Speculating about the playoffs in August always feels strange. The regular season isn’t over. It isn’t nearly over, either – the 45 or so games remaining on each team’s schedule will change how we think about them. The best two records in baseball belong to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros right now, but some team could go 35-10 and wrest that title away from them.

Still, today I’m going to speculate about the playoffs. Whether the Dodgers and Astros hold onto their top spots or not, they’re both playoff locks – our Playoff Odds give them both 100% odds of reaching the postseason. In the past week, they’ve also each gotten rotten injury news that will affect their playoff rosters. So suspend your inherent skepticism of articles in August that talk about October as we consider the playoff impact of losing Walker Buehler and Michael Brantley. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sunday afternoon, Drew Rasmussen had everything working. For eight innings, his fastball/cutter combination kept Orioles batters off balance, with intermittent sliders only deepening their confusion. The first 24 Orioles to come to the plate walked away empty-handed. It took Rasmussen just 79 pitches to navigate those eight innings. He was on course for both a perfect game and a Maddux, and the Orioles looked unlikely to stop him.

They managed to break through. Jorge Mateo led off the ninth inning by lacing a double down the third base line. He advanced on a groundout, then scored on a wild pitch. Rasmussen didn’t even manage a complete game; after Brett Phillips reached on a dropped third strike, Kevin Cash went to the bullpen for the last two outs of the game. It wasn’t the crowning achievement for Rasmussen that it might have been, but this season has been a success nonetheless, and a near-perfecto presents a great excuse to examine what’s gone right.

I last checked in on Rasmussen after his first start this season, when he adopted a new sweeping slider and threw it a ton. In 2021, he’d been a fastball-first pitcher with a slider that changed shape as he worked on it throughout the year. In 2022, he came out featuring the slider, with a new cutter to boot. Would 2022 be the year of the sweeper for Rasmussen?

As it turns out, not so much. His first few starts represented a local high in slider usage, and he’s been leaning on the pitch less and less since. He’s filled in that gap by going back to his high-octane fastball and by trusting that new cutter:

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On Wednesday, the Detroit Tigers fired general manager Al Avila. Mired in last place in the American League Central in what was supposed to be a resurgent season, the firing fit the mood around Detroit. This was meant to be the Tigers’ triumphant return to postseason contention, a culmination of seven years of stockpiling and honing. Instead, it’s been another lost season, adding to the gulf that separates today’s Tigers from the perennial World Series contenders of a decade ago.

It didn’t have to happen this way. Going into the year, we projected the Tigers as a 76-win team. That projection felt conservative; they won 77 games in 2021 and added Javier Báez and Eduardo Rodriguez to a promising core of young talent. Casey Mize, Tarik Skubal, and Matt Manning all stood ready to anchor the rotation. Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene, two of the top prospects in all of baseball, would give the offense a boost. On the eve of the season, they added Austin Meadows. All of the arrows were pointing up.

Four months later, all of that optimism has disappeared. Báez is having one of his worst years as a professional. Rodriguez got hurt early in the year and then hit the restricted list while dealing with a personal matter. He last pitched in the majors on May 18; when he took the mound for Single-A Lakeland this past Saturday, it was his first game action since June 9. Meadows, the third piece of the team’s major league talent trifecta, has missed extended time with a laundry list of injuries, and playing hurt when available has resulted in sub-replacement-level production.

That alone would hurt the offense, but it gets worse. Torkelson, who came into the season as our fifth-ranked prospect overall, made the Opening Day roster. To put it mildly, things haven’t gone according to plan since. His .197/.282/.295 line led to a demotion to Triple-A, where he’s also scuffled. Greene broke his foot in spring training and hasn’t lit the world on fire since joining the big league club in June. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a spray chart of Manny Machado’s groundballs this year:

And here’s a heat map of all of the grounders he’s hit in his career:

Oh, hi there. Don’t worry, you haven’t inadvertently stepped into a list of every player’s batted ball tendencies. Part of writing is building a sense of mystery. I’m just setting you up for a payoff later on. Whoops, gave that one away too easily! In any case, let’s move on. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a one-number kind of analyst, Teoscar Hernández is having an unremarkable season. After posting a 132 wRC+ last year, he’s back at it with a 129 mark this year. His overall batting line is down – .274/.326/.495 compared to .296/.346/.524 in 2021 – but between playing all of his home games in Toronto instead of Dunedin and Buffalo and the overall decline in league-wide offense, he’s been roughly the same hitter relative to league average in both years.

If you look at his underlying rates, you still won’t see much difference. Hernández is walking 0.5 percentage points more often this season than last season. He’s striking out 1.4 percentage points more often. He’s running a similar ISO, a similar BABIP, and a similar barrel rate. But zoom in juuust a little bit and things splinter:

Here’s one story you could tell about his season: he scuffled to start the year, made some adjustments that righted the ship somewhat but resulted in too many strikeouts, and finally dialed things in. You wouldn’t even necessarily be wrong; descriptively, those things all happened. Under the hood, though, Hernández made a big adjustment, one you won’t see in that data. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife spent three months working in Australia in 2019. I didn’t get to visit her thanks to a hectic work schedule, but that’s okay, because she brought back plenty of mementos from the trip. There were delicious snacks, wonderful pictures (check out the Twelve Apostles sometime if you haven’t), a t-shirt from the Australian Open, and excellent stories. None of that’s relevant for today, though. What’s relevant for today is what one of her coworkers called sharks: bitey boys.

That’s an excellent turn of phrase. It calls to mind a certain laziness combined with purity of purpose. They’re just boys hanging out, except for their one hobby: biting. Take an unsuspecting swim in their waters and you might be in for a bite. That’s just what they do.

Why bring this up on a baseball blog in 2022? I’d like to talk to you about a major league player who embodies that ethos. He’s mostly just there to hang out and live life. Sometimes, though, it’s time to bite – or in this case, swing for the fences. Meet Daniel Vogelbach, a shark lying in wait for a delicious fastball to devour. Read the rest of this entry »

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From 2018 through the first half of 2021, watching Jacob deGrom carve his way through whatever hapless lineup the Mets faced was a constant. His 1.94 ERA over that stretch was wildly impressive, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. He wasn’t just enjoyable for the ERA, or even his entire statistical line, though that also boggled the mind.

To me, what was most impressive about deGrom is how he seemed to make the opposition inconsequential. It didn’t matter who he was facing, really. Every start was deGrom against himself, a pitcher perfecting his craft. When he located well (and he frequently did), he might as well have been pitching to cardboard cutouts. Fastball on the upper corner, slider falling away beneath it — the specifics changed, but deGrom’s repetition of his pitches never did.

Then disaster fell. Though he’d been remarkably durable during his run, missing only a few games with lat issues early in the 2021 season, the fun came to an end last July. He sprained his flexor tendon — the tendon that runs from forearm to finger, which sounds pretty important for pitching — and never threw another pitch that year. Some of that was the Mets falling out of the race; the team said he would have been ready for the postseason.

After he missed the first half of this season with a right scapula stress reaction, no one would blame you for wondering whether the ride was coming to an end. An entire year without a major league start is an eternity for someone who didn’t get Tommy John surgery. But I have good news for those of you who, like me, found watching deGrom’s casual dominance calming and delightful: He’s back, and with little rust to be found.
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It’s the day after the trade deadline, which always means one thing: baseball writers begrudgingly cleaning up their gross, sparkling-water-can-filled workspaces. Oh, wait, actually it means two things: that, and a flood of “who won the trading deadline” articles.

This year, I’m going to do something slightly different. I won’t claim that I’ve re-invented the wheel, but I’ve always thought that those winner/loser columns are too deterministic and don’t leave enough room for nuance. I thought about listing each team that made a trade as a winner, with a “maybe” appended to indicate that we don’t know what will happen in the future; if you really want to know who won and who lost, check back in October… or maybe in October of 2025. I thought about making each team a “loser (maybe)” for the same reason. In the end, I settled on some broad archetypes. I’ll throw a subjective grade on how much I like the move, and also endeavor to explain the risks around each team’s deadline. You can find all of our deadline coverage here. Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »