Baseball Bum

I'm a Twins fan for life, and the Angels have been my adopted 2nd team since 2002 because of Darin Erstad's North Dakota roots. Big Trout fan as well. As much as I wish I could prove you wrong, I have had my doubts about the 2019 bomba squad ever since they came out of nowhere and started raking. I tried finding accusations about the Twins after the Stros trash can scandal but couldn't find anything official, apart from the fact that we signed Marwin Gonzales... yeah nothing to see there. The Twins also experienced an xBA dropoff in 19-20-21 and the 2019 Braves numbers looked out of line as well.

Hi folks! Mind if I chime in? I appreciate your posting my video in this forum. Youtube quickly learned that my video was popular with Astros fans for all the wrong reasons. I have been roasted pretty hard, and to be honest some of the criticism is fair. This is the first video I have ever made. I started pulling at threads and decided to run with it without doing enough due diligence. First and foremost, I personally still believe the Astros are cheating in 2021 but there are definitely arguments for either side. Stats will never prove cheating and of course I’m a normal dude with no way to find hard evidence, but every advanced metric I dig into I find more things that look sketchy. I took my video down because there were two major issues with it. For one, my xBA team stats were just straight up wrong. I couldn't find a way to pull the data from baseball savant, so I was manually pulling player data and I made some mistakes in my data entry. Secondly, the more info I see, the more outlandish stats I find from teams with previous accusations of cheating. It’s not just the Astros. I'm planning on making a new video which will be much more quantitative, and much less about my feelings... lol. Maybe I can bounce some ideas off of you guys? I found a super simple way to pull data from baseball savant so this is going to be a lot easier and a lot more data heavy. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/statcast_search Best way to search xBA data is by selecting pitch type ‘breaking’ player type ‘batter’, sort by ‘xBA’, group by ‘team’ and then selecting the season you’d like to see. Re-running the xBA data showed that in 2019 the Astros batted a team .245 xBA against breaking balls which was good for 1st in the MLB. In 2020 that dropped down to .201 and 19th place. In 2021, they’ve exceeded their 2019 pace and are currently hitting .246 which again leads the mlb by quite a margin. They are a full 14 xBA points above the second place nationals. As a percentage, that’s 6% higher. In comparison to the rest of the mlb, their 2019 breaking ball xBA numbers were 2.28 standard deviations above the mean. In 2020 they dropped down to .42 standard deviations below the mean, and this year they’re back up to 2.68 standard deviations above the mean. They had very little roster turnover from 19-20-21 and I have been trying to find a LEGIT explanation for this dropoff without much luck. No doubt the 2020 season is a small sample size, but July+August and September were their worst 3 months in the last 3 years. I considered the ‘dead ball’ playing a role, but we still have the dead ball in 2021 and their numbers are higher than ever. I also considered that ‘2020 was a tough year especially when you’re accused of cheating” but that’s where it gets more interesting. They’re not the only team to have this dropoff after 2019. Check out the yankees who went from 2019 2nd at .241 xBA down to 7th at .222 and now staying near .227 Check out the A’s who went from 2019 7th at .225 down to 28th place .182. Do you think they would play fair in 19 knowing what they knew about the Astros? Check out the rangers. Their xBA swings are as severe as the Astros except they have less talented players. I have heard allegations of sign stealing from the Rangers before so honestly wasn’t too surprised to see them fit right into the mold. Check out the Redsox who had one of the highest xBA vs breaking in 2019. They lost Mookie, Jackie Bradley, and Benintendi, replaced them with Verdugo, hunter Renfroe, and kike Hernandez and somehow that group is producing at near the same level. Then compare all 6 of those players numbers before and after leaving/joining the red sox. As far as incentive to cheat, there is plenty. From something as simple as propping up your players to get some steals on the trade market, to a player wanting a bigger FA contract, to something more meta like the collective bargaining agreement coming up after this year. From what I’ve heard, Manfred’s hands were kind of tied on player suspensions partially because of the current agreement. It would benefit both the MLB and player’s association to find a way to remove electronic sign stealing from the game and increase penalties, so this might be the last year of ‘no consequences for players’ as long as it’s kept under the table. I’m sure I sound like a tin foil hat but it also feels like a LOT of numbers are pointing to the same few conclusions. Check out these teams stats in their 3rd appearance vs a pitcher Check out 3rd, 4th, 5th inning runs vs rest of the game. A few familiar names at the top of the leaderboard. Oh yeah check out chase % too My brain is melting at this point and I definitely need more eyes on this so any thoughts or additional areas to look would be greatly appreciated.