“Replay is coming! Replay is coming!” You can almost hear Ben Revere running through the streets of Philadelphia sounding the call, if I remember my American history correctly. I imagine that 98% of FanGraphs readers read the news last week and reacted with only glee, because decades after some of their major sports competitors started using instant replay, MLB is finally getting with the times. Anything that can stop preventable mistakes from happening is a good thing, as I think you’d agree.

I probably don’t need to regale you with dozens of examples of terribly blown calls, from Phil Cuzzi blowing up the 2009 ALCS to Jim Joyce ruining Armando Galarraga’s perfect game to Don Denkinger’s infamous error in the 1985 World Series, so I won’t. You know the game needs replay, and so do I. Still, for the one straggler among you who might just be on the fence about it, I absolutely can’t pass up the opportunity to reuse this still of arguably the worst call in the history of sports, Tim Welke calling Jerry Hairston out on this play in Colorado in 2012:

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When the American League Cy Young Award winner is announced on Wednesday night, Detroit’s Max Scherzer is almost certainly going to defeat Yu Darvish of the Rangers and Seattle’s Hisashi Iwakuma, potentially by a lot. Look at those wins! Twenty one of them, against only three losses! There’s absolutely no question that some percentage of the voters are going to simply see “21-3 for a playoff team” and cast their ballot without a second thought. It’s sad, even infuriating, but it’s true. Even though pitcher wins don’t matter, even though we’ve made progress from things like peak-level Johan Santana losing out to Bartolo Colon in 2005 because the Twins weren’t very good that year, in this context: yeah, they still do.

That fact of life has caused a nearly unlimited amount of aggravation among many of us, but it can also obscure this very important truth: just because Scherzer had the best record and we hate that many voters will focus on that, it doesn’t automatically mean that he’s not actually the best pitcher in the American League. He might be, or he might not be — there’s plenty of candidates — but nor is his likely victory going to be some sort of travesty. Read the rest of this entry »

If you squinted hard enough, you could have seen this winter being the beginning of the road back to success for the Mets. Matt Harvey was establishing himself as a superstar in his first full season, highly-touted rookies Zack Wheeler & Travis d’Arnaud were getting their feet wet, and they’d be finally free of the disastrous contracts handed to Johan Santana, Jason Bay, & Frank Francisco. With what appeared to be a talented starting rotation and more prospects on the way, if they could just add another bat or two around David Wright, well, maybe they’d have something going.

But then Harvey’s elbow blew up, and d’Arnaud looked overwhelmed in his first crack at the bigs, and Ike Davis & Ruben Tejada proved that they probably aren’t part of the future, and even the team’s COO is saying that there are only four players who they “are sold on” right now (Wright and pitchers Dillon Gee, Jon Niese, & Wheeler). Suddenly the road back appears delayed by at least a year, if not two. Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t need me to tell you that the Houston Astros are a terrible baseball team (162-324 over the last three seasons), and you probably already know why. GM Jeff Luhnow and his growing collection of former internet baseball writers have committed to a full-scale, ground-up rebuilding of the talent-sparse organization he found himself with when he was hired in December 2011. That meant trading everything he possibly could for young talent, and it meant going with a young, inexperienced, and inexpensive — down to around $13 million total late in the year — roster as they sacrifice a watchable major league product in service of an increasingly bright future.

That strategy, one that I imagine a majority of FanGraphs readers understand and embrace, has been a source of some controversy in the larger sports world, with semi-regular stories popping up here and there accusing the team of not respecting their fans while they skimp on players and pocket the savings.

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Brian Wilson is a weird guy. You know that because you have eyes and watch baseball, and you’ve heard all about the beard and the Taco Bell ads. Honestly, I’m really not sure anything I say can sum up what he is better than this:  Read the rest of this entry »

Last October, Jeff Sullivan wrote about how the 2012 postseason was almost historically low-scoring, calling it “Where Offense Went to Die,” because Jeff Sullivan is wonderful and perceptive. He noted the following stats at the time:

Hitters had a combined .227 batting average, a combined .290 OBP, a combined .349 slugging percentage.

If the 2012 postseason were a player, it would have basically been Justin Smoak, who had a slash line roughly in that range. Smoak was nowhere near the World Series or the playoffs, of course, largely because his Seattle team was terrible, but also because Smoak was hitting like, well, that all year.

With either one or two games remaining in the 2013 postseason, not likely enough to significantly move the needle, we’ve seen 74 playoff games, exactly the same as last year. And where are we this time around? .229/.289/.355, also known as “being within the margin of error of being completely identical”. That’s in the Starlin Castro or Mike Moustakas range of hitters this year, and again, that’s pretty poor, especially when MLB as a whole hit .253/.318/.396 this season. If you liked last year’s lack of hitting, well, you’re seeing the sequel right now, and suddenly last year’s near-historic offensive outage looks like it might not be so historic after all. Read the rest of this entry »

In the bottom of the fourth inning of Game 4, with the Cardinals up 1-0, St. Louis manager Mike Matheny faced a choice. With two outs and men on first and second, pitcher Lance Lynn stepped up. Like most pitchers, Lynn is hardly a threat with the bat; in 137 regular season plate appearances over his first three seasons, he had just seven hits, all singles. Lynn had thrown four solid innings, so Matheny let his pitcher bat. Lynn flew out to right, and the Cardinals would score just one more run.

In the top of the fifth inning of Game 4, with the Cardinals still up 1-0, Boston manager John Farrell faced a similar choice. With two outs and men on first and second, pitcher Clay Buchholz stepped up. He may or may not be able to handle the bat, but with only four career regular season plate appearances in his seven years in the bigs, there’s little reason to think he could. Buchholz had also thrown four productive innings, but Farrell instead chose not to let his pitcher bat.

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After several years of trying to fill the post-Manny hole in left field with the likes of Carl Crawford, Bill Hall (!), Scott Podsednik, & Jeremy Hermida, the Red Sox actually managed to put together a cost-effective and productive platoon situation in 2013.

Returnee Daniel Nava would hit the righties (and he did, with a .392 wOBA), and free agent acquisition Jonny Gomes would hit the lefties, which he did as well, putting up a .346 wOBA split. Including the surprising Mike Carp, who was acquired in February when the Mariners couldn’t find room for him and who shockingly hit everyone (.382 wOBA), the Red Sox left fielders put up the team’s most valuable season for the position since 2009, also known as “the last year Jason Bay was any good”.

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The Detroit Tigers were really good in 2011, making it to the ALCS one year after finishing at just .500. Then 2012 went even better, where despite winning fewer regular season games they made it to the World Series, and 2013 was successful as well, going back to the ALCS. That’s a pretty excellent run of success, and they’re likely to be right back in the mix in 2014, since they return the majority of their core. But they still haven’t turned any of those seasons into a champion, and for a city that will next year be three decades past celebrating their last Tigers World Series winner, close isn’t good enough — and you start to wonder when this iteration runs out of chances.

That’s especially true for owner Mike Ilitch, who turned 84 this summer and has made it clear that he wants to see a winner in his hometown, for the first time since he purchased the club in 1992, while he’s still around to enjoy it. As if getting back to the ALCS (or beyond) for a fourth year in a row wasn’t going to be difficult enough, the Tigers find themselves contending with forces that make 2014 possibly their last best chance to get a championship out of this group. Read the rest of this entry »

In the brief interludes between arguing whether the Cardinals do indeed have “the best fans in baseball” and if they should or should not be offended by Yasiel Puig, a popular discussion topic on social media has centered on St. Louis’ so-called “Cardinals Devil Magic,” i.e., the sense that everything always seems to go the Cardinals’ way in October.

Setting aside the obvious fact that it didn’t help them out much last year when they frittered away a 3-1 NLCS lead to San Francisco, you can understand why, really. The Cardinals are in their ninth NLCS since 1996 and are just a single game away from their fourth World Series in ten seasons, but they’re not really outplaying the Dodgers. Los Angeles has outhit the Cardinals in each of the four games of the series, and held them to just a .134/.190/.175 line through three games; cumulatively, the Cardinals have outscored the Dodgers by just a single run, 8-7. But it’s the Cardinals who are up three games to one, and the Dodgers who find themselves in a desperate position in Wednesday’s Game 5. Read the rest of this entry »