JotCast | Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat

Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat - 9/22/20

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Jay Jaffe

2:49

you know what? let's see him post a 120 wRC+ in a single season before worrying about whether he can do 147 wRC+ across 2000+ games

Travis

2:49

Do you ever get dejected by HoF politics? It's clearly not (nor was it ever) the place to recognize the best in the game. With the anti-SABR sportswriting (mostly from 1995-2015ish), I found myself losing respect for those who vote in the players. Add in the Bonds/Clemens b.s., and my question is this: why have we not found a better institution upon which to aspire?

Jay Jaffe

2:50

Hall politics can be a big bummer, yes, but a) the Hall is about more than just the plaques and dumb annual debates; and b) there's no alternative in stature. If I started the Statgeek HOF it would still be just a list of players, not a physical location that brings people together year after year

Jake

2:51

Out of all the articles you've written this year, which is your favorite?

Jay Jaffe

2:53

I had a run of pieces in April-May like the Cooperstown shutdown one and the minor league contraction one and the interviews with Josh Lindblom and Eric Hacker that I was pretty happy with as those were things that made me exercise different skills than I generally utilize on a day-to-day basis — a lot more talking to people

Sammy So-so

2:54

I know it's a strange, short season, but fWAR has Rick Porcello as the the 13th most valuable pitcher in the NL, almost equal to Zack Wheeler and Brandon Woodruff. Is this just FIP noise or am I missing somethng?

Jay Jaffe

2:56

Low walk and homer rates versus high BABIP. I'm generally less fWAR oriented for pitchers than your average FG staffer and have a hard time putting too much stock into this with just two months of data

Jake

2:57

Why did you create JAWS? In other words, what idea/problem did you have that led you to create JAWS?

Jay Jaffe

3:01

Between New Bill James Historical Abstract and his Hall of Fame book i was thinking a lot about the Hall, was frustrated by the but found that his HOF Monitor and Standards metrics weren't geared towards handling high offense eras, nor did Win Shares do enough to account for the growing understanding of replacement level. Thus, I decided to take Baseball Prospectus' relatively new WARP out for a spin to see what it said about who was in the Hall and who was outside, and I found some glaring omissions, particularly Santo and Blyleven.

Erik

3:01

Tony Gonsolin or Jake Cronenworth for NL ROY?

Jay Jaffe

3:02

Both credible choices but I'd lean Cronenworth

Nolan

3:02

Who is Devin Williams, and how did he become the most valuable reliever in baseball?

Jay Jaffe

3:02

until a couple weeks ago I had very little idea either

3:04

Here's what I wrote for an ESPN Insider piece on top rookies that ran last week https://www.espn.com/mlb/insider/story/_/id/29894934/top-mlb-rookies-2...

2. RHP Devin Williams, Milwaukee Brewers
The one exception to my 30-inning minimum threshold is the owner of the most unhittable pitch in baseball. A 2013 second-round pick, Williams was waylaid in the minors by Tommy John surgery and subpar command, but since moving to the bullpen, he's been able to pump his fastball as high as 100 mph, pairing it with an 85 mph changeup against which batters have collected just one hit -- a Kolten Wong single on Monday -- on his first 48 at-bats ending with the pitch. That lethal 1-2 punch has helped him strike out 52.6% of the batters he has faced, tops for any pitcher in baseball with at least 10 innings.

Go check out what Jake Mailhot wrote here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/devin-williams-and-the-unicorn-changeup/

Erik

3:04

Re: Bauer: He's also said he very much wants to pitch every 4 days. Do you think any team would commit to allowing him to do so? It seems risky for the team, given the potential injury risk or effect on Bauer's performance, but perhaps the one-year contract length that Bauer also wants might help mitigate the risk from the team's perspective.

Jay Jaffe

3:06

it's really hard to accommodate one pitcher going every 4 days while the others go longer between turns — the lengths of time vary for these creatures of habit, which I think is why you don't see teams doing it.

3:07

It's been awhile since I diagrammed it out but take a normal year's schedule or at least a couple months of it, pencil Bauer in every 4 days and see how it works for the other pitchers as you try to throw them every 5 days

WinTwins0410

3:07

Jay, why hasn’t Tommy John done better in small HoF committees? Huge counting stats, underwent the most famous sports medical procedure in history, played for winners, WAR a solid 62.1. Peaked at 31.7% with the writers, yet on the small committees, constantly below vote disclosure levels. And with his 18%-or-less level in December (tiny voting group of 16, I know), it’s likely that his small-committee vote percentages always have been well below his peak percentage with the writers. I know you don't support John's candidacy, but I’m curious what specifically you think small committee voters have disliked about him. Poor run prevention? Misfortune of playing in an era of 300-game winners? Anything else? (In your 1/6/2020 chat, you called him an outstanding compiler but rarely dominant, and only fleetingly among the league’s best.)

Jay Jaffe

3:11

I think there are a few things going on:
1) lack of dominance (no Cy Youngs, low K total);
2) high concentration of dominant pitchers from the era (six with 300 wins, 10 in HOF, all but one with better ERA+ than John's 111)
3) lots of other strong candidates from what's now the Modern Baseball Era (the elected Trammell, Morris, Simmons and Miller, and now Whitaker and Evans)

3:12

With a maximum of four votes, and other guys on the ballot who won MVP awards such as Murphy and Parker and Munson, it's easy to run out of room

3:13

Memo to "Guest" and "Different Guest": i see that you have the same IP. Move along.

Rick

3:13

Vlad Jr. turning in a 0.1 WAR season in 2020 ought to be ___ for Blue Jays fans: merely disappointing? legitimately worrying? outright alarming?

Jay Jaffe

3:15

merely disappointing given the progress made by just about every other young(ish) player in their lineup. Bichette, Biggio, Teoscar, Gurriel, Rowdy, even Grichuk. Vlad Jr. doesn't need to be a savior, he just needs to find his position and hit.

Lorenzo

3:15

What do you envision happening to the Mets front office after the season ends?

Jay Jaffe

3:17

I think they bring in a new president of baseball ops, build out the scouting and analytics departments, maybe give BVW and Rojas one full season before making those changes.

Ben

3:18

Are there any players who have better Hall of Fame chances than they did circa January 2020? Obviously chances went down for players with poor/nonexistant years (Bryant, Altuve, Sale, etc) And even players with good years (Machado, Betts, Rendon, etc) got a lot less WAR than they were projected for in a full season. But what about guys like deGrom (if he wins CY), Luis Robert, Nelson Cruz, etc. or would even they have been better off with a full season and their original projections?

Jay Jaffe

3:18

I think deGrom is the one that could really benefit, with a third CY - his case would become like that of no other three-time Cy winner given his late start and low win totals.

Pat's Bat

3:18

Has Buster Posey's decision to sit out the season hurt his HoF case?

Jay Jaffe

3:20

It hurts his counting stats and his push towards 2,000 hits but I can't ding him for that. He's already caught more games than Mauer (who's still higher in JAWS, ahem) and the mileage is showing.

I'd vote for Buster without hesitation.

chicagodan1

3:20

How much more do you think Max Scherzer has to do to lock down a HOF berth? He is 36 and has one year left on his current contract.

Jay Jaffe

3:22

I think he's pretty close. He's 223 strikeouts away from 3,000, 26 wins away from 200, and still pitching well (leads NL in FIP, top-5 in K). By this time next year we might be talking about him the way we did Verlander a year ago.

sam

3:23

when will the orioles next make the playoffs?

Jay Jaffe

3:24

A lot depends upon how quickly the Red Sox rebound but the emergence of the Blue Jays, while the Rays and Yankees are strong, won't make it any easier. Let's go out on a limb (haha) and say that they won't make it before the end of Chris Davis' contract (which somehow runs through 2022)

Beeks

3:25

What is the difference in calculation between bWAR and fWAR, and why aren't you as big a fan of fWAR?

Jay Jaffe

3:29

My big issue is on the pitching side. fWAR is driven by FIP (strikeouts, walks and homers), completely independent of defense, whereas bWAR is driven by actual runs allowed, with adjustments for defense and quality of opponent. I do also prefer DRS (used in bWAR, and now accounting for infield shifts) to UZR (used in fWAR, which doesn't account for shifts) but the fact that the latter does have some regression built in is worth something.

Marshall

3:29

Kershaw is having a fantastic year by traditional metrics (especially ERA and WHIP), but his WAR seems relatively low (26th among pitchers), presumably because he's not racking up tons of strikeouts. Is he having a "great" season, or just a "nice" season?

Jay Jaffe

3:33

Kershaw has the NL's 2nd-lowest walk rate and 7th highest K-BB%, but his big issue is the big fly; his 1.0 HR/9 is like 12th-lowest of 26 NL qualifiers. he's pitching at a 5-WAR clip over a full season, a bit better than the past few years, but not at the level of his Cy Young campaigns.

Sean

3:34

Predictions for awards?

Jay Jaffe

3:34

Too much to think about during a chat given so little separation at the top for so many awards.

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