When he stepped off the mound after a dominant seven innings last Tuesday night, Jack Flaherty surely thought he’d thrown his last pitch of the regular season. The Cardinals led the Diamondbacks 1-0 and the Brewers by 3 1/2 games in the NL Central. A win that night would all but lock up the division; three games up in the loss column with five games left to play is a tough lead to cough up.

But it wasn’t to be. Andrew Miller gave up a tying home run in the ninth inning, the Cardinals ended up losing in nineteen (!!) innings, and the Brewers started to catch up. Saturday night, after a beatdown at the hands of the Cubs was matched by a Brewers loss in Colorado, leaving the Redbirds a game ahead in the standings, the Cardinals announced that Flaherty would start Sunday afternoon.

In the real world, the game was a breeze. Flaherty put together another strong outing, going seven scoreless and allowing only two hits, and the Cardinal offense came to life en route to an easy 9-0 victory. The Brewers, meanwhile, pulled their starters when a St. Louis victory became inevitable, eventually losing 4-3 in 13 innings.

But those are the results that actually happened, not the results that could have happened, and knowing what could happen is often more interesting than seeing the actual results. To that end, I was curious: did the gambit of starting your best pitcher in the regular season rather than saving him for a potential elimination game make sense? Let’s do the math.

To work out the cost and benefit of starting Flaherty, we need to work out the potential scenarios that follow a Flaherty start. First, there’s the world that actually occurred: the Cardinals win the NL Central and move on to face the Braves in the NLDS. In that situation, the cost of starting Flaherty in the last game of the regular season is low. He’ll start Game 2 of the series, and can start a potential Game 5 on regular rest. There’s almost no cost here; if Miles Mikolas had pitched yesterday instead, Flaherty would start Game 1 and Mikolas Game 2 instead of vice versa, and Flaherty would still start Game 5. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday evening in Flushing, Jacob deGrom put a bow on another superlative season. For seven innings, he flummoxed the Marlins, striking out seven while only allowing two hits. It wasn’t surprising, exactly — deGrom is one of the best few pitchers in baseball and the Marlins are, well, the Marlins. For once, the Mets provided deGrom with copious run support — the three they scored in the first would have been enough, but they added six more runs over the next two innings.

With 32 starts in the books, deGrom looks to have handily lapped the field in the Cy Young race. If FIP-based WAR is your preferred metric, he ranks second in the majors, behind only Gerrit Cole and half a win clear of Max Scherzer. By RA9-WAR, he’s also second in the majors, this time behind Justin Verlander, and miles ahead of NL runner up Jack Flaherty.

Craig Edwards published a Cy Young tracker last week if you’d prefer to dig even deeper into the minutiae, but deGrom was already in the lead, and his two most recent starts (14 innings, 16 strikeouts, one walk, and no runs) only widened the gap. There probably won’t be much surprise come awards season.

But while there isn’t much suspense when it comes to ranking deGrom’s preeminence in the National League this year, his two-year run has vaulted him into select historical territory. His ERA-, which controls for scoring environment, works out to 51 over the last two years, which means he allows about half as many runs as a league average pitcher.

That 51 ERA-, ludicrous as it is, can’t compete with the best seasons of all time — Pedro Martinez’s preposterous 2000 worked out to a 35 ERA- (1.74 ERA in Fenway in the heart of the steroids era, goodness gracious), and there have been 42 qualifying seasons with an ERA- of 50 or lower since 1901. Even if we limit ourselves to 1949 and beyond, there have been 24 of those seasons. There are plenty of Hall of Famers on the list, but also Kevin Brown, Dean Chance, and Trevor Bauer. Read the rest of this entry »

As the Twins closed in on a division title and their second playoff berth in three years, each of their games took on greater importance. On September 17, that intensity created a truly ridiculous 10 minutes of baseball. Sergio Romo came into a tie game in the eighth inning, and after a one-out bunt single by Yolmer Sánchez… Well, I’ll let this tweet do the talking:

Yikes. To make matters worse, there was that mound visit, and Romo also stepped off to regroup after one particularly strenuous pickoff throw. Overall, it took exactly 10 minutes to throw the final 11 pitches of the inning. Somewhere, Rob Manfred woke up from a nightmare about pace of play.

No one remembered this half-inning at the end of the day. It was a wild game, capped with a 12th-inning walk-off hit by pitch that was so close it had to be reviewed. Romo had an excuse — he landed awkwardly on his knee on his first pitch to Zack Collins and some of the pickoff throws were clearly half-hearted. He wanted to stay in a tight game with playoff implications, and the Twins let him.

But it was still absurd. Eleven pickoff attempts, 11 actual pitches. To make matters worse, it wasn’t Billy Hamilton over on first base or anything; Sánchez has five stolen bases and has been caught four times this year, and he’s not even particularly fast. One or two of the attempts were at least theoretically close, but most of them looked like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Far from the bright lights of the pennant chase, history was made last August when Oliver Drake came in to pitch the ninth inning of an 8-2 Twins victory. That appearance marked the fifth major league team Drake had appeared for in 2018 alone. He wasn’t done there; Drake changed teams a further three times in the offseason, with some of the transactions just seeming silly:

Drake was good-natured about the whole ordeal, appearing on Effectively Wild to talk about his odyssey. Still, he was clearly eager to put the past behind him and find a home on a single roster. No one gets into baseball in hopes of endlessly bouncing between teams, good enough to play in the majors but replaceable enough to frequently be a roster crunch casualty.

If you haven’t been following closely this year, you might not have heard anything about Drake. Did he slip off the edge of major league relevance, stuck in the purgatory of Triple-A Durham? Nope! Neither did he continue his travels across the major leagues. Instead he got better, and he now figures into the Rays’ bullpen plans for the rest of the regular season and beyond.

How did a reliever who had previously defined the word journeyman turn into a key cog in one of the best bullpens in baseball? For lack of a better way to say it, Drake essentially took every part of his game and made it better. In a world of nonstop player development and video-aided pitch design, no player is ever truly a finished product, and even marginal ones are seemingly a tweak away from being effective; Drake is the perfect example of that. Read the rest of this entry »

Yu Darvish’s 2018 could hardly have gone any worse. Fresh off of signing a six-year, $126 million contract with the Cubs, he made just eight starts before triceps tendinitis and a stress reaction in his right elbow ended his season. The Cubs made the playoffs, but Darvish could only watch their maddening 13-inning loss to the Rockies and wonder what could have been.

When Darvish struggled to start 2019, the situation seemed to go from frustrating to dire. His first eight starts were horrendous, rife with walks and home runs. He had been one of the most exciting pitchers in all of baseball, all strikeouts and gadget pitches, a highlight waiting to happen. He’d been a thrilling rookie, a prized deadline acquisition, and a top-tier free agent. Was he now on the downswing of his career, adding expensive journeyman to his list of accomplishments?

As it turns out, he wasn’t. As Devan Fink chronicled, Darvish turned his walk problems around, going from the pitcher with the most walks in baseball to the pitcher with the least. Since a disastrous outing in early May where he walked six Marlins, he’s been the third-best pitcher in baseball by xFIP, fourth-best by strikeout rate, and in the top 15 in WAR. In the second half, he’s been even better than that, combining a 37.2% strikeout rate with a 2.2% walk rate. His ERA, FIP, and xFIP are all in the mid-twos.

This fully actualized version of Darvish is what his flashes of brilliance through the years had always hinted at. The bottomless arsenal of pitches — he picked up Craig Kimbrel’s knuckle curve in a week — made him a delight to watch, the strikeouts coming from every conceivable angle, fastball following cutter following curve. The Cubs were off to a hot start, 22-13 even after Darvish’s disastrous turn against the Marlins, and now they were adding one of the best pitchers in baseball.

But while Darvish returned to form, the Cubs backslid. The team has gone 60-61 since that date, falling from the top of the division to nearly eliminated from postseason play. Darvish has made 23 starts in that time, and the team has gone 9-14 in those games. Wins and losses are no measure of pitcher quality, but Darvish has gone 4-5 over that timeframe. Even in the second half of the season, when Darvish went full supernova, the team was only 6-6 in his starts heading into this past Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

When you think of 2019 baseball, there’s probably a definite picture in your mind. Contact is rare but dangerous. Home runs fly out of the park at record levels on fly balls, and line drives are smashed left and right. Strikeouts are abundant, baserunners scarce. And when those runners do get on, they don’t steal very frequently, leading to a station-to-station game.

That’s a great aggregate — but who do you picture when you picture 2019 baseball? Maybe you see Mike Trout or Christian Yelich in your mind’s eye, but that’s not really right. They might be the best of 2019, but they’re certainly not the embodiment of 2019. Yelich and Trout don’t have strikeout problems that sap their on-base percentage. They hit for average and for power; heck, Yelich ended his season batting .329, and it’s not out of the question that he’ll win the batting title. That’s about as far from typical 2019 as it gets.

Not only that, but they’re both fast boys, even if Trout doesn’t steal as much as he used to. Yelich was on pace for a 50/30 season before his season-ending injury, and the fact that it would be the first such season in history should tell you that he’s not anything approaching average. Trout and Yelich are the face of baseball in 2019, but they’re not a fair representation of it.

If it’s not the game’s stars, could it be some kind of boom-or-bust slugger, a watered-down version of Nelson Cruz who sends balls out of the park often enough to offset a cover-your-eyes strikeout rate? Oakland’s Khris Davis, the .247 batting average king, is having too down of an offensive year to qualify, but what about Justin Smoak, another true-outcome-centric batter who would just as soon take a walk as swing at a pitch? He’s not really representative either! He walks 16.3% of the time, double the league average — that’s clearly no good.

To answer this specifically and arbitrarily posed question, I settled on some rules. I chose average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, walk rate, strikeout rate, home run rate, and stolen bases per plate appearance as the statistics that I’ll use to define average. You could make an argument that including all triple-slash stats is focusing too much on batting lines, or that some batted ball data should be folded in, but for me, those don’t stand up. Read the rest of this entry »

For the second straight year, the NL Central crown is coming right down to the wire. I won’t belabor the details — Jay Jaffe has you covered with his Team Entropy series. I’m interested in a slightly different angle. There’s one outstanding feature of the current year’s setup — two of the contenders, the Cardinals and Cubs, happen to play each other in seven of their last 10 games.

That seems like an ideal setup for the trailing team — if you take care of business and win your games, you’ll win the league. None of this hoping the other team loses nonsense — emerge victorious, and you guarantee them a loss.

There’s a problem, though — the Cubs have a tenuous hold on the second Wild Card spot, and the Cardinals are pretty good. Perform poorly, as is entirely possible when seven of your last 10 games are against a good team, and you might miss the playoffs altogether.

That’s the schedule as it exists. What this article presupposes is, what if the schedule could play out a different way? I built a lightweight version of our playoff odds model using Depth Charts projections and starter and home field adjustments, using the same rules as my earlier article on Dodgers playoff scenarios. First, let me show you my model’s view of the 2019 NL playoff race, as it varies ever so slightly from the official FanGraphs odds:

With that out of the way, let’s have some fun! Let’s mess with reality and change some odds. Read the rest of this entry »

It was never going to be a fun year to be a Detroit Tigers fan. The hundred losses could tell you that, or the fact that the team’s lone All-Star was reliever Shane Greene, who now plays for the Braves. The joy in Tigers fandom was concentrated in the minors this year; in top prospect Casey Mize’s polish, in Matt Manning’s production, in Isaac Paredes showing he was ready for Double-A.

But the major league team wasn’t without its bright spots. Greene performed well enough to net two interesting prospects in a trade, Niko Goodrum scratched out a 2-WAR season, and Matthew Boyd had a first half so nice that the Tigers asked for the world in trade (they didn’t get it). In addition to those major leaguers taking a step forward, there’s one other Tigers performance to get excited about: Spencer Turnbull has quietly been an above-average pitcher in his rookie season.

There were signs that Turnbull could hack it in the major leagues before this year, but nothing decisive. He used his sinker/slider starter kit well in Double-A in 2018, racking up a 25% strikeout rate and 3.16 FIP over 100 innings of work. That sounds excellent, but the hidden downside of performing well in Double-A is that you’re pitching in Double-A rather than the big leagues. Turnbull was 25 then, older than the average age for the league and way past when most top prospects move on.

Still, good pitching is good pitching, and the Tigers were desperate for whatever they could get. After a single dominant outing in Triple-A, where he struck out 7 of the 13 batters he faced, Turnbull was summoned back to the major leagues, where he had had a brief previous cameo as a September call-up. Read the rest of this entry »

In the midst of what will go down as a disappointing season for the Phillies, an interesting detail about the front office’s thinking appeared. This morsel snuck into a Ken Rosenthal article: “…once the Phillies began to slump, their front office’s thinking was, ‘We don’t want to go all-out for the chance to play in the wild-card game and then face the Dodgers in the Division Series.’”

There are separate discussions to be had about whether that’s a defeatist attitude, or even whether the Phillies could have done more at the deadline. That’s for someone else to decide, though. What this statement got me, among others, wondering was: wait, would you actually rather play the Dodgers in a seven-game series than a five-game one? No one would argue that the Phillies are as good as the Dodgers — they’d clearly be underdogs no matter what. But does the extra chance of avoiding the juggernaut make up for the fact that you’re more likely to win in a shorter series?

To investigate this problem, I worked out a simplistic playoff win probability model. For each team, I took their projected rest-of-season runs scored. Then I projected a playoff rotation and how many innings each pitcher would pitch per game. Using those starters’ projected runs allowed per inning and adding in the projected runs allowed per inning by the bullpen (an admittedly inexact science that involves stripping out starters’ projections from the team’s total runs allowed projections), I was able to produce a runs allowed forecast for each starter on each team. Let’s take a look at the Phillies, for example:

Read the rest of this entry »

Quick: Who are the best five hitters in baseball this year? Take a quick gander at the leaderboards, if you’d like, before answering. There’s the WAR leaderboard:

That’s not what you want, though, because defense gets involved there. How about a wRC+ leaderboard instead? That should keep the Xander Bogaerts’s and Marcus Semien’s of the world from intruding on our hitting party:

Trout, Yelich, Bregman, Bellinger, and Rendon. That’s a pretty solid five. It’s also missing an obvious name: Yordan Alvarez, quite possibly the best hitter in baseball this year.

Why isn’t Alvarez on the list? It comes down to the tyranny of the qualified hitter. Setting a plate appearance minimum is a reasonable idea: without it, the best wRC+ this year would belong to Oliver Drake, who singled in his only plate appearance. No one wants that, except perhaps Oliver Drake.

That doesn’t mean that it’s always right to ignore everyone who falls short of the qualification minimum, though. Alvarez has 320 plate appearances this year, a far cry from Drake territory. Because he wasn’t called up until June, he won’t qualify for the batting title this year, but that shouldn’t distract you from the fact that he’s one of the best hitters in the major leagues, full stop. Read the rest of this entry »