Burke Badenhop wasn’t expecting this when he signed with Cincinnati last winter. The free agent reliever thought he was joining a club that could contend. Instead, the Reds have floundered. With a lone game left on the docket, the team built by Walt Jocketty is 64-97 and will finish in last place for the first time since 1983.

Injuries weren’t the only issue, but they played a big role in Cincinnati’s crash-and-burn campaign.

“We never really got a chance to hit the ground running,” said Badenhop. “Right off the bat, Homer Bailey went down. Then Devin Mesoraco went down, Zack Cozart had a catastrophic knee injury just running to first base. We’re playing in the toughest division in baseball – the Cardinals, Pirates and Cubs would be in first place in every other division – and facing teams like that while battling injuries makes for a real uphill battle.”

Despite their doldrums, the Reds drew over 2.4 millions fans to Great American Ballpark this summer. Not that they were always there to see the home team. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s article is related to last week’s on a similar topic — and, much like that first article, begins with the premise that you’re the manager of major league club (congratulations!) and your team has qualified for the playoffs.

In that first piece, I argued that, under some conditions, you would slightly increase your chances of winning the ALDS/NLDS by employing the “save the ace” strategy, where you start your number-two pitcher in Game 1 and your ace in Game 2. Whether you choose this strategy or the conventional one of starting your ace in Game 1 and your number-two in Game 2, last week’s article assumed that all of your starting pitchers are rested and at your disposal at the beginning of the LDS. If you were fighting a close division or wild-card race (or perhaps both of these) at the end of the season, however, then this likely would not be the case, since you would have stuck to your regular five-man rotation until possibly even the final game of the regular season.

So this week, we will look at starting pitching in the final regular reason game, tiebreaker games, and wild-card game.

Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Norris began this season fighting for a rotation spot with the Toronto Blue Jays. At just 21 years of age to start the season, the Blue Jays prospect, who made news in Spring Training for living in a van, made the rotation. After struggling through a dead arm period, however, he was sent back down to the minor leagues while the big-league club struggled through the first half of the season. When David Price moved from the Detroit Tigers to the Blue Jays at the trade deadline, Norris was the headlining prospect heading back to Detroit. Both Toronto and Detroit have managed the left-hander’s innings this season — he’s recorded just 145.2 of them between the minors and majors this season — but on Tuesday, Norris suffered through three innings’ worth of pitches in just a single frame, requiring 54 pitches to get through the first inning against Texas.

The pitching scouting reports that local broadcasts put up on the screen are not always illuminating, but the final point in the graphic for Norris’ start was rather ominous.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Sunday, Clayton Kershaw has a shot to become the first pitcher to rack up 300 strikeouts in a season since Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling turned the trick back in 2002. He needs just six strikeouts to get there, so theoretically he could do it by the end of the second inning. He and his Dodgers brethren will be squaring off against the Padres, one of the strikeout-ingest teams in baseballs this season, so he’s got a real good shot to get there, even if his innings are capped. So let’s for a moment say that he does. How would he stack up against the other members of the 300 K club?

First, how many players are in this club? Thanks for asking: there’s 14. Of the 14, five have done it only once (Bob Feller, Mickey Lolich, Mike Scott, Steve Carlton and Vida Blue) and nine have done it multiple times (Curt Schilling, J.R. Richard, Nolan Ryan, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, Rube Waddell, Sam McDowell, Sandy Koufax and Walter Johnson). Overall, these 14 players have hit the 300 K mark 33 times. Kershaw would be #34. You can see the whole list, via the Baseball-Reference Play Index, right here.

Read the rest of this entry »

To think, there used to be real conversations about whether the Cubs should start Jon Lester or Jake Arrieta in a potential Wild Card Game. I don’t want to shortchange Lester, who’s a terrific pitcher in his own right — one of the better pitchers in the National League. But Arrieta is just on one of those runs. If you want to play along and say something stupid like “Arrieta’s on a run that he’s earned,” then that would be exactly three fewer earned runs than Arrieta has allowed since the beginning of August. Roll your eyes all you want, but don’t pretend like that sentence wasn’t effective.

There’s a certain detectable sense of dread. The Pirates and Cubs are guaranteed a one-game playoff to determine who advances to the NLDS. The only question is where it’ll be played, but the odds-on favorite at the moment is Pittsburgh. People have complaints about the one-game-playoff format. Some of them are legitimate, even given that playoff series don’t do much better to crown the deserving ballclub. But this is what we have, and it’s exciting, and it just means the Pirates get the misfortune of facing Arrieta with everything on the line. He’s an opponent who feels unbeatable. I don’t want to take anything away from Gerrit Cole, but it feels like it’s lopsided. There’s no one in the game pitching better than Arrieta has.

Arrieta just faced the Pirates, in Chicago. He got himself pretty deep into a perfect game. A week and a half earlier against the Pirates, Arrieta gave up two runs (one earned) in eight innings. In early August, he blanked the Pirates over seven frames. In the middle of May, he gave up one run in seven innings. Toward the end of April, another one-run, seven-inning outing. It’s not like the Pirates haven’t had chances. Arrieta has just been that dominant. The Cubs have lost just one of his past 17 starts; in that game, they got no-hit. Arrieta is officially an adversary you worry about.

The attention is on the Pirates. It’s on how they intend to win this seemingly unwinnable game. Buster Olney just talked to some people in the industry about what the Pirates are supposed to do. The general message is that the Pirates are up against it. There’s nothing as psychologically daunting as an ace, and Pirates fans can just think back to last October’s one-game playoff, against Madison Bumgarner. He never seemed to even give them an opportunity to advance. It’s true: Arrieta could well take over the game. He could literally win it on his own, like he did the other day, with seven shutout innings and a homer. But history, at least, isn’t quite so pessimistic. The Pirates’ odds aren’t as long as they seem.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

After we finished talking about his changeup and what he learned from Felix Hernandez, after we finished talking about command for the Hardball Times Annual, after we talked a little about his slider and his sinker, after we talked about a few hitters, even after I’d said goodbye and shook his hand, Zack Greinke hovered. He wasn’t done. He had noticed something about pitching inside and wondered if the numbers agreed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes we here at FanGraphs like to zig when others zag. Or there are times when others zag and we zag too and then before they can say “Hey you’re zagging!” we switch back to zigging. Lots of virtual ink has been spilled recently on Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts and both are well deserving of the attention they’ve received for reasons discussed more on this site and others. But [looks both ways] [leans in] they are not alone. There is a third prospect in Boston with a high ceiling who has been overshadowed by Betts and Bogaerts. His name is Blake Swihart. Three days ago he hit two home runs in Yankee Stadium and when a 23-year-old catcher hits two homers in Yankee Stadium, well, that seems like as good a pretense as any to assess him and his season. So there’s our pretense. Assessment time!

Despite his youth, the switch-hitting catcher spent the majority of the season in Boston. But that wasn’t the original plan. Swihart came into the season slated for duty in Triple-A as he’d spent all of 71 plate appearances over 18 games above Double-A, but all of a sudden catchers started going down. First, starting catcher Christian Vazquez needed Tommy John surgery and the organization promoted backup Ryan Hanigan and picked up Sandy Leon from Washington to back him up. Then two months into the season Hanigan broke his hand and the organization was out of options. Swihart got the call.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s just be real here and leave the analysis aside for a moment: it’s difficult to picture the Blue Jays losing. They got smoked yesterday, but only after clinching their division, so their lineup was missing its starters. That can be forgiven. Their overall run differential is better than second place by nearly 100. They have baseball’s best record since the All-Star break. Since beginning the little flurry with the Troy Tulowitzki trade, the Jays have won three-quarters of the time, and not even the Cubs have been able to keep up. Aggressiveness at the deadline took care of seemingly all the team’s problems, and now Marcus Stroman is back and starting and looking terrific, and this has been present the whole year:

The Jays are what’s been classically defined as “stupid-good,” one of the few teams in the American League playing like it ought to. It’s no mystery why they’ve succeeded, and now that a berth in the first round has been clinched, it’s at last time to look ahead. The Blue Jays feel like a super team. Especially given how they’ve played the last few months. So, what’s historically happened with teams like this?

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I took a look at the AL Cy Young race, utilizing batted-ball metrics to address the respective candidacies of David Price, Dallas Keuchel and Chris Sale. To make a long story short, I concluded that Sale’s strikeout-to-walk (K/BB) superiority, along with solid contact management skills that have been obscured by his horrendous team defense, placed him on top. Some readers expressed incredulity in the comment section, not believing that even the worst defense in the game could cost a pitcher one full point of ERA.

Today, let’s look at the counterweight to Chris Sale, Sonny Gray. Though he wasn’t quite the same guy in the second half as he was in the first, he has wrapped up a very strong campaign, especially in the more traditionally accepted statistical categories. He’ll finish third in the AL in ERA (2.73) and is likely to receive his share of down-ballot Cy Young votes, possibly enough to nose out Sale for third place overall. Sale’s ERA is 0.78 higher than his FIP, and as we saw the other day, 1.02 higher than his “tru” ERA, which incorporates Statcast batted ball data. Gray finishes 2015 with an ERA 0.73 lower than his FIP. What gives, and what is the true talent level exhibited by Gray this season?

Read the rest of this entry »

Around the beginning of the year, the Cardinals lost Adam Wainwright, and though they just welcomed him back to the active roster, there’s no time to build him up as a starter. Around the end of the year, the Cardinals lost Carlos Martinez, and while the hope is that there’s nothing seriously wrong with his shoulder, he won’t pitch again for a while. It speaks to the Cardinals’ organizational talents that Martinez developed into a quality option, and it speaks to their depth that his absence can be survived, but it puts a little more pressure on everyone else. Everyone includes Michael Wacha, but Wacha had himself a miserable September.

It was capped off Wednesday with a four-inning, six-run outing. Everyone’s allowed the occasional clunker, but it gets worrisome when a pattern develops, and in Wacha’s five September starts, he gave up 21 runs in 24 frames, with about as many walks as strikeouts. The obvious initial guess is fatigue. Wacha had a start skipped at the beginning of the month with his innings total in mind, and he’s cleared last year’s pitch count by about 1,200. And, absolutely, he might just be tired. Or it could be something else. There’s no reason to go with the initial guess and just stop there, when some research can be done.

Read the rest of this entry »