The Dodgers and Max Muncy clearly believe they have a pretty good thing going. Since retooling his swing after being cast off by the A’s, the late-blooming slugger has been a key middle-of-the-lineup component on six straight playoff teams, and part of three pennant winners including their 2020 championship squad. Within the past four years, the Dodgers have inked Muncy to three contract extensions, the latest of which — announced on Thursday — is a two-year, $24 million deal with a club option for a third season, potentially keeping Muncy in the fold through 2026.

Muncy, who turned 33 on August 25, is coming off a season in which he hit .212/.333/.475 and matched his career high with 36 homers, three of them grand slams. The batting average wasn’t pretty (though it was at least above the Mendoza Line) and his 26.4% strikeout rate was his highest since 2018, but his 14.7% walk rate and considerable power helped to make up for it. Amid some ups and downs, his 118 wRC+ was 18 points short of his career mark but still ranked eighth among regular third basemen.

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For much of Wednesday night, it appeared as though the World Series might head back to Texas, as Zac Gallen held the Rangers hitless for six innings in a dominant and impressive Game 5 performance, particularly given the circumstances. The Rangers came to life with a quick flurry of three hits off Gallen in the seventh inning, however, scratching out a run. They added four more in the ninth to pull away with a 5-0 win, giving them their first championship in franchise history.

There’s a lot to be said about that championship. Here are five thoughts — on the team’s turnaround from ignominy, their long wait, their road to victory, their postseason stars, and their Hall of Fame-bound manager — that I hope add some history and perspective to their accomplishment. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers’ Game 3 win proved costly and bittersweet, as both starter Max Scherzer and right fielder Adolis García departed due to injuries. General manager Chris Young and manager Bruce Bochy chose to treat the losses with the urgency befitting a team in hot pursuit of a championship, so prior to Tuesday night’s Game 4, both were replaced on the active roster, officially ending the seasons of a prospective Game 7 starter and record-setting cleanup hitter. Lefty reliever Brock Burke and utilityman Ezequiel Duran were anointed to replace them, ensuring Bochy a full complement of 26 able bodies.

The Rangers waited until an hour before gametime to announce the moves, which added an element of surprise to the situation, though had the injuries occurred during the regular season, the replacement of both players would have been a foregone conclusion. From the vantage point of the 10–0 lead the Rangers built by the third inning of Game 4 and the 11–7 victory that pushed them to within one win of a championship, the absences were felt, albeit not quite in the manner one might have expected. Burke pitched briefly and badly, and Duran remained a bystander as Travis Jankowski picked up the slack in García’s stead. Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the Halloween edition of my FanGraphs chat. I’m sure we’ll discuss some horror stories from free agency, playoff bullpens, and more.

2:02

Jay Jaffe: Nothing from me today as I plug away at my entries for our Top 50 Free Agents list, which runs next week, but I did do a piece on Ketel Marte’s record-setting postseason hitting streak, which he extended to 19 games last night https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-postseason-marte-party-is-one-long-hit…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: on with the show…

2:04

Jay Jaffe: Funny you should mention that, as he’s one of the players I’m writing about for the FA50. The change of scenery really worked for him, in that the Cubs found some mechanical changes he was able to implement without driving himself and everyone crazy with constant tinkering — mainly regarding his hand position and back hip — and he had a nice bounceback season. His Statcast numbers are pretty meager, but some of that is because he traded power for contact, cut his strikeout rate dramatically, and had some of the best 2-strike numbers of any hitter.

2:05	Jay Jaffe: I’m not sure he hits for a 134 wRC+ again in 2024, but his power and athleticism give him a pretty decent floor for the next few years.

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If there’s been one constant for the Diamondbacks during their run to the World Series, it hasn’t been dominant starting pitching or shutdown relief work, though they’ve gotten their shares of both. It’s been Ketel Marte, who has not only hit safely in all 14 of Arizona’s playoff games but also set a new postseason record on Saturday night with an 18-game hitting streak, dating back to 2017. He claimed the record by slapping a two-run eighth-inning single off Martín Pérez in Game 2.

Marte’s streak began with the 2017 NL Wild Card game, when his 3-for-5 showing against the Rockies (including starter and current Ranger Jon Gray) helped the Diamondbacks to an 11–8 win. He hit in all three games of the Division Series against the Dodgers, even homering off Clayton Kershaw, but the Diamondbacks were swept nonetheless. Six years later, the 30-year-old switch-hitter picked up where he left off, with a game-tying homer off Corbin Burnes in the NL Wild Card Series opener against the Brewers — one pitch after Corbin Carroll had homered off Burnes as well. His two-run single off Freddy Peralta in Game 2 of the Wild Card Series turned a 2–1 deficit into a 3–2 lead, sending the Diamondbacks on their merry way to their first upset of the postseason. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s a surprise about the Phillies falling one win short of a second straight trip to the World Series, it’s not that their fearsome sluggers couldn’t come up with one last big hit when needed. It’s that Philadelphia has gone fishing despite getting more out of its starting pitchers than any of the other postseason participants. Then again, you can call upon Zack Wheeler for relief in a do-or-die game, but you can’t do that every night, nor can you clone him and get an extra start per round. The reality is that any short series depends as much, if not more, on the performances of bullpens that continue to absorb an increasingly large share of the postseason innings. Regardless of those controversial decisions about whether to pull a starter who’s cruising along, eventually it comes down to which team can put out the fires in the seventh, eighth, or ninth innings of the close games.

This isn’t intended to be a “Eureka!” moment in cracking the postseason code — just a reminder as I take another spin through trends in postseason starting pitching, which I’ve been tracking annually for the last several seasons. In the broader context, last year’s rebound of starting pitcher workloads, both in the regular season and in October, may well have been an aberration. Read the rest of this entry »

When they acquired him from the Mets on July 30, the Rangers may have envisioned Max Scherzer starting Game 7 of a postseason series, but probably not under the circumstances that led to the decisive game of the ALCS against the Astros, or the early exit that followed. While Texas won in decisive fashion, the 39-year-old righty was quite shaky for the second outing in a row, and far from peak form. In context, that’s hardly a surprise given that his two ALCS starts were his first ones since being sidelined by an arm injury five weeks earlier. As the Rangers await their World Series matchup with the Diamondbacks, his performances are worth a closer look.

Scherzer left his September 12 start against the Blue Jays after 5.1 shutout innings but just 72 pitches due to what was initially termed a triceps spasm but soon revealed to be a low-grade strain of the teres major, a muscle that sits above the latissimus dorsi and attaches the scapula (shoulder blade) to the humerus (upper arm bone). At the time, Rangers general manager Chris Young was publicly pessimistic about the possibility of Scherzer pitching in the postseason if the Rangers made it, given an expected four-to-six week recovery period. “I don’t want to rule it out at this point,” he told reporters. “We’ll see where the next two weeks go and how he’s feeling. That said, it’s probably unlikely.”

Schezer didn’t pitch again in September, but he was able to play catch within a week of his injury, opening up the possibility of a return on the near side of that timeframe. While he progressed far enough to throw nearly 40 pitches in a simulated game on October 6, the Rangers left him off the Division Series roster they submitted the next day; they hardly missed him while upending the 101-win Orioles. By advancing to the ALCS, they bought Scherzer time for another simulated game before he took the ball in Game 3 on October 18 at Globe Life Field, with the team having already jumped out to a 2–0 series lead.

Understandably, Scherzer was raring to go, and he came out firing, throwing a 95-mph fastball on his first pitch to Jose Altuve, albeit slightly off the plate and outside for ball one. Working mostly around the edges of the strike zone, he sped through the inning on just eight pitches but needed nearly all of the warning track for center fielder Leody Taveras to haul in Altuve’s 100.7-mph fly ball 393 feet away from home. He struck out Michael Brantley on three pitches, the last a low-and-away curve that Brantley chased, then got Alex Bregman to fly to Taveras on a 95.7-mph fly to deep right center.

The second inning didn’t go nearly as well, and whatever Willis Reed effect Scherzer’s return might have produced quickly wore off. Over the course of 22 pitches, he hit Yordan Alvarez in the leg; struck out José Abreu looking at a 95.2-mph fastball; walked Kyle Tucker; gave up a 104.8 mph single to Mauricio Dubón on a slider at the bottom of the zone; induced Jeremy Peña to pop up; threw a wild pitch that scored Alvarez; and finally yielded a two-run single to Martín Maldonado, 101.1 mph off the bat. Fortunately for Scherzer, the slow-footed catcher was thrown out trying to advance to second base following a throw home, but for the first time in the series, the Rangers trailed.

The Astros continued to add to their lead, with Altuve leading off the third with a solo homer off a high fastball and Abreu leading off the fourth with a 112.5-mph double off a hanging slider, then coming around to score on a single by Dubón. Even while closing out his evening by striking out Peña (chasing a low curve) and Maldonado (looking at a slider on the inside corner), Scherzer had allowed five runs in four frames. He struck out four and walked only one, and while he did generate a 35% called strike and walk rate (CSW%) via eight whiffs and 14 called strikes, nine of the 12 batted balls he surrendered were hard-hit balls of 95 mph or higher, and all five hits were 101 mph or higher. Houston rockets, indeed.

Down 5–0 when Scherzer departed, the Rangers made a game of it, but lost 8–5. The Astros clawed their way back into the series, and Scherzer got the call again on Monday night. The potent Rangers offense staked him to a 3–0 lead before he even took the mound, but things didn’t go much better than in his first start; in fact, Altuve blasted his first pitch, a 93.7-mph high fastball, off the out-of-town scoreboard in left field for a ringing double. Bregman grounded out, and after Alvarez was intentionally walked, Abreu scorched a low slider down the left field line for an RBI single; all three balls were 99.9 mph off the bat or higher, if not necessarily elevated. Scherzer escaped by getting Brantley to hit into a routine 4-6-3 double play, a grounder that came off the bat at a comparatively pokey 88.3 mph. Though he was obviously on thin ice, by his own admission he kept his composure better than in Game 3, and that DP produced the game’s highest WPA (.116).

After a comparatively smooth second inning capped by another pair of back-to-back strikeouts of Peña (high 95.3-mph fastball) and Maldonado (chasing a slider in the dirt), then an Altuve groundout to start the third, Scherzer served up a middle-middle fastball to Bregman, who mashed it for a homer to left center, cutting the score to 4–2. Seven pitches later, including five straight foul balls, Alvarez reached out and drove a curveball that was well off the plate off the scoreboard for a triple. While third baseman Josh Jung’s play on an Abreu chopper prevented Alvarez from coming home, manager Bruce Bochy tabbed Jordan Montgomery — working on two days of rest — to finish the inning, which he did by getting Brantley to line out. The Rangers then broke things open with a four-run fourth inning; Montgomery added an additional two innings before Bochy turned things over to his late-inning guys, who shut the door for an 11–4 win.

For the outing, Scherzer walked two and struck out two, getting just six whiffs and four called strikes for a 23% CSW%. Six of the 10 batted balls he allowed were hit 95 mph or harder, including all four hits. All told, in his two outings he allowed seven runs via nine hits and two homers in 6.2 innings, that on the heels of an inconsistent season in which he posted his highest ERA since 2011 and the highest FIP of his 16-year career:

Batters have hit Scherzer exceptionally hard, with his xERA (which I estimated by interpolating his .395 xwOBA via the Statcast leaderboard) more than double his regular-season mark:

Via Baseball Savant, Scherzer’s .333 batting average allowed is 60 points ahead of his xBA, and his .704 slugging percentage allowed is 120 points ahead of his xSLG, but even those expected numbers yield an xERA that could be mistaken for a Boeing model.

Pitchwise, Scherzer is mustering slightly greater velocity than during the regular season, knowing he won’t have to pace himself for 90 or 100 pitches. But for the most part, his offerings are getting less spin — and here it’s worth noting that he drew a sticky stuff suspension in April — and less movement:

Those spec changes are a mixed bag. By Stuff+, for which we actually have postseason numbers to compare to his regular-season ones (which isn’t the case for PitchingBot), Scherzer’s fastball grades out out as slightly improved thanks to the velo uptick. Likewise for his cutter and change, though both have been used much less often:

The problem is that Scherzer’s breaking pitches and overall location have been worse, and while Stuff+ doesn’t account for contact, you’ve seen the damage. Broken out by pitch type, batters are connecting at averages of 94.6 mph or higher on all of them. Against the fastball, they’ve averaged 94.9 mph on the 14 they’ve connected with, for a .385 AVG and .923 SLG, and against the 12 breaking pitches they’ve made contact with, it’s .333 AVG/.583 SLG. Those two classifications account for 86% of his pitches and 87% of his contact, compared to 76% of the former and 70% of the latter. Basically, I think, he’s shortened his arsenal, becoming more predictable and less precise, and while he’s fooled some hitters some of the time, he’s paid a steep price when he hasn’t.

All of this is reading into a limited sample of data, and it’s worth noting that he faced the Astros four times between the regular season and the postseason, which may have helped them crack his codes. As a Met, he threw eight innings of one-run ball in an 11–1 rout on June 19, but he was thumped for seven runs — three via homers by Alvarez, Brantley, and Abreu, the last a grand slam — in three innings in a 12–3 loss on September 6 with the Rangers. Scherzer did face the Diamondbacks once, on July 4, surrendering four runs in six innings, three by solo homers to Corbin Carroll, Christian Walker, and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., the last two of which were back-to-back. Those two outings accounted for two of the four times he served up three or more homers in a start this year.

With Montgomery and Nathan Eovaldi likely to start the first two games of the World Series, Scherzer should have six or seven days between starts, giving him more time to rebuild strength and make adjustments. “You’re always tinkering with stuff. You’re always making little adjustments and trying to find different stuff,” he said before his first start of the ALCS. Perhaps he can summon better results and give his season a storybook ending after all.

The home run that Kyle Schwarber hit off Zac Gallen in the sixth inning of Game 5 of the National League Championship Series wasn’t his biggest of this year’s postseason, unless we’re talking strictly about distance. Like most of Schwarber’s homers, the 461-foot shot was a sight to behold as well as one of the biggest plays of a game that pushed the Phillies to within a win of a return trip to the World Series. With it, the legend of the 30-year-old slugger’s already impressive body of postseason work — which has been aided by his taking trips to the playoffs in eight of his nine seasons — grew even larger.

Schwarber had already helped the Phillies jump ahead of Gallen and the Diamondbacks on Saturday with perhaps his least impressive hit of the postseason. Leading off the first inning, he hit a 30-mph dribbler to third base, then came around to score via singles by Bryce Harper and Bryson Stott; Harper added another run by stealing home on the front end of a delayed double-steal. The score was still 2-0 when Schwarber came up in the top of the sixth. Gallen hung a 2-0 curveball right in the middle of the zone and Schwarber annihilated it:

If you’re wondering about distance — and with a blast like that, who wouldn’t? — that was the fifth-longest postseason homer of the Statcast era. Schwarber owns the second-longest as well, via a 488-footer from last year’s NLCS opener, which trails only a 491-footer by Willson Contreras in Game 4 of the 2017 NLCS. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the more positive outcomes of the Hall of Fame’s latest round of restructuring its Era Committees in 2022 was the creation of a ballot limited to managers, umpires, and executives, removing them from directly competing with players for votes and positioning them within a triennial election cycle. On Thursday, the Hall unveiled its slate of eight candidates for the 2024 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Executives/Umpires ballot, dedicated to candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. The candidates will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Nashville, Tennessee on December 3, with the results announced live at 7:30 p.m. ET on MLB Network’s MLB Tonight.

The eight-member ballot includes four managers, two executives, and two umpires. Five of the eight are first-time candidates, and seven of the eight are still alive:

While these candidates aren’t entirely without controversy — West in particular — weighty topics such as segregation and performance-enhancing drugs won’t dominate the discussions, which comes as a welcome relief. To be eligible for inclusion, managers and umpires need to have compiled 10 or more major league seasons and been retired for at least five years, though candidates 65 years or older are eligible six months following retirement. Executives need to have been retired for at least five years, though active executives 70 years or older are eligible “regardless of the position they hold in an organization and regardless of whether their body of work has been completed,” according to the Hall’s rules. Read the rest of this entry »

With his team down two games to none in the NLCS and practically having been blown off the field by the Phillies on Tuesday night, Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo had his work cut out for him, particularly given that he had little alternative but to send rookie Brandon Pfaadt, he of the 5.72 ERA and 5.18 FIP, to the Chase Field mound for a must-win game. But from the reconfigured lineup to the decision to pull Pfaadt after he’d put up a string of zeroes, just about everything Lovullo set in motion paid off. In a nailbiter, the Diamondbacks won, 2–1, on Ketel Marte’s walk-off single off Craig Kimbrel.

One couldn’t have blamed the Diamondbacks for entering this game in shell shock. Philadelphia put up five runs on ace Zac Gallen in Game 1 before Arizona closed the gap for a respectable 5–3 loss, then wore down Merrill Kelly and teed off on the soft underbelly of the Diamondbacks’ bullpen for a 10–0 rout in Game 2. Beyond the combined 15–3 score, the Phillies out-homered the Diamondbacks, 6–1 — all solo shots but mostly emphatic ones, with four of the six projected at 420 feet or more. They out-hit them convincingly, combining for a .313/.400/.688 line against Arizona’s .129/.167/.194 mark. Phillies pitchers collected 23 strikeouts against only three walks; the Diamondbacks struck out just 10 and walked nine.

With Phillies manager Rob Thomson tabbing lefty Ranger Suárez for the start, Lovullo switched things up, flip-flopping Marte and Corbin Carroll atop the lineup — a sensible move, given that the former posted for a 146 wRC+ against lefties, the latter just a 96. Marte responded by going 3-for-5 with the game-winning hit. Lovullo also moved slugging catcher Gabriel Moreno, another lefty-masher (139 wRC+ against) from fifth to third and started Emmanuel Rivera (92 wRC+ against lefties) at third base, put Evan Longoria at DH, and gave right field to Tommy Pham, who hadn’t played with a glove on since September 22 due to a bout of turf toe. With Pham in right, Carroll moved to center, with Alek Thomas (who hit for just a 12 wRC+ against lefties) on the bench; when Pham singled to start the seventh inning, Thomas pinch-ran and scored the game-tying run. Read the rest of this entry »