I don’t usually like to look too far ahead to the offseason when the September pennant races are still in full swing. There’s plenty of interesting baseball right now, especially with four of the six divisions still up for grabs, to say nothing of wild card spots. We’ll have months to talk about winter moves; if you remember how many words were spilled on Stephen Drew and Kendrys Morales by writers desperate to fill space in January and February, too many months.

But you understand how fans and employees of teams long since out of the race will be all too happy to turn the page on 2014 as soon as possible, and earlier this week, that’s exactly what Phillies GM Ruben Amaro, Jr. did:

Ruben Amaro Jr. said today there will be more adjustments to the Phillies’ roster in the future, following yesterday’s trade that sent John Mayberry Jr. to Toronto for Minor League third baseman Gustavo Pierre.

“Not that it’s a huge change, but we’re going to have to start churning the roster in a way that it’s going to have to be improved,” Amaro said in the press box at Turner Field.

Does he believe those changes could be significant?

“I do,” he said. “I think we need it. I think we need it because what we have on our roster right now is not working. How much we’ll do will depend on what makes sense for us. We’re still kind of assessing what we have. But I think it would behoove us to make some change because we need to be better.”

You don’t need to come to FanGraphs to know that the Phillies weren’t expected to be a good team this year, aren’t a good team this year and don’t seem to  have a bright future. But finally, we’re at least hearing Amaro admit to it. That’s a step in the right direction, probably. So the question, really, is what can he do?

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How was your Labor Day? You, hopefully, were off enjoying it and not reading Twitter. If you weren’t, it’s probably a safe guess to say that more likely than not, you don’t follow the official account of the Cincinnati Reds. If so, you may have missed this tweet:

Tomorrow, Reds expected to promote Contreras, Corcino, Elmore, Holmberg, Hoover, Barnhart, Lutz, YRodriguez, Bourgeois, Dennick.

— Cincinnati Reds (@Reds) September 1, 2014

That’s — deep breath — pitchers Carlos Contreras, Daniel Corcino, David Holmberg, J.J. Hoover, and Ryan Dennick; catcher Tucker Barnhart; infielders Jake Elmore and Donald Lutz; and outfielders Jason Bourgeois and Yorman Rodriguez. When I first saw it, I was sure adding 10 players for the September roster expansion, pushing it to 35 active players –16 pitchers! — with the possibility that Joey Votto may yet return to be No. 36 was a record. After doing some research, it seems that other teams have had 36 players recently, and the Mariners will soon have 17 active pitchers. So while my initial shock is maybe muted a bit after seeing that, the point hasn’t, which is that expanded rosters continue to be ridiculous.

This is barely even baseball. It’s time for this to change.

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There are a lot of reasons not to like Bartolo Colon. He’s 41 years old. He has a 50-game suspension for synthetic testosterone in the recent past, and he underwent controversial stem cell treatments before that. He pitched a grand total of 257.1 innings in a span of five years between the ages of 33 and 37. When he bats, he looks like this and this, and he still has $11 million coming to him for his age-42 season next year — along with the million-plus left on this year’s $9 million. If we’re thinking about the Moneyball scouts who (probably really didn’t) prioritize selling jeans over winning baseball games, Colon is the guy they were thinking about.

For all those reasons, and who knows how many others, Colon went unclaimed through the waiver process earlier this week. If the paragraph above was all you knew about the man, that would make a lot of sense. A fat, old, expensive pitcher who doesn’t throw hard or strike people out shouldn’t draw interest. Big deal, right?

Maybe it’s not. It’s probably not, because Colon is no ace. And yet it still raised a few eyebrows around the game, because Colon, for all his considerable flaws, is well into his fourth consecutive season of being a useful major league pitcher. And that’s after an earlier career portion that had eight seasons of being a useful — or better — major league pitcher. There’s a select few contenders Colon couldn’t help right now. There’s plenty more that could benefit, and there’s precious little pitching available. So why is he still a New York Met?

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The Giants can take no more. Well into Tim Lincecum’s third straight year of mediocrity — since the start of 2012, he’s got a 134 ERA- and 114 FIP- — and most of the way through the first year of his 2/$35m extension signed last winter, San Francisco will skip him in the rotation and instead give Thursday’s start to Yusmeiro Petit, a 29-year-old journeyman who has found a home as a swingman this season. Petit has appeared in 33 games for the Giants in 2014, which is one more major league game than he’d seen in the past five seasons combined.

Petit was once a top-100 prospect, and he has been around for so long that he was part of the 2005 trade that sent Carlos Delgado from the Marlins to the Mets, but he’s also been DFA’d at least twice, including by the Giants last year, and lost on waivers from Arizona to Seattle another time. For a three year stretch between 2010-12, he threw exactly 4.2 big league innings, and he spent all of 2011 in the Mexican Leagues before the Giants took a flyer on him as a non-roster guy in January of 2012. In the minors, he was once described as having the potential to be a “Nelson Figueroa type,” which: high praise!

It’s not really news that Lincecum is a shadow of what he once was. Petit, a soft-tossing righty who’s kicked around for a while, isn’t exactly the next hot prospect. But if you happen to find yourself with nothing to do at 3:45 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, you should take the time to check out Petit’s start against the Rockies anyway, for one simple reason: Petit, an otherwise nondescript pitcher of little repute, might just break a major league record for pitching dominance. 38 times in a row, hitters have stepped to the plate, and 38 times, they’ve failed to reach base. The record of 45 is within reach. Let’s take a walk through Petit’s magical month. Read the rest of this entry »

Buck Farmer, despite the name, is a real person who exists. A month ago, he was making his final start for the Single-A West Michigan Whitecaps in Clinton, Iowa, a town that has a smaller population (26,885 in 2010) than 21 of the 30 MLB teams pack into their ballparks on any given night. When he did, on July 25, the Tigers, the top of Farmer’s Detroit organization, had a 6.5-game lead in the AL Central and a 94.0% chance of winning the division, had just picked up Joakim Soria, and were about to add David Price to a rotation that was already very good.

This isn’t about Farmer, really, though he’s part of it. He’s just a pretty good entry point into how the Tigers, a team that was flying free and clear to their fourth straight division title against relatively indifferent AL Central competition, could manage to turn that lead into a 1.5-game deficit into fewer than six weeks. Those playoff odds, which seemed to make them a near-certainty to win the division, dropped all the way to 43.3% before the Royals lost last night, which, as Jeff showed yesterday, is by far the biggest downturn of any team in baseball. They wouldn’t even be in the wild card playoff at the moment, thanks to the fact that the AL West has two of the best teams in baseball and a Mariners club that has just stopped losing.

A month ago, Farmer was pitching in A-ball. A week ago, he was getting exactly one out while allowing eight runs for Toledo against a Columbus team that had someone named Giovanny Urshela hitting cleanup. Surrounding that, he’s made two major league starts for a Tigers team desperately trying to hold off one of the biggest collapses we’ve seen in years. If you want to know how the Tigers have fallen apart, that’s a great place to start.

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It almost seems funny now, but for the entirety of spring training and into the first few weeks of the season, the Mets were unable to resolve the issue that had been hanging over their head for more than a year: Ike Davis or Lucas Duda? Davis had hit 32 homers in 2012 and had certainly had his moments otherwise, but was never able to produce consistently around an injured ankle and a bout with Valley Fever, and had generally been awful in 2013. Duda had shown he could consistently be something more than a league-average hitter, but he’d never had 500 plate appearances and was such a bad defensive outfielder when forced out there that he was no longer an option anywhere but first base. Both are lefties, and neither can hit lefty pitching, ruling out a platoon. One had to go.

Duda started seven of the first 15 games at first, plus another at designated hitter. Davis started five. Josh Satin, a righty swinger who has long since been dispatched to Triple-A, started three more. On April 18, the Mets finally made a call and dealt Davis to Pittsburgh for minor leaguers Zach Thornton and Blake Taylor. Since then, Davis has been a replacement player — literally, 0.0 WAR — in part-time play for Pittsburgh, and he’s about to lose playing time to the Pedro Alvarez experiment.

The job, then as now, belonged to Duda. You might say that the Mets chose wisely.

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This is going to be one of those things where probably 95% of you will go “Wow, that’s somewhat interesting,” while 5% of you — the percentage who are a fan or close follower of the Tampa Bay Rays, probably — will say “Yeah, genius, we’ve been following this for months.” Still, the third week of August has some of the doggiest days of the summer, and there’s only so much to be said about tight division races that will only be resolved by waiting for games to be played. So for the moment, let’s check in on a little-known reliever doing something a bit extraordinary.

We’re talking about Brad Boxberger, of course. He’s 26. He’s in his third major league season and his third major league organization. He was once a first-round pick — if you can really say “No. 43 overall is a first-round pick” with a straight face — and he’s been in trades for both Mat Latos and Jesse Hahn/Alex Torres. He’s a righty. He throws two pitches: a fastball and a change. He throws them kind of hard, but not exceptionally so. He’s averaging about 93 mph on his fastball.

If this sounds like your typical fungible righty middle reliever, well, yeah, so far he does. Boxberger didn’t even break camp with the Rays this year, and didn’t stick when they did call for him. On April 14, he came up for three appearances but returned to Triple-A Durham five days later to make room for the immortal Charles Riefenhauser. On May 1, he came up as the 26th man in a doubleheader, then he went down immediately after the game. He returned on May 6 when Nate Karns was sent out. On May 8, he pitched an “immaculate inning,” getting three strikeouts on nine pitches with the bases loaded.

Boxberger has stuck around ever since, and he’s used that time well. He’s in the middle of doing something we haven’t quite seen… well, ever. Read the rest of this entry »

The August waiver period can be an interesting time, because it gives you a little bit of insight into how teams around the bigs value certain players. For example, it came as absolutely no surprise that the overpriced and under-performing Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier made it through waivers, or that Cole Hamels, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg did not. It came as a bit of a surprise that Jon Niese did get through, which maybe tells you something about how other teams view his shoulder and that he’s perhaps not as valuable as Mets fans seemed to think; if the worst-case scenario is that the Mets stick you with the $16 million he has left after this year and still nobody was interested, that’s not a great sign.

For guys like Crawford, Ethier and others, their contracts were signed years ago, and obviously much has changed since then, so it’s most interesting to see how the industry reacts to players who were popular free agents just last winter, a mere eight months or so ago. While obviously not every roster move or claim is public, we know of at least one: Curtis Granderson, who signed for four years and $60 million with the Mets. Even with the desperate need for offense around the majors, Granderson, on pace for only a two-win season despite a rebound from a slow start, went unclaimed. At 33, two years off his last good season and three years away from his last great one, the risk wasn’t worth it.

This isn’t about Granderson, though; it’s about one of the other major New York signings from last winter who is off to an atrocious start in his new home and has a considerable amount of money still coming: Brian McCann, who returned from a stay on the concussion list yesterday. We don’t know if McCann has been put on waivers or if anyone would put in a claim — you imagine a rich team with catching issues like the Dodgers would at least think about it, though not necessarily do it — but isn’t it fascinating to think that if someone did claim him, the Yankees might be best off just letting him go?

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At the close of business on July 20, the Braves and Nationals were exactly where they’d been for six of the previous seven days and for most of the season: tied. The two teams had been no further apart than 3.5 games all season long, continuing the two-headed competition that the NL East has been for the last several seasons since the Phillies stopped being competitive. (Your day will come, Mets and Marlins. Probably.)

At the time, our playoff odds still favored the Nationals to take the division simply because the projections considered them to be the better team, but it was easy to believe that the race was still a toss-up. After all, the Nationals were the big favorites in 2013, and they finished 10 games behind. They were the big favorites in 2014, and they weren’t doing all that much to back it up. I wondered last winter if we were overrating the Nationals coming into this year, and they certainly making it seem that way.

Just over three weeks later, the Nationals are holding a comfortable five-game lead in the NL East. Only one team in baseball has a higher likelihood of winning the division in our current playoff odds. The Nationals must have finally turned it on, right? Actually, no. They’re just 11-10 in the 21 games since. Ryan Zimmerman suffered another serious injury. Bryce Harper has been mediocre. Asdrubal Cabrera was their big trade deadline pickup. They haven’t suddenly woken up.

Instead, the Braves have gone on to drop 15 of their next 21. No team in baseball has won fewer games over that stretch. After losing all eight games on a west coast road trip, they’ve now lost three of their last four. They’re closer to the third-place Marlins than to the first-place Nationals. While the baseball world is busy watching what’s happening in Kansas City and Detroit, Atlanta is doing their best to hand this race to Washington. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you measure a truly great starting pitching season? Having an ERA that starts with a “1” generally qualifies, but there’s some obvious issues with that. First, that’s happened 82 times in the last 100 seasons, making it notable but perhaps not unthinkable. Second, obviously, are the flaws inherent to ERA, most importantly that it’s not adjusted for ballpark or league. Pedro Martinez (2000), Sandy Koufax (1964) and Carl Mays (1917) all had an ERA of 1.74. Clearly, none of them were facing the same kind of offenses.

You could, if you wanted, go by WAR. Steve Carlton‘s 1972 and Martinez’ 1999 make sense atop the list, but convincing people that Bert Blyleven‘s 1973 was the third-best season ever or that Bob Gibson’s legendary 1968 was merely his third-best season seem like tougher sells. Besides, since that’s a counting stat rather than a rate stat, it means no modern-day pitcher will ever be able to come close, because it seems pretty safe to say that we aren’t seeing a starting pitcher top 320 innings again, as both Carlton and Blyleven did.

FIP? That’s better, though still imperfect. Martinez, again, and 1984 Dwight Gooden top the leaderboards there, followed by a pair of guys essentially playing a different sport, Walter Johnson and Pete Alexander in 1915. (In 1915-16, Johnson pitched 706.1 innings; he allowed one home run. It was, as were 24 of the 97 total dingers he allowed, an inside-the-park job.) FIP also assumes some league-average inputs, and if we want “best-ever” perhaps we don’t want to assume any kind of average; like WAR, you’d also have a tough time winning a bar argument with something that you need to explain formulas for.

Enough setup, then. To the point, now. Clearly, there’s many different ways to do this, and no obvious, unassailable answer. You could make an argument for probably a dozen different years as the “best” starting pitching season of all time. What I’m doing, today, is to break it down into the most important things a pitcher can do that are more or less entirely within his control:

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