Yordano Ventura at His Best

Remembering Yordano Ventura, all of FG's SABR awards, and more! [View this email in your browser] Yordano Ventura at His Best As Jeff Sullivan [eloquently wrote yesterday], baseball was sent into mourning twice over Sunday with the separate deaths of Yordano Ventura and Andy Marte. Strictly in terms of the baseball we knew them through, gone are a fiery pitcher in his prime and an erstwhile top prospect, always overshadowed by his own potential and sadly overshadowed once more in death. As baseball remembers all too well from the death of José Fernández just a few months ago, this kind of mourning is difficult—you don't want to reduce these men to their baseball careers, yet baseball is the only lens we ever saw them through, no matter how easy it can be to think otherwise. But remembering them through how they played is not necessarily as one-dimensional as it may sound; to remember them by how they played can be to remember them by how they expressed themselves to us and how they demonstrated that they cared and how they chose to spend their time and their gifts. Many of the initial remembrances of Ventura have focused on a single performance—Game 6 of the 2014 World Series, a gem pitched in tribute to the death of his close friend Oscar Tavares. But technically his best game, as calculate by game score, came nearly a year later. On [September 28, 2015], the Royals had already clinched their playoff spot and were in the last week of a season that would end in a World Series title. The game was, in other words, totally meaningless. And Ventura was pitching at his highest level. He was perfect through the fifth, scoreless when he was removed after the seventh, with six strikeouts and one walk. The Royals went on to lose in extras, but the first comment from manager Ned Yost after the game wasn't about that: ''That could have been the best game Ventura pitched all year,'' he told reporters that night. ''He was fantastic." He was right, it was the best that Ventura pitched that year, and depending on how you want to define "best," it was the best Ventura ever pitched. That the best game of his career was one in which he had no real incentive to try at all could very well be coincidence, and it probably is. But it can also be a tiny beautiful fact about a pitcher who cared very much—who sometimes expressed his care too fiercely, but who cared deeply all the same. [FanGraphs produces over 400 articles each month, in addition to our ever-growing database of stats and graphs. Support our efforts today!] On FanGraphs Now: SABR Award Nominees! FG and THT were nominated for six SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards, and you can catch up on all of those now. Online for the first time today is Gerald Schifman's "[How Much Hope and Faith Is in Major League Baseball?]" originally in the Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2017, which you can buy [here]. Also nominated from the Annual is Jeff Sullivan's "[Pitch Framing Was Doomed From The Start]," and also from THT is Patrick Dubuque's historical narrative of "[Byron McLaughlin Avoids the Tag]." On the analysis side, we've got August Fagerstrom's "[The Game Plan: How the Indians Almost Won It All]" and Eno Sarris and Bill Petti's joint work with "[Are Veterans Better at Slump Busting?]" Check them all out now, and keep an eye out for the ballot to vote for your favorites coming soon! [Subscribe to our Podcasts!] Catch up on past newsletters or pass along to a friend [here]. Data Visualization of the Day: [Baseball's Embattled Middle Class] With more players getting paid near-minumum salary, baseball's "middle class" is shrinking. Today on FG, Travis Sawchik investigates the . Excerpt from "[The Marlins and the Future of Starting Rotations]" by Dave Cameron "In general, the idea of eight-man bullpens make most fans groan, as the expanded relief corps has been used before to simply add another specialist to the mix, giving managers even more opportunities to slow the game down by playing the match-ups late in contests. When you look at the Marlins potential relievers, though, that doesn’t really seem to be what they’ve been accumulating." [Forward] [Subscribe] Copyright © 2017 FanGraphs Inc, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the FanGraphs Newsletter. Our mailing address is: FanGraphs Inc 1200 N Hartford St. Apt 312 Arlington, Va 22201 [Add us to your address book] Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences] or [unsubscribe from this list]