JotCast | Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat - 5/9/23

Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat - 5/9/23

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Jay Jaffe

3:08

Oy, I had not seen the news about Fried

Fried's MRI didn't create any concern about possibly needing a second TJ surgery. He will be shut down from throwing until his forearm heals. He'll then have to build back up and basically go through Spring Training again. So, timetable is TBD. But this won't be a short-term IL

3:12

They've lost Ian Anderson (who was in the weeds, admittedly) to Tommy John surgery, and just lost Kyle Wright to a shoulder strain as well. it's not going great. I do think they believe enough in Dodd and Shuster that both will get longer looks, and likewise Soroka if he's healthy. For the most part, teams in this position at this time of year are basically trying to muddle through with internal options until they get past the draft and then trade stuff starts to heat up.

3:13

They may well wind up doing the Jesse Chavez opener dance for a bit

Nervous Flyball Pitcher

3:14

[sorry, hit enter too soon]

I've thought a lot about how the pitch clock is potentially causing pitchers to let innings run away from them due to momentum and inability to reset without a mound visit. How could we look through the data to prove whether this is the case? We can't necessarily point to only pitch tempo, but unless there's a way to look at inning by inning data and get a frequency on "meltdown" / "blow up" innings, I'm not sure you can even start to point at momentum without devolving to a qualitative assessment.

Jay Jaffe

3:16

If there's a quantitative way to address it, it's not occurring to me in the course of staring at your question in the chat sidebar. i do wonder if the Stuff+/Location+ model can tell us anything, but I'm a novice with that... stuff.

Jason N

3:16

What does Darvish need to accomplish to be in the HoF discussion? Your guess at the odds he does it?

Jay Jaffe

3:19

I don't see it happening, much as I love Yu. He's never won a Cy Young, had five years of single-digit win totals, and has just one season above 5.0 bWAR. If he gets to 200 wins and 3,000 strikeouts by pitching until age 42, maybe that changes but it's not like BBWAA voters are going to add his NPB numbers to his MLB ones to give him full credit - if they did, Hideki Matsui would be in Cooperstown.

Traumatized Mets Fan

3:20

Anything you can say that will reassure me?

Jay Jaffe

3:23

Justin Verlander will improve upon his 7.15 FIP, at some point they'll use a guy with a positive wRC+ as their starting catcher, and Eduardo Escobar won't make it through the season as the regular third baseman.

Tony

3:24

If this is the beginning of Arenado's decline phase and he ends up aging like Longoria, does he end up in the Hall? The two have nearly identical bWAR through age-31 (51.2 for Longo v. 52 for Arenado) and fWAR actually puts Longo a bit ahead through the same age

Jay Jaffe

3:25

Arenado is just 1.8 points of JAWS behind Longoria and is five years younger and with a stronger peak score.

3:26

I think Arenado will be a Hall of Famer and Longoria will join the long line of near-HOF third basemen.

At least we got one

3:29

Anthony Rendon - leading the league in BBK with an ISO less than half of what we should reasonably expect. A barrel rate of less than 4% but a EV of 91 and an LA of 17. xWOBA 30 pts above the actual stat. What do you expect ROS and would you trade for him if the Angels fall out of contention and you miss out in the Ohtani sweepstakes?

Jay Jaffe

3:31

Rendon is making $38 million annually through 2026 and is currently carrying an xSLG of .364. I expect better from him but I don't see nearly enough to justify trading for him at that price; you'd have to eat over half of that to convince most teams, I think

Tampa Bay to Stay?

3:32

Is Tampa the only example in the history of sports/baseball of a currently successful team that ownership has considered moving. Usually we only see bad teams with apathetic fan bases after attrition and periods of losing move (albeit the A's were good not that long ago, but are most certainly not now)

Jay Jaffe

3:34

The Dodgers were incredibly successful just before moving from Brooklyn, the Giants were successful in the 1950s as well (and much more successful than the Dodgers pre-integration), and the Braves were wildly successful in Milwaukee, at least initially (6 straight years of league-leading attendance capped by back-to-back pennants with one championship).

Walla Walla Ron Washington

3:35

People were being a bit rude to Ben in here yesterday, and it seemed to bum him out. I hope it’s really clear that the vast majority of readers and chatters have nothing but respect and admiration for y’all’s work and work effort. Sorry for the handful of loudmouth knuckleheads.

Jay Jaffe

3:36

I didn't see what happened in here yesterday, but thank you.

Yolanda

3:37

Have you looked into doing era adjusted innings totals? Rather than cutting people off at 250, giving then an IP+ metric scaled off the top X % of pitchers in a given year and scaling their WAR from there

Jay Jaffe

3:39

i futzed around by trying to look at league leaderboards a bit, but didn't get to a plus-stat before choosing to go the route that I did. Not ruling out looking at it all again at some point.

ChicagoDan

3:39

Is there a chance that Sal Bando gets elected via a committee? How about Buddy Bell? I think they both deserve at least some consideration.

Jay Jaffe

3:39

wrote about Bando's Hall case on the occasion of his passing, with implications for Bell as well. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/sal-bando-1944-2023-and-a-missed-date-for-...

3:41

At this juncture I don't see either getting in because of the bottleneck created for pre-1980 players, who have to vie for space on the ballot with Negro Leagues/pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball players as well as non-playing candidates (those have their own track but only for post-1980).

Discreet proofreader

3:41

No question, just an FYI, your post on Bellinger the other day (excellent by the way), has a grammar typo. The word "be" is missing from the beginning of the last sentence in the first paragraph: "He may not all the way back......." LOVE YOUR WORK JAY thank you

Jay Jaffe

3:41

I'll accept the proofreading when it's accompanied by lavish praise, thanks for reading!

Sonny

3:42

What's the most exciting thing you've seen in the 2023 season so far?

Jay Jaffe

3:43

The Rays (Wander Franco and Randy Arozarena especially), Acuña's rebound, Ohtani

3:45

ok folks, so many good questions in here but I have to go get back to Vida Blue. Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing your afternoon with me.

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