I think only the most casual MLB fans wouldn’t have realised that a ‘pitch timer’ has been introduced this season. It’s talked about on nearly every broadcast, and the countdown is clearly visible in all the stadiums. It’s taking about
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Category: Analytics
It’s Dumb Not To Steal
A fact about MLB I keep forgetting is that your experience of the league is skewed by the games you watch. This year I’ve watched a lot of two teams: the Guardians and the Cubs. And in watching these teams
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Why We (And The Projections) Hate Your Team
Regular Bat Flips & Nerds listeners will have recently heard Ben, John, Tom and myself make a series of win predictions in our long-running annual preseason game. We even let the Triple-A squad of Rob, Russell and Gav have a
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Can we Bake in some more Luck?
In the companion piece to this, I went through how I created a couple of metrics to show the cluster luck that can happen in a game. And armed with the Expected Runs (xRuns) and Run Luck (RL) we could
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Wait, Did we just get really lucky?
To me, one of the amazing things about baseball is that a team can get ten men on-base and, one day they could score zero runs and another day they could score all 10. Also, a team can score 20
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Is Shane Bieber Elite?
A while back, I was tagged in a Twitter thread talking about the predictive/sticky nature of hard hit balls for pitchers. The reason behind that discussion was the Cleveland pitcher Shane Bieber. Last season, he put up some fantastic numbers
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The rise of the hit by pitch
With the current trend of thinking in the front offices in MLB, we are seeing many aspects of the game at all-time highs and lows. A lot these are constantly talked about: strikeouts, home runs and lack of stolen bases
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An Application of Expected Stats
Welcome back Christopher Gauthier Have you ever been at a game and a player smokes a ball right at someone? Like, had that ball been hit a little more to the left or the right of the fielder, it’s a
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Investigating Sophomore Slump
This is Chris Gauthier’s debut article for Bat Flips and Nerds. He’s a college student and a Mets fan. If you’re a dedicated sports fan, chances are at one point or another, you’ve heard the term “sophomore slump,” referring to
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St. Louis Cardinals 2020: Reasons for optimism
What happened in 2019? The St. Louis Cardinals exceeded many expectations in 2019 by winning the National League Central, beating the Atlanta Braves in the National League Divisional Series but then falling short against the eventual World Series winning Washington
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