Morning Mound Visit: sabermetrics news - 1/23/19

FanGraphs | Jeff Sullivan: The Reds... might actually be good? After adding Tanner Roark, Sonny Gray, Yasiel Puig, and Alex Wood, and with a tight NL Central, which is projected to be the closest division race in modern times.

Baseball Prospectus | Doug Thorburn ($): By stats, or really any measure, Thorbun lays out the best pitchers in baseball. He also uses his perspective of pitcher mechanics, and finds that Max Scherzer, Corey Kluber, and Chris Sale are at the top of the heap. That doesn’t mean that’s all good pitchers, and he finds Jacob deGrom and Justin Verlander right behind them.

Hareeb’s Hangout | Hareeb al-Saq: Statcast created speed-adjusted xwOBA, which is pretty important for a player like Billy Hamilton versus Wellington Castillo, for example. He finds that “...fast players outperform the slow ones by 50 points in unadjusted wOBA-xwOBA and only 29 points after the speed adjustment.”