NEW YORK — On Wednesday night, DJ LeMahieu got it started for the Yankees, as he has so often done since arriving from Colorado in January 2019. Blue Jays starter Tanner Roark, having missed the strike zone with his first pitch of the night, left a 90.5 mph four-seam fastball in the upper outside corner of the zone — an area where the right-handed LeMahieu rarely swings — and this time the 32-year-old second baseman reached out and poked it onto the short porch in Yankee Stadium’s right field for a solo home run. The Yankees, who had dropped 20 runs on the Blue Jays on Tuesday night while retaking second place in the AL East, added another 13 more on Wednesday via a season-high season seven homers, including three by backup catcher Kyle Higashioka and another by LeMahieu. They did all of this despite Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge going hitless in their respective returns from injury.

“DJ just continued to set the tone for us,” said manager Aaron Boone, a night after LeMahieu had gone 4-for-6 with a homer and five RBI. Here’s the first-inning shot:

LeMonster pic.twitter.com/yq2OZDz2vY

— New York Yankees (@Yankees) September 16, 2020

The home run was LeMahieu’s fifth to lead off his team’s half of a game, moving him into the major league lead:

It was the 11th time LeMahieu has hit a leadoff homer in his two seasons as a Yankee; in that time, only Springer (15) has more, though until Wednesday, Acuña and Joc Pederson had as many in the same span. Read the rest of this entry »

Geoff Arnold knows the East. Not only do the Baltimore Orioles, the team he serves as a play-by-play announcer for, compete in the American League East, their inter-league schedule this year is solely comprised of the National League East. As a result, Arnold has been getting regular looks at two of the game’s most intriguing divisions. Surprises, both pleasant and not so pleasant, are present in both.

How would Arnold rank the teams and players he’s seen this season? That was the crux of a conversation I had with the radio (and sometimes TV) voice of the Orioles prior to last night’s game.

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David Laurila: Which is the best team you’ve seen this year?

Geoff Arnold: “The best team I’ve seen this year is probably the Tampa Bay Rays. They’ve got a really good starting rotation. We saw Tyler Glasnow when he was at his absolute best, and Blake Snell has obviously got great stuff. They’ve also got some hitters that can really make you pay for mistakes. They’re an extremely patient team; they get to 3-2 counts and work these long at-bats. I think their batting average on 3-2 counts might have been the highest in baseball when we last saw them.

“What Kevin Cash has done managing that bullpen… there were some guys they’d bring in and it was like, ‘I don’t know who these people are,’ yet he knew how to slide them into these specific roles — just like he figures out how to get enough production from their offense. Kevin Cash seems to know every right button to push. I’d say the Rays are the toughest team I’ve seen in the AL East, and probably the best overall.”

Laurila: What about in the NL East? Read the rest of this entry »

To paraphrase the late, great Chris Wallace, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another freaking other. After MLB announced its bubble-esque postseason format, Rob Manfred slipped in the claim that expanded playoffs are likely here to stay.

Manfred, as he is wont to do, conflated what the owners — his bosses — desire with what has actually been decided; expanded playoffs would require an agreement between the league and the MLBPA. Even though Manfred’s declaration is merely media signaling, though, it’s worth discussing its potential effect on baseball’s competitive landscape, because it would be absolutely earth-shattering.

While the commissioner didn’t elaborate on what type of expanded playoffs he was talking about, it’s fair to assume that they might take the form of this year’s tournament — eight teams in each league qualify, with best-of-three series at the higher seeds’ home parks to cut the field in half — though they could also feature a 14-team field, a possibility reported by Joel Sherman in February. I’ll assume a 16-team field here, as I think the extra television revenue will prove awfully enticing. From there, there would be the normal five-seven-seven structure we’ve grown accustomed to.

In an abbreviated season, expanded playoffs make some sense. 60 games isn’t enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, so a postseason cutoff was always going to feel arbitrary. Sixteen, eight, 10 — none would feel normal, because this season isn’t normal. Given that, creating more of a tournament atmosphere via short series feels like a fun one-off plan.

If every possible 2020 playoff format is going to feel equally valid, the owners have an obvious reason to expand the postseason: money. Owners take in the vast majority of playoff revenue — players get a share of the gate receipts in the first three (in the case of the Division Series) or four (League Championship and World Series) games of each round, while the owners get the rest of the gate as well the television money, which overshadows revenue from ticket sales. More games means more games to sell to TV networks. Ask a group of businesspeople if they’d like some extra money at almost no cost, and well, they probably won’t say no.

But in a full baseball season, a 16-game playoff does something else entirely. One of the neat features of a 162-game season is that it does an excellent job of determining which teams are best. On a given day, anyone can beat anyone. In the broad sweep of time, however, five percent edges add up. That doesn’t mean the 10 best teams always make the playoffs, but it does mean that you can be fairly certain the top team in each league is better than the sixth-best team. Read the rest of this entry »

The smoke is everywhere. It is in everything. It is inescapable. Closing the windows can’t keep it out completely. No air purifier will absorb all of the particles of ash. It has been days now since I stepped outside without feeling it immediately: the heaviness, the scratching in my throat and my lungs and my eyes. And I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m healthy, and I’m indoors, and though the air here is full of the aftermath of fires, those fires are far away to the south, where the wind is blowing in from. There, the fires are still burning. They burn more by the hour. Thousands of people have been displaced, forced to take refuge in fairgrounds left empty by the pandemic, the fates of their homes and their livelihoods unknown. Thousands more still have to work in this state of uncertainty, with the air around them full of danger. Dozens are missing; dozens have been killed. The skies have gone deep red, then disappeared entirely. And this, we are told, is what we have to look forward to in the summers of the future: More burning. More toxic air. More displacement. More death.

Through it all, they keep playing baseball.

***

The image looks like it’s been doctored, like someone has run a bad filter over it. Everything has a blurry red-gray haze: the players, the cardboard fans, the grass. More than 790,000 acres of land in the state of Washington has been consumed by fire. In Seattle, though, the Mariners are, unexpectedly, in the midst of a playoff push. They are scheduled to play a double-header. The amount of fine particulate matter in the air measures over 200 micrograms per cubic meter. The roof being closed doesn’t help.

Almost a month ago, when the fires started burning, MLB clarified their position on the cancellation of games due to air quality. There is precedent for such a thing happening. Northwestern minor league teams have done it in recent years; so have teams in the Australian Baseball League. But as far as major league teams go, MLB has decided on a hands-off approach, leaving the decision of whether or not to play with team ownership. There has been much discussion of air-quality-related postponement over the past month; there has yet to be an actual postponement. Not when the skies above Oracle Park were thick with an eerie orange haze, not when ash blanketed the cars parked outside the Oakland Coliseum. And not in Seattle, where the Air Quality Index stayed firmly in the Unhealthy range throughout Monday. In Vancouver, Canada Post canceled all deliveries. It was unsafe, they said, to make postal workers walk around in this environment. Read the rest of this entry »

If you like last-second changes to the postseason structure, this has been the year for you. Hours before the season started, MLB announced an expanded playoff format that will see 16 teams qualify. Yesterday, the league announced another structural change:

The 2020 @MLB Postseason will begin with the AL Wild Card Series on Tuesday, 9/29, while Game One of the 2020 World Series at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas will be played on Tuesday, 10/20. pic.twitter.com/KSzWMSAcBk

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) September 15, 2020

The bubble-like-substance playoffs (more on this in a moment) require some unpacking, so let’s unpack. The National League playoffs will take place in Texas — in Houston and Arlington for the NLDS, then Arlington for the NLCS. The American League playoffs will be their mirror in California — the ALDS will be in Los Angeles and San Diego, with the ALCS exclusively in San Diego.

It sounds weird, offhand, to have the NL playoffs in AL stadiums and vice versa. It’s a necessary step, however, to avoid creating home field advantage in a system designed to create neutral sites. Play AL games in Houston, and the Astros could find themselves “at” the Rays in a game played in Minute Maid. While home field advantage has been subdued this year, it also hasn’t been zero. The season is already going to be extremely weird, but MLB — rightly, in my opinion — drew the line at some playoff teams playing in their home cities.

That’s not to say it can’t happen — at least theoretically. The World Series will be played in Arlington, too, and the Rangers are not yet mathematically eliminated from postseason contention. As the only one of the four host cities not currently in playoff position — and fortuitously for MLB, the team with the newest stadium — Arlington was a natural choice for the World Series.

Oh yeah — though most news releases have called these bubble cities, and the playoffs a bubble system, that’s an inaccurate characterization. Teams in postseason contention will move to hotels next week for the final stretch of the regular season to “quarantine,” which I’ve placed in quotations because that’s not a great description of staying in a hotel but continuing to travel between cities and go to the ballpark. Many of us call that “business travel,” though baseball prefers the pandemic nomenclature.

From there, the league will establish “bubble sites” — again, quotations because of characterization — in each city. These will consist of locations near the ballpark where each team is sequestered. MLB has not yet announced a protocol for the various ballpark staff in each city, but they’ll be involved somewhere in the process as well. The teams will still travel between rounds, which further makes the term “bubble” confusing. It’s a permeable bubble that is sometimes not a bubble, I suppose.

Bubbles, or lack thereof, aside, there will be one major structural change to the postseason. For this year — and presumably this year only — the divisional and championship rounds will be played without off days. The divisional round will take place over five consecutive days, followed by a day off, followed by as many as seven consecutive days of championship series play.

To a far greater extent than the “bubble” system, this will change the way the postseason works. The former cadence of the playoffs lent itself to shortened rotations. The fifth game of the divisional series took place six days after the first — two travel days, one after the second and one after the fourth game, accounted for the time.

The way the math worked, it was hardly “strategy” to switch to a four-man rotation. It was simply the only way to do business. The starters from Game 1 and Game 2 were always available on full rest for Game 5. It’s not rocket science to use one of those two instead of a fifth starter. The two off days in the championship series enabled the same strategy.

With no travel days this year, a potential Game 5 would only be four days after the first game of the series. That would be three days’ rest for the Game 1 starter, with the alternative being a fifth starter or bullpen game. In isolation, that might lead many teams to go with the three days’ rest plan. The fifth starters for the 16 teams with the best playoff odds aren’t exactly an imposing group:

Your mileage may vary on which of these pitchers are actually their teams’ fifth starters, but it’s a rough cut of the kind of pitching talent that would show up in these games. Most teams would jump at the chance to use a top starter on short rest over them if that were the entire equation.

Due to the compressed nature of the second round, however, it won’t work that way. After a travel day, the championship series will begin. It, too, has no rest days, which puts you in the same bind, only with your best starter unavailable to start the series. To make two starts in that round, a pitcher who threw in Game 5 of the divisional round would need to start Game 3 (on three days’ rest) and then Game 7 (on three days’ rest again).

Quantifying the cost of consecutive short-rest starts is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s not free. Use a fifth starter, and you can get two full-rest starts from your ace in the second series. Is upgrading from short rest to full rest twice in the next series worth the difference between pitching your fifth starter and pitching your ace on short rest? The answer likely varies by team, and that’s an interesting tactical consideration where none previously existed.

Of course, just because something creates interesting tactical questions doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. If your opponent could choose your best player and force them to bat once and once only in each game, choosing when to use them would be interesting, but it wouldn’t be fun, or fair, or desirable in more or less any way.

The rollout of this new structure isn’t as capricious as that, but it’s close. Per Aaron Boone, teams only learned of the new structure this week, after the trade deadline. This means that no team had a chance to prepare for this style of playoffs — fifth starters have traditionally carried less trade value than their regular season value would indicate because the playoff structure diminishes their value, which won’t be the case this year.

I’d love to see this playoff setup in coming years, because the decision between short-rest aces and fifth starters is an enjoyable decision to consider. It also amps up the drama of the game — if one team uses their fifth starter and the other their ace, there’s a great risk-reward story to be told. If one team jumps out to a lead, they might consider pulling their ace early — the Jack Flaherty gambit. There are plenty of opportunities for shenanigans.

Dropping this rule on September 15 doesn’t mean that the shenanigans won’t happen, but it does feel like it unfairly changes the rules of the game at a late stage. The Dodgers happen to have Tony Gonsolin — for my money the best fifth starter of the bunch — but other teams would likely have pursued rotation upgrades had they known this detail. The 2020 season has been full of rules changes and convenient one-season gadgetry, but that was done out of necessity. Nothing prevented MLB from making this tweak before the trade deadline, which would have made it feel far more reasonable to me.

Regardless of a random internet baseball writer’s opinions on fairness, the new postseason format is set. The games will be fast and furious, wall-to-wall baseball: as many as 24 games in four days to settle the Wild Card round, followed by another blitz of between 12 and 20 games over a six-day span.

One silver lining: this plan likely covers enough contingencies that it makes further alterations unnecessary. Bad air quality in California? The league is leaning toward using Phoneix as an alternate site. Want to bring in a player from your alternate site? You can’t — teams will submit 40-man rosters to MLB by September 20 and “quarantine” the whole group. Fans in the stands? Uh… okay, this one isn’t settled yet.

For the most part though, the structure of the playoffs is set, at long last. All that remains is a sprint through the last two weeks of the season, followed by a second sprint through the postseason. May your fifth starters be ever in your favor — at least for 2020. Oh, and — also maybe 2021 and beyond. Rob Manfred told The Washington Post that the expanded postseason is likely to remain beyond 2020 if owners get their way, a distressing possibility for a sport that still plans to play 162-game regular seasons.

Minor league contraction is imminent, with 40 teams expected to lose their affiliated status once the Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) between Minor League Baseball and Major League Baseball expires at the end of this month. Part of a ‘One Baseball’ concept being formulated by the Commissioner’s office, this dismantling and rearranging of the minor league landscape is controversial. To a certain extent, it’s also not well-understood. That’s particularly true on the business front, where myriad factors are at play for nearly everyone involved.

Scott Bush has a solid understanding of what’s involved. Currently the CEO for the Society for American Baseball Research, Bush formerly served as Assistant General Manager for the St. Paul Saints, as well as a Senior Vice President for Business Development with the Goldklang Group, a sports entertainment consulting and management firm that is intricately involved with Minor League Baseball.

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David Laurila: What are your general impressions of the proposed contraction — good for baseball, or bad for baseball?

Scott Bush: “I think it’s going to be difficult to measure the impact of this for several years. With the focus on geographic proximity and the ability for teams
to have more access to players, there’s going to be the potential for improved player development. There’s also going to be, from a minor league perspective, the potential for improved relations with the parent clubs. And if there is an emphasis on geographic proximity, one could assume more meaningful regional ties between the minor league teams and their parent clubs.

“But there’s certainly going to be, at minimum, a short-term loss in terms of interest in baseball. We’re going to see communities lose access to baseball, and that can’t be a good thing. So the unknown — and one of the things that everyone is waiting for — is: Will there be a meaningful replacement? What does that look like? How long will it last? For me, that becomes the crux of starting to answer whether this will be good or bad for baseball overall.”

Laurila: Can you elaborate on the relationship between affiliates and parent clubs? Read the rest of this entry »

No-hitters are unlikely feats. Navigating 27 outs against a group of professional hitters without allowing a single hit takes a tremendous amount of skill. Still, the list of pitchers with a no-hitter might appear to be somewhat random, with hurlers like Hisashi Iwakuma, Mike Fiers, and Chris Heston making an appearance. Since that Heston no-hitter in 2015, there have been 14 complete game no-hitters. Of those 14, five have been thrown by Cy Young award winners: Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Jake Arrieta (twice). Former ace Cole Hamels has a no-hitter, ace-when-healthy James Paxton has one, and current ace Lucas Giolito just completed another. Recent history suggests about half of the pitcher who throw no-hitters are aces or something close to it, while half were aces for a single day. Alec Mills’ no-no against the Brewers on Sunday falls in the latter category, a journeyman righty who pitched his way to history.

Mills’ story deserves telling, though because he’s been an afterthought for much of his career, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you hadn’t heard it before. He was a walk-on at Tennessee-Martin before developing into their ace. Heading into the 2012 draft, Baseball America noted his good “control of an upper-80s fastball that bumps 90 mph at times” as well as “a slurvy breaking ball and nascent changeup.” He was drafted in a round — the 22nd — MLB would prefer doesn’t exist and sent to a rookie-league likely to be disbanded come 2021. He moved slowly through the minor leagues, needing Tommy John surgery early on, but pitched well all the way up through Triple-A in 2016 and made three appearances for the Royals that season.

As spring training began in 2017, the Royals designated Mills for assignment to make room for Jason Hammel on the 40-man roster. He was traded to the Cubs a day later and then missed most of the season with bone chips in his elbow. Mills was never ranked too highly on prospect lists, and the “pitchability righty” and “back-end starter” designations that appeared on the Cubs’ 2019 prospect list run pretty consistently with reports dating all the way to the draft eight years ago. Mills pitched well in a multi-inning relief role and had two good late-September starts against the division-winning Cardinals last season. If not for Jose Quintana’s injury before the start of the 2020 campaign, Mills wouldn’t have made the rotation, though Paul Sporer did mention that “a pair of breaking balls, including a new slow curve (67.6 mph)… [had] yielded a career-best 13% swinging strike rate” in our pre-season Positional Power Rankings.

Entering Sunday’s game, Mills had played pretty much as advertised. He wasn’t striking out many hitters, but posted a slightly above-average walk rate and solid groundball rate. He used his sinker to get those groundballs, but left the pitch up enough to surrender five of his eight homers on a pitch he throws about a third of the time. Those homers and a lack of strikeouts meant a 5.22 FIP entering Sunday, 14% below league average, though perfectly acceptable for an end-of-the-rotation starter. His 4.74 ERA was better and pretty close to league average, though the difference between his ERA and FIP was likely due in large part to a solid Cubs’ defense that has also helped Yu Darvish, Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks and the rest of the Cubs’ staff to lower figures than their Statcast data expects. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, I delved into what chaos there is to be had when it comes to the 2020 playoff picture in the National League. The answer, alas, is not very much, at least relative to a normal season. Alongside Major League Baseball’s combination of health and safety protocols and the expansion of each league’s playoff field from five teams to eight has come the decision to settle all seeding matters — including, potentially, who grabs a spot and who just misses — via the gripping excitement of mathematics instead of those boring tiebreaker games. MLB’s reasoning is that going the math route will minimize travel and keep the schedule as compact as possible during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and on the one hand I get it, but somewhere a McKinsey consultant must be proud of this bloodless, ultra-efficient solution. It stinks on ice, but like so much else, we’ll do our best at Entropy Central to play the hand that we’ve been dealt while hoping that things return to normalcy in 2021.

To refresh your memory regarding the format that was announced on Opening Day, each league’s playoff slates will include the division winners (who will be seeded 1-3), the second-place teams (seeded 4-6), and then the two other teams in the league with the best records (seeded 7-8, and deemed the Wild Card teams). For the first round, teams will be matched up in the familiar bracket format: 1-8, 2-7, 3-6, and 4-5, with all three games at the higher-seeded team’s ballpark in an effort to provide them with some kind of advantage.

If teams are tied for spots after the schedule has been completed, ties will be broken on the following basis:

• Head-to-head record (if applicable). Since teams haven’t played outside their divisions except against their interleague geographic counterparts, this is of use only for determining placement within the division. Presumably, if three teams were to end up tied, combined head-to-head records against the other two teams would be used, but with a minimum of four games separating any three teams in a division, that possibility appears to be remote.
• If head-to-head records are tied or not applicable, the next tiebreaker is intradivision record.
• If teams have the same intradivision records, the next tiebreaker is record in the final 20 division games. If that doesn’t break the tie, then record over the final 21 games is used, and then onto final 22, 23, 24, and so forth until the tie is broken.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I dug up an old concept: expected home run rate. The idea is deceptively simple: assign some probability of a home run to each ball a batter hits in the air, then add them up. It tells you some obvious things — Fernando Tatis Jr. hits a lot of baseballs very hard — and some less obvious things — before getting injured, Aaron Judge had lost some pop.

One question that many readers raised — reasonably so! — is whether this expected home run rate actually means anything. The list of over-performing hitters was full of sluggers. How good is this statistic if it tells you that good home run hitters are, in fact, not as good as their home runs? Sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me.

In search of truth — and, let’s be honest, article topics — I decided to do a little digging. Specifically, I wanted to test three things. First, how stable is expected home run rate? In other words, if a player has a high expected home run rate in a given sample, should we expect them to keep doing it? If the statistic isn’t stable, what’s the point?

Second, how does it do at predicting future home runs? In other words, does an expected home run rate in, say, July predict what will happen the rest of the year? It’s also useful here to see if expected home run rate (from here on in, I’ll be calling this xHR% for brevity) outperforms actual home run rate as a predictor. If xHR% doesn’t do a better job of explaining future home runs than actual home runs, what use is it? Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Cease has a simple calling card: a four-seam fastball that he throws in the upper 90s. Every prospect evaluation of Cease centered on the heater, a bludgeon he would use, the theory went, to leave hitters with no good choices. He backed it up with a curveball and a developing changeup, but those were the backup dancers; the fastball was the star everyone came to see. There were questions about whether he’d be able to make the whole package work, but if it did, the heater would be the reason why.

Nine starts into his sophomore season, however, things haven’t gone according to plan. Cease’s 15.4% strikeout rate is the fourth-lowest among qualified starters, ahead of only Mike Fiers, Antonio Senzatela, and teammate Dallas Keuchel. The White Sox probably hoped Keuchel would help mentor their pitching staff, but uh… not like this. On the other hand, Cease is running a 3.33 ERA, better than team ace Lucas Giolito. Huh?

In an even stranger development, Cease’s fastball appears to be the culprit behind his poor strikeout rate. Though it hasn’t lost any velocity — his 393 four-seamers this year have averaged 97.4 mph — the pitch simply hasn’t missed any bats. Here are the 12 pitchers with the lowest whiff-per-swing rates on their four-seamers, as well as their average velocity:

That’s not a list of bad pitchers. It is, however, disconcerting to see a fastball-first power pitcher sharing space on a list of contact-heavy fastballs with literally Zack Greinke. Cease has an absolute cannon, but he isn’t missing any bats with it. Read the rest of this entry »