A bit of an abbreviated power rankings this week since I’m in the middle of moving. There isn’t much movement in the standings to report on anyway; the best teams continue to coast into the playoffs, and just a handful of teams are still fighting to keep their playoff hopes alive.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — its offense (wRC+) and its starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

The Astros joined the Dodgers as the second team to clinch a postseason berth last week and could lock up the AL West as soon as today. They might not be on the Dodgers’ level right now, but a few of their key players are heating up at exactly the right time. Justin Verlander made his return to the mound on Friday and pitched five scoreless innings against the A’s with nine strikeouts. In that same game, Yordan Alvarez blasted three home runs; he’s collected 14 hits and six homers in his last seven games. They have plenty of strength throughout the roster, but those two players will likely carry the team deep into October if Houston is going to make a run at another World Series appearance. Read the rest of this entry »

The chase for history is on, and New York City is awash with excitement. I’m speaking, obviously, of the Mets’ pursuit of the modern era record for times hit by pitch by one team in one season. Mets hitters have been plunked 102 times this year, three shy of the record, and have 14 games left in which to overtake last year’s Reds for the all-time lead.

The full list is fun, because two things immediately become apparent. First, most of the high historical HBP totals came in the past five to seven years. And second, whenever a team shows up that isn’t from the mid-2010s or later, it’s immediately obvious which historical outlier is responsible: a Craig Biggio here, a Chase Utley there, a Jason Kendall over in the corner.

The Mets are a more well-rounded lineup, with six players being hit by 10 or more pitches this year. No. 102 came on Sunday afternoon, when Pete Alonso took a fastball off the elbow, causing a benches-clearing incident and earning warnings for both dugouts. The estimable Ron Darling, on the mic for WPIX, sensed that Alonso wasn’t angry because he thought Johan Oviedo hit him intentionally, but because it was the seventh time in that weekend’s four-game series that a Met had been hit. In fact, he said, he couldn’t remember one time this season when a Met had worn a pitch and it looked malicious.

So I went back and watched all 102 Mets HBPs, and he’s right. Read the rest of this entry »

Another series, another bundle of home runs for Aaron Judge. The Yankees’ superstar has set a scorching pace this September, and on Sunday, he hit his 58th and 59th home runs in a victory over the Brewers. As is customary, I’ve updated our game-by-game odds of him reaching his 60th, 61st, and 62nd home runs in a given game the rest of the season. If you want to see Judge tying Babe Ruth, tying Roger Maris, or leaving every previous Yankees (and American Leaguer) in the dust with 62, you can see our predictions below.

One note: I’ve added a few bells and whistles to this projection to handle Judge’s rest situation. The Yankees have been more aggressive than I expected in terms of getting him into games this September. To reflect that, I’ve changed the way I handle an off day. Previously, I set a specific day and simply gave Judge no plate appearances that day. As we’re getting closer to that scheduled off day, and closer to some milestones, that deterministic way of handling a day off feels wrong to me. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Raymond has fond memories of June 13, 2012. Then in his final year as a broadcaster for the Houston Astros, the now TV play-by-play voice of the Texas Rangers got to call a historic pitching performance — and it wasn’t even his biggest thrill of the day. Prior to the game, he was in the presence of a legend.

Raymond had an inkling that the season would be his last with the Astros. He was in the final year of his contract, and an ownership transition was resulting in numerous changes throughout the organization. With his future up in the air, Raymond decided that he was going to “hit all the high notes,” making sure to enjoy aspects of his job that can sometimes be taken for granted. That’s how he met Willie Mays.

“In San Francisco, Willie was always down in the clubhouse, just available to chat,” recalled Raymond, who graduated from Stanford University before becoming a broadcaster. “I’d never wanted to bother him all those years, but I decided to make it a point to talk to him, whether that was for five minutes, 10 minutes, or whatever. So I went to the ballpark early, hoping to ask him some questions and hear a few stories. For instance, he’d hit his 500th home run at the Astrodome, and they’d brought him a cake afterwards.”

The hoped for five-to-10 minutes ended up being far longer. Mays held court for hours, to the point where Raymond had to tell the iconic Hall of Famer that he needed to head upstairs, as the game was about to start. As he was getting up to leave, he added that the Astros would be returning to San Francisco right after the All-Star break, and maybe they could talk again. Mays responded by saying, “Well, you’ve got to come over to my house then.” Read the rest of this entry »

There are far better ways to evaluate offensive performance than the Triple Crown stats or whether a player leads the league in all three categories or not. But winning a Triple Crown, though not a gold star evaluative measure, is a lot of fun, and following a Triple Crown run is a family-friendly good time. It’s a rare feat to accomplish in baseball history, and while increased competitiveness and larger leagues make pulling it off more difficult, it can be achieved in both high-offense and low-offense seasons. It also puts you in the company of a lot of baseball greats, with every AL/NL Triple Crown winner having a plaque in Cooperstown except for Miguel Cabrera, who will almost certainly have his own five years after he retires.

Both Aaron Judge and Paul Goldschmidt look to be in realistic scenarios to win the Triple Crown. To get the exact projections, let’s look at them individually, starting with Judge, who has the simpler scenario.

(To get the probabilities, ZiPS uses the rest-of-season projections for every player, sims out a million seasons, and sees whose lines result in Triple Crown wins, if any. To get a more accurate gauge of what the probabilities are, ZiPS does not assume that the rest-of-season projection is necessarily the underlying ability of every player. In the case of Judge, for example, ZiPS estimates his underlying ability to hit homers over a three-week period as a distribution rather than a point. The generalized model ZiPS uses effectively replicates the number of streaks and slumps in reality over a short period; there’s a reason we have more consecutive hit streaks, homer streaks, and scoreless inning streaks than one would expect from a simple exercise of binomial hijinks.) Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Gausman entered Thursday leading the American League in both FIP and WAR, but any shred of hope that he had of winning this year’s AL Cy Young award flew out the window faster than the ball left the bat on Yandy Díaz’s three-run homer on Thursday afternoon in Toronto. For the second outing in a row, Gausman served up two homers and was touched for five runs en route to an 11–0 trouncing by Tampa, leaving him with numbers likely to be overlooked by awards voters.

In recent weeks, while writing about a few AL Cy Young contenders, I quickly dismissed Gausman’s candidacy. But even before the Rays knocked the 31-year-old righty around, I resolved that at some point I’d dig deeper into his campaign — which, to be clear, has been a very good one — to explore the reasons why.

Gausman entered the season surrounded by high expectations and, for the first time in his career, long-term security. The fourth pick of the 2012 draft by the Orioles hasn’t always lived up to expectations; some years he’s pitched well enough to lead a rotation, and in others he’s been trade fodder and even waiver bait. On the heels of a solid (if abbreviated) 2020 campaign with the Giants, last year he fully broke out, earning his first All-Star selection and placing sixth in the NL Cy Young voting following a 14–6 season with a 2.81 ERA, 3.00 FIP, 227 strikeouts, and 4.8 WAR with the 107-win Nl West champions. That set him up for a huge payday, and just a few days before the lockout began, the Blue Jays opted for Gausman via a five-year, $110 million deal.

Thanks in part to the fact that he didn’t allow a walk or a homer in any of his first five starts — he actually didn’t serve up his first homer until his seventh start and his 50th inning — Gausman has led the league in FIP and WAR since mid-April and still does, with marks of 2.41 and 5.2 despite his recent bumpy ride. Among qualifiers, he additionally owns the league’s lowest walk rate (3.8%), third-highest strikeout-walk differential (24.3%), and fourth-highest strikeout rate (28.1%). That’s impressive stuff, and it certainly suggests a viable Cy Young candidate. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners just wrapped up their most difficult homestand over the last two months of the season, going 4–4 against the White Sox, Braves, and Padres. They entered this stretch with a 99.4% probability of making the postseason, boosted by a three-game sweep of Cleveland during the first weekend of September; if there were going to be an epic collapse, it would have started here. Instead, they pulled off a split against three playoff caliber teams and now have 20 games remaining against teams with records below .500. Their odds of breaking their infamous playoff drought are now marginally better at 99.8%, but they’ve weathered the toughest storm and have clear skies ahead of them as they push toward a Wild Card berth.

The standout performer during this eight-game stretch was Eugenio Suárez. He blasted six homers during the homestand, including two multi-home run efforts, and a massive walk-off shot. The barrage started with a pair of dingers against the White Sox on September 7, the second of which tied the game at six in the bottom of the seventh inning. A couple of days later, Suárez blasted a solo shot off Max Fried to give the Mariners a 2–0 lead over Atlanta.

The next day, he hit another pair of homers, with the second being the most dramatic of the bunch. After the Braves had stormed back and scored five runs in the top of the ninth inning to take a 7–6 lead, Julio Rodríguez launched a 117-mph solo homer to tie the game in the bottom half. With two outs in the inning, Suárez stepped in and finished off Kenley Jansen and the Braves with a game-winning home run to left center.

He wasn’t finished either; on Wednesday, he hit his sixth home run of the homestand, part of the opening salvo of an eventual 6–1 victory over the Padres.

Suárez’s offensive onslaught isn’t limited to the last eight games either. Since the beginning of August, he’s hit 15 homers and slashed .250/.352/.625 (178 wRC+) in 39 games. In that same period, only Aaron Judge has been able to match his home run output.

Since 2018, Suárez leads the major leagues in homers — one ahead of Judge — with 160. This recent hot streak has helped him match a career high in WAR with 4.3, and he broke the 30 home run threshold for the fourth time in five years (with the shortened 2020 season as the lone exception). Suárez has always been prone to hot and cold stretches, and this latest peak is coming at the right time for the Mariners. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching the waning days of Albert Pujols’ career, one gets to remembering. The man cast such a huge shadow over the sport for so long, his early days seem like a different era. For a sense of how long, I remember hearing about him for the first time from a physical copy of USA Today’s Sports Weekly — the thing we used to read while walking to school uphill both ways, etc. The Cardinals, it was reported, were so impressed with a 21-year-old third baseman who’d barely played above low-A that they were considering plugging him into their Opening Day lineup.

Pujols’ rapid rise to prominence is unusual but not completely unheard of, and the rise of a precocious young hitter from the Dominican Republic conjures up certain images: signing as a teenager, working up through the low minors, proving himself against grown men at an age when his American counterparts are still eating meal plan tater tots and going to frat parties.

But Pujols, who moved to New York and then to Independence, Missouri, as a teenager, was a college baseball player. He played one season at Maple Woods Community College (now Metropolitan Community College-Maple Woods). There, he did about what you’d expect one of the best hitters ever to do against juco competition: hit .466 with 22 home runs in 56 games, led his team to a regional title, and earned All-American honors. That spring, the Cardinals picked him in the 13th round of the draft, and two years after that he was in the majors. Two World Series, three MVP awards, and almost 700 home runs later, you know the rest of the story. Read the rest of this entry »

Trayce Thompson may not be the most accomplished professional athlete in his family — not when father Mychal Thompson and older brother Klay Thompson have six NBA titles and five All-Star selections between them — but for the first time in six years, he’s making significant noise of his own at the major league level. Now on his second stint with the Dodgers, the 31-year-old Thompson is in the midst of a modest breakout, one that could have ramifications for Los Angeles’ roster in October and beyond.

A night after the Dodgers clinched their ninth NL West title in 10 years, Thompson started in right field in place of Mookie Betts and followed a solo homer by Will Smith with one of his own, a 445-foot shot off Zach Davies. That tied the game at 2–2, though Los Angeles eventually lost in extra innings.

The homer was Thompson’s 10th of the season in just 205 plate appearances; he’s the eighth Dodger to reach double digits. Even with a September slump, the well-traveled outfielder has the highest wRC+ of any Dodger since the All-Star break and is tied for third in WAR, behind or alongside three players who are going to wind up somewhere on MVP ballots:

That’s pretty lofty company for a player who’s on his third organization and fourth team (including affiliates) this season. Thompson is yet another reminder of the Dodgers’ ability to find diamonds in the rough and turn them into championship-caliber cogs, a facet of their organization that’s been as essential as their player development pipeline. Turner was in his age-29 season when he became a mainstay in 2014, Taylor in his age-26 season in ’17, and Muncy in his age-27 season in ’18. Despite their staggered starts, they’re three of the Dodgers’ five most valuable position players since Dave Roberts took over as manager in 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been having fun producing estimates of when Aaron Judge might hit his 60th, 61st, and 62nd home runs this season. It’s cool for multiple reasons: I love home run chases, like most baseball fans, and I also like coming up with ways to answer seemingly difficult questions via simulation. It’s one of the same reasons I like writing about baseball in the first place: I think it’s very neat that I can think about baseball both very tangibly (Randy Arozarena’s baserunning) and abstractly.

Since I have the technology, I’ve gotten a fairly obvious request a few times in the past week: do it for Pujols. His improbable quest for 700 homers has turned into an unlikely quest, and now a “wait could he?” quest. At 697 dingers, he’s within hailing distance of a momentous number to retire on. I’m going to use the same tools that helped me model when Judge might hit some big homers to do the same for Pujols.

The bare bones of this system will be the same. I started with the Cardinals’ remaining schedule and the park factors for right-handed hitters in those stadiums. Almost immediately, though, I took a detour, because the Cardinals don’t use Pujols like the Yankees use Judge. At this stage in his career, Pujols is at his best against left-handed pitching. He also needs more off days than Judge, eminently reasonable given his age. That creates a playing time puzzle, so to figure out which games Pujols will play in, I used Roster Resource to work out which days I expect opposing teams to start lefty pitchers. On those days, I project Pujols to start and get three plate appearances (against lefties) 30% of the time, four (three against lefties) 55% of the time, and five (three against lefties) 15% of the time. This is definitely not perfect, but as a rough approximation, it’ll do. Read the rest of this entry »