Sports – FiveThirtyEight — Cleveland Indians RSS



How Trevor Bauer Remade His Slider — And Changed Baseball

Travis Sawchik is a FiveThirtyEight staff writer. His new book “The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players,” co-authored with The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh, is available this week. In it, they examine how outsiders (and a few forward-thinking insiders) are employing unconventional ideas along with new data from new […]

Continue reading



The 2019 Favorites And Breakout Picks For The American League

Welcome to our two-part guide to the 2019 MLB season through the lens of our MLB prediction model. In each division, we’ll outline the key teams in the division race, discuss the incoming players who will make the biggest difference and classify the tanking teams you should ignore on principle. Here is our preview of […]

Continue reading




Baseball’s Top Staffs Have Come Around On The High-Spin Fastball

When baseball welcomed the new Statcast technology to every major league stadium in 2015, the system’s Doppler radar began tracking an underlying pitching skill: spin rate. Teams and players were suddenly armed with new data to study and optimize. They were able to quantify long-held beliefs about pitch characteristics, like “late life” and “rise,” and […]

Continue reading



We Break Down Each MLB Playoff Matchup (And Predict The World Series)

gfoster (Geoff Foster, sports editor): Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s postseason MLB chat. We are done with the one-game wild-card playoffs. We are done with the one-game playoffs to figure out who would play in the one-game playoffs. And the Oakland Athletics and the Chicago Cubs are the first casualties of October. I think Oakland has to […]

Continue reading