JotCast | Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 1/5/26

Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 1/5/26

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Ben Clemens

3:02

i mean.... kinda, yeah. it's really tough. given that everything is relative to replacement, and gievn that we're doing a lot of approximating, it's really hard to compare across in that way, totally agreed

3:03

the big issue is with replacement level. Like, we can totally calculate how many runs relative to average each player's contributions are worth

because we know average, and we know what they did

but replacement is trickier and leads to some hand waving for sure

Phil

3:03

Bopping in Chicago, the hot new hit for 1952 from Murakami and the Swingin' Sox.

Ben Clemens

3:03

love it

Pat

3:04

& doesn't the pitcher WAR # being divvied up due to lower innings also mean less SP's should be in the HOF from this era? Lots of talk about SP standards, but, if SP's are only pitching 2200-2500 innings, aren't they inherently less valuable than their forerunners who pitched 3000-4000, sometimes 5000 innings? To be as valuable, they would have to much more dominant.

Ben Clemens

3:04

relative to what?

like, no one should be in the hall but Cy Young hten

I think that the hall of fame generally means relative to your peers

but also, I thin I'm in the minority

3:05

Jay is working on something called S-JAWS off and on that adjusts pitching WAR for the fact that innings workloads have been declining

or at least, I see it in his articles sometimes

but if you look, the proportion of pitchers making the hall really is declining, and that's because of this exact thing

Nate

3:05

Right (and sorry to beat a dead horse on this). But I was thinking about a run environment where every pitcher is throwing 200 innings and the game scores are all 1-0. Since WAR is fixed at 600/400, some batters would still be awarded 6-8 WAR even though relative to the current run env, they are bad. At least I think that's what it means if I have it correct

Ben Clemens

3:06

yeah exactly. some batters still should get WAR in that low scoring environment, b/c they're still producing wins. And a pitcher with a 2.00 ERA is awful in this environment

like what the hell is he even doing? No one can even SCORE more than a run a game

so we have to fix everything to the era and the average

Guest

3:06

I'm a life-long Sox fan and I view this as a big "arrow-up" time. I like the value of analytics, but sometimes people need to go.

Tommyfastball

3:06

Continuing on Sox "arrow-up" comment...my sense is that most Red Sox fans view the teams management over the last year+ as strong, and we're happy. The portrayal on this site as everyone thinks the Sox leaders are penny-pinching idiots is frustrating.

Ben Clemens

3:06

i absolutely love these two added together

re: NPB guys

3:06

Plenty of teams have made underwhelming signings or watched rivals get better, but is the biggest loser of the MLB offseason the NPB as a whole? That posting money is pretty important in the context of running those teams and it seems like the MLB is taking intentional measures to avoid paying as much of it (this includes Imanaga's whole thing).

Big Buxton

3:07

On the topic of Japanese players: Weird market this year for signing players from Japan. Is this a sign of a systemic reevaluation of how guys will translate coming over? Or just a weird blip with a small sample size of players that the media world and teams viewed differently? Or maybe just a symptom of the looming CBA changes?

Ben Clemens

3:07

I think both of these questions are interesting, and particularly so whne taken together

I assume that NPB is very upset with these developments

it's a serious amount of monetary shortfall. they may need to look at a new posting system

3:08

but similarly, I think that this particular batch of players is the kind that would be particularly prone to lowballs

I mentioned this on Effectively Wild last week, but I had a MUCH lower estimate for Imai when I did my initial projections

And then I did my normal process of voraciously reading everything on the internet about imports

3:09

and moved my estimtae up considerably as a result

similar deal with Murakami

if you look through my free agent rankings, I had Imai getting 100 million ranked #20, and the next non-Murakami guy with a 9 figure projection was #11

3:10

so I initially had him meaningfully lower before letting myself get talked up. and murakami was similar at a higher tier. I basically think that the recent returns on foreign players (not just Yamamoto, but the contracts that guys like Jung Hoo Lee, Masataka Yoshida, even Seiya Suzuki got) had people thinking the dollars would automatically be big

3:11

I mean, I missed badly on the JHL and Yoshida contracts and in retrospect the teams who extended those deals surely wish they didn't

3:12

I think that this year, between the posting pressure (look at Imanaga's whole deal, the posting stuff clearly makes teams behave differently) and the fact that these guys just didn't project that great, there was more risk than I appreciated of "low-ball" (read not super aggressive) offers

okay, a few more questions and then it's lunchtime

bosoxforlife

3:12

As a fan of the game for a long time one of the things that has struck me is to see some hitter from the 50's put up a line like .328/ 28/ 111 and get 1.1 WAR which in today's game would garner a 7.6 WAR.

Ben Clemens

3:12

I concur

Insert Witty Name Here

3:12

You hype at all for the WBC this year? I thought the last one was really fun, just hoping no one pulls an Edwin Diaz in the celebrations again.

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