2018 Season MLB Non-Phillies News/Notes Discussion

[Lucky_Beagle]

I agree completely there should not be a game played to determine a divisional champion. Use a tie breaking system. I could go along with a play in game if it were 2 teams tied for the last wild card spot. How do they decide home field advantage if teams are tied? I bet they use some type of tiebreaker without playing a game.

Also, I do not believe game 163 should ever count in the regular season stats.

[LoneStarPhan]

Brewers down the Cubs 3-1. They out hit the Cubs, 12-3. Only home run was Rizzo for the Cubs.

Dodgers leading Rockies, 5-0, after 7 innings. So far, Rockies only have 2 hits. Dodgers have a couple 2-run home runs.

Edit: Dodgers win, 5-2. Rockies score 2 in the top of the 9th. They scored on two home runs but only had 4 hits total for the game.

[mdougherty12]

Jeff Sullivan from Fangraphs with a look at Christian Yelich’s huge second half (and a brief mention of Jorge Alfaro):

Lift-Off for Christian Yelich | FanGraphs Baseball

[zambonir]

Cubs win 15 more games than us and are now just as done.

[andyb]

Interesting that they mention Alfaro. On TV they were definitely talking about adjustments he made to his hands which I think get his swing started a little earlier (which in turn would shorten the swing some).

His Ks were down a bit and the walks were up slightly in the second half. OPS went from 700 to 788 though remember the second half had half the plate appearances as the first half. BABIP was over .400 in both so there is probably some regression to be expected though Alfaro would be expected to have a high BABIP since he hits the ball hard and runs fairly well.

Hard to know what it means, but there is probably much less of a chance these days of Alfaro becoming a really bad hitter (i.e. .220 with a 35%-40% K rate and sub-700 OPS) next year. More likely slight improvement and a 750 OPS with better K and BB rates balanced by a little less luck. That is a 2-3 WAR catcher with some improvement blocking balls along with upside remaining. In other words Ramos is the one person we probably should not sign, because there is a really good chance Alfaro will be better than Ramos over the next couple of years (coupled with the $50 million we would need to give Ramos).

[Philsmania]

Cubs win 15 more games than us and are now just as done.

While the AL clearly has its favorites--Red Sox, Astros and Yankees, it really feels like anybody can win the NL. After game 162, the Cubs were tied for the best record in the league and yes, now they are done.

[zambonir]

Run differential says the Dodgers were the best team in NL by far (102-win expected record, one fewer than Boston). They should be heavily favored over the Braves but I assume even that stat has never been a firewall against short-series upsets. Phillies went 4-3 against them (Braves were 2-5).

[EastFallowfield]

My dad pointed out to me that he doesn't think it's so weird to see a reliever start a postseason game since he was around to see Jim Konstanty pitch game 1 of a World Series.

[andyb]

Long article from the Athletic about how the Yankees transformed themselves in the analytics era. A big part of this is bludgeoning other teams with cash - in the international market and in trades where smaller market teams place more importance on cash. When I criticize the Phillies for not spending the extra million or two internationally this is what I have in mind. Clearly they have been better about this in recent years (and have also aggressively used cash to get better prospects in major league deals), but it is still worth pointing out when they do not maximize a resource.

Like it or not, cash and the ability to spend more than 20 other teams is an important component of building a good long-term competitive team.

‘Cold Hard Cash’: How Brian Cashman played the long game...

[Philsmania]

There was one year when the Yankees went nuclear in terms of international spending and those international prospects would become the backbone of what would be graded as a top farm system.

[fish]

I was stunned to see the Phils ranked 6th from the bottom in players signed or drafted playing in the big leagues. Awwwful.

[andyb]

That is kind of a reflection of our lean drafting years starting around 2007 or 2008 when we stopped getting high picks, lost them because of free agent signings, and did not do anything special internationally. We were not awful drafting in that period relative to our draft position - we just had few high picks. Of course we were not great in drafting either. But being average when you have few high picks leads to bad outcomes.

Even though we are now better internationally (in the top 10 spending usually) it is hard to argue that we have an above average record of success. When we point to all the relievers we are churning out, often from low dollar signings we fail to mention that most organizations have figured out how to teach young Latin American pitchers to throw 95 at the expense of other parts of their development.

Sixto is pretty important to us since we have not generated many LA stars (Carrasco is probably the best in recent years). Ortiz also.

[allentown]

This is why FA stars are the best hope for the Phillies to reach the playoffs anytime soon. The golden-era Phillies had multiple home-grown stars: Howard, Utley, Ruiz, Rollins, Burrell, Hamels. Victorino was Rule 5 and Werth from scrap heap. Some of the relievers were home-grown. Lidge was the big addition. Contrast that to the current Phillies, who have Hoskins and Nola, and ??? coming up from the minors over the next 3 seasons. There just is no 'build from within' and add when the build from within gets you to the playoffs or just on the doorstep. The internal talent hasn't been good enough for that.

[Austinfan]

Who has successfully built through free agency the last half dozen years or so?

Not add one or two FA to a good team (90+ win quality) but take a average to below average team and make them a WS contender through free agency.
One problem is since most FAs are over 30, even if you get a temporary boost spending a lot of money, some of these FAs will fall off the cliff in 2-3 seasons, but the cap hit (like Herpes) will remain.

Which is why it'll be hard to sign one of Machado and Harper, few "cornerstone" FAs ever become available.

[andyb]

Who has successfully built through free agency the last half dozen years or so?

JD Martinez is pretty important to Boston. Lorenzo Cain to Milwaukee. Nobody is advocating building an entire team in free agency (though that seems to be your argument).

Teams can walk and chew gum at the same time. One can develop young players while also signing free agents. Our current young core lacks stars. While it might improve a bit over time, it is likely not going to be good enough to win without adding talent that we pay for with money and not prospects.

And free agents getting worse over time is just the cost of doing business. I'd rather do that (and front load the contracts) rather than letting our TV dollars sit and collect dust in the owners' wallets.

[zambonir]

That's a really good read. What jumps out is that the Yankees started their analytics department in 2003. Also, they hired an insurance actuary with no baseball experience. And it still took years to get everyone on the same page. Of course they had all those rings and all that money to soldier through.

[andyb]

It certainly is easier to experiment and make mistakes when you have resources. And obviously the Phillies started 5 years too late on their analytics department (though I actually think that giant custom analytics departments are very overrated). Lots of data in baseball is widely available. This data is not proprietary even though the analytical decisions that come from it may be unique. To use another analogy from my world (politics), I often talk a campaign out of doing a lot of expensive, custom data collection. Think of polls. In any key Senate race there are a dozen polls out there. Campaigns certainly need to test their custom messaging, but sometimes they are asked to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that weekly or daily. Which is a complete waste of money since the publicly available polling data is often 98% as good as the data a custom poll might provide.

It does not impress me if the Phillies have more analytics staff. It is much more what they do with that staff. The failure of their shifts this season might be both a good and a bad sign. It might be good that they are trying new things to get an edge on other organizations. It is bad of course because it did not work. The real question is whether they learned from it. Do they get too far inside of the "our data is better" attitude to see that their mistakes might lie in what they are doing with the data (and that their own data is really not all that special).

We'll see how well they learn to value defense this next season. In 2018 they made a calculated decision to add offense (and specifically OBP) at the expense of defense. I think they thought that they were outsmarting other teams because defense is less important in 3-outcome baseball and their OBP strategy would be even more value. The results of lousy defense and OBP at the expense of batting average (.234 average for the team is pretty bad) are hopefully learning experiences. Defense might be more important than they are calculating. And hits are more valuable than walks.

All of these choices are about how you use analytical data - not whether you should use it. Hopefully they have learned (while also drafting better).

[julio]

It does not impress me if the Phillies have more analytics staff. It is much more what they do with that staff. The failure of their shifts this season might be both a good and a bad sign. It might be good that they are trying new things to get an edge on other organizations. It is bad of course because it did not work. The real question is whether they learned from it. Do they get too far inside of the "our data is better" attitude to see that their mistakes might lie in what they are doing with the data (and that their own data is really not all that special).

Well said.

It's what you do with the data. It's about the models you use - how you use the data to analyze and forecast the results of specific choices. And yes, it's about whether they learn from the choices they make - do they get wedded to the 'model,' regardless of results... or does their approach include appropriate review/analysis of actual results, which get incorporated as revisions to the 'model.' (E.g., are there appropriate feedback loops.)

Remains to be seen.

[allentown]

And when you have a new analytics department, it is wise to proceed in baby steps, not trying to do as much as organizations who have many years head start over you, until you have tested your models and proved them to be effective. To go with shifts at the same time you play players out of position at the same time many of those players don't have plus defensive skills and/or are rookies is dumb. We paid the price for that overly self-inflated dumb. We tried to mindlessly ape the Dodgers, without the resources of the Dodgers. Hopefully TPTB, as well as the analytics crew, have learned and will do better next season. Hopefully our 2019 roster will also contain more talented players. Hopefullly, whatever is expected of our players in Philly will be things they learned in the minors and ST.

[zambonir]

They had a plan that went very wrong, setting off a chain reaction that was aggravated by Crawford and Altherr's struggles (be they performance or health). I don't know if it was an analytics error or an old-fashioned scouting error, probably both, but they thought Hoskins would be more competent, and more importantly, offset by an elite defensive CF (as well as a very good RF) and a superior defensive 1B. Then Hoskins wasn't competent, the CF wasn't elite, the RF (either of them) wasn't good and Santana wasn't an upgrade.

Kingery was probably the least of their problems but I still believe he is talented enough to play multiple positions (plus why would the shifts bother him, he's a 2B anyway). He just needs to hit to have value doing it. Then Cabrera comes in and he doesn't hit either.

2019 is still going to have some holes, clearly. Either someone (Hoskins or Santana) will continue to play out of position and/or the SS and 2B will be a virtual rookie (unless they get Machado). The big question is Herrera.