Morning Mound Visit: sabermetrics news - 6/19/18

FanGraphs | Sheryl Ring: The talk of bettering the in-game experience misses the fact that marginalized populations have diminished access to the game in the first place, which should in of itself be an initiative to make it more inclusive to broader swathes of the population. Even though there are an estimated 140 LGBTQIA+ players at any one point, just by Gallup polling data, there is not a single publicly out LGBTQIA+ baseball player. This is because, and we don’t like to admit it, but: baseball culture is incredibly homophobic and penalizes players for identifying as such. To make not only the lives of fans and players more enjoyable and more inclusive (ie: the point of communal sport-watching), then pride nights at the ballpark hold an important place. They also put to light the teams that have yet to consider it (looking at you, Yankees and Angels).

Tangotiger Blog | Tom Tango: Tom Tango explores the effect of temperature on batted balls in Statcast. For most batted balls, there isn’t much of an effect either way; balls of most types are hit throughout the seasons. The one that has an effect, unsurprisingly, is on barrels. Higher temperatures highly correlate with more barrels, for the obvious reason that higher temperature lead to more carry when the ball is hit hard.

The Hardball Times | Frank Jackson: Jackson chronicles the changes in fan experience over the past 50 years from... his own experiences. It’s an interesting, non-judgmental, non-yells-at-cloud look at the good and the bad of the fan experience changes: paper to plastic cups, changes in ticketing and stadium design, in food and drink, and immersive entertainment options that seemingly surround us at games today.