Earlier this week, we crossed the quarter mark of the season, and while 40 games is hardly a large sample size, the round number makes for an easy occasion to reflect on what’s happened thus far and consider how that could impact what’s still to come. My favorite bit of trivia is that it’s been a month since an NL Central team had a losing record. That team, remarkably, was the Cubs, who were last below .500 on the morning of April 15 and are now in first place after rattling off two separate 10-game winning streaks. Meanwhile, both the Brewers and Cardinals have never spent a game below .500. Only three other teams in baseball have not had a losing record this season: the Yankees, Braves, and Dodgers. Notice that quintet includes just one team in the American League, which has been underwhelming overall through the first quarter of the season. Entering play Friday, only five teams in the AL had winning records. In addition to the Yankees, the other four teams, hilariously, are the Rays, Guardians, White Sox, and Athletics. Just as we all expected.
On the individual side of things, many of the usual suspects rank near the top of the offensive leaderboards. There’s Aaron Judge, Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Schwarber, and Matt Olson all within the top 10 for wRC+, with Olson, Judge, and Alvarez also in the top 10 when sorting by WAR, along with Bobby Witt Jr., the leader. But there are also some unexpected names alongside this cohort. Ben Rice (193 wRC+), Shea Langeliers (179), Mickey Moniak (170), Jordan Walker (166), and Brice Turang (166) have emerged as top-10 hitters so far this season, and while it’s not a shock to see a Dodgers duo in the top 10 for position player WAR, it is a surprise that the two players in the pair are Andy Pages and Max Muncy (both at 2.0 WAR). By his standards, Shohei Ohtani has struggled at the plate — he’s slashing .240/.370/.427 with seven home runs and a 122 wRC+ entering Friday — but he’s offset that by turning into the best pitcher in baseball, at least by ERA. Through seven starts and 44 innings, he has a 0.82 ERA and 1.6 WAR, with the latter figure ranking seventh among major league pitchers. He’s the only pitcher with a top-10 WAR who has thrown fewer than 50 innings. Of the six pitchers above him, pitcher WAR leader Cam Schlittler (2.4) and Davis Martin (1.9 WAR) stand as the most surprising.
So the natural question is this: How much of what we’ve seen so far should we expect to continue? I’d say at least one NL Central team will finish the year below .500, as will the White Sox. I said two weeks ago that I wasn’t buying the Rays and A’s as true contenders, and I stand by that. But I do think Langeliers and Walker can sustain most of their production at the plate, and none of us should doubt Ohtani at this point. Otherwise, I’d rather not prognosticate further. We’ve got a mailbag to get to, and that’s way more fun that anything I have to say about Mickey Moniak. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
__
Hello FanGraphs team,
As you may have guessed, I’m unfortunately an Angels fan. One of the early trends of the Angels’ season is that Nolan Schanuel seems to always be at bat representing the tying or winning run, or with the tying or winning run on base, and each time he seems to end the game with a soft grounder to second base. So my question is as follows: Who has been the most inept hitter to end a game with the tying/winning run a home run away? It must take a special combination of playability and ineptitude. Also is Schanuel’s start to the season anything memorable, or just confirmation bias?
Misery loves company,
Dr. Plantwrench
Michael Baumann: Dear Dr. Plantwrench —
The second-to-last line of your question flipped a switch in my brain. “Special combination of playability and ineptitude” is a really fascinating combination. I love nothing more than finding new ways to identify and express mediocrity.
So I busted out the trusty old Baseball Savant search engine and looked for plate appearances from the ninth inning or later, with two outs, where the score and state of the bases allowed the batter to tie or win the game with a home run. (I’m aware that a batter could hit into a game-ending double play or triple play, but I limited my search to two outs for simplicity’s sake.)
Now, I’m still riding the high from last week’s mailbag question, where Pat wrote in asking if Tim Hill was the most efficient pitcher in baseball on a per-pitch basis. Turns out that (at least at that moment in time), Hill was indeed the most efficient pitcher in the league, and by a massive margin. Doc, I was hoping your intuition would be similarly vindicated.
Unfortunately, I have some bad news.
Through Monday’s games — I’m tackling the mailbag question early this week — Schanuel has only come up once so far this season in a win-or-go-home moment, and he hit an RBI double.
If it makes you feel better, this is about the wimpiest RBI double you could produce in a potential walk-off situation, and because it only plated one run, the Angels lost the game anyway. But if we’re taking all situations where Schanuel came up with a chance to win, lose, or tie, he’s 4-for-10 with one walk in 11 career plate appearances. Maybe you’re remembering other high-leverage at-bats, but under these strict parameters, he has been extremely clutch.
Win-lose-or-tie plate appearances are pretty rare. I know it’s early in the season, but only 16 hitters have experienced more than two such plate appearances this year. Only five have more than four chances; Jac Caglianone has had five such opportunities. And the big guy has done quite well: 3-for-5.
Riley Greene is 2-for-2 with a walk, giving him the best batting record in baseball under these circumstances. Adolis GarcÃa and Julio RodrÃguez have produced hits in both of their win-lose-or-tie plate appearances. Ian Happ has a hit and a walk in two plate appearances, and Austin Wells has batted twice and walked twice.
Everyone else who’s had multiple cracks at a situation under these parameters has made at least one game-ending out. On the other end, Dillon Dingler, Brayan Rocchio, and Daniel Schneemann are all 0-for-3, making them the only players who have batted more than twice and failed to reach.
That’s some neat trivia, but even I find two plate appearances over six weeks to be thin gruel for a fun fact. So I ran the same search over Baseball Savant’s entire database of competitive games: since 2008, regular season and postseason.
The most frequent customers are the guys you’d expect. Really, this is just another way of asking who’s played the most games since 2008, and this table reflects that.
| Player | PA | AB | H | AVG | BB% | K% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joey Votto | 63 | 52 | 9 | .173 | 17.5% | 31.7% |
| Jose Altuve | 58 | 55 | 11 | .200 | 5.2% | 17.2% |
| Elvis Andrus | 58 | 55 | 21 | .382 | 5.2% | 13.8% |
| Freddie Freeman | 54 | 45 | 13 | .289 | 16.7% | 27.8% |
| Miguel Cabrera | 52 | 44 | 11 | .250 | 15.4% | 23.1% |
| Evan Longoria | 51 | 45 | 12 | .267 | 9.8% | 25.5% |
| Yadier Molina | 51 | 46 | 15 | .326 | 7.8% | 15.7% |
| Christian Yelich | 50 | 42 | 5 | .119 | 16.0% | 26.0% |
I almost didn’t include this table because the Yadi Sickos are going to go nuts over his .326 batting average with the game on the line. Someone’s going to cite this stat in a Hall of Fame column in a couple years, I’m sure of it.
But hitting .326 is genuinely impressive, because the league as a whole is hitting .213 with a strikeout rate of 27.8% in these situations. Which makes sense; this is the highest-leverage spot out there, so these at-bats are almost always coming against a really good reliever, if not the actual anointed closer. Chapeau to Yadi.
Unfortunately, the cranky old 2000s ball writers are about to get an even tastier bit of meat on which to feed.
| Player | PA | AB | H | AVG | BB% | K% | SO | BB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| David Eckstein | 11 | 10 | 6 | .600 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0 | 0 |
| A.J. Ellis | 10 | 7 | 4 | .571 | 20.0% | 0.0% | 0 | 2 |
| Ezequiel Duran | 10 | 9 | 5 | .556 | 10.0% | 10.0% | 1 | 1 |
| Nathaniel Lowe | 16 | 11 | 6 | .545 | 31.3% | 25.0% | 4 | 5 |
| Jazz Chisholm Jr. | 12 | 11 | 6 | .545 | 8.3% | 16.7% | 2 | 1 |
| Sam Fuld | 12 | 11 | 6 | .545 | 8.3% | 16.7% | 2 | 1 |
| Chipper Jones | 15 | 12 | 6 | .500 | 20.0% | 13.3% | 2 | 3 |
| Danny Jansen | 14 | 14 | 7 | .500 | 0.0% | 28.6% | 4 | 0 |
| Mickey Moniak | 13 | 10 | 5 | .500 | 23.1% | 23.1% | 3 | 3 |
| José A. MartÃnez | 11 | 10 | 5 | .500 | 9.1% | 27.3% | 3 | 1 |
Thank goodness Fire Joe Morgan is defunct.
The list of guys who went oh-fer in decent-sized volume is pretty long, so I’ll spare both you and them and just pick out some highlights. Brian Dozier is 0-for-18, but with six walks. Elly De La Cruz is the active leader in plate appearances without a hit, with 17, but he’s walked five times. Paul DeJong and MartÃn Maldonado are both 0-for-16 with no walks. DeJong’s a bit of a surprise, but that’s what you’d find in any sample of 16 Maldonado at-bats from the past decade.
What we’re not getting is that Goldilocks zone of hitters who are good enough to stay in the lineup (or at least good enough not to get pinch-hit for) but not good enough to succeed with the game on the line. Ultimately, these situations just don’t come around often enough for that effect to rise to the surface. Andrew McCutchen is the leader in games played since 2008; he’s hitting .162 in just 44 plate appearances in these situations, or an average of a little more than two a year.
My condolences to Dr. Plantwrench, and my apologies to the stereotypical crank national columnist from 2005. Turns out you were right all along.
__
Which franchise is the most forgettable? — Chase
Jay Jaffe: That’s a fun question, Chase. I’m sure I could draw the ire of a current fan base by settling on one of the current 30 teams, but even if — speaking hypothetically, of course — I were to nominate the Mariners (the only one never to play in a World Series) or the Rockies (currently on their way to their eighth straight losing season, with just nine .500-or-better seasons out of 34), I’d have to acknowledge that I’ve spilled a lot of ink on their Hall of Famers and their playoff runs over the years. The Marlins have only eight .500-or-better seasons out of 34, and churn their roster so frequently that every spring, The Athletic’s Jayson Stark challenges baseball people to remember who’s on the team in a game he calls Name Three Marlins. That said, they’ve won two World Series and have produced MVP and Cy Young winners, plus the now-relocated seven-story “Homer” sculpture, so even they’re tough to dismiss.
At the other end of the spectrum, a peek at the 1871-75 National Association — the first professional league considered a major league by our site, Baseball Reference, and the Hall of Fame (read the plaques), but not by Major League Baseball — and other bygone 19th-century leagues seems too easy. Did you know that in its inaugural season, the NA had not one but two teams nicknamed the Forest Citys (yes, with that spelling), one in Cleveland and the other in Rockford, Illinois? The former lasted just two seasons but included Hall of Famer Deacon White, who collected the NA’s first hit. The latter evolved out of an “amateur” team — the club wasn’t supposed to pay its players but did, quietly – that included pioneer Al Spalding and infielder Ross Barnes. Both future Hall of Famers were gone by 1871, but the team, which finished last with a 4-21 record and then disbanded, included Cap Anson, who left a huge footprint on the game, and not for the better given his refusal to take the field to face Black players, instigating the “gentleman’s agreement” that segregated top-level baseball for over 60 years. The 1884–85 Union Association, which some experts have argued shouldn’t be considered a major league, included a team called the Wilmington Quicksteps that joined the league late in the season after others dropped out, went 2-16, and then disbanded — but even they rostered an enigmatic phenom known as The Only Nolan. The UA also featured other short-lived teams that entered the season late, none of which included anybody who’s ever been part of a Remember Some Guys session. But really, going this route for an answer is too easy.
In the end, I settled on two franchises as most forgettable because their names were recycled, but not as part of their current franchises: the 1901 Milwaukee Brewers and 1901–02 Baltimore Orioles. Both were part of the original American League, but teams with the same names existed even before then.
A Brewers franchise that had been a staple of the AL’s forerunner, a minor league called the Western League (changed to the American League in 1900 but still considered minor), included future NL batting champion Ginger Beaumont in 1898 and was managed by Connie Mack from 1897-1900. Mack signed pitcher Rube Waddell for the 1900 season, then took him to Philadelphia — where he had become a minority owner in exchange for his investment and an agreement to manage — the next season. The 1901 Brewers did have eight players from the 1900 team and were managed by future Hall of Famer Hugh Duffy. They finished last at 48-89, and after the season relocated to St. Louis, where they became the Browns, who in turn moved to Baltimore after the 1953 season and are now the Orioles. A minor league franchise that ran from 1902–52 while moving between leagues would keep the name Brewers alive for another half-century, but the 1901 team has no relation to the current franchise, which arrived when the 1969 Seattle Pilots moved after their inaugural season. The Pilots, though short-lived, will never be considered forgettable thanks to reliever Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, perhaps the greatest baseball book of all time.
As for the Orioles, like the Brewers, that name has been used by multiple franchises since the 1880s. Most notably, a major league team that began in the American Association in 1882, jumped to the NL 10 years later, and won three straight pennants from 1894–96 with a bunch of future Hall of Famers — John McGraw, Dan Brouthers, Hughie Jennings, Joe Kelley, Willie Keeler, and Wilbert Robinson — leading the way. That franchise disbanded after 1899, at which point all of those players but Brouthers (who was in his 40s by then) scattered to other teams within the NL, which had just contracted from 12 teams to eight. When the AL was founded in 1901, McGraw, who spent 1900 with the St. Louis Cardinals, returned to Baltimore to manage the new team, which went a respectable 68-65 and finished fifth in 1901.
In July 1902, fed up with the frequency with which AL president Ban Johnson fined and suspended him for arguments with umpires, McGraw left the Orioles and joined the Giants, beginning a 31-year run as manager that included 10 pennants and three championships. It was a a shady-as-hell move; McGraw had been part-owner of the Orioles but sold the majority of his stock to Giants owner Andrew Freedman, who by agreement then released all but five players from the Orioles, including McGraw and future Hall of Famers Roger Bresnahan and Joe McGinnity, both of whom went with McGraw to New York. Robinson took over for McGraw as manager, but the team had to forfeit a July 17, 1902 game due to a lack of players. Under the bylaws, the franchise was then taken over by the league and stocked with players from other teams so as to finish their schedules. Those Orioles went just 50-88, finishing last in the AL.
After the 1902 season, the AL and NL made peace, agreeing not to poach each other’s players who were under contract. As part of the agreement, the AL was allowed to put a team in New York to replace the one in Baltimore, which had gone belly-up. The Giants ownership (Freedman and John T. Brush) was the only one in the two leagues that objected. The new New York team was named the Highlanders until 1913, when it became the Yankees.
For the next century, the 1901-02 Orioles were usually considered part of the Yankees’ history, but in 2014, Baseball Reference separated the two entities after years of mulling the prospect and consulting with experts, including Gary Gillette, co-editor of The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, and MLB official historian John Thorn. Years earlier, Gillette had pointed out that just five players appeared with both the 1902 Orioles and 1903 Highlanders, including only a couple of regulars. Thorn concurred, pointing out that the July 17, 1902 forfeit meant the end of the franchise, referring to what came after it as “a walking dead-shell operation” in an August 15, 2014 article in the Wall Street Journal by Jonathan Zalman. The ruling jibed with the view of the Elias Bureau, MLB’s official statisticians (who sometimes differ with Baseball Reference and FanGraphs) and the Yankees, who at the time were counting down to their franchise’s 10,000th victory. “I don’t think something like that has ever happened in another circumstance,” Elias executive vice president Steve Hirdt told Zalman. “That is a powerful enough demonstration that the franchise had been lost.”
So, the 1901 Brewers are one of two 20th- or 21st century franchises who spent only a year in one city (the 1969 Pilots being the other) and the 1901–02 Orioles are the only team in that timeframe considered to have gone defunct. Neither is connected to the current team that bears its name. If those two don’t count as forgettable, I don’t know what does.
__
Hello,
My overall question: Is bunting more destructive to run creating than we currently give it credit for? I’m more specifically wondering how would the run expectancy matrix change if we took out every sacrifice bunt event (attempt and success)? What would it look like including only the set of situations where there is a sacrifice bunt?
Consider the example of a team that has runners on first and second with nobody out. It faces a run expectancy of 1.55 runs in that situation, but just 1.41 runs with the runners at second and third and one out (per the good work of Mr. Clemens last year). The immediate conclusion is that bunting would cost the team, so the batter should swing away. But the decision the team is actually making is more nuanced. The club is really asking, “Do we expect to score more runs with runners on first and second and nobody out when we bunt, or first and second and nobody out when we swing away?” The actual value lost to bunting is therefore two different subsets of the 1.55 figure: the subset of instances where a team did not bunt, and the subset of instances where a team did bunt. In this way, the 1.55 expected runs gives an inaccurate picture of the true value of “swinging away” because it includes the two-on, no-out outcomes in which a team decided to bunt; outcomes that are expressly eliminated by the choice not to do it. Taking the above scenario as an example, my hypothesis is that the true value of swinging away is more than 1.55 runs, and the true value of bunting is less than 1.41 runs. I did OK for myself despite almost a full season of at-bats over my career lost to sacrifice bunts!
Sincerely,
The Ghost of Eddie Collins
Ben Clemens: Ooh, a ghost, spooky. I’m not into being haunted, though, so I better answer this question well enough that I leave no chance of that happening. The first thing I did was try to define the question. I took American League games before the universal DH was instituted and all games since as a sample size. I split the data into three eras – 2000-2009, 2010-2021, and 2022-2025. Then I looked at each situation where a sacrifice bunt was possible – runners on base, fewer than two outs – and divided them up into two groups. In one group, I put all plate appearances that didn’t end with a bunt. In the other, I put every plate appearance that ended in a bunt, whether or not it produced a sacrifice bunt. For example, let’s take the universal DH era and one standard spot for a bunt – runner on first, nobody out. Without splitting into bunts and non-bunts, teams have scored 0.8955 runs per inning after reaching that base/out state. When batters didn’t bunt (40,139 times), their teams scored 0.8963 runs the rest of the inning. When batters did bunt (928 times), their teams scored 0.861 runs the rest of the inning.
Those are basically the same numbers – the headline run expectancy is 0.896, and the run expectancy conditioned on swinging away is also 0.896. In fact, in the situation you mentioned – runners on first and second, no one out – teams have scored 1.513 runs after swinging away and 1.566 runs after bunting. Bunting has increased the run expectancy there. I think the most interesting question here is the gap between headline run expectancy and run expectancy conditioned on no bunts, so here’s a grid of that in the universal DH era. In other words, this is how much better than headline run expectancy teams do by swinging away:
| Bases/Outs | 0 | 1 |
|---|---|---|
| 1– | 0.0008 | -0.0001 |
| 12- | -0.0037 | -0.001 |
| 1-3 | -0.001 | -0.002 |
| 123 | -0.0002 | 0.0007 |
| -2- | 0.002 | 0 |
| -23 | -0.0012 | 0.0002 |
| –3 | -0.001 | -0.002 |
These are all tiny, and they’re not even in the direction you’d expect. Swinging away is “worse” than the headline run expectancy in nine of the 14 base/out states listed here. Even in the 2000-2009 era, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and bunts were far more frequent, run expectancy was frequently lower for swinging away than for all plate appearances including bunts:
| Bases/Outs | 0 | 1 |
|---|---|---|
| 1– | 0.002 | 0 |
| 12- | -0.0061 | -0.0005 |
| 1-3 | 0 | -0.0025 |
| 123 | 0.0009 | .00001 |
| -2- | 0.005 | 0 |
| -23 | -0.0003 | 0.0006 |
| –3 | 0.0002 | -0.0013 |
I can come up with some sneaky reasons why this isn’t showing you what you think. For example, the guys who have bunted are worse hitters on average. But if you measure by the hitters who come up afterwards, the hitters who bat after bunt attempts are better than the hitters who bat after swing-away plate appearances. That’s because bunts are disproportionately attempted by hitters at the bottom of the lineup – and that particular effect is getting stronger over time.
For example, if you restrict the study to nine-hole hitters, teams have scored 1.564 runs the rest of the inning after they swing away with runners on first and second and no one out, and 1.565 after they bunt in the same situation. That’s the worst hitter in the lineup, in the best situation for a bunt, and even then bunting is only equally as good as swinging away. With a runner on first and no one out, ninth hitters’ teams have put up 0.925 runs the rest of the inning after they swing away and only 0.847 after they bunt. In other words, the reason that bunts appear to outperform swinging away in some situations is a selection effect; the kinds of hitters who sometimes bunt aren’t the same as the kinds of hitters who almost always swing away, so their conditions are just different.
For the record, this doesn’t say anything about the win probability impact of a bunt, and I think that most pure sacrifice bunts these days occur in situations where a single run is very important, which makes win probability a better measure of value than run expectancy. That two-on, no-out bunt is a positive expected value decision when it’s late and close, particularly if the hitter isn’t good.
My final takeaway in all of this is that you don’t need to worry about the effect of bunts on run expectancy tables. They’re relatively rare, and the hitters attempting them aren’t a representative sample. Fun question, though!
* This article was originally published here
Comments
Post a Comment
Pitch Us Your Comments