Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 9/24/24

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Today I bring you a comparatively brief chat (just an hour) and the final one from this 2 pm ET time slot. Next week, I’ll be part of our group Wild Card chat (details tba), and in two weeks, I’m planning to debut in the 12 pm ET slot on Tuesdays.

Jay Jaffe: This is mainly because parenting responsibilities — mostly pick-ups from school  — have been cutting into this 2 pm time. I hope those of you who have joined me here will make the journey.

Jay Jaffe: I’ve got a piece today that’s the first of a four-part series, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the remaining contenders in a Replacement Level Killers-style trip around the diamond, only this time with pitching as well. This first installment is devoted to the best in the NL https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-strongest-positions-on-the-remaining-n…

Jay Jaffe: and now, on with the show…

brooklyn resident: Ohtani: best DH season ever?

Jay Jaffe: Yes, i think that’s a fair statement

Rick: Adell showed some 2nd half improvements before getting hurt and went 20/15 in 400 abs. How likely can he be a 30 HR hitter and up his average to the .230 range. He was a top prospect, maybe he’s a late bloomer

Jay Jaffe: He finally stuck in the majors for a full season and shaved 7.5 percentage points off his previous carer strikeout rate but .207/.280/.402 (90 wRC+) is nothing to write home about. He did fall a bit short of his .231 xBA and .431 xSLG but he didn’t hit the ball hard enough to offset his 28% strikeout rate. It’s a start but he’s still not where he should be given his prospect days

Harvey Wallbanger: Brewers haven’t lost more than three games in a row all year, they have the fewest blowout losses in MLB by a large margin, they are top notch across the boards in all the little things like bullpen WPA, DRS, BsR, hitting with RISP, hitting with two outs, they have the old codger archetype manager, with a roster full of young position players that don’t know any better…could this finally be their year?!?!?!?

Jay Jaffe: They’ve got a lot going for them but I look at that lineup and see just four regulars with a 100 wRC+ or better with Yelich out. I’d temper my hopes

Talfred: With young outfielders on the rise in Boston, the Red Sox aren’t going to find much of a market for Yoshida, are they? A platoon lefty bat with little power, defense or baserunning value is a tough sell at $18MM per.

Jay Jaffe: If they absorb enough salary they can find a new home for him. Somebody will have to play for the White Sox

Inverse Cy Young: Has Mikolas or Corbin been the biggest net negative in qualified SP? I bring this up because both are okay via FIP, but ERA and the eye test say they have been horrible. It seems FIP misses something with guys like them.

Jay Jaffe: Well, the point of FIP is to focus on the defense-independent aspects of pitching (strikeouts, walks, homers), but the assumption that held for the better part of two decades — that major league pitchers don’t differ greatly on their ability to control balls in play — has been somewhat supplanted by Statcast data that shows that some pitchers are better than others at suppressing hard contact. Mikolas and Corbin both have 5+ ERAs and 4.3-ish FIPs, but their xERAs — which take into account Statcast batted ball data as well as their walks and strikeouts — shows Corbin with a 5.57 mark, worst among qualifiers, but Mikolas with a 4.47 mark, not good but not hopeless.

Bay of Bengal: I’m not a Tigers fan — I’m an O’s fan — but it seems to me that in MLB’s new four-round playoff extravaganza, the team that wins is the hottest team, not the best. Thus I predict the Tigers win the World Series.
What’s your take? Who’s hot and ready to sweep through better regular-season teams next month?

Jay Jaffe: What it shows is that September records do not predict October performance. There’s almost no correlation, and for every red-hot 2007 Rockies team streaking through the playoffs there’s a 2006 Cardinals team somehow getting their shit together at the last minute

Jay Jaffe: That the Tigers have maybe two viable starting pitchers didn’t even figure in your thinking, huh?

Jimmy Wynn’s Toy Cannon: As voters have become more sabermetrically-inclined in recent years, do positional awards like ASG appearances, Silver Sluggers, Gold Gloves, etc. still hold weight? Or are they more window dressing at this point?

Jay Jaffe: They’re peripheral numbers that help frame a player’s case, but they vary in value. Absolutely nobody pays attention to the Silver Slugger awards; I sure as hell don’t. Gold Gloves have gotten a bit more useful thanks to the incorporation of the SABR Defensive Index aggregating several different metrics into 25% of the vote. All-Star appearances are harder to amass the more the leagues expand, and sometimes great players get bypassed. Francisco Lindor hasn’t made an All-Star team as a Met due to some slow starts, and because Adrian Beltre’s defensive value was underestimated he made only four All-Star teams in a tremendous career.

Sodo Mojo: If your the Mariner’s do you pencil in Robles as a starter next year based on the last 200 at bats or given his track record do you bring in another starter in the off season.

Jay Jaffe: Given the two-year, $9.75 million extension Robles already signed with the Mariners, it seems pretty clear they think of him as a starter. He was always well-regarded as a prospect, but it took a change of scenery and some mechanical adjustments to get him to this point (see Davy Andrews here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/vacillating-for-victor-robles/). That’s not to say that he won’t regress but as we’ve seen time and again, swing changes can greatly alter a player’s career path.

jackson: merrill or chourio rest of career?

Jay Jaffe: Yes please!

Jay Jaffe: If you’re asking me to pick between the two, hell, I dunno. I might go with Merrill because did very well in center whereas Chourio is now a corner outfielder (he did very well there, by the metrics). Eric Longehagen had Chourio 5th and Merrill 6th on his Top 100 — this is pretty much a toss-up.

Talfred: Other than a single Ohtani start following a 2-inning outing, neither Ohtani nor Yamamoto have ever pitched on fewer than 5 days of rest. Is there any way that the Dodgers can even consider a 5-man rotation next year?

Jay Jaffe: More likely they use a modified 5-man as they did earlier in the year, using spot starters and openers to buy the occasional extra day of rest for both. It will be an interesting juggling act; let’s hope it doesn’t reprise this year’s shuttle to the IL, which seems to board daily.

A Name: Amazing that the worst team of all time (the Yankees) is about to win their division. Obviously Cole and Rodon are the first two playoff starters, but I wonder if they keep all four of the other starters on the roster and piggyback, say, Gil/Cortes and Schmidt/Stroman? That feels like a way to manage risk with some high-variance pitchers.

Jay Jaffe: Stroman has already been told he would pitch out of the bullpen in the postseason so I suspect the choice for the other starters could depend on matchups and their estimation of whether Gil is physically up to the task given his huge workload increase.

Andrew: My favorite part of the offseason is reading your HOF profiles. Are there any first-time candidates you’re particularly excited to write about?

Jay Jaffe: oh it’s a bumper crop this year: Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia are the two big ones; Dustin Pedroia, Ian Kinsler, Felix Hernandez all deserve lengthy appraisals as their careers aren’t that far off the average Hall of Famer, and because I’ve had to listen to years and years of Yadier Molina-flavored praise, I’m going to pound the table about the value of pitch framing when it comes to the cases of Russell Martin and Brian McCann, both of whom were about as valuable as Molina once you incorporate those numbers.

Phil: How much rope and/or time should Pirates fans give the current front office?  While they might have something with developing arms, the bats are non-existent.

Jay Jaffe: The bats are a problem, but the real problem is ownership’s willingness to compete for quality free agents

Astros 1B: Who am I next year? Pete could be a interesting option if they let Breg walk, but the class is pretty dire after that and no prospect of theirs has a good enough bat to waste at 1B. Singleton is playable, but not ideal for a contender

Jay Jaffe: It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Alonso were to sign with the Astros, though they could repeat their skill of catching falling knives by going or Paul Goldschmidt or Anthony Rizzo or Justin Turner or… they could also do the stopgap thing and try Carlos Santana or Josh Bell, either for a full season or just the last two months if they sign with non-contenders (as has so often happened).

Jon Singleton is a great human interest story but at best a bench guy.

Jim: Does six weeks in Indy cost Skenes the Cy, or will his production outweigh his relative lack of bulk?

Jay Jaffe: I think Chris Sale’s excellent and full season is going to be what costs Skenes the Cy but it’s worth noting that Sale’s 2.09 FIP is a fair distance better than Skenes’ 2.48, and over a larger footprint of innings.

birds birds birds: I know the playoffs are basically coin tosses, but how much better would the O’s odds of advancing be with Grayson Rodriguez making a start than Suarez/Kremer?

Jay Jaffe: This is an extremely Dan Szymborski-flavored questiontaht will probably be answered soon.

Mark S: After a Cy Young season, what does Chris Sale have to do over the remainder of his career to feel relatively safe about a HOF spot? He’s up to 54 bWAR and 48 JAWS, still short of the traditional benchmarks but much better than where he was heading into his age 35 season.

Jay Jaffe: Mostly he just needs bulk. He’s still short of 2,000 innings and while I don’t expect him to get to 3,000, he probably needs a few more healthy seasons (say, 150 innings) to make his case more robust.

NL-A’s fan: Jay, do you think it bad for baseball that the White Sox are such a joke this year or is it positive that them likely braking the record draws more attention to baseball?

Jay Jaffe: it’s bad for baseball.

Jay Jaffe: Particularly having a large-market team that should be on strong financial footing doing a poverty act and basically banging rocks together instead of using modern analytics methods is a damn embarrassment.

Brewer fan: On the Brewers, it’s really 5 everyday hitters with a wRC+ over 100 including Mitchell….They’ve held pretty steady among the top run producing lineups all season even without Yelich due to getting on base and baserunning.

Jay Jaffe: I didn’t count Mitchell in that group because he has only 209 PA and his Statcast numbers don’t suggest what he’s doing is particularly sustainable (.393 xSLG, for one). But we’ll see if I’m wrong

Mike: Will Baldelli keep his job (heck, the FO too?) if the Twins don’t make the playoffs?

Jay Jaffe: It’s a good question. I think they’ll probably survive — I hope so for the sake of old friend Kevin Goldstein — but this is looking like a really gruesome collapse lately.

Guest: Do you think we’re going to see a repeat of the 2023 Dodgers this year?  A great team undone in the post-season by a lack of quality starting pitching?

Jay Jaffe: I think it’s entirely possible they go that route. I mean, a year ago I couldn’t have told you who Landon Knack was and now he’s quite possibly their Game 3 starter.

Idiotic Failson: I’m assuming Gleyber leaves and Jazz moves to 2nd. What do the Yankees do at 3rd next year?

Jay Jaffe: they take Gil McDougald out of cryostorage.

Jay Jaffe: I suspect they don’t commit either way to Chisholm until at least after the winter meetings because they probably need to make a trade to fill one position or the other

Michael Scarn: The Braves had a chance to set their rotation to allow Sale to pitch tonight and Sunday.  They decided to pitch him only once, Wednesday.  Could it be that the Braves would rather miss the postseason than to use Sale in g162 which means he would be unavailable for the 1st round?

Jay Jaffe: I noted this in yesterday’s and today’s pieces. Sale has already thrown more innings than in any season since 2017, and his fastball velo is down enough that they felt they couldn’t push him for two starts on regular rest. I don’t think for a moment it’s a matter of “rather miss the postseason” so much as it is believing they have a better shot at going somewhere by giving him a bit of extra rest and hoping they have enough arms (and bats) to make up ground.

Tacoby Bellsbury: What has been the most enjoyably surprising thing for you this regular season?

Jay Jaffe: three things that are very centered around my own viewing habits:

1) Ohtani’s newfound zeal for stealing bases, which has made for an historic season

2) Judge’s otherworldly performance since snapping out of his season-opening slump, not to mention his good health (knocks wood)

3) Lindor’s vault into the MVP race while helping the Mets turned what looked like it might be a writeoff season into one that’s been a lot of fun to watch.

wheelhouse: what are the odds mike elias is the orioles GM in 2027? brutal string of transactions this year aside from the burnes trade

Jay Jaffe: Probably still pretty good. You can quibble with the deals he did/didn’t do this year but he’s turned the franchise around and has a whole boatload of talent and a new, committed owner. Regardless of what happens over the next six weeks, we haven’t heard the last of this team

Jay Jaffe: OK folks, I said this would be a short one, and I’m going to cut if off here. Thanks so much for stopping by to help bid farewell to my 2pm timeslot. Watch for me at 12pm on Tuesdays, starting in two weeks.