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 »

NEW YORK — They own the majors’ best record since the All-Star break, but the 2019 Mets remain a work in progress. Winners of 27 out of 40 games in the second half, they’ve played themselves back into contention for a postseason berth, and energized Citi Field, but after winning 10 out of their previous 12 series, they spent this past weekend making mistakes, missing opportunities, and ultimately dropping their second series in as many weeks to the Braves — this time via a three-game sweep at home.

In Friday night’s 2-1 loss, the Mets squandered a seven-inning, 13-strikeout gem by Jacob deGrom, who provided the team’s only run of the night on a solo homer, his second of the year. For as well as the reigning NL Cy Young winner pitched, opposite number Mike Foltynewicz — who entered the evening with a 6.09 ERA and a 5.82 FIP, numbers more than double those deGrom — yielded just one other hit besides the homer over his seven innings. The 1-1 tie carried into extra innings, and after the scuffling Edwin Díaz stranded pinch-runner deluxe Billy Hamilton at third base by striking out both Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies in the top of the 10th, the Mets got the winning run to third in the bottom of both the 10th and 11th themselves, but failed to convert; the team went 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position on the night. Ultimately, a 14th-inning single by Hamilton (who entered hitting .211/.275/.269) off Jeurys Familia brought home the deciding run.

In Saturday night’s 9-5 loss, Zack Wheeler was knocked around for his third straight start, putting the Mets into a 4-0 hole by the middle of the third inning. They clawed their way back, and took a 5-4 lead when Pete Alonso walloped a 451-foot three-run homer into the black batters’ eye, tying the franchise’s single-season home run record — 41, previously reached by Todd Hundley (1996) and Carlos Beltran (2006) — and reaching 100 RBI in one fell swoop. Two significant defensive mistakes, an error by third baseman Todd Frazier on a grounder down the line by Francisco Cervelli in the sixth inning, and a lackadaisical relay play by left fielder J.D. Davis in the eighth, both led to runs, while a baserunning out at third base by Jeff McNeil, that after a pair of bunt attempts by hot-hitting Amed Rosario, snuffed a potential sixth-inning rally.

In Sunday’s 2-1 loss, the Mets could do little against Braves starter Dallas Keuchel, who shut them out for seven innings while allowing just four hits, all singles. Steven Matz answered with six innings of two-hit ball, but one of those hits was a Josh Donaldson homer, and the Braves’ third baseman greeted reliever Paul Sewald with another one in the seventh inning. The Mets broke through in the ninth inning against Mark Melancon, albeit on a fielder’s choice off the bat of Frazier that nearly became the team’s fourth double play of the afternoon. Ultimately, the tying run was stranded at second base, the last failure in a 1-for-8 day with runners in scoring position. So it goes. Read the rest of this entry »

FanGraphs contains multitudes. Multiple flavors of Wins Above Replacement — one in which the pitching component is driven by FIP, the other by actual runs allowed (RA9-WAR) — for one thing. Multiple projection systems (Steamer and ZiPS) and ERA estimators (FIP, xFIP, SIERA). Multiple measures for defense, pitch selection, and plate discipline, borne of different data feeds. Multiple ways of measuring playoff odds and projected won-loss records. Multiple depth charts, now that we’ve brought Roster Resource on board. There’s a lot of cool stuff… if you know where to look.

One of the cool but relatively new and lesser-known features is our Season Stat Grid, introduced just over a year ago, and in the planning stages for longer (I know that I’m one of the people who lobbied for the tool). The grid allows the user to view 11 year 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. It’s hours of fun, and occasionally fuel for an article. So after highlighting the exceptional, breakout season of Rafael Devers and noting that — at the time it was written, at least — he had the majors’ largest year-over-year improvements in batting average, on-base percentage, and WAR, while ranking second in his gains in wRC+ and fourth in slugging percentage, I figured the topic was worth a league-wide look.

Towards that end, I chose 10 statistical categories where we might look for significant changes, namely the aforementioned five plus walk and strikeout rates, out-of-zone swing rate, fielding (UZR plus positional adjustment, if any) and, for a nod towards win expectancy, Clutch. To qualify, players had to reach 400 plate appearances last year and 300 thus far this year. I then took the top 30 players whose changes went in the right direction (higher in all cases except for strikeout and chase rates), awarding 30 points for first place, 29 for second, and so on. When two or more players were tied — even if it was just a virtual tie, where we can’t see what’s to the right of the displayed decimals — I split the points evenly among the tied; for example, James McCann and Yoán Moncada, who have increased their batting average by 66 points apiece, occupy the third and fourth spots and thus each get 27.5 points. I doubled the impact of WAR and wRC+ (60 points maximum), even though components of those are included elsewhere within the survey, on the belief that those two stats drive the lion’s share of our understanding as to who has improved.

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While it did keep the record-setting streak of days with a position player pitching alive — it’s now up to seven, running the already record-level total number of such appearances this season to 80 — Richard Ureña‘s mop-and-bucket outing at the tail end of the Blue Jays’ 16-3 loss to the Dodgers was not the most notable thing about Tuesday night’s game. No, that would be Bo Bichette’s utter annihilation of two Clayton Kershaw pitches, one on the ace southpaw’s second pitch of the game, and the other in the sixth inning, before things really got out of hand:

For a brief and perhaps unprecedented moment, my Twitter timeline was unanimous:

Per Statcast, both of Bichette’s blasts came off his bat at 105.8 mph, the first one with a 25 degree launch angle and an estimated distance of 423 feet, the second with a 30 degree angle and a distance of 411 feet. None of those numbers were out of character for the 21-year-old rookie shortstop, who at this writing has clubbed seven homers in 103 plate appearances since being recalled on July 29, in a move that appeared timed to take some of the sting out of Marcus Stroman being traded to the Mets. Among Bichette’s blasts are a 107.5 mph, 441-footer off the Yankees’ Domingo Germán and a 107.7 mph, 436-footer off the Royals’ Jakob Junis, the latter his first in the majors on August 1. This was his first multi-homer game, and his first homers off a pitcher who had made an All-Star team or won a Cy Young award, though, so it counts as a momentous occasion.

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