Technology has heavily contributed to our ever-evolving understanding of pitching. The Rapsodo system, in particular, can be attributed for this change, by allowing both players and coaches to maximize a pitcher by observing the physicalities of his pitches. Kyle Boddy and his company, Driveline, have been at the forefront of the “Rapsodo movement”, continuously releasing articles on...
The St. Louis Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays have struck a deal for Tommy Pham. Pham is hitting .248/.331/.399 this season with a 101 wRC+. This is a far cry from his 2017 slash of .306/.411/.520 and 148 wRC+ but Pham is still a good defender and baserunner under team control. Pham currently sports a .320 wOBA but his expected wOBA is .369, which is a sign that he is due for some good luck in the...
It’s easy to forget how awesome Michael Conforto’s 2017 season was for several reasons. For starters, it ended with him writhing in pain on the ground with a dislocated shoulder, a crashing hault to his breakout campaign. Another was how the Mets season devolved into irrelevance. But in many ways, Conforto was, and still is, a rising star. The 24-year old slashed .279/.384/.555 with...
My colleague, Connor O’Brien, did a series of getting to know your sabermetrics statistics in 2016. I wanted to continue his efforts to bring more stats to you that many baseball front offices believe are important in player evaluation. The one we will discuss today is expected weighted on base average or xwOBA. Weighted on base average (wOBA) gives hitters credit for the types of ways that they...
One of the primary concerns heading into the Mets offseason is the third base situation. There are two legitimate free agent candidates in Eduardo Nunez and Todd Frazier. In this era of baseball, Statcast is one of the more important parts of the game. Teams are starting to look at it over scouting. The Astros are one of the organizations primarily focusing on it to judge talent going forward....
If you think the Mets are going to acquire another Yoenis Cespedes to save the struggling offense, think again. According to Randy Miller of NJ.com, the Mets are targeting role players rather than a big bat. According to Miller’s source, the farm system has been depleted by the recent graduations of Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, and Michael Conforto so the team may not be in a position to...
In last week’s installments of the widely-beloved “Know Your Stats” series, we looked at both OPS/OPS+ and wOBA. Today we already looked at wRAA and will now cover wRC+. Of all the popular offensive statistics publicly available in the baseball world, Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+) may be the gold standard. It combines the corrections to batting average, OBP, and slugging...
We continue our widely-beloved “Know Your Stats” series with a “gateway stat:” Weighted Runs Above Average. wRAA is essentially wOBA converted into runs, but understanding wRAA is crucial to understanding Wins Above Replacement and Weighted Runs Created Plus, which we’ll be talking about this afternoon. One of the biggest issues with rate statistics like wOBA and...
For the next few days, I will be bringing back my “Know Your Stats” series that I began a few years back to highlight some important sabermetric stats and concepts. Earlier today, we went through OPS and OPS+. Now we continue with wOBA… Perhaps the best way of describing weighted-On Base Average (wOBA) is to describe the faults of some of the traditional hitting statistics first. Batting...
For the next few days, I will be bringing back my “Know Your Stats” series that I began a few years back to highlight some important sabermetric stats and concepts. We begin this afternoon with OPS and OPS+. OPS, or On Base Plus Slugging was one of the first sabermetric stats to go mainstream. It is, as the name implies, On-Base Percentage plus Slugging Percentage. It’s crude...
According to Jim Bowden of ESPN on Twitter as well as various other sources, the Mets and Braves have reportedly finished a deal that has infielder Juan Uribe and utility man Kelly Johnson to the Mets in exchange for prospects John Gant and Robert Whalen. Uribe, 36, is a thirteen year veteran who has spent time with the Rockies, White Sox, Giants, Dodgers, and currently the Atlanta Braves....
Tim Rohan of the New York Times, wrote an extensive piece on Josh Satin this afternoon. He says that the 29-year old infielder has been taking this playing the outfield thing pretty seriously. Not willing to sit on his laurels and hope that he makes the team next Spring, he says Satin’s survival instincts kicked in. “When the off-season began, Satin went to work, refining his body...
