Every September, there are three different versions of baseball being played in the majors. For a number of teams, the year is all but over, and the last month is about hitting some personal milestones, playing spoiler, and working on next year. For another group – seemingly half of the American League this year – September is about fighting for a spot in the playoffs. And then there’s a final group, teams that are already headed to the postseason. For them, the last month of the season is about jockeying for seeding and hoping like crazy that none of their pitchers gets hurt.

With 100.0% odds to make the playoffs, the Rays fall into that final group this year. Sure, the AL East race isn’t over, but we give them an 80% chance of winning the division, and that title would come with a first-round bye. That “jockeying for seeding” part is going very well so far, in other words. But hoping for pitcher health? That ship has unfortunately already sailed. On September 4, the team placed co-ace Shane McClanahan on the 15-day IL with forearm tightness. A day later, middle reliever Garrett Cleavinger hit the same IL with the same injury.

The Rays have felt approximately one starter short for the majority of the 2026 season. Though they’ve put up excellent numbers as a group, the composition of that group has varied massively. Nick Martinez has provided enviable bulk. Drew Rasmussen is in the middle of the best season of his already very good career; he’s set a career high in innings pitched, and he’s on course to flirt with a top-three Cy Young finish. McClanahan, on the other hand, had been atop the starting hierarchy in Tampa Bay for years, health permitting — a caveat that is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

After missing the entirety of the 2024 and 2025 seasons, McClanahan returned with no ill effects and was one of the best pitchers in the AL during the first half of this season. He hit the IL on July 31 with lower back tightness, but truthfully, the team probably wasn’t terribly broken up about it. His workload was already in question given the aforementioned two years of injury recovery, and a back injury notably isn’t an arm ailment. McClanahan returned only days after the minimum stint and made four starts on a normal schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

Quick programming note: I’m working on a very special bonus Five Things that would normally run in this slot, but as with most bonus things, it’s taking a bit longer than expected. Look for it next week, along with a regular Five Things. In the meantime, join me in puzzling over what’s gotten into the A’s.

In 2023, the Oakland A’s were putrid. They won only 50 games, got outscored by 339 runs, and generally looked like the worst team in baseball. But over the next two years, sandwiched around a move to Sacramento, they figured things out. In 2024, they improved by 19 games. In 2025, they improved again, to a 76-86 record. Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Tyler Soderstrom, Brent Rooker, and Jacob Wilson either broke in or broke out in that span. Coming into 2026, the A’s weren’t favorites in the AL West, but they were trendy playoff picks, with various market and model estimates spitting out projections between 75 and 80 wins.

Yeah, about that. The American League is about as bad as it’s ever been this year, and the AL West is particularly poor. Eighty-two wins might be enough to take the division. But the A’s aren’t part of the race. They’re 54-86, a mere game ahead of the Angels for the worst record in baseball. They’ve been outscored by 194 runs, 54 runs clear of the Rockies in second-to-last place. I had to investigate what went down – both because rubbernecking is fun, and because I want to figure out what I should think about the A’s for 2027.

The obvious place to start is the offense. Last season saw four different Athletics eclipse 3.0 WAR on the batting side – Kurtz and Wilson had standout rookie seasons while Langeliers and Soderstrom both broke out to establish new career highs. Throw in Rooker and Lawrence Butler as offensive building blocks, mix in a blazing-fast center fielder (your choice of Denzel Clarke or Henry Bolte), and the bones of an upper echelon offense were clearly there. Even if you count the two center field options as only one position filled, that’s seven spots spoken for. The A’s traded for Jeff McNeil to fill an eighth spot. Their plan was surely to score a boatload of runs – a great plan in the snug confines of Sutter Health Park. Read the rest of this entry »

Four years ago, Arte Moreno explored a sale of the Angels. No firm bids materialized, and he ended that exploration the following year. Three years later, however, the tide has suddenly turned. On Tuesday, Moreno agreed to sell the team to multi-sport owner Stan Kroenke in a deal that values the Angels at $4 billion, a record-setting price for the sale of a majority stake in an MLB team.

They say it never rains in Southern California. They also say that when it rains, it pours. Consider those two adages, and then apply them both to the recent ownership changes in MLB. Earlier this year, Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano bought the Padres at a $3.9 billion valuation. Kroenke’s purchase of the Angels sets a new record, the team-sale equivalent of a free agent signing a contract that guarantees them $1 million more than the previous high. It’s a boom time to be selling baseball teams. In fact, these two sales might have set records for transfers of controlling stakes, but the Yankees blew the competition away earlier this year when they sold a minority share to Apollo, a private equity group, at a valuation of roughly $10 billion. It’s a boom time for baseball ownership in general, in other words.

Moreno purchased the Angels in 2003, in the wake of their World Series title. His relationship with both the city of Anaheim and the fans of the team is complicated. At first, his free-spending ways made up for his desire to rebrand the club as a Los Angeles concern. The team was quite successful in the beginning of Moreno’s stewardship, averaging 90 wins in the first 10 years after he purchased the club. That was the best stretch in Angels history by far; they made the playoffs five times, more than the four they’d racked up in the prior 42 years the franchise existed before Moreno bought it. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to give you a little cheat sheet for writing about deadline moves. If you’re talking about a seller who traded a player for a minimal return and you’re looking for silver linings, you can mention “opportunity.” It has two big advantages. First, it’s nebulous and hard to disprove. If you make a claim about a specific player, it might be wrong. If you say that a roster spot is an opportunity, how will someone counter that? But more importantly, roster spots really are opportunities, so your analysis will have the advantage of being correct. Case in point: Nate Lavender.

If you’re wondering who that is, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. Lavender debuted on August 4, the day after the Mets sent half the team out of town at the trade deadline. He was one of five Mets pitchers called up that day, a hockey-style line shift in the bullpen. Not all of them panned out. Xzavion Curry and Chayce McDermott are back in the minors. Jefry Yan has a fun strikeout celebration and a 5.18 FIP. But Lavender has been good enough that he’s worked his way from his big league debut into a setup role in three weeks. Opportunity, indeed.

A quick recap of Lavender’s minor league career: He was the Mets’ 14th-round draft pick in 2021, climbed the minor league ladder despite below-average velocity and stuff, and then blew out his elbow early in the 2024 season. He had an internal brace surgery that summer, and then the Rays plucked him away in the Rule 5 draft that December. They parked him on the 60-day injured list for the entirety of the 2025 season, as a bone spur in his elbow delayed his rehab. When the year ended and the 60-day IL disappeared, the Rays returned him to the Mets rather than place him on their 40-man roster. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I took a two month hiatus from writing this column because we had a heavy summer of evaluating baseball, and as it turns out, it’s tough to both analyze baseball and watch it entirely out of a sense of whimsy. But now the tables have turned. There are no more studies to do on prospect valuation. The trade values have been tabulated. The deadline has passed. The playoffs are still a month away. There’s not much to do other than watch baseball and enjoy, whether it’s playoff races, dominant performances, exciting debuts, or just the beauty of a well-played game on a warm summer evening. So kick back, relax, and join me in thanking Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the article format that I’ve been riffing on for the past four years.

1. Rangy Infielders
During the peak of the infield shift, 5-3 double plays had a brief heyday. With three defenders on the right side of the infield against most lefty batters, the third baseman played a de facto shortstop for large portions of most games. When those lefties grounded out to short with runners on, third basemen somewhat frequently fielded the ball, stepped on second, and threw to first to complete the play. But with two infielders now required to be on each side of second base, it wouldn’t make any sense for a third baseman to get the ball and then sprint past the shortstop to tag the base and make the relay throw.

Or would it? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I saw Aaron Ashby lean on his loopy curveball when he found himself in a jam:

Later that day, I was watching the Tigers when Drew Anderson used his own big hook to finish off an at-bat:

I’m a longtime admirer of the giant 12-to-6 curveball, a pitch that is on the decline across the majors. There’s a good reason for that – without delving into it too deeply, velocity is very important. The league-wide curveball rate is down by nearly a quarter over the last decade, and the curves that remain tend to be harder and sharper than the ones I grew up seeing. But no amount of cold hard data about the pitch’s effectiveness would make it less visually enjoyable for me. So in this, the age of the looping breaker’s decline, I set out to find some good examples of my favorite pitch, even as guys throw it less and less frequently.

How do you define a looping curveball? My first thought was to look for the curveball that falls the most from its initial trajectory as it heads home. There’s just one problem with that definition, and that problem’s name is Victor Robles:

Amazingly, this clip doesn’t come from either the 22-0 or 19-2 blowouts the Mariners endured last week; they’re having some kind of month on the “getting blown out” front. But that perfectly located curveball had an absurd amount of downward movement because he threw it at 46 mph. I don’t even think it’s a curveball, to be honest; Statcast says it had nearly a foot of positive vertical break from backspin. In any case, clearly this criteria isn’t sufficient for our purposes. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday afternoon, the Astros gave up seven unanswered runs to lose to the A’s 7-6. That loss, against the team with the worst record in the American League, dropped Houston below .500 for the first time this month, and into a tie with the Texas Rangers for the AL West division lead. That was the last game of a 3-9 homestand. The capper to this bummer of a fortnight in Houston followed promptly; the team and GM Dana Brown mutually agreed to part ways Sunday evening, which is team-and-manager speak for firing him.

Boy, am I bummed that I’ve already made an Apollo 13 reference about the Astros this year. Two in the same season would just be too many. So allow me to use some Shakespeare instead: Something is rotten in the state of Texas. While a 12-game stretch of poor play is a strange reason to change GMs, this move wasn’t about a couple of poor weeks of play. Instead, it’s about the last couple of years of poor play; the once-dominant Astros missed the playoffs in 2025, and this year they’re on track for their worst record since 2014 (excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when they went 29-31 but still made the playoffs). The farm system is one of the worst in baseball – 29th in our farm system rankings. The big league team has been outscored by 44 runs this year, and BaseRuns suggests Houston has played even a bit worse than that. Things really have deteriorated in Space City.

What’s meaningfully less clear is how much of that blame should be apportioned to Brown. He joined the Astros immediately after their 2022 World Series victory, replacing the departing James Click. Not many incoming GMs inherit a roster that just won the whole ball of yarn, but that cuts both ways. Brown inherited a great roster as well as the kind of dysfunction that leads a team and its GM to split up while simultaneously reaching the peak of the sport. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Mathemadage, a new series where I investigate time-honored baseball adages using whatever data I can get my hands on and explore whether there’s any validity to them. I’ll apply my normal Ben Clemens mixture of a bit of math, a bit of intuition, and plenty of healthy doubt in declaring strong solutions to complicated problems. I hope to demonstrate that some of these true and others false, but I’m sure that many will end up in a suggestive but unprovable middle ground. And true to the premise of the series, we’re starting off with a fun adage that resists easy conclusions.

If you watch a baseball game from start to finish, you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a hitter get tied up on an inside fastball. “Got jammed,” the announcer might say, or maybe, “He just couldn’t get around on that one.” It’s a visual reminder of one of the pitching truisms that I learned as a kid and haven’t forgotten since: hard in, soft away.

I intuitively look for this pitching pattern when I’m watching a game. Hitters look incredibly uncomfortable when they’re trying to get their bat around a fastball in on their hands. Now that we have a few years of bat tracking data, though, I can do better than just vaguely searching for this effect. So this week, when I saw someone get jammed, I winced in sympathy and then started furiously downloading spreadsheets. Read the rest of this entry »