JotCast | Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat

Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat - 5/23/24

Dan Szymborski

12:01

Greetings!

12:02

I'm sad to report that the chili I was making last week when we chatted did not turn out well.

I got careless with the salt and the whole thing was way too salty.

So I had to eat it with VERY improper cheese and sour cream added in to mute the saltiness.

Joe

12:03

Can Gil be a front line guy? Or Schmidt? Both have looked great

Dan Szymborski

12:04

Both are certainly making their cases. Pitching development is weird, so when a guys' working out a lot of the time it's just him working out

12:05

Ther'es nothing particularly head-scratching in the peripherals or statcast data

Randy

12:05

What do you think about Volpe? Could be better under the hood but seems like xwOBA underrates him given his spray angles

Dan Szymborski

12:05

the zstats do use spray information and like him better

You're Name

12:05

With the Martian on his way back, why is it that ZiPS seems so down of him? ZiPS has him for a 98 wRC+ despite his high prospect pedigree and stellar performance (even if it was only 8 games) last year.

Dan Szymborski

12:06

I mean "even if it was only 8 games" is a pretty big if. It's a bit like saying Abraham Lincoln only REALLY had a couple bad minutes during the play

ZiPS and Steamer are very close on this. I know ZiPS loves his long term potential

but he was only OK in AA last year

Now, the young part is why the long-term upside is huge

Guest

12:07

do you believe in pork chili? bison? chicken?

Dan Szymborski

12:08

As long as its still primarily meat-and-chili peppers sure

12:09

Weirdly, there's no chili alignment chart

Travis

12:09

Do you think baseball analytics has gone a bit too far, and sucked some of the fun out of the game? I loved sabermetrics but now am worried the increased strikeouts and pitch designs are creating an unbalanced game that is less fun to watch. How can we model fun factor?

Dan Szymborski

12:09

I think aesthetics are in the eyes of the behodler

the more interesting question is: let's assume for the sake of argument that it's true, now what?

I posed this on Twitter the other day

12:10

and as expected, the "solution" for most people was to not use analytics

Which is an absolute cretinous reponse

response

If a portion of a game is "solved" in a sense that the winning strategy is known and excludes alternate strategies, and that strategy isn't fun, then the solution is to change the rules

12:11

Because for many people, the solution is to just expect teams to un-know some basic things, which isn't going to happen

Guest

12:11

Would you convey one non-baseball societal opinion that (a) you feel strongly and (b) perhaps we don't know?

Dan Szymborski

12:12

OH god, are you trying to get me into trouble?

OK, on opinions I haven't expressed before, let me think

The problem is I'm opinionated and a big mouth

12:13

hmm...MAYBE my belief that no election ballots should list a political party as I consider that advertising, and names should be in randomized order on each ballot

Trevor Larnach

12:14

Am I real? K rate down 12% and currently 8th in MLB in average exit velo..

Dan Szymborski

12:14

The power probably. K should be improved, but not this much as still below average contact

Edamame

12:15

How is injury data incorporated into statistical analysis (both ZIPS and teams')? Is it just a categorical flag for each (torn UCL, etc.) or is it something more fine-grained?

Dan Szymborski

12:15

The former

The data doesn't really exist to do it fine-grained

Guest

12:15

does knowing the inherent flaws / gaps in ZiPS give you an edge on baseball betting? Like at this point, the sports books' odds are probably derived similarly to ZiPS, so do you ever see "Oh, here's why they put the over here, that's a flaw in the system that overvalues X" so then you bet the under?

Dan Szymborski

12:15

No, I don't try to eleventy-dimension chess it

If I see a good EV+ I take it, and if I don't, I don't care

12:16

errr +EV

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