14 Comments

banger article. i wonder if Clase's poor fielding is at all related to the fact that he may have allowed less contact with the ball over his entire career and never learned to be as sharp as other pitchers when dealing with balls in play. suffering from success, as it were

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sooooooo…

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Liked "moral-hazard rallies"

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I'm all for any article demonstrating the nonsense of earned vs unearned runs and ERA vs RA9. I'll spare everyone my rant, but I don't understand why ERA is still a thing, especially in sabermetric circles.

Another fun fact related to this article: While Clase does have a lower career ERA than Rivera, his career 2.62 RA9 is higher than Rivera's 2.38 RA9!

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This is really interesting. It also reminds me why I have such a hard time remembering or explaining when runs are unearned. Are the zombie runners considered inherited runners?

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They are not considered inherited runners. An interesting decision.

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fascinating. it would be interesting to put this in the context of the team's overall fielding performance

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Interesting points Sam. Also the article earlier in the week inspired me to write about the death of the closer. Thanks!

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This was amazing. And jarring? This, + I’ve always felt weird about pitcher A who lets up a single, gets taken out, and his reliever B lets the runner score, and pitcher A being charged with the full run when he only allowed for 25% of the journey.

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Sam, with regards to the Zombie runner issue, is Clase one of those pitchers who is generally less effective (or even less than you’d expect) with men on base? And would that lead to more unearned runs than you’d expect, because he’s either not used to, or doesn’t like having ducks on the pond?

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Nope, he's great with runners on. Relative to the league, he's even a bit better w/ runners on base than without.

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I will offer a partial explanation as to why Clase's been awful with Zombie runners: I would guess many of those came in 2023. That was the last year Terry Francona managed him, and Francona managed him more as a traditional closer than Vogt has, but more importantly it was also Clase's worst season. It was also our bullpen's worst season in a while, and Tito leaned on Clase a lot more than normal.

Another brief aside: I despite the error stat. I think it's worthless and should be abandoned.

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When I was a baseball novice, I was unaware of unearned run case 1, and to this day it feels kind of out of line.

There are a lot of baseball rules/standards that involve assuming what would or should have happened (ex: iirc if a batter reaches on error, and the next batter grounds into a forceout, the second batter scoring would still be an unearned run if he scored because without the forceout, the play at first would've been routine).

The whole idea of error scoring and unearned runs is a little goofy because it frequently revolves around the ball touching the glove but not being caught. Everybody's seen the silly plays where an outfielder either misplays a ball altogether or loses the ball in the lights - those plays for some reason (tradition?) not scored as errors.

Anyway, this is a plug for DIPS, FIP, xFIP, and DRA.

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Great stuff, Sam! Now I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of reliever WAR.

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