JotCast | Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 6/8/26

Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 6/8/26

powered by

Prev Page View Full Chat Next Page

This chat is available to members only. Please log in to participate.

Ben Clemens

2:14

ehhhhh.... judgment call. I think I'd probably have said out of the basepath? But I don't feel confident in that view AT ALL

it was really close

and the rule is purposefully very hard to pares

prase*

bosoxforlife

2:14

Your article on bunting beat me to it but in my opinion the percentage of runners failing to score from 3rd with less than two outs has risen as K's increase, most noticeably with weak hitters, such as Nasim Nunez, as you mentioned. It is a pleasure to see this part of the game return.

Ben Clemens

2:14

yeah, I'm a longtime pro-bunt-for-hit guy. I love seeing this. I agree that it's noticeable, and particularly with weak hitters. And I think there'll be more stuff like this, more small edges. Big fan for sure

SPArn

2:14

Curious if you've had any chance to look into the Ben Brown surge, and whether you're a believer. I was positing last week that his fastball profile (high arm angle, etc) could be similar to Chase Burns, who succeeds despite some "hittability" as you wrote on.

Ben Clemens

2:16

Not really. I have a lot of big projects going on at the moment, hope you'll get to see many of them soon. It's an interesting idea though. I think that the high arm angle fastball style is under-researched because everyone saw the way that low-release, flat-VAA fastballs produce the good number everyone wants to go up (whiff%), while the benefits of the steep ones are harder to pin down. It's one of those 'once you have a model, you stop paying attention to the things your model doesn't do well' problems

Nate

2:16

This is maybe a silly question, but why do the percentages on the live scoreboard for today not match up with the results from the Baseball Sim in the lab? It's not usually much or a difference, maybe a percentage point or two, but they're never exactly the same.

Ben Clemens

2:16

No, good question. It's a matter of two different ways we simulate games, which is understandably confusing. The ones we show on the page are just our playoff odds methodology applied to a single game, based on the projected starters and lineups

2:17

so we just figure out how good we think each team is (BaseRuns-implied Win%) with the team they're putting on the field for that game, and compare it to the other team (plus homefield)

whereas the sim goes through each game granularly. They're very similar (which shows to us that both methods are probably doing something good) but yeah, the sim is not deterministic, whereas the game odds are just a formula, which explains the difference

oaktownblues

2:18

Earlier this year when you guys changed the JotCast chats so that they show up without clicking into a new tab on mobile, there was a little "expand" icon you could click to get it to still open in a new tab. In the past few weeks, that button is gone. Any chance that could get put back? The current set up feels cramped on mobile

trophy

1

Ben Clemens

2:18

I'll ask

kingkash7788

2:18

Have you found any good baseball variants for 82-0?

Ben Clemens

2:18

no but it's not for a lack of trying

dan999999

2:19

I recently saw a clip of consequence successful bunt against a closer (can't remember the teams) but there was a suggestion that scouting reports told them this pitcher would particularly bad a fielding an unexpected bunt. Does the recent decrease in bunts mean defenses are less prepared for bunts and that explains much of the current increased value?

Ben Clemens

2:19

that's surely some of it. Like, I think that explains why bunts are succeeding more frequently than ever before

But I really do think that a bigger part of it is the situations you bunt in

It's not immediately evident to everyone that a bunt is a very different play, and so different that it can go from good to bad or vice versa, based on situation

2:20

so fewer of the bad-situation bunts, more of the good-situation bunts, that is a huge lever to pull

in fact, teams are getting better at defending safety squeezes b/c of how many there have been in the past few years

but it's still a good play

Hollis

2:21

Hi Ben, Any idea why Tito dislikes Noelvi Marte so much? Noelvi can't earn his way into playing time from the bench. Plus he's being sat for guys who routinely go 0 for 4. Puzzling why they brought him up. Could there be a disconnect between management and the head coach with regard to Marte's upside? Thanks!

Ben Clemens

2:21

could definitely be. I haven't paid clos eattention to the daily ins and outs but I do sometimes go "huh Marte's not in again? weird'

and more often than I expected

PC1970

2:21

The bunt is a fun play- Good to have it back. Always prefer plays with movement, running, snap judgements, etc. A salutory effect is it forces the infielder to play closer to the positions we all grew up with & less of the "3B covers the whole left side, SS just left of 2B, 2B in the hole between 1B/2B" de facto shift that has become too common. In theory, should open up holes some, esp for left-handed hitters.

Ben Clemens

2:21

for sure. and at least in some spots. Moving the fieldres around and changing the context of the game is, from my perspective, strictly good for my enjoyment

InsertWittyNameHere

2:21

I finished reading Everybody Loses about the rise of sports gambling. I find it absurd how the league saw $$$ and reversed their stance on it so quickly. My issue now though is how the books will blacklist anyone who wins too much, and lavishes "gifts" on the biggest losers to lose even more. On moral grounds, how can we turn a blind eye that the league pushes engagement with companies whose literally business plan is a rigged game in this economy?

Ben Clemens

2:22

I have not read that book, but I think I might have already been on the bandwagon, because I think the systematic restriction of advantage gamblers shows what these companies are really about

2:23

it's not about someone being able to win or lose based on their knowledge of sports, and it's not about gambling, or price discovery, or stuff like that. it's about finding people they can bilk, and then bilking them

How can you turn a blind eye to the league doing that? Because there's no ethical consumption under capitalism

2:24

The system is set up to encourage bad actions. Hard to blame the bad actors - or at least, hard to blame them primarily. If you just never want to watch sports or vote or pay attention to politics or leave your home or eat or consume media, you can do that

but like, man, it sucks!

Sports gambling needs to be far more regulated, and the current paradigm is gross

oaktownblues

2:24

Speaking of baseball sim discrepancies: I submitted some feedback a couple weeks back about a discrepancy I had found where the projected run totals for the cached projections were significantly higher than the projected run totals I get when I re-run the simulation with the same settings. Not sure how quick you guys get through feedback so not sure if this was investigated already

Ben Clemens

2:24

not through it yet, I don't think, I'll mention it to somebody

Daron

2:24

The Brewers have done a lot of winning over the past decade, and yet this is the fastest they've made it to 40 wins in franchise history. Is this the year they break character and "make a splash" at the deadline?

Ben Clemens

2:25

I don't think so. I think that sticking with the process is what they like

keeps working. why deviate?

Connecting…

Register

Message History

On Off

On Off

On Off

On Off

Your current subscriptions

None

Register now to continue managing your subscriptions

E-mail Address	Chat Owner	Status	Remove

Enter your email address to be notified when Ben Clemens hosts a chat