Nice you mentioned "Tip Your Cap." Yesterday, my kids asked me to look through my old photos for a reason not relevant to this comment, and I found a photo of myself tipping a West Indies cricket cap (bought for the 2007 World Cup held there) and remembered that way we were trying to help the Negro Leagues Museum. Of course my favorite way to support it is to visit.
One of the many wonderful things about baseball is that there are so many different ways to play, so many different ways to win. It's not that one way to play is "right" and other ways are "wrong," but rather that many different ways can be "right enough."
Joe - you're correct - We may never figure it out! The Rays, in their offensive style or wisdom might just display "multum in parvo". It might be baffling for the AL East, because, the other teams do not play that style of baseball. Since divisional wins account for a larger percentage of total wins, And most non-divisional teams do not play that type of baseball, More for the Big W!
Or maybe it's just a line from a song - "Don't you love a farce?"
The modern truisms also need a dash of the old truism. Walks are fine, but without enough hitting they are a flaccid contribution to the offense. Strikeouts are still just outs, but put enough high strikeout hitters in your lineup, it stagnates....the ball needs to be put into play to make things happen. RBI's are a proxy for slugging, and there are smart hitters who change their approach based on the situation....no one on base, take a walk if it is offered, men on base, you should be more aggressive. Outs are not things that should hoarded. It's runs that win games, not prevented outs. Outs should be considered currency that is spent in risk appropriate scenarios for runs.
And yet they are still 28th in attendance. The Rays are a great example of how winning alone isn’t enough to bring fans to the game. You need players that fans recognize. As fun as the Rays are every year their inability to keep even one recognizable player around is a bad business decision.
Maybe. But the Florida Gators playing just up I-75 seem to be able to draw fans to their football games while having a 25-50% turnover in player-personnel every season.
I'm sorry, who thinks that getting a hit with a runner in scoring position is unimportant? I have most certainly seen guys with power hit singles in that situation like say, sorry to upset you, Aaron Judge.
I think one of the things missing in your analysis is that the Rays offensively have the least number of Ks and the most ball in play of any team. They are attacking earlier in counts and taking a two strike approach.
The average team in the MLB has .643 rate of putting the ball in play. The Rays are #1 with .682. (The Angels are at .600)
Over the last 10 full seasons, the team with the least Ks averages 90.2 wins and have won a couple of championships. This is a significant difference considering it is only a small and often overlooked part of the game. I do think that the negative connotations of strikeouts are underrated on the offensive side. It makes sens that the strikeout for the offense has the same amount of negative as the strikeout for the pitcher is positive. (The team with the most K's in this TTO environment has averaged 75.3 wins)
Balls in play and limiting Ks is something people don't look at hardly at all, but it can make a difference. Don't get me wrong, not every team with low Ks and high balls in play does well, but there is a general correlation that is largely ignored.
Hitting the ball hard matters less than we think, and expected stats don't have the correlation many expect with future (or even present) performance. It is just something we can measure, and it is fun. The announcer can say the mph when a guy hits the ball hard and call him unlucky, or say a ball not hit hard by the other team is lucky. We can ooh and aah over the exit velocity of home runs.
It kind of reminds me of when we started focusing on mph for pitching. There is no doubt that pitchers throw harder now than they did 20 years ago, as the league focuses on speed and max effort over all, but have runs gone down?
Teams have focused on launch angle and hitting the ball hard and TTO in recent years, but has their been an explosion of runs? (No, just less excitement in between)
We have limited pitchers number of pitches as well as the frequency to reduce injury, but injuries have gone way up.
They have changed the way teams handle the late innings over the years many times, but I read a study somewhere (it actually might have been here) that showed the different philosophies about the late innings haven't changed the percentage of late inning comebacks.
There are always trends. Someday there will be new ones. But the game stays the relatively the. same.
The simplest explanation for all that is that hitters and pitchers have both gotten better, in a way that mostly balances out. Throwing harder helps a lot. Hitting the ball harder helps a lot. MLB teams from today would absolutely crush the teams from 1996, but they score and allow roughly the same number of runs because they don't get to play the teams from 1996.
If you watch a well-played high school game, it'll more or less resemble an MLB game in terms of the box score. That doesn't mean teenagers are as good at baseball as adults.
"The pitching speed revolution came way before the change in hitting style. They didn't dovetail."
Yeah, and they called 2010 the Year of the Pitcher because pitchers pulled ahead of hitters and scoring collapsed. The modern approach to hitting was a reaction to the fact that pitchers got better and hitting strategy had to change to compensate.
"High school games resemble MLB games because the focus on pitch speed and the TTO approach is the same."
Sure, but I hope you'll agree that MLB teams are *better* than high school teams, even though they score and allow roughly the same number of runs. You're arguing that pitchers now aren't any better than pitchers of a generation ago, even though they throw much harder, and your evidence is that they allow roughly the same number of runs. By that logic, any high school kid with an ERA under 3 is as good as Paul Skenes. They allow the same number of runs!
Everyone agrees that MLB players are better than high school players.
2010 was the year of the pitcher mainly because baseball had become used to high scoring over the previous 15 years. They scored about the same amount if runs as 2024, and more than 2022., and pitchers still hit in the NL then. It ranks 31st in run scoring in the last 50 years - which includes the entire steroid era. Pitchers only struck out 7.1 hitters per 9. Hitters had a higher batting average than they have had any year since, and the OPS would have be the 2nd best of the last 5 years. The dip in runs scored was mainly driven by a comparative lack of home runs.
Of course high school baseball isn't as good as MLB but comparing MLB players from different time periods is tricky. So you're saying that Ruth & Bonds would both be mediocre hitters in today's game?
I agree that the Rays can be confounding, but I don't feel like their success is QUITE as mysterious as Joe makes it sound. The clue is near the top of his article, when he says we learned OBP is more important than batting average. And the Rays are the best team in the league in on-base percentage. This is where the Whiteyball Cardinals comparison is instructive. Yes, the Cards played 'small ball' and didn't hit homers and all that, but when they were good it's because they got on base; when they weren't good, it's because they didn't. (Just look at their league rank in OBP in their 3 playoff years: 1st, 1st, 1st.) Yes, those Cards also had much better gloves than these Rays, but otherwise the formula is not terribly complicated: OBP is life.
I think it's being generous to the Rays to say that they are trying to win in counterintuitive ways. The main thing they are trying to do is not spend money. The Rays have lots of guys who are good at old-fashioned stuff like bunting and making lots of soft contact because those guys are cheap, and they are cheap because we have a robust body of evidence telling us that their skills are not terribly valuable.
If you gave the Rays' front office the Dodgers' budget they would probably build something like the Dodgers roster.
As for the Rays' win-loss record, it's not even June yet. A team wildly outperforming its metrics in a small sample is not that unusual, because small samples are where all kinds of weird stuff happens.
It's also possible that the Ray's early season success at small ball will encourage the players, manager and front office to be more aggressive in their contrary approach and actually end up with an even better record down the stretch than they do now.
The Rays are a great example of the value in just trying to be a decent team every year. If you're a smart organization, I believe it's not *that* hard to win 77-80 games. And if you shoot for that mark, you're going to have years where enough guys overachieve that you end up winning a lot more than that, while also putting yourself in position to add more talent along the way.
Too many other teams with limited financial resources get stuck in perpetual rebuilds.
I’d argue that the Brewers are an even better example. They aim to be competitive every year and have made the playoffs 7 out of the last 8 years, granted they’ve only twice in the span made it past the divisional series round. For them at least those appear to be to the trade offs— competitive every year but never built for a deep playoff run, wary of big prospects-for-stars trades that could get them there, and trade your front end starters as they approach free agency
"We are adrift in a black sea of ignorance, and we are carrying handheld flashlights. The funny part of this in baseball is that our confidence never falters." Alas, wish this were relegated to baseball. But the Dunning Kruger is rampant in all realms. One of my favorite concepts - The Dunning Kruger Effect, As Psychology Today notes: "The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills."
It seems to me that analytics is still working "in general" with that players shouldn't or even can't situational hit (for maximum success one should always try to hit the ball in the air as hard as you can). It seems clear that if a player could significantly increase his batting average when trying for a hit (any hit) and the situation provided a benefit for it, that it would be valuable. I think those players exist but I do wonder if they can be made. A key to this is the difference between the Yankees, who can afford to have a lineup of sluggers and the Rays who cannot. It may be counterproductive for a slugger to try to hit a single with a runner on second or third, but a player less likely to hit a home run is giving up less to shorten up the swing, go with the pitch, or just make sure to put the ball in play in order to score the run.
An easy response is that I'm stuck believing that the style of baseball I enjoy watching is also competitive. It's anecdotal, but a few years ago when a 40ish Nelson Cruz was on the Twins, he would normally slug the ball but with 2 strikes and RISP it sure looked like he was intentionally going for a shift-beating single to right that scored the run. But there I go again, thinking that the RBI mattered while he was really better off trying for a home run with a walk as plan B and a strikeout not being a big deal.
I have often doubted exit velocity and launch angle and bat speed -- if the ball is catchable. As a matter of fact, I'd say the best power statistic is how far beyond the outfield wall the ball lands. (For illustration, read the chapter in "The Baseball 100" on Mel Ott.) But the attention to all these new statistics mostly reflects how analysts get excited about a statistic that couldn't be measured a few years ago. They're bright shiny distractions from true reasons great new players are great: baseball skill and talent.
There's an old line that Eddie Stanky wasn't much of a hitter, fielder, or runner, but all he did was beat you. Considering that he went from the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers to the 1948 Boston Braves to the 1951 New York Giants, maybe that wasn't true, since those three teams won pennants but didn't win the World Series.
But for these purposes ... Lindsey Nelson (he, Ralph Kiner, and Bob Murphy remain the longest-running Mets three-man crew at 17 years, since Messrs. Cohen, Darling, and Hernandez had substitutes and only did TV) once had Walter Alston on the pre-game show and asked what he'd learned in 20 years of managing. Alston replied that when you put the players out on the field, some strange things happen. That about covers it.
As a teenager living in Mobile, I met Stanky several times. He was nearing the end of his career as a college manager at Univ. South Alabama. Great raconteur telling stories of Leo the Lip, Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World, and the sanitized version of Jackie Robinson’s arrival. Fascinating guy, warts and all.
I think of the story of when other players were yelling at Robinson, and he finally started yelling back at them, and Branch Rickey was happy because it was a sign of the players appreciating Robinson. Then he traded Stanky to Boston so Robinson would have a clear path to play 2B!
The quote from Stanky, which clearly is not meant for 21st century readers was, "sure he's a N---, but he's our N---."
His portrayal in Kahn's Boys of Summer isn't overly positive. Decades later after he had time to sit with his own past, he defended the virulent comments his Cardinals players made shouting from the dugout towards Robinson as a natural part of the game. I was only about 16 when he retired from his time as a coach for the USA Jaguars, and I obviously don't think he'd be completely unvarnished in his comments to some nearly random kid, But by then, his comments about Robinson were 100% positive and not racially tinged.
Nice you mentioned "Tip Your Cap." Yesterday, my kids asked me to look through my old photos for a reason not relevant to this comment, and I found a photo of myself tipping a West Indies cricket cap (bought for the 2007 World Cup held there) and remembered that way we were trying to help the Negro Leagues Museum. Of course my favorite way to support it is to visit.
One of the many wonderful things about baseball is that there are so many different ways to play, so many different ways to win. It's not that one way to play is "right" and other ways are "wrong," but rather that many different ways can be "right enough."
Joe - you're correct - We may never figure it out! The Rays, in their offensive style or wisdom might just display "multum in parvo". It might be baffling for the AL East, because, the other teams do not play that style of baseball. Since divisional wins account for a larger percentage of total wins, And most non-divisional teams do not play that type of baseball, More for the Big W!
Or maybe it's just a line from a song - "Don't you love a farce?"
The modern truisms also need a dash of the old truism. Walks are fine, but without enough hitting they are a flaccid contribution to the offense. Strikeouts are still just outs, but put enough high strikeout hitters in your lineup, it stagnates....the ball needs to be put into play to make things happen. RBI's are a proxy for slugging, and there are smart hitters who change their approach based on the situation....no one on base, take a walk if it is offered, men on base, you should be more aggressive. Outs are not things that should hoarded. It's runs that win games, not prevented outs. Outs should be considered currency that is spent in risk appropriate scenarios for runs.
And yet they are still 28th in attendance. The Rays are a great example of how winning alone isn’t enough to bring fans to the game. You need players that fans recognize. As fun as the Rays are every year their inability to keep even one recognizable player around is a bad business decision.
Maybe. But the Florida Gators playing just up I-75 seem to be able to draw fans to their football games while having a 25-50% turnover in player-personnel every season.
Did they sell better when Tim Tebow was there?
I'm sorry, who thinks that getting a hit with a runner in scoring position is unimportant? I have most certainly seen guys with power hit singles in that situation like say, sorry to upset you, Aaron Judge.
I think one of the things missing in your analysis is that the Rays offensively have the least number of Ks and the most ball in play of any team. They are attacking earlier in counts and taking a two strike approach.
The average team in the MLB has .643 rate of putting the ball in play. The Rays are #1 with .682. (The Angels are at .600)
Over the last 10 full seasons, the team with the least Ks averages 90.2 wins and have won a couple of championships. This is a significant difference considering it is only a small and often overlooked part of the game. I do think that the negative connotations of strikeouts are underrated on the offensive side. It makes sens that the strikeout for the offense has the same amount of negative as the strikeout for the pitcher is positive. (The team with the most K's in this TTO environment has averaged 75.3 wins)
Balls in play and limiting Ks is something people don't look at hardly at all, but it can make a difference. Don't get me wrong, not every team with low Ks and high balls in play does well, but there is a general correlation that is largely ignored.
Hitting the ball hard matters less than we think, and expected stats don't have the correlation many expect with future (or even present) performance. It is just something we can measure, and it is fun. The announcer can say the mph when a guy hits the ball hard and call him unlucky, or say a ball not hit hard by the other team is lucky. We can ooh and aah over the exit velocity of home runs.
It kind of reminds me of when we started focusing on mph for pitching. There is no doubt that pitchers throw harder now than they did 20 years ago, as the league focuses on speed and max effort over all, but have runs gone down?
Teams have focused on launch angle and hitting the ball hard and TTO in recent years, but has their been an explosion of runs? (No, just less excitement in between)
We have limited pitchers number of pitches as well as the frequency to reduce injury, but injuries have gone way up.
They have changed the way teams handle the late innings over the years many times, but I read a study somewhere (it actually might have been here) that showed the different philosophies about the late innings haven't changed the percentage of late inning comebacks.
There are always trends. Someday there will be new ones. But the game stays the relatively the. same.
The game hasn't changed?!? Over what time span? Not what I see. Reggie Jackson was a feared slugger, how many times did he hit 40 homers in a season?
The simplest explanation for all that is that hitters and pitchers have both gotten better, in a way that mostly balances out. Throwing harder helps a lot. Hitting the ball harder helps a lot. MLB teams from today would absolutely crush the teams from 1996, but they score and allow roughly the same number of runs because they don't get to play the teams from 1996.
If you watch a well-played high school game, it'll more or less resemble an MLB game in terms of the box score. That doesn't mean teenagers are as good at baseball as adults.
The pitching speed revolution came way before the change in hitting style. They didn't dovetail.
I disagree with the 1996 thing. I believe you could drop one of the Yankees dynasty teams in this league and they would still be great.
High school games resemble MLB games because the focus on pitch speed and the TTO approach is the same.
"The pitching speed revolution came way before the change in hitting style. They didn't dovetail."
Yeah, and they called 2010 the Year of the Pitcher because pitchers pulled ahead of hitters and scoring collapsed. The modern approach to hitting was a reaction to the fact that pitchers got better and hitting strategy had to change to compensate.
"High school games resemble MLB games because the focus on pitch speed and the TTO approach is the same."
Sure, but I hope you'll agree that MLB teams are *better* than high school teams, even though they score and allow roughly the same number of runs. You're arguing that pitchers now aren't any better than pitchers of a generation ago, even though they throw much harder, and your evidence is that they allow roughly the same number of runs. By that logic, any high school kid with an ERA under 3 is as good as Paul Skenes. They allow the same number of runs!
Everyone agrees that MLB players are better than high school players.
2010 was the year of the pitcher mainly because baseball had become used to high scoring over the previous 15 years. They scored about the same amount if runs as 2024, and more than 2022., and pitchers still hit in the NL then. It ranks 31st in run scoring in the last 50 years - which includes the entire steroid era. Pitchers only struck out 7.1 hitters per 9. Hitters had a higher batting average than they have had any year since, and the OPS would have be the 2nd best of the last 5 years. The dip in runs scored was mainly driven by a comparative lack of home runs.
Of course high school baseball isn't as good as MLB but comparing MLB players from different time periods is tricky. So you're saying that Ruth & Bonds would both be mediocre hitters in today's game?
It's impossible to know, really, but I don't think Ruth would be a mediocre hitter. I think he would strike out every single time.
I can't help but notice that regardless of whether the Rays have cracked the code for winning, they certainly haven't figured out how to sell tickets.
I agree that the Rays can be confounding, but I don't feel like their success is QUITE as mysterious as Joe makes it sound. The clue is near the top of his article, when he says we learned OBP is more important than batting average. And the Rays are the best team in the league in on-base percentage. This is where the Whiteyball Cardinals comparison is instructive. Yes, the Cards played 'small ball' and didn't hit homers and all that, but when they were good it's because they got on base; when they weren't good, it's because they didn't. (Just look at their league rank in OBP in their 3 playoff years: 1st, 1st, 1st.) Yes, those Cards also had much better gloves than these Rays, but otherwise the formula is not terribly complicated: OBP is life.
I remember Bill James described their lineup as “seven leadoff hitters and Jack Clark.”
I think it's being generous to the Rays to say that they are trying to win in counterintuitive ways. The main thing they are trying to do is not spend money. The Rays have lots of guys who are good at old-fashioned stuff like bunting and making lots of soft contact because those guys are cheap, and they are cheap because we have a robust body of evidence telling us that their skills are not terribly valuable.
If you gave the Rays' front office the Dodgers' budget they would probably build something like the Dodgers roster.
As for the Rays' win-loss record, it's not even June yet. A team wildly outperforming its metrics in a small sample is not that unusual, because small samples are where all kinds of weird stuff happens.
Since the Dodgers’ front office used to be the Rays’ front office, …
It's also possible that the Ray's early season success at small ball will encourage the players, manager and front office to be more aggressive in their contrary approach and actually end up with an even better record down the stretch than they do now.
The Rays are a great example of the value in just trying to be a decent team every year. If you're a smart organization, I believe it's not *that* hard to win 77-80 games. And if you shoot for that mark, you're going to have years where enough guys overachieve that you end up winning a lot more than that, while also putting yourself in position to add more talent along the way.
Too many other teams with limited financial resources get stuck in perpetual rebuilds.
I’d argue that the Brewers are an even better example. They aim to be competitive every year and have made the playoffs 7 out of the last 8 years, granted they’ve only twice in the span made it past the divisional series round. For them at least those appear to be to the trade offs— competitive every year but never built for a deep playoff run, wary of big prospects-for-stars trades that could get them there, and trade your front end starters as they approach free agency
"We are adrift in a black sea of ignorance, and we are carrying handheld flashlights. The funny part of this in baseball is that our confidence never falters." Alas, wish this were relegated to baseball. But the Dunning Kruger is rampant in all realms. One of my favorite concepts - The Dunning Kruger Effect, As Psychology Today notes: "The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills."
It seems to me that analytics is still working "in general" with that players shouldn't or even can't situational hit (for maximum success one should always try to hit the ball in the air as hard as you can). It seems clear that if a player could significantly increase his batting average when trying for a hit (any hit) and the situation provided a benefit for it, that it would be valuable. I think those players exist but I do wonder if they can be made. A key to this is the difference between the Yankees, who can afford to have a lineup of sluggers and the Rays who cannot. It may be counterproductive for a slugger to try to hit a single with a runner on second or third, but a player less likely to hit a home run is giving up less to shorten up the swing, go with the pitch, or just make sure to put the ball in play in order to score the run.
An easy response is that I'm stuck believing that the style of baseball I enjoy watching is also competitive. It's anecdotal, but a few years ago when a 40ish Nelson Cruz was on the Twins, he would normally slug the ball but with 2 strikes and RISP it sure looked like he was intentionally going for a shift-beating single to right that scored the run. But there I go again, thinking that the RBI mattered while he was really better off trying for a home run with a walk as plan B and a strikeout not being a big deal.
I have often doubted exit velocity and launch angle and bat speed -- if the ball is catchable. As a matter of fact, I'd say the best power statistic is how far beyond the outfield wall the ball lands. (For illustration, read the chapter in "The Baseball 100" on Mel Ott.) But the attention to all these new statistics mostly reflects how analysts get excited about a statistic that couldn't be measured a few years ago. They're bright shiny distractions from true reasons great new players are great: baseball skill and talent.
There's an old line that Eddie Stanky wasn't much of a hitter, fielder, or runner, but all he did was beat you. Considering that he went from the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers to the 1948 Boston Braves to the 1951 New York Giants, maybe that wasn't true, since those three teams won pennants but didn't win the World Series.
But for these purposes ... Lindsey Nelson (he, Ralph Kiner, and Bob Murphy remain the longest-running Mets three-man crew at 17 years, since Messrs. Cohen, Darling, and Hernandez had substitutes and only did TV) once had Walter Alston on the pre-game show and asked what he'd learned in 20 years of managing. Alston replied that when you put the players out on the field, some strange things happen. That about covers it.
As a teenager living in Mobile, I met Stanky several times. He was nearing the end of his career as a college manager at Univ. South Alabama. Great raconteur telling stories of Leo the Lip, Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World, and the sanitized version of Jackie Robinson’s arrival. Fascinating guy, warts and all.
I think of the story of when other players were yelling at Robinson, and he finally started yelling back at them, and Branch Rickey was happy because it was a sign of the players appreciating Robinson. Then he traded Stanky to Boston so Robinson would have a clear path to play 2B!
The quote from Stanky, which clearly is not meant for 21st century readers was, "sure he's a N---, but he's our N---."
His portrayal in Kahn's Boys of Summer isn't overly positive. Decades later after he had time to sit with his own past, he defended the virulent comments his Cardinals players made shouting from the dugout towards Robinson as a natural part of the game. I was only about 16 when he retired from his time as a coach for the USA Jaguars, and I obviously don't think he'd be completely unvarnished in his comments to some nearly random kid, But by then, his comments about Robinson were 100% positive and not racially tinged.