With apologies to Matt Olson, Freddie Freeman, and Corbin Carroll, the race for the NL MVP Award has essentially boiled down to two players: Ronald Acuña Jr. and Mookie Betts. It’s an incredibly close one, with the pair producing such similar batting lines that they’re tied for the NL lead with a 169 wRC+. Betts has the edge in both the FanGraphs and Baseball Reference versions of WAR, Acuña has the edge in several counting stats, and each player has added some unique additional flavors into the mix.

For Acuña, those largely center around his prolific baserunning. Aided by the new rules — particularly the limits on pickoff throws — and unhindered by a drop in sprint speed in the wake of his 2021 ACL tear, he’s stolen 68 bases, the highest total in the majors since 2010. With his 40th homer coming against the Nationals on Friday, he has just the fifth 40–40 season ever, and now the most steals of any player in that club, surpassing Alex Rodriguez’s 46 from 1998 (to go with 42 homers). With one week remaining, he needs two steals to become the first player ever to combine 40 homers and 70 steals in the same campaign, in what’s arguably the greatest power-speed combo season anybody has seen.

There’s certainly value to such an accomplishment, though we’re entering the realm of intangibility. We’re already crediting the value of his homers and steals within the context of the rest of his offensive stat line, but things like wOBA, wRC+, and WAR don’t tell us how much to care about a player reaching round-numbered milestones like these, even if they’re without precedent. Even less clear-cut is the attempt to examine the extent to which Acuña’s baserunning has helped his teammates, mainly by giving them more fastballs to hit. Colleague Esteban Rivera established that yes, players do see more fastballs when he’s on first, but their performances against those fastballs wasn’t uniformly better. “Acuña is most likely helping his teammates see more heaters,” he concluded. “What they do with those pitches, though, is completely up to them.”

Betts isn’t without his own cool counting stat achievements. His two-run double off Ross Stripling on Saturday night gave him 105 RBIs out of the leadoff spot, a record (Acuña is third at 101). Meanwhile, he’s hit 12 leadoff homers, one shy of the single-season record set by Alfonso Soriano in 2003, and his career-high 39 homers are two shy of the post-World War II record for the most by a player listed at 5-foot-9 or shorter, currently held by Roy Campanella. But bigger (if more difficult to measure) impact he’s made is with his sudden burst of Zobristian versatility: In the wake of Gavin Lux tearing his right ACL in late February, Betts has started 69 games in the infield — 56 at second base and another 12 at shortstop — in his most infield play in nearly a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

The rookies took the spotlight this past Saturday in Baltimore, as the Orioles battled the Rays and clinched their first playoff berth since 2016 via an 8-0 victory. Leading the way on the offensive side was 22-year-old Gunnar Henderson, who led off the first inning with a first-pitch single off Tyler Glasnow and came around to score the game’s first run, then added a two-run homer in the second and an RBI single in the fourth, helping to stake rookie starter Grayson Rodriguez to a 5-0 lead. The 23-year-old righty turned in the best start of his brief big league career, spinning eight shutout innings while striking out seven and allowing just five baserunners. A day later, when the Orioles beat the Rays in 11 innings to reclaim the AL East lead, a trio of rookies — Shintaro Fujinami, Yennier Cano, and DL Hall — combined to allow just one hit and one unearned run over the final three frames.

Earlier this month, colleague Chris Gilligan highlighted the contributions of this year’s rookie class. With just under four weeks to go in the regular season at that point, rookie pitchers and position players had combined to produce more WAR than all but three other classes since the turn of the millennium. Collectively they’re now second only to the Class of 2015 (more on which below), and since the publication of that piece, four teams besides the Orioles, all heavy with rookie contributions, have made headway in the playoff races. The Dodgers clinched the NL West for the 10th time in 11 years on Saturday, while the Mariners and Diamondbacks are clinging to Wild Card spots, and the Reds are in the thick of the NL race as well. Read the rest of this entry »

2:04

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my weekly chat — the first one in two weeks. It’s been a lively time around Casa Jaffe-Span lately due to pending real estate transactions; I missed last week’s caht and was late setting this one up. Since i’m also late in securing lunch, I’m going to let the queue fill up for a few more minutes and then light this candle.

2:12

Jay Jaffe: This isn’t just a proposal, they actually appear to have a deal, so yes. Other than the fact that they literally could not get any other deals done until now, what I don’t get is how this one solves one of the big problems that Tropicana Field has faced, which is simply getting to the ballpark given its location.

2:12	Jay Jaffe: Because this park will be right near the current one

2:13	Jay Jaffe: and it’s a dome, not even a retractable.

2:13	Jay Jaffe: it will be interesting to see how this ignites the discussion of expansion to 32 teams. When I wrote about Salt Lake City’s surprising bid, it was clear that solving the Oakland and Tampa Bay stadium issues was necessary and both have now been, uh, dealt with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Wainwright rose to the occasion. Summoning vintage form to pitch like the staff stalwart he’s been for the better part of the past two decades instead of the palooka he’s been for most of this season, the 42-year-old righty tossed seven shutout innings against the NL Central-leading Brewers at Busch Stadium. Thanks to a solo homer by catcher Willson Contreras and two more scoreless innings from his bullpen, Wainwright collected the 200th win of his career, and provided some long-awaited cheer and relief for the Cardinals and their fans in an otherwise dismal season.

If you haven’t been paying attention, most of what you need to know about how hard-won this milestone was is right there in Wainwright’s ERA: his seven scoreless frames lowered his mark from 7.95 to 7.40. You’re not going to notch many victories allowing runs at that clip, and in most organizations, you wouldn’t get many opportunities to keep trying, particularly when the underlying numbers do nothing to mitigate that ugly top line. The Cardinals, now 67-83 and en route to their first sub-.500 season since 2007, have continued sending him out there nonetheless, at times seeming to do so out of a sense of loyalty to a player who’s been a vital part of 10 playoff teams, two pennant winners and one champion rather than a clear-eyed judgment of his current abilities.

For one night, all that was put aside. Facing a team that began the day 18 games ahead of the Cardinals in the standings, and lacking even the pedestrian fastball velocity he could summon earlier this season, Wainwright nonetheless kept the Brewers off balance while working into and out of trouble in the majority of his innings. His one-out, first-inning walk to William Contreras was erased by a 4-6-3 double play off the bat of Carlos Santana. After retiring the side in order in the second, he induced Contreras to hit a slow chopper to Paul Goldschmidt to escape a two-on, two-out jam to end the third. In perhaps his most impressive sequence of the night, after serving up a two-out double to Willy Adames, he struck out Rowdy Tellez to end the fourth via a well-placed 87-mph sinker, that after the slugger had fouled off three curveballs and a cutter. He ended the sixth erasing another single by Contreras with another double play at the expense of Santana, who hit a 98.8-mph hot shot straight up the middle but right at shortstop Masyn Winn, who stepped on second and threw to first. After Mark Canha smacked a leadoff single on an 87.6-mph sinker — his fastest pitch of the night — then took second on a grounder and stole third with two outs, Wainwright stranded him, as Lars Nootbar chased down Josh Donaldson’s fly ball into the left-center gap. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Beforetimes, mid-September brought my annual check-in on the potential for end-of-season chaos in the playoff races via the Team Entropy series. With last year’s introduction of an expanded and restructured postseason, however, Major League Baseball did away with the potential for scheduling mayhem in favor of a larger inventory of playoff games. Along with the expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12 and of the Wild Card round from a pair of winner-take-all games to a quartet of three-game series, MLB also eliminated all winner-take-all regular-season tiebreaker games. In the name of efficiency, we have no more Games 163 and no more potential Bucky Dents. Instead, ties, even for spots where the winner would receive a postseason berth and the loser would go home, are decided by mathematics. It’s enough to make a fan want to shout, “Hey, Manfred, pull your head out of a spreadsheet and watch an elimination game!”

The untangling of the often-chaotic scenarios by which those one-game tiebreakers could come about was Team Entropy’s raison d’etre. But particularly with so many close races, there’s still enough untangling to do in potentially complex tie scenarios that I’ve chosen to continue a version of this exercise, pouring out a cold one for what might have been. If what we’re left with isn’t exactly chaotic, you can thumb your nose at the commissioner as you take a seat on the Team Un-Tropy bandwagon. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine trading Mookie Betts. Chaim Bloom must have done that, must have considered all of the angles and potential outcomes of such a move, including the possibility that he would be saddled with it as his legacy — then sold principal owner John Henry on a vision of the Red Sox without the superstar right fielder in order to be hired as the team’s chief baseball officer in October 2019. That trade has not worked out well for the Red Sox, who have made the playoffs just once since winning the 2018 World Series, behaving more like a mid-market franchise than the league’s third-most valuable one. And while Bloom had put something of a stamp on the post-Betts roster, the rest of his vision will not be realized. On Thursday, the Red Sox fired him, kicking off a search for new leadership of their baseball operations department for the fourth time since Theo Epstein departed for the Cubs in October 2011.

Unlike predecessors Ben Cherington (2011–15) and Dave Dombrowski (2015–19), Bloom didn’t win a championship during his run to offset the team’s disappointing seasons. On his watch, the Red Sox went just 267–262 from the start of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to the point of his dismissal, becoming more notable for their belt-tightening than for their on-field success. They made the playoffs only in 2021, when they went 92–70, finishing second in the AL East, then beating the Yankees in the Wild Card Game and the Rays in the Division Series before losing to the Astros in the ALCS. They finished last in the division in both 2020 (24–36) and ’22 (78–84) and fired Bloom while tied for fourth with the Yankees at 73–72, with just a 0.3% chance of making the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

In the moment, the home run was huge. With the Mariners trailing 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning against the Angels on Monday night, needing a win to stay half a game ahead of the Rangers in the race for the third AL Wild Card spot, Julio Rodríguez chased a low sinker from José Marte and swatted it over the center field wall into the No Fly Zone, the personal cheering section of T-Mobile Park where the J-Rod Squad sits. The 402-foot blast was Rodríguez’s 30th of the year, meaning that it not only tied the game, it made the 22-year-old center fielder the third-youngest player to join the 30-homer, 30-steal club.

Counting to the point where the players joined the club by reaching the second milestone, only Mike Trout (21 years, 54 days in 2012) and Ronald Acuña Jr. (21 years, 248 days in 2019) reached 30 homers and 30 stolen bases in the same season at a younger age. Alex Rodriguez, like Julio Rodríguez, reached the mark in his age-22 season — and is the only other Mariner to accomplish the feat, but he was 23 years and three days old when he notched his 30th steal in 1998. Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently, the Yankees can’t have nice things even after shifting their focus to next season. Less than two weeks into his major league career, and just two days after he hit the fourth home run of his brief stay with the Yankees, long-awaited prospect Jasson Domínguez — nicknamed “The Martian” for his otherworldly collection of tools — has been diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. He’ll soon undergo season-ending surgery that will likely sideline him for part of 2024 as well.

The 20-year-old Domínguez, who has been on prospect hounds’ radars since he signed out of the Dominican Republic for a $5.1-million bonus in 2019, entered the season ranked 50th on our Top 100 Prospects list and third on the Yankees list as a switch-hitting 50 FV prospect with a projected ETA of 2025. He did not figure in the Yankees’ immediate plans for this season, having split his 2022 campaign between A-level Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley. He finished the year with a 10-game cameo at Double-A Somerset; the last five of those games were in the Eastern League playoffs, capped by a two-homer, six-RBI performance in the championship series clincher.

This season, Domínguez hit .254/.367/.414 (117 wRC+) with 15 homers, 37 steals, and a 15.2% walk rate at Somerset, albeit with a dramatic improvement from the first half to the second. Before the All-Star break he scuffled, batting just .204/.345/.346 (95 wRC+) with 10 homers, 23 steals, and a 28.4% strikeout rate, numbers mitigated somewhat by his plate discipline (17.7% walk rate) and his age in a league where he was nearly four years younger than the average position player. He caught fire after the break, doing a better job of making contact and translating his 65-grade raw power into game power, hitting .354/.416/.549 with five homers and 13 steals from July 14 through August 20 while trimming his strikeout rate to 19.3%. He not only netted Player of the Week honors in the final week of his run at Somerset, he earned a promotion to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Read the rest of this entry »

Zac Gallen couldn’t even wait until the sun went down to thumb his nose at my attempt to sort out the NL Cy Young race — or at least at the notion that he was out of it. While I mentioned Gallen in passing in a piece focused on Spencer Strider and a few other pitchers who appeared to have the best statistical cases for the award, I had little to say about Gallen, who spent much of this season as the league’s frontrunner but has faded in the second half, and was coming off back-to-back bad starts that had further puffed up his numbers. On Friday afternoon, the 28-year-old righty threw a three-hit complete-game shutout against the Cubs in a 1-0 win, prompting me to take a second look at situating him within the race as the candidates head into the home stretch.

Building off a 2022 campaign in which he posted a 2.54 ERA, 3.05 FIP, and 4.2 WAR en route to a fifth-place finish in the Cy Young voting, Gallen jumped out to the front of the race early this season. He ran off a streak of 28 consecutive scoreless innings from April 4–26, with an eye-opening 41-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio along the way. He finished June with a 2.72 ERA and 2.06 FIP, led the NL in FIP (2.85) and fWAR (3.8) at the All-Star break, and earned the starting nod for the All-Star Game opposite Gerrit Cole. He’s been the consensus pick for the Cy Young in four monthly polls of MLB.com voters.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Strider may be comically overpowering, but his bid to win the NL Cy Young is anything but a cakewalk. Over the course of his past two outings, he’s been hit for 10 runs in 8.2 innings, elevating his ERA from 3.46 to 3.83, higher than any pitcher who has won the award. The truth is that with less than four weeks to go in the season, no NL pitcher — not Strider, Blake Snell, Justin Steele, Zac Gallen or Zack Wheeler, just to run through a partial list of names — has a particularly strong statistical case to win. While each candidate’s remaining few starts may provide some clarity before voters send off their ballots, the race as it stands is worth a closer look.

I’m not a BBWAA voter in this or any of the annual awards this year, but I had been thinking about this race a bit lately thanks to a couple of questions from readers in recent chats and on social media. To that point, my default answer prior to those had been “Strider or Snell,” but I hardly had my mind made up. By a happy coincidence, all of this happened just as we introduced a Cy Young Projections leaderboard based on a simple model created by Tom Tango, using only earned runs, innings pitched, strikeouts, and wins — all counting stats, no rate stats. I know what the leaderboard says, and you can look as well, but I’ll save what it’s telling us about this race until later in this piece. Read the rest of this entry »