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

The Athletic | Ben Harris: The Phillies’ shifts... aren’t working at all. Jake Arrieta expressed some frustration with Gabe Kapler’s insistence on heavy shifting, and this comes on the heels of a Russell Carleton study on how the shift forfeits more walks than singles taken away. They claim that they’re looking into this, but it definitely brings up a point: reactions to the shift in a negative aren’t just reactionary. They’re now starting to have real statistical arguments.

FanGraphs | Stephen Loftus: Do younger teams not have the ‘experience’ to have a hot start and then maintain down the stretch? That is possible, as Loftus finds that young teams tend to regress to .500 after hot starts as to opposed to older teams that are more consistent. This could be because of ‘experience,’ or just because younger players have a higher variance than older players with longer track records where the results are more consistent and the opposing players know the scouting report. That’s just a theory as well.

Baseball Prospectus | Beth Davies-Stofka: When talking about childhood abuse in light of the Luke Heimlich circus, listen to people who actually went through this trauma and how it makes them feel. Plain and simple: admitting Heimlich into a class of people you root for and that get a public spotlight is so incredibly harmful to people who went through abuse and have to watch their abuser (and by proxy, other abusers who in a way stand in for them) succeeding in the public forum while they are routinely discredited and dismissed. That may well be changing, but considering this debacle, clearly not that much.