I was going to start this piece by acknowledging that a month ago, it would’ve been logical to write the Cincinnati Reds off. Then I remembered something: I actually did write the Reds off. From FanGraphs Dot Com, on August 29: “Unless the Reds Do Something Wild, the NL Playoff Race Is Over.”

Well, the Reds did something wild. As a rule, I try to caveat my predictions; rather than saying something absolutely will or won’t happen, I’ll use a frame like “This is extremely unlikely to happen; we’ll write about it if and when it does.” Well, from August 29 to September 22, Cincinnati went from playoff odds in the low single digits to a virtual coin flip:

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The Boston Red Sox enter the final week of the regular season with a one-game cushion in the AL Wild Card race, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. With Boston and Detroit at 85-71 and Cleveland and Houston at 84-72, with the AL Central and two Wild Card spots on the line, this is a four-goes-into-three situation. Factor in that the Astros have been pretty anemic of late, and the Tigers — who actually end the season with a three-game set at Fenway — look like they couldn’t find their own shoes with a flashlight and a map right now, and you have to like Boston’s chances.

Our playoff odds give the Sox an 89.9% chance of making the postseason. That’s not what I’d consider a lock, but it’s pretty close. Close enough to wonder about what their playoff rotation is going to look like. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I dug into the data a little to see if there was any empirical basis to the suspicion that the Brewers lineup might not be cut out for October. The result was a new metric, if you want to call it that, called MeatWaste%. This number — the percentage of pitches that end up either in the dead center of the strike zone or out in Baseball Savant’s Waste region — I used as a proxy for pitcher quality. MeatWaste pitches are gifts to the batter, the kind of offering that produces an instant swing decision and either an easy take or a full-force swing.

I found two things: First, that the Brewers are better, relative to the league, on these two pitch locations than they are on the whole. And second, that these easy opportunities come around often in the regular season, but disappear in close playoff games. Simple enough, though there are limits to what this finding allows us to infer about the Brewers’ future. It’s why they play the games, after all. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — Let’s get one thing clear off the top: A splitter is not a fastball. Any confusion about this topic is understandable, seeing as the full government name of the pitch is “split-finger fastball.” Don’t be a captive to the inflexibility of language. The splitter is lying to you about its very nature.

The origin story of the splitter begins in 1973, when a Cubs minor leaguer named Bruce Sutter was recovering from offseason elbow surgery and struggling to regain his fastball velocity. A pitching instructor named Fred Martin approached the sore-armed 20-year-old with a new pitch. This would be a variation on the familiar forkball, held with index and middle finger spread as far apart as possible in order to impart downward movement.

But while the forkball came out of the hand with an identifiable knuckleball action, Martin had Sutter grip the baseball ever so slightly forward, getting similar action with fastball-like spin. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — Nostalgia for the 1990s is so back! The Mets are running back Generation K, and at an interesting time. As it stands, their playoff rotation could include three pitchers who were in the minors in mid-August: Nolan McLean, Brandon Sproat, and Jonah Tong. At least, all three should figure somewhere on the postseason roster, should the Mets stop playing with their food and sew up the playoff berth they’ve had a hand on all season.

I’m old enough to remember the 90s the first time around — an era of flared jeans and futurism, much of which was rebadged 1960s nostalgia. Not least in Mets pitching prospects, when Bill Pulsipher, Paul Wilson, and Jason Isringhausen were viewed as the second coming of Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Gary Gentry and/or Nolan Ryan.

There is nothing new under the sun. Read the rest of this entry »

With the NL playoff bracket basically settled (a statement I could live to regret if the Mets keep losing), I’ve started to think about how the various participants match up against each other. Not only did five of these six teams make the playoffs last year, all of those five have made it to October at least three times in the past four postseasons. The Cubs — a recidivist NLCS participant in the mid-2010s who last made the postseason in 2020 — are the closest thing we have to new blood.

Absent some shocking reversal of fortune in the next two weeks, we’re in for an October of sequels. But while there’s often at least one standout team in the bracket — usually the Dodgers, but not always — this year the top six teams in the NL seem fairly evenly matched. At least, every team has flaws.

The most interesting team, at least to me, is the presumptive no. 1 seed: the Milwaukee Brewers. As much of a postseason fixture as the Brewers have become, and as many early-round thrills as they’ve delivered, they’ve only bothered the NLCS once in the past decade, out of six trips to the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not going to act like Byron Buxton has been healthy all year or anything. He’s already had two IL stints this season for two unrelated injuries, and just this week he missed a game after being hit in the thigh with a pitch. This isn’t a single nagging, career-altering injury; this is a man who just can’t catch a break. Or who can’t catch without breaking, rather.

But this is about as close to a healthy Byron Buxton season as we’re likely to see. The 31-year-old has figured in 109 of Minnesota’s first 144 games and collected 467 plate appearances in those games, putting him on pace to qualify for the batting title for just the second time in 11 big league seasons. And he’s made the most of that extended run of playing time: .271/.332/.562 with 30 dingers and 21 steals. That comes out to a wRC+ of 140 (tied for 10th among qualified hitters) and 4.7 WAR.

For all intents and purposes, this is a full season. Which is not something you can take for granted where Buxton is concerned. Read the rest of this entry »

I learned a new fact while watching the Yankees-Blue Jays game on Sunday, and I’d like to share it with you: YES Network play-by-play man Michael Kay mentioned that Austin Wells is tied for the league lead in sacrifice flies with Geraldo Perdomo.

I don’t want to disabuse anyone of the notion that FanGraphs writers are all-seeing brains-in-jars, but I had no idea this was the case. Even considering the vast bigness of my highly learned noggin, I can’t say that sacrifice flies have ever been a stat I cared much about tracking. I’m sure there’s some connection (positive or negative, I cannot say) between the quality of a hitter and the number of sac flies he produces, but mostly sacrifice flies seem to be more a function of opportunity than skill. Not least because I don’t think anyone sets out to hit a sacrifice fly as such; if you’re putting the ball in the air with a runner on third and less than two outs, you’d probably rather hit a home run or a double. A sac fly is a fallback position.

But this fun fact about the major league sac fly leaderboard struck me, because in my mind, Perdomo isn’t the sac fly guy, he’s the sac bunt guy. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the Yankees went to Daikin Park for the middle game of an important three-game set against the Astros. The Yanks were 2 1/2 games behind the Blue Jays in the AL East with the two divisional foes scheduled for three games in the Bronx this weekend, so maybe this matchup with Houston wouldn’t have a direct impact on their place in the standings, but every win helps at this point in the season.

With the game tied 4-4 in the bottom of the eighth, manager Aaron Boone called on Devin Williams to hold the line. Williams, a two-time All-Star and the 2020 NL Rookie of the Year, came to New York this past offseason after posting an ERA under 2.00 in each of his last three seasons with Milwaukee. This season, his last before he hits free agency, has been… uneven, let’s say, and I’ll get to that.

Still, through all the ups and downs, Williams has remained one of Boone’s high-leverage guys. He’s a big-time reliever, and a tie game on the road against a major postseason rival is a big-time situation. So on Williams came. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros are almost definitely going to make the playoffs again. They have a four-game lead in the AL West with 22 games to play, which puts them at roughly 2-to-1 odds in favor of winning the division and 9-to-1 odds in favor of taking part in the postseason in some fashion. That would make nine playoff appearances in a row and 10 in 11 years for the Astros, across multiple roster makeovers, three front office regimes, and three managers. Same as it ever was.

What’s a little unusual about this Astros team is that the pitching staff is a bit unsettled. Not unheard of, to be sure; I remember that 2017 team with a pitching staff that destabilized to total entropy after Justin Verlander and Dallas Keuchel. But manager Joe Espada is going to have to do a little tinkering here to make sure the pieces all fit. Read the rest of this entry »