Nelson Cruz, a man seemingly determined to hit 30 home runs in every ballpark in America, has signed a one-year deal to hit 30 home runs for the Twins. Jon Heyman reported the contract is for $14.3 million for 2019, with a $12 million club option for 2020. That puts 2019’s value right around Kiley McDaniel’s AAV estimate from our Top 50 Free Agents list. That seems like a perfectly reasonable price to pay for the services of a man who, at age 38, is projected to produce about 2.7 WAR next year, though both Kiley and the crowd expected Cruz to secure a two-year deal, even with his market largely confined to the American League.

Cruz will likely spend much of his time in Minnesota as the Twins’ primary designated hitter, ably backed in that capacity by C.J. Cron, a fine power hitter in his own right and a recent waiver acquisition from Tampa. Cruz might also play a little right field from time to time, allowing Max Kepler to spell Byron Buxton in center; Cron will split time between DH and first base (sorry, Tyler Austin) though he could also, of course, be spun off in exchange for someone else, now that the Twins have reeled in Cruz. The winter certainly isn’t over yet, and the gap between the Twins and the Indians is still large enough that if the Twins mean to compete in 2019, we might expect another move or two from them before they’re done.

Here’s the reason for the deal in a nutshell:

You can quibble with the playing time projections a bit, because people are going to move around or out of town, but the overall message is clear: the Twins want to get better right now and are willing to pay real money to do so. In an AL Central division marked by rebuilding and a Cleveland roster that’s not getting any younger, that’s a refreshing change of pace. And there’s room to grow yet. The Twins’ payroll, even with Cruz in hand, is just slightly north of $100 million, and they don’t have a single guaranteed contract in place for 2020. Cruz stabilizes their lineup for 2019 without taking a single iota of flexibility away from the team in the future. That’s a deal you should do every time.

It’s true that you’d usually be concerned about a 38-year-old designated hitter falling off a production cliff, especially in a new ballpark. But Cruz has shown time and again that the usual rules don’t apply to him. That 132 wRC+ projection seems eminently sensible to me (it would be his lowest mark since 2013) and nothing about his 2018 performance at Safeco suggests the final, inevitable collapse is near at hand. Cruz may not be the hitter he was in 2018 next year, but even if he’s half that he’s a valuable addition for Minnesota. He will certainly be better than Logan Morrison.

And however you slice it, the Twins just added a lot more power in the short term; at least right now, they have three players (Cruz, Cron, and holdover Miguel Sano) who might reasonably be expected to hit 30 home runs, and two more (Eddie Rosario and Jonathan Schoop) who could match that figure with luck and a fair wind.

The Twins may not be so far away from contending. Pretty much everything went poorly for them in 2018, and they still won 78 games. If Sano’s titanium leg gets him back on the field with any consistency, if Buxton can bounce back from a wildly disappointing 2018, and, critically, if this Cruz signing is paired with other moves, you could squint and see how the Twins have the chance to be respectable in a division running low on respectability. The only thing standing between them and the postseason in the Central is a still-dangerous but weakened Cleveland squad (the Wild Card field, while theoretically an easier sell, is relatively crowded). The White Sox are still probably a year or two away from contention, and the Royals and Tigers are for the most part concerned with figuring out which way is up. If you’re the Twins and you still have money to spend, why not go for it?

Maybe Cruz will be bad in 2019. Maybe the Twins will be, too. But it isn’t a foregone conclusion coming into the season, and that’s more than can be said for a number of teams around the league today, including at least two in their own division. Nelson Cruz is a good baseball player and the Twins need a few more of those to be a good baseball team in 2019. They got him, and all they had to pay was money. This move won’t seal the division or the postseason for them, but it’ll get them much closer than they were last year. And if this is the beginning of a series of moves, it might be just enough to make the Indians think about spending money, which is a win in and of itself. This is a good signing for the Twins. On to the next.

You may have heard of a statistic called “championship win probability added” (cWPA), which measures the extent to which any given baseball play contributes to a team’s chances of winning a championship. It’s a neat little statistic that can be used to write articles like this one, which identified Hal Smith’s three-run home run for Pittsburgh in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series as the biggest baseball play of all time. Joe Carter, Kirk Gibson, and Sid Bream also made it onto that list. cWPA is the type of statistic that conjures up, merely by its reference, vivid images of confetti-filled ballparks, raucous crowds, and men made high by glorious deeds. This article is about whatever the opposite of that is. Today, I’d like to take you on a journey to find the least consequential pitch of 2018.

How would someone even go about identifying the least consequential pitch of 2018? I’m sure there are a lot of answers to that question, some of which you will no doubt point out in the comments, but here’s mine: The least consequential pitch of 2018 is the pitch that least affected the outcome of the least important game of the season. A pitch that swung a late-season game between two eliminated clubs, however inconsequential that game might be to you, me, and Bobby McGee, cannot be the least consequential pitch of 2018 because, well, players on eliminated teams are players too, and a tree that falls amidst a Royals-Orioles game still falls for those players and for those fans. No, this pitch should be so inconsequential that even players with nothing left to play for decline to grasp at it for a taste of something once lost.

The first step is to find all the games played late in the season between teams that had by that point been eliminated from playoff contention. But this by itself is not enough of a standard, because teams like the Diamondbacks, while out of contention on the final day of the season, had as recently as September 1 had playoff odds of 37.4% (and higher before that). The sheen of consequence for Arizona was too bright to include the Diamondbacks. No, the game we are searching for should have been between teams that had been out of contention for a long time, ideally effectively since the beginning of the season. It should have been played between teams that had so long ago last tasted the sweet elixir of a playoff race that all the little things players do to keep themselves motivated during a long season had fallen aside. I present to you the playoff odds of the White Sox, Royals, Tigers, Marlins, Reds, and Padres, plotted over the course of the season, with the Red Sox’s odds thrown in there just for comparison’s sake:

I suspect some of you will note at this point that there’s a reasonable case to be made that a game between two teams who have locked up a playoff spot for most of the season (like, say, the Red Sox) deserves to be considered alongside games between bad ones as the least consequential game of 2018, as it is equally irrelevant to the outcome of the season. But any game between two contending teams is consequential insofar as it can be used to glean information about the nature of the playoffs to come, and brings with each pitch an injury risk to players who might determine the course of a seasons’ future. No game featuring the 2018 Red Sox could be considered the least consequential of 2018. The champions were playing. No, the game we want is one played, as late in the season as possible, between the six teams who never really sniffed contention at all in 2018.

Unfortunately for us, none of the final series of the 2018 campaign featured any of these six teams playing against each other. But the second-to-last series did. September 25-26 witnessed a two game set between the Reds (who entered 66-92) and Royals (54-102), in Cincinnati. The first game was a relatively taut affair won by the Royals 4-3 with a ninth-inning run; that game was too tense to work for our purposes. The second game, however, saw the Royals win 6-1. This game, I think, is a strong contender for the least consequential of 2018. You may disagree. But I’d argue that it was. All that was at stake — and it was a relatively low stake at that — was the Reds’ position in the 2019 draft order, and the 2018 Reds were not sufficiently bad that a win or a loss was the difference between the first, second, or third picks, where order really matters. I think, after some consideration, we have found our game:

But what of the least consequential pitch of that least consequential game? This one’s easier. The Royals scored in the first, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh innings; the Reds scored in the first. That means the top of the ninth inning, in which the Royals had a chance to add on a seventh run before the Reds got one last chance at a comeback, was clearly the least consequential of the game. Winning by six isn’t that much different than winning by seven; I hope we can agree on that. So the pitch we’re looking for is in the top of the ninth. And the least consequential pitch of the top of the ninth inning was the one that ended it — a sinker from Jared Hughes to Adalberto Mondesi that changed the outcome of a meaningless game not at all; after all, with two outs, the chances of adding on a meaningless run in a meaningless inning in a meaningless game were very small, and even if such a run had been added, the chances of it then mattering later, when the Reds had said their piece, were smaller still. Here it is:

What I love about this pitch, and why I wanted to write about it today, is how much everyone involved seems to care about it. There is, of course, a good case to be made that it is the least consequential pitch of a season of tens of thousands of pitches. The pitch didn’t matter. The game didn’t matter. The season didn’t matter. And yet there was Adalberto Mondesi, sprinting down to first, trying just as hard as he could to make it to first base in time, and there was Joey Votto, stretching his legs out to beat him. The pitch didn’t matter, when you think about it. But when you don’t think too hard about it, it’s just another opportunity to do well however you can. And that’s something. Life, too, doesn’t really matter one little bit, when held up to even the slightest scrutiny. But of course, it still does.

The reason called strikes exist is that, at a certain point, the game wants hitters to get on with it. If we didn’t have called strikes, hitters could, and almost certainly would, let pitch after pitch in the strike zone sail by, content to wait as long as might be necessary for precisely the right one to arrive. How many pitches would it take before you’d start shouting at the hitter to get the bat off his shoulder and just swing already? 10? 20? 100? No need to find out. Baseball doesn’t have a clock; called strikes serve just as well. You get three pitches in the zone. Three pitches you should be able to do something with. Three pitches, then you’re out, and someone else gets to take their turn.

But of course major league pitches in the zone are still extremely hard to hit. Major league hitters, who become major league hitters, at least in part, by demonstrating a consistent ability to make contact with pitches inside the zone, usually whiff on about one out of every six or seven strikes they swing at. Mike Trout missed about one in every 10 last year. So did 2004 Barry Bonds. Even the very best of the very best miss on pitches inside the zone all the time. Which makes it all the more amazing that Michael Brantley, who is admittedly neither Barry Bonds nor Mike Trout, made contact with 97.3% of the pitches he swung at inside the zone last year. Now, he didn’t swing at pitches in the zone all the time; he was discerning, swinging at 65.8% of those pitches, a number that takes a few pages of the leaderboard to click over to. And not all of the contact he made was necessarily good contact. But it was a lot of contact. Indeed, it was, by a fair margin, the best mark in baseball.

When I first learned this particular fact, which was just a few minutes before I started writing this article, I almost immediately asked myself a question about Michael Brantley that I’m afraid may be rather unfair to the man: What happened on the 2.7% of pitches on which he missed?

Let’s go back to September 1, 2018. That was the day the Cleveland Indians were playing the second game of a three game series against the Tampa Bay Rays in Cleveland, and it was a day — the last of only five such days this year  — on which Michael Brantley swung and missed at more than one strike in a single game. I’d like to focus on the two he missed that day because they emphasize, I think, the utter improbability of not missing that same kind of pitch far more often. Here’s the first one (with some bonus Francisco Lindor):

That’s a good pitch. Blake Snell has a good slider. But it’s not like that pitch was extraordinarily outside the bounds of what big league hitters have to face every day. What Brantley probably should have done is to lay off of it, because the best he was ever going to be able to do was ground the ball weakly to the left side, or maybe pop it over the third baseman’s head and into left field. But that’s easy to say and very hard to do. When the ball comes out of Snell’s hand, it looks like it might end up somewhere just south of Brantley’s left elbow. Instead it ends up just south of the catcher’s left knee. This is part of what makes baseball hard. This is why only mis-identifying a pitch like this 22 times in a given season is, to me, stunning and worth writing about. Here’s another of those 22 pitches–the second Brantley missed that day (this time with bonus Donaldson content):

Here, you can see Brantley sigh a little bit. I’m not sure, but I imagine that’s because this is the same pitch he missed earlier in the game, from the same pitcher. That sigh is him recognizing that he had a whole three innings to think about what Snell did to him last time and he still wasn’t able to prevent it from happening again. That sigh, probably, is him recognizing that Blake Snell is an excellent major league pitcher and life just happens that way sometimes. And it’s the sigh of a man who’s come rather close to perfection in one particular skill in one particular game and has been reminded, if only for a moment, that actual perfection is probably unattainable.

I like baseball for a lot of reasons, but one big one is that its challenges are presented in discrete form, pitch by pitch. Pitches lead to plate appearances, plate appearances lead to outs, outs lead to innings, and innings lead to games. We can break the whole thing down into thousands of tiny moments and consider each moment separately. And players have that many more discrete moments in which to fail or succeed. Michael Brantley failed at one particular thing less often, on a rate basis, than any other player in baseball last year. He approached perfection in something that demands unimaginable skill to do well even once. He missed two pitches on September 1st, 2018, and they were fine pitches to miss. That he saw so many others like them this year and did not miss those is something to be proud of.

If your perception of Jesse Chavez, who on Tuesday signed with the Texas Rangers for two years and $8 million, is anchored by his time with the A’s from 2012-2015 — or even, honestly, with the Blue Jays (2016), Dodgers (2016), Angels (2017) or Rangers (for the first half of 2018) — then I think it’s probably worth spending a little time familiarizing yourself with the following table:

After July 21st, when he joined the Cubs in exchange for an A-ball reliever, Chavez wasn’t just the best reliever in Joe Maddon’s much-taxed bullpen, though he was that. He wasn’t even just the best reliever in the N.L. Central, though he was that, too. After July 21st, there’s a reasonable case to be made that Jesse Chavez was among the most valuable relievers in baseball. Just three — all Rays, for obvious reasons — threw more innings than Chavez’s 39; just four bested his .211 wOBA over the period. Nobody better than Jesse Chavez threw more innings after July 21st; nobody who threw more innings was better.

Here is, perhaps, one reason why:

Chavez first picked up his cutter during the 2013 season, and for a few years the pitch worked much as it did in 2018: when used more, his ERA went down; when used less, his ERA went up. In 2015, that changed, as a season-long velocity decline brought on by overuse in the rotation sapped the pitch of much of its zip. By the time Chavez got his arm strength back, he’d arrived in Los Angeles for the 2016 and 2017 seasons, where he was asked to pitch up in the zone more than he wanted to, further diminishing the value of a pitch that gets outs by generating balls on the ground. The pitch didn’t click until Chavez dropped his arm slot on Mother’s Day, 2018, a month before he arrived in Chicago. See if you can pick it out on the graph above.

There are reasons to think, in other words, that this particular version of Jesse Chavez is better than the one we’ve become used to seeing. If that’s the case, it’s good news for the Rangers, who had a middling ‘pen (their 4.23 FIP was 16th in the majors last year) and a downright bad rotation (their 5.18 FIP was 27th) in 2018. Chavez can start, if that’s the way the Rangers want to go, or pitch in long relief like he did last season, or even jump into a two-inning opener role. Whatever he takes on, Chavez seems poised to bring some stability to a Texas squad that’s likely to experience another rocky season in 2019, and if he performs anything like he did last year, he should be trade bait once again come July.

I think it’s probably unreasonable to expect a 1.15 ERA out of Chavez for a full season next year — that 97 percent strand rate will almost certainly come down, and Adrián Beltré won’t be around to convert quite as many ground balls hit to third base into outs — but even splitting the difference between his strong second half and his career numbers gets you a perfectly adequate pitcher, and that’s pretty much exactly what Steamer thinks he will be. I’d take the under on his 3.85 projected ERA, especially if he comes out of the ‘pen, and I suspect the Rangers would be perfectly happy to have him hit that number on the money out of the rotation.

In fact, the case for Texas signing Chavez is pretty clear: he’s a known quantity who comes relatively cheap, had a great second half, and can do a number of useful things in the rotation or in the ‘pen. What’s odd about that case is that it’s also the case for the Cubs signing Chavez, instead, which they didn’t do. And that’s very strange. Word is apparently getting around that the Cubs aren’t planning to “spend big” this offseason. But in what universe is signing Jesse Chavez “spending big”? And if the rumors are false, and the Cubs plan to blow past the luxury tax threshold and sign one or both of Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, why not throw in an extra $8 million for Chavez?

It sure sounds like Chavez would have given Chicago a discount, if they’d tried for one: when the season ended, he was overheard telling teammates that “if I’m not wearing this [Cubs jersey] next year, I’m done.” Maybe he got a good night’s sleep and decided he’d been a little rash. Maybe the Cubs’ budget really is stretched. Maybe something else happened. We don’t really know, and in the end it doesn’t matter that much. Now Jesse Chavez is a Texas Ranger. And he’s far from done.

Five years after leaving his hometown Braves for New York City, and two years after winning a title in Houston, Brian McCann returned to Atlanta Monday night on a one-year deal worth $2 million. This deal would have made sense even if the Braves hadn’t also signed Josh Donaldson Monday night; Kurt Suzuki and Tyler Flowers shared catching duties for Atlanta in 2018, and Suzuki is now a Washington National. But with Donaldson also in the fold, the picture is crystal clear: The Braves expect to win the National League East for a second straight year, and Brian McCann, fresh off the high of two straight trips to the LCS, wants a piece of the action.

The upside for the Braves here is pretty obvious. McCann probably isn’t going to put up a wOBA above .350 ever again, as he did five times in his previous nine seasons for Atlanta, but he’s only one season removed from three consecutive years of wOBAs above .320, and Baseball Prospectus‘ catcher metrics still have him as a passable if not exceptional defensive receiver. Package that on-field skill-set with the kind of gruff, beardy clubhouse leadership that big-league executives always seem to think young teams need, and you’ve got a perfectly solid backup catcher at a reasonable price. In a catching market that saw Jeff Mathis get $3 million a year on a multi-year guarantee, the Braves could have done a lot worse. Steamer certainly thinks so: Read the rest of this entry »

I think most people know that Aaron Nola and Jake Arrieta are members of the Philadelphia Phillies’ rotation. I’m guessing that a lot of you — even those not from or otherwise affectionate towards Philadelphia — could identify Vince Velasquez as a Philly starter, too. It may interest you to know, then, that none of these three men, all possessed of relative fame, led their club in strikeout percentage as a starter last year. The man who did so struck out fully 27.1% of the batters he faced, which was the 14th-best such mark in the league among starters with as many innings thrown. He also posted, at 1.01, the second-highest differential between his ERA (4.80) and FIP (3.79) in the game. His name is Nick Pivetta. Nick Pivetta is 25 years old. You may wish to consider Nick Pivetta.

When my colleague Jeff Sullivan last considered Nick Pivetta, back in April, he called him “the newest good Phillies starter,” and gave particular attention to Pivetta’s renewed confidence in his curveball. Nothing in Pivetta’s 2018 performance suggested Jeff was off the mark in this assessment, and indeed there may now be more reasons to be optimistic about the right-hander’s future than there were before the year.

Here’s one of them: a heat map of all the curveballs Pivetta threw this year (from the pitcher’s point of view):

And here’s that same chart, but for 2017:

In 2017, the curveballs Pivetta threw were basically in the same spot — down and away to righties; down and in to lefties — whether he was ahead or behind in the count. As a pitcher, it’s good not to do the same thing all the time. So it’s very encouraging that this year, Pivetta found two new places to throw his curveball: in on right-handers’ hands, even when behind in the count, and down and away to lefties.

Pivetta used to have one curveball, and now he has four. Because of the way his pitches interact — as Jeff noted, he uses his curveball mostly to set up his fastball — that means an even greater increase in the number of possible pitch sequences available to him.

And it’s not as if Pivetta spent the entire year reliant on that promising curve. Although he ended 2018 having thrown the pitch 21.7% of the time — more than six points above his 2017 mark — he wasn’t consistent in his use of the pitch throughout the season. In April, when Jeff wrote about it, Pivetta was going to the curve around 27% of the time. By the end of the year, with the Phillies solidly out of contention and (presumably) with a tiring arm, Pivetta went to the curve a little less than 19% of the time. The difference was, for the most part, made up by his increased use of a sinker, which generates an unusually high percentage of whiffs for a pitch of its kind (8.3% in 2018). That ability to adjust an otherwise successful approach as the season goes along augurs well for his future.

Which brings me to another promising thing about Pivetta’s 2018 — he didn’t really get worse as the season went along, despite setting a career high in innings pitched:

When it comes to pitching, the best predictor of success in the future is success in the past, and we now have evidence that Pivetta can put up a FIP- better than league average (92) over a full season. That isn’t evidence we had before the season (Pivetta was never especially highly regarded as a prospect), and it means that it’s now reasonable to expect something at least close to that level of performance in 2019.

Pivetta is never going to be a guy who blows you away with his stuff or his velocity — his spin rate is just about average, and his velocity is fast but not otherworldly in this supercharged environment — but he can be a guy fully in command of four serviceable big-league pitches, and that’s not nothing today or any day. For a fourth starter, it’s very good indeed.

What I’ll be paying attention to in 2019 is whether the large gap between Pivetta’s ERA and his FIP, which I noted at the beginning of this piece but have left unmentioned until now, persists for a third consecutive season. There are some players who just consistently under-perform their peripherals for one reason or another, and a third season with an ERA more than a full point above his FIP might be reasonable evidence that Pivetta is one of those guys. It might also just be evidence that Philadelphia’s defense is unusually terrible.

Batters hit over .300 on ground balls against Pivetta in 2018, which is unusual given that the league average usually sits in the .240s; he also allowed an unusually high slugging percentage on fly balls. Maybe some of those balls will find gloves in 2019. Maybe they won’t. Again, Philly’s defense was very bad in 2018. Either way, we’ll learn something. For now, Pivetta remains one of the better young starters in the game, and a key component of what could be — depending on how free agency plays out — a very solid Phillies team in 2019.

Miguel Enrique Andújar was born in San Cristóbal, in the Dominican Republic, on March 2nd, 1995. That same day, 968 miles north and northwest of the newborn child, the space shuttle Endeavour launched itself into low-earth orbit, bearing five men and two women. It returned to eastern Florida 16 days later, flew 17 more missions over the next 16 years, and was finally decommissioned on the first day of June, 2011. Andújar, now 23 years old and a finalist for this year’s Rookie of the Year Award, remains in active service.

In 2018, Andújar took 606 plate appearances for the Yankees. In 239 of those appearances, he reached base by hit, walk, or hit-by-pitch. 15 of those hits came in a seven-game stretch in April during which Andújar recorded a 1.706 OPS and joined Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle as the only Yankees to record seven straight games with an extra-base hit before turning 25. Of his hits, 47 were doubles, which tied an American League rookie record set by Fred Lynn in 1975 and vaulted Andújar past DiMaggio, this time, into the Yankee record books. Andújar also hit 27 home runs in 2018, and his 128 wRC+ was third-best among AL hitters under 25, behind Francisco Lindor and Alex Bregman.

I don’t know if Andújar tipped his servers well in 2018, or brushed his teeth every night without fail, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He did a lot of things right in 2018. And he was part of a powerful Yankees infield that included Didi Gregorius and Gleyber Torres.

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Nearly eight months ago, I asked you to predict the future. Here are the words I used to introduce that piece:

In 2017, the fastball rate fell again. It’s been falling for some time now, but in 2017 it fell again, from 56.7% in 2016 to 55.6% last year. There’s some reason to think that the drop in the fastball rate is linked to the increase in baseball’s increasing swinging-strike rate, which in turn is linked to the rise in strikeouts and hit batsmen, and on and on and on. Baseball is a complex system of action and reaction, and small changes can grow large quickly.

So this year, I want to know: what do you think will happen to some of baseball’s key stats, league-wide, in 2018? Maybe you think home-run rates will go up and strikeouts will fall. Maybe you think if home-run rates go up then strikeout rates have to fall. Maybe you think it’s the other way around. I don’t know. But I want to hear from you, and most of all I want to hear why you think certain changes are linked, and others aren’t.

Below are a series of tables featuring 10 years’ worth of data for a few key metrics. I’ve also included percentage changes year over year. Below each table is a poll which asks you to indicate whether you think a given statistic will increase or decrease — and, if so, by how much. Answer each poll, if you wish, and then also indicate in the comments why you voted the way you did on one statistic and not others. In a year or so, I’ll come back to this and we’ll talk about it as a group. Maybe it’ll be interesting. Maybe it won’t! We’ll see.

A lot has happened since I wrote those words: I’ve gotten married, my wife and I moved from Boston to Seattle, and I became a telecommuter (in my day job; this one has always been virtual-only). Oh, and the 2018 season came and went. The future I asked you to predict is now a part of the history books. Let’s see how good you were at reading ahead.

Note: a reader of the March post suggested he/she was unsure if answers should be submitted in percent or percentage point. It’s possible, as a result, that a few ballots could distort the overall results. Because I presented all the original deltas in the form of a percent, however, that is how I have once again presented them here. Fortunately, none of this matters at all!

Fastball Rate

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Xander Bogaerts triple-slashed .288/.360/.522 in 580 regular-season plate appearances in 2018, which translated to a 133 wRC+ and 4.9 WAR. Both figures represented career highs. Like his teammate Mookie Betts, Bogaerts thrived offensively while largely maintaining a disciplined approach at the plate. This year, the 25-year-old swung at 61% of pitches he saw in the strike zone and just 43% of pitches overall. Both figures sit below league norms (just 16 of 140 qualified hitters swung at pitches in the zone less often this year) and are broadly consistent with Bogaerts’scareer figures. Bogaerts can, clearly, be a successful major-league hitter without taking a cut at every tempting fastball and slider he sees in the zone. He’s done it in each of past four years.

He did not, however, do so during this World Series. The only ball he struck really well in all five games was a second-inning double against Hyun-Jin Ryu in Game Two; his only other hits were a soft line-drive single in the ninth inning of Game Four that appeared to be almost the accidental result of a swing on which Bogaerts rolled over badly, and a single in the seventh in the clincher. Everything else he produced during this World Series was, for the most part, a weak ground ball or, in one horrible sequence of the 18-inning marathon that was Game Three, a ground out to second, a ground out to the pitcher, a ground out to the catcher, a strikeout swinging, and a ground ball into a double play. Bogaerts seemed simply unable to get his timing right for any consistent length of time in this World Series. Nor, until the final game, did Mookie Betts or J.D. Martinez.

Although all three Boston stars struggled to a greater or lesser extent during this Fall Classic — a matter examined by Jeff Sullivan earlier today — I’d like to focus on Bogaerts for much of this piece because his struggles seem, at least to me, the most pronounced — and most out of line with his performance during the regular season in 2018 (and, one presumes, his forthcoming performance in 2019). The first ground out in that horrible five-PA sequence I mentioned above, against Kenley Jansen in the ninth inning of Game Three, is instructive for its demonstration of Bogaerts’ Series-long inability to time up usually hittable pitches. (Please note: I’m not saying I could do this. I would cry if someone threw something past me at even 85.) The first pitch of the sequence was a sinker at 95 that Bogaerts took as a strike on the lower inside corner of the plate. Here it is:

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Here is one list of names: Matt Albers, Chase Anderson, Jett Bandy, Jacob Barnes, Ji-Man Choi, Oliver Drake, Eric Sogard, Brent Suter, Eric Thames, and Jonathan Villar.

Here’s another: Scott Alexander, J.T. Chargois, Tony Cingrani, Kyle Farmer, Josh Fields, Logan Forsythe, Wilmer Font, Corey Seager, Ross Stripling, and Chase Utley.

These are the 20 men — ten Dodgers and ten Brewers — who appeared on their clubs’ 2018 Opening Day rosters but will not — for one reason or another — appear in any of the seven games of this year’s National League Championship Series. One of the two teams they played for this year will advance to the World Series tonight, and will do so without these men. And yet, for some portion of the season at least, there they were, willing their teams along. And so, let us celebrate a few moments in which these guys were glorious, before the inevitable offseason cries of “That guy was a Dodger?” and “Oh! I’d forgotten about him!” set in.

Villar Takes Harvey Deep (+.238 WPA)

Unless you’re a Milwaukee fan, you might not even remember that Jonathan Villar was a Brewer this year. I’d understand. He spent the second half of the season toughing it out for the Orioles, who are best forgotten, and in my mind he is still most closely associated with the Astros. But the fact is that, yes, Villar was indeed a Milwaukee Brewer until July 31st, and on April 14th he was tasked with playing second base for the Crew against the New York Mets at Citi Field.

Harvey, brilliant in his home whites, set down Lorenzo Cain, Eric Thames, and Ryan Braun in order in the first, but then ran into trouble almost immediately in the second, yielding a double to Travis Shaw, before walking Domingo Santana ahead of an Eric Sogard strikeout. That brought Villar — then the owner of a .298 batting average (and a .298 OBP, but let’s pay that no mind) — to the plate. Harvey’s first pitch, a slider, missed badly down and in, and Villar wisely didn’t offer at it. On Harvey’s second pitch, however, Villar flicked his bat out and, almost apologetically, took Harvey deep down the left-field line. Here it is:

I think we can all agree that that was a nice moment for Jonathan Villar.

Chase Utley up past his bedtime in the desert (+.350 WPA)

It feels a little odd to include a guy like Utley on a list like this, which is meant to celebrate the little guy, but he meets all the criteria so I suppose we’ll let him in on a technicality. On April 2nd, which was the Dodgers’ first road game of the season, they played 15 innings against the Arizona Diamondbacks. They were a good 15 innings, too — the Dodgers went up 3-0 in the top of the first, only to see the Diamondbacks tie it with runs in the first, third, and fourth; then the Dodgers added on in each of the sixth, seventh, and eighth to make it 6-3, only to have Arizona tie it in again the ninth and send it to extras. The game proceeded at 6-6 for five innings of taut bonus baseball, until — in the top of the 15th, and presumably somewhat less fresh than he’d been five hours before, when the game began — Chase Utley came to the plate with Cody Bellinger on second, and proceeded to do this:

The Dodgers went on to lose 8-7. But that was nice, Chase.

Scott Alexander shuts it down (+.372 WPA)

Scott Alexander had kind of an anonymous season, as far as seasons by 6’2″ lefties go. His ERA was 3.68. His FIP was 3.57. Both numbers were fine. Scott Alexander was fine. Scott Alexander is not on the Dodgers’ NLCS roster. But on July 13th, he was asked by his manager to go out in the ninth inning of a one-run game against the Los Angeles Angels of Angel Stadium in Anaheim and close things out. Being presumably in search of something to get the ol’ heart moving, he proceeded to allow a double to Shohei Ohtani, which was understandable, and then a single to José Briceño, which was not. That single brought the Dodgers’ win expectancy down from 91 percent at the start of the inning, to 63 percent, when David Fletcher stepped up to the plate with one out. Which made it rather relieving for reliever Alexander that David Fletcher promptly did this:

Ji-Man Choi has a good night (+.463 WPA)

Sometimes you get a lot of WPA because you come to the plate with the game on the line in late innings and do something ordinary, like hit a single or draw a walk. And sometimes you get a lot of WPA because you come to the plate in some random anonymous middle inning and do something very good, like drive in four runs with one swing of the bat. That latter thing is what Ji-Man Choi did against Luis Garcia in the sixth inning of an otherwise unexciting game between the Phillies and the Brewers. This was Choi’s final swing as a Milwaukee Brewer–he was traded to Tampa Bay the next day:

Bonus Jake Arrieta Is Mad content in the above.

Kyle Farmer Drives in Barnes (+.678 WPA)

Kyle Farmer was, before the 2018 season began, featured in articles on this site that referred to him as, variously, one of “seven scrubs” and a “fringe prospect.” Neither of those characterizations are necessarily untrue, but they also failed to anticipate this one wonderful moment from June 19th, when Farmer came to the plate with runners on first and second in a game his team trailed by a run. It was the first game of a doubleheader the Cubs and Dodgers played that day, and Cubs pitcher Justin Wilson was a little bit rattled. After battling to a 2-2 count, and with an almost-casual delivery, Wilson left a 90 mph cutter just a little bit too far over the plate, and within seconds the Dodgers were ahead, as it turned out for good:

Eric Thames Sinks Wade Davis (+.822 WPA)

Here it is: The single most impactful moment by a Dodger or Brewer not featured in tonight’s game, and it’s a classic. The Brewers entered the bottom of the ninth inning of their August 3rd game against the Colorado Rockies down 3-2. They trailed the Cubs in the NL Central standings by one game. The Cubs had won that afternoon behind a José Quintana dandy, and a loss would have put the Brewers two games back headed into the long month of August. Which all made this ninth inning rather important for Milwaukee. Wade Davis managed to retire Mike Moustakas swinging, then walked Jesús Aguilar and Travis Shaw in order before retiring Jonathan Schoop on a pop fly. That brought Thames to the plate — still struggling, as he had been all season, and about to enter a spiral that would pull his average from .244 that day to .219 on September 30th. He did, however, have one more good swing in him:

Villar, Utley, Alexander, Choi, Farmer, and Thames. I’d wager they’ll be watching the game tonight. They helped these teams get to where they are right now. They’ll own a little bit of whatever celebration comes next.