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Dave Cameron FanGraphs Chat
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Dave Cameron
12:04
Happy Wednesday, everyone. It's the final chat of the regular season; next week we'll be in full on postseason mode.
So let's wrap up the six month run with an hour's worth of baseball talk.
Matt
12:04
Will the death of Jose Fernandez impact your Cy Young award vote?
Dave Cameron
12:06
I've spent a decent amount of time thinking about this over the last few days, and I continue to be of mixed feelings. On the one hand, Fernandez is a legitimate candidate, and we will never get to vote for him again; giving him the award would be a great way to say goodbye. On the other hand, I'm uncomfortable with the idea that an award for on-field performance should be determined by something like this, and think it's not fair to Jose or the other contenders to decide my vote based on his death. In the end, I think I'm going to vote as if he was still alive, and not have it impact the ballot.
Tommy Lasordid
12:06
Considering the current health of both teams, should the Dodgers be considered favorites over the Nats?
Dave Cameron
12:06
I would say so, yes.
Asabin
12:07
How much do you expect a win to be worth on the free agent market this offseason? How much was it last offseason?
Dave Cameron
12:08
It was roughly $8 million last year. I'd expect it to be around that again.
Ben
12:09
Absolutely loved Pitch Talks Chicago. Was it just me, or did Jason Benefit steal the show?
Dave Cameron
12:09
Thanks for coming out. I thought a lot of people were great, but yeah, he was definitely entertaining.
Thomas
12:10
How much of the "World Series winner isn't necessarily the best team in baseball" problem would be solved by just having another trophy given to the team with the best record at the end of the season. That way, we can recognize that "best team at the end of the season" and "World Series champion" are two different things that both are worthy of praise
Dave Cameron
12:10
I don't think having a trophy for regular season record would work; that's basically what the division title banners that teams raise are, though.
Theresa May
12:12
Would you consider providing the analyses used for FanGraphs articles in a reproducible format? (i.e. have both the code and data available if it's not proprietary)
Dave Cameron
12:12
Almost everything on FanGraphs is available on the leaderboards, in exportable formats. Besides UZR/DRS (which we license and did not create ourselves), nearly everything we have is easily recreated from the raw data.
Erik
12:14
Trying to get an idea of how much we can believe in abnormal BABIPs: Mike Trout has a .360 BABIP after 5+ seasons. As a rule of thumb, how far should we regress that towards .300 to get an idea of his real skill? Around 50% of the way? Or is 5 years a large enough sample to believe that basically 100% of it is a skill?
Dave Cameron
12:15
There's much more variance in BABIP skill for hitters than pitchers. Line drive guys who never hit infield flies run .360ish BABIPs over thousands of plate appearances. I think Yelich's career BABIP is over .360.
B.B. Rodriguez
12:16
If it comes down to the last game for the Jays and they might lose home field advantage to the O's. Should they cede(pitch Dickey) the home field to save Sanchez to pitch the wild card game in Baltimore. Sanchez has owned the O's this year.
Dave Cameron
12:16
Home field isn't important enough to screw up your playoff rotation.
Julio Pepper
12:17
A heretofore undiscovered 5yr old Seager brother emerges. You are a wealthy investor, and you know nothing else about him; how much would you be willing to pay for his future MLB earnings?
Dave Cameron
12:18
This is a fun question. Justin Seager gives you pause, as it's clear that not every Seager can hit just because he comes from that family. But given what Corey/Kyle have become, I think you have to at least throw down a few hundred grand just because.
(This assumes I am totally fine losing a few hundred grand)
Guest
12:19
Do you have any thoughts on how the A's pitchers are 14th in BABIP, yet they are the worst fielding team in the league? Seems really counter intuitive
Dave Cameron
12:19
The A's play in a BABIP-suppressing park.
Steve
12:20
What would your Dodgers playoff rotation look like?
Dave Cameron
12:20
Writing about this today, but I don't think their "#4 starter" actually matters.
It's Kershaw-Hill-Maeda-bullpen game
J
12:20
Is there a way to factor in data on batted balls to help UBR and other base running metrics to see how often a player takes an extra base relative to the average runner?
Dave Cameron
12:20
That is literally what UBR does.
12:22
On our playoff odds page, there's a date selector tool. http://www.fangraphs.com/coolstandings.aspx
NatsFan
12:22
Is there anyway for readers to see changes in playoff odds over time? Specifically, I want to see how much the Nats are affected by Ramos going down
Dave Cameron
12:22
Not sure why the answer showed up first, but there you go.
Rick
12:23
You mentioned on the pod that teams are taking a venture capitalist approach to analytics by investing in tech start-up companies that may have relevance to baseball. Do you know of specific companies/projects that a team has invested in?
Dave Cameron
12:23
The Dodgers are the team doing this at the moment; I bet other teams will follow eventually.
Chris
12:24
Be honest: how strong is the urge to write a 'told-you-so' article about the Dodgers?
Dave Cameron
12:26
Not that strong; in any given year, there's so many things that could swing the results one way or the other that pretending that we "knew" the Dodgers were going to be this good is silly. As long as we keep doing analysis based off quality data, our long-run results will show it, and people can judge for themselves whether or not we're credible.
The Lure of the Animal
12:26
At this moment, what is the most convincing baseball argument that the Cubs won't win it all?
Dave Cameron
12:27
That the postseason is mostly random and even the best team in an 8 team tournament is something like 80% likely to not win it all.
some guy
12:27
Every qualified first baseman has a negative defensive WAR. Does the model need tweaked or did literally every single starting first baseman decide to be terrible in the field this year?
Dave Cameron
12:28
First off, there's no such thing as defensive WAR. The DEF stat, which is what you're referring to, is defensive value relative to the average of all players, position-adjustment included. Because 1Bs are selected based on their inability to play more challenging defensive positions, they are less valuable than defenders at other positions. If you want to look at how a 1B rates solely within his position (where there are lots of above average players, as you'd expect), you want UZR or DRS.
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