News and Notes: April 8, 2020

Here’s the latest from around the sabermetrics world:

• Jeff Wiser took a look for Baseball Prospectus at one of my favorite statistics back in the day, “Nasty Factor” (subscription required and recommended). As it turns out, “Nasty Factor” didn’t really mean a whole lot, but it looked and sounded cool a decade ago to those of us who were first being initiated into the MLB stats community. When I was in law school, I actually remember attempting to build a pitcher projection model around Nasty Factor and failing miserably, probably because the metric itself was so flawed.
• The incomparable Jay Jaffe at Fangraphs wrote a tribute to the late Mr. Tiger, Al Kaline, who passed away earlier this week. Jaffe notes that there were times when the Hall of Fame right fielder was booed for not being Mickey Mantle, despite the fact that Kaline’s .297/.376/.480 triple-slash batting line, 134 wRC+, and 88.9 fWAR are all stellar marks and among the best all-time at his position.
• At TrueBlueLA, the always-excellent Eric Stephen took an excellent look at the problems with the plan floated by MLB to play at least a large portion of the season in Arizona. As Stephen notes, “[e]ven if we accept the baseball aspect of this, that there can be some good that can come of this plan, sequestering everybody away from their families for several months — or the alternative, if a player’s family is with them in Arizona, would they be able to go anywhere outside of the proposed hotel-to-stadium loop? — seems makes this a nonstarter.” The entire piece is well worth your time.