Trevor Bauer sits on a folding chair in a drafty warehouse, sipping applesauce from a plastic cup and electrocuting his brain. … Read More
(via Sports Illustrated)
The Braves unexpectedly won the NL East last year and they did so with a bunch of exciting young players that should be around for a good while. That’s the stuff that sustains you as a fan: winning baseball and guys you want to root for. But I’m having a really, really hard time enjoying the Braves at the moment because, quite simply, the team’s front office thinks I’m a friggin’ moron.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw from this interview of Braves team president Terry McGuirk and general manager Alex Anthopoulos, conducted by David O’Brein and Jeff Schultz of The Athletic. It’s a masterwork of condescension, dishonesty and, at the end of the day, constitutes a clear signal that the Braves care about profits, first, second, third and foremost. “Sure, winning baseball is pretty spiffy, but let’s not keep our eyes off the prize, which is ‘financial flexibility,’” the Braves brass seems to be telling us.
Don’t just take my word for it. … Read More
(via Hardball Talk)
Last month, I wrote about the substantial change in the way Baseball Prospectus is measuring hitter value and the significance of that change to Miguel Cabrera’s statistical legacy. Yesterday morning, BP announced “updates” to its hitter-value metric, DRC+. The description of the updates is pretty technical, and I commend you to the linked article if you want to get into the nuts and bolts, to the extent BP exposes them to the public. The short story seems to be that the original version of DRC+ undervalued two types of players: 1) those who play many of their games in “extreme ballparks” (Coors Field is the only one I’ve seen mentioned in the early DRC+ critiques and the update article, but I assume others are included) and 2) “extreme”-output hitters who do one thing really well (the examples I’ve seen discussed usually include singles hitters like Tony Gwynn and Ichiro Suzuki).
For Cabrera, the update credited him with even more productive value, adding almost two wins to his career total. The following chart, which I’ve adapted from the one I created for the BttP article, compares Cabrera’s career and season-by-season win totals under three different WARP regimes: a) TAv-based WARP; b) the original DRC+-based WARP; and c) the updated DRC+-based WARP.
(Notes: TAv-based WARP isn’t available for 2018, which affects the WARP totals in the bottom row. Orange highlighting signals seasons in which TAv and original DRC+ disagree about whether Cabrera’s offense was above or below average. Updated DRC+ was consistent with original DRC+ in that respect.)
Looking first at the table’s seventh column, the DRC+ update added to Cabrera’s totals, not infrequently by double digits, in every season save two minor decreases in 2007 and 2014. Looking next to the table’s final column, though, there isn’t really a consistent correlation between either the direction or magnitude of the update’s DRC+ adjustments and WARP; indeed, in 2008 and 2012, the update resulted in increases in Cabrera’s DRC+ but decreases in WARP. As the totals in the bottom row indicate, however, overall, the DRC+ update boosted Cabrera’s career WARP total by 1.8 wins. Not bad.
Here I will add the same caveat I included in my previous article on this subject, which is that I don’t have a deep enough understanding of DRC+, a proprietary metric, to explain with any further detail why this happened. (I also will note that, because BP does not archive its statistical reports from prior metric regimes, the foregoing is reliant on data previously captured by Archive.org’s Wayback Machine and me.)
What outsiders like us can say is that the Deserved-Runs-Created era has been good to Cabrera, from validating his MVP wins over Mike Trout to restoring all of his season-by-season WARP numbers into the black to, following yesterday’s update, increasing his career WARP total. None of this is likely to stir any concern on the parts of Al Avila or Chris Ilitch that Cabrera suddenly is on track to challenge for MVP votes in 2023 such that his $30 million option for his age-forty-one season in 2024 will vest, but the growing– even if by very small amounts– recognition of Cabrera’s past achievements is nice to see.
_________________________________________________________
Previously
Miguel Cabrera further bolstered by sabermetric update
Trout vs. Cabrera, and Aging with DRC+ (via Baseball Prospectus)
Paraphrasing scripture, David Crosby wrote in reference to the months of January and February vis-a-vis the baseball media, “to every offseason there is a season, churn, churn, churn,” and so we find ourselves in that season of a season when the game is unplayed, the transactions are slow, and meta-speculation abounds. MLB is set to announce its 2019 Hall of Fame class this evening, which means everybody who’s nobody is talking about the publicized selections of everybody who’s very slightly somebody solely by virtue of having a hall-of-fame vote, which led me to the shared ballot of known typer of baseball words Bob Nightengale, whose selections were surprisingly inoffensive. These days, the things to look for to get a quick read on a voter are whether he or she included or excluded Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, and Edgar Martinez. There are a bunch of names on the ballot, and voters may vote for as many as ten, but I think the quickest way to get a feel for the type of person the voter is is to check the selections on those four players. If you somehow care, Bob was in on all four of those guys.
The selection/non-selection combination that caught my eye was the vote for Gary Sheffield and no-vote for Manny Ramirez. To be clear, I do not care about how Bob voted, and it’s a testament to the failed human experiment that is the internet (probably) how quickly the cult-like obsession around the publicization of MLB HOF ballots has dissipated into wait-was-it-ever-even-a-story? status, but this ballot pairing is interesting to me in part because it wasn’t surprising that any eligible voter would choose Sheffield over Ramirez, even though I think Ramirez probably has a better resume and, in any event, they’re pretty close. Here’s how they stack up on a series of potentially relevant factors:
Sheffield has Ramirez by a few seasons and about a hundred hits, which, at those levels, should not be discounted, but things otherwise look pretty good for Manny. I don’t know if either of these guys deserves a plaque in Cooperstown, but if you think Sheffield does, maybe it makes sense for you to think Ramirez does too? Or maybe you just have a weird thing for mid-aughts Tigers. Maybe it’s Sheffield’s work as a World War I historian that tips the scales for today’s writer-voters. Who knows.
My guesses for who will make the cut tonight? (you didn’t ask): Mussina, Martinez, Mariano Rivera, and Roy Halladay. Tune into MLB Network at six if you want the full scoop.
UPDATE: My guesses were correct.
A recent update to the way Baseball Prospectus evaluates offensive production already has resulted in the retroactive revision of one of baseball’s biggest conversations in favor of Miguel Cabrera. Could there be other aspects of Cabrera’s track record that shine more brightly after this update? Yes there could, I explain in my latest post at Banished to the Pen, which looks at Cabrera’s standing among the game’s all-time elite.
The full post is available here.
The year 2018 was a year. Here are some of our favorite things from the year that was 2018.
Thank you for your readership this year. Look for more great content here in 2019.
Thanks to all of you for making 2018 another great year in ALDLAND. Your digital greeting card is after the jump. Continue reading
The Raconteurs have been my favorite Jack White outfit, but I didn’t think they still were an active group until this week, when they posted a new music video and stated that they’ve released two new songs, their first public recordings since 2008’s Consolers of the Lonely. One of those songs, “Sunday Driver,” is this week’s Jam:
News broke last night that Justin Fields, Georgia’s number-two quarterback behind Jake Fromm, is considering a transfer. Initial reports indicated that he had decided to transfer, but follow-ups this morning have softened that somewhat. Still, from Fields’ perspective, a transfer makes some sense for the second overall recruit from the 2018 class who, thus far, has not overtaken Fromm and probably wants– and would receive– a starting opportunity at another top-tier program.
If Fields does leave after this season, he will be the second highly regarded QB to depart Athens under the Kirby Smart regime. Former starter Jacob Eason left after he lost the job to Fromm in the 2017 season, transferring to Washington (in his home state). He had to sit out the 2018 season, though he was allowed to practice with the Huskies and play on the scout team. Although Washington coach Chris Peterson told Eason during his high-school recruitment that, if Eason “ever needed to or had the opportunity to come home, he would have a place for” Eason, there obviously is no guarantee of a starting job for him in Seattle. In fact, a report yesterday shows that Eason will face a challenge from a former high-school rival, Dylan Morris, who will enroll early to begin the competition with Eason this spring. While the Seattle Times regards Eason as the presumptive starter– “of course”– for 2019, the report also notes that Eason will be one of five scholarship quarterbacks on campus this spring.
Even if Fields doesn’t have to sit out a year, something he obviously hopes to avoid even if it isn’t clear how he would do so under current NCAA rules, Eason’s situation should serve as a reminder that there are no certainties in college football.
The rest of us can occupy the moments between bowl games trying to guess if and, probably more significantly, where Fields might transfer. Some reading the tea leaves are seeing early indications that Fields is setting his sights on Columbus.
UPDATE: Fields has taken the necessary step to commence the transfer process. Coaches at other schools now are free to recruit him to join their programs without having to receive permission from UGA. It apparently is possible that the SEC still could restrict Fields’ ability to transfer within the conference, however.
UPDATE: Fields is transferring to Ohio State. The immediate reports do not indicate whether he’ll have to sit out a year, but I think that’s the reasonable expectation absent extraordinary circumstances.
It was about as clear as these things get, and the writers got it wrong. In fact, they got it wrong twice. That was the consensus, in our sabermetric corner of the internet, when Miguel Cabrera stole consecutive MVP awards from Mike Trout in 2012 and 2013.
Cabrera was a lumbering first baseman, shoved across the diamond only because the Tigers decided to force-fit Prince Fielder onto their plodding roster. He was a great hitter, but he added no value beyond that hitting. Trout, at the tender ages of 20 and 21, lit up the field in ways Cabrera couldn’t. He robbed home runs in center field, stole bases both often and efficiently, was one of the most consistent hitters in baseball, and according to the best information we had at the time, he was also Cabrera’s equal (or very nearly so, or perhaps even his superior) at the plate.
Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs each had Trout about 3.0 WAR better than Cabrera in 2012, and about 1.5 WAR better than him in 2013. We had the gap slightly smaller in 2012, but slightly larger in 2013. When such a clear gap between the best player and the field exists, it’s rare that the award goes to the “wrong” one. In this case, though, more or less everyone with a stat-savvy bone in their body espoused the belief that it had happened.
We were, all of us, deceived. … Read More
(via Baseball Prospectus)
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