Tonight, the Yankees take the field with their season on the line, as they host the Astros in the AL’s Wild Card game. CC Sabathia will not be with the team for the game, or any other game this postseason, because he checked into a rehab clinic for treatment related to alcohol abuse. The full statement that he released to the media.

“Today I am checking myself into an alcohol rehabilitation center to receive the professional care and assistance needed to treat my disease.

“I love baseball and I love my teammates like brothers, and I am also fully aware that I am leaving at a time when we should all be coming together for one last push toward the World Series. It hurts me deeply to do this now, but I owe it to myself and to my family to get myself right. I want to take control of my disease, and I want to be a better man, father and player.

“I want to thank the New York Yankees organization for their encouragement and understanding. Their support gives me great strength and has allowed me to move forward with this decision with a clear mind.

“As difficult as this decision is to share publicly, I don’t want to run and hide. But for now please respect my family’s need for privacy as we work through this challenge together.

“Being an adult means being accountable. Being a baseball player means that others look up to you. I want my kids — and others who may have become fans of mine over the years — to know that I am not too big of a man to ask for help. I want to hold my head up high, have a full heart and be the type of person again that I can be proud of. And that’s exactly what I am going to do.

“I am looking forward to being out on the field with my team next season playing the game that brings me so much happiness.”

For making this decision, Mr. Sabathia, I’m already proud of you.

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The 2015 season has been chock-full of high-profile rookie debuts. From Kris Bryant to Corey Seager to Noah Syndergaard, I’ve certainly had no shortage of players to write about. But the most impressive rookie campaign — at least on a per-game basis — might very well belong to Carlos Correa, who’s developing into a superstar right before our eyes. Although he’s completed just his age-20 season, Correa’s been one of the best better hitters in the game since the Astros called him up on June 8th. His 133 wRC+ was the 28th best among hitters with at least 400 plate appearances this year, and second best among rookies, trailing only Kris Bryant. By the barometer of WAR per 150 games, Correa ranked 21st in baseball with mark of 5.2.

You probably didn’t need me to tell you that Carlos Correa’s been really good. This isn’t exactly news. So rather than dwelling on how good Correa is now, I want to consider what his impressive rookie campaign means for his short- and long-term future.

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After the conclusion of yet another great regular season of baseball, we can now start in on the exciting year in review retrospectives. The stats are in, the playoffs are scheduled, and we can look back on the totality of 2015’s regular season with a full sample of what worked and what didn’t for players and teams. The first day after the end of the season can be disappointing for fans who don’t get to root for their favorite club during October, but it’s also our first chance to draw that all-important end line that frames this year along with all the others that have come before it.

The same goes for evaluating managers. We have an idea of the managers who have done a good job; many of them still have games to play. We also have an idea of those who haven’t done a good job — even up to the point of knowing who has a chance of being fired. The drawback, unfortunately, is that we still don’t have a great way of truly evaluating managers, and so we look to the small amount of data that we do have when we try to gauge their performance. Dave Cameron talked about this in the context of filling out his NL Manager of the Year ballot last year — here’s a paragraph from that piece relevant to what we’re discussing today:

“Evaluating player performance is tricky enough even with all the amount of information we have about their performance; with managers, we’re basically just guessing. We can speculate about things that we think matter, but we don’t really have much objective data to support these thoughts.”

Dave’s right — we have very little data, and the data that we do have isn’t terribly useful for evaluation. That being said, there is one newer area of data with respect to managers that I find interesting, and it lends itself to not only understanding an aspect of performance, but also — in this year’s case — serves as a window into the operating style of particular managers.

That data is the result of the fairly new system of manager replay review, and this season of baseball has produced some very interesting results. We already had a post earlier in the season on manager challenges, looking specifically at Kevin Cash, and his rather “unique” style of challenging (not waiting for any sort of video consultation from his coaches/advisors before popping out of the dugout to signal for an official review). That post theorized on a way to rank managers on their challenge ability; this post will go a step further in refining an attempt to do that.

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I have a great deal of interest in the Mariners having hired Jerry Dipoto, so once they made it official, I set about reading as much as I could about what he’d done and what he intended to do. As part of that research, I re-visited an old article at ESPN written by Sam Miller, talking about the Angels’ attempts to improve their whole player-development system. The article was more about Scott Servais than Dipoto, and Servais might not come to work with Dipoto in Seattle, but the article is just good regardless of what it might or might not mean for the Mariners going forward, and some of the way through I found the following pair of lines:

The Angels’ PD staff — half of it hired or in new positions since Servais took over — has become used to seeing its unconventional ideas tested. In the Dominican Republic, the Angels started measuring time of possession.

Time of possession is a familiar statistic to fans of other sports. It’s very much unfamiliar to fans of baseball, because baseball is the sport that doesn’t even keep time, so it’s not something you hear about. But, reading that section was all I needed. It put the idea in my head, and there was no getting it out without writing this post. Because of that excerpt, I’ve calculated time of possession for the regular season just gone. One thing’s for sure: you can’t say I didn’t do this.

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The final day of the regular season saw the fulfillment of what was, for Ichiro, a career-long dream — he got to pitch in a game in the major leagues. Which is something that made Ichiro happy, and it made all the other players happy, and it made all the fans happy, and here we all are, delighted to no end that Ichiro got to stand on the rubber. Think about it hard enough and maybe you end up wondering why you feel so good that Ichiro finally got what he wanted, given that he’s made more than $150 million in the country on the other side of the ocean from the country in which he’s most popular, but then they’re all living gifted lives. And this is only in part about Ichiro anyway — it’s at least as much about us and our own curiosity. Ichiro always wanted to pitch, and we always wanted to see it.

It’s pretty easy to pinpoint the moment when people here wondered what Ichiro might look like on the mound. It goes back to that throw that’s part of the origin story of the Ichiro legend:

That was the first glimpse we had of his arm. That’s when we knew, but Ichiro had already known for years.

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Talking about matchups in a one-game playoff is an almost futile enterprise. Batter versus pitcher numbers have proven to be mostly useless, and other than a perusal of the platoon situations, a discussion of roster decisions around the edges, and some tinkering with the order in which you throw your pitchers, previewing Tuesday’s American League Wild Card game seems like heavy-breathing about the pre-game coin toss in football.

There is one way you can classify pitchers and hitters that may be meaningful to this game in particular, however. Because of the way swings work, there are matchup problems for certain hitters against certain pitchers. Most of the research says that extreme ground ball pitchers have problems with fly ball hitters — one study found fly ball hitters had better outcomes against ground-ball pitchers than any other matchup of batted ball mixes, and another found that this type of matchup produces the most line drives in baseball. And it makes sense, because fly ball hitters usually have ‘uppercut’ type swings that can reach down and produce power on the low pitch.

Dallas Keuchel has the second-best ground-ball rate in baseball. The Yankees should have Chris Young bat leadoff.

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An offseason ago, the Nationals made a commitment to Max Scherzer worth $210 million. Scherzer subsequently reduced his OPS allowed by an incredible 63 points. Now, in fairness, these are the five best OPS-allowed figures by qualified pitchers in the last 15 years:

• 2015 Jake Arrieta, .507
• 2015 Zack Greinke, .507
• 2015 Clayton Kershaw, .521
• 2014 Clayton Kershaw, .521
• 2013 Clayton Kershaw, .521

The feeling is that Kershaw is about to finish a distant third for the Cy Young. That despite having one of the all-time best seasons, his third such season in a row. As so often happens, a post about a different pitcher being amazing has to carve out space to acknowledge that Clayton Kershaw is more amazing. It’s incredible that Kershaw presumably won’t win the Cy Young, but it’s only a little less incredible that Scherzer won’t get a single first-place vote. Or, I imagine, a single second-place vote. Scherzer just finished a year in which he was worth every penny, and it was a year that saw him throw a couple of no-hitters. That’s twice as many no-hitters as one no-hitter, and one no-hitter qualifies as a historic career achievement.

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When the city of San Jose, California sued Major League Baseball back in the summer of 2013, the city’s attorneys likely anticipated that they would eventually have to litigate the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to prevail in the suit. Indeed, because San Jose alleged that MLB’s refusal to allow the Oakland Athletics to move to the city – territory assigned to the San Francisco Giants under the league constitution – violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, the city was directly challenging MLB’s infamous antitrust exemption. And because it was the Supreme Court that originally created the exemption nearly 100 years ago, that court is the only judicial body that has the power to modify baseball’s antitrust immunity today.

Given all that, it was not particularly surprising that San Jose quickly lost at both the trial and appellate court levels, with both courts basing their dismissals of the city’s lawsuit on the sport’s antitrust exemption. Nor was it surprising to learn in April that San Jose was officially appealing the suit to the Supreme Court.

As I noted at the time San Jose filed its appeal, the city faced long odds of successfully persuading the Supreme Court to take its case. Not only does the Court grant less than 3% of the appeals it receives in any given year, but it has also subsequently reaffirmed baseball’s antitrust exemption on two separate occasions since first creating the doctrine in 1922, both times insisting that any change in the law must come from Congress, and not the courts.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the U.S. Supreme Court officially rejected San Jose’s appeal on Monday, marking the end of the city’s antitrust lawsuit against the league.

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Brandon Guyer homered in his first big league bat. That was in 2011, a year in which he went deep 16 times, in 429 at bats, between Triple-A and Tampa Bay. The following spring, Baseball America wrote that, “Guyer offers and impressive combination of speed and power,” and is “ready to become a big league regular.”

Then he got hurt. In late May, Guyer underwent shoulder surgery and was lost for the balance of the 2012 season. He returned to Durham in 2013, where he batted over .300, but with just seven home runs. A year ago, he left the yard a mere three times, in 259 at bats, in part-time duty with the Rays.

The 29-year-old University of Virginia product appears to be getting his stroke back. The resurgence isn’t dramatic – he finished this year with eight home runs in 332 at bats – but Guyer is looking more and more like his old self. Half of his homers traveled over 400 feet, and all went at least 360 feet. Seven came off lefties, against whom he had an .847 OPS.

Guyer’s glimpses of power came primarily as an often-platooned outfielder and as a lead-off hitter. He slashed .266/.361/.416 overall, and whether he projects as a regular going forward is hard to say. Some of that may depend on his ability to clear fences, which presents a bit of a quandary. Guyer likes to hit home runs – everyone does – but he’s determined that it’s not in his best interest to adopt that mindset. Read the rest of this entry »