Too many baserunners, not enough Ks. WAR really wants pitchers to keep batters off the basepath.
But then that’s totally inconsistent with his FIP, which suggest his ERA wasn’t really all that lucky. If he SHOULD have had a 3.06 ERA in a season in which he led the league in innings, I just don’t for an instant think he was worth that little.
Look at Aaron Nola - 3.25 ERA, 2.58 FIP - not too far off, and the exact same hits/9. But he blows Valdez out of the water in WHIP, Ks, K/BB. And Nola gave up 8 more HRs than Valdez.
Well hell. Now I’m looking at Cease’s numbers. More walks, but same K/BB. Cease had a minuscule 2.20 ERA, but a 3.10 FIP. But he struck guys out at a MUCH higher clip. And Fried is a Nola clone. Too many sliders to move around on this…
The point of FIP is to see to it the defense is given appropriate credit (or, presumably, penalty) for how they affect how many runs are given up, and that makes sense. Defense matters. Good defensive teams can help pitchers a lot, and bad ones can hurt them a lot.
But these numbers you see on BBRef are all guesses. They’re assuming from a pitcher’s stats that the defense helped them or hurt them based on the pitcher’s K/BB/HR rates. It’s not actually based on defensive performance in that pitcher’s innings. It ignores the very real possibility that Valdez just induced a lot of soft contact - which may not be the most repeatable skill, but if it ACTUALLY HAPPENED, then it actually happened. It represents real value that happened.
(I also continue to find it idiotic that BBRef and Fangraphs based a team’s total WAR on their runs scored and allowed, not on how many wins the team actually had above replacement level. That doesn’t affect Valdez, however, because the Astros actually won exactly as many games as their runs scored and allowed would suggest.)
5 teams. 3 of which I’m indifferent to and 2 of which I actively loathe. So screw that!
Stomp the Asterisks!!!
Game 3 rain delayed to tomorrow. All games pushed back a day, so if it gets that far, Game 7 on Sunday.
And that gives more advantages to the Phillies, with their thin pitching staff. The Astros’ staff is better, but with this delay the advantage differential has decreased.
What’s the procedure if multiple games are rained out? Just keep postponing them? If Philly was set to have a week of solid rain, would MLB shift the games elsewhere?
Not a problem this year, but does anybody know the contingency plans?
I honestly don’t think they have one. It’s “postpone and pray.”
Interesting article on how Moneyball killed baseball. Sorta.
The Atlantic really likes playing the contrarian, eh? Seems like that’s all it does these days.
World Series ratings have been dropping since the 80s. Football supplanted baseball as Americans favorite game to watch in the 70s or 80s.
Baseball’s place in American culture was already in question well before the rise of analytics. Maybe there’s a case to be made that analytics has contributed to the trend, but it had been a generation in the making before the idea of hiring statisticians in front offices even became a thing.
Does anyone like more strikeouts and less hits? The sport has lost some its excitement, but there aren’t any easy answers except for radically shrinking the strike zone, I guess.
Eliminating “the shift” is designed to provide more hits. We’ll see.
The pitch clock that’s coming next year might change things a bit, though from what I’ve heard from the people who were testing it in the minors, it doesn’t hurt pitchers much. On the contrary, some were claiming that it forces them to “focus” and improves them. That might have just been MLB propaganda of course, coaching their minor league players to say certain things, I dunno.
In their defense, it would probably be a logistical nightmare if they tried to do anything but wait it out. An awful lot goes into scheduling and preparing for a game of that magnitude to be played in a certain place at a certain time. Then there loss of revenue because of extra transportation, security, stadium rental, etc. And what about hotel reservations? You need a lot of rooms to house 2 teams and their staffs. You could get that many rooms in a hotel on that short of a notice? The alternative would be having them scattered around in several hotels.
Barring a major catastrophe, you can’t take the game away from the home fans. You just wait it out, I guess. It can’t rain forever.
The sun is (partly) shining in Philly today. There will be baseball!
Pitchers, probably, and pitching aficionados. 
I would suspect that MLB would argue that, with home runs rates being historically high, there’s plenty of excitement in today’s game; as we’ve flogged to death in various threads here over the last few years, the issue is that a couple of home runs per game provide a few moments of excitement, in a game that is otherwise historically low on any other kind of excitement (non-home run hits, baserunning, stolen bases, etc.), as well as being glacially slow-paced.
The evidence would suggest such people are few and far between.
Tell that to Noah of the Bible.