Last week, Ben Clemens broke down the trade that sent Tyler Glasnow to the Dodgers, as well as the extension that Glasnow signed soon afterward. In this article, our focus is the conditional option at the very end of the contract. Before the 2028 season, the Dodgers have a $30 million team option. If they decline to exercise it, Glasnow has his own $21.5 million player option. When I read about the structure of the options, my first thought was to wonder why this doesn’t happen all the time. Here’s how Ben interpreted the situation:

“It seems likely to me that one of those two will be exercised; in my mind, it’s a five-year, $135 million deal with a $10 million kicker if he’s pitching well in year four. The circumstances where neither side exercises their option just feel much less likely than one side or the other being an obvious yes.”

I was inclined to agree. It is sort of like a performance bonus: Pitch well and we’ll bring you back for $30 million, but if you don’t, then you’ll be back for $21.5 million. The $8.5 million difference is a lot of money, but it’s also small enough that, depending on the market and their own particular health and performance, a player might not be certain that they’d make it up in free agency. It might just be easier and safer to stick around. The more I thought about it, though, the more wrinkles I saw. Read the rest of this entry »

Last winter, Mets prospect Ronny Mauricio took the Dominican Winter League by storm, slashing .287/.335/.468 for Los Tigres del Licey and earning MVP honors. The 22-year-old was off to an even better start in the 2023–24 season, batting .433 with four extra-base hits in seven games, but all that ground to a halt on Monday. Facing rivals Las Águilas Cibaeñas, Mauricio attempted to steal second, but when he tried to make a sudden stop, his right leg buckled. On Tuesday, SNY’s Andy Martino reported that the injury is a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Although the Mets won’t put a timetable on his return until after he undergoes surgery, even the most aggressive rehab schedule would have him missing at least the first half of the season before getting his legs back under him in the minors. It’s grim news for a young player who was primed to get his first real shot at breaking camp with the big club. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I took a long look at the predictive power of rookie exit velocity. One of the things I learned was that for rookies with at least 200 balls in play, wRC+ was less predictive of their future performance than max exit velocity. That blew my mind. Knowing just one measurement, the velocity of a player’s hardest-hit ball, was more useful than knowing about their overall performance through their entire rookie season. Exit velocity matters a lot, as does how you interpret the data.

Since the rollout of Statcast in 2015, we’ve been introduced to three general ways of thinking about exit velocity, along with half a dozen individual variations. Depending on the context, we might read about a player’s average exit velocity, their maximum exit velocity, their hard-hit rate, or any number of exit velocity percentiles. For a while now, I’ve been wondering which one of these methods is most useful. Could there be one exit velocity metric to rule them all?

I have to imagine that at some point in the last several years, the R&D department of each major league team has asked itself that exact same question. In each big league city, someone much smarter than I am did the math and wrote up the results in a report that now rests comfortably in a proprietary database with a catchy name. The rest of us just have to make do with rumors and innuendo suggesting that teams most often value something akin to 90th-percentile exit velocity. To my knowledge, no one in the public sphere has made a comprehensive survey, and I wanted to look into the matter for myself. Read the rest of this entry »

José Ramírez is the definition of a set-it-and-forget-it player, and I mean that at least a little bit literally. Neither we nor our friends over at Baseball Prospectus published a single article that focused on him during a 2023 season when, for the fourth time in a row, he finished in the top 10 in the AL MVP voting. He turned out to have a very interesting season, and not just because he was, as always, excellent.

In June of 2022, Ramírez injured the ulnar collateral ligament in his right thumb. To the surprise of the Cleveland coaching staff, he decided to play through significant pain and postpone surgery until the offseason. Despite seeing his power drop off dramatically, he ended the season with a 141 wRC+ and 6.4 WAR. He finally had the surgery in November and came into the 2023 season healthy, but he got off to a slow start and finished with a 123 wRC+. It was his worst showing since 2019, when a broken hamate bone ended his season prematurely. (As an aside, if you’re desperate for for reassurance that Mike Trout will bounce back from his hamate injury, look no further than Ramírez, who immediately returned to superstardom in 2020.) Read the rest of this entry »

While Monday night’s World Series Game 3 victory might not qualify as Pyrrhic, it definitely came at a price for the Rangers. After three scoreless innings, starter Max Scherzer left with back tightness, forcing Jon Gray into an impromptu piggyback start. Adolis García, who is in the midst of a jaw-dropping, record-setting postseason run, left after seven innings with left side tightness. Meanwhile, two days removed from stealing one on the road in Texas, the Diamondbacks must feel deflated, losing 3-1 despite outhitting the Rangers, six hits to five. Texas now boast a 2-1 series lead.

Coming in, the question was about Scherzer’s thumb, which had developed a cut just below the base of the nail. He reportedly kept the wound from reopening with a concoction of super glue and cotton. It’s hard to say, but it could have had an effect on his pitching. Scherzer’s spin rate was below his season average on all five of his pitches (even during the first two innings, when his velocity was above his season average), and his curveball, slider, and changeup all had less movement than usual. Until his injury, Scherzer seemed to be benefitting from luck. He walked two and allowed two hits over his three innings, but he kept the Diamondbacks off the scoreboard by virtue of a double play, an outfield assist on some bad baserunning in the second inning, and a fortunate bounce on a comebacker. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the nice things about the playoffs is that there’s often just one game happening at a time. Don’t get me wrong. I love a summer day with a full slate of 15 games, but you are where your attention is, and there’s too much baseball happening in any one day for us to be present for all of it. When the whole of the baseball world gets compressed down to one high-stakes game, you catch little things that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

During the NLCS, I noticed a little thing about Kevin Ginkel. It was about how he holds runners on second base, and man, does he hold runners on second base. Here’s the pitch that caught my attention:

Read the rest of this entry »

Get ready to hear a whole lot about the 2019 World Series. After a 9–2 Rangers victory in Game 6 of the ALCS on Sunday night, the Rangers have evened the series at three and raised the specter that the Astros were hoping would stay buried. Game 7 will take place on Monday night in Houston, unfortunately for Houston. The Astros — the only team ever to lose all four home games in a seven-game series — now have the chance either to exorcise those demons or to relive them all over again. And pitching for Texas in Game 7 will be none other than Max Scherzer, who started Game 7 of the World Series for the Nationals back in 2019.

The Rangers, on the other hand, are looking to make their own history. While the Astros are chasing their third straight World Series appearance, Bruce Bochy’s club is looking to get there for just the third time ever. They’re also hoping to win their first championship. Read the rest of this entry »

If you came into Game 5 hoping for a pitchers’ duel between Justin Verlander and Jordan Montgomery, then this was your lucky night, for a while. The two starters traded blows for the first five innings, allowing a solo homer apiece, but otherwise made short work of the opposing lineups. Then the sixth inning rolled around and the narratives entered a tumble dryer. The game featured a little bit of everything: lead changes, defensive plays both great and terrible, bloops, blasts, backspinning bunts, and benches-clearing beanballs. Read the rest of this entry »

This postseason, pitchers have allowed a .311 wOBA and a 3.74 ERA, down from .318 and 4.33 during the regular season. That part’s not terribly surprising. Since the start of the Wild Card era in 1995, the league’s postseason ERA is 3.85, nearly half a run below the regular season ERA of 4.29. The thing that caught my eye was that this year’s .311 wOBA is 21 points lower than its .332 xwOBA. In fact, for as long as we’ve been calculating xwOBA, wOBA has underperformed it in the playoffs:

This year’s gap is the largest, but it’s hardly an outlier. There’s a big gap between ERA and FIP during the postseason. Pitchers have outperformed their FIP 24 times in the last 29 postseasons. Over that period, they’ve run an ERA of 3.85 and a FIP of 4.15. They’re performing better overall, but they’re also outpitching their FIP to the tune of .3 runs per game. I started thinking about the causes that might explain these discrepancies, and I realized that our new postseason leaderboards would allow us to break them down in some cool new ways. Read the rest of this entry »

After leading the AL Central for 157 days, sweeping the Blue Jays to win their first playoff series since 2002, and coming into the ALDS with a pair of starters who could go head-to-head just about anyone in the league, Minnesota’s season came to an end on Wednesday night. On paper, the Twins matched up reasonably well with the Astros. They couldn’t match Houston’s overall thunder, but their lefty-packed lineup was a good match for an Astros squad that featured just one left-handed pitcher and whose bullpen fared much worse against lefties in 2023 than it had in ’22. That didn’t turn out to matter much. Over two games at Target Field, the Twins mustered just six hits and three runs, going 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position, and falling short in Game 4, 3–2.

Meanwhile, the Astros are headed to their seventh consecutive League Championship Series, one shy of the record held by the 1990s Atlanta Braves. Despite their dominance on the mound, the scariest thing about the Astros might just be the fact that on Wednesday they showed that they’re capable of winning even on nights when Yordan Alvarez looks mostly human.

For Houston, the question was what to expect from José Urquidy, who was limited by injury to 16 appearances and 10 starts and didn’t look like himself for much of the season. He answered it emphatically, striking out six and allowing just three hits and two earned runs, both of them on solo homers; he earned 19 whiffs, the third-highest total of his career. Urquidy got the Twins to chase four-seamers up, breaking balls down, and changeups that looked tempting before diving down and in off the plate to righties.

For Minnesota, the concern coming into the game was Joe Ryan and his four-seam fastball, a pitch he threw 56.9% of the time this season. That presented a problem; the Astros ran a .372 wOBA against four-seamers this season, with a second-in-baseball 46.8 run value against the pitch (the Braves finished in first with an absurd 73.2). Would Ryan rely more on his splitter and sweeper, or would he be scared away from doing so after watching the Astros sit on and obliterate Sonny Gray’s secondaries one day earlier? The issue turned out to be moot; Rocco Baldelli decided to go with a bullpen game, pulling Ryan after two innings. In a do-or-die affair, the Twins manager told Fox Sports’ Tom Verducci that he was looking to “virtually every guy in our bullpen.”

Those who were able to tune out the sound of old-school baseball men gnashing their teeth and rending their garments witnessed a game in which Baldelli’s plan worked well. Ryan and a cavalcade of Minnesota relievers held the Astros to six hits and kept them under four runs for just the 66th time all season, including the playoffs. The issue was that for just the 54th time all season, the Twins couldn’t push across more than two runs of their own. As was the case all series long, Minnesota’s rookies led the way. Edouard Julien went 2-for-3 with a double, a homer, and a walk, and Royce Lewis walked once and knocked his third home run of the series.

But that one sentence constitutes the entirety of the Minnesota offense. The Twins, who set an all-time record with 1,654 strikeouts during the regular season, struck out 14 times for the second game in a row. Julien’s first-inning double, the only non-homer hit of the night, was promptly erased on a hard luck liner that gave him no real chance to return to the bag in time, making Lewis’ blast off the left field façade a solo shot.

The lead evaporated quickly. Michael Brantley, the second batter in the top of the second inning, got his arms extended on a middle-away Ryan fastball and sent it into the right field stands at 101.8 mph, tying the game at one. Ryan finished his night having thrown just 26 pitches and with a single baserunner allowed in two innings, but he’d been given a lead and let it slip. Between innings, Baldelli came over to Ryan on the bench and shook his hand. From that point, the game belonged to the bullpen.

Urquidy buckled down after the bumpy first inning, facing 16 batters after Lewis’ homer and retiring every single one of them who wasn’t named Edouard Julien. The Twins’ bullpen, though, faltered. After Brock Stewart retired the Astros in order in the third, lefty Caleb Thielbar was given the unenviable task of facing Alvarez, who had homered off him in Game 1, to lead off the fourth inning. After falling behind 1–2, Alvarez reached out and lined a fastball off the plate outside into center for a single. As Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri tweeted, “Limiting Yordan Alvarez to a single at this point feels like recording a strikeout.” Thielbar followed by striking out Kyle Tucker, but he couldn’t handle José Abreu, who went the other way with a monster 424-foot home run off the upper deck in right field.

It was the third homer of the series for Abreu, who ran an 86 wRC+ during the regular season and didn’t hit his first home run until May 28. It was also 3–1 Astros.

Chris Paddack replaced Thielbar, allowing a single to Chas McCormick, then retiring seven straight batters, four by way of strikeout. And in the bottom of the sixth, Minnesota chipped a run back. Urquidy retired Michael A. Taylor on a chopper to third to start the frame, bringing Julien to the plate. He stayed back on a changeup, sending it into the left field bleachers at 100.2 mph and drawing the Twins to within one.

After donning Minnesota’s fishing vest and high-fiving his teammates, he spiked his helmet off the dugout floor. “I was just trying to see a fastball up,” he told Verducci. “He’s got a great fastball and he commands it well. He left the changeup up and I was able to recognize it early and put a good swing on it.”

With a reason to cheer at long last, the Minnesota crowd got back into the game. Jorge Polanco nearly tied things up immediately after Julien’s shot, getting under a high changeup and sending it 339 feet into center field at 100.7 mph for an out. And that was the end of Urquidy’s night; he finished with 5.2 innings, walking one and allowing two runs on three hits.

Urquidy was followed by Hector Neris, Bryan Abreu, and Ryan Pressly, who allowed just one baserunner between them. Minnesota did find some small hope in the eighth, when Baldelli pinch-hit Byron Buxton — only on the roster because a shoulder injury forced Alex Kirilloff off — for Taylor. The crowd understandably went crazy, but Abreu, who hasn’t allowed a run since July 15, induced a harmless popup from Buxton, who hadn’t played at all since August 1. The Twins sent Polanco, Lewis, and Max Kepler to the plate in the ninth; if any of them reached, Carlos Correa would bat representing the winning run. Again the crowd grew frenzied, but for the last time it was disappointed. Correa never got a chance; Pressly stuck Polanco out on a foul tip, struck out Lewis swinging, and struck out Kepler looking.

Baldelli did everything you’d expect a manager running a bullpen game to do. He rode the hot hand when a pitcher looked sharp. He gave relievers clean innings when possible. He saved his most trustworthy arms for the fearsome top of the Houston lineup. He didn’t wait for his offense to tie the game before calling on closer Jhoan Duran in the eighth inning. Aside from a single off the end of Alvarez’s bat and an ill-timed mistake to Abreu, the relief corps delivered; at one point, they retired 13 straight Astros. But Minnesota’s offense just wasn’t enough.

Had anyone other than Julien or Lewis been able to get anything going, had Urquidy betrayed any hint of his previous struggles, had Alvarez not been strong enough to muscle an outside fastball into center, had Polanco’s first-inning liner not led Jeremy Peña directly toward second base to double off the helpless Julien, the two teams might be preparing for Game 4 right now. Instead, thanks to another big night from Abreu, the state of Texas is guaranteed a spot in the World Series. “Now me and Bruce Bochy need to battle,” Dusty Baker said after the game. The ALCS will feature four World Series championships, seven pennants, and 4,276 regular season wins between its two managers. The Twins will have a long offseason with a lot of bright spots and even more what-ifs to to think back on.