Morning Mound Visit: sabermetrics news - 9/25/18

FanGraphs | Sheryl Ring: Is it legal to tank in baseball? The rules are actually murkier than expected, stating that any person attempting to intentionally lose a game will be deemed permanently ineligible. But tanking does not imply individual games, and does throwing a season count as throwing a game? It seems that for a team like the 2013 Astros, the line between intentionally throwing a season, and say, swapping current wins for potential future ones, is very blurred.

Baseball Prospectus | Patrick Dubuque: What if we designed a sabermetric triple crown, and who would be the winner? For something like wRC+ / BRR / FRAA, there has never been a winner, while with OBP / HR / wRC+, for example, Bryce Harper won the crown in 2015.

Bill James Online | Bill James: What qualifies a player as “five tool”? Using some classification methods, James breaks down the historical five-tool players by era, and concludes that there are about four or five five-tool players per era; the last era constituted David Wright, Bobby Abreu, Matt Kemp, and Andrew McCutchen, and one would assume this era would include Mookie Betts, Mike Trout, and Francisco Lindor, at least.

MLB.com | Mike Petriello: Other than “pitchers shouldn’t win the MVP,” there aren’t many reasons why Jacob deGrom isn’t a great MVP candidate. Who cares about the wins, and who cares about him being on a bad team? He is the WAR leader by far amidst a crowded field, and he has easily been the best player, no matter the position, in the National League.