The end of the regular season is always bittersweet for me. On one hand, playoff baseball is one of my favorite times of year. Taking the leisurely pace of the game and injecting it with win-or-go-home drama makes for great viewing. Who could forget last year’s rally goose, or Bryce Harper’s monster NLCS-deciding homer? Who could forget the Astros winning one for Dusty?

But there’s no more regular-season baseball to watch, and that’s also something I love. No-drama afternoons, sixth innings where your team is down five and the announcers are looking for something to talk about — that’s the regular rhythm of my summer, and it’ll be weird to move on without it. So to ease the transition from one style of baseball to another, I gathered a few whimsical things and a few high-drama things and combined them into one, well, Five Things. Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Twins and a short first round playoff series: Name a more iconic duo. The Twins have been quietly excellent this year, compiling the seventh-best run differential in baseball. To be sure, some of that is because they have the good fortune of facing fellow AL Central clubs, but a lot of it is because their team is full of good pitchers. They’ll meet the Toronto Blue Jays in a Wild Card clash. You’ve probably watched and heard a lot about the Blue Jays this year, and I’ll get to them, but let’s start with the thing you probably most need to hear: The Twins are good, not just the token AL Central representative, and they got a lot better when you probably weren’t paying attention.

The Minnesota rotation might be short on name recognition relative to some other playoff squads, but Pablo López and Sonny Gray are each top 10 pitchers by WAR this year. Joe Ryan, Kenta Maeda, and Bailey Ober are both above average as well – Ryan will likely draw the third start, but the other two will surely be available to relieve him if necessary. They’re one of those classic playoff tropes, the team you hate to face because so much of their value is concentrated in good pitching. López has gone six or more innings while allowing one or fewer runs 11 times this year; Gray has done it nine times himself. It’s easy to imagine the Jays coming into Minneapolis and leaving with very few runs to show for their trip. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you, FanGraphs reader: I can’t imagine that FanGraphs analysis is exactly what you’re most interested in right now, baseball-wise. The exciting things going on are the games on the field as they happen. These playoff races are amazing. The schedule sets up with a wonderful mix of both-teams-in games and rivals playing spoiler. In that context, I can’t imagine that many people are dying to read about Tommy Kahnle’s changeup-heavy arsenal, just to pick on a random article I recently wrote.

That’s never stopped me from writing about whatever random thing caught my eye, but I thought I’d take advantage of a slow week (again, just in my kind of baseball analysis, not in actual baseball) to go over some predictions I made before the season. I like to look back on my own work for a few reasons — not just to bask in successes, but that’s certainly part of it. It’s also useful to talk process and separate bad outcomes from bad ex-ante decisions, though to be honest, that’s really hard, so I’m not certain I’ll get it right today.

I’ve named the column after one of my favorite weird sports things. I always knew this, but I’ve noticed it more since I started playing in a recreational softball league. After you return to the dugout, there’s a pretty good chance someone will slap your butt with their glove. It doesn’t matter what you did, there’s always a reason to. Did you score a run or make a great defensive play? It often comes with an “attaboy” or “way to go.” Did you make an out or embarrass yourself in the field? “Get ‘em next time” is nearly guaranteed. The butt slap? That’s a constant. The words that go with it? They’re versatile. Without further ado, let’s figure out whether my hypothetical dugout should be congratulating or consoling me. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I looked into the odds displayed on Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball broadcasts. I found them to not be very good. Then I stopped paying attention; there are a ton of baseball games on every week, most of which Apple does not broadcast, and even when I did watch an Apple game, I basically ignored the odds. I knew they were silly, after all – why distract myself by looking at them?

Of course, I didn’t really expect that to keep going indefinitely. Apple is a massive company. They have more than 150,000 full-time employees, and a ridiculous proportion of that group knows how to code. At its core, this is a data problem. There are companies I’d trust over Apple to solve a data problem, but there aren’t a lot of companies, you know? Sure, they outsourced their predictions to nVenue, a sports analytics company, but they’re Apple. Surely they’d find a way to make this all work. I noted their relative inaccuracy in my head as a temporary curiosity and moved on.

Last month, I started compiling data for an update. It’s all well and good to assume things have changed, but at some point, you have to go verify it. I decided to wait for the back half of the season because of the way I designed my test, which I’ll now explain. Similar to last time, I started by watching a bunch of games. This time, I got data from the 12 Apple TV+ games played between August 18 and September 22. I watched the entirety of those broadcasts and noted the last probability, if any, displayed before every pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

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After a week off to recharge my batteries — and watch other sports, gasp — it’s time for another installment of five things that caught my eye in baseball this week. Honestly, this list is almost superfluous at this time of year. The standings are so jammed together that half the games in baseball have playoff implications. Teams are getting hot at the right time or collapsing down the stretch in equal measure. Still, you can’t watch everything, so here are some delightful moments you might have missed.

1. Legends, in the Fall
It’s been a rough year for Adam Wainwright. He has put up by far the worst season of his career — a 7.40 ERA says all you really need to know about it — and the Cardinals have collapsed from the perpetual contention he enjoyed for the vast majority of his career. They’ve seemingly played more meaningless games this year than in Wainwright’s entire previous time with the club. Read the rest of this entry »

They say everything in baseball happens in cycles. Actually, I’m not sure if they say that, but it certainly sounds like a real quote. And that’s fortunate for me, because today I’d like to talk about another thing that happens in cycles: Tommy Kahnle being a valuable reliever. Years after it seemed like that might never happen again, he’s back on the Yankees and pitching well, to the tune of a 2.66 ERA and 3.97 FIP across 40.2 innings of work, that despite a four-walk disaster of an outing on Wednesday night.

The last time Kahnle was good and healthy was also with the Yankees, in 2019. Before that, you’d have to go back to 2017 (split between the White Sox and Yankees). He was hurt and ineffective in 2018, then only pitched a combined 13.2 innings from 2020 to ’22 due to injury. But now here he is, back at it, though you might not know it thanks to the Yankees’ general desultoriness (probably not a word, but my spellcheck didn’t flag it, so let’s roll with it). Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles have a tight grip on the AL East race. With time running out on the season, they have a 2.5 game lead on the Rays with the tiebreaker in hand; the division title comes with homefield advantage throughout the AL playoffs. Their +127 run differential is the third-best in the AL. So then why oh why do we at FanGraphs think they only have a 5.5% chance of winning the World Series, worse than the Astros and Rays and just ahead of the Blue Jays and Mariners?

It’s happened two years in a row now. FanGraphs keeps doubting the Orioles, and they keep winning. But don’t you worry, disgruntled O’s fans. As the resident Orioles believer – I picked them to win their division before the season, even if that was mostly a statement that they were underrated rather than a sincere belief that they were the best team in the East – I’m here to dig through the madness and see what’s going on.

First things first, in these “why don’t the odds believe in my team?” articles, it’s always good to walk through how the odds work. They’re quite straightforward, though straightforward isn’t the same thing as simple. We start at the player level, averaging the Steamer and ZiPS projections to come up with projections for every player in baseball. Then we manually build a depth chart for each team. From there, we stitch those pieces together to come up with team-level offensive, defensive, and pitching projections. We plug those into the BaseRuns formula and get projections of how many runs per game each team will score and allow, then convert those to expected winning percentages using Pythagenpat expectation.
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Last week, David Laurila asked me an interesting question. He’d been talking baseball with some baseball players – it’s true, we really do have great jobs – and the conversation landed on Josh Hader. That got Laurila thinking about Hader’s similarities to Spencer Strider. The crux of the discussion: Would Hader have ended up as a lefty version of Strider if, after appearing in the major leagues as a reliever, he’d transitioned back to the starting role he held in the minors?

I love questions like this. They’re fun to research, and I also feel no pressure to reach a definitive answer. Would Hader have ended up as a great starter? It’s clearly unknowable. That gives me a lot more latitude to speculate. In addition, this question isn’t just about Hader. It’s about whether future pitchers with Hader-esque profiles make more sense as starters or in the bullpen. No wrong answers and broad implications? Sign me up.

First things first, let’s talk about what it means to look like Strider as a starter. Strider has two standout pitches, but it’s really one standout pitch and a capable understudy. His fastball explodes through the top of the zone and screws hitters into the ground. It’s not so much the velocity – though that doesn’t hurt – but the shape and release point that combine to bamboozle opposing hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

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