Through Monday night, major league baseball teams have played 415 games, the same number of games they had played on April 28 of last year. Back then, Cody Bellinger, Christian Yelich and Mike Trout were the top three players by WAR. Also in the top 10 were Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Pete Alonso, Anthony Rendon, Javier Báez, and Paul DeJong, who all went on to have good-to-great seasons. Elvis Andrus, on the other hand, put up 1.5 WAR through most of April and was replacement-level the rest of the way. Moving one month forward, a stretch equivalent to half of this season, Pete Alonso was replacement-level in May. Marcus Semien put up an 80 wRC+. All of which serves as a good reminder that in this shortened season, it’s best not to make too much of one month’s worth of performance when looking forward. That said, though, let’s take a look at the current WAR Leaderboard for position players:

Over the last month, Ben Clemens has written about Mike Yastrzemski, Mookie Betts, and Ian Happ; Jay Jaffe has added his own piece on Betts. Fernando Tatis Jr. has been featured in posts from Jaffe and Dan Szymborski, and ranked very highly in our Trade Value Series. Jake Mailhot has written up Kyle Lewis and Trent Grisham. While Anthony Rendon, Nelson Cruz, and Bryce Harper have all been great and perhaps deserve articles of their own, their greatness isn’t too far removed from our general expectations for them. That just leaves Brandon Lowe, whose start definitely merits attention. Read the rest of this entry »

Most fans are familiar with Fred Lynn’s career. A superstar in six-plus seasons with the Red Sox — good for a 142 wRC+ and 30.7 WAR — Lynn subsequently fell short of those lofty standards after being dealt to the Angels following the 1980 season. Even so, he continued to be a solid player despite myriad injuries. Three of Lynn’s nine All-Star nods came with the Halos, and by the time he hung up his spikes at age 38, he’d accumulated 1,960 hits and 306 home runs. A four-time Gold Glove winner as a center fielder — and an AL MVP to boot — Lynn finished with 49.2 WAR.

The later of Lynn’s seasons aren’t nearly as well-chronicled as his earlier ones. Especially overlooked is his time in Detroit. Acquired by the Tigers at the 1988 trade deadline, Lynn joined a team in a pennant race, then returned the following year for what was to be his penultimate big-league season. What was Lynn’s Motown experience like? That’s the focus of this two-part interview, which was conducted over the phone earlier this month.

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David Laurila: You went from the Orioles to the Tigers in a trade-deadline deal. What are your memories of that?

Fred Lynn: “It wasn’t unexpected. We’d gone through that 0-21 start to the 1988 season, and during the All-Star break the A’s wanted to get me. The deal just wasn’t good enough for [the Orioles] to make the move. My wife and I both liked Baltimore. The fans were great, and while we weren’t playing well, it was a good bunch of guys, so I enjoyed playing there. And it was baseball-only. The Colts had exited, so baseball was the only game in town.

“So the Oakland thing hadn’t panned out during the break, and now the trade deadline comes around. We’re playing the Angels, I’m at my hotel room, and my agent calls and says the Tigers are interested in making a deal. This is probably around 4:00 o’clock, and I’m going to the park at 5:00. I have no-trade clause, and it doesn’t work out. I call my wife and tell her, ‘The deal is off, don’t worry about it.’

“I hang up the phone, and my agent calls back. The Tigers have sweetened the pot. I said, ‘Okay, deal.’ Then I had to call the ballpark. I called my manager and said, ‘Hey, Frank [Robinson], am I in the lineup tonight?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, you’re hitting third.’ ‘I said, ‘Well, you might want to change that lineup, because I’ve just been traded to Detroit.’” Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re looking for a sure sign that a manager is thinking in old-timey baseball cliches instead of playing to win, listen for the words “save situation.” There are tons of reasons not to use your best reliever in a big spot — load management, handedness matchups, heck, maybe he ate some bad sushi last night. “We wanted to hold him for a save situation”? Nope! Bad management alert… or at least, it was until the rules of baseball changed.

Love or hate the automatic runner in extra innings, it’s changed the tactical calculus of baseball significantly. Teams haven’t bunted as much as I predicted, which is fascinating in itself, but today, I’m more interested in which pitchers are doing the extra innings pitching. Before 2020, “saving” a pitcher for a lead was self-defeating, but that isn’t an automatic truth, simply a contextual one. Let’s delve into why that was the case, and why it might not be this year.

To explain how this scenario worked in the past, I’m going to use a hypothetical situation. It’s the bottom of the ninth inning in a tie game, and the visiting team has two options for pitching: Nick Anderson or Aaron Loup. They’ll bring one of the two in for the ninth, the other for the 10th if necessary, and then completely average pitchers for every inning after that.

More specifically, they’ll be bringing in pitchers with the career rate statistics that exactly match Anderson’s and Loup’s. This is an abstraction, so we’re ignoring opposing batters and handedness matchups, which a real-life manager would care about: for this article, we’re only worrying about whether bringing in your closer makes sense with everything else held equal. Here are those result rates:

Anderson is clearly better. In fact, over a million simulated innings (every batter receives a random result from each pitcher’s result grid until there are three outs), he allowed 2.80 runs per nine innings, while Loup allowed 3.74 runs. Anderson was better in terms of the percentage of innings holding opponents scoreless, too: 80.3% of his innings were scoreless, as compared to 76% for Loup. Read the rest of this entry »

In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. And yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets, and have presented it at FanGraphs in an expanded format since 2018.

Things are different this year, as you may have noticed. With six days to go before the August 31 deadline, just a month’s worth of performance to analyze — if, that is, a team has avoided a COVID-19 outbreak that has blown a hole in its schedule — and 23 teams within two games of spot in the expanded playoff field through Monday, putting together this year’s set of Replacement-Level Killers is a challenge like no other. The sample sizes are tiny, especially when players are sharing a position; month-long slumps are hardly unique. Even without being a complete devotee to exactitude, normally I’m able to curate a tidy list at each position by focusing on the subset of contenders (teams with .500 records or at least a 10% chance of reaching the playoffs) who have gotten less than 1.0 WAR at that spot through roughly two-thirds of the season. Scale that down to 30 games, and the threshold becomes 0.3 WAR or less, in which case a single good day by a player at the position in question might boost him from Killer to mid-pack producer.

Thus, I’m doing things a bit differently this time around. While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (apologies in advance to fans of the Royals, Angels, Tigers, Red Sox, Rangers, Mariners, and Pirates), I’ll incorporate our Depth Charts rest-of-season WARs into the equation, considering any team that comes out with a total of 0.4 WAR or less to be in the replacement-level realm (that’s 1.1 WAR over the course of 162 games, decidedly subpar), though I may give a few teams in each batch a lightning round-type treatment, as I see their problems as less pressing given other contexts (returns from injury, contradictory defensive metrics, bigger holes elsewhere on the roster etc.) and I’ve pledged to keep these from becoming 3,000-word tomes. Read the rest of this entry »

Back before the Chicago Cubs decided to go full-on Ebenezer Scrooge, they aggressively pursued top players in free agency to improve their roster. One of those players was Yu Darvish, an ace for the Rangers and Dodgers after seven years of dominating the Japan Pacific League, a feat he accomplished while still a teenager. Darvish was the best pitcher available after the 2017 season and the Cubs signed him to a six-year, $126 million contract, a sum commensurate with his abilities. And unlike his first deal in the majors, Darvish didn’t have to contend with a posting fee; when the right-hander came to the States, the Nippon Ham Fighters got nearly as much ($51.7 million) as he did ($56 million).

The initial returns were not promising. The Cubs won 95 games in 2018 before being bounced in the Wild Card game by the Colorado Rockies, while triceps and elbow issues limited Darvish to just eight games. Those were mostly ineffective games to boot, as his walk rate jumped to career highs, his ERA and FIP ballooned to near five, and he failed to complete the fifth inning in five of his starts. MRIs revealed no structural damage to his arm, but the team was careful; the triceps is important in the arm deceleration phase of a pitcher’s delivery:

Activity of the triceps muscles, as well as activity of the anconeus and wrist flexor muscles, helped the joint’s ligaments apply a compression force during this phase in order to stabilize the elbow and prevent elbow distraction.

Darvish was already a veteran of one Tommy John surgery and the Cubs were rightly conservative about rushing their ace to full-time duty. The first victory of 2019 was just staying healthy, which he achieved; Darvish only missed a single start down the stretch due to forearm pain. But the control wasn’t there in the early-going and a third of the way through the season, his ERA was at 5.40 with an extremely worrying 38 walks in 11 starts. Indeed, even late as Independence Day, Darvish’s ERA was north of five. Read the rest of this entry »

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of last night’s game between the Braves and Phillies, the visiting Phillies were holding on to a two-run lead. Dansby Swanson stood on first base with Adeiny Hechavarría on second. Freddie Freeman was facing off against new Phillies acquisition Brandon Workman. In terms of compelling endings, this is pretty close to what you hope for. One of the better hitters in the game had a chance to hit a walk-off home run to end the game, while making an out would mean victory for the other side. Freeman did get a hit, pushing a double into the gap, but the game ended when Swanson was thrown out at home trying to score the tying run. The play, already compelling given the game state, was made more interesting by two factors:

1. Andrew Knapp might have blocked the plate in violation of the rules designed to prevent collisions at home.
2. Swanson decided to try to score the tying run on the play, but made the final out instead.

Before getting to the collision rule and whether Knapp was where he shouldn’t have been, let’s first consider Swanson’s decision to attempt to score from first base. While Freeman hit the ball pretty far, it was cut off by Roman Quinn. One of the fastest runners in the game, Quinn got to the ball in the gap before left fielder Andrew McCutchen. While McCutchen’s arm strength isn’t terrible, it isn’t much more than average, while Quinn has thrown an easy 87 mph pitch from the mound, and made this throw earlier this month:

Read the rest of this entry »

David Fletcher is 5 feet and 9 inches tall. By the standards of professional baseball, that’s quite short. He makes up for it a bit by standing upright in the batter’s box, but no one is going to confuse him for Aaron Judge anytime soon. That makes it all the more confusing that on Friday night, he did this:

First of all, wow! Are you kidding me? That ball was nearly five feet off the ground. Halfway to home plate, it was unclear whether Fletcher was taking a swing at a major league pitch or a piñata:

If you’ve been paying attention throughout his career, Fletcher making contact with that pitch will be less surprising. He’s a singular player, a contact machine who will defend the strike zone at all costs when the count reaches two strikes. So far this year, he’s swung at 51 pitches outside the strike zone and only missed nine of them. That 87.3% out-of-zone contact rate is higher than the league contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 season couldn’t have gone much better for Stephen Strasburg, but his follow-up performance is already over. After making just two long-delayed and abbreviated starts, the 32-year-old righty has been transferred to the 60-day Injured List and is slated to undergo surgery to alleviate carpal tunnel neuritis in his right hand. He becomes the latest top-flight pitcher to land on the IL this season, and leaves the already-struggling Nationals just that much more shorthanded as they defend their title.

After averaging just 24 starts per season from 2015-18 due to a variety of ailments, Strasburg didn’t miss a single start in 2019. He struck out a career-high 251 batters in a National League-high 209 innings, received enough run support to notch an NL-high 18 wins as well, and finished with a 3.32 ERA, 3.25 FIP, and 5.7 WAR, the last of which ranked third in the NL behind Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer. He followed that stellar season with a dominant postseason performance, pitching to a 1.98 ERA with 47 strikeouts and just four walks in 36.1 innings, and won World Series MVP honors while helping the Nationals win their first championship in franchise history. After opting out of the final four years and $100 million of his contract, he signed a new seven-year, $245 million deal. It was a very good year.

Strasburg appeared to be on track to make his season debut on July 25, in the Nationals’ second game, but he was scratched from the start just hours before first pitch due to what was described as a nerve issue. He was replaced by Erick Fedde, and received an injection of cortisone. At the time, he admitted that he had been pitching through numbness in his hand for weeks. From NBC Sports’ Todd Dybas:

“Started out, probably, like the end of the first week of camp. I was waking up in the middle of the night and my hand was asleep. Kept falling asleep and I was getting these feelings, and it wasn’t really bothering me throwing. It seemed like once I tried starting to ramp up and stuff, the symptoms started to increase. It really’s something the last two [intrasquad] games was feeling it pretty regularly. Just something you try to throw through. After I got out of the last start problems, issues, just kept persisting. Saw that there was nerve impingement in my wrist. Got a cortisone shot to hopefully create more space in there to get it to calm down and get back to normal.

…”It got to the point where I didn’t have the same feeling in my hand holding the ball. It was affecting my ability to command the baseball the way I’m accustomed to. It’s something that I feel like if I take some time now to get that feeling back to normal, I can be out there much sooner than if I try to just gut it out at this point.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Five of the first 12 picks in the 2016 draft were high school pitchers. In order, those selections were: Ian Anderson to the Braves (third overall), Riley Pint to the Rockies (fourth), Braxton Garrett to the Marlins (seventh), Matt Manning to the Tigers (ninth), and Jay Groome to the Red Sox (12th). Not surprisingly, their respective development paths have varied, injuries hindering the progress of fully half.

Chris Mears — at the time a pitching crosschecker for the Red Sox — was especially enamored with Manning.

“I liked his athleticism, his looseness, his fastball quality,” said Mears, who is now one of Boston’s two pitching coordinators, along with Shawn Haviland. “I thought he would be a longer-term development type guy — the Tigers have done a really good job; he’s made adjustments faster than I would have anticipated — but I remember him being a guy I really wanted.”

Asked why he’d viewed him as a longer-term project, Mears cited Manning’s basketball background, and “less pitching experience than many high-school draftees have at that point in their careers.” Moreover, Manning is 6’ 6” and “usually those long-lever guys take a little bit longer to get the feel of repeating their delivery.” Mears also saw a breaking ball that while having good shape and spin, wasn’t always consistent.

Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t enthralled with his potential. Mears first saw Manning at the Arizona Fall Classic, and based on that look he and Josh Labandeira, Boston’s Northern California area scout, went to see him early the following spring. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at the bottom of the standings around the league, and you’ll find some expected names. The rebuilding Pirates, Royals, Mariners and Giants all occupy a last-place spot in their respective divisions, while similar teams like the Tigers and Blue Jays are hovering near the basement and below .500. Yet tucked into that group of teams that came into the season with no hope is a franchise just two years removed from 108 wins and its fourth World Series title in the last 16 seasons: the Red Sox. And while 2020 has been a predictably dismal showing for those aforementioned clubs, Boston’s season has been one surprisingly long tumble down an endless flight of stairs. Entering Friday’s play, the Sox are a miserable 8–18 and losers of nine out of their last 11 games. They’re also firmly in last place in the American League East, staring up at the Orioles, whom they trail by 4 1/2 games.

On the one hand, that’s not where anyone predicted the Red Sox to be. They were no juggernaut in 2019 at 84–78, and losing Mookie Betts was only going to hurt. Consequently, our preseason prediction was a modest 31–29 record with a third-place finish in the division and playoff odds of 64.7% with the new expanded format. But while these weren’t the ‘27 Yankees reborn, this also wasn’t a shipwreck visible from miles away. Instead, it’s been a sudden and violent collapse that’s taken them fully out of the playoff picture. The Red Sox’s projected record for the season is now a dismal 25–35, and their resulting postseason odds are just 10.4% — lower chances than every AL team but Seattle and Detroit.

On the other hand, the Red Sox have come by their awful start honestly, thanks in large part to one of the worst pitching staffs the game has ever seen. Boston hurlers have given up the most runs in the majors (160), resulting in a run differential of -43 that’s third worst in baseball, and have a ghastly ERA of 6.01, putting them in a virtual tie with Detroit (6.03) for last place, and in the running for the worst team ERA of the modern era. Only the 1996 Tigers, who put up a 6.38 mark en route to 109 losses, and ‘99 Rockies, who posted a 6.03 figure, have done worse in the last 85 years. The Red Sox are tied for San Francisco for lowest WAR among pitching staffs (-0.6), have given up the second-most homers in the league (43, alongside the Giants), are third in walks allowed (107, tied with — you guessed it — the Giants), and rank 24th in Win Probability Added (-2.69).

It gets uglier. Owing to injuries, trades and an offseason they more or less skipped, the Red Sox have already used 11 different starters in just 26 games, and those guys have been lit up for a 6.50 ERA in 101 innings (their staff FIP is an only modestly better 6.16). Most of those pressed into service are overmatched rookies and fringe major leaguers, with the Sox cycling through cast-offs like Ryan Weber, Zack Godley, and Chris Mazza. When that hasn’t worked (which is often), Boston has been forced to go with an opener-style strategy of using its worst relievers from the get-go; consequently, the team not only is averaging a mere 3.88 innings out of its starters, but has also allowed a ridiculous 59 runs across the first, second and third innings of its games. The only constants rotation-wise are Nathan Eovaldi and Martín Pérez, and both have been mediocre at best: The former has a 4.98 ERA and seven homers allowed in 34 1/3 innings; the latter is at 4.07, which leads the team, but coupled with a strikeout rate of just 16.5% and a bloated walk rate of 13.6%. Read the rest of this entry »