Drew Gagnon, Journeyman
Drew Gagnon is not, shall we say, a household name. Mets fans, holding all else equal, might be most familiar with his career, but particularly fastidious baseball fans might just as well have familiarity...
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...
How Do Pitch Characteristics Relate to Value?
An evolving phenomenon in baseball is that of pitch design. In general terms, pitch design entails making adjustments a to players’ pitch(es) based on that pitches attributes. This could be achieved a plethora of...
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...
Using K Nearest Neighbors to Predict Pitch Types
Fans of baseball have, to varying degrees, a fair understanding of what defines any given pitch type. Fastballs are defined by features like high velocity, backspin, and a straight flight path, relatively speaking. Curveballs...
Giving High-FIP Pitchers a Mulligan
High-FIP pitchers have a pretty rough time of it these days. FIP gets thrown around in common conversation more than ever and, per the nature of FIP (or more accurately, xFIP), high-FIP players must...
The Texas Rangers, and The Skinny Rebuild
In 2015 the Texas Rangers won the American League West. Texas’ front office was rewarded for its faith in the 2015 Rangers roster when it acquired Cole Hamels at the Trade Deadline despite the...
Pythagoras’ Rabbit Hole
This post comes about after having perused 2019’s Pythagorean records, and is admittedly a bit meandering. In an attempt to pin down where this meandering content goes, below are the three primary takeaways I...
Swinging Against the Tide: Ground-Ball Risers
In the past couple of years, a growing number of MLB hitters have been making some changes. Those changes, to grossly oversimplify, have generally been made in an effort to get the ball in...
Because Not Everyone Can Be An All-Star
Anthony Rendon had an eventful 2019. Chief among those events were a World Series title and a new nine-figure contract. Of lesser, but still significant note, was that Rendon was a first time All-Star....