Tonight, the Royals and A’s play a single-game elimination to determine the winner of the American League Wild Card, with the winner going on to face the Angels starting on Thursday. Both teams have their best starters on the mound, and Jon Lester versus James Shields is about as good a match-up as you can hope for in a winner-take-all contest. With these two starters, strong defenses, and a pitcher’s park as the venue, we shouldn’t expect a ton of runs to be scored in tonight’s game.

And so the managers for each squad are likely going to feel the pressure to try and steal a run here or there, knowing that in a low run environment, every little advantage could turn out to be the difference between advancement or the end of the team’s season. So, against that background, let’s offer Ned Yost some friendly pieces of advice.

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As the headline notes, the Colorado Rockies set a record this year, but it’s not the kind that they’re going to want to celebrate: they tied the 2006 Indians for the biggest negative difference between their BaseRuns expected record and their actual finish, at least for the years in which we have BaseRuns data, which covers 2002-2014.

Their actual record was 66-96, good for just a .407 winning percentage. Their expected record by BaseRuns was 77-85, a mediocre-but-not-awful .476 winning percentage. By actual record, the Rockies were the second worst team in baseball, but by BaseRuns, they were “only” the 10th worst team. What went wrong?

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The postseason begins tomorrow, and we have our 10 contenders for the crown: Anaheim, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, and Kansas City in the AL, and Los Angeles, St. Louis, Washington, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco in the NL.

Two of these teams will be eliminated by the end of the day on Wednesday. Let’s take a look at the early odds for the Wild Card games, based on our depth charts model and the season-to-date stats model.

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Sponsored by the Ford Motor Company.

Last night, Derek Jeter played his final game at Yankee Stadium, and his career will come to a close this Sunday in Boston, putting an official end to the era of the Yankees Core Four: Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and Jorge Posada have already sailed off into the metaphorical sunset. And certainly, this particular Yankee dynasty will go down as the premier team of their time.

Over the last 20 years, since those four debuted together in 1995, the Yankees have won 1,897 games, and have a chance to push that to 1,900 total wins with a strong finish this weekend. This mark is easily the best of any team during the Core Four’s reign, 63 wins ahead of the second place Braves and more than 100 wins. This is the group that returned the Yankees to their historical place atop baseball’s landscape, and re-established the franchise’s legacy for a new generation.

And what a legacy it is. This isn’t the Yankees first 20 year stretch of dominance, of course, and the end of the Core Four era allows us to look back at some of the other dominant runs the Yankees have had throughout their history.

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Derek Jeter’s final game at Yankee Stadium ended like a Disney movie. That’s not an insult; moments like this are one of the reasons why we love baseball.

You don’t have to like Jeter or the Yankees to enjoy that moment. There is perhaps no better way for Jeter to leave Yankee Stadium than with a game-winning, opposite-field single.

As his career comes to a close, nearly everyone who covers baseball has weighed in on Jeter’s legacy, and unfortunately, part of that legacy is his status as a poster boy for disagreements between the traditional media and the statistically inclined crowd, especially regarding his defensive value. Jeter’s poor ratings at shortstop have made him the subject of numerous articles on defensive performance, and that has created the perception that Jeter has been a poor defender; a notion which Jeff did a nice job of debunking earlier this year.

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During the massive disappointment of the 2014 season, the Red Sox have been busy acquiring hitters: Yoenis Cespedes from the A’s, Allen Craig from the Cardinals, and Rusney Castillo from Cuba being the most notable additions to the team’s line-up. The team has not been shy about the fact that this strategy has a second act, as they will aggressively pursue pitching upgrades this winter since the market will be more flush with arms than bats. And given that they already declined to pay market price for one of the winter’s best free agent starters, it seems likely that the team might be more interested in trading for pitchers rather than attempting to outbid others for pricey free agents.

Which brings us to Mookie Betts. If we believe the Red Sox are likely to pursue big trades for premium starting pitching this winter, Betts is likely going to be the piece that everyone asks for. His dynamic debut has increased his value by establishing that his skills can translate to this level, but the Red Sox roster makes his future in Boston still a bit uncertain; he’s a natural second baseman blocked by Dustin Pedroia who converted to play center field, only to see the team spend $72 million on Castillo, rumored to be a plus defender in center himself. Betts could play right field, but one assumes that the Red Sox would prefer to let Shane Victorino win his job back next spring, and Betts has played far too well to head back to Triple-A.

So, a trade does make some sense, especially if putting Betts on the table opens the door to acquiring a young, lower-cost ace — think someone like Chris Sale or Stephen Strasburg — which would still allow the team to use their cash reserves to make a run at one of the big free agent starters, rebuilding their rotation in a big way. But as tempting as that idea might be, I have a suggestion for Red Sox GM Ben Cherington: keep Mookie Betts. You might really regret trading him, even for an ace.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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The Yankees haven’t had a very good season. They’re 81-75, and are likely going to finish 10+ games out of first place for the second year in a row; the first time that has happened since 1992. Fun piece of trivia unrelated to the rest of this post: their manager in 1992 was Buck Showalter, whose team is the reason they’re so far out of first place this year.

But this isn’t a post about Buck Showalter, or even about the Yankees lousy season. This is a post about the thing the Yankees did this year that went really well. At the trade deadline, they weren’t so close to the race that they could justify making big moves to add star players, but they’re also the Yankees, so they weren’t going to punt the season in July. This left them in the position of wanting to upgrade their roster without borrowing significantly from their future to do so, which meant that they had to go dumpster diving. Or, maybe phrased more politely, they had to target buy-low players in the midst of down years and hope that their early struggles weren’t predictive of future performance.

This low-cost upgrade plan began in earnest on July 6th, when the acquired Brandon McCarthy from the D’Backs. On July 22nd, they got Chase Headley from the Padres. On July 24th, they bought Chris Capuano from the Rockies. On July 31st, they acquired Martin Prado from the D’Backs, Stephen Drew from the Red Sox, and claimed Esmil Rogers off waivers from the Blue Jays. And then on August 28th, they signed Chris Young after the Mets cut him loose.

Over the course of a couple of months, they brought in eight new players, and the total cost was a couple of non-elite prospects and some cash. How has it worked out?

Here are the players PA/IP totals and WAR totals for their seasons before joining NYY, and then after. Since we’re focusing heavily on players who were regression candidates, we’ll use RA9-WAR instead of FIP-WAR, since a high runs allowed total is what allowed these pitchers to be available in the first place.

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With a week to go in the regular season, the AL MVP race is all but over. Mike Trout is going to win it this year, and the only question is whether he’s going to win unanimously. There’s no real argument at the top this year, and no real way you can even make a case for anyone else. He’s been the best hitter in baseball. He’s still a great baserunner. He plays an up-the-middle position. He’s hit even better in clutch situations. His team won the division. Unless a voter just wants to draw attention to himself, the #1 spot on the AL MVP ballot is as easy as picking the NL Cy Young award this year.

But spots #2 through #10 are still pretty interesting, with a lot of players having good-but-not-transcendent seasons. And going through the process of filling out the top 10 lets us talk about the process of evaluating different player types, so while it probably doesn’t matter whether someone finishes 4th or 7th in the grand scheme of things, I’ll present my full ballot with an explanation for each player. To the list.

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