As we track trends and tendencies to suss out a potential philosophy behind the White Sox's approach to the automated ball-strike challenge system, Baseball Savant has rolled out a new dashboard that provides a helpful place to start. You're greeted with the scant data from the first week or so of spring training games, but it also reports the data from last year's Triple-A games to provide a better sense of what leaderboards will look like with a bigger sample.
Alongside it, MLB.com's Mike Petriello went through that data and relayed some of the most convincing themes and gray areas he found compelling.
His findings confirm one hunch I wrote about after the first spring training game, where the success rate drops as the game approaches its end because teams have challenges to burn. It also provided some reinforcement to a question Steve V. posed in the Prospect Week P.O. Sox mailbag, as the three most successful challengers in Triple-A all stood 5-foot-7.
Then again, maybe that's because the 6-foot-5-inch Colson Montgomery didn't spend all that much time in Triple-A. Between his Arizona sabbatical in April and his major league call-up in early July, the Charlotte leaderboard shows that Montgomery only had four chances to challenge, and he succeeded on all of them.
Another takeaway is that while framing still matters for catchers since so few pitches are challenged, there's no correlation between a catcher's success rate with challenges and the quality of his receiving. That makes sense, because while a catcher with quieter actions may have a more defined sense of the edges of the zone, that skill could be offset by the guys whose loud actions fool umpires into seeing strikes as balls. For what it's worth, Korey Lee fared better in challenges than Kyle Teel, but with only one year of data, it will take some time to see whether any individual performances can be seen as sticky.
Spare Parts
Eloy Jiménez is off to a strong start to his spring with the Toronto Blue Jays, going 5-for-10 with a homer and two doubles. He says he feels like he's finally healthy, which is something he's said many times. But he also talked about retiring due to the cumulative frustration of so many seasons lost to injuries, and that part is new.
I've considered Salt Lake City a natural contender for MLB expansion, so much so that I've kept my mind open to the Athletics ending up there somehow. They have the desire, but they also have the land and the money.
The Cleveland Guardians are an argument for and against a salary floor. On one hand, it's pretty sad that they're subtracting from their payroll after winning the division. On the other, paying veterans for the sake of paying veterans might screw up a team that isn't punished when it opts for younger and cheaper.
Having started remediation work on the site last week, the Chicago Fire are set to break ground on their privately financed South Loop stadium on Tuesday. It helps that soccer stadiums cost a fraction of what baseball and football stadiums run these days.
The Atlanta Braves' Battery development around Truist Park continues to bring in gobs of money for Atlanta Braves Holdings, and money that isn't subject to revenue-sharing.
