In retrospect, of course he was going to do it. On Thursday, Shohei Ohtani became the first player in history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season, and he did it loudly. His 6-for-6, three-homer, two-steal game would be among the best single-game lines by any player all year even if it hadn’t simultaneously helped him achieve a feat that no one has ever done before. Sometimes you just have to marvel at the greatness.

Ohtani wasn’t supposed to be at his peak this year. He’s rehabbing from UCL repair surgery and thus not pitching. His two-way prowess has always been part of the Ohtani mystique, and 2024 felt like a warmup for next year, his first fully operational campaign with the Dodgers. But instead, Ohtani reached new heights as a hitter this year. He’s already set career bests for every counting stat imaginable. He’d have highs in every rate stat too, if it weren’t for his offensive breakthrough in 2023 (.304/.412/.654 for a 179 wRC+).

Ohtani always felt like a threat to hit 50 homers – he hit 46 in 2021 and 44 last year — but 50 steals felt like a pipe dream; he’d swiped only 86 total bases in 716 games before this year, and even with last year’s rule changes that increased stolen base attempts and success rates, he swiped only 20 bags in 135 games.
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Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. September is a magical time for baseball. Half of the games are mostly for fun, with teams playing out the string and competing for bragging rights. Those games produce some delightful nonsense, because teams are often more willing to engage in tomfoolery when the stakes are low. The other half of the games (using half very broadly here, of course) are far more important than any games from earlier in the season; they determine playoff berths, home field advantage, and statistical milestones. Those games have all the intensity missing from the other half, right down to electric crowds and locked-in benches. That duality is a ton of fun. This year, we’ve even got a truly historic statistical chase going on to add to the excitement. Zach Lowe’s NBA column, which inspired this series, always hits its stride when teams are building up for the playoffs. I think that baseball trends in the same direction. Let’s get right to it.

1. When the Ball Doesn’t Lie

This is just outrageous:

The umpire is part of the field of play. That’s just how the rule works. Umpires do their best to get out of the way of batted balls, both for self-preservation and for the integrity of the game. John Bacon wasn’t trying to insert himself into the play; he was in foul territory and focused on getting the fair/foul call right, and there was simply no way to avoid this rip. Bryson Stott couldn’t believe it:

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If you’re a major league hitter, you’ll reach a two-strike count. Not every time – baseball isn’t an every time game – but frequently, consistently, inevitably. In those two-strike counts, you’re going to see sliders. Again, not every time, but frequently. A quarter of two-strike pitches in the majors this year have been sliders of some variety. Pitchers are no dummies, and they know where their bread is buttered.

The worst thing that could happen with those two-strike sliders you’re bound to face? A strikeout, obviously. But bad news: There are going to be strikeouts. Again, not every time, but strikeouts are just a fact of life in baseball these days, and 21% of two-strike sliders have resulted in strikeouts this year. Not in the plate appearance – on that pitch specifically. No wonder pitchers throw so many of them.

With all that in mind, here’s a statement I’m sure you’ll agree with: A good way to get better at hitting is to stop striking out on two-strike sliders. I mean, this isn’t rocket science. Striking out is bad. Doing it less is good. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Oh, right, I guess I still have to tell you what this article is about. Let’s talk about a player who made a heroic change. Early in his career, he did a fair job protecting against sliders with two strikes (15.4% putaway rate on two-strike sliders). In 2023, though, things took a turn; he struck out on 20% of the two-strike sliders he saw. This year, however, he’s defending against them better than ever. No player in baseball has gone down less frequently against two-strike sliders than our mystery man’s 8.6% clip. Pitchers simply can’t get him out. He’s putting up a glorious 118 wRC+ and striking out less often than last year.
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Relief pitching is hard work. More than that, it’s work whose difficulty builds on itself. If you’re covering a single inning in a single game, you can use your best reliever. Second inning? You’ll need your second-best guy, and so on. Second day in a row? Now your best relievers are tired. Third day in a row? Now maybe everyone is tired. And relief work never stops; through Monday’s action, there have been 4,322 starts in baseball this year and 26 complete games.

There’s an inherent tradeoff between how much teams rely on their bullpen and the average quality of the relievers who come in. No one does this anymore, but a team that was only asking its bullpen for a few innings a game could use its best arms for a high proportion of its overall innings. A team full of five-and-dive starters has to go much further down the depth chart; covering four innings per game with relievers requires more contributors.

There’s no obvious correlation between relief innings pitched and quality, for various reasons. Teams aren’t passive observers here; the teams that expect to need more relief innings tend to acquire more relievers, because they know they’ll be needed. Front offices are always on the lookout for innings eaters to lighten the bullpen load. But increasingly, this is just a cost of doing business. Teams and starters are both of the opinion that their best work is done in short bursts. If that’s the case, there will be more relief innings. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week, I modeled Shohei Ohtani’s chase for 50 home runs and 50 steals to predict when he might reach that historic dual milestone. That prediction isn’t static, though. Every time Ohtani plays a game, the likelihood of his getting to 50/50 changes. Good news, though: Updating the model is as easy as hitting a few keys and listening to my computer hum for a bit.

This isn’t going to be a long article. It is, however, an updated set of probabilities, which is the whole point of this exercise. Ohtani hit two homers in his weekend series against the Guardians, which leaves him only four home runs and four steals short of a half century in each statistic. His odds of reaching 50/50 are up to 61.3% in my simulations – they were 55.6% before this series.

As a quick refresher, I’m simulating the likelihood of his hitting 50 of each statistic with a Monte Carlo simulation that takes his talent, his opponents, and the stadiums where he plays into account. I also introduce a random fluctuation in his home run talent: Sometimes he’s hot, sometimes he’s not, and sometimes he’s in between. I then simulate the season a million times and note whether he hits 50/50, and if so, in which game he does it.

The two homers in the weekend series have slightly moved up the most likely date for when he’ll reach the 50/50 threshold. Before his series against Cleveland, my simulation suggested that the single game most likely to see Ohtani either steal the base or hit the homer that pushes him over the line was the Dodgers’ September 27 game in Colorado. That’s still the case – but it’s now dead even with the previous game, September 26 in Los Angeles against the Padres. Furthermore, the Padres series has overtaken the final Rockies series as the three-game set in which he is most likely to set the mark.

Here’s the complete set of game-by-game probabilities:

I think these projections do a good job of handling a tricky problem. But I do want to make one point about their limitations: Steals aren’t quite as easy to model as home runs. Pretty much every time that Ohtani comes to the plate, his ideal outcome is a home run. He swings to hit home runs, and pitchers do their best to prevent them. The past does a great job of predicting the future here, because intent doesn’t change from one plate appearance to the next. Steals don’t work quite like that. Sure, Ohtani’s speed is a consistent and important input; the same is true for his baserunning instincts, the opposing pitcher’s ability to hold him on, the catcher’s throwing arm, and so on. But how much he wants to steal is also crucially important. He’s attempting to steal more frequently in the second half of the season than he was in the first, and his desire to run presumably will only accelerate if he’s sitting on, say, 50 home runs and 49 steals. I’m modeling a steady-state true-talent world, but I think it would be reasonable to tilt the distribution slightly earlier if Ohtani hits the homer plateau before the stolen base one, which looks more likely today than it did last week.

In any case, some takeaways: The last six games of the season are the most likely time to see history. The series against the Padres is now the best bet despite San Diego’s excellent pitching staff. The last series of the season, at elevation against a bad pitching staff, is the next most likely. The likelihood of Ohtani’s getting to 50 during both series is higher now than it was on Thursday, and I might even be underestimating it given that he might decide to attempt more steals as he nears the border of history.

There’s only one playoff race this year. That might not sound right to you. The Yankees and Orioles are deadlocked in the AL East. The Guardians are holding the Twins and Royals at bay in the Central. The Padres are looking menacingly northwards toward LA. But those aren’t playoff races, because everyone involved is making the playoffs either way. The only race where the winner is in and the loser is out is the one for the last NL Wild Card spot, and it’s taking place between divisional rivals: the Mets and the Braves.

It’s weird seeing so little actual drama in September. Those two teams are the only ones with playoff odds between 20% and 80% right now. That’s rare for this time of year. There were seven such teams last year, six in 2022, and three in the top-heavy 2021 season. Even if we go back to the 10-team playoff era, the years from 2015-2019 averaged four teams in that 20-80% range with a month left in the season. Despite no truly dominant teams, the playoff races are abnormally set in stone this year.

That only makes the last race more exciting, though. In one corner, we have the Braves, who came into the year as the best team in baseball. They were so good, in fact, that we used them as a model when delving into some new depth chart data this spring. What might the Braves look like if they lost Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr. to injury? Our model thought they’d be a .551 team. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of great baseball storylines to keep tabs on this month. Aaron Judge is on yet another historic tear. Bobby Witt Jr. and the Royals are crashing the playoff party. The Brewers and Guardians are showing the league that you overlook the Central divisions at your own peril. But it all pales in comparison to Shohei Ohtani’s pursuit of 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases, at least for me.

The 50-50 club doesn’t have any members. Ohtani is alone in the 44-44 club, the highest current rung he’s attained, and it doesn’t look like anyone else will be joining him anytime soon. Ohtani himself probably won’t repeat this; this is a career high in steals by a mile, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s happening in a season when he isn’t pitching. Next year, I think that he’ll rein himself in more, but right now, we’re seeing what it looks like when a fast player decides that they really do want to steal all the bases they can. Of course, it helps that he’s also one of the most powerful hitters in the game – both to aim for the 50-50 target and because opposing pitchers walk him quite often.

Will he make it? I’m not sure, but luckily I have a method that lets me estimate the odds. When Judge hit 62 homers two years ago, I built a little tool to estimate the likelihood of him hitting that milestone, as well as the chances of it happening in any particular game. That method works pretty well in general, so I redid it with a few modifications to handle the fact that we’re looking at two counting statistics instead of just one. I’ll start by reviewing the methodology, though if you’re not into that, there are some tables down below that will give you an idea of when and where Ohtani might hit (or run into) this momentous milestone. Read the rest of this entry »

When Michael King’s season got off to a slow start, it was pretty easy to find the things that were going wrong. The walks, the homers, the short outings: I wouldn’t blame an analyst for doubting him. Oh, wait, that was me doubting King? Well that’s awkward, because he’s been exceptional ever since. But for someone with King’s profile – a kitchen-sink arsenal without a clear standout pitch and a history of working in relief – disaster never feels far off. So today I thought I’d highlight all the stuff that hasn’t gone wrong, because seeing King pitch is a good reminder that sometimes life is all about minimizing your weaknesses.

The first thing that could have gone wrong was decreased fastball velocity. King averaged 95.1 mph on his four-seamer in starts last year, but he was down around 93 mph through a month of play this season. He’s sitting 94 mph since the start of June, though, and his results on that pitch have improved markedly. He’s doing the same thing with his sinker: adding velocity and getting better results. To be fair, the results have been much better on his sinker than his four-seamer, but in both cases, they’ve improved quite a bit since the beginning of the year, and the improvement is the key here.

Pitching off of those two fastballs is particularly important for King, because he struggled mightily with falling behind in the count earlier this year. That led to a predictable dance. King would attack the zone with fastballs to get back into the count, and he’d sometimes fly too close to the sun. Given that his four-seamer is still crushable and he doesn’t consistently locate his sinker for strikes, he was getting himself into a lot of trouble and spending too much effort digging out of holes. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’m going to keep the introduction short and sweet today so I can get back to my once-annual guilty pleasure: spending all day watching the US Open. But while I’m going full Jimmy Butler, plenty of baseball is happening, so I’ve got my eyes on that as well. You couldn’t watch a game this week without seeing something spectacular. We’ve got great baserunning, awful baserunning, and phenomenal catches. We’ve got teams misunderstanding risk and reward, and GMs touching hot stoves over and over again. It’s a great week to watch baseball, because it always is. Shout out to Zach Lowe of ESPN as always for the column idea, and one programming note: Five Things will be off next Friday. Let’s get to the baseball!

1. Anthony Volpe’s Disruptive Speed
Another year, another below-average season with the bat for the Yankees shortstop. That’s turning him into a lightning rod for controversy, because he’s a type of player who often gets overlooked (defense and speed) playing for a team where players often get overrated. The combination of the two leads to some confusing opinions. “He’s a good player who will make fewer All-Star teams than you think because defensive value is consistently underappreciated” isn’t exactly a strong argument if you’re talking to an acquaintance at a sports bar.

One thing that everyone can agree on, though: After he reaches base, Anthony Volpe is a problem. I tuned into Monday’s Nationals-Yankees game to see Dylan Crews in the majors and to watch Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, but I ended up just marveling at Volpe for a lot of the afternoon. He got on base three times (that’s the hard part for him, to be clear) and tilted the entire defense each time. He wasn’t even going on this play, and his vault lead still dragged Ildemaro Vargas out of position:

I’m not quite sure how to assign value for that play. The ball found a hole there, but DJ LeMahieu could just as easily have hit the ball straight to Vargas. I’m not saying that we need an advanced statistical reckoning about the value of a runner bluffing a fielder into motion, but that doesn’t change how cool it is to watch Volpe spook good veteran infielders just by standing around and bouncing.

Some of his baserunning value is of the straightforward, look-at-this-fast-human-being variety. You don’t need to hit the ball very deep to drive him home from third:

Some of the value is effort-based. Volpe’s always thinking about an extra base. Even when he hits a clean single, he’s got eyes on the play. An innocuous outfield bobble? He’ll take the base, thank you very much:

Of course, if you show someone taking a bouncing lead in the first GIF, you have to show them stealing a base in the fourth: Call it Volpe’s Run. That double led to a pitching change, and after two looks at Joe La Sorsa’s delivery, Volpe helped himself to third base:

Not every game is like this, but most of his times on base are. He’s never content to go station to station. His instincts are finely tuned, his speed blazing. I’m rooting for Volpe to improve at the plate, and it’s for selfish reasons: I love to watch great baserunning, and I want to see him get more chances to do it.

2. Whatever the Opposite of That Is

Oh Washington. The Nats are near the top of my watch list right now. Their assortment of young offensive standouts makes for fun games, and now that Crews has debuted, the top of their lineup looks legitimately excellent. You can see the future of the team even before they’re ready to contend, and that’s just cool. They might even be good already – they won the series against the Yankees this week, with Crews hitting his first big league homer in the deciding game. But uh, they’re not quite ready for prime time yet. Take a look at this laser beam double:

Boy, it sure looks fun to pour on the runs when you’re already winning. Wait, I misspoke. Take a look at this long fielder’s choice:

Somehow, Joey Gallo didn’t score on a jog on that one. He slammed on the brakes at third base and realized he couldn’t make it home. Then he got hung out to dry because everyone else in the play kept running like it was a clear double (it was). What a goof! That meant the only question was whether he’d be able to hold the rundown long enough to let everyone advance a base. The answer was a resounding yes – to everyone other than Juan Yepez:

I think his brain just short circuited there. He was standing on third with Gallo completely caught in a rundown. All you have to do to finish the play is stand still. But for whatever reason, he started side-shuffling in retreat toward second, another base currently occupied by a runner (!). While Jazz Chisholm Jr. tagged Gallo out, Yepez was busy hanging José Tena out to dry. Famously, you can’t have two runners on the same base. The rest of the play was academic:

I feel bad hanging Yepez out to dry, because some clearer communication would have made this play a run-scoring double. First, Gallo was overly cautious tagging up on the deep drive to center. Then, he got bamboozled. Watch the base coach hold Yepez, only for Gallo to see the sign and think it was intended for him:

Just a disaster all around. I can’t get enough of the Gameday description: “José Tena singles on a sharp line drive to center fielder Aaron Judge. Juan Yepez to 3rd. José Tena lines into a double play, center fielder Aaron Judge to shortstop Anthony Volpe to catcher Austin Wells to first baseman DJ LeMahieu to catcher Austin Wells to third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. to second baseman Gleyber Torres. Joey Gallo out at home. Juan Yepez to 3rd. José Tena out at 2nd. Two Outs.”

Ah, yes, just your typical 8-6-2-3-2-5-4 double play. The Nationals are a lot of fun to watch – even when it’s at their expense.

3. We Get It, Rays

The whole never-trade-with-Tampa-Bay bit is overdone. The Rays lose plenty of trades. They win their fair share too, of course, but they are high volume operators in a business full of uncertainty. Sometimes, you get Isaac Paredes for almost nothing. Sometimes, you get Jonny DeLuca. When you churn your roster to the extent that they do, you can’t win them all, and that’s fine. But the Cardinals? Yeah, they should definitely not trade with the Rays.

First, in 2018, they sent Tommy Pham to Tampa Bay in exchange for some depth prospects, and Pham racked up 8 WAR in the next year and a half with the Rays. Then, before the 2020 season, the Cardinals swapped Randy Arozarena for Matthew Liberatore; Randy became the face of the postseason, and Libby turned into a long reliever. The most recent deal might not be the most damaging, but it’s an apt capper to a transaction trilogy.

Dylan Carlson was supposed to be the next big thing in St. Louis, but that ship had sailed long before the Cardinals jettisoned him at the deadline this year. His offensive game just broke down out of nowhere over the last two years, and he played himself out of St. Louis even as the team floundered for outfield depth this year. He had a 50 wRC+ in a part-time role when the team decided it was time to move on.

That’s fine, guys need changes of scenery all the time. But trading him to the Rays, of all teams, felt a little on the nose. The reliever they got back, Shawn Armstrong, is a perfectly good bullpen option. He made 11 appearances for the Redbirds and compiled a 2.84 ERA (2.78 FIP), a solid month’s work. But I’m using the past tense because they designated him for assignment earlier this week, hoping another team would pick up the balance of his contract and save them $350,000 or so. They’ve made a similar move with Pham, whom they also acquired at the deadline, since then. In Armstrong’s case, they also did it because he’d pitched two days in a row and they needed another fresh arm on the active roster; it was a messy situation all around.

We have their postseason odds at 1.1% after a desultory August, and they likely aren’t losing much of that value by moving on from Armstrong. It’s the signaling of it all, though: They traded for the guy, got exactly what they wanted from him, and still couldn’t keep him around for two months. Meanwhile, Carlson looks like a reasonable major leaguer again. He hasn’t been a world beater by any means, but he’s hitting the ball hard more frequently in a semi-platoon role that takes advantage of his ability to hit lefties. He already has three homers as a Ray after none all year as a Cardinal.

Carlson had to go, because something wasn’t working in St. Louis. Armstrong was a perfectly reasonable return, and he did exactly what the team hoped for when the Cardinals acquired him. The optics, though! They traded yet another pretty good outfielder who didn’t fit into the puzzle in St. Louis. Tampa Bay has two years to get the most out of him. As is customary, none of the players the Rays sent back to Missouri moved the needle. For appearances’ sake, if nothing else, the Cardinals can’t keep making these trades.

4. Outrageous Robberies

It feels weird that Jackson Chourio, a five-tool superstar with blazing footspeed, doesn’t play center. It seems like a knock on him, almost. Sure, this guy’s a prodigy, but he can’t handle the tough defensive position that you might expect him to play given his talent. Except, that’s not quite right. Why would you play him in center field when you currently have Spider-Man patrolling the grass? I mean…

Blake Perkins robs ANOTHER home run! ? pic.twitter.com/vvEn9GVR7V

— MLB (@MLB) August 28, 2024

Oh my goodness. I don’t even want to hear about catch probability on this one, because the difficulty of this play is the part where he gets over the wall in deep center. This isn’t one of those “robberies” where the fielder grazes the wall with his back and everyone celebrates. Blake Perkins can do those just fine – he has four robberies this year, and they weren’t all this hard – but he can also go the extra mile. He went all the way up and over to get this one:

That’s an 8-foot wall, so he probably got to the ball 9 or so feet in the air. He had to cover a ton of ground before getting there; 101 feet from his initial position, to be precise. He took a great route, which gave him time to decelerate and time the jump, but the ball kept carrying. In the end, he had to parkour up the wall a little bit to get enough height:

What more can I say? You can’t do it any better than that. Perkins reacted like he was shocked by his own play:

So no sweat, Jackson. You’re a pretty good outfielder too; you just can’t climb walls quite so nimbly. There’s no shame in second place when first place looks like that.

5. Getting by With a Little Help

Austin Riley is on the IL right now, and 2024 has been a down year for him. That’s largely an offensive issue, though his defense isn’t quite up to previous years’ standards, either. That said, he can still turn an absolute gem out there. Take a look at this beauty from two weeks ago:

That’s the area where he’s improved the most. His arm is below average for third base, so he compensates by getting his feet planted and putting his entire body into the throw. That ball had to travel forever, and to be fair, it two-hopped Matt Olson, but that’s an accurate ball given where he caught it and how quickly he had to let it go. That’s very nice, but watch Jo Adell at the bag. What is he doing?!? That isn’t how you’re supposed to run out a bang-bang play. If he went straight in, he’d beat the throw comfortably. Instead, he curled his way into an out.

In his mind, I’m sure that ball was a double right out of the box. That’s reasonable! Look at where Riley made the play:

Riley’s plant foot ended up all the way into the grass in foul territory. Not many baseballs get fielded there, and Adell hit that one on a line, so when he started out of the box, he was surely considering his options in regards to second base. He came out of the box looking down the line and taking a direct, rather than rounded, route. But as you can see from the high angle replay, he started to bend his path to cut the bag and head for second, right around the same time that Riley rose and fired:

The closeup of Adell is definitely a bad look:

But take another look at those last two shots and you’ll get a better idea of what happened. Adell probably couldn’t see the ball in the corner cleanly. There was a lot of traffic: baserunners, umpires, Riley himself, the pitcher, and so on. About halfway down the baseline, he looked away from the play to pick up first base coach Bo Porter, exactly what you should do when you can’t find the ball on your own. But Porter just plain missed it. He was pinwheeling Adell toward second, imploring him to arc out for extra speed. He clearly thought the ball was in the outfield and that Adell going wide could give him a shot at an extra base.

I’d put more blame on Porter than on Adell in this situation, but there’s blame to go around for both. I’d give credit to Riley, too, of course. Base coaches and baserunners make mistakes sometimes, and they aren’t always punished by outstanding defensive plays like that. But this is an unforgivable mistake given the game situation.

Adell’s run was far less important than the two in front of him. If there was any question at all about his being safe or not, any question about whether Riley had fielded it, the correct play was to book it to first and completely forget about the double. Reaching first safely is worth more than a run: the runner scoring from third plus the first and third situation that would’ve result from it. Teams have scored 0.52 runs after first and third with two outs this year, and 0.59 runs after second and third with two outs. Meaning, if Adell had taken a straight line path, the Angels would’ve scored a run and had that 0.52 on top of it, so making an out at first base cost them an expected 1.52 runs. Advancing to second would have gained them another 0.07 expected runs, but only if that runner on third scored, which didn’t happen because Adell was out at first. They would’ve needed to successfully advance to second 96 times out of 100 to make the math work there. It’s worse than that, though: Going from a one-run lead to a two-run lead is worth astronomically more than stepping up from two to three. Take that into account, and we’re looking at a play where you’d need to be right 98 times out of 100.

The Angels mistook playing hard for playing smart. The winning baseball play there is to ensure the run. It didn’t end up costing them, but it could have. They never scored again, and the Braves put plenty of traffic on the bases the rest of the way. The funny thing is, I’m sure that Adell will get knocked for not hustling on this play, and I don’t think that’s what went wrong. He and Porter just got greedy aiming for a hustle double when the right choice was to nit it up (play extremely conservatively, for the non-poker-players out there). It’s a strange way to make a mistake – but it’s definitely still a mistake.