Imagine that you were running the Padres, and a genie appeared on July 15. The genie told you you’d carry a one-run lead into the ninth inning of Game 3 in an NLDS clash with the Dodgers. Knowing that, what would you do for the next two weeks? Scramble to the ends of the earth to find the best closer available, that’s what.
Josh Hader stepped to the mound in the top of the ninth inning on Friday night with a one-run lead. He’s been one of the very best relievers in baseball since the first day he stepped on a major league mound. No one has thrown more relief innings since 2017 with a lower ERA. Only 12 relievers have thrown more innings, period. He’s been both durable and dominant — and crucially, available in trade.
Since joining the Padres, Hader has been anything but automatic. There’s reason to wonder whether he’s still a member of that top relief tier; his strikeout rate has plummeted and his walk rate has increased, never a welcome sign for a fastball-dominant reliever. But he’s still Josh Hader, and he put up a vintage Hader month in September. As bullpen toppers go, he’s one of the best. He’d have to be, facing the smallest possible lead against the scariest possible opponent, and in the pressure cooker of the playoffs to boot.
How did the Padres get to this situation that A.J. Preller perfectly outfitted the team for? It’s a long story, and one that wasn’t preordained. If a few early breaks had gone a different way, the Padres might have led by five. They might have trailed. That’s an inevitable fact of baseball. The margins are so slim, the teams so evenly matched from night to night, that no outcome is inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »
Every time Yordan Alvarez has stepped to the plate against the Mariners this week, I’m reminded of Star Trek. There’s an in-show famous training exercise known as the Kobayashi Maru, one every single officer candidate tries. The goal is to rescue a ship named, you guessed it, Kobayashi Maru. It’s famous because you can’t beat it. No matter what you try, you fail. The test isn’t about succeeding; it’s about how you handle failure.
That’s the energy Alvarez is bringing to the plate in the ALDS right now. He always seems to step into big spots — Jeremy Peña has done a great job getting on base in front of him — and delivers runs in droves. He’s 4–8 with two homers and a double and has accounted for seven RBI on those hits. Bring in Robbie Rayto face him? He doesn’t care. Refuse to enter the strike zone? He doesn’t care.
In the bottom of the eighth inning last night, Scott Servais attempted a new Kobayashi Maru solution. With Peña on first base and two outs in a one-run game, he chose to walk Alvarez intentionally. That put a runner in scoring position for Alex Bregman, hardly a weak hitter. Bregman singled home that insurance run the Astros were aiming for, the Mariners didn’t score in the ninth, and that was that. Read the rest of this entry »
Taylor Walls, pinch-hitter. Pinch-hitter Taylor Walls. I keep turning the words around in my head, like a mantra. Taylor Walls, pinch-hitter. Walls, Taylor: hitter, pinch. Sometimes it makes more sense to me, sometimes less; over enough time, anything you repeat enough seems to lose all meaning. It’s called semantic satiation: your brain starts to perceive anything as gibberish if it’s repeated frequently enough.
In this case, I’m not even sure the phrase made sense in the first place. Taylor Walls, pinch-hitter? This guy? The one who hit .172/.268/.285 this year? In the game to hit? It sounds strange right from the jump. Maybe I started from a faulty premise somewhere. Maybe pinch-hitter Taylor Walls only exists in my head. Maybe this is all a strange fever dream.
Only, it’s not. There’s box score evidence of it, right on MLB.com:
There he is, pinch-hitting in a playoff game. He’s hitting for Isaac Paredes, a right-hander, which gives us our first piece of evidence. Walls is a switch-hitter. Surely, then he came into the game to bat left-handed. Indeed he did: he faced off against Nick Sandlin, a right-handed reliever, in that initial plate appearance. Read the rest of this entry »
The Mariners didn’t have an imposing offense this season. They hung their hat on pitching and defense, with a pinch of offense when they most needed it. The Astros turned otherwise-imposing offenses into weaklings; they allowed a shocking 3.2 runs per game, second only to the Dodgers in the majors. They brought out the likely Cy Young winner for today’s matchup. I’m sure you can see where this is going: Seattle scored seven runs and allowed eight.
It’s fair to say that Justin Verlander didn’t have his best stuff today. His slider came out flat; of the first eight that the Mariners swung at, they came up empty on only one. His fastball was scattershot, its normal backspinning movement coming and going, as did his command of the pitch. But he might have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for that meddling kid.
The kid, in this instance, is Julio Rodríguez. He’s an electric talent, a generational Seattle superstar in the mold of Ken Griffey Jr. After a sensational rookie season, he had a quiet start to the playoffs in Toronto, but he was in the straw that stirred the drink for Seattle today. Read the rest of this entry »
After ending an 11-year postseason drought, the Phillies weren’t content with a short stay in October. They got a chance to vanquish their most recent playoff conqueror, the St. Louis Cardinals. Somehow, Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina still loomed large, though the Phillies have remade themselves several times since then. The ghosts of the past couldn’t stop them, though; they won in a sweep.
Now, they’ll get a chance to face some more recent tormentors. The Braves have won the NL East in each of the last four seasons. The Phillies have had playoff hopes in each of those years and ended up on the outside looking in each time. It seems only fitting that the Braves, who haven’t lost the season-long series against the Phillies since 2017, stand in their way after the Cardinals.
Atlanta will be comfortably favored in the series. We give them around a 54% chance of advancing; betting markets have them a hair over 60%. That makes sense to me; the Braves won 101 games while the Phillies muddled their way into the last Wild Card slot. But rather than try to predict who will win – it’s a five-game series, so the odds will tend towards 50% regardless of the teams involved – let’s consider some matchups that will help determine the series. Read the rest of this entry »
You bring in star pitchers for games like this. Cost? That’s for the accountants. You can’t put a price on a lockdown playoff start, the kind that sucks the air out of the opposing offense one out at a time. Bring in an ace, find your way to the playoffs, and the dominance will flow.
Oh, this is awkward. Did you think I was talking about Max Scherzer? I meant Yu Darvish, who the Padres acquired before the 2021 season in a blockbuster trade. Darvish didn’t harness his usual swing-and-miss stuff Friday night, but he’s spent the entire 2022 season learning how to succeed without it. He’s never run a lower strikeout rate or missed fewer bats, but it hasn’t mattered: He’s having his best season in eight years thanks to a raft of soft contact and no walks to speak of.
Darvish has been a cutter-first pitcher for years, and he leaned into it to the tune of 39 cutters in 101 pitches against the Mets. It’s still Yu Darvish we’re talking about, so he threw six different pitch types, but cutters and four-seamers comprised 65% of his offerings. Add in his slider, and the count climbs to 90%. We think of Darvish as overpowering opposing hitters, but he’s become adept at keeping them off balance, with equally offense-suppressing results. The Mets were eternally in a 1-2 count, eternally popping up pitches they were just too early or too late on. Read the rest of this entry »
There isn’t a lot to ponder for most teams when it comes to Wild Card starters. The Padres should start their best three starters. So should the Phillies, Guardians, Blue Jays, Mariners, and Padres. That leaves the Rays, Mets, and Cardinals as teams that have decisions to make, at least in my estimation. The Rays — well, let’s just say that if the Rays called up a sentient ham sandwich to start in the playoffs, we analysts would dig into Ham Sandwichson’s minor league numbers and try to figure out what they saw. There’s no predicting Tampa Bay. That just leaves the Mets and Cardinals.
New York Mets
Wait, the Mets? They have Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom, backed by Chris Bassitt and Carlos Carrasco. They’ve already announced Scherzer for the first game; can’t they just run out deGrom and then Bassitt (or Carrasco) in case of a deciding game? Sure, they could. But they should — and probably will — get fancy by holding deGrom back, something I expect them to do should they win the first game of the series.
This doesn’t sound like a good plan offhand. Leave the best starter on the planet behind Bassitt, a man whose fastball can best be described as “adequate,” in a game where you could end the series with a win? That sounds too cute by half for a franchise eternally stepping on rakes. Read the rest of this entry »
Shohei Ohtani is one of the best pitchers in baseball and one of the best hitters in baseball. That’s the first thing everyone thinks when his name comes up, and it always will be. He pitches and hits! How could you talk about anything other than that?
While that’s true, it’s leaving out something important. Ohtani is fascinating not just because he’s a two-way player, but because he’s completely overhauled his pitching approach in the middle of his best season yet. When Ohtani threw eight two-hit innings in his latest start, he hardly resembled the pitcher he was in 2021 – or even early in 2022.
When Ohtani pitched and hit his way to the American League MVP award last year (my colleague Jay Jaffe recently covered his quest to defend that title), he did so with a garden-variety pitch mix. He relied most on his four-seam fastball and complemented it with two plus secondaries, a slider and a splitter. He mixed in the occasional cutter and curveball, but mostly stuck with his best three offerings. It’s a classic pairing: fastball, breaking ball, offspeed pitch. It worked because all three pitches are excellent; if you had a 100 mph fastball, a fall-off-the-table splitter, and a biting slider, you’d probably do the same.
Over the offseason, though, Ohtani overhauled his slider. He came out this season throwing it harder and more frequently. In his third start of the year, he flirted with perfection against a loaded Astros lineup, and from that point on, he was a slider-first pitcher. Look at his slider usage by month this year and marvel:
For a moment, it seemed like Aaron Judge might not reach 62 home runs. After hitting his 61st in Toronto last Wednesday, he fell into what counts as a slump for him these days: four games, two hits, and a handful of walks. After feeling inevitable for most of September, 62 suddenly felt tenuous.
What a foolish sentiment. Judge, as we’ve seen all year, is a home run machine. He’s an offensive machine, in fact, blowing away the rest of the league with the kind of performance not seen since Barry Bonds in his prime. Unlike most single-season home run chases, Judge’s season isn’t defined by a single round number. His offensive greatness is so robust, so all-encompassing, that treating this accomplishment as the crowning achievement of his season is unfair.
The single-season home run record in major league baseball is 73. It was set in 2001, by Barry Bonds. Sixty-one has a ring to it, of course, because it was the record for so long. It was also the American League and Yankee record, two marks that feel weighty even if they aren’t quite as impressive as “best of all time.” Plenty of the fanfare around Judge comes from the sheer rarity of seeing so many homers, but plenty also comes from the fact that some fans would prefer to ignore everything that happened from 1998 to 2001 and make the record 61 again.
I’m giving you permission to tune all of that out. Sixty-two home runs is cool regardless of what the all-time record is. Only six players have ever accomplished the feat of hitting 60 home runs, and you know all of their names: Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Maris, Babe Ruth, and now Judge. That alone is mind-blowing; baseball has been around an impossibly long time, through periods of high and low scoring, and yet only six players have ever cracked 60 home runs in a year throughout it all.
Does that mean hitting 62 is anti-climactic? I’ll leave that interpretation up to you. But more so than any one increment – would it be special at 63? 65? – I’m impressed by how handily Judge has lapped the league today. Is it cool to pass Maris? Undoubtedly. If nothing else, now Judge’s future offspring can traipse around the country and opine about someone else’s homers hit in the far-off future. More pressingly, though, Judge has left the rest of baseball behind in a way not seen for many years.
Home runs aren’t hit in a vacuum. The majors go through home run droughts and booms for myriad reasons, including pitcher talent, park dimensions, pitching style, and baseball composition. It’s hard to say whether 2022 Judge or 1961 Maris hit under easier conditions, but one way to look at it is to consider how many home runs separate the major league leader from their closest challenger at the end of each season. By that standard, Judge is in impressive company. Here are the top 11 seasons (including a 10th place tie) by home run gap since the dawn of the 20th century:
First, yeah, that Babe Ruth guy was pretty good. Since the 1920s and ’30s, though, no one has done what Judge is doing. The only player to come close was Willie Mays, not exactly shabby company. Last year, Shohei Ohtani won an MVP by playing the way people think Babe Ruth did – pitching and hitting. This year, Judge is likely going to win an MVP by playing like Ruth actually did: with a ludicrous string of home runs that makes everyone else playing look like a weakling by comparison.
Even without that gap between Judge and Kyle Schwarber, though, this season would be an all-timer. The great arrow of baseball time points inexorably towards more uniformity and more talent. It’s a professional game; even the up-and-down bullpen arms and utility infielders of today work year-round at their craft, honing their bodies and minds in pursuit of fame and riches. In a sport where we measure success relative to a league baseline, that means it’s harder than ever to stand out.
This arc of progress isn’t some new phenomenon. Stephen Jay Gould, the late and celebrated biologist, wrote about it in 1986, though he framed it in terms of the extinction of .400 hitters. Standing out from the field simply gets harder with every generation because even the lesser lights of baseball now search for every possible edge.
To wit: wRC+, our marquee offensive statistic here at FanGraphs, considers a player’s production relative to his peers. A 150 wRC+ has no fixed statistical translation. It merely means that a player’s overall batting line is 50% better than the league as a whole. Judge’s mark – 208 heading into today’s action – means that he’s 108% better than the overall league.
In Ruth’s day, when dinosaurs walked the earth and many of baseball’s best players weren’t allowed to play in the same league as him, a 200 wRC+ wasn’t particularly uncommon. But as competition increased, players lapped the rest of the field less often. Ruth and Ted Williams each had career wRC+ marks that approached 200. Since 1972, though, there have only been nine individual seasons that eclipsed 200:
Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas, and Juan Soto all accomplished their feats in shortened seasons. Bonds – well, he’s Barry Bonds. That just leaves Judge and McGwire out of the last half-century. Heck, order every season by wRC+ and exclude Bonds, and that gives Judge the best single season relative to his peers since Williams (223) and Mickey Mantle (217) posted similarly absurd seasons in 1957.
If I had my druthers, that’s how Judge’s season would be remembered. Sixty-two home runs is neat, and I’m glad he got there. A 16-homer lead on the field is spectacular, the stuff that only long-forgotten icons of the game have ever even dreamed of. But putting together an offensive season that blows away the rest of the league to this degree, at a time when his peers are as good as they are? Goodness gracious. We probably won’t see another season like Aaron Judge’s 2022 in our lifetimes. Let’s appreciate it.
Baseball is unique among major American sports for its lengthy schedule. For six months a year, there’s a game nearly every day. Every. Dang. Day. Working for the weekend? There’s no such thing; Saturdays and Sundays are for games. Want to have a lazy one and “work from home” with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and an eye on your emails? Yeah, uh, that’s not going to work, though you can at least wear pajamas in the dugout.
We marvel at the physical prowess of players all the time, but I’m interested in their mental fortitude. It’s hard to keep grinding day in and day out for half a year. It’s harder still when there’s no postseason carrot dangled in front of you. I’ve never personally been in a pennant race, but I imagine a chance at a hunk of metal is a great motivator. Without that powerful incentive, spending a few months with no mental breaks is beyond my ken.
Earlier this year, I observed that down-and-out teams perform worse than expected late in the season. That seems entirely reasonable. I’ve always wondered where that effect comes from, though. Every time I try to look for hitting or pitching performance relative to expectations late in the season, I find a whole lot of nothing. Read the rest of this entry »
