After several days hiatus due to the brevity of the two League Championship Series, baseball returns on Tuesday night with Game One of the World Series. This won’t be the first Series matchup of wild card teams, but it will be the first showdown between non division winners who both won fewer than 90 regular season games. While this Series might lack team and individual excellence compared to many past matchups, it does promise to be quite competitive. Instead of breaking down individual player matchups, let’s take a different tack and examine the venues in which the games will be played – Kauffman Stadium and AT&T Park – to get a feel for the context that will surround the Royals and Giants over the next week or so. Read the rest of this entry »

October hasn’t been too kind to most of the game’s very best players. Of the position players who made my ten-man Fangraphs Player of the Year ballot, Michael Brantley, Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Bautista and Jonathan Lucroy didn’t make it to the dance, Andrew McCutchen‘s postseason lasted all of one game, and Mike Trout‘s struggles were at the center of the Angels’ quick exit. Among the pitchers, the seasons of Felix Hernandez and Corey Kluber ended in September, and Clayton Kershaw’s two 7th-inning implosions keyed the Dodgers’ loss to the Cardinals. The last man standing is Buster Posey, whose Giants stand one win away from their third World Series appearance in five years. Read the rest of this entry »

The postseason took a breath on Monday night, with the NLCS participants enjoying a scheduled travel day, and the Orioles and Royals soaking in – pun intended – a rainy night in Kansas City. The Royals have clearly been the lead story of the postseason to date – they’re flying high at 6-0 after barely qualifying in the first place. As recently as one month ago, you would have been hard pressed to find anyone who would have pegged them for a significant October run.

If they were fortunate enough to earn their way in, a short October stay was all that was expected of them. They were young, inexperienced, and most of all, offensively challenged. They were four runs down to Jon Lester in the 8th inning of the wild card game, but have been untouchable ever since. Is there a prototype, a contemporary, a forefather of this current Royals’ run? Read the rest of this entry »

The divisional round of the playoffs is in the books, and the sport is taking a deep breath for a couple of days before the final four tournament gets underway. Both wild card survivors live on, the team with the best record in each league has been sent home, and all viable regular season MVP candidates suddenly have some unexpected free time on their hands. In fact, the two likely frontrunners, Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw, were among the primary culprits for their respective teams’ defeats.

Kershaw, most visibly, had a couple of really bad 7th innings, and Trout pulled the ol’ 1 for 15 as the Angels were swept by the Royals. It’s small sample size theater, obviously – these guys are generational greats, no matter what happened in the 2014 playoffs. In the details of Trout’s exceptional 2014 season, however, lie the imprint of some worrisome trends that might be signs of long-term trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

The first few days of playoff action have had a little bit of everything. At one point or another, we all likely saw something we had never seen before, and been reminded in some way why we had fallen in love with this game in the first place. Each postseason, a narrative or two seems to emerge – this time around, seemingly every media outlet opines that a team’s bullpen is the primary reason for each playoff team’s success, or lack thereof. This was particularly true during the Orioles-Tigers series, which in truth, did feature one of the most catastrophic pen implosions in recent memory. The narrative tells us that a club must do whatever possible, especially via the trade and free agent markets, to bolster one’s bullpen. In other words, do exactly what the Tigers did to build their still smoldering relief corps. Read the rest of this entry »

Award season is upon us, and as far as the biggest pieces of individual hardware go, there will be relatively little debate this season. Clayton Kershaw would appear to be poised to sweep the NL Cy Young and MVP awards, and Mike Trout would seemingly be in line to finally (?) land his first AL MVP. That leaves us with the AL Cy Young, a heavyweight matchup between perennial contender and one-time winner Felix Hernandez and this year’s breakthrough pitcher, Corey Kluber. Conventional wisdom seems to hold that Hernandez would be the choice of traditionalists, while Kluber would gain the sabermetric vote. Should that be the case? Let’s take a deeper look. Read the rest of this entry »

The marathon regular season is over, and the middle-distance sprint that is the playoffs is about to begin. The Pirates will host the Giants on Wednesday in the NL Wild Card game, and now that the dust has settled, it appears that righty Edinson Volquez is the Bucs’ choice to take on Giants’ ace southpaw Madison Bumgarner. Many have pointed to Volquez’ relatively lofty 4.15 FIP as a rationale to bypass him in favor of other options – my gut is that the Pirates have chosen the right guy. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday on these very pages Mike Petriello wrote a piece about the Pirates’ pitching staff, discussing in part their ground ball tendencies and recent upgrades in their infield defense. I figured I’d approach similar subjective matter from a slightly different angle today, focusing on the (recent) historical significance of their ability to keep the ball on the ground, and the manner in which this aspect of the club fits into the Pirates’ overall plan to win with a small to mid-market payroll. To put it mildly, the starting rotation the Pirates have put together in 2013-14 is not getting all of these grounders by accident. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re in the pennant race home stretch, when thoughts of hardcore and casual baseball fans alike turn to the individual and team hardware that will be presented in the coming weeks. Memories will be made, and the annual class of heroes and goats will be added to the game’s record. This year, in addition to the “official” MLB awards that will be handed out to the game’s best, Fangraphs is getting into the act, with its first annual Player of the Year Award. I am privileged to be one of the 11 voters, and rest assured, I will take my vote quite seriously. One player who is likely to fill a spot on my Top Ten is Giancarlo Stanton – a player who hasn’t had a single at bat since he was hit in the face by a Mike Fiers pitch on September 11. How should this and other factors, such as the offensive context of Marlins Park, affect the thought processes of award voters? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest stories of the season’s second half has been the historic decline of the Oakland Athletics. They are flirting with accomplishing the extremely difficult feat of having the best record in baseball at the All Star break, and then missing the playoffs. Winning the final two games of their pivotal series with the Seattle Mariners this past weekend has sharply decreased the likelihood of that worst case scenario, but the collapse has been stark nonetheless. It’s convenient to tie the A’s second half results to the departure of Yoenis Cespedes in the Jon Lester trade, but the reality is a bit more complicated than that. There are many factors in play, but arguably the foremost among them has been the precipitous fall of two of their key offensive players – Derek Norris and Brandon Moss. Read the rest of this entry »