JotCast | Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat

Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat - 6/6/23

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Guest

2:40

what is your mount rushmore of bad ranking configurations?

Jay Jaffe

2:41

occupying the first head on Mount Rushmore would be "My Hanukkah Menorah of Great ______"

next to that "A Baker's Dozen of the Best _______"

In honor of Abe Lincolns' spot on the actual Rushmore, here's "Four Score and Seven of the Best ________"

2:43

and finally a Rushmore on Rushmore, because why do we need to confine ourselves to four if we have five fingers? I may be an old man yelling at clouds, but this ain't Springfield.

Guest

2:43

Why don’t major league schedulers make some effort to reduce the number of extra miles the Mariners and a few other outliers must travel every year?

Jay Jaffe

2:46

You know, the added travel burden on west coast teams is my biggest beef about the new schedule. IIRC, the so-called balanced schedule added about 7% to the total number of air miles traveled by the 30 teams, with the Mariners more or less in line with that and the A's increasing by like 20%. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/visuals/map?team=&year=2023

2:47

Given all that we've learned about travel's effect on the body and sleep, you'd think we should be trying to minimize this stuff. And maybe there are fewer times where players have to jump from Pacific to Eastern (the big one) that offset this, i don't know, but I think the players have legitimate beef here

Erik

2:48

Combining your specialty with the big news of the day: Elly de la Cruz, surefire inner-circle Hall of Famer or even better than that?

Jay Jaffe

2:53

a ton of Elly questions in the queue. I'm excited for his debut, too! But I won't pretend to know whether he's going to light it up initially. I will say that debuting at 21 doesn't give the player as good odds of reaching the Hall as debuting at 20 or 19. This is a couple years old but is more or less good enough:

I'm just full of screenshots to old tables today

RA Niekro

2:54

Where do the Mets go from here? Just hope the old guys perform better going forward?

Jay Jaffe

2:56

DH is a trade deadline solution and perhaps one outfield spot as well, but they've brought up the kids (Alvarez, Baty, Vientos) and need McNeil and Lindor to hit like they did last year, at the very least, and getting Canha and/or Marte going would be helpful too

Alex

2:56

In light of the PGA Tour/LIV golf merger, when are you going to announce that you will be collaborating with Jack Morris on his new as-told-to autobiography "Hall-of-Famer"?

Jay Jaffe

2:57

LOL. Morris does feature in my Roger Craig tribute, as he was an early adopter who found great success with the splitter, though Sparky Anderson thought that messing with the splitter caused his other pitches to deteriorate

lee_rumbah

2:59

Favorite rookie pitcher thus far? I didn't catch the Abbot start but Bobby Miller has the looks of a frontliner.

Jay Jaffe

3:01

I can't claim anything close to a comprehensive view of all the folks people might name but I've been very impressed by Bobby Miller and Yennier Cano

Anon21

3:01

Such sad news about Strasburg's continued setbacks and daily pain. I hate the Nationals and am glad in general that they've fallen apart, but I find it hard to fault their decisionmaking in choosing to build around him, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Jay Jaffe

3:03

They were a bit too giddy in re-signing him after he opted out, but damn did he come up huge in 2019. He'll be fine financially, obv, but it is heartbreaking to see a pitcher with Hall-caliber talent fall apart like this and not even get the chance to pitch

Joe

3:04

Is Mike Trout's peak over? Obviously still great player but this is the first year where he looks mortal

Jay Jaffe

3:07

yes, this may be true. We're off by a few days that have lowered his wRC+ to 133, but his 144 through the end of May was his lowest:

3:08

i only see a small handful of two-month spans where he had a lower wRC+ than that — though this is abiding by a strict calendar month structure, and I imagine we can find some less flattering 60-game spans as well by moving the endpoints

Guest

3:09

As HOF guru, help me get past two travesties. Pete Rose was one of the greatest players of all time. His gambling came well after he retired as a player. The hypocrisy of MLB now embracing gambling sites should be the tipping point for Rose to get in. On the flip side, I can't get past the Harold Baines induction. There must be 50 guys more deserving that got left out. How can you help prevent that from happening again?

Jay Jaffe

3:10

Players have been prohibited from gambling on baseball, with knowledge that the would be banned for life for doing so, since Landis handed down his ban on the Black Sox more than a century ago. Nothing MLB does with regards to getting into bed with gambling companies mitigates that one iota.

Farhandrew Zaidman

3:11

Is "WAR/GS" a stat that currently exists for SP, and if not, would it be helpful at all for the future of SP in the HOF (in the context of declining innings pitched)?

Jay Jaffe

3:11

I sometimes poke around with a WAR/200 (innings) as a cross-era comparative device. It's worth keeping an eye on

Marshall

3:11

In a recent chat you made a couple references to a player having some number of “HoF seasons” vs (I think) “good” seasons. What is your cutoff for a HoF season, and how many do you view as necessary for enshrinement?

Jay Jaffe

3:14

when I say "HOF seasons" I mean "useful in building a foundation of a Hall of Fame case," which isn't to say that they need be elite seasons. Generally that starts around 4.5 WAR. You're not getting in if those are your best years, or even your average across a 7-year peak, but if those are the worst of your 7-year peak (or won't even fit into it) then you're probably getting to the point of a reasonable case.

3:15

this is while acknowledging that one player's 4.5 season might look a whole lot better than another player's 5.0 WAR season once we bring additional context into it (he won awards, led league in something, All-Star, did it in compressed amount of time)

Pixley

3:16

In or out on Casas? I feel like a team that thinks they can make the playoffs cant deal with this all season. Is there any hope for him? plate discipline only counts for so much , if there's nothing else there

Jay Jaffe

3:17

The Red Sox really do need to send him down for a few weeks and get a reset. He's lagging relative to his Statcast expected numbers but -0.3 WAR ain't cutting it.

Sammy So-so

3:17

I get the feeling that Volpe's not going to make it to the All-Star break without a return trip to the minors. Is it clear to you what's particularly ailing him as a hitter? Thanks, Jay.

Jay Jaffe

3:22

Volpe's lagging too, by a similar margin (34 points of wOBA), but the difference is that his speed and defense have him worth 0.4 WAR. he's really struggling with contact at the bottom of the zone, especially sinkers for some reason. Not sure what's up there.

3:23

But I don't see the Yankees in a rush to send him down now that they're playing well

RAndoM121

3:24

Would a borderline HOF player get a bump in voting had they played their whole career with a single team?

Jay Jaffe

3:24

it would probably help a little.

Joe Randa

3:24

Assuming he gets closer his previous form, what would you think Tatis HOF chances are? He seems like an interesting case study given his trajectory prior to 2022 and his ability to "redeem" himself after the suspension.

Jay Jaffe

3:27

We're in uncharted territory here. If Tatis is a model citizen for the rest of his career — by which I mean no PED issues or other icky stuff, not suddenly becoming some boring normal button-down dude — I would think he'll get a shot at the "redemption" angle in a way that others haven't but we're a good 20 years away from that, and he's got a whole lot of ground to cover between now and then

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