Think about how many of the major awards are all but sewn up with just under a week before the ballots are due, won’t you?

Clayton Kershaw is clearly winning the NL Cy Young, probably unanimously. Felix Hernandez, despite a late push from Corey Kluber and an atrocious outing in Toronto on Tuesday, is still the favorite to win the AL Cy Young, though I guess I’m less certain of that each day. Mike Trout is obviously the AL MVP, becoming a three-time winner at age 22. (Oh.) Jose Abreu is even more obviously the AL Rookie of the Year, since Masahiro Tanaka missed so much time. There’s a fair amount of uncertainty about the NL MVP, but Kershaw’s momentum continues to build, and he’ll get a #narrative boost if the Dodgers clinch the NL West with him on the mound on Wednesday night. I won’t even bring up the managerial awards, because they’re less interesting and impossible to discuss.

But then there’s the NL Rookie of the Year, and that might be the award that’s hardest to pin down. With apologies to Ken Giles, Ender Inciarte, Joe Panik, Kolten Wong, and a few others, it’s pretty clear that this is a two-man race. It’s either Billy Hamilton, or it’s Jacob deGrom. That’s it, and with deGrom’s surprisingly effective rookie season now coming to an end with the Mets’ decision to shut him down in advance of his final start, this seems like an opportune moment to get into it. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in early June, I wrote about Pittsburgh’s impending recall of Gregory Polanco, with the viewpoint that while he would be a welcome upgrade over Travis Snider and Jose Tabata in right field, he wasn’t going to single-handedly save the Pirates’ season, since he wasn’t a pitcher.

Or as I put it at the time:

They were the worst in April. They were the worst in May. If you prefer RA9-WAR rather than FIP-based WAR, it’s 27th. If you like FIP, they’re 29th. ERA has them at 15th, which is something. You’d have to do some serious contorting to make the argument that the Pirates have anything other than a considerably below-average pitching staff.

Which was true! Even taking into account a much better June, the first-half Pirates pitching situation wasn’t much to be proud of, ranking either last or in the bottom third, depending on whether you like your WAR based on FIP or RA9. Though the offense, even with Polanco’s fade and Andrew McCutchen’s absence, has generally been outstanding, the pitching wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain, especially compared to how good they had been last season.

It wasn’t hard to see why, really. Francisco Liriano had taken a step back, and Gerrit Cole hadn’t taken the expected step forward. A.J. Burnett was gone, and Edinson Volquez wasn’t exactly matching Burnett’s 2013. Wandy Rodriguez had been a disaster. So had Jason Grilli. Jameson Taillon blew out his arm, taking a possible reinforcement out. The Pirates haven’t been in first place since April 8, and with the Brewers surging, the season was quickly fading. At one point in late June, they were one game over .500 and eight games out.

GM Neil Huntington’s solution to the pitching crisis was, let’s say, muted. Rodriguez was released in May, and reliever Bryan Morris was sent to the Marlins for a competitive balance pick on June 1. Grilli went to the Angels on June 27 for Ernesto Frieri; Grilli has excelled in Anaheim, while Frieri contributed 14 awful outings and was released three weeks ago. John Axford, who had lost his closing job in Cleveland, arrived in an August waiver trade. That’s it. Really.

There was no David Price, or Jon Lester, or Jeff Samardzija, or Jason Hammel, though calls existed in certain areas — including here, probably — that said the Pirates would be the perfect home for any of them. If there was to be improvement, it was going to have to be with what they had laying around.

Now, there’s less than a week left in the season. The Pirates have allowed six runs in their last seven games, have had one of the best run prevention units in baseball in the second half, and are all but certain to play the Giants in the wild card game next week. They still have an outside shot at unseating the Cardinals for the NL Central division title. This is better. Read the rest of this entry »

For years, people have been writing “nothing good ever comes out of Cliff Lee trades” articles. I’m sure somewhere along the line, I wrote one too, and that’s mostly because, well, nothing really had. Justin Smoak was probably the best player to come out of any of those deals, and he isn’t any good. Jason Donald, Jason Knapp and Lou Marson didn’t amount to anything, nor has Blake Beavan. I don’t want to talk about Josh Lueke. Among Ruben Amaro’s many missteps, the 2009 deal that shipped off Lee to Seattle for the massive return of Tyson Gillies, Phillippe Aumont and J.C. Ramirez probably doesn’t get enough press.

For most of the last five-plus years — yes, really, it’s been that long — Carlos Carrasco was lumped in with those failures, too. In parts of four seasons with Cleveland (2009-11, ’13) he’d put up a 5.29 ERA and 4.48 FIP in 238.1 innings. He’s been DFA’d at least once, lost all of 2012 to Tommy John surgery, and served multiple suspensions for head hunting. While he won the fifth starter job out of camp this year, he was also sent to the bullpen in favor of Zach McAllister after four lousy starts.

At the time, his career ERA stood at 5.43. He had mediocre strikeout numbers, and the inexplicable combination of “gets both groundballs and home runs.” We’ve been writing stories about him here since at least 2008, and all we’d seen in that time was disappointment and absence. There was really little reason to think any of that was going to change. After all, it had already been five years of struggle since the trade.

Carrasco moved back into the rotation in August. Since then, he’s made eight starts. He’s allowed seven earned runs, and since four of them came in one game, that means he’s made seven starts allowing zero or one earned run, including Wednesday’s two-hit — neither of which left the infield — shutout of Houston. He’s got a 59/7 K/BB in that time. Is this finally the Carrasco Cleveland had waited so long to see? Let’s find out.

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In some ways, this Reds season has turned out exactly like we expected. Way back in February, I worried that Cincinnati wouldn’t have enough offense to compete in 2014, and that the season would be a disappointment. It wasn’t hard to see why, really. Take a team that was 15th in wRC+ in 2013, replace Shin-Soo Choo’s elite on-base skills with the huge question mark of Billy Hamilton, do absolutely nothing else other than add the mediocre Skip Schumaker and Brayan Pena to the bench, have Brandon Phillips and Ryan Ludwick get another year older, and watch the offense collapse.

That’s what happened! Sort of. The Reds are 29th in wRC+, saved from last only by the Padres, and are probably going to lose more games than they have since 2008, but it hasn’t happened in exactly in the way we might have thought. Hamilton has been good enough. Joey Votto and Jay Bruce, the only two Reds hitters you could have counted on entering the season, have had disaster years. Devin Mesoraco and Todd Frazier have had breakout campaigns. The end result is still bad, just a different kind of bad.

You can see the same thing on the pitching side, too, just in the other direction. A good, deep rotation was expected to be a strength, and it has. Homer Bailey had finally put it all together in 2013, earning himself a rich contract extension, and a full year of Tony Cingrani seemed fascinating. But Bailey, dealing with a bulging disk in his neck, made only 23 decent starts before undergoing flexor tendon surgery. Cingrani was a huge disappointment, dealt with shoulder issues and hasn’t been seen in the bigs since June. Mat Latos didn’t make his first start until June thanks to elbow trouble, then made only 16 before being shut down earlier this month with — wait for it — elbow trouble.

This shouldn’t be a good rotation. By one measure, it’s arguably been the best rotation. We should talk about that.

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We keep trying to explain the Baltimore Orioles. After all, they’re destroying the American League East, up by 12.5 games at the moment over the Blue Jays. They’re likely to clinch it in the next 24-48 hours, and when the playoffs roll around, they’ll be the No. 2 seed, kicking off an ALDS at home against either Detroit or Kansas City, depending on which of the two win the AL Central. They’re doing this despite a list of things that have gone wrong this year, most of which I laid out here in July, and that was before Manny Machado injured his knee and Chris Davis got suspended. Dave Cameron made a very thorough case for the simplicity of accepting randomness, and August Fagerstrom looked into how much power the lineup has had, largely thanks to Nelson Cruz.

It’s all of those things, and it’s none of them. It’s the managerial genius of Buck Showalter, if you want it to be, and it’s also the unquantifiable magic of balls bouncing the right way. It’s Dan Duquette playing with never-ending roster moves, or it’s outstanding (and generally random) performance in clutch situations, or it’s defense that hasn’t had a single weak spot. We can argue about whether the Orioles are a good team that has had enough things go their way in the right spots to look like a great one, or if they are actually that great team and we’ve just been so wrong about them, but in the end it doesn’t matter so much. The wins are banked, and they’re headed to the playoffs, and if that sounds insane knowing that they won’t have Davis, Machado or Matt Wieters, you’re not alone.

Sometimes, though, it’s not so complicated. Sometimes there’s a Steve Pearce.

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If you looked at Twitter for even half a second on Sunday, you probably already know that Ned Yost is doing it again. Nearly six years to the day after the Brewers took the nearly unprecedented step of firing a first-place manager in September, at least in part due to some extreme bullpen mismanagement, Yost’s decisions — and bizarre defenses of them — are again being questioned, as the suddenly struggling Royals have lost six of their last nine.

This article isn’t really going to be about Yost’s one decision, but we have to at least explain what happened. On Sunday, with the Royals up 4-3 in the sixth inning and starter Jason Vargas on his way out of the game, Yost brought in Aaron Crow with a man out and two on. Crow walked Yoenis Cespedes to load the bases, struck out Allen Craig, then allowed a grand slam to Daniel Nava to blow the lead and then some. Nava is one of the more extreme platoon bats in baseball — a switch-hitter, he’s got a career 125 wRC+ against righties and merely a 60 against lefties — and he even admitted to being surprised after the game that Yost allowed him to face a righty.

Worse, Yost’s postgame comments defy logic. He chose Crow because he wanted strikeouts, but Crow doesn’t really strike people out, with a K% mark tied for 296th of the 311 pitchers with 50 innings. He found it frustrating that the game was lost before he could bring in Kelvin Herrera, but didn’t actually bring in Herrera because “the sixth inning is Crow’s inning,” whatever that means. Crow’s velocity is way down and he’s having the worst season of his career, yet he was still allowed to face a hitter who had the platoon advantage in the biggest spot of the game, apparently because Yost feared Mike Napoli would pinch hit if he made a move. Read the rest of this entry »

When Jose Fernandez blew out his elbow in May, the baseball world wept, rightfully so. It didn’t matter if you were a Marlins fan or not, it only mattered that one of the brightest young stars in baseball was gone, just one of a billion (probably) pitchers to learn that pitching is really, really unhealthy. It wasn’t fair, in the same way that it wasn’t fair when Matt Harvey went down, or when Stephen Strasburg was injured before that. Never love a pitcher. They’ll just let you down.

If it was sad for baseball, it was all but certain doom for the Marlins. They had Giancarlo Stanton, sure, and a few interesting young players, but they also had little rotation depth, an infield that was supposedly going to be duct-taped together by guys who sort of looked like they might have once been Casey McGehee, Rafael Furcal, Garrett Jones and Jeff Baker, and two tough competitors in the NL East. Even with Fernandez, it was going to be a tough run to the playoffs. Without him? Impossible.

As expected, the Marlins are not going to make the playoffs. As completely unexpected, the Marlins have not only not collapsed without Fernandez, they’ve hung in there all season long. A win last night over Milwaukee would have put them at .500, on a four-game win streak and 3.5 games out of the second wild card. You can certainly make the argument that being the second wild card is barely “making the playoffs,” and many have. Of course, the Marlins have won two championships and have yet to win a division title. Considering how they’ve stuck around, did Fernandez’ injury cost Miami the playoffs?

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Melky Cabrera’s season ended on Friday with a broken finger. Normally, “team headed for 22nd straight year out of the playoffs loses second-best outfielder for the final three weeks” isn’t much of a story, but this situation is a little different. Cabrera is about to be a free agent in what looks to be a terrible market for offense, is only entering his age-30 season in 2015, and has had three pretty good seasons in the last four years. He’s been essentially the same hitter as Anthony Rendon has this year. That’s a pretty good resume to take into free agency, and understandably, talk is already focusing on where he’ll be playing next season.

Also understandably, that discussion has mostly centered around the considerable baggage that Cabrera brings with him, notably his 2012 PED suspension and the associated “let’s build a fake website” weirdness that came with it. Buster Olney devoted a column to it earlier this week, interviewing at least one player who complained that the system is set up in such a way that a rule-breaker can still find himself collecting a huge free agent payday. That player suggested that two-time offenders be restricted to one-year contracts in the future, which seems to me to be a thing that will never, ever happen.

Whether the feelings of that unnamed player are correct or not — you can probably guess my feelings on the subject — is kind of beside the point, because the fact is that Cabrera will go into free agency without any official restrictions, just unofficial reservations. While there’s some real reasons to question about him going forward, he’s also about to enter a market that is almost totally devoid of outfield offensive talent. Cabrera’s going to get paid, and it’s going to make a lot of people unhappy.

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One of the more fascinating stories of last winter was the Cincinnati Reds’ intention to replace the departing center fielder Shin-Soo Choo with the completely unproven Billy Hamilton. While it obviously made sense that Cincinnati had no intention of paying Choo anything like what he got from Texas — a move that looks great right now — they were also subtracting Choo’s .423 OBP from a lineup that had been merely middle-of-the-pack even with him. It’s not entirely a stretch to say Choo’s presence was the biggest part of why Brandon Phillips had suddenly looked so good last year. Phillips declined in nearly every way between 2012 and 2013 then saw his RBI total jump from 77 to 103 in large part because he was hitting behind Choo’s .423 OBP, rather than the out-making ways of Zack Cozart and Drew Stubbs.

That being the case — and because Cincinnati’s main offseason acquisition was the inexplicable decision to give Skip Schumaker two guaranteed years — most of the discussion around Hamilton centered om whether he could get on base enough to take advantage of his fantastic speed. He wasn’t going to match Choo’s OBP, of course, but could he even get on base enough to stay in the big leagues, or to avoid being a one-man out machine out of the leadoff spot? To his credit, after a tough start, he has been more part of the solution than the problem — especially if you can forget he took the worst swing in the history of baseball.

His OBP is at least around .300, which isn’t good, but isn’t the .250 that some of us —  myself included — feared it might be. He’s shown a little bit of power, with six homers. While being caught 21 times on the bases is unacceptable for a player with his speed, that’s the kind of thing that can be eliminated with experience, and he’s still added a considerable amount of value on the bases. He’s a below-average hitter, but that can be tolerated as long as he’s not a complete disaster of a hitter. And he hasn’t been. He’s probably the best candidate in a weak National League Rookie of the Year class.

But while we were spending so much time talking about whether Hamilton would hit, and how many bases he could steal, it was easy to forget he was about to become a major league center fielder. For the first four years of his career, he was a middle infielder. He first played center in 2012 during his stint in the Arizona Fall League. Now that we’ve seen him in center for nearly an entire season… hey, this might just work out. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Kemp has had a terrible season.

He’s been worth only 0.9 WAR — close enough within the margin of error to refer to him as a “replacement-level player” — and he’s being paid $21 million to do it. He was so awful in center field that the Dodgers removed him from the spot in late May despite not having a reasonable alternative. No, really, they first turned to Andre Ethier, then to Scott Van Slyke, then to Yasiel Puig — then pushed Kemp to left field before eventually finding him a home in right field. His reaction to the move was so poor that he didn’t start for five consecutive games, around which he had an 0-18 streak. His agent, former pitcher Dave Stewart, couldn’t stop talking about how much he’d like to see a trade. That didn’t happen, obviously, in part because no one would reasonably want any part of his large contract.

Matt Kemp has had a great season.

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