New York Mets third baseman David Wright announced his retirement, effective at the end of the 2018 season, at a press conference on Thursday afternoon. Wright’s been trying to mount a comeback for a few years now, following a 2015 diagnosis of spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spine that puts pressure on the nerves. The condition is degenerative and, in the four seasons since the start of that 2015 campaign, Wright has managed to appear in only 75 games with the Mets. He was hoping to make one last attempt to resume his career, working with the St. Lucie Mets for most of August before a couple of tuneup games with Triple-A Las Vegas, but that time in the minors appears merely to have confirmed the challenges that a major-league role would have presented to him.

Finishing off my 30s gave me a perspective on chronic injuries that I didn’t have 20 years ago. I am decidedly not a professional athlete. That said, I’ve observed as my own random aches and pains have multiplied over the last decade. I assume that, for a professional athlete — with much higher physical standards to maintain and much more day-to-day activity than a doughy sportswriter — it’s much worse. There are those who will say, “Don’t worry. He has a $100 million. He’ll be OK!” Certainly that was one view of Prince Fielder’s own premature retirement. (That was another tear-jerker of a press conference.) And, in one sense, it’s not incorrect: David Wright is free from worrying about the day-to-day costs of living. But he’s also someone who’s entire adult life has been dedicated to a particular endeavor (baseball) and who’s now forced to contend with the fact that his ability to participate in that endeavor has been cut short by five or so years. Hearing Wright say that “physically, the way I feel right now and everything the doctors have told me, there’s not going to be any improvement” was tough to watch for any fan of Wright or any fan of baseball.

Wright’s major-league career isn’t quite over, though: the Mets will activate him to start at third base on September 29th against the Marlins. I like when teams have the ability to do this kind of thing, and I was personally disappointed when the Yankees didn’t play A-Rod at shortstop for the final inning of his career. And playing one last game seems a lot more satisfying than signing a one-day contract, as players sometimes do with clubs that have had particular relevance to their careers.

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Detroit’s contention window didn’t just close in 2017, it dramatically shut on the team’s fingers, the paramedics arrived and kicked them in the groin, and then everything caught on fire. I have zero problems regarding the 2006-14 team as a dynasty even if they failed to to win a championship. At their best, they were as dangerous a team as the Tigers of the mid-1980s.

The Setup

The Tigers squeezed out an 86-75 season in 2016, but they were also clearly a team on the downswing, with most of the key contributors approaching free agency, well into their 30s, and sometimes both things. With a 56-48 record at the trade deadline and sitting just 4.5 games back in the AL Central, the Tigers did precisely nothing, likely a result both of a farm system weakened by previous trades and a lack of understanding between the front office and ownership about what lay ahead for the team.

In this case, rather than a stubborn inability to agree, the discord (such as it was) was a product of owner Mike Ilitch’s interest in winning a championship before his passing, a fact which his age (he was 87 at the time) dictated must occur sooner than later.

This après moi, le déluge was, of course absolutely justified — even if it wasn’t necessarily great for someone who’d remain a fan of the Tigers into the 2018 and -19 seasons. After all, this is a sports team. The only consequences for unwise spending in the present are (a) fewer wins in the future and (b) slightly fewer millions of dollars for the billionaire’s heirs.

Ilitch passed away before the 2017 season, but there were no big offseason additions — unless you’re the world’s biggest Brendan Ryan or Alex Avila fan. The team managed to lurk around .500 into early June, 29-29 representing their final .500 record, but the club struggled after that, going 18-28 in the period from then to the trade deadline, and I don’t think any analyst (and I doubt anyone internally) really thought Detroit was going anywhere.

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Perhaps the biggest surprise for the White Sox in 2018 was just how long they clung to their mathematical chances of reaching the postseason, surviving weeks longer than either the Royals or Orioles. But as goes the way of all flesh, the Pale Hose became pale dust — along with five other teams in the last week, meaning Dan is going to be busy over the next five days.

The Setup

Unlike with the Orioles, who still had at least a plausible argument coming into the season about playoff volatility, and the Royals, who pretended to have one, nobody was ever under the illusion that the White Sox would play October baseball.

Which is perfectly fine, of course, given that the team only threw in the towel late in 2016. Unfortunately, that was well after acquiring James Shields from the Padres (though this trade has turned out way worse than could be expected on average).

Chicago wasn’t among those clubs, like the Braves and Phillies, poised to return from the depths of their rebuild and compete for a place in the postseason. They’re still very early in that period of sorting out which of their prospects and low-risk pickups will help them in that capacity.

The White Sox entered the 2018 campaign clearly intent on avoiding expensive moves — costly in terms of dollars or prospects — that were unlikely to help make the team better in the future. Giving Miguel Gonzalez a one-year, $4.75 million deal isn’t crazy for a team that’s just trying to cover 162 starts a year. The team believed Welington Castillo was enough of a bargain at two years and $15 million that, even if the team failed to compete in the second year of the deal, they could always flip him for something useful.

Outside of a clever little trade of Jake Peter, a low-ceiling now-or-never utility-type for trade bait in Luis Avilan and Joakim Soria, it was a quiet offseason.

The Projection

ZiPS projected the White Sox to go 68-94, tying with the Tigers and a game behind the Royals. Who says I’m not optimistic about the Royals?

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The New York Mets are a treasure trove of interesting case studies. They’re a large-market team run frequently like a small-market one, a club that doesn’t always seem to consider the present quality of the team when making decisions about the future, an organization whose various departments — medical, public relations, etc. — don’t always appear to interact. Whatever they are, the Mess are never boring.

Fresh off rumors that the team is interested in pursuing, for their next general manager, someone who is less reliant on data, the team has recently caused the internet buzz again by choosing not to promote the team’s top first-base prospect, Peter Alonso. My colleagues Jay Jaffe and Sheryl Ring have already addressed the service-time games that involve Alonso, but I think it’s interesting to also tackle the situation by looking directly at Alonso vs. Jay Bruce as a pure baseball decision.

It’s a completely non-controversial opinion that 2018 has been a monster season for Alonso, one that has given him real hype as a prospect, something that was not a foregone conclusion entering the year. Even the ZiPS projections for Alonso didn’t quite see this comping, ranking him as the No. 2 Mets prospect coming into the season, the No. 3 first-base prospect in baseball, and the No. 99 prospect overall — all of which I believe were the most optimistic forecasts. Alonso started off the season blazing hot, hitting .408/.505/.776 with seven home runs in April for the Binghamton Rumble Ponies. That performance led to a mid-June promotion to Triple-A Las Vegas. Alonso struggled early there, hitting .171/.330/.368 with 29 strikeouts in 76 at-bats for the 51s. That was extremely concerning in light of the fact that, at 23, Alonso was not a young player at Double-A, but he hit .297/.367/.676 with 17 homers in 182 at-bats after the All-Star break.

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The Blue Jays made the long-awaited trade of Josh Donaldson on Friday night, sending their former MVP third baseman to the Cleveland Indians and cash considerations for a player to be named later.

With the Blue Jays out of contention quickly in both 2017 and 2018, a trade of Donaldson was always likely at some point. Without an agreement on a long-term contract for Donaldson, it would have been very risky to hang onto him. The Jays’ had some concern, in fact, that, due to his recent struggles with injury, Donaldson would actually accept a one-year qualifying offer — a factor which changed the calculus somewhat as the non-waiver deadline approached. At the start of the season, retaining Donaldson would have seemed like a possible option even if the club didn’t remain competitive, because a characterstically productive Donaldson would have almost certain fetched a $50-plus million deal this offseason and commanded a compensation pick for Toronto.

At one point, with the Oakland A’s, Donaldson was in danger of becoming a minor-league journeyman, hitting .156/.206/.281 in a little cup of espresso in 2010 during his age-24 season. His .238/.336/.476 and .261/.344/.439 lines over his age-24 and -25 seasons for the Sacramento River Cats in the Pacific Coast League were extremely marginal for that league, not even at the level at which you’d call him a Ken Phelps All-Star, Bill James’ terms for minor-league sluggers who never received a real chance in the majors.

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At this point, it should surprise absolutely nobody paying even the remotest attention to the doings and transpirings of Major League Baseball that Jose Ramirez is having an MVP-type season. Ramirez may not, in fact, actually win the MVP award: Mookie Betts and Mike Trout have had similarly valuable seasons, while J.D. Martinez’s pursuit of the Triple Crown remains active. That said, one could easily make the argument that a very good defensive third baseman who’s produced a .292/.403/.607, 166 wRC+, and 8.1 WAR with another month go is clearly at least MVP-adjacent.

Perhaps the most telling tribute to Ramirez’s season is that he has somehow managed to overshadow Francisco Lindor’s own work a bit. The towering presence of Lindor’s talent and pedigree had previously — like sneaking a shot by Dikembe Mutombo — made such a thing seem unlikely.

If Ramirez is a superhero, though, Lindor’s more partner rather than sidekick. He gets to drive the Batmobile, solve the caper in 1890s London, and sing “Twist and Shout” in the Von Steuben Day Parade. Lindor ranks fourth in the American League in WAR among position players, hitting .291/.367/.533 and playing his typical interstellar defense at short. Some cities are built on rock ‘n’ roll, some on efficiency of infrastructure due to increased density, but Cleveland’s run-scoring is built on the backs of their shortstop and third-base pair.

To say that Lindor and Ramirez are a dangerous pair isn’t a flaming hot take. They’ve been so productive, however, that the time has come to ask not where the rank relative to their peers but to other shortstop/third-base combinations in major-league history. To answer this, I went through every team’s SS/3B pair — as defined by the players who received the most time at each position for their teams — since the beginning of the sport. I used their seasonal numbers because, after all, if Ramirez plays some scattered games at second base, as he did in 2016, does that really diminish how good the pair is?

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The Baltimore Orioles now have some friends on the other side: the Kansas City Royals recently shuffled off the mortal coil of contention and have now joined the Orioles among those clubs mathematically eliminated from the postseason. While the competition for the No. 1 pick rolls on, Kansas City’s season is otherwise dead. Today, they’re the topic in our series of post-mortems on 2018 clubs.

The Setup

The 2018 season was always going to be a dreadful one for the Kansas City Royals, no matter the objections lodged by the franchise to the contrary. The 2017 campaign was the final one before free agency for most of Kansas City’s core contributors, with Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Mike Minor, Mike Moustakas, and Jason Vargas all departing — a group, incidentally, that combined for 14.2 WAR in their final season together. That’s not to say the Royals should have attempted to retain most of those players — after pitching like Greg “Mad Dog” Maddux in the first half, for example, Jason Vargas more resembled Chris “Mad Dog” Russo” in the second — but the departure of 14 wins was a real loss for a team that only won 80 total (72 in terms of Pythagoras).

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The Orioles became the first team in Major League Baseball to be eliminated from all theoretical playoff contention in 2018, the first team to cross to the “other side,” where even Harry and Lloyd can’t say there’s a chance. As such, the Baltimore Orioles become our first team in our series of post-mortems for the 2018 season, in which we’ll talk about where each team was, is, and where they’re headed.

The Setup

After a 75-87 season in 2017, the Baltimore Orioles were in no mood for a rebuild. The season marked the team’s first losing campaign since 2011, a stretch that marked the most successful sustained non-losing run by the Baltimore Orioles since the early 1980s, a happier time featuring Eddie Murray, Jim Palmer, Ken Singleton, Cal Ripken a little later on, and until his first retirement, legendary manager/tomato grower/curse-word innovator/umpire fighter Earl Weaver.

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