On the Value of Sprint Speed
Baseball players, you’ll be surprised to hear, are evaluated in part based on how fast they are. You know: speed is one of the five tools! To that end, what follows briefly examines player...
Category: Quantitative
In-Zone, Out-of-Zone, Hot-Zone, Cold-Zone: Batter Contact Rates
Hitters, it turns out, are pitched to differently based on their strengths and weaknesses. For their part, pitchers can choose what to throw those hitters and in what order, all the while doing their...
Will the Real Joey Gallo Please Stand Up
Joey Gallo, now several seasons into his Major League career and still just 26, has felt like a known commodity for years. He has proved himself to be a capable Major League regular, an...
MLB Debuts, by Season and Franchise
As the truncated 2020 regular season wraps up, it’s a good time to take a look at some of the trends that this unprecedented seasonal format has given way to. Among all these changes...
Baseball is Getting Younger, but Not Uniformly So
It probably does not come as a great surprise to hear that, on average, MLB players are getting younger. There are a handful of possible reasons for that trend. Significantly, younger players are paid...
The Modal Slash Line, 2010-2019
What follows was inspired by an interesting podcast episode by NPR’s Planet Money, which outlined one potential process for identifying “The Modal American.” The podcast’s creators suggested that, while people often refer to the...
MVP Votes and WAR Leaderboards, Converging Lists
Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, has become a pervasive statistic in baseball in recent years. The concept of evaluating a baseball player through the lens of wins, and in the context of his theoretical...
Raising Usage of Rising Pitches
Please note before reading: there are contradicting profiles of pitch classifications/usage in the case of Zack Wheeler. I have used Baseball Savant’s pitch classifications, but am aware that Brooks Baseball, for one, presents an...
Pillars of Consistency and Paragons of Change
There will either be a truncated 2020 MLB season or no MLB season at all. While this fact is due to a phenomenon drastically more serious and important than baseball, it gives way to...
Insights from a Decade of Offense and Defense Data
Modern baseball statistics are often made easy to interpret. Many statistics available come pre-normalized and with many facets of a player’s production baked in. This post focuses on two such statistics, FanGraphs’ Off and...