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Dan Szymborski: Uh oh

12:03

Dan Szymborski: OK, this seems to be fixed now

12:03

Dan Szymborski: But I’ll have to type pretty slowly since nobody’s in here yet

Read the rest of this entry »

While the book isn’t completely shut on the 2024 Cincinnati Reds, with a 0.3% projected chance of making the postseason entering this week, only a plot twist out of left field could change the story. At 82-80, the 2023 Reds weren’t exactly good, but after entering the season with a bleak outlook, they comfortably beat most expectations. Given that their improvements last year largely came from their young talent rather than short-term signings, it wasn’t unreasonable back in March to believe this team could contend for a postseason berth. Five months later, as the Reds look more likely to play the role of spoiler in September than make it to October, now seems like a fine time to consider where they should go from here.

The first step would be to ask ourselves what were the reasonable expectations for the Reds in 2024. The ZiPS projections gave them an 80-82 record, but with enough uncertainty that if things broke their way, they could make a playoff push (35.1% odds). One man’s digital monstrosity isn’t the only fair outlook, of course, but our depth charts and Baseball Prospectus both had Cincinnati in a similar position, at 79 wins.

Right now, our depth charts and ZiPS have the Reds finishing with a 77-85 record, a disappointing result, but not exactly a massive miss relative to the projections above. If we’re going to figure out where the Reds go from here, we first have to understand how they got to this point, and that means looking back at the lessons they drew from their 82 wins last year.

Based on their offseason moves, it appears the organization decided – no doubt some unknown combination of ownership and the front office – that the general approach was to stay the course with their young talent and make mid-tier free agent signings to fill the team’s most pressing holes. The Reds made no significant trades over the winter, unless you count sending pitcher Daniel Duarte to the Rangers for cash in January after designating him for assignment as significant. It wasn’t until nearly Opening Day that the team made a move that would have an actual effect on the roster, picking up Santiago Espinal from the Blue Jays in the aftermath of the Noelvi Marte suspension.

Excluding the Espinal trade, the players signed in free agency made up the entirety of the external improvements from 2023 to 2024. Suffice it to say, I was not a fan of the specific signings they made. To sum up my general feelings at the time, I thought Jeimer Candelario was the right player for the wrong team. It doesn’t make much sense for a team overloaded with third basemen to sign a player who is most valuable as a third baseman and then make him a mediocre first baseman. On the pitching side, Emilio Pagán was a disaster waiting to happen, and $13 million was a lot to give Nick Martinez. Other pitcher signings made more sense: Brent Suter was a good addition and Frankie Montas was a reasonable gamble. The signings didn’t go exactly as I expected – some were worse, some were better – but they certainly didn’t do much to improve the club.

As a group, the free agents have performed a bit worse than projected, but not alarmingly so. By the end of the year, we project these nine free agents to be worth 5.1 WAR to the Reds, compared to the 7.3 WAR that was predicted. Two wins would not have salvaged Cincinnati’s season.

Injuries to some of the young talent has certainly hindered the Reds. Matt McLain, who made a convincing case for being one of the team’s foundational talents last year, injured his shoulder in the spring and has yet to play for Cincinnati this season. Christian Encarnacion-Strand didn’t get the chance to make up for his cold start because he underwent season-ending surgery in July after fracturing his right wrist in May, and while it’s not an injury, the team went without Marte for 80 games after he was suspended for performance-enhancing drugs.

However, the Reds also got some impressive breakouts on the flip side to compensate. For as exciting as they are, Elly De La Cruz and Hunter Greene weren’t expected to be in this year’s MVP and Cy Young races, though that’s where they stand in late August.

Moreover, injuries alone didn’t stop Cincinnati in its tracks. I ran the numbers on time lost to injuries two weeks ago, and the Reds ranked 11th out of 30 teams in potential value lost to injury, at 6.46 wins, right in line with the mean (6.5 wins) and a half-win more than median (six wins).

That leaves us with the conclusion that the Reds didn’t struggle this season because they were unlucky; rather, they did so because they were a roughly .500 team in terms of talent and didn’t get lucky. The path forward, then, is for ownership and the front office to recognize this so they can work to improve the team in the offseason instead of staying the course again and hoping for better results.

One part of this year’s plan — relying on the young talent — was justified and is worth doing again next season, as long as the Reds reinforce their core with more impactful veterans. Looking at the projections for 2025 now versus where they were six months ago, the Reds have lost a few wins, but their foundation is still quite solid.

(Rhett Lowder is not included here because he didn’t get a preseason ZiPS projection this year for 2025, so there would be nothing to compare with his current projection for next season.)

When I run some very preliminary projections for the NL Central in 2025, based on players who are under team control for next season, the division looks a lot like it did in this year’s the preseason projections, with all five teams roughly clustered around the .500 mark. That indicates that, with the right moves, the Reds could boost their playoff odds considerably this offseason.

Their plan to paper over holes this season by moving third basemen around has not been successful: The team ranks 25th in outfield WAR and 28th both in first base WAR and designated hitter WAR. Upgrading those positions with players who actually play them would go a long way toward turning things around. The rotation hasn’t been bad this season, but it is not good enough as it’s currently constructed.

It’s worth mentioning that the Reds did spend money on their roster entering this season, but they just didn’t do so effectively. Signing mid-tier free agents again this offseason won’t remedy the team’s woes. Yes, ownership almost certainly would balk at the idea of giving Juan Soto a blank check to play for Cincinnati, but it would be even more preposterous to spend the same amount to sign six players who are slightly above replacement level, which is kind of what the Reds did last winter.

Looking ahead, even though the upcoming class of free agents isn’t particularly deep, Cincinnati’s front office needs to strike the right balance of quality and quantity. Corbin Burnes is one of the best players available, and the Reds should make a serious push to sign him. Blake Snell has been on such a roll after his rough start to this season that it seems nearly certain that he will opt out of his Giants contract. The Braves have yet to extend Max Fried, so he seems bound for free agency, too. And while they might fall short, why shouldn’t the Reds go after Roki Sasaki if he gets posted this winter? After all, they made a bid to land Shohei Ohtani back when he was coming over from Japan.

On the offensive side, Anthony Santander would give the Reds the legitimate middle-of-the-order bat in the outfield that they currently lack, as would Tyler O’Neill and Teoscar Hernández

We currently have the Reds with a guaranteed payroll of just under $50 million for 2025, though that’s not including arbitration awards. They certainly have the ability to go after players who would make a real difference and still have a payroll well below that of the average team. A repeat of last winter’s approach would be a disaster; more of the same will likely lead to more of the same. The Reds quite possibly have more upside than any other team in the NL Central, but the time’s come for them to pick a direction rather than treading water.

On Wednesday, Joey Votto officially announced his retirement from a major league career that spanned parts of 17 seasons, all with the Cincinnati Reds. He hit free agency for the first time last winter before signing a minor league contract with the Toronto Blue Jays, his hometown team. During his first spring training game with Toronto, he stepped on a bat and twisted his ankle, and it took him until June to get back into games. He eventually reached Triple-A at the start of this month but struggled there, hitting .143/.275/.214 with 22 strikeouts in 51 plate appearances with Buffalo.

“Toronto + Canada, I wanted to play in front of you,” Votto wrote on Instagram. “Sigh, I tried with all my heart to play for my people. I’m just not good anymore. Thank you for all the support during my attempt.”

“Anymore” is the key word there, because for the bulk of his career, Joey Votto banged. He retires with a .294/.409/.511 slash line, a 145 wRC+, 58.8 WAR, 356 home runs, and 2,135 hits. He made six All-Star teams, won the NL MVP award in 2010, and ranks 40th all-time in career MVP shares at 3.08.

I will be very surprised if Votto isn’t inducted into the Hall of Fame fairly quickly after he debuts on the ballot in four years. (He didn’t play in the majors this season, so for the purposes of eligibility, he retired after 2023.) Assuming he does, he’ll mainly get in on the basis of his tangible career accomplishments, with no controversy to counterbalance. My vote for him, so long as I haven’t prematurely shuffled off to eternity, will be based on his accomplishments as a player, but when it comes to Votto, his legacy is more than just his on-field performance.

As a baseball player, Votto was very much a 21st-century slugger, rather than the classic power hitter archetype. A phenomenally disciplined hitter, Votto swung at just 19% of pitches thrown to him outside the strike zone from 2012 to ’20 (using the Sports Info Solution data), second only to Alex Avila. It’s no coincidence that Votto was one of the most disciplined hitters around; you would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t think of Votto as one of the game’s most thoughtful people. Whether hanging out at chess clubs, learning Spanish just to communicate better with teammates, or using his Players’ Weekend nickname to pay tribute to Canadian soldiers who died in World War I — by way of Canadian poet John McCrae’s famous poem, “In Flanders Fields” — he was always interesting, in the best possible way. Votto was a constant tinkerer of his swing and his approach at the plate, and when his career was on the definite downslope, he took the bold step of becoming more aggressive at the plate, a pretty big change for a player in his late 30s, squeezing out one last great offensive season in 2021 (36 homers, 140 wRC+).

Votto also spoke out about his experiences with grief and anxiety, back in 2009, when it was taboo for an athlete to talk publicly about their mental health. As Julie Kliegman reported in her recent book, Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, players today are more open about their struggles with mental illness and more willing to seek the help that they need than they were 10-15 years ago; that’s because of stars like Votto and Zack Greinke, among others from across the sports landscape, who came forward at a time when mental-health conversations in sports were rare. This kind of thing has always resonated with me because my dad was severely psychologically affected by his experiences in Vietnam, and rather than being able to accept assistance — no matter how often and vigorously it was offered to him — he spent 25 years trying to drink away his memories, which he managed to do permanently in 1997. I’ll always have a very soft spot for someone who speaks up so that others can get help.

It’s bittersweet when a beloved player retires. It represents a sudden change in a player’s life, but also in ours. Suddenly, athletes have to accept that they will never again do the thing that they were best at doing for so long, and we realize we’ll never get to watch them do it again, either. As was the case with Buster Posey, Votto’s retirement hit me harder than I expected it would. There’s a real feeling of mortality when people you were writing about as young players are now old (in baseball terms) and out of baseball.

Okay, that’s enough sentimentality for this stathead; back to Votto’s career and Hall of Fame profile. Let’s look at his career numbers and see how they compare to other first basemen. Classifying players by position is never neat, but for the purposes of this piece, any player who appears on Jay Jaffe’s First Base JAWS leaders list will be considered a first baseman. However, I’ve removed any data from before 1901, simply because professional baseball in the 1800s was as much carnival sideshow as competitive sport. You could argue for a later – or even much later – starting point, but this deep into an article about Joey Votto isn’t the best place to have that fight.

By career WAR alone, Votto’s résumé isn’t that overwhelming, and it doesn’t help his case that he has just over 2,000 hits and fewer than 400 homers at an offense-first position, but one has to take peak performance and career length into consideration. I’m a big believer in looking at peak value — how good they are at their best over an extended period, divorced from the bulk counting stats at the start and end of their careers — so long as we’re talking about a peak that’s beyond just a couple of years. I think Aaron Judge is a Hall of Famer right now, and had I been a voter at the time, I would have cast my vote for Johan Santana. I’m also not positive that Félix Hernández shouldn’t be a Hall of Famer. It isn’t a flaw in the data that Jack Morris has more career WAR than Sandy Koufax, but if you’re using WAR to make the case that Morris was just as good as or better than Koufax, the flaw is how you’re using the tool.

The Hall is about greatness, so I tend to prefer measures that include a peak run — such as WAR7 — and/or focus on wins above average rather than replacement. The table above is sorted by our version of WAR, but for the rest of this piece, I’m going to use Baseball Reference’s WAR, which ranks Votto slightly higher (64.5, 11th) than ours does, because that’s what Jay uses for JAWS. I am also using Baseball Reference’s wins above average to keep things consistent. Excluding anything that happened before 1901, Votto ranks seventh at the position in both WAA (37.7) and WAR7 (46.9) and ninth in JAWS (55.7). Except for those who were busted for performance enhancing drug use, all of the Hall of Fame-eligible players who rank in the top 15 by First Base JAWS have been inducted. Simply, Votto belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Votto’s fairly rapid decline kept him from gaudier WAR numbers. After a big drop-off in his power in 2018, his age 34 season, his resurgent 2021 campaign was a real outlier. But as Orson Welles once said, in one of my favorite quotes – and my desired epitaph – if you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop the story. Yes, many of us wanted another chapter, but Joey Votto’s career amounts to a banger of a story.

You can add two more stars to the game’s unfortunate tally of injured players, as Braves third baseman Austin Riley and Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte were both added to the 10-day injured list on Monday. Riley, who has been one of Atlanta’s hottest hitters after an ice-cold start to the 2024 season, was removed from Sunday’s game against the Angels after a 97-mph Jack Kochanowicz sinker went very high and very inside, connecting with his wrist. Marte’s injury appears less serious than Riley’s, but a re-aggravated sprained ankle has put him on the shelf at a key moment in Arizona’s playoff run.

When I ran the numbers on baseball’s most injured teams last week, Atlanta came out second in terms of the most lost potential value, “beaten” by only the Dodgers. Riley, who has gotten MVP votes in each of the last three seasons, has had a bit of a down year, posting a .256/.322/.461 slash line and 2.4 WAR, which represents his weakest performance since before his 2021 breakout. But even if he hasn’t had a particularly sterling season overall, he’s become very important lately, especially as the injuries have piled up and the rest of the team’s offense has swooned. Riley’s seasonal line was as low as .220/.288/.330 back in mid-June; he’d gone more than a month without a homer and had only hit three on the season. Since June 13, however, Riley has led Atlanta’s lineup in WAR and hit 16 round-trippers:

Monday’s MRI, which revealed a broken wrist, puts Riley out of action for 6-8 weeks, meaning that unless the Braves go deep into the playoffs, his 2024 season is probably over. While there’s never a good time to lose a middle-of-the-order hitter, Riley’s loss comes at a particularly awkward point for the Braves, as their seven games against the division-leading Phillies over the next week-and-a-half likely represent their last, best chance to seize the NL East, long-shot though it may be. The Braves seem to have arrested their fall in the standings, winning five of their last seven, but they’re still barely clinging to the last Wild Card spot, as they’re only 1 1/2 games ahead of the Mets and 3 1/2 in front of the Giants.

The silver lining — or arguably a dull gray one — is that Gio Urshela was suddenly available in free agency after being released by the Detroit Tigers on Sunday; the Braves signed him to a major league deal earlier today. The problem, of course, is that the only reason Urshela was available is that he’s having such a poor season that nobody wanted to risk picking up the pro-rated dollars remaining on his one-year, $1.5 million contract. Urshela had a solid little peak, putting up a 118 wRC+ and 8.1 WAR for the Yankees and Twins from 2019 to 2022, but after a fractured pelvis in 2023 and a miserable .243/.286/.333 line this year, he appears to be on the downslope of his career.

While I still think Nacho Alvarez Jr. would have been the best replacement despite his weak debut stint, Atlanta appears to want to play it safer, opting for the veteran Urshela over Luke Williams and maybe a bit of Whit Merrifield if Ozzie Albies returns in September. Without the Riley injury, ZiPS projected a 73% chance of the Braves holding off the Mets and Giants and making the playoffs; replacing Riley with Urshela drops that probability to 68%, while playing mostly Williams at third would cause it to dip a little further to 67%. Despite Urshela only being projected at replacement level or a hair above, paying $400,000 for 1% of a playoff spot is actually a reasonable value. To make room for Urshela on the 40-man roster, A.J. Minter, who is out with hip surgery, was moved to the 60-day IL. However, that doesn’t change the team’s projection, as I had already baked in the assumption that, at best, Minter was very likely to only get a few outings in the season’s final days.

As I mentioned above, Ketel Marte’s injury is far less serious than Riley’s. Marte originally sprained his ankle on August 10 after a Garrett Stubbs slide into second base. The Diamondbacks didn’t place him on the IL, opting to use him carefully in the last week, with a couple late-inning appearances and a game at DH. They’re taking no chances this time, though, and the hope is that he’ll be able to make a quick return after taking some time to recuperate.

As with Riley’s injury, Marte’s comes at a key point in the season for his team. After treading water earlier this season, the Diamondbacks have been one of baseball’s hottest teams, and along with the Padres, they’ve actually made the Dodgers feel at least mildly uncomfortable at the top of the NL West. Before the injury, Marte had been on the hottest run of his career, hitting .333/.422/.652 with 20 homers since the start of June. His 3.9 WAR over that timeframe ranked behind only Francisco Lindor’s 4.2 WAR among NL hitters. Combined with Arizona’s surge, Marte was putting together a reasonable MVP case. Assuming he only requires a minimum stay on the IL, the significant downgrade to Kevin Newman doesn’t represent a serious hit to the Snakes’ playoff hopes; ZiPS has them at 90% odds to make the playoffs, only a 0.5% drop from their projection without the injury. In the best-case scenario, the Diamondbacks would get Marte back just in time for a key four-game series against the Dodgers next week, their last opportunity to directly inflict punishment on their division rival in the standings.

The injuries to Riley and Marte don’t doom their teams to 2024 oblivion, but they do make their respective team’s challenges this year a bit more daunting. But hey, nobody said it would be easy.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Thank you those in attendance for fulfilling your legally required duties to appear here.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I don’t think it’s unreasonable for anyone

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Dan Szymborski: He’s hit a lot better last two seasons, but in a limited role. But there’s certainly a good deal of risk

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Dan Szymborski: but theres’ upside too. People forget that Robles was once one of the elite prospects and had a *very* solid rookie season

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Dan Szymborski: But there’s downside too since he has like a low .600s OPS since COVID

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Thanks to the trade deadline, this is a quiet time of the year for transactions, but baseball’s injured list is always hopping, and Tuesday was sadly no exception. First came the announcement that Dodgers pitching prospect River Ryan, our 21st-ranked prospect on the Top 100, would require Tommy John surgery, ending his 2024 season, and at best keeping him out for the vast majority of 2025. Not to be left out of the UCL injury party, Jazz Chisholm Jr. injured his left elbow on a slide into home plate on Monday night. The exact severity of Chisholm’s injury is still unknown, but with the season rapidly reaching its conclusion, any significant time on the shelf could imperil his ability to help the Yankees in their playoff push this year.

Chisholm was easily the biggest addition the Yankees made at the deadline, a flexible offensive player who the team hoped would bring some emergency relief to an extremely top-heavy offense that has received an OPS in the mid-.600s from four positions (first base, second base, third base, and left field). And Chisholm was more than fulfilling that expectation, with seven home runs in 14 games on the back of a .316/.361/.702 slashline. As noted above, the full extent of his injury isn’t yet known, but in a tight divisional race with the Baltimore Orioles (and with a playoff bye at stake), every run is precious. The Yankees have had a curious amount of misfortune when it comes to the health of their deadline acquisitions in recent years; between Frankie Montas, Scott Effross, Lou Trivino, Andrew Benintendi, and Harrison Bader, you might get the idea that they mostly acquire medical bills in their trades. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s quite a lot of bickering in sports, and not many things bring out more vehement disagreement than discussions involving who should get various awards. Even now, nearly 30 years later, when I think about Mo Vaughn beating out Albert Belle for the 1995 AL MVP, or Dante Bichette finishing second in that year’s NL race despite putting up just 1.8 WAR, I have to suppress a compelling desire to flip over a table. This year, thankfully, it’s hard to imagine the MVP voting results will be anywhere near as egregious as the ones we saw in ’95. That’s because the way MVP voters in the BBWAA evaluate players has changed dramatically since then.

Aaron Judge has easily the best traditional case for the AL MVP award if the season ended today. He leads the league in two of the main old-school batting stats: home runs and RBI. Bobby Witt Jr. and his .347 batting average is all that would stand between Judge and the Triple Crown. For what it’s worth, Judge would win the MLB Triple Crown, with twice the emeralds, rather than the AL one.

For most of baseball history, beginning with the first time the BBWAA handed out the award in 1931, numbers like these usually would’ve been good enough to win MVP honors. It also would’ve helped Judge’s case that the Yankees have one of the best records in baseball. If this were 30 years ago, Judge would all but officially have this thing wrapped up, barring an injury or the worst slump of his career.

But it’s the 2020s, not the 1990s, and I doubt anyone would dispute too strenuously the notion that ideas on performance, and their related awards, have shifted in recent years. Now, when talking about either an advanced offense statistic like wRC+ or a modern framework statistic like WAR, Judge certainly is no slouch. He currently leads baseball with 8.3 WAR, and his 218 wRC+ would be the eighth-highest seasonal mark in AL/NL history, behind only seasons by Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. But by WAR, his lead is a small one, roughly two-tenths of a run (!) over Bobby Witt Jr., who has surged since the start of July (.439/.476/.803, 247 wRC+ in 33 games) to supplant Gunnar Henderson as Judge’s main competition for the award. Henderson was right there with Judge for much of the early part of the season, and though he’s fallen off a bit, he’s still fourth in the majors with 6.4 WAR and capable of catching fire again at any time. With a month and a half left, Juan Soto can’t be completely counted out either.

A similar dynamic persists in the NL. Shohei Ohtani has looked a lot like the obvious MVP choice for much of the season, as he’s done, well, one half of the Shohei Ohtani thing: He is murdering baseballs and pitchers’ dreams. But as with Judge, there’s some serious competition when you look at WAR. Ohtani stands at the top, but by a fraction of a run ahead of Elly De La Cruz. Ketel Marte and Francisco Lindor are both within five runs of Ohtani, and nobody serious has ever claimed you can use WAR to conclusively settle disputes on differences that small. De La Cruz has more WAR than Ohtani since the start of June, and the latter two have more than the Dodgers slugger since the beginning of May. Marcell Ozuna, who has strong traditional stats (.302 BA, 35 HR, 90 RBI) shouldn’t be completely discounted if the Braves show signs of life; those numbers still matter, just not to the extent that they once did. With a fairly wide open race, there are plenty of stars with name power lurking just behind the leaders, such as Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman.

The answer of who should win the MVP awards is one we probably can’t answer beyond me giving my opinion, which I won’t do given the likelihood that I will be voting for one of the awards. But who will win the MVP awards is something we can make a reasonable stab at predicting. It’s actually been a while since I approached the topic, but I’ve long had a model derived from history to project the major year-end awards given out by the BBWAA. It was due for some updates, because the voters have changed. Some of the traditional things that voters prioritized, like team quality, have been de-emphasized by voters, though not completely. And the biggest change is the existence of WAR. Whatever flavor you prefer, be it Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, or the smooth, creamy swirl that can be scooped by our display window, this general stat has changed a lot about how performance is perceived.

There have been 47 MVP awards presented to position players who finished their seasons with fewer than 6.0 WAR; that’s more than a quarter of all hitter MVP seasons. However, excluding 2020, a hitter has not won an MVP without reaching that threshold since ’06, when both winners fell short: the NL’s Ryan Howard had 5.92 WAR, while AL winner Justin Morneau had 3.77 WAR.

When modeling the data, I use all the votes, not just the winners, and WAR is a pretty lousy variable when predicting voter behavior throughout most of history. That’s not surprising on its face since we’ve had WAR to use for only the last 15 years or so, making it impossible for most awards to have explicitly considered it. But there also appears to be only marginal implicit consideration, in which voters based their votes on the things that go into WAR without using the actual statistic. There’s a great deal of correlation between winning awards and high WARs in history, but that’s only because two of the things that voters have really liked, home runs and batting average, also tend to lead to higher WAR numbers. As an independent variable, WAR doesn’t help explain votes very well. That is, until about the year 2000.

If you only look at votes since 2000, all of a sudden, WAR goes from an irrelevant variable to one of the key components in a voting model. Voters in 2002 may not have been able to actually look at WAR, but even before Moneyball was a thing, baseball writers were paying much more attention to OBP, SLG, and defensive value at least partially because of analysts like Bill James, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, depending on your approach, once you deal with the correlations between variables, WAR comes out as one of or the most crucial MVP variable today. Could you imagine a world, even just 20 years ago, in which owners would propose paying players based on what sabermetrics nerds on the internet concocted?

The model I use, which I spent most of last week updating, takes modern voting behaviors into consideration. I use all three WAR variants listed above because it’s not clear which one most voters use. Here is how ZiPS currently sees the two MVP races this season:

This model thinks Judge is the favorite, but his odds to lose are nearly a coin flip. Witt is the runner-up, followed by Soto, Henderson, and the somehow-still-underrated José Ramírez. If we look at a model that considers all the BBWAA-voting years rather than just the 21st century results, this becomes a much more lopsided race.

Over in the NL, the updated ZiPS model sees a race that’s far more uncertain than the one in the AL.

Ohtani comes out as the favorite, but he has less than a one-in-three chance to win it. Behind him are the other WAR leaders, plus Ozuna.

Some of the WAR leaders without strong Triple Crown numbers, like Lindor, drop off considerably based on the entire history of voting, while Ozuna becomes a co-favorite with Ohtani. I haven’t talked about pitchers much in this article; they’re still included in the model, but none make the top 10 in the projected probabilities. Simply put, the willingness to vote pitchers for MVP seems to have declined over time. ZiPS doesn’t think any pitcher has been as dominant this season as the two most recent starters to win the award, Clayton Kershaw in 2014 and Justin Verlander in ’11, and closers these days typically can’t expect to get more than a few stray votes at the bottom of ballots.

It’ll be interesting to see how voting continues to change moving forward. In any case, no matter who you support for the MVP awards, strap in because there’s still plenty of baseball left to be played.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Good afternoon gang!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Well, not an organized gang

12:05

Dan Szymborski: He’s a decent contact hitter, but his pitch selection has always been rather dysfunctional; he’s not a Javy Baez-esque flailer, but he hits a lot of rather mediocre pitches and lets a lot of good ones go by

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Add in taht he has power upside and the swings in fortune can be pretty intense

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The 2024 season started absolutely terribly for the White Sox. After 25 games, the team’s record stood at 3-22, thanks in large part to an anemic offense that barely scored two runs per game. At the time – the Sox were 3-21 when I wrote the piece – I posed the question of whether the White Sox had a real shot at losing 120 games. I concluded that it was possible, with ZiPS projecting an 8.1% chance that Chicago would lose 120 games, better odds than even the Oakland A’s during their brutal 2023 season. That appeared to be the end of the story, at least until July.

After the awful start, things got slightly sunnier for the Sox for awhile. They swept the Tampa Bay Rays, a team expected to be a contender, and over the next not-so-nice 69 games, they went 24-45. While a .348 winning percentage isn’t in the same zip code as competence, that’s a 56-win pace, a level of lousiness that is fairly commonplace for the worst teams in the league, not the stuff of legend. But as the trade deadline approached, things again turned grim.

The White Sox won the first game of a doubleheader against the Twins on July 10, improving their record to 27-67. That date, almost a month ago, was the last time the White Sox won a game. The team’s 21 straight losses ties them with the 1988 Orioles for the second-most consecutive losses in modern baseball history (since 1901), just two losses behind the biggest loser, the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies. In some sense, the current one might be the most impressive losing streak, simply because the differences between the best and worst teams in baseball has shrunk over the years, making streaks like this more challenging to achieve.

And no, the White Sox haven’t been unlucky. Using a modified Pythagorean winning percentage (I use 1.83 for the exponent rather than two, as it’s been slightly more accurate historically), the White Sox have been the fourth-worst team since 1901.

If the season ended today, the White Sox would have the worst modified Pythagorean win percentage in more than 80 years, since the Philadelphia Phils in 1942. No, that’s not a typo; the Phillies officially shortened their team name for a season in 1942, apparently because they decided they didn’t want to have the same name as the line of cigars.

Problem is, the season doesn’t end today, so the Sox haven’t closed the deal yet. Regression toward the mean is a real thing, and one of the primary reasons why people overrate teams when things are going very well, and vice-versa. At the end of the day, a .235 winning percentage or the .272 in modified Pythag are likely – though not guaranteed – to go up over the remaining games. Projections represent a more stable description of a team’s ability, as well as one that’s generally more predictive of the future, and even with the diminished post-deadline roster, ZiPS sees the White Sox as “only” a .355 team, a 58-104 pace that represents merely a ho-hum level of awfulness.

But it’s also likely that given more games, these other terrible teams likely would have played better ball as well, for similar reasons. (Remember, Major League Baseball didn’t implement the current 162-game schedule until 1961.) While ZiPS projections date back to 2005, I have a quick little estimator for a team’s underlying ability that correlates fairly well with projections; it’s a mix of actual record, a team’s “wRC Pythagorean” — which uses wRC rather than runs score and allowed — and a model of regression toward .500. So I calculated the worst teams by this method and compared them to Chicago’s .356 estimate.

Whew, the White Sox once again fall to satisfyingly hurlicious levels as the worst team since the 1952 Pirates. And the thing is that for the Sox, a .355 record is lousy enough that they stand an excellent chance at losing 120 games anyway with the number of losses they already have banked. With 47 games to play, a .355 record would net them only 16.7 wins, leaving them at just under a 44-118 record, tantalizingly close to the 1962 Mets standard. And since we know that projections aren’t perfect, or at least maybe reality isn’t, that gives the White Sox ample room to continue to underperform and take the grand prize. Luckily, ZiPS can take care of that estimate.

Even with things projected not to go quite as badly, ZiPS gives the White Sox a slightly better than one-in-three chance (34%) to lose 120 games. And it could get even worse, with a 1% projected shot of finishing with a 35-127 record (or worse). That is championship brutality right there. The amusing thing is that this probability could’ve been even higher, but the White Sox didn’t trade Garrett Crochet or Luis Robert Jr. at the deadline, leaving the team encumbered with an additional 2-3 wins. If I remove Crochet and Robert Jr. in favor of their likely sub-replacement replacements, ZiPS projects the Pale Hose to have a 66% chance of losing at least 120 games!

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it a silver lining, but hope remains even for the most woeful teams in baseball. The last team to make a serious late run at 120 losses, the 2003 Tigers, improved quickly in the following seasons and made it to the World Series just three years later. Those 1952 Pirates were in the middle of a full rebuild helmed by legendary general manager Branch Rickey, hired in ’51, and though health problems forced him to step down in ’55, the organization assembled many of the key players who were on the World Series-winning team in ’60. And let’s not forget that seven years after losing 120 games, the Mets won the 1969 World Series. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf isn’t one to embrace change, but a disaster of epic proportions could, in theory, be the one thing that would prompt him to overhaul the organization. I wouldn’t say I’m terribly optimistic about this actually happening, but with an improved farm system – we now rank Chicago’s farm as the third best in baseball – and maybe a better front office assembled, the Sox could turn things around.

Whether the White Sox have a brighter future is something we’ll have to wait to find out. For now, enjoy these Sox as they reach new levels of ineptitude, because they may be the worst major league team you’ll ever see.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: And awaaaay we go!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: A shot? Yes. But it’s an uphill fight. Dodgers are an excellent team. The Padres need to not just be really good, they have to have the Dodgers hit some of their swingy injury risk in their high-end talent

12:03

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS has Dodgers at like 77% this morning, and I think I’d take the over on what the true mystical probability is that we can’t actually tell

12:04

Dan Szymborski: No, the site doesn’t reformulate the old projections

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