JotCast | Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat

Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 5/17/21

Ben Clemens

2:00

Hey everyone, let's get chatting. No clever intro today because I've been knee-deep in slider run values all morning and that sapped the comedy right out of me.

Old Timer

2:00

What is up with Oscar Mercado. How can a player go from promising to seemingly lost so quickly? thanks.

Ben Clemens

2:00

I was incredibly surprised to see Mercado start off hot in 2019

2:01

Maybe it's just my inner Cards fan coming out, but his generally blah minor league performances in StL made me think that he wasn't anything more than a fourth outfielder, and then he exploded onto the scene there

2:02

That said, I think that his problems are the same problems that you would have expected from his time as a prospect. He doesn't have the power to punish pitchers for mistakes, so they just slam the zone

2:03

I know he had a big power uptick in 2019, but like.... not buying it

I thikn he's still a nice fourth outfielder, 2021 performance notwithstanding, but I don' think you want him as a starter

Cueto's Shimmy

2:03

Does the times through the order penalty vary with the number of pitches a batter saw? Is there a penalty for pitchers who've seen, say division opponents, multiple times in the same year? Like hypothetically Kershaw having a penalty for seeing Posey the 3rd time in a season? Or the 114th time in a career?

Ben Clemens

2:04

As for the second one, here's an interesting article from Ben Lindbergh

https://www.theringer.com/2016/10/21/16043096/mlb-playoff-familiarity-...

As for the first one, an old BP article about various permutations of TTO

https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/22156/baseball-progues...

Jason

2:04

The A's ROS RP WAR is currently ranked 24th. But they're forecasted to have the 11th best ERA, 14th best FIP, while pitching the 11th most innings. How can I better understand this? What factors could be causing the discrepancy?

Ben Clemens

2:04

It's the park, basically

2:05

That's an oversimplification, but per our numbers it's the fourth-friendliest stadium for pitchers

All that foul ground and space

FIP and ERA aren't park-adjusted, WAR is, etc

2:06

There's more to it than that, but I think that's a good starting point

Travis

2:06

When doing analytics/data research, what tools do you use? (I'm compiling these for everyone to use, so amateurs can get started with baseball analysis)

Ben Clemens

2:06

Great question

I'll break it down into a few categories

2:07

For data acquisition, I use Baseball Savant and FanGraphs

They're both quite friendly to data downloads

2:08

I also access some of our data that we have stored on a database via SQL, and SQL is generally worth learning

2:09

Regardless of whether you're downloading data with it, it's really good for sorting and querying. Savant is essentially a pile of data in the background, and a fancy skin for SQL that lets you choose which pitches to query

From there, I tend to analyze data in Excel or Google Sheets

Nothing too complex usually

2:10

That said, for some of the more complex projects I've attempted, I'll use Python as well

I'm sure R would do the same thing, and I bet you can even do some of it in pre-processing in SQL, I'm just most comfortable with Python

But Excel/Sheets will get you al ot of the way

Derek

2:10

SQL + Excel + R will generally get you pretty far when analyzing any kind of data!

Ben Clemens

2:11

Yeah totally agree with this. You can also substitute in Sheets for Excel and Python + pandas for R without much loss

MarinersSource

2:11

WIll Jarred Kelenic win ROTY?

Ben Clemens

2:11

I'm going to stick with my preseason prediction of Andrew Vaughn. Despite wonky early-season PT he's been pretty good!

2:12

And he's now basically playing every day

Guest

2:12

I learned the other day that Statcast has Outs Above Average data that measures the quality of the defense played behind each pitcher. Have you played around with this data at all? Is there hope for someone like Luis Castillo, who seems to have been seriously victimized by poor defense?

Ben Clemens

2:12

I'm literally digging through some of this in my spare time today

2:13

I'm not ready to say anything definitive yet but I think it has promise for doing a little more than shrugging our shoulders about batted ball results

Greg

2:13

Is this the least valuable year in recent memory to have the 1-1 pick?

Ben Clemens

2:13

This feels more like a question for Eric and Kevin, but I don't think so. Maybe I'm just an unconnected dope but Leiter seems pretty good to me

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