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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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This all started because I wanted to write about Isaac Paredes. He’s my kind of player, excellent despite all sorts of warning signs that what he’s doing shouldn’t be working. Advanced metrics and in-person scouting assessments are both quite negative on Paredes, and yet he’s batting .255/.354/.503, good for a 140 wRC+, in mid-September. He’s been one of the most valuable players on one of the best teams in baseball. It’s so weird!

But lo and behold, the exact thing I wanted to write about has already been written. Curse you, Esteban Rivera! Well, not actually, of course. Esteban’s writing is great, and it’s also of particular interest to me because he’s so observant of hitting mechanics. But I can’t exactly write an article about how Paredes’ pull-happy tendencies have helped him keep regression at bay when there’s a better article talking about just that already on the site. Read the rest of this entry »

All season, the Rangers have been fighting gravity. They stormed out to a lead in the AL West, but they lost Jacob deGrom in the interim. The Astros lurked not far off the pace. But the Rangers persevered and held their lead until the trade deadline. Reinforcements were on the way! Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Aroldis Chapman — they made more improvements than any other team in the league.

They needed it, too, because Nathan Eovaldi hit the IL the next day. Josh Jung followed not long after. As they slogged through August, the Mariners charged into the AL West race, making it a three-way fracas. No sooner did Eovaldi return than Adolis García succumbed to injury. And now, with the playoffs hanging in the balance and every win at a premium, this:

Right-hander Max Scherzer is expected to miss the remainder of the regular season with a strained teres major — a muscle that connects the scapula to the humerus. Scherzer is, Texas GM Chris Young told reporters, "unlikely" to pitch in the playoffs.

Brutal news for the Rangers.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 13, 2023

What rotten luck. For those of you who aren’t anatomists, the teres major is a muscle in the rear shoulder that gets stressed by pitching. It’s been in the news quite a bit this year, in fact. Justin Verlander missed the first month of the season with a low-grade teres major strain. Triston McKenzie missed the first two months of the season with a strained teres major. John Means’ return from Tommy John surgery was delayed by a teres major injury. None of these injuries have seemed to linger, and none required surgery, but the timeline is unfortunately immutable: there’s no chance of Scherzer making it back for the regular season, and little shot of him pitching in the playoffs either. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you at the start of this: I never quite bought into what Luis Arraez was doing. When he won the batting title last year, I was skeptical. When he was traded from Minnesota to Miami before the season, I loved the Twins’ side of the deal. When he was flirting with a .400 batting average at the All-Star break, I relegated him to Honorable Mention status on our top 50 trade value list. He just perpetually flummoxed me, slapping singles while I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Arraez has been downright putrid of late. He’s been below replacement level since the start of August. He’s batting .262 with a .282 OBP in that span, which is hard to fathom for a guy who is still only striking out 6.7% of the time. This isn’t a victory lap article, though. It won’t last. It can’t last. I don’t believe in this version of Arraez any more than I believed in the .400 hitter from June.

In trying to solve this mystery, I let other people guide me. Honestly, I’m not the person to figure out what Arraez is doing wrong, because I never quite understood what he was doing right. So instead, I read a bunch of articles about the good times. Then I looked to see whether Arraez had stopped doing the things that had so recently made him special. Read the rest of this entry »

You already know the deal with the Blue Jays, so much so that I barely have to mention it. The good players on their team? They’re major league legacies. As kids, they were in major league clubhouses. There are cute pictures of them, chubby-cheeked, watching their famous parents win various accolades. Their major league success was hardly preordained, but let’s just say it didn’t come out of nowhere.

That lazy narrative had already sprung a few leaks, even before this year. Matt Chapman and George Springer don’t quite fit the bill. Kevin Gausman and Jordan Romano don’t either. Cavan Biggio isn’t even a starter. But there’s perhaps no better counter-example than Davis Schneider, the Jays’ newest star. Schneider flew so far under the radar that the metaphor doesn’t work; he was almost subterranean. He was a 28th-round draft pick in 2017, a round that doesn’t exist anymore. He didn’t reach Double-A until the end of the 2022 season. Now he’s the best hitter on the Jays, and in at least a few contrived ways that I’ll endeavor to show you in this article, he might be the best hitter of all time.

I know what you’re thinking. “Really, Ben? The best hitter of all time? He’s not even the best hitter on his own team right now.” To that I say, sure, you might think that. But that’s based on your perception of the future. If we limit our analysis to merely what has happened on the field, no Blue Jays hitter even approaches Schneider’s magnificence. Read the rest of this entry »