With six days left in the regular season — and six games for most teams — three teams have clinched their respective divisions (the Brewers, Guardians, and Phillies), and two others have clinched playoff berths (the Dodgers and Yankees). That leaves 10 teams fighting for seven spots, but even with the playoff field not fully set, we thought it would be a fun and worthwhile exercise to highlight various facets of the potential October teams by going around the diamond to identify the strongest and weakest at each position in each league.

This is something of an offshoot of my annual Replacement Level Killers series, and in fact even some confirmed October participants have spots that still fit the bill as true lineup sinkholes — think first base for the Yankees and Brewers, to pick one position from among the aforementioned teams — but this time with no trade deadline to help fill them. For this, I’ll be considering full-season performance but with an eye to who’s best or worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Unlike the Killers series, I’ll also be considering pitching, with the shortening of rotations and bullpens part of the deliberations.

For the first installment of this series, I’ll focus on each position’s best among the remaining National League contenders. In this case that limits the field to the Phillies, Brewers, Dodgers, Padres, Mets, Diamondbacks, and Braves, with the last three of those teams fighting for two Wild Card spots. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re running out of season. With the field of contenders winnowed to the point that only two teams have Playoff Odds between 8% and 80%, much of the intrigue beyond jockeying for seeding concerns a race against the clock. Players have only so much time to recover from injuries, particularly new ones, and so some returns are in doubt. Their availability could very well affect how the playoffs unfold.

On that front, it was a weekend featuring bad news for some contenders as they reckoned with their latest bad breaks, figuratively and literally. Gavin Stone, the unexpected stalwart of the Dodgers rotation, landed on the injured list due to shoulder inflammation, while Jeff McNeil, one of the Mets’ hottest hitters, suffered a fractured wrist. Whit Merrifield, who’s done good work filling in at second base for the Braves, broke a bone in his foot, and, if we shift focus to the fringes of the Wild Card race, the Mariners Luis Castillo strained a hamstring. Each of these situations deserves a closer look, so pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s only one playoff race this year. That might not sound right to you. The Yankees and Orioles are deadlocked in the AL East. The Guardians are holding the Twins and Royals at bay in the Central. The Padres are looking menacingly northwards toward LA. But those aren’t playoff races, because everyone involved is making the playoffs either way. The only race where the winner is in and the loser is out is the one for the last NL Wild Card spot, and it’s taking place between divisional rivals: the Mets and the Braves.

It’s weird seeing so little actual drama in September. Those two teams are the only ones with playoff odds between 20% and 80% right now. That’s rare for this time of year. There were seven such teams last year, six in 2022, and three in the top-heavy 2021 season. Even if we go back to the 10-team playoff era, the years from 2015-2019 averaged four teams in that 20-80% range with a month left in the season. Despite no truly dominant teams, the playoff races are abnormally set in stone this year.

That only makes the last race more exciting, though. In one corner, we have the Braves, who came into the year as the best team in baseball. They were so good, in fact, that we used them as a model when delving into some new depth chart data this spring. What might the Braves look like if they lost Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr. to injury? Our model thought they’d be a .551 team. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the oldest story in baseball. The Braves took an athletic, hard-throwing, but undersized college pitcher named Spencer sometime after the first round of the draft. Even though said pitcher had done most of his collegiate work out of the bullpen, Atlanta stuck him in the rotation. And after only 20-odd starts in the minors, Spencer is in Atlanta’s major league rotation and a candidate to throw high-leverage innings — possibly even to start — in the playoffs.

OK, maybe it’s not the oldest story in baseball, but it’s happened twice now in the span of three seasons. And that’s where the paths of Spencer Strider and Spencer Schwellenbach diverge. Strider is what you’d get if a traditional power closer could throw 180 innings a year. (Well, if he could throw 180 innings in one year. We remember what happened a couple months ago.) It’s a hard fastball, and then a wicked slider. Pick one, because there’s no way for a hitter to cover both.

Schwellenbach also boasts mid-to-upper 90s fastball velocity, but unlike his teammate and fellow Spencer, he has one of the most varied repertoires in all of baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Friends, I come to you today to relieve my soul of a burden I’ve been carrying. I’ve been harboring a cranky, irrational, old man opinion, and worse still, I’ve been lying to you about it.

Time and again, while evaluating pitchers, I’ve praised the slider. Dylan Cease’s slider? Incredible. Andrés Muñoz, Chris Sale, whoever. In the kayfabe my position demands, I must praise a slider that gets outs. But my heart isn’t in it. I am awed by the slider’s effectiveness the same way I’m awed by the voraciousness of a swarm of locusts.

Deep down, I detest the slider. It is a crude instrument, with none of the curveball’s grace or the changeup’s playfulness. The curveball is a calligraphy brush, all swooping lines and fine control. The changeup is a Blackwing pencil, rich and precise, its marks here one moment and gone the next.

The slider is a crayon. Read the rest of this entry »

You can add two more stars to the game’s unfortunate tally of injured players, as Braves third baseman Austin Riley and Diamondbacks second baseman Ketel Marte were both added to the 10-day injured list on Monday. Riley, who has been one of Atlanta’s hottest hitters after an ice-cold start to the 2024 season, was removed from Sunday’s game against the Angels after a 97-mph Jack Kochanowicz sinker went very high and very inside, connecting with his wrist. Marte’s injury appears less serious than Riley’s, but a re-aggravated sprained ankle has put him on the shelf at a key moment in Arizona’s playoff run.

When I ran the numbers on baseball’s most injured teams last week, Atlanta came out second in terms of the most lost potential value, “beaten” by only the Dodgers. Riley, who has gotten MVP votes in each of the last three seasons, has had a bit of a down year, posting a .256/.322/.461 slash line and 2.4 WAR, which represents his weakest performance since before his 2021 breakout. But even if he hasn’t had a particularly sterling season overall, he’s become very important lately, especially as the injuries have piled up and the rest of the team’s offense has swooned. Riley’s seasonal line was as low as .220/.288/.330 back in mid-June; he’d gone more than a month without a homer and had only hit three on the season. Since June 13, however, Riley has led Atlanta’s lineup in WAR and hit 16 round-trippers:

Monday’s MRI, which revealed a broken wrist, puts Riley out of action for 6-8 weeks, meaning that unless the Braves go deep into the playoffs, his 2024 season is probably over. While there’s never a good time to lose a middle-of-the-order hitter, Riley’s loss comes at a particularly awkward point for the Braves, as their seven games against the division-leading Phillies over the next week-and-a-half likely represent their last, best chance to seize the NL East, long-shot though it may be. The Braves seem to have arrested their fall in the standings, winning five of their last seven, but they’re still barely clinging to the last Wild Card spot, as they’re only 1 1/2 games ahead of the Mets and 3 1/2 in front of the Giants.

The silver lining — or arguably a dull gray one — is that Gio Urshela was suddenly available in free agency after being released by the Detroit Tigers on Sunday; the Braves signed him to a major league deal earlier today. The problem, of course, is that the only reason Urshela was available is that he’s having such a poor season that nobody wanted to risk picking up the pro-rated dollars remaining on his one-year, $1.5 million contract. Urshela had a solid little peak, putting up a 118 wRC+ and 8.1 WAR for the Yankees and Twins from 2019 to 2022, but after a fractured pelvis in 2023 and a miserable .243/.286/.333 line this year, he appears to be on the downslope of his career.

While I still think Nacho Alvarez Jr. would have been the best replacement despite his weak debut stint, Atlanta appears to want to play it safer, opting for the veteran Urshela over Luke Williams and maybe a bit of Whit Merrifield if Ozzie Albies returns in September. Without the Riley injury, ZiPS projected a 73% chance of the Braves holding off the Mets and Giants and making the playoffs; replacing Riley with Urshela drops that probability to 68%, while playing mostly Williams at third would cause it to dip a little further to 67%. Despite Urshela only being projected at replacement level or a hair above, paying $400,000 for 1% of a playoff spot is actually a reasonable value. To make room for Urshela on the 40-man roster, A.J. Minter, who is out with hip surgery, was moved to the 60-day IL. However, that doesn’t change the team’s projection, as I had already baked in the assumption that, at best, Minter was very likely to only get a few outings in the season’s final days.

As I mentioned above, Ketel Marte’s injury is far less serious than Riley’s. Marte originally sprained his ankle on August 10 after a Garrett Stubbs slide into second base. The Diamondbacks didn’t place him on the IL, opting to use him carefully in the last week, with a couple late-inning appearances and a game at DH. They’re taking no chances this time, though, and the hope is that he’ll be able to make a quick return after taking some time to recuperate.

As with Riley’s injury, Marte’s comes at a key point in the season for his team. After treading water earlier this season, the Diamondbacks have been one of baseball’s hottest teams, and along with the Padres, they’ve actually made the Dodgers feel at least mildly uncomfortable at the top of the NL West. Before the injury, Marte had been on the hottest run of his career, hitting .333/.422/.652 with 20 homers since the start of June. His 3.9 WAR over that timeframe ranked behind only Francisco Lindor’s 4.2 WAR among NL hitters. Combined with Arizona’s surge, Marte was putting together a reasonable MVP case. Assuming he only requires a minimum stay on the IL, the significant downgrade to Kevin Newman doesn’t represent a serious hit to the Snakes’ playoff hopes; ZiPS has them at 90% odds to make the playoffs, only a 0.5% drop from their projection without the injury. In the best-case scenario, the Diamondbacks would get Marte back just in time for a key four-game series against the Dodgers next week, their last opportunity to directly inflict punishment on their division rival in the standings.

The injuries to Riley and Marte don’t doom their teams to 2024 oblivion, but they do make their respective team’s challenges this year a bit more daunting. But hey, nobody said it would be easy.

The other day, I wrote about Jake McCarthy’s BABIP, and touched on an assumption about which kinds of hitters are going to put up outlier numbers in that stat. McCarthy hits a lot of grounders, which generally produce a higher BABIP than fly balls (though they’re less productive by other metrics). He’s also left-handed and very fast, which means he ought to be able to beat out grounders for infield singles.

So let’s take a little gander at the infield hit rate leaderboard for qualified hitters. This is the percentage of groundballs a batter produces that turn into infield hits. Simple enough:

So yeah, Bellinger is primarily known for grinding hanging curveballs to make his bread, but in spite of his size, he is a left-handed fast guy. That tracks. Peña is a righty, but he’s very fast. His average home-to-first time is actually in the top 20 among all hitters — lefties and righties alike — this season. And because Peña hits so many grounders, he leads all batters in total infield hits with 24.

And then there’s Rhys Hoskins. Wait, what? Read the rest of this entry »

There’s quite a lot of bickering in sports, and not many things bring out more vehement disagreement than discussions involving who should get various awards. Even now, nearly 30 years later, when I think about Mo Vaughn beating out Albert Belle for the 1995 AL MVP, or Dante Bichette finishing second in that year’s NL race despite putting up just 1.8 WAR, I have to suppress a compelling desire to flip over a table. This year, thankfully, it’s hard to imagine the MVP voting results will be anywhere near as egregious as the ones we saw in ’95. That’s because the way MVP voters in the BBWAA evaluate players has changed dramatically since then.

Aaron Judge has easily the best traditional case for the AL MVP award if the season ended today. He leads the league in two of the main old-school batting stats: home runs and RBI. Bobby Witt Jr. and his .347 batting average is all that would stand between Judge and the Triple Crown. For what it’s worth, Judge would win the MLB Triple Crown, with twice the emeralds, rather than the AL one.

For most of baseball history, beginning with the first time the BBWAA handed out the award in 1931, numbers like these usually would’ve been good enough to win MVP honors. It also would’ve helped Judge’s case that the Yankees have one of the best records in baseball. If this were 30 years ago, Judge would all but officially have this thing wrapped up, barring an injury or the worst slump of his career.

But it’s the 2020s, not the 1990s, and I doubt anyone would dispute too strenuously the notion that ideas on performance, and their related awards, have shifted in recent years. Now, when talking about either an advanced offense statistic like wRC+ or a modern framework statistic like WAR, Judge certainly is no slouch. He currently leads baseball with 8.3 WAR, and his 218 wRC+ would be the eighth-highest seasonal mark in AL/NL history, behind only seasons by Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. But by WAR, his lead is a small one, roughly two-tenths of a run (!) over Bobby Witt Jr., who has surged since the start of July (.439/.476/.803, 247 wRC+ in 33 games) to supplant Gunnar Henderson as Judge’s main competition for the award. Henderson was right there with Judge for much of the early part of the season, and though he’s fallen off a bit, he’s still fourth in the majors with 6.4 WAR and capable of catching fire again at any time. With a month and a half left, Juan Soto can’t be completely counted out either.

A similar dynamic persists in the NL. Shohei Ohtani has looked a lot like the obvious MVP choice for much of the season, as he’s done, well, one half of the Shohei Ohtani thing: He is murdering baseballs and pitchers’ dreams. But as with Judge, there’s some serious competition when you look at WAR. Ohtani stands at the top, but by a fraction of a run ahead of Elly De La Cruz. Ketel Marte and Francisco Lindor are both within five runs of Ohtani, and nobody serious has ever claimed you can use WAR to conclusively settle disputes on differences that small. De La Cruz has more WAR than Ohtani since the start of June, and the latter two have more than the Dodgers slugger since the beginning of May. Marcell Ozuna, who has strong traditional stats (.302 BA, 35 HR, 90 RBI) shouldn’t be completely discounted if the Braves show signs of life; those numbers still matter, just not to the extent that they once did. With a fairly wide open race, there are plenty of stars with name power lurking just behind the leaders, such as Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman.

The answer of who should win the MVP awards is one we probably can’t answer beyond me giving my opinion, which I won’t do given the likelihood that I will be voting for one of the awards. But who will win the MVP awards is something we can make a reasonable stab at predicting. It’s actually been a while since I approached the topic, but I’ve long had a model derived from history to project the major year-end awards given out by the BBWAA. It was due for some updates, because the voters have changed. Some of the traditional things that voters prioritized, like team quality, have been de-emphasized by voters, though not completely. And the biggest change is the existence of WAR. Whatever flavor you prefer, be it Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, or the smooth, creamy swirl that can be scooped by our display window, this general stat has changed a lot about how performance is perceived.

There have been 47 MVP awards presented to position players who finished their seasons with fewer than 6.0 WAR; that’s more than a quarter of all hitter MVP seasons. However, excluding 2020, a hitter has not won an MVP without reaching that threshold since ’06, when both winners fell short: the NL’s Ryan Howard had 5.92 WAR, while AL winner Justin Morneau had 3.77 WAR.

When modeling the data, I use all the votes, not just the winners, and WAR is a pretty lousy variable when predicting voter behavior throughout most of history. That’s not surprising on its face since we’ve had WAR to use for only the last 15 years or so, making it impossible for most awards to have explicitly considered it. But there also appears to be only marginal implicit consideration, in which voters based their votes on the things that go into WAR without using the actual statistic. There’s a great deal of correlation between winning awards and high WARs in history, but that’s only because two of the things that voters have really liked, home runs and batting average, also tend to lead to higher WAR numbers. As an independent variable, WAR doesn’t help explain votes very well. That is, until about the year 2000.

If you only look at votes since 2000, all of a sudden, WAR goes from an irrelevant variable to one of the key components in a voting model. Voters in 2002 may not have been able to actually look at WAR, but even before Moneyball was a thing, baseball writers were paying much more attention to OBP, SLG, and defensive value at least partially because of analysts like Bill James, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, depending on your approach, once you deal with the correlations between variables, WAR comes out as one of or the most crucial MVP variable today. Could you imagine a world, even just 20 years ago, in which owners would propose paying players based on what sabermetrics nerds on the internet concocted?

The model I use, which I spent most of last week updating, takes modern voting behaviors into consideration. I use all three WAR variants listed above because it’s not clear which one most voters use. Here is how ZiPS currently sees the two MVP races this season:

This model thinks Judge is the favorite, but his odds to lose are nearly a coin flip. Witt is the runner-up, followed by Soto, Henderson, and the somehow-still-underrated José Ramírez. If we look at a model that considers all the BBWAA-voting years rather than just the 21st century results, this becomes a much more lopsided race.

Over in the NL, the updated ZiPS model sees a race that’s far more uncertain than the one in the AL.

Ohtani comes out as the favorite, but he has less than a one-in-three chance to win it. Behind him are the other WAR leaders, plus Ozuna.

Some of the WAR leaders without strong Triple Crown numbers, like Lindor, drop off considerably based on the entire history of voting, while Ozuna becomes a co-favorite with Ohtani. I haven’t talked about pitchers much in this article; they’re still included in the model, but none make the top 10 in the projected probabilities. Simply put, the willingness to vote pitchers for MVP seems to have declined over time. ZiPS doesn’t think any pitcher has been as dominant this season as the two most recent starters to win the award, Clayton Kershaw in 2014 and Justin Verlander in ’11, and closers these days typically can’t expect to get more than a few stray votes at the bottom of ballots.

It’ll be interesting to see how voting continues to change moving forward. In any case, no matter who you support for the MVP awards, strap in because there’s still plenty of baseball left to be played.

With Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr. both out for the season, the Braves haven’t been anywhere close to full strength for awhile, and the injury bug has continued to bite, with Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies sidelined for extended periods as well. In a dispiriting sequence involving the rotation, Max Fried returned from the injured list on Sunday (and was roughed up), then Reynaldo López landed on the IL. With so many absences, the cracks are beginning to show. Where the Braves occupied the top National League Wild Card spot for a good long time, they entered Tuesday having fallen into a three-way tie with the Diamondbacks and Padres.

The not-so-well-kept secret about the Braves is that since finishing April with a 19-9 record, they’ve gone just 41-42, and haven’t been more than a game over .500 in any calendar month. They went 13-14 in May, 14-13 in June, and 12-13 in July; so far, they’re 2-2 in August. Here’s how they now sit via the standings and our Playoff Odds:

Read the rest of this entry »

The struggling Atlanta Braves made a deadline move on Monday, acquiring DH/OF Jorge Soler and right-handed reliever Luke Jackson from the San Francisco Giants in exchange for left-handed reliever Tyler Matzek and minor league infielder Sabin Ceballos.

Theodor Reik, an Austrian psychoanalyst, is believed to be the original source of what (with slight modification) has become the saying “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” That’s the case here, as both Soler and Jackson were key contributors on the Braves team that won the World Series in 2021. If we were to set our time machine to travel back a rather unambitious three years in the past, we would see a similar deadline tale. When Soler was acquired by Atlanta back then (from the Royals for minor league reliever Kasey Kalich), the Braves were a struggling team (51-54) that was grappling with the season-ending loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL. Today, the Braves are a struggling team (56-49, but 37-40 since the end of April) that is grappling with the season-ending loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL. It would be wrong to say that Soler was the reason the Braves turned their season around in 2021, but his efforts (a .269/.358/.524 line and 14 homers in two months) proved to be a crucial part of that team push. Jackson has had an up-and-down career, but 2021 was his apogee, with a 1.98 ERA and 3.66 FIP for those Braves. Read the rest of this entry »