Athletic – Coffee Spoons

MLB’s Realignment

Last weekend, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred created a mild furore when he discussed the sport’s looming expansion and how it would likely prompt a geographic realignment. I am old enough I still recall baseball’s two leagues—the American and National—organised into only two divisions—East and West. In the early 1990s, baseball expanded and created a new Central Division. Afterwards, teams changed divisions, teams changed leagues, the sport expanded again to add new teams. As of today, MLB comprises 30 teams, 15 each in each league divided five teams per division. The only potential downside is whereas for decades the leagues only played amongst themselves, since the late 1990s, the odd numbers of teams have required “interleague” play on a daily basis.

But baseball wants to expand to 32 teams in a process yet to begin. Expansion requires the interested parties to pay an enormous fee, making other owners significant amounts of sweet, sweet cash. The question on everyone’s mind is where will the two expansion teams locate? And once they start play, how will the sport organise its teams?

The Athletic posted an article about this very issue earlier this week and it included two nice and simple maps showing one potential geographic realignment. This image is of author Stephen J. Nesbitt’s idea for the American League. (I care about the American League because as my regular readers by now know, I am an unapologetic fan of the Red Sox.)

As maps go, I think it works well. Personally, I prefer lighter backgrounds to darker, but a grey map is a grey map all the same. I think the colours work well and visually group the proposed divisions clearly. The white box makes clear the new division. (The map for the National League also works well.)

Beyond the information design or data visualisation level, I generally like the realignment proposed here as it offers a decent compromise between those wanting a basketball-style apportionment into two conferences, one eastern and one western, and those traditionalists like myself who still value the distinction between the American and National Leagues.

The biggest issue is where will the teams be? The author assumes one team on the East Coast or at least east of the Mississippi, and one West Coast or west of the Rocky Mountains. But baseball returning to Canada and Montreal would be welcome as would an expansion team in Texas, say Austin or San Antonio. Then of course you have the issue of Oakland. And the longshots have always been expansion into Mexico.

Personally, I have long been in favour of an even larger expansion to 36 teams. For sake of argument: Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Charlotte, Nashville, and Montreal have always made sense to me. Of course six new teams in one quick go would be impractical and thus it would be a long-term goal. But three 6-team divisions would mean 18 teams per league and you could still eliminate or reduce interleague play to special occasion weekends.

Credit for the piece goes to Drew Jordan.

When Is a Torpedo Is Not a Torpedo?

When it’s a torpedo bat.

Last week I looked at baseball’s new torpedo bats in a humourous light. But I did want to take a more serious look, because bat evolution has been part of the tale of baseball since its beginning. Back in the day bats featured long lengths and heavier weights. These days, bats are in the mid-30 inch length and mid-30 ounce weight. Current regulations limit bats to 42 inches in length and a maximum diameter of 2.61 inches. ¹ (There is some other stuff in there that is not terribly relevant to the torpedo bat.) And that’s it. Nothing about where the widest part of the bat need be nor the overall shape—merely a round, solid piece of wood.

The solid piece of wood is connected to corked bats. At my age I remember seeing the ESPN clips of Sammy Sosa’s corked bat in 2003 and the story of Albert Belle’s bat, stolen from the umpire’s room.

The torpedo bat, however, is not corked, instead it uses increased mass at the bat’s sweet spot, where it generates the greatest exit velocities when the batter hits the pitch. This graphic from ESPN shows how this works.

How a torpedo bat differs from the normal bat

Overall I like the graphic. The use of contrasting red and blue does a good job highlighting, particularly at the end where the normal bat continues with its edges running parallel as a regular cylinder. The torpedo bat changes into a cone with its top sliced off then rounded. I might have exaggerated the vertical dimensions of the bat illustration, but it still works.

Additionally, as I understand the design, it maximises the diameter of the bat to the aforementioned 2.61 inches. I have heard—but not confirmed—most bats do not reach the full diameter. If that is true, perhaps an illustration where the red lines fell below the maximum diameter of the torpedo bat could do a better job differentiating between the two shapes.

I prefer the above illustration to that produced by the Athletic/New York Times, which attempts a similar distinction.

I think ESPN’s overlay better shows the difference and that the Athletic’s wood pattern distracts from the graphic overall. Whereas ESPN uses the solid red vs. blue hatching to distinguish between the two shapes.

Of course that begets the question, why doesn’t every batter use the torpedo bat?

Suffice it to say, some players are better at hitting the ball consistently at the same spot on the bat. If a hitter can repeatedly make contact at a specific spot along the length of the bat, it makes sense to concentrate the mass of the bat at that spot for better hard contact. If, however, a hitter spreads his contact out along the length of the barrel, he probably wants a more evenly distributed mass to help create a better spread of good contact.

Regardless, as I wrote on Friday, the torpedo does not look like a torpedo. If anything, the normal baseball bat looks more like a torpedo than a torpedo bat.

Credit for the ESPN piece goes to ESPN’s graphics department.

Credit for the Athletic’s piece goes to Drew Jordan.

https://mktg.mlbstatic.com/mlb/official-information/2025-official-baseball-rules.pdf ↩︎

Sankey Shows Starters Sticking with Sticky Stuff

I spent way more time trying to craft that title than I’d like to admit. Headline writing is not easy.

Quick little piece today about Sankey diagrams. I love them. You often see them described as flow diagrams—this piece is in the article we’ll get to shortly—but they are more of a subset within a flow diagram. What sets Sankeys apart is their use of proportional strokes or widths of the directional arrows to indicate share of movement.

The graphic in question comes from an article about Major League Baseball’s (MLB’s) problem with “sticky stuff”. For the unfamiliar, sticky stuff is a broad term for foreign substances pitchers put on their fingers to provide better grip on the baseball. A better grip makes it easier to create movement like sliding and sinking in a pitch there therefore makes it harder for a hitter to hit it. Back when I was a wannabe pitcher, it was spitballs and scuff balls. Now professionals use things like Spider Tack. These are substances that allow you to put the ball in the palm of your hand, then turn your hand over to face the ground and not have the ball fall out of your hand.

So the graphic looks at starting pitchers and how their spin rate, the quantifiable measure impacted by sticky stuff, of their fastballs has changed since MLB instituted a ban on sticky stuff. (It had actually long been in place, see spitballs for example, but had rarely been enforced.)

Showing a small number of pitchers have managed to increased their fastball spin rates

This graphic explores how 223 pitchers saw their spin rates change in the first two months after the change in policy was announced to the nearly month after that period.

Sankeys use proportional width not just to show movement from category to category but the important element of what share of which category moves to which category. For example, we can see a little less than half of starting pitchers saw their spin rates stay the same after the policy change and another almost equal group saw their spin rates decrease. That’s probably a sign they were using sticky stuff and stopped lest they get caught.

But we can then see of that group, maybe 1/6 then saw their spin rates increase again over the last month. That could be a sign that they have found a way to evade the ban. Though it could also be they’ve found new ways of gripping or throwing the baseball. Spin rate alone does not prove sticky stuff usage.

Similarly, we can see that in the group that maintained their spin rate, a small group has found a way to increase it. Finally, a small fraction of the original 223 saw their spin rates increase and a fraction of that group has seen their spin rates increase even further.

This was just a really nice graphic to see in an article from the Athletic about sticky stuff and its potential return.

Credit for the piece goes to Max Bay.