After frittering away what was once an 11 1/2-game lead over the Indians, the Twins have reestablished firm control of the AL Central race, but this weekend, their hopes to play deep into October took a hit when Michael Pineda was suspended for 60 games for violating MLB’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. Pineda tested positive for hydrochlorothiazide, a diuretic on the league’s banned substances list, and while his suspension was reduced from the standard 80 games upon appeal, he won’t be available for the playoffs, making this one of the most impactful recent Joint Drug suspensions.

Pineda’s suspension was announced amid a three-game series between the division rivals. On Friday night, he held the Indians to one run over six innings while striking out a season-high 10; he left the game carrying a 2-1 lead, but the Indians tied the game in the eighth and won 6-2 in 11 innings. The next day, MLB announced the suspension, and while a fired-up Twins team rallied late to win 5-3 and cut the team’s magic number to clinch the division to 14, they lost the rubber match on Sunday, 5-2.

In a statement released by the Major League Baseball Players Association, 30-year-old Pineda said in part:

“I mistakenly took a medication that was given to me by a close acquaintance, who obtained it over-the-counter and assured me it would safely help me manage my weight. I ingested a few of these pills without the consent of the Twins’ training staff. Testing revealed trace elements of a substance called Hydrochlorothiazide, which is a banned diuretic under baseball’s testing program.”

Hydrochlorothiazide is a medication used to treat high blood pressure and fluid retention (edema) by producing more urine, which helps the body get rid of excess sodium and water. It’s on the list of banned substances because it is often abused as a masking agent, which helps to to conceal the use of anabolic steroids by reducing their concentration in urine due to the increase in volume. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Hello and good afternoon! Welcome to my first chat in this new time slot — real life events (mainly my daughter starting preschool) have necessitated changing from my Thursday slot, and thankfully, Dan Szymborski was able to accommodate. You’ll still get the same artisanal blend of sense and nonsense as I usually dish out.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: I’ve got a thing in the pipeline today about Michael Pineda’s suspension and its impact on the Twins. And now, onto the questions…

12:03

Jay Jaffe: That is a particularly weak move as it leaves Alex Cora and the players to answer questions without knowing all that went into the decision or what the future holds

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Well, I suspect that J.D. Martinez will opt out and that the Sox might decide that their chances of re-signing Betts are better if they haven’t committed $100M+ to him. Beyond that… they’re going to have to get creative and hope that some of their young players pan out.

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This week, Michael Lorenzen put himself in the company of the Bambino, Abba Dabba, and The Caveman. In Wednesday night’s game between the Reds and Phillies in Cincinnati, the versatile 27-year-old became the first player since Babe Ruth to collect a win as a pitcher, hit a home run, and play the outfield in a single game, something Ruth did for the Yankees on June 13, 1921. On Thursday afternoon, Lorenzen drew the first start of his career in center field, thus becoming the first pitcher to make a start in the field in the game after netting a win since the Braves’ Jim Tobin (nicknamed Abba Dabba for reasons unclear) on July 29, 1943, and the first pitcher to start in the outfield since Don Robinson (nicknamed The Caveman for his physique) in 1984. As esoteric as this collection of achievements may be, it’s reason enough to examine the progress of Lorenzen and a few other potential two-way players whom I highlighted in late February.

In the top of the seventh inning of Wednesday’s game, manager David Bell called upon Lorenzen for his 66th appearance of the year, in the service of protecting a 5-4 lead. While Lorenzen served up a game-tying homer to Jay Bruce, the second batter he faced, Jose Iglesias’ solo homer off Jose Alvarez in the bottom of the frame put the Reds back on top. Lorenzen then threw a scoreless eighth, retiring Bryce Harper, Rhys Hoskins, and Jean Segura in order. In the bottom of the eighth, with two outs and one on against Blake Parker, he launched his first home run of the season and seventh of his career, a 100.7-mph, 387-foot shot that put the Reds up 8-5. When closer Raisel Iglesias entered for the ninth, Lorenzen moved to center field (his 18th appearance in the outfield this year), replacing rookie Brian O’Grady. He was a bystander as Iglesias set down the side in order, but he did vulture a win, his first of the season.

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Lost somewhat amid the holiday weekend, the Twins set a new major league record on Saturday. Granted, the mark they surpassed was no long-standing, hallowed standard — in fact, it stood for less than a full year. Nonetheless, with Mitch Garver’s ninth-inning solo shot off the Tigers’ Joe Jiménez, the Twins overtook the 2018 Yankees with their 268th home run, the most by any team in one season. That they left themselves with four full weeks to pad the mark is just one more sign of how over-the-top this this year’s home run totals — fueled primarily by more aerodynamic baseballs, with smoother leather and seams so low that the balls are nearly round — are. The feat deserves a closer look, as well as some perspective.

Here’s Garver’s home run, his second of the day and 26th of the season — in just his 76th game:

Garver’s homers were two of six the Twins hit in their 10-7 loss (a subject to which I’ll return momentarily). His total ranks fifth on the team behind Max Kepler (36), Nelson Cruz (35, in just 101 games), Eddie Rosario (28), and Miguel Sanó (27, in just 87 games). Counting C.J. Cron (24), Jonathan Schoop (21) and Jorge Polanco (20), the Twins are the first team with eight players to reach 20 homers in a season, and they’re the 14th team to have five players reach 25 homers, with multiple candidates to make them the second team to have six:

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When the All-Star break arrived, Max Scherzer appeared to be making a pretty strong case to win a fourth Cy Young award. Nearly two months and two stints on the injured list later, however, he’s trying to recover his dominant form and to restart his campaign for the hardware, one that will be difficult in light of recent voting history. In a performance that was largely lost amid Tuesday night’s late-inning drama in Washington — the Nationals allowed five ninth-inning runs to fall behind 10-4, then scored seven in the bottom of the frame, capped by Kurt Suzuki’s walk-off homer — Scherzer did show some semblance of his usual self. Unfortunately for the 35-year-old righty, the other inning he threw, a four-run fourth during which the Mets teed off on his first pitches, was his undoing.

Making just his fourth start since the All-Star break, Scherzer wasn’t at his sharpest against the Mets, but he did retire nine of the first 10 batters he faced, with a seven-pitch second inning walk by Brandon Nimmo the only blemish. While he did strike out four in that span, the Mets made him work for those shutout innings, as he needed 46 pitches. The Mets changed their approach in the fourth, attacking Scherzer’s first pitch even if it was outside the zone during a three-pitch sequence to start the frame, Pete Alonso and Michael Conforto both singled, and then Wilson Ramos doubled, plating one run. Nimmo went four pitches deep before hitting a sacrifice fly to put the Mets up 2-1, and then Joe Panik pounced on the next pitch, a 91.9-mph cutter high in the zone, for a two-run homer to left field, expanding the lead to 4-1. Scherzer didn’t allow another run amid that 21-pitch slog of an inning, but he did give up one more hit, a double down the line by light-hitting Luis Guillorme.

Scherzer recovered to retire the final six Mets he faced. Outside of the fourth inning, he didn’t surrender a hit, and allowed just one walk. With opposite pitcher Jacob deGrom also wobbly — after allowing two runs through his first seven innings, he served up a two-run homer to Juan Soto in the eighth — the Nationals remained in the game and ultimately produced a comeback of a type that hadn’t been seen in 58 years. It was the first time Scherzer had gone six innings or thrown at least 90 pitches in a start since July 6. Read the rest of this entry »

As a fan, you know the feeling. Some years, everything just comes together, as if by magic. Pitchers find that extra gear, hitters come through under pressure so repeatedly you’re ready to believe clutch is a skill, and even the bit players rise to the occasion. Such was the Cinderella season of Team Entropy in 2018, the culmination of my long-running efforts to track the seemingly endless possibilities for end-of-season chaos. Last year, for the first time in MLB history, the baseball gods gave us a pair of Game 163 tiebreakers, specifically to determine which teams would win the NL Central and West crowns, and which would play in the NL Wild Card game. It was a beautiful bounty of baseball, the kind I dreamed of when I began this project in 2011.

That year, you may recall, the Rays and Cardinals snatched spots away from the collapsing Red Sox and Braves, respectively, on the season’s final day. Writing for Baseball Prospectus at the time, I coined the phrase “Team Entropy” — taking a page from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all systems tend toward disorder — to describe the phenomenon of rooting for scenarios that produced such mayhem. I’ve returned to the concept on an annual basis, tracking the possibilities for end-of-season, multi-team pileups that would require MLB to deviate from its previously scheduled programming.

The idea is that, if you’re a die-hard fan of a team trying to secure (or avoid blowing) a playoff spot, flag-waving for your squad of choice generally takes precedence, but if you’ve embraced the modern day’s maximalist menu of options that allow one not just to watch scoreboards but also to view multiple games on multiple gadgets, You Want more. More baseball in the form of final-weekend division and Wild Card races. More baseball in the form of extra innings and tiebreaker scenarios topped with mustard and sauerkraut. TVs, laptops, tablets, and phones stacked like a Nam June Paik installation so that you can monitor all the action at once, and you want the MLB schedule-makers to contemplate entering the Federal Witness Protection Program instead of untangling once-far-fetched scenarios. Welcome to Team Entropy, friends. Read the rest of this entry »

It takes incredible talent just to be a fringe major leaguer, and even more talent to be a first-round draft pick and a top 10 prospect, as Lucas Giolito was earlier in this decade. Yet last year, the 6-foot-6 righty was The Worst, at least among the 57 pitchers who threw enough innings (162) to qualify for the ERA title. While good health and the White Sox’s commitment to rebuilding allowed him to take the ball 32 times and throw 173.1 innings, Giolito finished his age-23 season with the highest ERA (6.13) and FIP (5.56), and the lowest strikeout-walk differential (4.5%) and WAR (-0.1), of any qualifier. Ouch.

This year, it’s been an entirely different story, as Giolito has pitched like an ace, posting a 3.20 ERA and 3.30 FIP in 157.1 innings en route to 4.7 WAR, good for fourth in the league. When I set out to adapt my “Most Improved Position Players” methodology to starting pitchers, I strongly suspected that the now-25-year-old righty would come out on top, just as Cody Bellinger did in that exercise. He not only did, he was the runaway winner, scoring points in eight of the nine categories I chose to measure. In three of them, he had the largest improvement of any pitcher, and in four others, he ranked among the majors’ top four.

For those unacquainted with my previous foray, its basis is our handy but somewhat obscure Season Stat Grid, introduced just over a year ago. The grid allows the user to view up to 11 years worth of data in a single category, and to track and rank year-to-year totals and changes based on thresholds of plate appearances and innings. Echoing what I did for the position players, and some of the feedback I received (thankfully no tar or feathers), I chose nine statistical categories where we might look for significant, skill-driven changes. To qualify, pitchers needed to have thrown just 80 innings last year, and 120 this year; for the position players, I used 400 plate appearances last year and 300 this year, but in retrospect realized that some very improved players, such as Christian Vázquez, had slipped through the cracks. With pitchers such as the Yankees’ Domingo Germán (who didn’t even crack my top 20) in mind, time I loosened the pitcher thresholds a bit. For the top 20 pitchers whose changes went in the right direction (lower ERA, FIP, walk and home run rates on the one hand, higher WAR and strikeout, first-pitch strike, groundball, and chase rates on the other), I awarded 20 points for first place, 19 for second, and so on. I went 30 deep on the position players, but found that among the pitchers, often the 25th- or 30th “best” change might be a negligible improvement or even a step in the wrong direction. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to another edition of my Thursday chat. While I wait for the queue to fill, a couple of housekeeping notes. First off, either next week or the week after, I will be migrating my chat to another day, not because I don’t love you Thursday regulars (well, most of you) but because my daughter’s preschool schedule requires a bit of juggling responsibilities within our household. People always ask, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” and here, I have.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: So please do not be shocked if my next chat is on, like, a Monday or a Tuesday (the day is still TBD). Embrace the change.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Second, my piece on Aaron Judge’s recent hot streak, and the great team home run race between the Twins and Yankees, is up here. I think I set a personal best for bells and whistles — GIFs, vids, tables, spray charts — added to a piece, and so you will have plenty of things to entertain you but most notably, a Judge sentencing baseballs to die.  https://blogs.fangraphs.com/aaron-judge-is-mercilessly-punishing-baseb…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Velocity. Via Pitch Info, here’s his progression for his cutter: 2016 94.2 2017 93.5 2018 92.7 2019 92.1

12:07

Jay Jaffe: That’s two full clicks gone, and with it some movement — about 2 inches of horizontal movement and an inch of vertical movement. Not great, Bob!

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It’s no secret that the Yankees have weathered quite the storm when it comes to injuries. Despite losing more player-days (2,210) and payroll dollars ($70.9 million) to the injured list than any other team, they own the AL’s best record (88-47) and highest-scoring offense (5.86 runs per game), and they’re fast closing in on the Twins for the major league lead in homers. They’ve done all of this despite receiving comparatively modest contributions from their two most potent sluggers, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge. But while the former has been limited to one home run and nine games played amid myriad injuries and setbacks, the latter appears to be finding his stroke.

The 27-year-old Judge, who missed two months (April 21 to June 21) due to an oblique strain on his left side, has played just 78 games this season and homered 18 times, but six of his homers came during the Yankees’ just-completed nine-game west coast road swing, that after he had homered just once in his previous 28 games and 127 plate appearances while hitting.222/.339/.333. For the trip, he hit .359/.375/.897 — there’s one walk and 13 strikeouts in 40 PA, a fair tradeoff for that extreme power — lifting his season line to .277/.386/.514 (135 wRC+). Along the way, he set personal season highs with a 116.0 mph, 467 foot blast off the A’s Joakim Soria on August 20, and — wait, you think I’m not gonna show Judge sentencing that ball to die?

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With three losses in a row against the Nationals at Wrigley Field this past weekend, the Cubs (69-61) slipped out of first place in the NL Central. They’re now three games behind the Cardinals (72-58), the furthest they’ve been from first since May 1, and just one game ahead of the Phillies (68-62) and two games ahead of the Mets (67-63) in the race for the second NL Wild Card spot. They’ll face the latter in an important three-game series starting today, but the bad news for them is that they’ve had to pack their suitcases to head to Citi Field. At 25-39, the Cubs own the major’s eighth-lowest winning percentage on the road (.391), and the lowest of any contender by 44 points (the Mets are 30-39 at .435 on the road).

In a race for a playoff spot, that’s quite a handicap, of course. In fact, in the Wild Card era, no team has ever won less than 40% of its games away from home and still reached the playoffs. Just a small handful of teams has won less than 45% and done so. Here’s the bottom 10:

Of the 10 teams above, the 2006 Cardinals, who won the World Series despite finishing with just an 83-78 record — the low-water mark for any World Series champ — and the 2005 Astros at least made it to the big dance, but aside from the 2015 Astros winning the AL Wild Card game, the 2008 Dodgers were the only other team from the above group to advance in the postseason.

I limited that list to 10 because beyond that, the rankings get pretty bunched up, with three teams at .458 (from the strike-shortened 1995 season), six at .469, 11 at .481, and so on. In all, 43 of the period’s 206 postseason teams (20.9%) had sub-.500 records on the road; if you’re a stickler for a full 162-game schedule, it’s 40 out of 198 (20.2%). Just 10 of those teams won a pennant, and only three — the aforementioned 2006 Cardinals, and the 1997 and 2003 Marlins, because of course — won the World Series. It’s not a particularly viable route to dog-piles and champagne showers. Read the rest of this entry »