JotCast | Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat

Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 2/6/23

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Ben Clemens

2:50

I'm not the premier chronicler of wet guys, but let's think

Crawford and Marsh are clearly way up there

Wireless Joe Jackson

2:50

Uh, what is a wet guy?

Ben Clemens

2:50

Those guys who look like they're just drenched in water for no obvious reason

2:51

Like, watch Brandon Marsh play and you'll be like, dang, that guy is soaking wet

And he is!

Lou Perltzman

2:51

Isn't the Wet Guys thing more of a David Roth question?

Ben Clemens

2:51

Or the BBQ boys

I'm merely a pretender to the 'funny observations I've made about baseball' throne compared to them and Brisbee

Sandwich

2:51

What is the best candy? (Not your favorite. The best.)

Ben Clemens

2:52

The best candy is my favorite candy, of course

How else could I judge this?

And it's Sockerbit, this swedish salty candy

I will accept no other responses. My wife gets it for me for my birthday every year and I devour it

Richard

2:53

As an article suggestion: we tend to look at plate discipline in terms of swinging at balls and strikes, but each player is going to have their own individual zone where they are comfortable hitting a pitch. Do you think it would be possible to calculate players' individual target zones and then assess their efficiency at swinging at pitches within their individual zones and laying off on others?

Ben Clemens

2:53

Shout out to Robert Orr from BP for a really good take on this

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/74813/the-crooked-inni...

Sam

2:53

Max Kepler's EV numbers were average this last year but have usually been above average - is he underperforming these peripherals or is he performing in line with what they show? Does he have a launch angle issue?

Ben Clemens

2:55

He has a babip problem and I think the best way to explain it is via launch angle distribution

He doesn't hit many line drives, basically

2:56

He used to just be all fly balls all the time and get under things too much

2:57

I'm not surprsied that he posted his highest xBA last year, he had fewer wasted batted balls. Interested to see what 2023 looks like for him

2:57

I hope your logically sound confidence in the Cardinals is utterly (and finally) shattered this year. That is all.

Ben Clemens

2:57

Finally seems unlikely

Utterly certainly possible

Best Names

2:57

Jazz, Yastrzemski, and Sanchez (pick one) could always start a law firm if this baseball thing doesn't work out

Yaz, Jazz, and Sanchez - Attorneys at law

Ben Clemens

2:58

Let's get tennis phenom Carlos Alcaraz in there too

also.... watch Carlos Alcaraz

hebrew

2:58

re: the baseball card guy - twitter is a great place to learn! I just got back into the hobby this year myself!

now for a baseball question: if we assume that Ohtani isn't re-signing with the Angels (seems more likely every day,) do you think he'd be more likely to be traded at the deadline, or hit free angecy from the Angels?

Ben Clemens

2:59

Very useful, thanks for making the chat more informative without me having to know things

I think he's gonna make free agency. I think it'd just be a bad PR move that isn't worth the return unless they get an unprecedented haul for a deadline deal

Zach

3:00

The Dodgers roster looks a lot better than people are making it out to be. Would you be surprised if they won 100 games again this year?

Ben Clemens

3:00

I wouldn't be surprised, but I think it's higher than their median outcome, if that makes sense

Uncle Spike

3:00

I was hoping we were going to see a list of the 4.4% of players that saw their EV95 change more than one standard deviation. Do you have that list handy?

Ben Clemens

3:01

It's in that spreadsheet I posted up above, but honestly I didn't look through them all, it was more of a giant data pull kinda deal, there were 1,900 season-pairs to dig through so I just ran it in Python without investigating each one

Matt Damon

3:01

MATT. DAMON.

Ben Clemens

3:01

Boy, we almost missed this this week, because this chat is going to be wrapping up soon so I can eat lunch.

Sam

3:02

Odds the yankees infield ends up with Peraza and Volpe up the middle while they fake it at third with some combo of Lemahieu and Donaldson?

Ben Clemens

3:03

Oh yeah, well within the realm of possibility, let's call it 35%