The Dodgers got their 2019 postseason off to a convincing start, blanking the Nationals 6-0 in a game that remained close longer than it should have. Walker Buehler earned his first postseason win, throwing six mostly strong innings marred only by a dicey fourth.

Hyun-Jin Ryu has been getting more attention where the Cy Young race is concerned by virtue of his league-leading 2.32 ERA, but with both Ryu and Clayton Kershaw now in their 30s, Buehler has more clearly become the team’s build-around pitcher. For the first time in his career, Buehler was given the Game 1 nod and responded by allowing just a single hit in six innings, while striking out eight. The scoreless outing brings Beuhler’s consecutive postseason scoreless innings streak to 16.2 innings; his last run allowed was a solo homer given up to Christian Yelich in the 2018 NLCS. The next time Buehler fails to strike out seven batters in a postseason game, it will be the first time.

The fourth inning was a very near thing for Buehler and the Dodgers. Only up 2-0 at that point in the game, Buehler threw 11 of his 13 fastballs outside of the strike zone, allowing all three of Washington’s walks in the game. The pitches weren’t a function of failing to get borderline strikes on the edge of the zone, either; five of the fastballs weren’t anywhere close to the strike zone, including two to Adam Eaton that would have been high balls to Manute Bol.

Buehler’s fourth inning a close call continued when facing Juan Soto with Adam Eaton and Anthony Rendon on-base. Soto put up a 1.000 OPS against right-handed pitchers in 2019, but he’s struggled against sliders with a .161 batting average and a .274 slugging against sliders from righties. Buehler left a tempting one right in Soto’s wheelhouse and Soto was just an eyelash away from fully crushing it. But after a Howie Kendrick walk, an easy groundout from Asdrúbal Cabrera left the bases loaded and the Nats scoreless.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Playoffs begin Tuesday evening as the Milwaukee Brewers (89-73) head to the nation’s capital to face the Washington Nationals (93-69). After a season during which most of the National League was in the playoff picture until very late in the season, both teams finished their respective campaigns in surprisingly convincing fashion, managing to clinch postseason appearances with time to spare. Both squads also fell short in their improbable runs for a division title late in the season, but making the Wild Card is still good enough to earn a bit of bubbly.

For the Washington Nationals, the end of the Bryce Harper era didn’t spell the end of their contending years. As it turns out, there is a foolproof way to replace a Bryce Harper: make a new one. Juan Soto only needed 121 minor league games to prepare for instant stardom in the majors had a fantastic 2018 run, hitting .292/.406/.517 with 22 homers and 3.7 WAR in 116 games for Washington. But Harper was still the Big Name on the team, and it wasn’t until his lucrative departure to Philadelphia that Soto could define Washington’s outfield.

Anything can happen in one game — the Detroit Tigers beat better teams on 47 occasions this season — but if I’m one of the other NL playoff teams, the Nationals aren’t the team I’d be pulling for to win. When considering the playoff construction of the teams — with less of an emphasis on depth and more on the top of the rotation — ZiPS projects the Nationals as the second-best squad in the National League. Second-in-the-National-League means they even edge out the Atlanta Braves by the slenderest of threads.

Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: It is time. A time for chats.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Absolutely.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Let’s not forget that offense is up more than a half-run a game since 2015

12:04

Dan Szymborski: And Arizona is still tougher than Dodger stadium

Read the rest of this entry »

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra

In 2017 and ’18, for the first time in franchise history, the Colorado Rockies made the playoffs in consecutive seasons. The team didn’t play deep into October in either season, but for an organization that hadn’t even had back-to-back winning seasons since the mid-90s, it was a wonderful result. Problem is, the team gave little thought as to how they got there or the weaknesses that could prevent them from doing so again in the future. The strengths Colorado rode in 2017 and 2018 were absent in 2019, and left the team high-and-dry with no real Plan B.

The Setup

The Rockies clearly believed that 2019 would be another year of contendership. But I’m not sure they realized how dependent they had been on the production of a few stars every season. 91 wins are nothing to scoff at, but to get to the point of barely making the playoffs, the Rockies had to have two legitimate MVP contenders and two legitimate Cy Young candidates. All told, Colorado received 19 WAR from their top four players in 2018, an identical sum as in 2017. In both years, that figure represented more than half the team’s value, a ratio far worse than every other postseason team from 2017, 2018, and now 2019.

In 2017, the Rockies made the playoffs despite an offense that ranked 26th in the league in wRC+. To fix this lack of run-scoring — the team ranked third in baseball in runs scored, but a good offense in Colorado should be crushing the league in runs, even given the most generous application of the Coors Field Hangover — the Rockies did, well, not much. They signed a 35-year-old catcher and given the opportunity to upgrade from fading veteran Carlos González, he of an 85 wRC+ and 0 WAR, decided to upgrade to…Carlos González. Read the rest of this entry »

The retooling of the Toronto Blue Jays hasn’t gone quite as planned. While the team won’t say so in such explicit terms, I believe that the original plan was to keep the basic core of the team together just long enough that reinforcements would arrive and save the team from a more painful long-term rebuild. Toronto’s stable of All-Star relatives has started to arrive — possibly the most impressive such group in baseball history — but the MLB roster is in a worse state than I imagine the team had hoped.

The Setup

The 2017 Toronto Blue Jays could point to a run of bad luck as the possible culprit for dropping from 89 to 76 wins, but the 2018 Blue Jays probably ought to have let go of those hopes. The post-2018 offseason didn’t feature much that would change the trajectory of the team, and the transactions were consistent with a plan of trying to simply stay relevant before players like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, and Cavan Biggio started hitting the major leagues. Moves were made but generally featured the supporting cast. In a perfect world, a healthy Matt Shoemaker and the resurgent Clay Buchholz could fill out the rotation, making up for the losses of J.A. Happ by trade and Marco Estrada by decline and then free agency. The thin bullpen that finished 21st in ERA and 23rd in WAR in 2018 before losing its top two pitchers by WAR, Seunghwan Oh and Tyler Clippard, could hopefully be buttressed with veteran free agents Bud Norris, David Phelps, Daniel Hudson, and John Axford.

As the team attempted to keep a skeleton crew together, the need to simultaneously add minor-league talent was obvious. The Jays traded off some of the players that were perceived to be surplus talent in an attempt to add to the team’s depth. Russell Martin could be replaced by Danny Jansen, Aledmys Diaz didn’t bring much that Lourdes Gurriel Jr. or Richard Urena couldn’t, and Kendrys Morales’s 2018 production could be replicated by Rowdy Tellez.

With just enough luck, the winter pickups would be enough when combined with the existing core (Marcus Stroman, Justin Smoak, Aaron Sanchez, Ken Giles, Teoscar Hernandez, Randal Grichuk) to make the Blue Jays a .500 team, or even a skosh better. Then the fun would start. The Jays later made the public argument that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was not one of the best 25 players in the organization, but I don’t imagine that a single person that heard that either believed it or even thought that Toronto actually believed it. Vladito and Bichette would be the latest on baseball’s list of exciting phenoms starring quickly in the majors (with more on the way!) and help get the Blue Jays to at least the mid-80s in wins. And in a bifurcated American League, with a few great teams and several that looked like spring training B-squads, that might be enough to make a serious playoff run. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s undeniable that Nicholas Castellanos has changed his 2019 storyline. Castellanos has hit .330/.365/.665 as a Chicago Cub with 15 homers and 35 RBIs before even completing his second month with the team. When the Cubs won the World Series, they ranked second in the National League in runs scored, behind only the team playing on Planet Coors. The Cubs were a middle-of-the-pack offense in 2019 through the trade deadline, and the main culprit was underwhelming production from the outfield. Castellanos’s surge been enough for one particularly optimistic national writer to predict that Castellanos would get $100 million in free agency.

If you go by the first four months of the season, 2019 looked like a weak followup to Castellanos’s 2018 campaign, when he set career-bests in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and WAR. As one of the best free-agents-to-be at a corner outfield position, it appeared likely that Castellanos would start 2019 with a new home given the state of the Detroit Tigers. Castellanos expressed a desire to have a trade completed before the season started, but no such transaction materialized until the trade deadline. That deadline trade was no blockbuster, with the Tigers only squeezing from the Cubs a single prospect ranked by THE BOARD, and a 40 FV prospect at that.

At the trade deadline, ZiPS projected the Chicago Cubs as the team that had the most to gain from adding Castellanos. But the longer-term question remains: should his post-deadline flurry change how clubs think of Castellanos going into the winter? Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, Miguel Rojas and the Miami Marlins agreed on a two-year extension, covering Rojas’s final year of salary arbitration and a year of free agent eligibility. The exact financial terms are undisclosed, but it appears that the contract’s guarantee is roughly in the $10-million range. The Marlins also get an option to get a third year from Rojas in 2022.

Miami currently stands in last place in the National League in WAR for hitters at 2.3. Your offense doesn’t reach those depths of sadness without being able to point your fingers at a lot of players, but Rojas is one of the few in the lineup who doesn’t shoulder a share of the blame. As of Thursday morning, Rojas has hit .285/.335/.383 in 2019, good for 1.9 WAR. He hasn’t been able to leverage the hitter-friendly environment for a boost in home runs — at five homers, he looks an easy bet to miss 2018’s total of 11 — but he has established himself as a top-tier defender this season. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Peanut butter?

12:03

Dan Szymborski: All I know about gum removal is that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa has gum in her hair and everyone lines up to “help”

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Generally speaking, hitters age, pitchers break.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: You don’t really get into a pitcher aging *curve* (apart from the normal risks for a pitcher) until the late 30s.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox are a franchise that can just taste the end of their rebuild. While they didn’t always move every veteran they could, they got top-shelf returns for Chris Sale, Adam Eaton, and José Quintana. The winning part tends to be the fun part, and the Sox play in a division with two teams that are in much worse shape, and two good teams that don’t spend aggressively. In front of this backdrop, you can almost feel the White Sox’s eagerness to throw their winter clothing to the back of the closet.

The Setup

From a transaction perspective, 2018 wasn’t quite as action-packed for the White Sox as prior years had been, largely because most of the team’s old core had already been traded to other teams. Jose Abreu was essentially the last remnant of the pre-rebuild White Sox, but the team didn’t move him for two significant reasons. First, the market for sub-elite first base/corner outfielder types has collapsed in recent years, and with Abreu 31 and dropping from his previous numbers, it was unlikely a return would be impressive. The other stumbling block to an Abreu trade was that Chicago didn’t actually want to trade him. Abreu’s a well-respected player in the clubhouse and popular with fans, as well as a mentor to Yoán Moncada, so if you’re not going to do better than, say, a 26-year-old Double-A reliever, why not keep him?

As I’ve discussed in the past, one of the disappointing things about the team’s 2018 was how few questions they really answered about their talent. Moncada looked like the same extraordinarily talented but up-and-down player at the end of 2018 that he appeared to be at the beginning. Neither Tim Anderson nor Yolmer Sánchez took a step forward, nor did much of the back of the roster, and the Daniel Palkas and Adam Engels failed to make much of a case for more significant roles. And the player who showed the most progress, Michael Kopech, was ruled out for the 2019 season after needing Tommy John surgery before 2018 had even wrapped.

Without knowing what to make a lot of their talent, the White Sox didn’t engage in much offseason wheeling-and-dealing, instead choosing to mostly hunker down for 2019. There was one big exception, however: the hunt for Manny Machado. For the future of the White Sox, this was one of the most promising signs.

“But Dan, I thought you hate rebuilding teams picking up veterans! I’m sure I’ve seen about 300 snarky tweets on this subject from you in the last…week or so!” Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time in a while, the Mariners weren’t playoff-adjacent in 2019. Depending on your point-of-view, over the last decade the Mariners have either been the worst playoff contender or the greatest also-ran in baseball. Rarely a thoroughly dreadful team, the mid to late 2010s Mariners were a fringe playoff threat in most seasons, typically flirting with contender status before staying home to listen to old Morrissey albums. It’s now been 18 years since the last time Seattle played postseason baseball. Team executive VP/GM Jerry Dipoto is banking on the notion that the organization can remedy that state of affairs with a quick retooling, initiated before the team reached the direst of straits.

The Setup

The 2018 Seattle Mariners played baseball quite adequately, winning 89 games, the team’s most since 2003. It wasn’t enough to punch a ticket to October, thanks to the Houston Astros winning 103 games and it taking a 97-win season merely to tie with the second wild card team, the Oakland A’s. The Mariners made it interesting and were able to stay close to the Astros for most of the year. The team’s divisional deficit didn’t permanently stretch to more than five games until late August. They scared Houston for a while, grabbing sole possession of first-place for part of June. Perhaps most impressively, the Mariners did it with bandaids and duct tape; former cornerstone players Félix Hernández and Kyle Seager were no longer stars, and second baseman Robinson Canó missed most of the midseason thanks to an 80-game suspension for a banned substance.

After the season, the Mariners made a rare decision for an 89-win team: they blew it up. The decision to enter a rebuild is a hard one, typically resulting in multiple years of struggle. But one of the advantages of going this route is that the Mariners were better able to control their destiny. Unlike the Orioles or the pre-Luhnow Astros, Seattle wasn’t forced to take a long view by having a system devoid of talent at the major and minor league levels.

For an extremely active executive like Jerry Dipoto, having a lot of options is important. The 2018-2019 Mariners were still able to find someone interested in Canó, and rather than treating a closer as a player you build around *coughRedscough*, they bundled Edwin Diaz with some cash and were able to land Jarred Kelenic and Justin Dunn. In addition to getting two of their top five prospects from the Mets — both ranked 50 or better by THE BOARD — the Mets picked up some spare baubles in Anthony Swarzak and Gerson Bautista. Even Jay Bruce, mostly brought in to make the cash work, has been occasionally useful in recent years. Read the rest of this entry »