Perfectly Cromulent Musings

MLB fielders have gotten A LOT better at their job in the past five years - at least, according to one key metric. In 2019, there were 2,900 errors across baseball, working out to an average of 1.19 per game . In 2024, there were 2,600 (1.07 per game), a more than 10% decline in 5 years. In 2023, at the recent nadir of this trend, there were just 2,500 (1.04 per game), a 13% decline.  Total Errors Per Year (2015 - 2024, AKA The Statcast Era) Errors Per Game (2015 - 2024, AKA The Statcast Era) Note: Here on in this analysis, "Per Game" can more intuitively be read as "Per Play Ball!". Think of the denominator here not as the number of errors a given team will make in a game, but the number of errors you can expect to see when you show up to the park (in other words, all the errors committed over the course of the whole game by both teams).  Indeed, there was plenty of chatter in 2023 about what exactly what was going on with official mistakes in MLB.  Kyle Glaser ove...

Let's put a bow on our holiday season examination of prospect values (see what I did there?) by retreating ever so slightly to the comforts of a simple scatter plot.  In the third part of our series , we built out the list of z score values for the hitting and pitching prospect groups of all 30 MLB teams from 2019 - 2024 (data courtesy of Fangraphs). That full list of 180  z scores (30 teams, 6 seasons) can be found  HERE  in my GitHub.  We then pivoted  last week  in Part 4  to roll up those z scores by team and look at cumulative success across the timeframe. Let's undo that quickly and go back to looking at all those 180 team-season combos in graph form. This way, we can really see how hitter and pitcher z scores interact with one another, further informing our understanding of how teams build their farm systems. To start, let's just simply put all 180 team-seasons on a graph, like so:  I've added in lines that bisect 0,0 so we can see the...