Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 9/10/24

Ben Clemens: Hey everyone, welcome to the chat

171: The Orioles… woof. I haven’t been able to make myself be interested in watching this team in weeks. Do you think that there needs to be managerial/coaching changes made to remedy whatever cause these last 3 months to happen?

Ben Clemens: Ooh, it seems like it’s time for the Orioles to be the AL East team with a great record who everyone thinks is terrible

Ben Clemens: Remember the halcyon days of a week and a half ago when everyone said the Yankees were a below .500 team who wouldn’t sniff the playoffs?

Ben Clemens: those were fun

Ben Clemens: The O’s are fine, c’mon

Not AJ Preller: Contracts aside, who would you rather have for the next 5 years: JRod, Carroll, or Chourio?

Ben Clemens: I think I’d take JRod

Ben Clemens: But there are no wrong answers, imo

DeeBo: It’s a small sample, I know, but is there anything from Connor Norby’s current hot streak that makes you think the prospect reports might have undersold him a bit? He’s hit everywhere he’s been and looks like a very solid piece for the M’s going forward

Ben Clemens: Ehhhhh…. I like Norby, but I don’t think his recent string of success is changing my view much

Ben Clemens: he’s striking out a third of the time, and I don’t think he’s gonna keep posting a .300 ISO

Ben Clemens: I’m basically in the same place where I was before this hot streak – intriguing player, liked the trade for the Marlins, not ready to change my priors

Bob: Which two would you keep for fantasy baseball among Elly De La Cruz, Kyle Tucker, Jarren Duran and Paul Skenes?

Ben Clemens: I think Skenes and Elly? Man, I don’t know

Ben Clemens: good problem to have, depends on keeper prices and all

Ben Clemens: I’m definitely worried about Tucker’s injury for this year, but I think in the long term it’ll be just fine

Oaktown Blues: Hi Ben! On July 8, you wrote about Brent Rooker’s success built on not being afraid to rack up the Ks as long as he keeps hitting it hard. Since your article, Rooker has a 194 wRC+ and a 22.6% K rate (217 PAs). Do you think he unlocked another gear? Or just an extended hot streak for a guy who was already pretty damn good?

Ben Clemens: I am somehwere between those two. I thought about writing about Rooker again but to be honest, I already write about the A’s a lot 🙂

Ben Clemens: SO I thought I’d give it a rest and maybe let someone else take it

Down by the River Ryan: I’m sure it’s automated and due to the whole indy ball thing, but Kumar Rocker being listed as No School despite famously going to Vanderbilt looks odd.

Ben Clemens: Oh yeah, definitely automated, but I”ll mention it

GA Blood: Nasim Nunez’s season makes me sad. I don’t understand it in the context of the Nationals’ season. All season on the roster, 36 games played, 38 plate appearances. 141 wRC+. What was the point, really?

Ben Clemens: I’ve been trying to write about this for a while now

Ben Clemens: I can’t quite find an angle that works

Ben Clemens: for how many days he’s been on the roster, he’s basically just never playing

Ben Clemens: That said, I gave it up when the Nats started letting him play the occasional full game in August

Ben Clemens: He’s now only a kind of interesting outlier — he has 17 PA in the past month, and he only had 14 in the entire first half of the season

Sean: Do you think Dipoto should lose his job if the M’s miss the playoffs with that starting staff?  He’s done a great job building the farm, and the pitching staff, but are his roster decisions holding the M’s back at this point?

Sodo Mojo: I am torn about the Mariners retaining Dipoto for another year.  On one hand I think he is not the best GM to lead the teams forward and there other better options who would gladly take the job even though ownership seems ambivalent about winning. On the other hand that same ownership group hired Bill Bavasi and Jack Zduriencik both of whom were unmitigated disasters.  What should I think as a Mariners fan?

Ben Clemens: I typed up and then deleted a few possible answers here

Ben Clemens: I’m really divided here

Ben Clemens: I feel like the main thing holding the Mariners back is the entire organizational structure; ownership doesn’t want to spend, and that view permeates downward

Ben Clemens: but letting Dipoto off the hook for putting that view into practice doesn’t feel quite right

Ben Clemens: I think I’d probably give him another year against my better judgment, but it’s a really tough one

Tom A.: Do outcomes on a 3-2 count vary depending if the count started 0-2 or 3-2?  I’ve always been fascinated by this.  My feeling is that the batter has the relative advantage in both of these cases, but the pitcher in other cases.

Ben Clemens: I’m actually in the process of investigating this, or at least the general case of this

Ben Clemens: Here’s a note I took down at Saber Seminar: “count not modeled well by Markov Chain??? investigate”

Ben Clemens: someone mentioned that kind of off hand and I’ve been curious about it ever since

laughingstock: Why are stolen bases always assigned +0.2 runs of value in the calculation of WAR, regardless of era, situation, or even which base you steal? I’ve never understood the reasoning there of not calculating the value dependent on the base-out state and run scoring environment, like is done with the value of caught stealing

Ben Clemens: it’s a great question that has to do with the way wOBA is calculated, and I completely don’t understand it

Ben Clemens: Another thing we talked about at saber seminar

2025: Which of these guys do you think will be able to repeat their success next season: Houck, R Lopez, Schwellenbach

Ben Clemens: I think I might be most in on Lopez, which feels weird to say

Ben Clemens: b/c I really didn’t think he’d play as a starter

Ben Clemens: I was just way off on a lot of these starter conversions, to be fair

Fernando Ludwick Jr: Is the NL wildcard race the most exciting years?  Can’t remember a race this tight….hope it bodes well for baseball in general.

Ben Clemens: I’m having a tough time thinking of one I personally enjoyed more since 2020

Ben Clemens: The Giants/Dodgers division race in 2021 was awesome but that’s not wild card

Gotham: Are the days of Cashman getting a pass over? The Dominguez / Verdugo conundrum aside, if he can’t sign Soto, what is the most sensible path forward? Judge and Cole cost a ton of money, the farm system stinks, and outside of Wells there have been very few pleasant surprises this year…

Ben Clemens: I mean… the Yankees are good! They have a lot of good players, and they have the best record in the AL

Ben Clemens: for what it’s worth, our most recent update has their farm system 11th in baseball

Ben Clemens: I do love that now Yankees and O’s fans now want to burn everything to the ground at the same time

Ben Clemens: they’re out-disappointing each other

James: Do you know of any way to get stats on check swings? My hypothesis is that umpires are less likely to call strikes when a batter checks his swing, even if it is a strike, but I’ve never seen anyone research that

Ben Clemens: Sadly no. I’ve been interested in researching this exact question for a while, but the data just doesn’t exist

Ben Clemens: I wonder if bat tracking is going to make it possible

Liam: Hey Ben! I’m curious about your technical chops and tools you use – I want to become a little more savvy there, and was wondering when you talk about running your monte carlo sims and other projections, is that done in python? r? and did you learn primarily by tinkering?

Ben Clemens: Oh sure. That’s all done in Python, but R might honestly be better

Ben Clemens: I just started with Python and it works for my purposes

Ben Clemens: I use that and SQL fairly often, SQL because we have a FanGraphs database and I need to query it in intelligent ways. I learned first largely by tinkering, but I’ll be totally honest: AI has been a massive help in improving my skills recently

Ben Clemens: If you’re willing to engage Gemini (or whatever your preferred LLM is) in a conversation about how to code something you’re trying to do, and if you mostly understand the logic behind it, you can go far

Ben Clemens: I’ve gotten MUCH better at doing complex calculations or just tricky stuff that isn’t obvious at first glance by asking an LLM how to do it, finding where their instructions goes wrong, and just iterating and refining

Refugee: is there a premium premium membership that gives us access to that SQL database?

Ben Clemens: Ha, I don’t think so, but you could definitely create your own from the data downloads that come with membership

Ben Clemens: We don’t really maintain a lot of the stuff I’m messing with to the high standard of quality we like for official FG stuff

Esix Snead: I find myself getting burned out from baseball due to the inundation of metrics and general computer optimization.  Feel like there is no “fog of war” or mystique because every team has identical Trackman and batted ball data.  When every team has identical information in a zero-sum game, it feels like the only differences in teams are how much money ownership is willing to spend, and how near-death your owner is as to whether they’re willing to eschew future success in favor of a current run.   How do I not feel jaded by this?

Ben Clemens: That’s definitely a real issue facing baseball today

Ben Clemens: i do think that teams are doing interesting and smart things around long-term strategy, development, things like htat

Ben Clemens: but it’s not particularly visible to us as fans, which makes that less interesting

Ben Clemens: The reason I write 5 things, and why I look at whimsical stuff in general, is b/c the amount of joy I get from that hasn’t changed

Ben Clemens: but the amount of joy I get from trying to figure out whether the Cardinals are using hte wrong fifth starter based on advanced metrics has definitely declined in the past decade

Oddball Herrera: If you’re bummed that everyone is using analytics, just remember the Rockies are still out there asking why guys can’t hit good if they’re such good hitters

Ben Clemens: It’s a great question

Insert Witty Name Here: Thoughts on the US Open finals? Sabalenka is amazing, I love how she goes full throttle on every shot. On the men’s side, what do you think about the aptly named Sinner’s failed test?

Ben Clemens: Love Sabalenka, and I completely agree, her style is really fun. I think it also leads to great matches b/c when she’s off she just gets boat raced, which keeps things close

Ben Clemens: I guess I’m okay with Sinner getting to still play, it seems like a silly thing to get suspended over at the concentrations he had. That said, it does feel like special treatment, maybe everyone should get the benefit of the doubt like him

Ben Clemens: I love watching him play, though. It’s wild how he gets so much power into his shots, it feels like he’s using every single inch of his body to do so

New GM: I’m looking at the free agency classes in the next couple years after this one and there’s not a ton of position players at the top of the market after Kyle Tucker, who may or may not even make it to FA, and Vlad who is position limited.  Could we see spending this offseason inflated due to that or do most teams not look ahead?

Ben Clemens: Yeah, not to give too much away, but I’m trying to model for this a little bit in my free agency predictions this year

Ben Clemens: I think that teams definitely do spend for one winter with the next winter’s fallback options in mind

Ben Clemens: there’s always a lot of uncertainty, but I think it’d be smart to be slightly more aggressive this winter

Nate: Is there a split on the website for when the infield is drawn? I know there are splits for when there is a shift on, but curious if drawn-in infield is there somewhere as well

Ben Clemens: no, but you could maybe piece one together from statcast data about infielder depth

Ben Clemens: I’m definitely curious, sounds like maybe something for later in the month

Sam: Do you think there’s a solution to the amount of groupthink that seems to permeate most MLB front offices (not counting the Rockies) and how it homogenizes the game?

Ben Clemens: Not really? I think that’s just a side effect of the interconnected world we live in

Ben Clemens: Like, name an industry where this isn’t a problem

Ben Clemens: the world is massively more connected now than it has ever been, naturally groupthink is on the rise

Insert Witty Name Here: What books do you have lined up after the baseball season is over?

Ben Clemens: first on the list is Alien Clay (which I believe isn’t even out in the US yet) for a book club

Ben Clemens: I just got my library card hooked up to my e-reader, which has been a game changer

Ben Clemens: since then I’ve read The Fury (good), Nine Lives (meh), Fourth Wing (bad), The Great Train Robbery (a classic)

Ben Clemens: going on vacation next week, so I’m gonna juice up the e reader even more

Oddball Herrera: Alien Clay based on the name sounds like a sequel to Chubby Rain

Okra: The O’s keep playing Emmanual Rivera and Nick Maton over Mayo.  Rivera has been DFA twice this year and Maton three times.  I don’t get it.  If they don’t trust Mayo why didn’t they cash him in at the deadline?

Ben Clemens: I’m very confused by that behavior too

Ben Clemens: I wonder if Holliday’s struggles are somehow messing with their confidence in playing minor leaguers

James: Is Verlander just out of sorts from the injuries, or is he cooked? I don’t see much hope for this year but is this the end for good

Ben Clemens: Obviously I can’t say for certain, but I’ll say this:

Ben Clemens: I think that the odds that it’s over are pretty high, more than 50%

Ben Clemens: ‘over’ as in he’s never a true talent top 3 starter again

Ben Clemens: top 3 on the team, not top 3 in baseball

Ben Clemens: hard to predict when pitchers will lose effectiveness, and maybe he can just find some new adjustment to make it keep working, but I kinda think this is what decline looks like

Dan: Do you think there is a front office equivalent to peak Mike Trout, does nearly everything very well; all time great; the difference between his team being average and a dumpster fire and we just don’t know because it’s too hard to measure or is the talent level of the front office personnel too flat for that comparison?

Ben Clemens: My guess is the second, that there’s just not that much talent gap

Ben Clemens: That said, the first is definitely true: we do not have the tools to measure this well, so I’m not sure of my answer

Saint Lou: Will Ivan Herrera ever get a chance to play full time? I don’t understand the reluctancy to play him more.

Ben Clemens: I think that this boils down to the organization’s long-running obsession with catcher defense

Ben Clemens: Having Yadi for 20 years or so really messes with your head, you know?

Ben Clemens: That’s how you get the pitching staff having a weird mini-revolt against very good catcher Willson Contreras

Ben Clemens: and Pedro Pages getting extended run despite definitely not being a great major league hitter

Ben Clemens: I think that there’s just an organizational expectation that the person who catches will be an ultra-premium defender who does everything and also is a pitcher whisperer, and that’s been tough on Herrera, who is not that, despite being a good player

Dan: I remember reading preseason previews in the early 90s and there was always at least one that predicted my team would be in the world series. Now that I (and the media) understand statistics better and what makes winning baseball is better understood it’s a lot harder to delude myself when my team is bad.

Ben Clemens: Yep, totally agree with this

Ben Clemens: a better understanding of what leads to success in baseball definitely decreases uncertainty

Zach: I’m curious to hear about your experience with how LLMs have affected your job/life. I know you just mentioned it in terms of coding, but how often do you use it, are you excited about future iterations, etc.?

Ben Clemens: I mainly use it for work

Ben Clemens: I guess I like its sorting of cooking/recipe results better than looking through the miserable here’s a story about my life before the recipe style blogs

Brad: Ben…is it me or does Spencer Horwitz look like he could be an above average hitter?  I have seen him go the other way and also drop the bat head and pull the ball.   Where do you see his position in the future?

Ben Clemens: I could totally see it

Ben Clemens: I was trying to find something to write about for this week and ALMOST landed on Horwitz

Ben Clemens: I might still before long

Ben Clemens: it doesn’t look fake, and the minor league numbers look real

Ben Clemens: I think that he’s gonna be a positionless wanderer defensively, though

Sanford: Juan Soto is younger than 16 of the top 35 rookies (45%) by fWAR this year. That’s all

Dan: Cooking with a LLM is fun because you can’t be 100% certain it didn’t hallucinate the recipe. Well maybe an experienced chef can but not me

Ben Clemens: I think that’s part of the fun

Ben Clemens: I try a lot of weird combinations as it is

Adam: Is DJ Herz anything?

Ben Clemens: I’m trying to answer this exact question for a friend of mine who’s a big Nats fan

Ben Clemens: I think yes? But I don’t have a perfectly reasoned opinion just yet

Adam: Do you have an internal heuristic for the relative importance of the aspects of catcher defense?  I.e. what % is framing vs. blocking vs. throwing out baserunners?

Ben Clemens: HEre’s one way of looking at it

Ben Clemens: the worst blocker this year, per Statcast, is Shea Langeliers at -6, best is six players at +3. No one else is worse than -3. So 9 run gap. The run game gap is 12 runs (Will Smith +7, Yasmani Grandal -5). The framing gap is 25 runs (Patrick Bailey +16, Yainer Diaz -9)

Ben Clemens: so that’s the order, and framing is, roughly speaking, worth as much as the other two skills combined

Ed Kranepool: 12 team pts league, 9 keepers.  Time to drop 1 of my keepers, Michael Harris?

Ben Clemens: I think Michael Harris is great. I would definitely not drop him

Ben Clemens: I’m slow to update my priors, though

Brett: What is more likely to happen, someone other than Ohtani to be in 50/50 club or someone other than Judge hitting more than 62 HR in your lifetime?

Ben Clemens: I think 50/50 club

Ben Clemens: it’s only been a year since we had a legit contender in Acuna

Insert Witty Name Here: Naming kids are hard.  I once thought about naming it after my favorite baseball player, but it didn’t quite sound right.  If you had to name your future son after a big leaguer, who would it be?

Ben Clemens: I don’t think we’ll do this, but Curtis Granderson

Ben Clemens: great player, great guy, and I happen to like the name

Adam: Are we at the point where, push come to shove, the Dodgers would just employ bullpen games in the playoffs rather than throw Buehler or Miller out there?

Ben Clemens: Yeah, I think they should employ bullpen games with those guys as part of the plan

Jared: Which of these rookies do you think will have the best career? Holliday, Chourio, Merrill, or Langford?

Ben Clemens: Gimme Chourio

Ben Clemens: I would have said Merrill a month ago, so I have those close

Ben Clemens: I’m down on Holliday

Ben Clemens: so I’d go Chourio Merril (tier gap) Langford (mini tier gap) Holliday

Mark Seaman: Rangers pitching might not suck next season. The offense wasn’t great this year, do they just hope the young guys figure it out?

Ben Clemens: they still project well, I think

Ben Clemens: plenty of good options, Carter will hopefully be back and better

Ben Clemens: hope that Adolis Garcia is an average to slightly above average hitter instead of a tire fire

Ben Clemens: I’ve been donw on the Rangers for a while, though. I think one of my ‘bold predictions’ for the year was that the Rangers would miss the playoffs and finish below .500

Ben Clemens: They’ve been light on depth for a while now

Ben Clemens: and when things don’t hit right, it’s ugly

ResumeMan: Oakland in the postseason!*

(*Ballers, that is)

hopeful champion: would you start Bido tonight against the astros? even with him pitching in relief the other day?

Ben Clemens: Yeesh, I think no, but I don’t have a strong lean either way

Insert Witty Name Here: When I think of Curtis Granderson, all I think of is that commercial on repeat that kept mentioning his parents were teachers.  Also I think I asked this to you years ago because I remember thinking Curtis Carl Clemens would be a funny name.

Ben Clemens: I don’t remember that quesiton – but look, I really like Granderson

DeeBo: What do you think the mood inside the White Sox clubhouse is right now? A lot of young guys trying to prove themselves, but among the veterans it must be pretty miserable

Ben Clemens: oh yeah I think it’s probably mostly awful

Ben Clemens: it is just NOT fun to lose so often in anything

Guardcore Clevelander: Not so much as question as an observation. The Royals have a weak outfield, a strong rotation, and no bullpen, with their best player being a middle infielder. The Guardians have multiple All-Stars who can play the outfield, a struggling rotation, an elite bullpen, and their best infielder is at third base. It’s like the 2015 Royals and 2018 Guardians swapped roles.

Ben Clemens: This is Andrew Miller erasure, but true in a broad sense

Ben Clemens: It’s definitely strange to see the Royals built around a meteoric up-the-middle talent while the Guardians go the pitching and defense route, although I don’t think their outfield all stars will last

Sirras: When do the White Sox next have a .500 season?

Ben Clemens: Uh…. yikes

Ben Clemens: I feel like they have it in them to turn it around soon

Sully: With ~3 weeks left in the season, can I throw any starter in there for Ks and not worry about a blow-up hurting my lead in WHIP?  I’m at 1.063 and 2nd place is at 1.125.

Ben Clemens: let’s say you’re in a 1,400 innings max league. Your lead is 84 walks or hits

Ben Clemens: how much of a blowup are we expecting? I have to assume less than that

Ben Clemens: so I think you’re good

Guest: Who do you think gets left out of the NL WC? I know that you wrote a detailed defense of the playoff odds methodology recently, and ARI and SD have very high odds; but it also seems like either team could get squeezed out. They don’t have much of a lead on NYM and ATL.

Ben Clemens: I think it’ll be the Mets, though I hope I’m wrong b/c this has been a really fun team

Ben Clemens: But honestly, it feels like a pretty big tossup to me

Ben Clemens: all these odds are really close, and I’m DEFINITELY not confident that I’m good at telling a 60% chance from a 65% chance

Christian: New rule: The ownership of the team with the worst regular season record is forced to sell at the end of the year.

Ben Clemens: oh yes, let’s do that

Insert Witty Name Here: Weird hypothetical – would increasing the baseball size help reduce the massive velo we’re seeing nowdays? Or is that just too extreme and maybe in 2050?

Ben Clemens: I think it’d just be too extreme

Ben Clemens: I’d mess with seams and ball composition way before doing that

Ben Clemens: Okay, on that note, I’m gonna call it a chat. Stick around for Jay Jaffe’s FanGraphs chat later today, banner Tuesday.