Coming into the American League Division Series, the Chicago White Sox faced a tough task: controlling the tireless Houston Astros offense, which paced the majors in scoring. They’re a nightmarish matchup; high on-base hitters up top, power in the middle, and enough firepower that Carlos Correa (134 wRC+) bats sixth and Kyle Tucker (147 wRC+) seventh.

Chicago’s plan? Fastballs. That’s less by design and more because Lance Lynn, their Game 1 starter, throws more of them than anyone else in baseball. Is that a smart plan against the Astros? No, it is not — they were the third-best fastball-hitting team in baseball this year by run value. On the other hand, they were also the third-best team against breaking pitches and the second-best against offspeed offerings, so it’s not as though there were easy choices. But fastballs? In this economy? It felt like it might be a long afternoon.

For an inning, Lynn managed it. He mixed four-seamers and cutters, keeping Houston hitters off-balance. His cutter could almost be called a slider, and it’s key to keeping opponents uneasy; it’s the only pitch he throws with glove-side movement. He set the side down in order — but even then, Alex Bregman smashed a line drive directly at Leury García for the third out. The cutters weren’t doing enough to keep Astros hitters from sitting on other fastballs.
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Do you subscribe to the notion that styles make fights? I’m not 100% sure what that means — I’ve never been a boxing fan. But styles make for entertaining baseball games, and the Cardinals and Dodgers set out to prove that during Wednesday night’s National League Wild Card game.

The Dodgers brought the heavy artillery: a coterie of MVP winners, Silver Sluggers, and All-Stars who led the NL in scoring. Their splendor was slightly diminished by Max Muncy’s absence, but the offense still felt like a battering ram. Their starter? None other than Max Scherzer, the modern avatar of power pitching, all glowering stares and challenge fastballs.

The Cardinals? They’ve got star hitters, too, but nothing like the Dodgers’ onslaught. They thrived this year both by smacking home runs — Tyler O’Neill and Paul Goldschmidt are large and powerful — and by playing the best defense in the majors. Their pitcher of choice Wednesday? Crafty old Adam Wainwright, who rarely tops 90 mph on the radar gun but makes up for it with a time-bending curveball and pinpoint command. Read the rest of this entry »

Nathan Eovaldi had it all working. Through his first five innings of work, he had a spectacular game brewing: seven strikeouts, two hits, no walks, and no runs. The Red Sox were already ahead 3–0. Everything was coming up Boston.

After a strikeout to begin the sixth inning, Eovaldi faced the top of the Yankees’ order. Suddenly, things got tough. Anthony Rizzo clobbered a home run. Aaron Judge followed with an infield single, narrowly beating out a throw from Xander Bogaerts. Suddenly, the tying run was at the plate — and it was freaking Giancarlo Stanton, who had already doinked a ball off of the Green Monster earlier in the night.

Ten years ago, that would be the introduction to an article about one of two things: either Eovaldi’s heroic stand where he faced down his doom and retired Stanton and Joey Gallo, or the Yankees’ dramatic comeback from a 3-0 deficit. But last night, Alex Cora went to the bullpen.

It wasn’t a pitch count issue, to say the least. Eovaldi had thrown only 71 pitches, carving through the New York lineup with great speed. It wasn’t a handedness issue; Cora went with a righty to replace him. It wasn’t even a homer-proneness issue, a handy thing to keep an eye on when the tying run stands at the plate: Eovaldi induces more grounders than does Ryan Brasier, the pitcher who replaced him, and has allowed fewer home runs per inning pitched, both in 2021 and his career.
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Saturday afternoon, Corbin Burnes made several uncharacteristic missteps. He walked Max Muncy on five pitches, only the 34th walk he’d issued all year. The next batter, Justin Turner, deposited a 3-1 cutter into the left field stands for a three-run home run, only the seventh Burnes had allowed all season.

He pitched another inning without incident, then — back in the lead in the ERA race after briefly falling behind Max Scherzer — came out of the game for good, his regular season now complete. That ineffective outing might worry Brewers fans for the playoffs, but it also emphasized how spectacular the rest of his year has been. Surrendering a walk and a home run? It happens to everyone — batters hit 5,944 homers this season, third-most in history, and walked roughly 9% of the time they came to the plate. But it doesn’t happen to Burnes — and that’s why he deserves to win the NL Cy Young this year.

There’s no single criteria for the most outstanding pitcher in the National League, but in my eyes, Burnes has claims on several axes, and no real warts. More than that, his 2021 season is a towering achievement, one that we’ll hear about in 20 years when we talk about the best pitching seasons in history. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I tested how well our playoff odds have predicted eventual playoff teams. Today, I’m going to slice the data a few more ways to get a more robust look at what our odds do well, and where they have fewer advantages over other models. It will be number- and picture-heavy, word-light. Without further ado, let’s get started.

A discussion with Tom Tango got me wondering about why our Depth Charts-based odds do so well early in the season relative to other systems. Their advantage is particularly strong at the beginning of the season and fades as the year goes on. For all charts in the article that are based on days into a season, I’ve excluded the 2020 season for obvious reasons. Here are the mean average errors for each of the three systems over the first 60 days of the season:

What’s driving that early outperformance? In essence, it comes down to one thing: the projection-based model is willing to give teams high or low probabilities of making the postseason right away. Our season-to-date stats mode is hesitant to do that, and the coin flip mode obviously can’t do it. Take a look at the percentage of teams that each system moves to the extremes of the distribution — either less than 5% or more than 95% to make the playoffs — by day of season:

Why does this matter? If you’re judging based on mean absolute error, making extreme predictions that turn out to be right is a huge tailwind. If you predict something as 50% likely, you’ll have an error of 0.5 no matter what. The further you predict from the center of the distribution, the more chance you have to reduce your error.

Of course, that only works if you get it right. If you simply randomly predicted either 5% or 95% chances without any information about the teams involved, you’d do just as poorly as predicting 50% for everything. Making extreme picks when you have information that suggests they’re likely to be right is the name of the game. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the time of year when folks doubt the playoff odds. With the St. Louis Cardinals going from 71-69 long-shots to postseason clinchers, and the rollercoaster that is the American League Wild Card race, you’ve probably heard the skeptics’ refrains. “You had the Jays at 5%, and now you have them at 50%. Why did you hate them so much?” Or, hey, this tongue-in-cheek interview response that mainly makes me happy Adam Wainwright reads our site:

Adam Wainwright: “FanGraphs had us at like a negative 400 percent chance to make the playoffs, and we just proved everyone wrong. We're going to try to and keep doing that.”

— Zach Silver (@zachsilver) September 29, 2021

In that generic statement’s defense, it really does feel that way. In your head, 5% rounds to impossible. When the odds say “impossible” and then the season progresses to a point where outcomes are far less certain, what other impression can you take away than “these odds were wrong”?

I feel the same way from time to time. Just this year, the Cardinals and Blue Jays have been written off and then exploded back into contention. St. Louis bottomed out at 1.3% odds to make the playoffs – in August! It’s not quite negative 400 percent, but it sure feels that way. Can it really be that those odds were accurate, and that we just witnessed a one-in-100 event?

To investigate this question, I did what I often do when I don’t know where to turn: I bothered Sean Dolinar. More specifically, I got a copy of our playoff odds on every day since 2014, the first year when we calculated them using our current method. I left out 2021, as we don’t have a full season of data to use yet, but that still left me with a robust (some would say too robust) amount of data. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the season started, I made a series of bold-ish predictions about what would happen in baseball this year. I focused on things that were unlikely but possible, unexpected playoff teams or players that you’ve heard of but didn’t expect to be great. You can find those eight predictions here and here.

Today, I’m grading myself on these predictions. The season is still going, but we’re close to the end, and reading about pre-season speculation will soon take a deserved back seat to actual playoff baseball. I’m assigning each of the predictions a grade of a win, a push, or a loss. Fair warning: I’m grading myself on a curve. Coming close on a high-percentage prediction is clearly a loss. Getting something half right when it was a 40-to-1 shot? I’ll claim half credit whether I deserve it or not. That’s simply how this goes — doing your own grading comes with advantages. Let’s get to the predictions. Read the rest of this entry »

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There are tons of great hitters in the game today. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is having the breakout season presaged by his pedigree and minor league success. Shohei Ohtani has 45 home runs and somehow also pitches. Fernando Tatis Jr. has a .618 slugging percentage and plays shortstop. I haven’t even mentioned the old guard of “best hitters” — Mookie Betts, Bryce Harper, and ringleader Mike Trout.

They’re all great — and they’re all worse than the best overall hitter on the planet, Juan Soto. Soto is comical. He put on a rookie performance for the ages, and has done nothing but improve since then. The Ted Williams comps he’s drawn aren’t given out lightly. All those wonderful hitters — and Wander Franco, and whoever else you want to name — are looking up at him.

Normally, I’d try to write a “here’s how he does it” article. That doesn’t work with Soto. How does he do it? My best guess is that he’s a time-traveling wizard from the future who set his sights on being the best hitter he could be. Since I’m not an expert in either time travel or wizardry, you’ll have to settle for three vignettes about Soto’s unparalleled excellence. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m on record as being against intentional walks in most situations. That’s hardly some bold claim — over the last 15 years, they’re on a steady downward path as front offices and managers come to grips with the ills of extra baserunners. That’s not to say there’s never a good situation for a free pass, but those situations are few and far between.

Why pinpoint the last 15 years as the timeframe for this drop-off? In 1955, the first year where we have intentional walk totals, teams issued roughly 7.5 intentional walks per 1,000 plate appearances. In 2002, they issued 7.8 intentional walks per 1,000 PAs. Sure, there were peaks and valleys in between, but the data hardly indicated a trend. Take a look at the number of intentional walks issued per 1,000 plate appearances each year since 1955:

One note: I’ve excluded 2020 because of the universal DH, which created a meaningfully different backdrop for intentional walks — walking a decent hitter to face a pitcher is one of the best uses of the tactic.

I could end this article right there. That’s a convincing chart — the year with the least frequent intentional walks is 2021, and the year with the second-least is 2019. They’re roughly equivalent — four walks per 1,000 in 2019, 3.8 in ’21 — but even so, the writing is on the wall. Give the game 20 years, and we’ll surely see even fewer. Read the rest of this entry »