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On Friday, in the midst of a fifth losing season in the last seven years, the Mariners fired general manager Jack Zduriencik. In the few hours that followed that announcement, I got a series of texts and emails from friends and acquaintances, all with the same general theme: “Congratulations, your team now has a chance to be decent again!”

And changing leadership probably will help the Mariners — though if the lingering Kenny Williams rumor proves true, this change could prove less like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and more like using those deck chairs to puncture all the remaining life rafts — given the struggles the team has had during Zduriencik’s tenure at the helm. But despite that fact, I didn’t react to the news with celebration, or even any kind of relief. Instead, my reaction to Zduriencik’s dismissal was pretty much the same one I had when the Brewers fired Doug Melvin.

While I generally prefer to write about baseball rather than provide commentary about myself or the nature of baseball commentary as a profession, this news provides an opportunity to write something I probably should have written a few years ago. Because the Mariners haven’t been “my team” for a while now. I haven’t written a post at USSMariner in 18 months. I probably haven’t watched more than 20 or 30 innings of the Mariners games this year. Over the last five or so years, my fandom has waned, and now it’s probably at the point of dormancy.

I will note that this wasn’t really a conscious decision. While I’ve long been aware of the traditional “no cheering in the press box” rule, I don’t spend much time in press boxes, and I didn’t choose to renounce allegiance to a specific team in order to try and appear more objective. It just kind of happened. And as it was happening, I’ve spent some time thinking about why we become fans, and why I’ve been unbecoming one.

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The Wild Card races in the American and National Leagues could hardly be more different. Over in the AL, only four teams are playing at a level that would normally make them contenders, but the rules require that a fifth team qualify for the postseason, so one team from a remarkably mediocre group is going to get rewarded with a playoff spot even though they may end the year with 82 or 83 wins. The AL Wild Card game is very likely going to feature one of the weakest postseason teams we’ve seen since the playoffs expanded to include non-division winners.

In the National League, though, the Wild Card game is going to be a clash of the titans. The three best records in the NL all come from the Central division, meaning that the Wild Card game is likely to be a showdown between the Pirates and Cubs, unless one of those two can run down the Cardinals for the division title. There are still other possible outcomes, but most likely, the NL Wild Card game this year will pit two excellent Central division teams against each other, probably for the right to play the NL Central winner in the Division Series.

Meanwhile, the winners of the NL West and NL East — right now, the Dodgers and Mets, who currently hold the fourth and fifth best records in the league — are set to play each other for the right to advance to the NL Championship Series. Because of the playoff structure and the dominance of the Central teams this year, we’re almost guaranteed to only have one team in the NLCS out of the clubs with the three best regular season records, with lesser performing teams getting an easier path to the pennant.

And, understandably, that’s frustrating for anyone rooting for an NL Central club this year. The Wall Street Journal’s Jared Diamond spoke to some of the players on the teams involved, who said things like this:

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A few months ago, someone asked me who the most underrated player in baseball was, and after kicking around a few names, I settled on Arizona outfielder A.J. Pollock. Pollock got to the big leagues as a speed-and-defense center fielder who hit well enough to justify a regular gig, and then had his breakout year derailed last season when Johnny Cueto hit him in the hand with a fastball. Since he missed roughly half the season, it was easy to overlook his offensive improvements, but Pollock carried the added power and improved contact rate over to this season, and has developed into one of the very best outfielders in all of baseball.

But Pollock’s 2015 season has been so good that it’s hard to call him the game’s most underrated player anymore. After all, he made the All-Star team this year, and thanks to a .325 average and a decent likelihood of being honored with a Gold Glove at years end, he’s not really flying under the radar anymore. Like Ben Zobrist and Bobby Abreu, Pollock might have been mentioned as the game’s most underrated player so many times that he’s now being properly rated.

But even with Pollock’s graduation to stardom now being pretty widely accepted, I still think the game’s most underrated player might be an outfielder for the Diamondbacks. This time, I’m going with Pollock’s teammate David Peralta.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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Around here, you know that we spend a lot of time working with metrics that attempt to strip noise out of results. Often times, we’re less concerned with what has happened and more concerned with what is going to happen, and these component metrics often do a better job of isolating either a player or a team’s overall contribution to the results, while removing some of the factors that lead to those results but aren’t likely to continue in the future.

At the team level, the most comprehensive component metric we host is called BaseRuns, which evaluates a team’s quality based on all the plays they were involved in, without regard for the sequence in which those events occurred. BaseRuns essentially gives us a context-neutral evaluation of a team’s performance, assuming that the distribution of hits and runs isn’t really something a team has a lot of control over. BaseRuns can be thought of as the spiritual successor to Bill James‘ implementation of the pythagorean theorem to baseball, as pythag strips sequencing out of the conversion of runs to wins, but doesn’t do anything to strip the sequencing effects out of turning specific plays into runs scored and runs allowed.

Historically, BaseRuns has worked really well. For the years we have historical BaseRuns data (2002 to 2014), one standard deviation was right around four wins, and the data appears to be normally distributed; 73% of team-seasons have fallen within one standard deviation, 97% of team-seasons have fallen within two standard deviations, and no team had ever exceeded three standard deviations. There have been years here and there where a team sequenced their way to an extra 11 or 12 wins, but they weren’t very common, and that was usually the only break from the norm in that season.

Until this year. Here is the year by year standard deviation in BaseRuns wins versus actual wins for every year that we have the data.

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10 days ago, I was informed that I will be voting for the National League Cy Young Award this year. This will be my first time voting on the pitcher awards — last year, I was tasked with voting for Manager of the Year and MVP — and so I’ve spent the last week and a half trying to work through what kind of factors I’m going to want to consider in putting my ballot together. And as I work through the process, I’ve come to realize that there’s one potentially significant factor that I’m not sure whether to consider or not; a pitcher’s performance while batting.

My initial reaction to the idea of using a pitcher’s batting line as a variable was to reject the notion, considering that it’s an award designed to honor the best pitcher of the season, and a pitcher’s job is to prevent runs. What a pitcher does at the plate can be rewarded when they vote on the Silver Slugger Award. I think that’s generally the commonly accepted approach, and when I broached this topic with a few people at Saber Seminar this weekend, most of them — even Brian Bannister, the former MLB pitcher who posted a career .276/.300/.414 batting line — suggested that a pitcher’s hitting performance shouldn’t be a factor in the Cy Young voting.

But I guess I’m still not convinced. I certainly haven’t made up my mind to definitely include a pitcher’s batting performance as a factor in my vote, but I don’t know that I can accept the idea that we should only be evaluating a pitcher’s contribution to run prevention, when National League pitchers are also required to hit as a function of their jobs. It’s a smaller part of their job, certainly, but it is something they have to do, much like big lumbering sluggers who are selected for their ability to hit the ball a long way still have to run the bases, even though that is definitely not the skill they are being paid for.

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There’s a new trend in baseball: fire your outgoing GM on a Tuesday. Two weeks ago, it was Dave Dombrowski getting the axe in Detroit, and last week, the Brewers announced they were going to move Doug Melvin out of the top spot in baseball operations department. Yesterday, the Red Sox joined the Tuesday makeover party, announcing that they were bringing in Dombrowski to serve as their President of Baseball Operations, and as a result, current GM Ben Cherington would be leaving the organization.

So, as we’ve done the last few weeks, let’s take a look at what led to the fall of the Red Sox GM.

Cherington’s story is quite a bit different than either Dombrowski’s or Melvin’s, with both higher highs and lower lows than either managed to reach. Promoted to the GM position after Theo Epstein left for Chicago following the 2011 season, Cherington’s initial impression in Boston was a train wreck. The team dropped from 90 wins in Epstein’s final season to 69 wins in Cherington’s first year, and there was so much internal strife that the team fired manager Bobby Valentine less than a year after they hired him.

But during that miserable last place run, Cherington and his staff did one very wise thing, trading Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, and Carl Crawford to the Dodgers for a package of prospects and a mountain of salary relief. It was Cherington’s first big move as a GM, and clearing the roster of dead weight contracts gave the team the flexibility they needed to overhaul the team in quick order. That winter, the front office reallocated that money to sign a series of mid-level free agents, and hit on just about every single one; Shane Victorino, Stephen Drew, and Koji Uehara were significant contributors, and even depth pieces like David Ross and Jonny Gomes helped the team come together.

The result was a worst-to-first turnaround that resulted in a World Series title, the organization’s third championship in 11 seasons after not winning one for 84 years. Cherington’s spread-the-wealth plan was a massive success, and seemed to put him on the path to a long run with the club. And now, less than two years later, he’s being replaced. How did it all go so wrong?

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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A month ago, as baseball was just finishing up the All-Star break, the Nationals looked to be in a pretty good position. They were 48-39, sitting atop the NL East, and were expecting a host of quality reinforcements from the disabled list. The team hadn’t quite lived up to pre-season expectations, but a lot of that could be chalked up to health issues, and even their somewhat disappointing first half had them in first place; with some of their best players rejoining the club, the second half looked promising.

At that point, our projections gave the Nationals an 85% chance of winning the division. In the first 30 games of the second half, however, well, just take a look for yourself.

Since the break, they’re just 10-20, and they now find themselves 4 1/2 games behind the Mets in the NL East; their chances of making the postseason are down to 31%. They’ve lost six straight on their current west coast road trip, and now sitting at a game under .500, questions are starting to get raised about whether Matt Williams even makes it to the end of the season as the team’s manager.

So, how has this second half, and potentially the entire season, gone so wrong?

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