The news last night out of Anaheim landed like a punch to the gut of every reasonable baseball fan: Shohei Ohtani has a torn ulnar collateral ligament and at the very least is done pitching for the season, thus ending perhaps the greatest campaign we’ve ever seen. And in a double whammy that shouldn’t be dismissed, the team announced that Mike Trout is heading back to the injured list after playing just one game following a seven-week absence due to a fractured left hamate that required surgery.

Set aside the money for a moment; obviously this carries ramifications for Ohtani’s upcoming payday, which I’ll get to below. And forget the playoffs. The Angels went all-in in advance of the August 1 trade deadline but have gone an unfathomable 5-16 this month, plummeting out of the AL Wild Card race like an anvil without a parachute. Their Playoff Odds were already down to 0.3% before they were swept by the Reds in a bleak doubleheader on Wednesday. Even if Ohtani and Trout had both played at their peaks over the season’s final 34 games, the team’s fate was sealed. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, the Rangers and Diamondbacks played a classic at Chase Field. It started as a pitcher’s duel between Jordan Montgomery, who pitched beautifully over eight scoreless frames, and a cadre of Diamondbacks pitchers led by bulk man Slade Cecconi, who allowed the only run of the first eight innings on a solo shot off the bat of Adolis García. Then, things got chaotic. From the ninth inning on, the game swung from an 88.4% chance of a Texas win to an 81.3% likelihood for Arizona, then back to 95.1% odds in favor of the Rangers before a final swing back to the D-backs on a Tommy Pham walk-off double. Not to be confused for the heart rates of each team’s fans Monday evening, the win probability chart came out looking like this:

Last week, Ben Clemens wrote about how neat Win Probability Added is, and its merits as a part of the MVP discussion. While Ben’s piece made the great point that WPA is not “just a storytelling statistic,” lobbying for its use in measuring value over a season, its storytelling powers are indeed pretty remarkable. So much of the drama within Monday’s game was made quantifiable by measuring the shifts in win probability. Ketel Marte’s game-tying homer in the ninth was worth .467 WPA, or 46.7 percentage points of win probability; Nathaniel Lowe’s go-ahead double was worth .454; Tommy Pham’s walk-off was worth .754, the 11th-highest WPA value for any single play this year. That’s three hits that turned the game on its head, and then back on its feet, and then back on its head again. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tigers’ season hasn’t been much to write home about, particularly on the offensive side, but one encouraging sign has been the play of Spencer Torkelson. The top pick of the 2020 draft was utterly overwhelmed by major league pitching as a rookie last year, to the point that he was demoted to Triple-A for a spell. He started this season slowly as well, but has shown significant signs of progress and has been red-hot this month.

Even while going hitless in his last two games — can’t win ’em all when it comes to timing these articles — the 23-year-old Torkelson entered Wednesday hitting .237/.320/.449 with 23 homers and a 112 wRC+. Those numbers may not jump off the page, but that represents significant advancement over last year’s dismal line (.203/.285/.319, 76 wRC+), not to mention a strong effort to overcome this year’s early-season struggles. After hitting just .206/.266/.309 (55 wRC+) through April, he’s at .243/.331/.480 (124 wRC+) since, including .267/.375/.653 with eight home runs and a 179 wRC+ in August, with a pair of four-hit games and a quartet of two-hit games. And he’s done this month’s damage against the Pirates, Rays, Twins, Red Sox, Guardians, and Cubs — mostly contending teams, if not necessarily powerhouses.

A hot month or six weeks may just be that, and while it’s too early to suggest that Torkelson is a finished product, there’s a lot to like about the evolution of his performance. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020, the Washington Nationals succumbed to one of the worst championship hangovers of all time. They’re on course to finish in last place in the NL East for the fourth year running (though by God, the Mets are going to make them earn it this year!), and while signs of rejuvenation are on the horizon, they are only signs at this point. Since that pandemic-shortened season, Patrick Corbin has existed mostly as a study in contrast, a reminder that the ruins of now used to be the enviable bastion of then. In 2019, Corbin was one of three bona fide front-of-the-rotation starters in Washington, along with Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg. Now, Strasburg is on the IL indefinitely as he recovers from thoracic outlet syndrome. Scherzer is gone. So are Juan Soto, Trea Turner, Anthony Rendon, Ryan Zimmerman, Daniel Hudson, and Sean Doolittle. Victor Robles has been limited to just 36 games this season due to injury. For all intents and purposes, Corbin is the only championship National left.

Last year, Corbin pitched as an act of self-abnegation, posting a 6.31 ERA and leading all of baseball in losses, hits, and earned runs allowed. His name was a metonym for futility.

But right now? Things aren’t that bad. Read the rest of this entry »

Look, I know that isn’t the line. It’s a chicken in every pot. But I came up with a good lobster pun last week, and I’m writing more about the ins and outs of teams driving home runners from third base, so I decided to go back to the well. You’ll just have to live with it; I’m the one driving the boat here, and as it turns out, it’s a lobster boat.

With the puns are now settled, let’s get down to business. Last week, I chopped up the 2023 season into halves to see how well various statistical indicators correlated with a team’s future ability to cash in their runners. As a recap, strikeout rate had a fairly strong correlation, and not much else did. Quite frankly, though, I wasn’t particularly convinced by that. There just wasn’t enough data. With only 30 observations, it’s too easy for one team to skew things, or at least that’s how it feels in my head.

There’s an easy solution: more data. So I used the same split-half methodology from last week and started chopping past seasons in two. More specifically, I picked the years from 2012-22, excluding the shortened 2020 season. In each case, I followed the same procedure: I split the season in two and noted each team’s offensive statistics in the first half. Then I looked at how efficient each team was at scoring when a runner reached third with less than two outs. I got a much bigger sample this time; 300 observations, which makes it a lot harder for a single outlier to mess things up. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Scherzer was 26 years old and pitching for the Tigers when I first interviewed him. Thirteen seasons and three Cy Young awards later, he’s taking the mound for the Rangers, the sixth team he’s played for in what has been an illustrious career. Scherzer’s accolades include eight All-Star berths, and just this week, he moved into 11th place on MLB’s all-time strikeout list. Already at 72.0 WAR, he has a Hall of Fame plaque in his future.

In our initial interview, which ran on today’s date back in 2010, Scherzer described himself as “a power pitcher” and “a very mathematic guy” who appreciated, but didn’t overly rely on, analytics available at that time. How does the veteran right-hander approach his craft all these years later, and how has he evolved along the way? I caught up with him to address those questions shortly before he was dealt from the Mets to the Rangers at the August trade deadline.

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David Laurila: We talked pitching in 2010. How differently do think about your craft 13 years later?

Max Scherzer: “Way different, but the game is also way different. In 2010, it was much more based on what the human eye can see, what’s going on in the field, and listening to the pro scouts. We were understanding some of the numbers back then, but nowhere near what it has blossomed into. It’s almost the inverse now. In 2023, so much of the game is just number, number, number, number, number. I actually think it’s gone too far, that we’ve forgotten some of the human aspects that go into baseball. It’s become, ‘Follow the numbers, they have to be right.’ But no. There is actually a human component that doesn’t get enough credit.”

Laurila: Can you elaborate on that?

Scherzer: “There are times where what you’re seeing on the field matters more than what the data says. There are times to execute based on what you see. For me, that’s been a maturation process over the course of my career.

“I’ve evolved in what I’m looking for and what I’m trying to ascertain. I’m always trying to figure out what I actually want to know on the mound. There is a limit to how much thought you can have about the hitter before you start taking away from yourself. There is a limit to how much bandwidth… like, you want to know what the hitter hits and what he doesn’t hit, but you also need to know what you do well. You need to understand, ‘When I execute this pitch, that’s when I’m at my best,’ and ‘When I put these sequences together, that’s when I’m at my best.’ As much as you want to scout your opponents, scouting yourself is just as important.” Read the rest of this entry »

Since the beginning of 2021, when Francisco Lindor joined the Mets, he ranks fifth in position player WAR (16.2) behind Aaron Judge (20.4), Freddie Freeman (17.9), Mookie Betts (16.8), and José Ramírez (16.5). While others at his position have seen their production tail off for one reason or another, he has remained excellent thanks to his all-around game.

In recent seasons, though, Lindor has struggled at the plate for prolonged periods. But this year and last, he has made up for slow starts with excellent second halves. From an overall production standpoint, he is an extremely similar hitter from both sides, but since the most advantageous platoon split comes as a left-handed hitter, his bouncebacks have often been driven by adjustments on that side of the plate. That story tracks this season, too, as Lindor is on one of the best stretches of his career as a lefty. Here are the differences between his left-handed production before and after the start of July:

Lindor’s SweetSpot% from this side is top notch; that wasn’t — and never has been — an issue for him. His adjustable bat path and swing decisions propel him to launch the ball consistently at an ideal angle. Oddly enough, despite this consistency in his spread of launch angles, his performance was still down in the first few months of the year, and even despite a couple of percentage points decrease in SweetSpot%, his performance and expected outcomes on balls in play still ticked up from July on because of a rate that is still high relative to his peers. To understand why that resulted in more success recently than at the beginning of the year, we have to do some digging into those sweet spot batted balls. Read the rest of this entry »

Suffice it to say, the 2023 season has not gone the way either the New York Yankees or their fans had hoped. The team’s current nine-game losing streak is their longest in 41 years. And while the team’s 60-65 record isn’t on the same grim level as those of the Athletics or Royals, it’s still awful by the franchise’s typical standards. New York has teetered on the edge of .500 a few times recently, including being outscored in three of four seasons from 2013 to 2016, but you have to go back to 1992 to find the last time they crossed that negative line. Rather than tear everything down to the foundation when things go wrong, the Yankees tend to be a team that reloads and tries again next time. But can they do that this offseason?

The Yankees have had some bad breaks this season, but blaming everything on that would be a mistake. I’m not going to wax poetic about why this season has been so miserable — other writers have already laid out the club’s tale of woe — but we still need to review the basics to get a good view of where things truly stand. The pitching bears quite a lot of the blame. In detailing how the preseason PECOTA projections for the Yankees diverged from what has actually happened, Patrick Dubuque didn’t mince words at Baseball Prospectus:

Two of the Yankees’ seven starters have met expectations so far, and it’s their two worst ones. Injuries have pressed those sixth and seventh (and eighth) starters into service, even more so than our depth chart team anticipated. But when you imagine a collapse like the Yankees have had, you assume that it’s injuries. You envision Aaron Judge’s plate appearances replaced by Billy McKinney’s, like the world’s most unprepared Broadway understudy. While Brito and Randy Vásquez haven’t bailed the team out, they also didn’t make the hole. And at this point, it’s more hole than boat.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins are in first place. I’m not talking about the standings, though it’s true that they’ve got a substantial lead over the Guardians in the AL Central. The Twins are in first place where it counts: on the strikeout leaderboards. Minnesota’s pitchers are striking out 25.7% of the batters they face, and Minnesota’s batters are striking out 27.2% of the time. Both of those numbers are the highest in baseball this season, and the latter is just a tenth of a percentage point off the all-time record set by the 2020 Tigers. In all, the Twins are on pace to be involved in 3,211 strikeouts, the most of all-time.

In a way, the Twins are on the cutting edge. We are living in the strikeout era, the golden age of the golden sombrero. If you sort every team offense in AL/NL history by strikeout rate, 299 of the top 300 played in this century (congratulations and apologies to the 1998 Diamondbacks). Relative to the rest of the league, the Twins aren’t close to making history; they’re just the team in first place. Their offense’s 118 K%+ pales in comparison to the 163 put up by the 1927 Yankees, to pick a notable example.

The game has been trending toward more strikeouts for as long as it’s been around, and if the Twins do end up setting an all-time record, it likely won’t last all that long. Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t honor them for racing out ahead of the pack and playing winning baseball in the crushing maw of the strikeout apocalypse. Read the rest of this entry »

The Marlins began this season on an historic pace in one-run games. They won every single one of their first 12 such contests, besting a record that had stood for 51 years. Since then, they’ve played to a more modest 15-11 mark in those bouts, but their .711 winning percentage in such games on the whole would still tie them for the fifth-best in a single season since the Live Ball Era began in 1920 (min. 20 one-run games).

Last Thursday, my colleague Michael Baumann wrote a piece that got me thinking. Specifically, he found that of the three teams outperforming their Pythagorean (run differential-based) record by at least five games at the time, two — the Orioles and Brewers — had outstanding bullpens in one form or another. This idea isn’t new — it’s been hashed, and re-hashed, and re-hashed again. The Tigers, which have since joined that group of five-game overperformers, have also had a remarkably clutch relief corps. But the Marlins, outperforming their expected wins by six games, have a middling ‘pen by any measure. Marlins position players have come through in big moments more than expected, but they also haven’t wowed in those situations to the same extent that the Orioles’ crop of hitters have. Read the rest of this entry »