JotCast | Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat

Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat - 6/3/22

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Ben Clemens

12:30

Hey everyone, welcome to the chat

12:31

Today's gonna be a lightning round in general; fewer deep dives, more takes and letting you readers be funny and insightful on your own

Let's get started right away, it's a fun day for baseball

Guest

12:31

Points league, needing to switch things up with numerous injuries to my team. Should I trade India for Rasmussen?

Ben Clemens

12:31

I would not, but I'm kinda low on Rasmussen

Insert Witty Name Here

12:31

Well my day just got even better! Girardi fired and a Ben chat!! If you were given the interim manager job for the Phightin’s, what would your priorities be?

Ben Clemens

12:32

Oh man, it's gonna be a tough job b/c of the fans, but I think a rewarding job b/c the Phillies aren't THIS bad

My priorities would be 1)figure out a bullpen hierarchy

2)figure out a bullpen hierarchy

12:33

The defense is a tough fix for a manager, that's kinda on Dombrowski, but managing the bullpen is something that I think a amanger can really impact

The Real Ben Clemens

12:33

Think this is the end for Greinke? Got hit a lot harder in May, still not a ton of swing and miss, velo as low as ever, and flexor problems are about the last thing you want to see on a 38 year old pitcher.

Ben Clemens

12:33

Yeah... I think it might be, sadly

Colton

12:33

Hey Ben, hope all is well! Was curious if you could give some thoughts on what type of impact you think Shane Baz could give the Rays moving forward in the season with him coming off the IL soon?

Ben Clemens

12:34

He could be great! I don't know how well he's holding his velocity gains from last year (he's generally either had pure stuff or pitchability but not both at the same time) so I think there's some wait and see mode here until he's thrown a few games, but he's an impact arm for sure

I'm very curious to see how they go about building him up

fanoftheman

12:34

Any chance we have the idea of lineup protection all wrong, and that batting *behind* another good hitter helps make sure you get to see pitches to hit?

Ben Clemens

12:34

Definitely a chance of this

It's not even a particularly crazy claim. Everyone knows that you see more pitches to hit when there's someone on base

It's just strange to hear it said that way

Dave

12:34

Have you ever played 6 Nimmt? By far my favorite casual game to play with a handful of friends. Fun combination of game theory and laughing at friends' misfortunes.

Ben Clemens

12:35

Underrated gem of a game

I've played a ton in my life, and it's always fun

Zonk

12:35

Willson Contreras probably on the move this summer....where do you see a fit? NYY seems obvious, but do you see other teams bidding, like NYM, LAA, HOU maybe?

Ben Clemens

12:35

NYM makes a ton of sense to me. Houston seems unlikely, they've always been really into Maldonado. LAA, I dunno, that doesn't feel like the kind of trade they like to swing

12:36

I hope the Cubs keep Contreras, he's a nice connection to the past and I know Cubs fans love him

I myself am not a huge fan of his human rain delay tendencies, but hey, I'm a Cardinals fan, so I can't exactly talk

Guest

12:36

You said you were going for burritos last chat, what’s your go to spot in SF?

Ben Clemens

12:36

Don't judge me, but there's a The Little Chihuahua near me that I usually go to

12:37

my favorite in the city is La Taqueria but I don't live near the mission

so that's more of an event

Smucky the Cat

12:37

Hi Ben, I really liked your article on the AppleTV probabilities. Is there anything interesting or weird you found in your assessment that you weren't able to include in the article? Like maybe one of the models was pretty good at predicting one specific category but awful at another

Ben Clemens

12:37

I thought it was interesting that the errors on GIDP and RBI were meaningfully lower than on reach base

12:38

I don't have a great way of thinking about that, because I couldn't create a naive model there, but I thought that was interesting

Maybe players are more uniform in those situations? Maybe modeling groundball rates adds something helpful?

brad penny for your thoughts

12:38

putting your cards fan hat on, what are your initial opinions/thoughts of liberatore and gorman?

Ben Clemens

12:39

Gorman bops just like we expected. Liberatore shows flashes of pretty secondary stuff but isn't very efficient; I'm definitely higher on Gorman than Libby and I think the early evaluations match that. I still find Liberatore's pitch mix kinda confusing, they don't seem to pair well, but I'm gonna hold judgment for a while longer

Matt

12:39

What do you think went on behind the scenes to cause Girardi to get fired?

Ben Clemens

12:40

I think that it wouldn't take much. Probably the players were bristling a little bit and that's all they needed

Smucky the Cat

12:40

With all the talk about model assessment, one page I've found interesting on assessing model accuracy is 538's "Checking our Work" page. I think the calibration plots in particular are a simple, interpretable way to see that events are occurring at roughly the same rate a model says they will. Does FanGraphs have something similar to this?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/

Ben Clemens

12:40

We did it for our playoff odds last year:

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