What to Expect from Public MLB Analytics and Commentary in 2016

At its best, baseball fandom transcends simply enjoying the sport: it teaches us new things about ourselves and becomes the foundation of a community. For me (perhaps more than others), analytical baseball writing is the lifeblood of that community, and reminds me why I stay a fan.

I’m using the word “analytical” in a broad sense here, covering everything from thoughtful game recaps, to dives into why a particular player or team isn’t meeting expectations, to the eloquence of someone like Roger Angell. I’m also using the word “writing” in a broad sense — a rigorous statistical analysis, an effective piece of software, or a cogent data visualization count just as much in this formulation as some sparkling prose. Most of us grew up getting this writing (and with it, a piece of our connection to the game) from newspapers and baseball books, but these days, for better or for worse, it’s largely online.

In that spirit, and at the risk of getting meta, here are some things to expect from the baseball Internet in 2016.

More Data, More Stats

One baseball event of 2015 that will have the big long-term impact on how the game is discussed and analyzed (and played) is the roll-out of Statcast, MLB’s fancy radar/camera setup that quantifies in a systematic manner many things that were not previously captured, or captured only by hand privately and imprecisely.

Last year, the primary public manifestation of Statcast data was exit velocity, which provides the opportunity for a more process-oriented, less results-focused analysis of batted balls. However, in spite of the excitement generated by these data and the subsequent rush by many analysts to draw conclusions from them, two large issues remained. The first is that exit velocity was not accurately captured for a large number of batted balls, with data availability that was skewed toward more successful balls in play.

The second is that there exists, as yet, no compelling (public) model for what the relationship between exit velocity and performance (either past or future) looks like. Without having a well-specified theoretical or empirical framework for using exit velocity, last year’s analysis of exit velocity was necessarily limited to exploration, rather than inference.

However, there’s reason to believe that both of these issues will be partially ameliorated this coming year. The second one comes naturally—as a data set grows over a longer period of time, our understanding of its predictive power and all-around utility increases. With respect to data quality, I was told by Daren Wilman, proprietor of Baseball Savant and recently hired director of baseball research and development for MLB.com, that he expects that the exit velocity data for 2016 will be more accurate and will be available for nearly every batted ball. Additionally, the likely addition of launch angle (already being shared on a limited basis) will potentially greatly increase the utility of the velocity data.

The portion of Statcast data that was of most interest to many analysts was on the fielding side, including granular positioning and reaction data that would allow for a more direct measurement of defensive aptitude. To that end, Wilman says to expect visualizations of player ranges (like this one) at some time during the year.

A point of concern after Statcast’s announcement was that the data wouldn’t be shared with the public in a systematic manner; for those of us who believe in transparency and open science (and who do public analytics), the level of sharing during 2015 was a bit of a letdown. It’s not clear how this is likely to change during this coming year, though it should be noted that Statcast data was sometimes available by special request, as we saw with Neil Weinberg’s essay in The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2016. On a more open front, Wilman did mention that there are plans in the work for a public Application Program Interface (API), which is a good sign, but it’s hard to be too excited without knowing which data will be available to the public in a broad fashion.

Some other big advances in baseball statistics in 2015 came out of Baseball Prospectus, which introduced two new big pitcher metrics (Deserved Run Average and Contextual FIP) and a number of sophisticated metrics for catcher defense. Two things to look for in 2016 is how those metrics influence discussions now that they’re no longer so new, and how people think of them with the ability to view them over the course of a full season.

More exciting, though, is the prospect of bigger changes to other BP stats. Per Harry Pavlidis, BP’s director of technology, BP expects to roll out substantial changes this year to PECOTA, its oft-cited projection system, and to Fielding Runs Above Average, its fielding stat. Without knowing more detail, it’s hard to say how meaningful the changes will be, but the prospect of substantial changes at one of the preeminent sabermetric sites is something worth anticipating.

Of course, part of rolling out new stats is disseminating them in a helpful manner, and Pavlidis also mentioned that there will be changes to the currently quite old-school presentation of the numbers on BP’s site, with some likely in place by Opening Day and others by midseason. He also said that BP plans to incorporate confidence intervals in the presentation, which is (as far as I know) a first for a major stats site, and something I think is essential, especially as the statistical theory behind commonplace metrics grows more complex over time.

One final set of things to look out for is how previous years’ analyses will seep into the game. There’s been some suggestion that catcher framing is becoming less impactful, which is something to monitor over the course of the year. Even more important is the possibility that MLB will seek to shrink the strike zone (especially at the bottom edge), which would be an indirect response to the analysis by Brian Mills and Jon Roegele (among others) illuminating the strike zone’s growth and the corresponding decrease in scoring over the past few years.

Changes in Baseball Media

Every year there are big changes in online media, and last year those changes included the worrying shuttering of two sites featuring a substantial amount of baseball writing. The first was Grantland, shut down in late October, with its baseball writers (including Jonah Keri, Ben Lindbergh and Michael Baumann) scattering to various places around the Web.

The other is Just A Bit Outside, the Rob Neyer-led baseball vertical at Fox Sports that ran from July 2014 until this past December. While its composition differed from Grantland (much of its content came from ex-players like Gabe Kapler or cross-posting with BP and FanGraphs), it too represents a regular home for baseball writing that doesn’t exist anymore.

As a consumer, I’m not particularly worried that I won’t be able to read the writers I liked at those sites, or that there isn’t enough baseball writing out there. Instead, it’s a concern about a broader decline in quality, both from established names and from up-and-coming analysts. For new writers, it’s strictly a matter of opportunity; if there are fewer outlets for their work, then it’s harder for new voices to get the break they need, and less good writing to read. For established names, the worry has to do with resources and emphasis. Jonah Keri won a SABR award for his thoroughly-researched Grantland feature on base stealing, and it’s hard to imagine that analysis being published on most other sites, even the large outlets he’s writing for this season. (These concerns are, of course, hardly original, and are touched on this Jason McIntyre piece about CBS Sports that mentions Jon Heyman’s departure.)

On the topic of new voices, there’s at least one new site of some interest: the prospect-oriented 2080 Baseball, founded and staffed by a number of writers with prospect experience (largely at Baseball Prospectus). It will be interesting to see what sort of stories come out of there in the future and how much they contribute to the greater baseball discourse. Hopefully, there will also be quality baseball content at Bill Simmons’ new site, The Ringer, when it launches later this year.

A Change in Tone

Amid the doldrums of the offseason, two related and long-simmering topics concerning the baseball media were discussed a bit more in the open. Expressed generally, they are what’s going to be written, and who’s going to be writing.

The first topic was most notably discussed by Rian Watt at BP, who posited that baseball analysis is moving away from sabermetric and statistical analysis and in a direction that he calls “intersectional”—that is, with a greater emphasis on the players as people and the game as a microcosm of our larger society. (It’s also worth reading Craig Calcaterra’s response to Watt’s article; in which he discusses how Watt’s prediction is as much a return to an older style of reporting as it is a paradigm shift.)

One small piece of evidence for this transition can be seen by looking at this year’s SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards. In past years, none of the contemporary commentary nominees were quite in the vein of what Watt’s talking about (though a number were focused on the economics of the game, and some of the historical commentary nominees fit into his characterization). This year, two very clearly are: Meg Rowley’s discussion of exclusion in major league front office hiring and Alexis Brudnicki’s essay on the challenges of working in baseball as a woman. Two nominations isn’t proof, but it is a suggestion. While Watt’s piece met with a fair bit of criticism from those who think he’s wrong, those who’d rather he be wrong, and those who think it’s all a bit overblown, it’s an interesting thought to have in mind as the season starts.

You may have noticed that the two pieces I just cited were both written by women. They were the only two of the 15 nominated for SABR awards this year that fit that description. That represented an increase in parity, as all 15 articles nominated the prior year were written by men. This gets to the point of who is doing the writing, which is just as important as the topics covered. With increased efforts at a few prominent baseball sites to hire from a wider pool of candidates, there’s room for a little bit of hope that the people who write about baseball will more closely resemble the people watching it going forward.

The focus of this piece is 2016 in baseball writing, but the most visible change with regards to diversity in commentary will be in another medium. Jessica Mendoza will be in the Sunday Night Baseball booth as ESPN’s first full-time female analyst. She acquitted herself well in her appearances last year, and so it’s easy to be optimistic about her laying the groundwork for a time when such an appointment is no longer such a big deal.

Furthermore, I’d be wrong not to mention that it’s likely the last season for two of the most prominent TV announcers in the sport, men who are a huge part of their team’s national identities. The universally-beloved Vin Scully is one (and we covered him here at THT on Friday); the less-universally-beloved Ken “Hawk” Harrelson is the other. Whether it’s counting the days until you don’t have to use the home feed for White Sox games on MLB.TV or making a point of staying up late on the East Coast to catch a few innings of Vin, their retirements represent milestones even for those who aren’t Dodgers or White Sox fans.

This preview’s been, for lack of a better term, a bit of inside baseball. Given the way that many of us engage with the game and the people around it, though, it’s important for a season preview to consider not just what will happen on the field, but how the games are processed, analyzed, quantified, and otherwise discussed. For some of us, this secondary portion of baseball is just as important as the games.

References & Resources

• Tony Blengino, FanGraphs, “Statcast Data Limitations – Year-End Update”
• Jonathan Judge, Harry Pavlidis and Dan Turkenkopf, Baseball Prospectus, “Introducing Deserved Run Average (DRA)—And All Its Friends”
• Jonathan Judge, The Hardball Times, “FIP, In Context”
• Jonathan Judge and Harry Pavlidis, Baseball Prospectus, “Catching Up”
• Jeff Sullivan, FanGraphs, “The Beginning of the End for Pitch-Framing?”
• Ronald Blum, The Associated Press, “APNewsBreak: MLB studying raise of strike zone’s bottom”
• Brian M. Mills, Social Science Research Network, “Expert Workers, Performance Standards, and On-the-Job Training: Evaluating Major League Baseball Umpires”
• Jon Roegele, The Hardball Times, “The 2015 Strike Zone”
• Jonah Keri, Grantland, “Grand Theft Baseball”
• Jason McIntyre, The Big Lead, “Low Morale at CBS Sports.com as it Eschews Reporting in Favor of Aggregation”
• Rian Watt, Baseball Prospectus, “What Comes After Sabermetrics?”
• Craig Calcaterra, NBC Sports Hardball Talk, “Stick to Sports? Never! The Intersectionalist Manifesto”
• Meg Rowley, Baseball Prospectus, “Post-Moneyball’s Clubability”
• Alexis Brudnicki, The Hardball Times, “I’m Different. I’m the Same.”