Welcome to the first edition of Baseball IQ, a weekly newsletter about recent happenings, highlights, and statistics in Major League Baseball.

There will be a couple recurring sections in each edition: links to the most interesting articles I’ve found this week, a hand-crafted leaderboard of advanced metrics that I’ve built using pitch-level Statcast data, and data visualizations and video highlights of the hardest hit balls of the week.

I’ll also feature occasional segments explaining recent or past findings in baseball research. All in all, I hope this newsletter serves to both entertain with highlights and fun statistics + stories, and to make you feel a little bit smarter on the topic of America’s pastime. If this interests you or sounds like someone you know, please subscribe or share Baseball IQ with a friend!

On to the weekly recap.

News from Around The League

• The pandemic may have eliminated home field advantage. With no fans, home team win % is just barely above 50% so far this year (story: mlb.com)

• Mike Trout continues to climb the career WAR leaderboard, surprising no one. Recently, he passed Jim Thome and Larry Walker (story: espn.com)

• Separating MLB’s Buyers From Sellers at the Weirdest Trade Deadline Ever (story: FiveThirtyEight)

League Leaders

Season-to-date, sorted by xwOBA. Don’t recognize some of these statistics? Check out this glossary.

Top 1% of Batters for Select Stats

Season-to-date Statcast metric leaders (top 1% of the league)

Longest Hits This Week (in Ft.)

1. Austin Riley, 471.0 (video)

2. Christian Yelich, 460.0 (video)

3. Luis Robert, 458.0 (video)

4. Garrett Cooper, 455.0 (video)

5. Gary Sanchez, 453.0 (video)

Hardest Hits This Week (in MPH)

1. Vladimir Guerrero, 115.8 (video)

2. George Springer, 115.0 (video)

3. Rafael Devers, 114.5 (video)

4. Jorge Soler, 114.0 (video)

5. Jonathan Schoop, 113.9 (video)

Best Games This Week (By Total xwOBA)

1. Alex Dickerson, COL vs. SFN 2020-09-01 (box score)

2. Franmil Reyes, KCA vs. CLE 2020-09-01 (box score)

3. Marcell Ozuna, BOS vs. ATL 2020-09-01 (box score)

4. Mike Brosseau, NYA vs. TBA 2020-09-02 (box score)

5. Victor Reyes, MIL vs. DET 2020-09-01 (box score)

This chart uses xWOBA to account for good or bad luck based on fielding and other factors.

Great Tweets

Baseball Twitter(TM) is a goldmine. This will be a recurring segment of some of the best stuff I’m seeing over there. Send me your favorites in a reply or tag me @jmzledoux!

Mike Petriello @mike_petriello

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