It’s been a month of upheaval in the AL West. As Jay Jaffe detailed, the Mariners are playing their best baseball of the season right now. A 9-1 stretch has carried them to the top of the division, turning what had been a two-team race all year into a three-way showdown. It’s the most competitive division race remaining, so a lot of people searching for a jolt of excitement down the stretch will be looking west.

Of course, Seattle’s climb to the top of the division didn’t happen in a vacuum. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and at the moment, that reaction is happening in Texas. The Astros spent the last week treading water, which allowed the Mariners to roar past them. The Rangers did them one worse; they’ve fallen into a 3-9 tailspin that turned a season-long lead in the division into a deficit.

It’s always tempting to turn a 3-9 stretch – or a 4-8 stretch, or really any stretch that takes a team out of first place – into a referendum on the squad. The Rangers should have seen this coming, the thinking goes. This team? With these weaknesses? It was always going to happen. But let’s withhold judgment for a few minutes and break it down like this: What’s going on in Arlington, and what has to change to turn the team’s fortunes around? Read the rest of this entry »

Félix Bautista has been as emblematic of and as crucial to the Orioles’ sudden breakthrough as any player. In his second major league season, the imposing 28-year-old closer — nicknamed “The Mountain” for his 6-foot-8, 285-pound physique — has emerged as one of the game’s most dominant and valuable relievers, the biggest cog in a bullpen that’s helped to prop up a wobbly rotation. Unfortunately, Bautista’s season is at the very least on hold after he left Friday night’s game with what the Orioles have called “some degree of injury” to his ulnar collateral ligament.

Facing the Rockies at Camden Yards, Bautista entered a 5-4 game in the ninth inning in search of his 34th save and his second in as many nights. He battled Jurickson Profar for six pitches before striking him out on a 101.7-mph fastball, then induced Harold Castro to ground out on a 1-0 pitch. He was one strike away from finishing off Michael Toglia when he stumbled off the mound while uncorking a 102.3-mph fastball that missed up and outside. After he called for time to recover, the sight of him flexing and squeezing his right hand prompted manager Brandon Hyde, head athletic trainer Brian Ebel, and coach José Hernández to check on him and ultimately pull him from the game.

While Danny Coulombe struck out Toglia on his first and only pitch of the night to finish the game, the sequence understandably put a damper on the Orioles’ comeback win. On Saturday, general manager Mike Elias announced that Bautista had injured his UCL and would be placed on the 15-day injured list. It’s unclear yet whether the injury — likely a sprain of the ligament, meaning some kind of tear — is severe enough to require Tommy John surgery. Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the 2019 postseason, the Washington Nationals made a habit of using their entire margin of error. They needed a three-run, last-ditch rally to get out of the Wild Card game, then another 11th-hour comeback to get past the Dodgers in Game 5 of the NLDS. Dave Martinez tried to shorten his pitching staff as much as possible, a desperation move that’s backfired on manager after manager as long as there have been playoffs.

By the time Game 6 of the World Series rolled around, the Nationals were facing elimination once again. They’d lost three straight to the 107-win Astros and needed to beat Justin Verlander on the road to stay alive. Patrick Corbin had been run ragged. Max Scherzer’s body had locked up to the point where he couldn’t dress himself. Martinez had already gambled with the likes of Tanner Rainey and Wander Suero more than anyone was comfortable with.

Then Stephen Strasburg stepped up and did something you don’t see pitchers do much anymore. He handled it.

After a rocky first inning, Strasburg kept the irrepressible Astros offense off the board into the ninth. The Nats once again scored bunches of runs late, and the next evening they were hoisting the proverbial piece of metal. Read the rest of this entry »

John Michael Bertrand is an under-the-radar pitching prospect with multi-sport bloodlines and a good backstory. Moreover, he’s performing above expectations in his first full professional season. Drafted in the 10th round last year by the San Francisco Giants out of the University of Notre Dame, the 25-year-old left-hander is 10-5 with a 3.17 ERA in 99-and-a-third innings across three levels. Bertrand began the campaign at Low-A San Jose and has since progressed to High-A Eugene and Double-A Richmond.

Growing up in Alpharetta, Georgia, the 6-foot-3, 225-pound hurler aspired to play college basketball, but it eventually became apparent that baseball would provide him with the better long-term opportunity. The decision proved prudent, but only after a bumpy beginning. Bertrand’s Blessed Trinity School prep days were followed by a pair of disappointments that might easily have ended his career before it even started.

“I went to the University of Dayton for a camp, and they told me that I didn’t throw hard enough,” Bertrand explained. “I was around 82 [mph] and had a loopy curveball, so it was basically, ‘Thank you for your time.’ After that, my guidance counselor suggested Furman [University]. It was closer to home, and purple happened to be my favorite color, so I was like, ‘Perfect, I’ll go.’ I walked on to their baseball team, but ended up getting cut my first fall. The coaches told me that I wasn’t good enough to play Division One baseball.”

Undeterred, and more determined than ever, Bertrand decided that not only would he return the following year and make the team, he intended to go on to play professionally. As he put it, ‘God kind of called me to go back to that campus and work even harder.’ That started that train, started my journey.” Read the rest of this entry »

You’re going to hear a lot about the Braves over the next couple months. They’re the best team in baseball, and that’s how it goes. Some of you are Braves fans, so getting to see more of your favorite team in October will just be one more drop of good news in a season filled up to the brim with happy headlines. But for those of you who are indifferent or ambivalent toward the Braves, for those of you who loathe them in your very core, I have a little treat. That’s all this article is: a treat to bring a bit more fun to the wall-to-wall coverage awaiting us all.

On Tuesday night, Daniel Vogelbach homered to straightaway center field and Michael Harris II attempted to rob it. Harris tried very hard, and I went back and watched the replay to see exactly how close he came to making the play. However, after watching a few times, my attention shifted. I kept rewinding because I noticed that something was sticking out of Harris’ glove and flapping like the tongue of a golden retriever:

That’s the little positioning card that tells Harris where to stand for each batter. Those cheat sheets are a small part of the revolution in outfield positioning that has hammered BABIP league-wide over the last several years. Your local sports outlet probably wrote about the phenomenon when these cards started appearing back in 2018, but at this point they’re old hat (especially for the Yankees, who literally kept the cards in their hats). Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox are going to miss the playoffs in the AL Central, which is the baseball equivalent of failing driver’s ed. It’s disappointing but not particularly surprising; since winning the World Series in 2005, the Sox have made the postseason just three times and won a grand total of three games across all of those trips.

Shockingly, the White Sox have enjoyed remarkable front office continuity over that time. For most of the 21st century, the duo of Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn, in some combination of titles, was running the show. I say “was” because, as you well know, Williams and Hahn were fired on Tuesday.

There’s no structural reason the White Sox can’t be successful. They have history and branding half the league would kill for. They play in the third-largest media market in the U.S., and though they share it with a richer and more popular neighbor, if Houston and Philadelphia and Toronto can spend enough to put out a winning team, so can the White Sox. Most important, they play in the easiest division in baseball, where the last-place club in the AL East would have a decent shot at winning the division.

They’re also lucky enough to have an owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, who cares whether the team wins. Not every team can say the same. Unfortunately, Reinsdorf seems to care how the White Sox win. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »