I don’t pay too much attention to the standings in April. I look at them, of course, but that’s more a matter of routine than a desire to learn something substantial. It’s hard for teams to pull ahead of the pack this early in the season, and I’d rather not read too much into the fact that, say, the banged-up Blue Jays are a few games below .500, or that none of the five teams in the NL Central has a losing record. It takes time for these things to sort themselves out.
And yet, upon checking the standings Friday morning, I found myself pondering the significance of what I saw: specifically, that only three teams in the American League had a winning record. After a dizzying 20 minutes of digging, I lifted my head from my laptop in a daze, wondering how the heck I ended up staring at Baseball Reference’s playoff odds for the 14-18 White Sox. I think seeing the number 16.1% is what snapped me out of my stupor. (For what it’s worth, our Playoff Odds gave the South Siders a 2.2% chance to make the postseason, double their odds on Opening Day.) Anyway, about those three AL clubs above .500, the Yankees (20-11) were expected to be one of the best teams in baseball, so their place atop the standings wasn’t surprising, but the strong starts of the Rays (18-12) and Athletics (17-14) caught me a bit off guard. I thought Tampa Bay was destined for last place when the season began, and our Playoff Odds agreed, projecting the team to finish with 79.7 wins and giving it a 28.9% shot to reach the postseason. Entering May, the Rays have only added about two wins to their median projection (81.9), but they now have a 45.6% chance of making the playoffs. Meanwhile, I believed the A’s would be better this year, but better meant maybe a third-place finish in the AL West and an outside shot to snag the final AL Wild Card spot. Still, I figured they were more likely still a year or two away from true contention. Our preseason Playoff Odds tabbed them for 78 wins and a 21.4% shot at the playoffs. Now, they’re up to a projected 81.3 wins and 43.1% odds. I still don’t think either team will play postseason baseball this year; according to both their Pythagorean and BaseRuns records, the Rays have played more like a .500 team than one that’s on pace to win 97 games, while the A’s simply don’t have enough pitching. Remember, it’s only the start of May. There’s so much more baseball still to be played.
OK, that’s enough about the Rays and A’s in this week’s mailbag. Today, we’ll be answering your questions about how good Shohei Ohtani would be at basketball, whether James Wood is one of the best lefty batters ever at hitting the ball the other way, which batter has the most hits against a pitcher without recording an out, and what would happen if ZiPS forgot about 2020. But before we get to all of that, 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.
__
Would Shohei Ohtani be better at basketball than Michael Jordan was at baseball? — Jeremy William Fox
Michael Baumann: I like this question quite a bit, Jeremy William Fox. Ohtani is 31, the same age as Jordan was when he took his baseball sabbatical, and if you’re making a list of modern athletes for whom no hypothetical seems too outlandish, Jordan and Ohtani would be near the top of any list. Though some believe Jordan’s baseball career was actually an under-the-table gambling suspension, and Ohtani… oh, did you do that on purpose, Jeremy William Fox? How naughty! How insouciant!
When it comes to basketball, I’m about a 90th-percentile Jordan hater. Not only do I think LeBron James is the greatest basketball player ever and find most arguments in Jordan’s favor specious at best, I’m exhausted by Jordan’s whole shtick. In most anecdotes you hear about the competitiveness that made him great, Jordan comes off as somewhere between selfish and sociopathic. It’s 20 years of all-time-great basketball, written in the style of a Taylor Sheridan power fantasy.
I say that so you know I mean what’s about to come: I’ve written about Michael Jordan’s stint in the minors at some length before, and came away astounded by how good his baseball career was. If anything, Jordan doesn’t get anything near the credit he deserves for jumping straight into Double-A and not embarrassing himself.
At 6-foot-6, 200 pounds, Jordan did not have the right body to hit, and his gangly, knock-kneed hitting action showed. He was also coming back to baseball — as a hitter, not a pitcher — after almost 15 years away from the sport. And it’s not like he had a cup of coffee in the big leagues at 20; he topped out playing high school baseball in North Carolina. So to even hit .200 jumping straight into the high minors with all that going against him… honestly, I think that’s better proof of Jordan’s singular athletic ability than anything he did on the hardwood.
In other words: Ohtani’s got a high bar to clear.
Literally. Ohtani is a big man, 6-foot-4, 210 pounds. At certain points in his career he’s had plus-plus speed — I think it’s fair to assume that he’s a reasonably strong and explosive athlete, and that his exceptional intelligence and coordination would translate to basketball.
But they’re not doing this in the NL West.
And this isn’t even the best basketball player out there. From what I understand, Jamal Cain is just some guy. If Ohtani isn’t careful, he’s gonna end up on a lot of posters.
The level of speed, passing, shooting, and overall skill and athleticism in the NBA right now beggars belief. We’ve got 7-foot-3 guys who move like guards did 30 years ago. Everyone can shoot three-pointers. (Did you know Andre Drummond is a good three-point shooter now? Andre Drummond!) On the other hand, you can finish hard at the rim without getting punched in the throat by Bill Laimbeer or Charles Oakley, which was definitely not the case in Jordan’s prime. Would it be more difficult for Ohtani to play in pro basketball now than in 1994? I don’t know for sure, but certainly the nature of the challenge has changed.
Let’s say the equivalent of hitting .200 in Double-A is playing 12 minutes a night in the G-League and more or less blending in. Could Ohtani do that?
I’m not convinced. Ohtani’s got the body to play professional basketball, but as a wing at best. That means he’s got to be quick, he’s got to be able to dribble, shoot and pass, and play defense without falling on his backside every time he sees a crossover.
In other words, I think skill is a bigger question than athleticism. How much so, I don’t know, because I have no idea how good Ohtani is at basketball. As far as I know, he’s never played any kind of organized basketball. Jordan had probably at least hit against breaking balls and reasonable velocity as a high schooler in the early 1980s. Ohtani is, of course, married to a professional basketball player, so I presume he knows the rules well and has at least a fundamental understanding of technique and strategy, but skills aren’t transmissible through marriage.
Absent evidence of Ohtani’s basketball skill, I have to go with Jordan. But if Ohtani shows up at South Bay Lakers training camp with 30-foot shooting range and an old man YMCA post game, and jumps passing lanes like he’s got eyes in the back of his head, it wouldn’t be the most shocking thing in the world. I’d love to be proved wrong.
__
Hello —
David Laurila offered a statistic in his most recent Sunday Notes that I found quite astounding: Spencer Horwitz is 10-for-10 in his career against Nick Martinez.
Could someone on staff run a query to see if any batter in MLB history has produced a 1.000 average against a single pitcher in more at-bats than that? Who’s maintained such an average in the most at-bats?
Thanks very much,
deaconblueray
David Laurila: Great question, deaconblueray. The answer is no. According to our database/number-cruncher extraordinaire Jon Becker, Horwitz’s 10-for-10 versus Martinez is tops, followed by a trio of 8-for-8s: Will Clark against Julio Santana, Jay Payton against Jimmy Haynes, and Rob Mackowiak against Scott Baker. Another six batters have gone 7-for-7 against an individual pitcher, with Wade Boggs (versus Tom Tellmann) and Fred McGriff (Ryan Glynn) most notable among the names.
Barring a trade, the record that Horwitz currently holds is safe at least through this season. Their respective teams — Horwitz is a Pirate, Martinez a Ray — won’t face each other again in 2026. If there are any future matchups, the astounding, as you put it, record will be in serious jeopardy.
For those wondering about the opposite end of the matchup spectrum, the record for most at-bats against an individual pitcher without a hit belongs to Mike Jorgensen. The erstwhile 1970s-1980s first baseman went 0-for-32 against the legendary Dock Ellis. Two other batters went 0-for-29: Deron Johnson against Ron Reed, and Eddie Mathews against Bob Veale. The latter of those is noteworthy, as Mathews punished no shortage of pitchers on his way to the Hall of Fame.
__
Is James Wood becoming one of the best opposite-field left-handed hitters ever? — Justin
Ryan Blake: Yes.
I mean, it really is that simple. We publish batted ball data going back to 2002, and searching for performance on batted balls to the opposite field returns this table:
| Name | PA | wRC+ | Oppo% | BABIP | GB% | HR/FB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| James Wood | 198 | 309 | 30.5% | .432 | 30.8% | 25.0% |
| Aaron Judge | 708 | 270 | 24.9% | .285 | 14.1% | 23.9% |
| Alex Kirilloff | 154 | 266 | 26.0% | .407 | 14.9% | 15.9% |
| Edouard Julien | 157 | 257 | 28.2% | .413 | 22.4% | 18.8% |
| Ryan Howard | 824 | 248 | 21.0% | .291 | 11.7% | 19.9% |
| Jim Thome | 751 | 236 | 25.1% | .326 | 14.9% | 18.7% |
| Zack Gelof | 111 | 231 | 19.2% | .398 | 10.2% | 8.8% |
| Yadiel Hernandez | 132 | 224 | 29.0% | .372 | 21.4% | 16.4% |
| Franmil Reyes | 300 | 223 | 23.7% | .337 | 19.7% | 18.3% |
| David Freese | 624 | 220 | 29.5% | .400 | 24.4% | 12.9% |
Wood is simply the best we’ve seen on a rate basis at going the other way over the last two decades, regardless of handedness. He’s not quite the most extreme at using the opposite field (30.5% oppo rate is about the 90th percentile), but the production he gets in that direction is pretty close to outlier territory.
Now, the sample is still quite small. If we were to look at a counting stat like wRC (no plus), Wood is tied with Marco Scutaro and Mookie Betts at 73 wRC, for 363rd place. That’s actually kind of incredible if you consider the list is 1,534 hitters long, and most of those batters have played many more games than Wood. But that’s a bit of perspective on how far Wood has to climb before the title is truly his.
Another way to look at this is how much of Wood’s total production comes from hits to the opposite field. We see Judge high on the leaderboard, but that’s only because he’s high on every leaderboard. Wood is a true oppo hitter.
I took the wRC for plate appearances ending in an opposite-field ball in play and divided it by total wRC across all plate appearances. And, yup, about 40% of Wood’s total production has come on batted balls to the opposite field. Of course, this list isn’t quite so impressive, but it highlights how few hitters at Wood’s level are truly living in the opposite field.
| Name | Total PA | Oppo wRC | Total wRC | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Humberto Quintero | 1423 | 46 | 95 | 0.49 |
| Julio Franco | 1517 | 91 | 195 | 0.47 |
| Austin Romine | 1449 | 52 | 113 | 0.46 |
| Wil Nieves | 1260 | 37 | 85 | 0.44 |
| Luis Guillorme | 1031 | 45 | 105 | 0.43 |
| Joe Mauer | 7960 | 493 | 1178 | 0.42 |
| Travis Jankowski | 1759 | 65 | 159 | 0.41 |
| Gabriel Arias | 1066 | 38 | 94 | 0.41 |
| James Wood | 1176 | 73 | 180 | 0.40 |
| DJ LeMahieu | 6822 | 353 | 889 | 0.40 |
Unlike Mauer and LeMahieu and the other good hitters at the top of this list, Wood isn’t simply slapping the ball the other way. He’s throttling it. Wood has a 17.2% barrel rate on batted balls to the opposite field for his career — third best in the majors since tracking began, behind only Judge (21.1%) and Alex Avila (17.9%). Most sluggers try to pull the ball, because the pull side is where the fence is closest and often where players make the best contact. Wood is the rare batter whose swing simply creates better contact to the opposite field. He gets more oomf going the other way, and he can elevate:
| Direction | % | wOBA | xwOBA | Adj. EV | LA | HH% | Barrel% | Bat Speed | Attack Angle |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oppo | 28.8 | .614 | .537 | 97.8 | 19 | 56.7 | 18.1 | 75.5 | 3° |
| Straight | 41.1 | .442 | .545 | 99.7 | 5 | 64.6 | 18.5 | 76.2 | 8° |
| Pull | 30.1 | .434 | .448 | 96.3 | -3 | 46.6 | 12.4 | 76.6 | 12° |
| All | 100.0 | .489 | .514 | 98.1 | 7 | 56.9 | 16.6 | 76.1 | 8° |
That elevation has been more frequent in 2026, too. I touched on this last week when I wrote about Wood and the Nationals’ surprisingly good lineup. He struggled in his first two seasons to get the ball off the ground, which limited him to being merely very good instead of elite. This year, he’s raised his oppo-air rate from 19.7% in each his first two seasons to 29.6% this year. That’s an exciting premise. We’ve seen few, if any, batters hit the ball the other way as well as Wood, and at age 23, he seems to still be getting better.
__
This one’s for Dan: What if ZiPS ignored 2020?
It was such a weird season that I basically pretend it didn’t happen. Now that we have five full seasons since the pandemic, I’m curious to see a comparison of the accuracy ZIPS gets in two scenarios: one in which it uses the 2020 data (using any adjustments/weighting/etc. that you put in place to account for the weirdness) vs. a second scenario in which it completely ignores 2020. — Keith
Dan Szymborski: Hi Keith,
While I can’t expect any pity spared for the poor predictive algorithm baseball guy given the devastation that COVID-19 caused the entire world and the lives it took, there were definitely some awkward decisions that had to be made dealing with 2020 baseball in order to have 2021-2024 projections. Normally, when changes are made to ZiPS, they’re tested with live data for years to make sure they improve the model, since that’s kind of the gold standard. But that wasn’t really an option in this case; I couldn’t very well message David and Meg and say, “Hey, ZiPS is going on hiatus for four years or so!” Unfortunately, shortened seasons like 1994-1995 and 1981 couldn’t provide a ton of guidance. Those were much smaller disruptions for less horrifying reasons.
So I treated MLB data in 2020 like it was in-season data in a normal year. That means the 2021 projections looked like what a projection run would have looked like if 2020 had been a normal 162-game season, and I was doing an updated projection run at the end of May. ZiPS formed a hybrid “2020 season” by combining the numbers for the actual 60-game season, and the rest-of-season projection for the other 102 games that didn’t exist. For minor league data, ZiPS does have awareness history of non-injury missed seasons, and basically treated the players who didn’t play like they went on a year-long sojourn to play the zither, get hands-on experience making Prosciutto di Parma, or take a 75-day rafting trip that faced misfortune and led to 290 days of foraging for food in the wilderness.
With this methodology, looking at the 362 players with at least 200 plate appearances in 2021, the hitter projections for that year had a median absolute error of 14 points of wRC+, a mean absolute error of 17 points of wRC+, and an RMSE of 22 points of wRC+. If I totally wiped out the existence of 2020 and reprojected the 2021 season as if it were 2020, these numbers rise to 17 points, 23 points, and 31 points, respectively. Turns out, the 2020 campaign did convey some useful information about players that we lose by pretending the awful year didn’t happen. The same thing works with pitchers: 21, 28, and 34 points of ERA+ for pitchers, respectively, with 50 innings in 2021, and 24, 31, 37 points if we wipe out 2020.
It didn’t work out too badly in the end. The 2021 projections were slightly more accurate than the 2019 or 2018 projections, but there were also iterative improvements over that time that are really tricky to rewind. The 2022 projections were only slightly more accurate than the 2021 ones. Realistically, a lot of the improvements in projections these days are long-term projections; short-term projections are calibrated quite well and most players are going to have a hard time moving the needle much at this point. Even so, I’m quite happy to be back to doing projection things that are testable instead of having to pull something like this out of thin air again.
* This article was originally published here
Comments
Post a Comment
Pitch Us Your Comments