Why don’t teams ever sign former quarterbacks to try and turn them into pitchers?

This thought stems from watching Patrick Mahomes and his pre-draft NFL tape and discovering that his father was a former major league pitcher. Can a quarterback’s arm strength transfer to pitching? What can be learned from football velocity to uncover a future successful pitcher?

ESPN was ramping up their coverage in the weeks leading up to the 2017 NFL Draft, and Mahomes was gaining momentum. A SportsCenter interview with the future MVP explored his multi-sport background, which caught my attention.

I was vaguely familiar with the story about Mahomes’ father reaching MLB as a pitcher. Apparently there was a time when Mahomes considered following in his father’s baseball footsteps. The interview spilled over into the prospect’s appearance in the Gruden QB Camp. He mentioned then that he was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in high school, but due to a strong desire to play quarterback at Texas Tech, he went in the 37th round. If his football passion wasn’t as strong, scouts told him that the top three rounds were a likely landing spot.

As the video continued, it featured highlights of in-game play and practices where Mahomes showed a dynamic skill set. He had special throwing abilities, and his baseball background and natural talent was obvious in just a few of his tosses. There were impressive clips of him throwing a football from his knees about 50 or so yards, and another highlighting a final pregame warmup toss and ritual: throwing the ball about 75-80 yards in the air. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 20, 1976, Dick Arndt got up in the morning and shuffled off to his job as a vocational rehabilitation counselor. Once his day shift ended, Dick headed to his part-time gig as the Brewers’ groundskeeper at Milwaukee County Stadium, where he was in charge of opening and closing the gate for the bullpen cart. This, however, would be no ordinary day for Arndt.

The sparse crowd of 10,134 that night — about a fifth of capacity — was there to see the Angels take on the lowly Brewers, part of the draw being 42-year-old Hank Aaron during his farewell season. In the seventh inning, Arndt was sitting in the left-field stands keeping a lookout for any signals that a pitching change was to be made. With the Brewers ahead 2-1, George Scott hit a two-run home run, increasing the Milwaukee lead. Aaron came up next and drove a Dick Drago offering on a line into the left-field seats, flying about 10 feet over Arndt’s head. The ball settled into an empty row, where Arndt quickly retrieved it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Cubs have basically admitted they won’t be signing impact free agents until they “clear some payroll,” with the only likely major moves being trading away star-level players rather than trying to re-sign them, despite having already cleared $15 million in salary, projecting for a decent win total, and having a very lucrative TV deal about to begin that could net them $50 million a year.

This is a long way of saying: I hate this offseason and I present to you the following speculative post on how much the Phillie Phanatic would earn in the offseason.

As you may have heard, the company that created the Phillie Phanatic tried to get out of its previous agreement to assign its rights to the Philadelphia Phillies “forever” (I’ll leave my lawyering critiques on the side for now). As a result, the Phillies sued the mascot company to ensure that it can keep the Phanatic from becoming a “free agent.” (Fun fact: the designer of the Phanatic also designed Miss Piggy and Statler and Waldorf!)

This leads to the obvious question: What is a reasonable contract for the Phillie Phanatic? Read the rest of this entry »

“Alex Bregman is the runaway AL MVP for 2019” – MVP voters from the 1950s & 1960s

“Mike Trout finishes a disappointing 5th in 2019 AL MVP voting” – MVP voters from the 1960s & 1970s

“Christian Yelich is the near-unanimous 2019 NL MVP” – MVP voters from the 1980s & 1990s

“Xander Bogaerts narrowly misses the 2019 AL MVP” – MVP voters from the 1960s & 1970s

The Evolving MVP Voter’s Criteria

The winner of the MLB MVP awards is a function of two factors: How the players performed, and how the electorate evaluated that performance.

Much attention is paid to how players perform and how they stack up historically to peers from different eras, but for MVP selection, little attention has been paid to how the electorate has changed and shifted the definition of the Most Valuable Player.

Since 1931, the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) has voted and awarded each league’s MVP award. Over this period of time, the world’s understanding of player performance and what contributes to winning has changed dramatically. The 1931 voters probably looked at home runs, RBIs, and batting average leaderboards printed at year-end in their daily newspaper before filling out their ballot. That’s not to accuse them of being narrowly minded, it was just all they had available to them and all the baseball world knew to look at.

On the other hand, the 2019 voter (hopefully) spent at least a few minutes on FanGraphs or a similar site looking at things like WAR, wRC+, and DRS, and at best also considered advanced Statcast data and maybe even built their own AI-powered simulations to model a season without the player to see how much worse their team performed. At least, that’s what I would do if I had a ballot, and that’s what I would call “responsible voting” in 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

When your favorite baseball team misses out on the playoffs, October offers a brief free-agency in fandom. Do you temporarily switch to root for a loved one’s team, or choose to root against a rival?

For me personally, I want former Rockies players to do well. It would be fantastic to see DJ LeMahieu lift the Commissioner’s Trophy, even if he’s now wearing the wrong color of pinstripes.

But do I really have to root for the Yankees? I wanted to see if I had any other option — to see if there was any other playoff team with more former Rockies.

I started with FanGraphs data showing player totals from every season going back to 2001 (CC Sabathia is the player on a 2019 playoff roster with the earliest debut, having come on April 8, 2001 for Cleveland). I also defined “playoff roster” as only including players who made an appearance for a playoff-bound team in September of 2019, so if someone hasn’t seen the field in the last month, they’re not counted here.

I didn’t want a player with only 15 ABs to have the same weight as a player with 1,000 at-bats, so I used each player’s “appearances” for their former clubs (plate appearances as a batter plus total batters faced for pitchers, including both regular season and playoffs). Read the rest of this entry »

*Note: All numbers updated to August 12th, 2019*

Introduction

Consider the following comparison between Freddie Freeman (29) and Carlos Santana (33). Both players were starters for the 2019 All-Star teams of their respective leagues, and both are enjoying breakout seasons beyond their usual high production level, with nearly identical statistics across the board.

However, I argue that there is an underlying statistic that makes Santana’s success less impressive and Freeman’s worth MVP consideration. Recall the quality of competition of pitchers faced. The Atlanta Braves’ division, the NL East, contains the respectable pitching competition of the Mets (13th in league-wide in ERA), Nationals (15th), Marlins (16th), and Phillies (19th). Contrast this with the competition of the Cleveland Indians in the AL Central: The Twins (ninth), White Sox (22nd), Royals (24th), and Tigers (28th). Over 503 plate appearances, Santana has faced a top-15 pitcher (ranked by FIP) just 15 times, compared to 46 times by Freeman over 533 plate appearances. wRC+ controls for park effects and the current run environment, while xwOBA takes into account quality of contact, but all modern sabermetrics fail to address the problem of Freeman and Santana’s near-equal statistics despite widely different qualities of competition. Thus, I present the modeling system of playerElo. Read the rest of this entry »

I have found a gaping hole in the rules and laws of baseball. When you know the flaw, you won’t be able to ignore it, and you will wonder why teams haven’t tried to exploit this, just once. It all has to do with equipment regulations, or more specifically, baserunning equipment regulations. It’s brilliant (if I say so myself) and something I had to keep a secret, otherwise there would be madness on the basepaths.

In boxing, the competitors wear shorts with rather large waistbands. This is because any shot below the waistline is classified as “below the belt” and therefore an illegal hit. I don’t pretend to know boxing or the rules (I despise fighting sports), but this is one I’m pretty sure about. It probably leads to points deductions or a fine or a yellow card or a sinbin (imagine a two-minute penalty box in boxing, with one opponent dancing around the ring on his own… anyway…). Essentially, hitting below the belt is bad, so boxers try and maximize the size of their waistband and try to pull their shorts as high as possible.

In baseball, there are regulations on the size of a bat, the size of a glove, the way players and coaches dress themselves, their conduct during play, and the distance between the pitchers mound and home plate (thankfully the field dimensions are a recommendation and not specified like NFL/NBA etc, which allows for great and different ballparks to be made), and they are all laid out for everyone to see.

There is a piece of equipment that doesn’t have a set of dimensions or regulations. This small and insignificant bit of swag is the baserunning mitt, the single oven glove, the nubbin, the sock puppet, whatever you call it. It’s the thing you see those folks who like their fingers not to be treated to a studding from the baseman’s cleats wear while running the bases. It fits over one of their hands, and they use that hand to lead when sliding head-first into the bases.

While watching a game in the postseason, I noticed a hitter reach first base and be handed one of these mitts by one of the equipment guys. As he placed the device onto his hand, I couldn’t help but notice the size of it. It looked considerably bigger than the others I had laid eyes on previously. It then made me wonder, what length of mitt could you get away with before umpires start noticing? Clearly the ideal solution would be to have a 90-foot mitt on the end of your hand and simply tap the next base while being stood at your current location. Clearly this would attract a lot of attention, as the equipment guy comes out of the dugout, holding it horizontally over his two arms, bumping into umpires and players on the way out to second base. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, Major League Baseball reached an agreement with the Atlantic League that allowed MLB to test any new playing rules in Atlantic League games. Five new rules already went into effect in the first half of the season, and a day after the Atlantic League All-Star Game, in addition to testing the electronic strike zone using TrackMan radar, MLB announced four new rules that would go into effect in the second half of the Atlantic League season. One of the four seems to have received stronger criticism on the Internet than others, and that is the idea of stealing first base.

According to this new rule, if a pitch is not caught in flight, the batter has the right to “steal” first base. In essence, this is an extended version of the dropped-third-strike rule that has long been engrained in the baseball rule books. Of course, a dropped third strike has many criteria: it must occur with two strikes, the pitch must be a strike, and unless it occurs with two outs, there cannot be a runner occupying first base. With this new rule, however, batters now have the right to go for first base in any count, regardless the pitch is a ball or strike, and in any base situations. And recently, we witnessed the first steal of first in professional baseball history:

On the second pitch in the bottom of the sixth inning, Alejandro Chacin of the Lancaster Barnstormers threw a wild pitch, which allowed Southern Maryland Blue Crabs outfielder Tony Thomas to steal first base. From the video, we can clearly tell that the players were still adjusting to this new rule, as neither the catcher nor the batter reacted at first. The fact that catcher Anderson De La Rosa took time to react was probably the main reason that allowed Thomas to reach first without a throw. Interestingly, the term “stealing first” might actually be a misnomer, as the play was scored as a fielder’s choice and counted as an 0-for-1, according to Somerset Patriots southpaw Rick Teasley. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been over a month since James Holzhauer lost on Jeopardy!, crushing my heart and, if Twitter is to be believed, the hearts of many others. Since part of the way through his incredible run, however, one question nagged at me. If we consider Jeopardy! to be a sport, then Holzhauer may very well have just had the most dominant stretch ever produced by an athlete. What would it take for a baseball player to equal this absurd level of performance?

There are some rules that first have to be established here. For the purposes of this exercise, monetary winnings on Jeopardy! will be equated to WAR. According to this research from the Jeopardy! fan website, the average contestant (since October of 2004) wins $11,899.44. Given that the show airs every weekday in the year, that rounds to about 261 episodes per year. With three contestants per episode, the average amount of money rewarded to Jeopardy! contestants in one season (ignoring that for certain tournaments there are set amounts of prize money, this only applies to the actual amounts won) is easily calculable. Three contestants per episode times 261 episodes times $11,899.44 per contestant equals $9,317,261.52 awarded from Jeopardy! to contestants each year.

In this article, in which the baseball equivalent of LeBron James is calculated, it is stated that MLB allots 1,000 WAR per season. Holzhauer’s winnings on Jeopardy! totaled $2,462,216, a staggering amount, one that would constitute 26.426% of the winnings in an average season. In baseball terms, Holzhauer was worth 264.3 WAR. That would be in one season. For reference, no player has even reached 200 career WAR. Now to see what it would take to reach this lofty number. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot has been written over the past year about pay at the minor league level and attempts to fix things, and with good reason — it’s a pretty bad situation, and with fundamental decency in mind, it is certainly a good thing that it may be changing.

But alongside that discussion, I’ve been kind of curious of how changing minor league pay would actually change performance. In theory, paying players more could let them focus on baseball, translating to better performance. If that’s the case, it’s even possible that paying players more could actually “pay for itself” if the value of the extra wins players generate outweighs the costs of paying them more. In a perfect world, to test that, you could randomly pay some players more than others and see which group does better.

We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in one where signing bonuses are still pretty random. Yes, obviously players drafted higher receive higher bonuses on average, but there’s still pretty significant variation across the board, especially when you get into later rounds. In 2015, for example, there were 105 players drafted who had assigned “slot values” of between $130,000 and $200,000, and their bonuses were anywhere from $2,000 to $1,000,000. While in general higher bonuses should go to more talented prospects, it also stands to reason that two players drafted around the same time with around the same slot values should have around the same talent level and chances to make the majors.

With that in mind, I took a look at a couple different ways of seeing how well players with much lower bonuses progressed. Using 2014-16 draft data from SBN, I had a set of all players drafted in the first 10 rounds along with their signing bonuses and slot values, which I then matched with FanGraphs’ data on player appearances at either the Triple-A or major league level from 2014 to 2019. In total, this left me with 922 players, of whom 319 (~35%) made a Triple-A or MLB appearance and 144 (~16%) that made an MLB appearance. 153 (~17%) had a signing bonus of $50,000 or lower. I looked at two different ways to see how signing bonuses varied with advancement. Read the rest of this entry »