Morning Mound Visit: sabermetrics news - 2/2/19

FanGraphs | Jay Jaffe: Many of the top free agents have not signed yet, so where could (should) they go? Manny Machado to the Phillies feels like it makes the most sense even now; Bryce Harper to the Dodgers makes just as much sense even given their payroll crunch; the Angels are blah but could still use Dallas Keuchel; and Craig Kimbrel could very well go home to Atlanta.

Bill James Online | Bill James: James gets in on the “Babe Ruth in modern times debate,” with an interesting twist. He argues that the quality of play happens at the order of magnitude of leagues and not just individual players, and the standard deviation of play is much smaller, and advances at a slower rate. Evidence of this is that players can be dominant in three different decades even as they decline, meaning that the league can’t jump forward so fast or else those players would be more quickly phased out (As an aside I generally agree with that, but the only issue is that we don’t know if the standard deviation change is actually 0.05. Because if it’s even 0.1 then we have improved a full standard deviation better than a century ago, which I think makes more sense given those players’ physical limitations in relation to how many standard deviations the human body could improve.)

Hareeb’s Hangout | Hareeb al-Saq: Here’s an interesting critique of DRC+: it doesn’t do a great job at correlating with winning percentage, something one would find important. OBP, wRC+, wOBA and even OPS have better R^2 than DRC+.