles to pitches in the 2017 World Series, most notably during game five. The video was about five minutes, presenting trimmed clips of certain pitches. He argued that a ‘charge’ whistle was coming out before off-speed pitches, and a note that quickly rises, called here a ‘pwip’ whistle, was heard before fastballs. Rafael Garcia promised a 5-part series of videos on the topic but stopped after releasing two. The game Rafael pulled the whistles from is available on YouTube in its entirety , no doctoring or editing occurred and the whistles he presented were confirmed to be there.
The trashcan bangs were not heard in the 2018 season, the MLB stated that the Astros stopped cheating in 2018, and the two leaders of the 2017 system, Carlos Beltran and Alex Cora, left the organization after 2017. However, Kurt Suzuki was quoted as saying that you could ‘hear the whistling coming from the dugout’ during the 2019 World Series. And as mentioned previously, the Yankees also accused the Astro’s of using whistling in the 2019 ALDS to convey signs. In the same way that Tony Adam’s cataloged trashcan bangs for 2017, could whistles be identified and cataloged for the 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons?

Preliminary Discussion

Some discussion needs to be had on how damning any correlation between whistles and pitches would be.
First, with the trashcan bangs, multiple 1st hand sources from within the organization admitted to journalists that the Astros cheated and described how. Then, after that information was released, fans investigated and found the proof. Here, the evidence is searched for without any 1st hand sources admitting to a system nor describing how the system works. Thus, this work is unable to prove wrongdoing but rather provide evidence for the plausibility of a system without trashcan bangs, and to attempt to build a case against the claim made by MLB and the Astros that the behavior stopped.
Second, the incriminating nature of the out of place noise of a trashcan bang should be considered. That is not a normal baseball game sound and so it is easy to recognize and catalog them. Whistles on the other hand, are a baseball game staple, and discerning the possibility of a ‘nefarious intent’ whistle as opposed to a fan who spontaneously decides to start whistling before every pitch, is subjective. The choice to filter the time window to around the pitches only and limiting the types of whistles to document was an attempt to address some of this ambiguity. Whenever possible it is verified that the pitcher has already confirmed the pitch before a whistle is documented but even then, it could be a fan. By documenting every whistle that comes out near a pitch trends can be looked for that surface from the cataloging of the entire season. Similar to the first point, because no sources have come forward, these findings have a limit. Ultimately, a member of the Astros could come forward to corroborate which whistles were used and how. Further, any member of an opposing dugout could also come forward and state which whistles they were hearing from the Astro’s dugout. The dataset presents audio timestamps for most home game pitches of the 2018 baseball season, so even if the categorization of pwip and charge whistles is wrong, any statement on what whistles were heard could be immediately be searched for in these games. To that end, YouTube comments have been made on every game that was processed with timestamps to each pitch. Each pitch also has a designation on whether a whistle was heard or not.
One game in particular will be looked at in detail, game five of the 2017 World Series. This displays the two types of whistle that were listened for throughout the 2018 season and the rest of the 2017 postseason and is probably the most extreme example of correlated whistles and pitches. Then the results of this listening is presented in its entirety. In a vacuum, most games don’t have egregious passages of whistles and no whistles, but looking at the full catalog reveals trends.
Finally, due to the 2020 MLB season starting, one final point of credibility can be addressed. The microphone that picks up the game audio is near the field of play. Umpire calls and player expletives can be heard, pitches hitting the dirt, the bat weights clacking to the ground. The whistles cataloged were attempted to be discerned from crowd whistles using this fact. A ‘nefarious intent’ whistle would be loud enough for the batter (and microphone) to hear but not much louder. Since the person whistling is assumed to be in the dugout there would not be excessive reverberation of the whistle before it was picked up on the microphone. In contrast, fans whistling in the crowd are as loud as they can be and would echo about the stadium as it reached the microphone. If whistles came out right before pitches but had these loud, echo-y characteristics they were not cataloged. This assumption was confirmed when games started being played in empty stadiums. The loud reverberating whistles were gone, but during any game for any team, whistles can be heard that are ‘calm’ and with minimal echo. These must be staff or players either trying to get players attention or to convey information to them during the game. It was these same kinds of whistles that were looked for in the games listened to from 2017-2018.

Results

2017 Postseason

The 2017 postseason comprised of three series, the ALDS against the Red Sox, the ALCS against the Yankees, and the World Series against the Dodgers. The first two series are more interesting for what is not there. There were no trashcan bangs found. This agrees with Correa saying they stopped in the postseason and the reporting that the Astros moved away from the trashcan after getting spooked by Farquhar noticing it during the White Sox series in September of 2017. Also missing in the first two series were charge whistles. Each game had at most two or three charge whistles.
In the World Series against the Dodgers, there are many more instances of charge whistles right before pitches during all three Astros home games. It hurts the case that charge whistles were fan noise when over the course of six sellout home games during the ALDS and ALCS their instance of directly preceding pitches was sparse. Then over the course of the three home World Series games they were much more consistently there. Interestingly, charge whistles correlated more with fastballs in games three and four, and with offspeed/breaking balls in game five. There is nothing preventing the Astros changing what pitches they choose to put charge whistles on.
The focus here will be on game five of the World Series. This game has some of the most consistent patterned whistling, with fastballs having pwips and offspeed/breaking balls having charges. Tony Adams made a video looking at the charge whistles in game five . Here, there is a difference of opinion. Adams looked at every charge whistle during the course of the game, and found them all throughout the game; during Astros at bats, Dodgers at bats, times when no one was in the batter’s box, after pitches were made, and on fastballs. The argument is that because of this the charge whistles cannot be a signal. This is an issue of signal and noise. When collecting data its often important to perform actions to clean the data, removing known sources of error. If the data is significantly noisy it may only look like random noise until you properly process it. Here in this situation, by collecting every charge whistle in the game, whistles that have no chance of being a signal to Astros batters are needlessly included. Only the whistles that come out in the vicinity of a pitch have any possibility of being a signal. The rest can only be legitimate fan whistles or possibly ‘smokescreen’ whistles to mask the pattern of charge whistles coming out before certain pitches. When only focusing on the time window around pitches to Astros batters, you remove a large source of noise and only focus on whistles that could be a signal. The test then becomes does this particular whistle come out on particular pitches, after the signs and before the pitch.
The first exemplary sequence was Alex Bregman’s second at bat against Clayton Kershaw in the 5th inning. Table 1 presents the 10 pitches Bregman saw that at-bat along with links to the video of each pitch and if a whistle was heard. A Charge whistle is heard three times, before each of Kershaw’s three curveballs. It would seem very unlikely that a fan chose to spontaneously make a charge whistle before only those three pitches, coincidentally all curveballs.

Pitch with link	Whistle
Curveball	Charge
Slider	no
Curveball	Charge
Four-Seam	no
Four-Seam	no
Slider	no
Four-Seam	no
Curveball	Charge
Two-Seam	no
Slider	no

The result of this at-bat was walking Bregman and knocking Kershaw out of the game. Kenta Maeda replaced Kershaw, Tony Watson replaced Maeda, and Brandon Morrow replaced Watson. Whistles were heard sporadically but not in such a tight sequence as this Bregman at bat.
Tony Cingrani replaced Morrow in the 7th inning. Table 2 shows every pitch Cingrani threw in his appearance. Here you can see a high coincidence of pwip whistles coming out on Cingrani’s fastballs. Out of 14 fastballs thrown eight had pwips before them with one pwip coming out on a slider during Gurriel’s at-bat. It should be noted, McCann rarely had trashcan bangs come out during his at-bats in the 2017 season and it has come out since that he was opposed to his team’s actions . Given this, the fact he did not receive whistles on his at-bat versus Cingrani is not surprising. If these fastballs are excluded, then of Cingrani’s 12 fastballs, 8 had pwips and only one non-fastball had a pwip. See figure for example spectrogram.

Pitch with link	Batter	Whistle
Four-Seam	Gurriel	no
Slider	Gurriel	no
Slider	Gurriel	Pwip
Four-Seam	Gurriel	no
Four-Seam	Gurriel	Pwip
Four-Seam	Reddick	Pwip
Four-Seam	Reddick	Pwip
Four-Seam	Reddick	Pwip
Slider	Reddick	no
Four-Seam	Gattis	Pwip
Changeup	Gattis	no
Four-Seam	Gattis	no
Four-Seam	Gattis	no
Four-Seam	Gattis	Pwip
Four-Seam	Gattis	Pwip
Slider	Gonzalez	no
Slider	Gonzalez	no
Four-Seam	Gonzalez	Pwip
Four-Seam	McCann	no
Four-Seam	McCann	no

Cingrani was relieved by Stripling and then the Dodger’s called on their closer Kenley Jansen. Table 3 shows all 33 pitches Jansen threw. Jansen threw 31 cut-fastballs and two sliders. Jansen is effectively a two-pitch pitcher who predominately cutters while sprinkling sliders in. The slider is there to keep batters on their toes. The batter can never sit too comfortably waiting for the cutter because Jansen could surprise with a slider. By signaling when the sliders are coming, Jansen’s abilities are then greatly hampered. One of the two sliders thrown by Jansen has a charge whistle. There is a charge whistle before the second slider as well, but it comes out very early making it unlikely that the signs were down yet and the camera is not trained on the Dodgers catcher to verify. Also tellingly, only one charge whistle is heard directly before any of Kenley’s Jansen’s other 31 pitches. In this instance it is suggested you watch his appearance in its entirety because other charge whistles come out during his time and they appear to cause Jansen to step off the mound. It would seem that Jansen recognized they were stealing his signs. Pwips were also heard throughout Jansen’s appearance. This would seem redundant since he only throws two pitches. The crowd was very excited at this time so the possibility of some of those pwips being fan whistles is high. It’s also possible the pwips were conveying location. Its worth noting, Bregman’s walkoff hit was preceded by a cut-fastball with a pwip. A charge is heard earlier, but its before Bregman steps into the box.

Pitch with link	Batter	Whistle
Cutter	Altuve	Pwip
Cutter	Altuve	no
Cutter	Altuve	Pwip
Cutter	Correa	no
Cutter	Gurriel	no
Cutter	Gurriel	no
Cutter	Gurriel	no
Slider	Gurriel	Charge
Cutter	Gurriel	Pwip
Cutter	Reddick	no
Cutter	Reddick	no
Cutter	Reddick	Pwip
Cutter	Gattis	no
Cutter	Gattis	no
Cutter	Gattis	no
Cutter	Gattis	no
Cutter	Gattis	Charge
Cutter	Gonzalez	no
Cutter	Gonzalez	no
Cutter	Gonzalez	no
Slider	Gonzalez	no
Cutter	McCann	no
Cutter	McCann	Pwip
Cutter	McCann	no
Cutter	McCann	no
Cutter	McCann	Pwip
Cutter	McCann	no
Cutter	Springer	Pwip
Cutter	Springer	no
Cutter	Springer	no
Cutter	Springer	no
Cutter	Springer	no
Cutter	Bregman	Pwip

2018 Exploratory Analysis

Here we present the season wide analysis of the 2018 season. A similar analysis of the 2017 postseason was not performed. Pwips were heard throughout the postseason but the comparatively small size of total pitches was a detriment. With that, the fact that the charge whistles only appeared in one series and which pitch they correlated with changed (fastballs in games three and four, offspeed/breaking in game 5) suggests the alleged system was very fluid at this time, so finding trends from the whole set is less likely. The 2017 postseason data is still provided for independent analysis of the nine games but are not examined here.
In 2018, 1,269 pitches were observed throughout the year to have either a pwip or charge whistle directly preceding it out of a total 9,208 pitches seen by Astros batters in the games analyzed. The number of these whistles heard fluctuates from game to game with an average of about 20 whistles per game. The percentage of pitches with whistles preceding them is plotted for each game that was analyzed and presented in figure 9. The average percentage of pitches with whistles over the 2018 season was about 14% and is indicated in figure 9 by the horizontal dashed red line. For comparison, Tony Adams looking at the 2017 season found 1,142 pitches had trashcan bangs out of a total 8,274 pitches in the games analyzed, or 13.8%.
As mentioned previously, after accusations by the Oakland A’s of cheating during a late August 2018 home game, MLB stationed personnel at the replay booths during the 2018 postseason. The whistles observed notably drop once the Astros enter the 2018 postseason. Since the personnel were stationed there, the assumption is made that this form of cheating should have stopped. The whistles that were observed during the postseason then can be used as a coarse estimate of error. On average nine pitches with whistles (or about 5%) were observed for games where there should hypothetically be zero. Then we can project that for each game as many as 5% of whistles that were observed that were not nefarious in intent were cataloged. On the contrary, the error of whistles that were there but missed depends on crowd noise and audio issues (broadcasters talking over the game). No estimate of this upper error is found so the same nine whistle/5% error is used in lieu of a more accurate error.
Some argue that (paraphrasing) ‘Astro’s fans love to whistle’ and that the charge whistles heard during the World Series game five are nothing but fans. Charge whistles are heard in 2018, but as can be seen in figure 9, rarely do they actually appear right before pitches like they did during the 2017 World Series. Only one game of the 65 games analyzed had significant amounts of charge whistles before pitches, May, 11th, 2018 versus the Rangers.
In an attempt to attribute the whistles to innocent crowd noise, correlations in the fluctuations of whistles with benign explanations were searched for. First, do weekend games have more whistles than weekday games. Weekend games are marked in red text along the x-axis in figure 9 and on average nine more whistles were observed on weekend games than weekday games. This suggests that a ‘rowdier’ weekend crowd was producing more whistles in general and were coincidentally produced before pitches and cataloged. This gives another source of lower bound error that actually agrees with the previous discussion of the postseason whistles. In both cases we have reasons to believe up to 5% of whistles a game that were cataloged were innocent in origin. Less likely an explanation for the increase in weekend whistling but worth putting forth would be that the rowdy weekend crowds are louder and force the Astros to whistle louder, thus allowing them to be picked up by the microphone more readily.
Another search for an innocent explanation for the whistles was to look at the Minute Maid Park attendance for each game. If whistles were coming from fans, then more fans should mean more whistles. Crowd size as a percent of total Minute Maid Park capacity are displayed as black dots in figure 9. A Pearson product between the capacity and percent whistles with pitches can be performed to find how correlated the two variables are. For perfectly correlated variables (as crowd goes up whistles go up) you would get a value of 1, for inversely correlated variables (as crowd goes up whistles go down) a value of -1 would be found. A value close to 0 means the two variables are not correlated. Here the correlation between crowd and pitches with whistles was 0.001 meaning that crowd size had no impact on whistle count.
Next, we look at what type of whistle (pwip or charge) preceded each pitch, the results of which are plotted in figure 10. Only 78 charge whistles were heard before pitches while 1,190 pwips were heard. 68% of pitches with pwips were fastballs (two-seam, four-seam, cutter, sinker) whereas 21% of the time the pwips came out on breaking balls (slider, curveball, Knuckle curve) and 11% on offspeed (changeups and splitters).
The whistle occurrences are also broken down by each player who took at-bats for the Astros in 2018 in figure 11. The whistle occurrences were not evenly distributed, meaning it was more likely for whistles to come out before pitches for certain Astros. Marwin Gonzalez saw the highest amount of pitches with pwips at 16.16% followed by Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman. On the low end, Brian McCann and Max Stassi had the lowest amount of whistles for players who saw over 200 pitches. This breakdown can be compared to the same breakdown done by Tony Adams with trashcan bangs which is presented in figure 12. Josh Reddick and Jose Altuve saw large increases from trashcan bangs to pitches with whistles while Marisnick saw a decrease. Outside of these changes Gonzalez, Bregman and Correa maintained similar high percentages and McCann retained his low percentage.
Lastly, whistles are broken down by base occupancy in figure 13. Whistles were heard most often when bases were empty, but the situation of having bases empty is much more frequent. If you look at the percent of pitches that had whistles for each base occupancy the whistles came out least often with bases empty, at about 11%. Whistles as a percent became more frequent when runners were in scoring position (second and/or third).

Conclusions and Future

In 2017, The Houston Astros cheated by using a camera system to decipher pitch signals between the opposing team’s battery. Sources from within the Astros organization admitted it, baseball fans found evidence of it in publicly available video, and the MLB investigation confirmed it. MLB also stated that evidence of cheating stopped during the 2018 season. The recent track record of MLB acting on accusations of cheating were not reassuring. Cleveland threw an Astros employee out of the journalist’s section during the 2018 playoffs and the Red Sox had to remove the same person during the next series. The Oakland A’s accused the Astros of patterned clapping on certain pitches during a game in the 2018 regular season. The Yankees accused the Astros of whistling during certain pitches during the 2019 playoffs. MLB found no wrong doing and the only actions taken that are known at this time was installing personnel that watched the review stations during the 2018 postseason. In articles discussing the 2017 system it is stated that the Astros tried clapping and whistling to convey signs before settling on using a trashcan bang. MLB puts forth the narrative; nothing to see here. An alternative line of reasoning would be this; the Astros continued cheating after 2017 but reverted to more subtle ways to convey information. A system they fell back on when trashcan bangs were being noticed by the White Sox and when the 2017 postseason became too loud to hear trashcan bangs. MLB’s investigators of the 2018 and 2019 season either were truly unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing despite multiple teams telling them what they were hearing, the team admitting they used those same systems previously, and guaranteeing immunity to the players of any repercussions, or MLB didn’t want to admit finding anything and assumed the 2018-2019 system was too subtle to be noticed.
Game 5 of the World Series was suspicious and was described in detail. The same whistles heard in that game were looked for in the rest of the 2017-18 games. A similar percent of pitches had trashcan bangs in 2017 that had whistles in 2018, 13.8% compared to 14%. A noticeable decrease in whistles per game occurred in the 2018 postseason when MLB personnel were installed to monitor the replay stations used to cheat. Individual players share of pitches with whistles largely reflected the same share of pitches the players had with trashcan bangs the year previous. This would appear to be evidence of wrongdoing continuing.
This project is not proof that the Astros cheated in 2018 by whistling but it does build on that theory, providing a set of data and performing exploratory analysis on said data. The analysis performed here only begins what could be done with it. Other possibilities are looking into swing rates and contact on pitches with whistles versus those without. Further, while pwips came out a majority of the time on fastballs, the system is more complex than that. Certain pitchers faced had pwips consistently on pitches other than fastballs suggesting that the system was adjusted for particular pitchers. Other times it was not a single pwip but two or three in quick succession, possibly conveying different information than a single pwip or possibly just making sure the pwip was heard. Altuve in particular tended to have bursts of four or five pwips in a row spectrogram during at bats but these details were not pursued.
Beyond the current form of the datasets there are other ideas worth investigating. Pwips and charges were not the only whistles observed but to limit the scope of the project, were the only ones cataloged. Notes were made of other common whistles found like the wiggler , the downturn and the weird . Beyond that as the A’s suspected and the Astros have admitted doing in the past, claps were not cataloged or focused on. But, in a few instances it was impossible to ignore a quiet game moment where only one person in the stadium seemed to be clapping, coincidentally right after the signs were put down . The dataset provides a YouTube timestamp for every pitch observed. A YouTube comment has been posted on every video analyzed providing time links to each pitch. Any individual could use the datasets and timestamps to search for other whistles, claps, or even whether certain players were changing in or out of undershirts during games.
If manual listening appears daunting the hope is that the collection of pitch spectrograms may benefit individuals interested in machine learning. The Fourier transform settings used to create the spectrogram come from a paper showing the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to identify birdsong via spectrograms . The idea is that the 10,000 pitch spectrograms created will be enough to train a CNN to accurately identify pwips and charges. This CNN could then be used on the remaining 13 home games. Further, the CNN could be used on all the Astro’s away games of 2018 or the entire Astro’s 2019 season (if they were made available) to automate the search for these whistles. It could even be used on other teams games if there’s evidence of the same whistles being used. If particular claps or whistles are cataloged the CNN could even be updated to search for those as well.
If any of the project ideas with the dataset or spectrograms sound intriguing, I encourage you to pursue them. I definitely will be playing around with a CNN and might look into Tony Adams 2017 dataset for whistles but beyond that I'll be taking a break from Astros cheating. I plan to come back to this at some point but I'm interested in pursing other topics at the intersection of physics/stats/baseball that doesn't have me listening to hours of game audio! I'm on twitter @DrNateTurner1 if you want to keep up on any projects I do in the future. Also reach out to me if your interested in giving this a more permanent home then a reddit post and a google drive folder!

Why the MLB Draft League is going to fail (or: Holy shit, that's a lot of miles)

Trying to Formulate a Reasonable but Acceptable Offseason Plan (it's tough out here)

Alrighty, I've been doing this and posting here for the last few offseasons, so I figured I might as well give it a go this offseason and spark some conversation around these parts. As we collectively sweat out these election results amid a frustrating pandemic, I figure we could all use some spirited offseason conversation about our favorite team!
So, as pretty much anyone who has paid even a lick of attention to the events in baseball since the end of the World Series would know, things are...bleak around baseball right now. Pretty much every team will be looking for ways to cut back payroll, and we'll probably see a record number of non-tenders. I think a few teams will be opportunistic and add valuable deals to their payrolls (and unfortunately, I believe that the juggernaut Dodgers will be one of those teams), but the expectation is not that the Reds will be one of those teams -- at least in terms of adding to their (non-prorated) 2020 payroll. The Reds' non-prorated 2020 payroll was set to be $143M. Right now, accounting for arbitration projections, the Reds' current payroll obligations are set to be between $129M and about $136M. It's clear that, if the Reds really aren't going to add to their 2020 payroll number, the margins are pretty slim for adding talent.
However, given the talk around Trevor Bauer, which I believe to be more than mere lip service, I think we can read between the lines that -- while we shouldn't be expecting the Reds to go wild -- they may be more willing to push the margins than most would think. This also falls in line with Bob Castellini's tone over the past couple offseasons, where he basically has said that he wants to win, and he wants to win now. Despite the horrible revenue losses of 2020, I think he may be willing to take some risks.
That said, I think expectations should be reasonably limited. I would say that, at most, the Reds' payroll would rise to about the $145M range. Personally, I expect arb numbers to come in on the low side of expectations, so before accounting for any non-tenders, I'll put the hypothetical current payroll at $129M. That gives between $14M and $16M to spend in 2021 payroll as I currently have it set up. All this in mind, let's get to the moves.
Non-tenders:
The Reds, as it stands, have 9 players slated for arbitration -- Bradley, Casali, Castillo, Garrett, Goodwin, Lorenzen, Mahle, R. Stephenson, Winker. Personally, I don't necessarily see a non-tender in this bunch. Stephenson and Goodwin could both be legitimate candidates, but Stephenson is going to be making so little money (projected $600k) that there's no reason to non-tender him unless you think there's no hope for him to be in your MLB 'pen (I don't find that to be the case).
With Goodwin, the Reds just traded a legitimate (albeit unexciting) prospect for him, so it's obvious that they like him, and he's still rather cheap ($2.7M projected). I think he's a strong option to keep around as an extra OF, even with 2021 payroll restrictions.
Overall, I think most expect at least one non-tender, but I don't see one here. Let's move on.
Free Agent Acquisitions:

Sign SS Andrelton Simmons to a one year deal with $10M guaranteed, with a mutual option for a 2nd year.

Details: 2021 salary of $8M, with a second year mutual option for $10M with a $2M buyout.
Reasoning: The Reds obviously have a dire need at SS, but they also need to be cognizant of Jose Garcia's existence. Garcia was objectively abysmal this year with the bat (with his 3 wRC+ being the second worst among all hitters with at least 60 PAs), but that was to be expected given his jump in competition. There is still reason for extreme optimism, but it'll take some time (plus his glove looked legit). Thus, the Reds need a bridge on a short-term deal, but it needs to be a good bridge. Furthermore, defense is also a major issue on this team, so adding a great defender at SS should be of the utmost concern. Enter Andrelton Simmons. Simmons is one of the best defensive players in baseball history (not an exaggeration at all), and despite ankle injuries hobbling him over the past two seasons, the expectation is that he can still play elite defense going forward. However, those ankle injuries will drive down his demand in both years and money, which sucks for him but is perfect for the Reds. His bat is meh (probably about average), but his impact on team defense would be immense. Further, with the bat, he's a low strikeout guy. I don't mind strikeouts, but I also think it's worthwhile to have a guy or two in the lineup that you can trust to put the ball in play. Some may disagree, but I think that the Reds and Simmons are a perfect fit. They need to get this done, imo.
Money remaining for 2021 payroll: $6-8M

Sign UTL Enrique Hernandez to a one year, $4M deal.

Details: 2021 salary of $4M
Reasoning: You may know this Dodger by a different name, but given my lack of ability to use accent marks, I can't type out his nickname (for obvious reasons). First, I want to address the deal. I would give him more than one year, but as a UTL guy, I think he'll be victimized by the cash-strapped nature of the offseason more than most. If he wants a longer deal, give it to him. But I imagine he'll want to be able to re-enter the market next year. As a player, Hernandez is legitimately capable of playing all 7 non-catchepitcher positions, and he's an elite defender at 2B, while also being a plus defender in the OF throughout his career. He, like Simmons, would greatly improve the team defense, which is the most underrated aspect of building a baseball team (look at the Rays and Cardinals, two good-to-great teams buoyed by elite defense). He would also give great flexibility, especially against LHP. He has a career 120 wRC+ against LHP. In my opinion, he can get spot starts all around the field, but he can be a regular starter against LHP. If I were running the team, I would run him out at 2B against LHP, and give either Moose or Votto the day off (either from the field if there is a DH or altogether if there is not). Regardless, he could be a great defensive replacement even when not starting, and he and Simmons could form an immaculate middle infield when starting together. No disrespect to Kyle Farmer, who would still have a place on the team, but Hernandez is a fantastic utility player. Also, by all accounts, he is an absolute glue guy in the locker room. I think the Reds really need to improve on the margins of their roster (bullpen depth and bench players), and Hernandez would be a great start.
Money remaining: $2-4M

Sign LHP Justin Wilson to a two year, $6M deal with a club option for a third season

Details: $2M in 2021, $3M in 2022, with a third year $4M option with a $1M buyout
Reasoning: Amir Garrett is great, but the Reds NEED another LHP in the 'pen. Wilson has long been a good and steady LH reliever, but he has always been rather cheap, and he should be especially cheap this year as a non-closing reliever. Wilson has some walk issues, but they've never been ruinous for his run prevention, and he's a very steady strikeout artist. He also doesn't have real platoon splits throughout his career, so you don't really need to worry about him against RHH given the three-batter minimum. Wilson would be a fantastic fit. I wanted him two years ago (when he eventually signed a 2 year, $10M deal with the Mets), and I still want him now. Adding a LH reliever should be a priority, and Wilson is a great option there.
Money remaining: $0-2M

Find a bargain bin SP on a MiLB deal or VERY cheap MLB deal

Reasoning: I would love for the Reds to maintain a position of strength, but I really do think it's more important to upgrade at the other positions listed above, given the presence not only of Derek Johnson, but also Michael Lorenzen and Tejay Antone (as well as possible top prospect promotions during the year). That said, I want them to at least take a shot on a SP that they can give a chance to win a rotation spot or at least serve as valuable depth. I don't have a specific name chosen, but I do like two LHP that have struggled recently but have reason for optimism -- old friend Alex Wood and Gio Gonzalez. More on this later.
Also, I would love to think that an injury-recovery flier like Corey Kluber could financially fit into this plan, but I don't feel comfortable projecting it at the moment. I would LOVE to see Kluber (if anywhere close to healthy) return to form under Derek Johnson, though.

Trades:

Trade C Tucker Barnhart

Reasoning: Look, I know some people won't like this idea, but the Reds have a surplus at catcher. While I think the Reds may be reluctant to mess with the good rapport their pitchers have with Barnhart, I also have some questions about his pitch framing and (less so) game-calling compared to Casali. He's obviously an elite defender in many regards, but he's not perfect. He also makes the most money of the Reds' catchers ($4M in 2021) and, given his defensive reputation, probably has the higher trade value between him and Casali. I also think Casali has an equivalent (if not better) rapport with the pitchers, and he's been productive and cheap. Either way, this is a spot where they can cut back spending a bit, and it is imperative to let Tyler Stephenson get some real playing time.
I didn't pick a team or return package, but multiple teams that lose in the JT Realmuto sweepstakes will be looking for a catcher, and Barnhart could be in high demand. I wouldn't expect him to fetch a franchise-altering package, but the Reds could capitalize and get some legitimate value here. Keep your eyes on the Phillies and Mets here.
Money remaining: $4-6M

Key Strategy Change:

Implement an Opener Strategy with Lorenzen/Miley, and possibly Antone/FA signing

Reasoning: As the Rays have shown, teams can paradoxically maximize the impact of their lesser pitchers by limiting their innings pitched. Wade Miley is a fine pitcher to have at the back of your rotation, but he has long had struggles during his third time through the batting order (TTO). The Rays have also shown the value in messing with hitters' eyes by mixing up pitcher handedness and arm slots. If the Reds were to utilize the hard-throwing RHP Lorenzen as an opener and let him pitch the first TTO -- which would hopefully be 2-3 IP -- they could bring in the soft-tossing LHP Miley to handle the next two TTO -- hopefully 4-5 IP. This would not only mess with opposing hitters, but it also forces opposing managers' hands when it comes to crafting a lineup. Also, if you're worried about this limiting Lorenzen's usage as a true reliever, fret not. He could likely be available any time except for the day after he starts and the day before he starts (so at least 3/5 of the games), and he's a horse, so he might even be able to push it on those other days in emergencies. Instead of getting a 4.5 ERA from Wade Miley as the #4/5 starter, the Reds could hopefully get an ERA in the mid-3s from the Lorenzen-Miley amalgamation. Openers are the future of baseball, and I think it's time for the Reds to embrace it when it comes to their back-end SPs.
As noted, I also think this could work with Antone and a bargain bin FA signing, for the same reasoning listed above. This plan would be the main impetus behind targeting guys like Wood and Gio instead of comparable RHPs.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the above moves, the Reds' roster would look as follows:
Lineup vs. RHP (assuming the DH is bargained-for and agreed to, which I believe it will be):

DH Jesse Winker
RF Nick Castellanos
1B Joey Votto
3B Eugenio Suarez
2B Mike Moustakas
LF Shogo Akiyama
CF Nick Senzel
C Tyler Stephenson
SS Andrelton Simmons

Bench vs. RHP:
UTL Hernandez, UTL Farmer, OF Goodwin, C Casali
Lineup vs. LHP:

CF Nick Senzel
RF Nick Castellanos
3B Eugenio Suarez
1B Mike Moustakas
DH Joey Votto
2B Enrique Hernandez
LF Shogo Akiyama/Brian Goodwin
C Curt Casali
SS Andrelton Simmons

Bench vs. LHP:
OF Winker, OF Akiyama/Goodwin, UTL Farmer, C Stephenson
Rotation:

RHP Sonny Gray
RHP Luis Castillo
RHP Tyler Mahle
RHP Michael Lorenzen (opener)/LHP Wade Miley (follower)
RHP Tejay Antone (maybe opener)/(maybe) LHP FA signing

Bullpen:

RHP Raisel Iglesias
RHP Archie Bradley
RHP Lucas Sims
LHP Amir Garrett
LHP Justin Wilson
RHP Michael Lorenzen
RHP Robert Stephenson
either RHP Tejay Antone if he's an opener or [option slot] if Antone is a full SP
*[option slot]

the ninth slot is in the case that Antone is a full rotation member. The Reds would not carry nine relievers. Also, it's best to have a spot in the bullpen where the pitcher has a MiLB option, in case you need a fresh arm at any point. If Antone were an opener, I think Stephenson would lose his job to the almighty "option slot"

Sorry for the full-length manifesto, but I wanted to be thorough and explain myself, because I know this offseason will be frustrating and full of tension. There are plenty of ways to go about it, but this is what I would do if I were in charge. I think that's an NLC champion squad right there (especially given there's no way that the Reds repeat their historic BABIP bad luck).
Also, if anyone is gonna clamor for Didi Gregorius, I want to get out in front and say that his 2020 was almost certainly a mirage, and it gave me SERIOUS questions about his future. His defense is completely eroded (and, as I said, the Reds need a good defensive SS), and his exit velocity numbers this year were near the bottom of the league, meaning his offensive output was almost certainly not repeatable. I could forgive the Reds if they gave Didi a short deal, but logic and reason would caution against signing him at all. Just wanted to get out in front of that one given my expectation that Reds fans will love the idea of bringing Didi back home.

2020 r/baseball Power Rankings -- Week 4: Top 10 Has New NL West Members, Flying Fish Soar, Blue Jays Plummet, Houston We Have a Problem but Phoenix and DC, Too

Hey Sportsfans — it's time for Week 4 of baseball's 2020 Power Rankings — Four weeks into the season and we've learned a lot: some teams win, some teams lose, and some don't play baseball at all. We solider on, trying to make sense of a season best described as 'baseball as viewed by a drunk Jake Peavy through a broken kaleidoscope'.
You may notice the Cardinals are being treated differently this week.
There was one tie this week between the #22 and #23 teams -- our 2nd tiebreaker, run differential, was used to break. Difference of just two runs!
Every voter has their own style / system and the only voting instructions are these:

"To an extent determined individually, you must take into account how strong a team is right now and likely to be going forward. You must, to some degree, give weight to the events and games of the previous week."

The auxiliary post with added data / fun can be seen here.
TRANSPARENCY: this link will show you who voted each team where and has added neat statistics!
If something is a little messed up, feel free to ~~pester me~~ let me know.
Total Votes: 29 of 30. So close.

#	Team	Δ	Comment	Record
1	Dodgers	+1	Ohhhhh Mooookieeee, when you caaame and you gaaave without taaakinnnng, and I need ya today ohhhh Mookie. I am in love. Hell, even AJ Pollock did the impossible, and won me over despite his 0 for everything playoffs last year. Now if only Cody could find himself... Here's the scary part: The Dodgers are rolling and they are nowhere near playing at their ceiling. If you can't beat this team while its firing on half its cylinders, how the hell do you beat them when they're firing on all of them?	11-5
2	Yankees	-1	Bit of a rough week for the Yankees, but the bats are still alive and well against pitchers I've never heard of. Everyone knows Judge leads the league in HR, but did you know DJ leads the league in Singles? Great to see him having a bit of a repeat from last season's performance. Additionally, Britton and Green have been fantastic out of the pen, and Chapman is going to be back at some point.	10-6
3	Athletics	+4	Mon. had a ten run W vs. the M's. Next was TEX- Piscotty hit the 2nd walk-off GS of our year then we finished a quick sweep. The HOU series opener was cursed- we had 15 LOBs, left a runner on 3rd with 0/1 outs 3 seperate times, but down to our last strike A. Allen hit a single and M. Semien sealed the game. Montas/Luzardo/Bassit were dynamic and our pen is the league's best. Our lineup might lead MLB in Ks, but we're second in BBs. Just before sweeping the cheats R. Laureano, worth 1 bWAR, got his 2nd HBP of the day. We lead the league in those. After jawing at the RP, he arrived at 1st base. Their batting coach, a human dirtbag, taunted our mvp into a brawl even if it was he worked for a club shamed by scandals and a HS JV quality bullpen.	12-4
4	Braves	0	Roller-coaster week for the Braves. We lost our ace for the season. We got Markakis back and Will Smith made his debut. Acuña quadrupled his homer total in one day and Freeman continues to hit. Still looking good for us, but we definitely need to make a move. Our bullpen is incredible, but this meme made by u/riseupidemic sums it up: Our bullpen is doing big things, but...	11-6
5	Twins	-2	We capped off a six game winning streak with a 4 game losing streak. Some were pretty flukey, but we really need the bats to wake up. Also, having three starters on the IL isn't ideal.	10-6
6	Cubs	0	The Cubs played well against the Royals, and then the Cardinals series was postponed. With no evidence that any Cardinals players actually went to a casino or broke protocol more than any other team, I believe that fans making moral judgments against the Cardinals are wrong. Perhaps we shouldn't blame teams for getting a deadly disease during a global pandemic; getting the coronavirus is not a moral indictment. Let's be better fans and better people as the world is falling apart.	10-3
7	Indians	+2	The Tribe pitching continues to dazzle - the rotation has put up a quality start in all but two games, one of which was 5.2 shutout innings. Meanwhile the bullpen has a sub-1 ERA if you take away a single nightmare outing by Brad Hand. The less said about the batting order the better, but there's no way they can rank dead last in BA and SLG all year, right guys? G-g-guys?	10-7
8	Rockies	+6	The Rockies have the 2nd best run differential in baseball going into Sunday's games due in large part to their starting pitching. Their offense has been middle of the pack so far but that's with Nolan Arenado hitting about as poor as we've ever seen from him. Charlie Blackmon is the early favorite for NL MVP as he racks up a .446/.475/.679 slash. Last week: 5-2. This week: 3 vs AZ & 3 vs Texas.	11-4
9	Rays	-1	A return to Dome Sweet Dome is what the Rays needed to right the ship, splitting the sox and winning a tight series with the Yankees. The bats still need to come around, you would think it'd be hard to stay ice cold in Florida and all. The most inspiring things for Rays fans this week were the retunr of Austin Meadows and having a non-Zunino catcher not only bat, but also get the clutch walkoff to send the Yanks home. Let us all pray Charlie Morton is ok and flap on.	8-8
10	Padres	+1	The Pads scored every one of their fourteen runs in the Arizona series by way of the long ball. We got to see Luis Pattiño in some relief after being called up, and saw Hos return to action. Fernando Tatis Jr. is very good at baseball. This week we started against the Dodgers, then played the D’Backs, while looking ahead we play the Dodgers, then have a series against the D’Backs…	9-7
11	Astros	-6	Our pitching is, for the most part, bad. Seriously, almost our entire bullpen is comprised of AA and A rookies with a handful of MLB appearances under their belt. When the pitching is not bad, our offense is bad and we can't provide enough run support. I've seen enough extra inning games this season. Hard to feel confident in the team right now, but hopefully the beginning of a homestand will turn things around.	6-9
12	White Sox	+1	Eloy getting tangled in the left field netting is going to be on lowlight reels for a long time and his 0-20 slide makes it worse. Thankfully, we're looking at a 4 day weekend with the Cards series in doubt. If you told the fanbase in the spring we would be 8-8 after 16 games, most would be happy. A week of the offense averaging 2.5 runs makes 8-8 feel a lot worse. On the plus side, Giolito has looked like an ace again and Moncada is on a 20 game on base streak.	8-8
13	Brewers	-1	Props to BeHereNow91 for stealing my lead in about Yelich this past week, short version Yelich is rocking a 1.400 OPS this week. A few other key players have been getting some really interesting BABIP stats. Hiura with his .333 BABIP and only .250 AVG and Gyorko with the .375 BABIP/.250 AVG split.	6-7
14	Reds	+2	It’s a special kind of hell having the best rotation in the entire league and the worst bullpen in the entire league. Yesterday’s loss was a microcosm of the season: leading 2-1 going into the 6th inning and trailing 9-2 by the end of the 7th. Michael Lorenzen has surrendered 10 earned runs in 5.1 innings while the combination of Gray, Bauer, Disco, and Mahle have allowed the same number in 64.1 innings. If you remove Tejay Antone’s stellar mopup job against Chicago, the Reds’ bullpen has an unfathomably bad 8.32 ERA. In other news, they’re batting .203 as a team and got shutout by the Indians two nights in a row.	7-9
15	Nationals	-5	The Nats did not respond well coming out of their break. They have played poorly against AL East power-team, the Baltmiore Orioles, and have not given a lot of reason for hope. However, Sean Doolittle is a national treasure and it is completely unacceptable to harass a human on Twitter for poor sports performance. If you logged into your account and tweeted or DM'd Doo, you should be ashamed of yourself and turn in your World Series gear because you don't deserve it.	4-7
16	Mets	+4	This was an interesting week. Just when you think the Mets are in freefall they come back, and go 4-2, including taking 2 of 3 from "The Best Team in the League" (technically, at the time) Miami Marlins. On top of that Conforto is swinging a hot bat, the team has scored a couple of actual runs, and deGrom even got a win (two in a row!). However, Alonso is quickly turning into Adam Dunn with a better (at times) glove, and the bullpen is still shaky despite Jared Hughes being the bright spot nobody saw coming. Well, what's see what this next week brings... together :) #GiménezNLROY2020	7-9
17	Phillies	0	The Phillies didn't have all that bad of a week all things considered. After a week long break, they split a series with the Yankees and went 1-2 against the Braves. Harper and Realmuto have looked great, and the introduction of Spencer Howard a better (?) Arrieta means the Phillies might just have a servicable rotation. The bullpen is a different story. If they can somehow put together a not terrible bullpen, they should have a shot at the playoffs and maybe some more.	4-6
18	Marlins	+9	What this team has been able to do with a bunch of replacement players is a testament to the coaching staff Miami has. Primarily, the bullpen. We may have even found a couple diamonds in the rough. That being said, replacement batters havent fared as well. After some initial success, solid Mets pitching has shown that the lineup sorely misses Ramirez, Rojas, Cooper and Alfaro at the plate. Once our guys come back from covid, this team should be able to finish out tough games like yesterdays. Wouldnt be a surprised to see them finish at or slightly above .500 this season. We got Blue jays and Braves this week.	7-3
19	Tigers	+6	Don't look now, but Detrot is one half game off the lead for the AL Central, making these boys rather tough to rank. If the Tigers can continue to be competitive, look to find Casey Mize getting the call sooner rather than later to help shore up the back end of the rotation. This week: 3 vs. CWS, 2 vs STL (although this is unlikely), and 3 vs. CLE.	8-5
20	Orioles	+4	It's week 4 and the Orioles are at .500. A miracle if you ask me. They get swept by the Marlins (probably to avoid COVID) and then should have swept the Nats. Can anyone explain to me why the Yankees got a rain shortened win earlier this year and the Orioles have their game suspended? Weird...	7-7
21	Angels	-3	Sometimes, a single play captures a season perfectly.	5-11
22	Rangers	0	Wear a mask. Wash your hads. Started the weekend with the worst record in the AL, now 2nd place in the AL West with a playoff spot after a sweep of the Angels and still 2 games below .500. That's the Rangers way.	6-8
23	Blue Jays	-7	The Buffalo Blue Jays are finally going home! The first MLB game at Sahlen field will take place on Tuesday, and the migratory birds will be able to settle in. Hopfully it will lead to the bats waking up. The Jays have been the 5th worst hitting team in baseball by wRC+, posting a pitiful line of .218/.277/.366. Good thing the pitching has been good.	5-8
24	Giants	-3		7-10
25	Red Sox	-2	Decent week for the Sox this time around. Our pitching staff came to play for once, however with impeccable timing the offense decided to disappear for a bit, leaving us with a respectable 3-2 record for the week. Of note is Verdugo, who had a standout game against Toronto with 2 HRs as well as robbing one from off of none other than Former-Red-Sock Travis Shaw. Calling it now, Verdugo 2022 AL MVP	6-9
26	D-Backs	-6	D-backs continue to underperform their talent level as their streaky offense can't buoy a terrible, no-good pitching staff. MadBum hasn't looked like himself all year and is currently being evaluated for back issues in Phoenix, while Ray is as frustrating as ever. Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly have looked legitimately fantastic, but it's hard to get by on two good starting pitching performances a week.	6-10
27	Royals	+1	A winning streak and a sweep of the Twins? Really? That just happened? While Brad Keller helps the rotation, and getting rid of Jorge Lopez helps any pitching staff, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. This is still a rebulding team, and while the sudden show of competence is nice, the Royals are not suddenly going to contend for the postseason. Unless Lopez was that fucking useless...	7-10
28	Mariners	-2	Justus Sheffield claimed his first career win this past week. Another bright light in a ridiculous season. Once baseball returns for real, the Mariners should be a force to reckon with as the new guys are looking fantastic. Evan White's glove is a beautiful thing.	6-11
29	Pirates	0	D̷̥̗̬͇͕̗͕̙̱̪̄̈́̆̃̔̂͆̍̆̒̓͛̑͝ȩ̶̣̞̣̻͈̲̰͉̰̪̏͛̅̅̈́͑̉̅̓̌̊͒͠͠a̵̡̡̙͚̭͕̳͕̖͔̫̪̘̐̓̿ͅr̸̡̧̢̙̞̤͙͍̭͕̦͙͈̀̍͋͋͜ͅ ̴̡̗̲̗͍̣̞̝̤̜̱̑͆͊͂͂̽̋̒̾͘̕͜T̴͈̝̥͚͂͘̚ẁ̶̢͎̱͈̳̘̜̙͆͐̈́͂͐̈́̔͊̂̕͠i̷̩̩̹̫̫̾́͌́̿͂̑͐͋͝͝n̶̡̧̠̘̝̟͔̩̫̩͈̰̍̔̽̈́̈́̕̚s̸͔̖̈́̈̇̐͘̚ͅ ̷̛͓͙̙͇͔̯̻̟͓̣̫͖͖͈͗̍̂͂͌̔̈́̽͊̐͋͒̇̕ͅǎ̴̢͎̪͇̬͔̻̼̯̀̀̋͂ͅn̵̳̩̰̠̱̳̯͕͊̔͐̿͛̇̊́̄͂͝d̵̡̹͓̣̺̪̦̺̗͊̈́͌̃̈́̆ͅ ̴̡̗̮̤̣͙̗̰̗̊͂͊̑̍͊̒̀̚͝T̵͇͍̯̄̑̈͛͗̉̅͂i̷̩̱̇̈́̈́g̴̡̧̣͈̪͉̹͈̞̺̜͖͕͇͋͐͒̿̚͝ͅe̷̮͊̌̈̃̔̂̇̊͌͘͜͝r̶̨̛̛̭̺͉͎͍̘̗͊̎̀͗͛̍͌́͊̉͒s̴̫̭͍͉̠̰̙̍̈́̋̕͝:̴̡̨͚̭̥͉͖͎͍̪͖͙͚̝͓̀̈́͂̄̌̾̒̂ ̶̨̢̢̫̱͉̣̥͈̈́T̸̡̧̢̩̖̼͈̮̙̟̬̹͕̈́̈̎͗͘͝h̵̢̥̳̣͔̜͈̝͎͎́̎̂̊́a̸̧̻̝̪̝͎̙̟͕̬̾͐̌̎̕ṅ̸̛͇̲̻͍̦͙̏̓͊̉̀͆̓̽̓̿̕k̵͍̳̰͉͑̑̊͌̆̃͒̚͠͝ ̶̛̱̮͈̙͖̫̉́͛̔̄͒̾͐͐̀̏͝ͅy̷̧̛̻̬͉̤̥͔̩̼̲͊̂̅͜ͅo̵͇̬͔̣̼̰̟̐̑͒̽͒̐̀̕̕ͅṷ̶̧̧̢̬̳͕̙̖̺̫̹̮̤̪̈́̌͂̒̔̽̉͂̅̇̕ ̶͇̻͓̱̘͔͚̙͙̟̉̋́̽͑̈́͌ͅͅf̵̛̮̈́͗͛̔̉̕͝ó̸̢̞̲͕̫̳͈͙͙̎̀̕͜͜ŕ̶̨͉̞̠̠̤̳̯̻̱̬̩̻̽̇̄̀̒̈͊̈͛͊ ̵̧̢̙̝͎͚̙̩̺̥̙̱̝̈͛̒̅̓̎͠ͅh̵̯̄̍͊e̷͍̗̞̬̪̣͙̦͇̲̓̈́̾̀̃̑́̽̀͌̀̍̚͝ͅl̵͈͖̰̭͐̂͑͝͠p̵̠͌͌̇͗̅į̷̨̡̱̻̭̮͖͗͐͗́͜͠ͅn̸̢̨̛̟̯̫̦̰̻̘̠̻̗̯g̸̢̥̯͊́̅͗̈́̉̇̿̈́͝ ̵̛̜̮̮̲̝͊́̀̄̈́̏̑͒͘͠t̴̤̥̓̐̾̄ḩ̴͖̼̞͔̱̦͎̞͆̇̋͆́͛́̓͘͝͝ė̷̛̥̠̏͌̎͗̀͒̃̓́̚͠ ̵̧͍̦͖̯͛̊̽͛͆̅͂̔̒́̇̿͘P̴̝̭̬̬̣̿̾͒̈́͌́̈í̵̡̭̠͈̦͕͕͓͚̲̓͋̎̈́͊̈̊̍̇͗͒̉͘͝t̶̢̨̡̩͚̖͇͍͍̥͈̀̒̀́̒͊̐̎͝t̶͍̪͚̻̭͍̩̼̮̰̺͌ş̵̨̠̮̱͔̪͕̜͎̻̳̱̆̇̈́̄͝͝͠b̸̡̮̝̯̗̥͋̓̾̃̈́u̵̳͂͌̈́͛̽̀̈́̾͝͝r̴͇̲̟̓̃̿͌̇̍̈͘͝͠ǧ̴̝̯̲̙̠̜̲̱͋͌h̷̢̢̡̛̬̹͈̠̰̼̼̭̤̹͂̑͗̂̌̈́̇͘͝ ̶̱̪̝̦̭̮͙̮̬͊P̸̢̤͈̰̠̟̹͕̐͂̋̃̌͌̓͝͠í̸̢͚̟͇̣̏̾̌ŗ̵̲͙͓͇͖̝̳̻̖̔̑̂̏̂̕͝ä̵͕̱̤̝̥̪͇̮͙̖́̑͒̈́͐ț̴̢̛̛͉͈̪̙̜̖͍͔͉͂̃̓̈́͛͒̋̆̈́͜͜ͅe̶͈̠̔̄̈́̐͒s̵̜͙͖͉̪̝̘̼̏̇̋̃͋̏͗̍̍͊̓͊̕̕ ̴̨̯̯̭̻͚͈̜̯̺̤̗̂͊͂̊̂̓̾̆̔͑̌̈́̕͝ồ̵̡̨̝̬͈̮̲̲̥́̽̆͂̅̓̽̄̈́̕̚͠͝ͅn̶̲͉͍̞̍̀̓̌̿͆͂̅̄̀̀̃͠͝ͅ ̷̳͖̭̤͓̹̞͚͉̥͔̟̱̣̍̂̽͜t̸̨̥̣̪͚̘̻͔̳̠̲̦̺̰͐̀̿̂͌̅͝ḥ̶̛͍͙̗͎̪̬̱̰̙̄͛̌͋̋ẻ̶͍̦͖̥͎͆́́͂̈́̚ͅḯ̸̢̜̖̖͍̭̙̱̙̘̫̙̂͑̀͒̓ͅr̷̼̯̗̙̞̼̄̈́ ̶̡̨̳͔̦̂̾̈͑͝͝ͅq̴̡̛̙͕̺̗̪̜͇͉͕̱̟̩̊͌̈́̐́̔͐̓͌́͛̈̏͝u̴̡̥͓͍̭̿̀̆̃̃̎̓̽̓͊̓͝͠ę̷͓̗͈͚͙̒̎͌͘̕s̶̡̝̮͚̜̣͚͇̖̭͖̓̈́̃̔͊̿͗̓̚̕ͅͅt̸̻̝̜̺̺̳͍̜͎̹͖̔̎̏̓̃̇̀̀̏̚̚ ̴̧̳̱̣̯͓̗̞̰̻̆͂̆̍̂͑̀͐̃̈̌͋̾͆͜f̵̣̻̝̹̖̱͍̂̽ơ̴̡̛͖̝̮͕̜̞̣̤̩̜̦̜̑̅̉͒̿̋̆̉͠r̸̨̙̹͚̰̣͓͐͆̋͆̓͂̆̃̓̃͂͛̌̿̃ ̸̢̨̙͓̱̫̯͉͙̘̙͙̻͇͆K̶͉̲̞̪̮̜̤͉͉̗̖̿̆́̂̀̄̍́͑ͅͅų̴̜͇͕͔̲̺̭͍̩͗̾̉̊̀̊̆̚ṃ̵̧̡̢̣̞̮͇͓̱̥̹̒̈ͅͅą̵͖̞̖̼̣̠̤̥̪͚͋͌̀̽̋͝r̵̢͚̬̺̍͒̂̒̽̏͝ͅ ̸̮̀̄̐̀͊̿̋͂͌̆̈̕͝R̷̡̨̬͚͙̫̻̱͍̬̭̅̿͒͋͒́̿̇̆̕ǫ̵̨̖̗̳͍̹͉̤̘̯̣͕͊̔̈̍̏͋̊͐̅͛͝ͅc̶͖̪̙̣̲̤̖͚̠̹̖̳̞͙̏̅̐͜ḵ̷̢̨̘̙̹͕̠̙͍̳͙̠͙͒͒̅̒ͅe̸̢̻̦̮̻͌̉̄̉̀̎̇́̇̽̑̓͂ŗ̴̗͙̲̝̱̠̭͙͕̮̯̱͠	3-13

N/A, Quarantined Rank: 17||Cardinals|-2| 5 games lul |2-3

mlb batting average explained video

In order to qualify for batting titles in averaged categories (Avg, Slg, OBP, OPS, RC, OW%, #P/PA, G/F), a player must average at least 3.1 plate appearances for every game his team has played ... Batting average is a statistic that shows how successful a batter is at getting a hit by using a number to indicate the percentage of total at-bats that a batter successfully collects a hit. The statistic only measures how often they get a hit, and doesn’t distinguish between types of hits. Batting average is one of the most recognizable ... Batting Average (AVG or BA) This one is pretty easy. Batting average (BA) is calculated by taking a player’s total hits and dividing them by at bats. The above box score would represent a player ... Origin. Batting average was created as a measure to judge the success of a hitter. For one season, in 1887, walks counted as hits as well. But after that season, it was determined that batting ... Expected Batting Average (xBA) xBA measures the likelihood that a batted ball will become a hit. Expected Weighted On-base Average (xwOBA) xwOBA is formulated using exit velocity, launch angle and, on certain types of batted balls, Sprint Speed. Expected Earned Run Avg (xERA) xERA is a simple 1:1 translation of xwOBA, converted to the ERA scale ... The official source for sortable MLB player and team stats, including customizable splits and filters. Visit ESPN to view 2020 MLB stat leaders. MLB has enhanced its code of conduct pertaining to harassment and discrimination, has set up an anonymous hotline for those with information about sexual ... MLB advanced stats glossary: A guide to baseball stats that go beyond RBI, batting average, ERA ... It's denominated in runs and compares fielders to the MLB average at their respective positions. Batting Average is a stat the represents the percentage of times a hitter successfully gets a hit when they are at bat. HOW IS IT CALCULATED? It is determined by dividing the number of hits a player gets by the number of at bats they have. (Hits)/(At Bats) = Batting Average. Batting Average. The total number of hits a player has divided by the total number of at bats. It is expressed as a three place decimal but recited as a whole number. In other words, a player’s batting average will be written as .278 but an announcer will say the player is “hitting two-seventy-eight.” Key Batting Averages

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mlb batting average explained

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Baserunning

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mlb batting average explained video

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