Tuesday night was big for clinching. The Astros secured the AL West, leaving only the AL East and the NL West in play. The Guardians became the first team to clinch a first-round bye, and both the Orioles and Padres clinched playoff berths, the latter by getting the final three outs via a triple play against the Dodgers, a confluence of circumstances unprecedented in major league history. Where we entered Tuesday with 10 teams fighting for seven remaining berths, we’re down to seven teams battling for four spots. But even with the playoff field not fully set, we thought it would be a fun and worthwhile exercise to highlight various facets of the potential October teams by going around the diamond to identify the strongest and weakest at each position in each league.

As noted in Tuesday’s installment, which focused on the strongest positions among the remaining NL contenders, this is something of an offshoot of my annual Replacement Level Killers series, and in fact, even some confirmed October participants have spots that still fit the bill as true lineup sinkholes — think first base for the Yankees and Brewers — only this time with no trade deadline to help fill them. For this, I’m considering full-season performance but with an eye to who’s best or worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Unlike the Killers series, I’m also considering pitching, with the shortening of rotations and bullpens factoring into my deliberations.

For this installment, I’ll go around the American League, highlighting each position’s best among the remaining contenders. In this case that limits the field to the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Tigers, Royals, Twins, Astros, and Mariners, with the last of those admittedly on the ropes, down two and a half games in the Wild Card race, with the Twins half a game ahead of them, and Playoff Odds of just 2.9%. Read the rest of this entry »

Julio Rodríguez’s season was growing bleaker and bleaker by the day as he labored through the longest slump of his short career. We had expected him to get right sooner than later — after all, he’s one of the most talented players in the sport, with an explosive bat, top-shelf sprint speed, and a cannon of an arm — but it was worrisome to see him struggle for so long. He had an 86 wRC+ across 360 plate appearances at the end of June.

Over the last few months, though, Rodríguez has progressively figured things out, with his turnaround culminating with his current heater. Since July 1, he is batting .321/.377/.545 with 12 home runs and a 166 wRC+, and over his last 10 games, fueled by his .458/.471/.833 line, five homers, and 270 wRC+, he’s added 1.3 WAR to his ledger. He is a key reason why the Mariners are still in the playoff race with less than a week remaining in the season, though you could also make the case that his overall underperformance is one of the reasons why Seattle is barely hanging around. Either way, to better understand the story of Rodríguez’s season, we have to dive deeper into his struggles.

Rodríguez pitch-by-pitch performance data show he spent the first three months of the season almost exclusively hunting fastballs, which isn’t a bad idea considering he feasts on them. The problem was that because his eyes were focused only on one speed, he started swinging at any pitch that he thought might be a fastball, and as a result, he was chasing too many breaking balls and offspeed pitches.

During the first three months of this season, Rodríguez may have been the worst everyday hitter against offspeed pitches in the entire sport. Among the 260 batters who saw at least 50 offspeed pitches outside the zone through the end of June, he had the second-worst chase rate at 54.9%, behind Nick Gordon. As a result, Rodríguez had a .157 wOBA against offspeed pitches, which dragged down his overall numbers, especially because he also had trouble against breaking balls (.232 wOBA).

Rodríguez’s feast-on-fastballs approach corresponded with a swing deviation that limited his production. In previous seasons, Rodríguez thrived because of his swing variability, which allowed him to do damage against different pitches in different locations. That is an essential skill for him because he is one of the more aggressive hitters in baseball. However, during the first months of this season, because he seemed to be selling out for fastballs, his hacks were too noisy on most of his swings. That type of one-dimensional swing is designed to crush higher-velocity meatballs — and, even as he struggled, he was still doing that — but it is susceptible to pretty much everything else.

When looking at SEAGER, it becomes clearer that Rodríguez truly did have an eat-the-meatball approach. Yet despite his increased chase rate against offspeed pitches, his SEAGER has actually improved from last year. His Selectivity% is about league average as of this week, in the 54th percentile (mainly due to recent improvements), but his Hittable Pitch Take% is in the 97th percentile, meaning he is rarely letting pitches he can damage pass him by. Altogether, he is in the 95th percentile for SEAGER, a jump from last year’s 69th percentile score. At first glance, this might seem contradictory, that he’s making better swing decisions during his worst season. But just because he is swinging at hittable pitches doesn’t mean those swings have enough variability to produce against pitches with different speeds and locations.

The thing is, even though Rodríguez was hunting heaters with a swing that is tailored to damage them, it doesn’t seem like he intentionally altered his mechanics. Rather, the two changes likely came about simultaneously and spiraled as they reinforced each other. Here’s what probably happened: After getting off to a slow start, he began pressing to break out of his funk and tried to clobber the most hittable pitches he saw, leading to a one-dimensional, fastball-dependent swing.

Rodríguez is at his best when he has a flatter Vertical Bat Angle (VBA). VBA is the angle of the barrel relative to the ground at contact. So that means his best performance has come when his bat has been flatter at contact. That could mean deeper contact and/or a flatter entry into the hitting zone. Flat swings don’t work for all hitters, but for a someone like Rodríguez who creates so much bat speed deep in the zone, they typically are a recipe for success. Over the first three months of the season, Rodríguez had the steepest VBA of his career, ranging between 33.4 to 35.5 degrees; this stretch coincided with his below-average offensive production. Since the beginning of July, though, he’s flattened his VBA to somewhere between 30 and 31 degrees, much more in line with his career norms.

Rodríguez’s upper body mechanics are crucial to his swing because they determine the path his bat takes to the ball. He has a louder bat row, similar to those of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Rafael Devers, two hitters who also have swings on the flatter side. Noisy movements help batters generate power and time up their swings, but with more movement comes more room for error when something goes awry. Having an effectively loud swing requires maintenance and attention to ensure the delicate balance between power and control doesn’t fall out of whack.

If Rodríguez’s swing had unintentionally become more vertically oriented because of a different setup or row, that could have disrupted where he perceived his bat to be in space (proprioception) and hindered his contact quality and frequency. This all makes sense in theory, but let’s confirm it with some video analysis. The first two swings below are from May and the next two are from July:

May

July

You can see a much more toned-down bat row in July compared to what it was in May. Since Rodríguez isn’t moving it as aggressively in the pre-swing, his bat starts on a flatter plane when he descends into his downswing. That helps decrease the amount of time it takes to get his barrel into the zone and is more in line with where his swing has been in the past.

Now, let’s compare two swings, one from last season when he was rolling, and another from the second half of this season, as he returned to form:

2023

His mechanics aren’t identical, but they are much closer now than they were when he was struggling during the first few months of this year. Pay attention to the angle of his bat throughout the row and how far his hands drift from his body. Maintaining the connection between his barrel/hands and the rest of his upper body is paramount for him to control his barrel.

As a last piece of information to consider, I was curious about how Rodríguez’s bat speed changed as his row calmed down a bit and his swing flattened back out. This month, his bat speed has ticked up significantly compared to the first three months of the season. He’s swinging at an average velocity of 77.7 mph in September, a sizable spike from April through June, when his average swing was just under 76.0 mph. If flatter means faster, then it sounds like he should stay where he’s at right now.

Any Mariners fan would tell you that in the first few months when Rodríguez was struggling, he was clearly pressing. Any player would tell you that when you start pressing, your swing can regress because of it. You try and hack your way back to your normal numbers and get too far from the best version of yourself. It’s an intuitive story.

Considering the Mariners were just eliminated from the AL West race Tuesday night and currently sit 2.5 games out of the final Wild Card spot with four games to play, it would have been nice for them to have gotten this version of Rodríguez a bit sooner. But the season isn’t over just yet. Maybe the young superstar can propel his team into an unlikely playoff berth. After “The J-Rod Show” got off to such a slow start this year, that would be an especially epic season finale.

Except for the standings, which include Tuesday’s results, all stats are updated as of Tuesday morning.

Last night, the Royals finally won a baseball game. In doing so, they snapped a seven-game losing streak that very nearly burned up their 5.5-game cushion in the Wild Card standings. The only reason they’re still in position for the third spot this morning is that the Twins have lost five of their last six. Even so, the Royals did everything in their power to avoid getting the win last night. They stranded nine baserunners over the first four innings and squandered a brilliant start from Cole Ragans. They took a scoreless game into the 10th inning, and they scored (for the first time in 27 innings) only because the Nationals did everything short of driving the zombie runner around the bases in the bullpen cart. The Manfred Man scored when the Nationals threw the ball away in the top of the 10th. In the bottom of the inning, with a runner on third base and two outs, the Nationals did the Royals another favor, removing Nasim Nuñez, who has a .386 on-base percentage, in favor of Joey Gallo, whose OBP is more than 100 points lower. In the most Joey Gallo plate appearance of all time, the slugger was one pitch from walking, then 10 feet from wrapping the game-winning homer around the right field foul pole, before finally striking out.

Now that the Royals have finally won a game, it’s time to investigate what exactly went wrong. The numbers weren’t great, but they weren’t terrible either. During the streak, they ran an 88 wRC+, which ranked 20th over that period. Their 3.24 FIP was the second best in baseball, and their 3.79 ERA ranked 14th. They hit 10 more homers than they allowed and their strikeout differential was up above 40. No matter. Six of those seven losses were decided by either one or two runs. They just kept finding a way to lose, because they were cursed. At a certain point, that’s just the simplest explanation. In order for Kansas City to break its streak, the team required the good fortune of running into a Nationals team that had lost six of its last seven, had already clinched its fifth consecutive losing season, and played as if it badly wanted to throw away a ballgame. In other words, the only thing that saved the accursed Royals was running into a team that was somehow even more despised by the movers of the universe. After all, if there’s one thing the baseball gods love, it’s whatever fits neatly into a baseball writer’s pre-existing narrative.

What did the Royals do to anger the baseball gods so? That’s what we’re here to find out. The baseball gods can be hard to please and even harder to understand. They’re vindictive. They’re unpredictable. Sometimes they like bunting, and yet other times, not so much. So let’s focus on what we know. Clearly, this infraction occurred on September 14, the date of Kansas City’s last victory before the freefall. In order to figure out what went wrong, I went back and watched the game closely, taking detailed notes about any and all possible transgressions. Surely, one of these infractions had to be the reason for the skid.

First Inning

Well, here’s a gimme right off the bat. This team is literally called the Royals. They’ve got crowns all over their uniforms and their stadiums. Ever heard of hubris, Kansas City? You’re claiming the divine right of kings; no wonder the almighty wants to see you laid low. Maybe dial it down to the Kansas City Nobles. If you want to be extra safe, you could go with the Kansas City Miserable Wretches. Just like the rest of us, the baseball gods love an underdog.

As if that weren’t enough, the second batter of the game, Bobby Witt Jr. crushed a majestic home run. If this isn’t hubris, I don’t know what else to call it.

He’s flapping his wings like a bird. What do the Royals call this celebration, the Icarus Dance? All season long, Witt has been flying too close to the sun (which in this tortured metaphor is Aaron Judge, I guess), and now his wax wings have melted and he’s fallen into the ocean to be devoured by the Detroit Tigers. Like I said, this is just the simplest explanation.

Second Inning

This is the final pitch of the second inning. It’s a four-seamer to Yasmani Grandal that’s supposed to be on the outside corner but instead ends up low and inside. It’s a mistake, but it’s still a good location. Starter Michael Wacha marches off the mound, certain that it’s strike three. Grandal thinks it’s ball four, and he starts toward first base and winds up to toss his bat over toward the dugout. When he finds out he’s instead been called out on strikes, he shouts, “No, man,” followed by a 70-grade F-bomb. But watch catcher Freddy Fermin behind home plate. He winds up to throw the ball back to Wacha before realizing that it needs to go to the first baseman.

It’s not clear whether Fermin thought the pitch was a ball, didn’t realize that it was strike three, or didn’t realize that it was the third out. Either way, he’s tempting fate. There’s one player on the field who’s always supposed to know the situation, and it’s the catcher. If it’s enough to make old-school baseball men weep into their beer, it’s enough to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.

Third Inning

Nothing to see here. Just a normal popup, right? Take a closer look, and this time keep your eye on Wacha. He doesn’t shout, “Up!” He doesn’t even point toward the sky in order to help any fielders who somehow made it to the big leagues despite lacking the spatial awareness to remember which direction up is. He’s violating one of baseball’s iron-clad laws. It’s in the rulebook. It’s in the unwritten rules. I’m pretty sure it’s in the Constitution. When the batter hits a popup, the pitcher points up and yells, “Up!” It’s the only thing that keeps the sky from falling.

Two innings earlier, Wacha remembered to point when he induced a popup from the exact same hitter. What makes this omission even weirder is that Wacha is especially well-suited to this easiest of tasks. If you watch the play again, you’ll notice that he does raise his right hand pretty high. It’s part of his follow-through, and he does it after every pitch. All he needed to do was extend his index finger. There’s nobody in baseball for whom this effort could’ve be easier, and yet Wacha couldn’t be bothered. Three Finger Brown is rolling over in his grave.

Fourth Inning

Do the baseball gods hate bat flips? It’s hard to say. I’d like to think that they keep up with the times, and that while celebrating a home run was once the kind of trespass that could get you demoted to Paducah for the rest of your living days, the mysterious beings who balance the scales of hits and errors have learned to enjoy a nice bat flip just as much as the rest of us. But if they do hate bat flips, then the only thing they hate even more is a bat flip that comes on a routine flyout. So MJ Melendez just might be to blame for this whole thing.

Fifth Inning

Look, this one isn’t Kansas City’s fault. The team was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Adam Frazier is about to lead off the inning with a triple, but first he needs to take a warmup cut and get situated in the batter’s box and — oh. Oh no.

Apparently umpire Chad Fairchild needs to get situated too. The best part is what happens after Fairchild wraps up downstairs. Frazier steps back out of the batter’s box and heaves the world’s biggest sigh. It’s hard to blame him for needing a second to refocus after what he just witnessed.

Later in the inning, Kyle Isbel got hit in the shin by a pitch. Disobeying the rule shouted by every high school baseball player in American history, he leaned over to rub the spot where he got hit. Still, I think that offense pales in comparison to Fairchild’s. I know I feel cursed after watching it.

Sixth Inning

I noticed two things in the sixth. First, it turns out that Adam Frazier has his own hip issues. I don’t know if this is enough to anger the baseball gods. Maybe they’re into this sort of thing. Either way, it is my solemn duty to bring any and all pelvic gyrations to your attention.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not looping the same video over and over. These are different pitches in the same plate appearance, all in the sixth inning. Frazier really needs to keep that pelvis good and limber.

The second thing seemed much more likely to cause a curse. All game long, there were two Royals fans in the fancy seats behind home plate. (This is off topic, but in that section, the snacks that go for Armageddon prices in the rest of the stadium aren’t just free, they’re tossed to you by a vendor who walks around in a full Pirates uniform. Sometimes you’ll see him winding up to throw a water bottle and you’ll think for second that one of the perks of sitting in the fancy seats is being waited on by an actual big leaguer.) I had my eye on that pair the entire time. The fan on the left had some glorious facial hair and a cool vintage hat. (He also kept pouring the free water on his neck to beat the heat, and considering what those water bottles cost in the rest of the stadium, it was the most conspicuous consumption I’ve ever witnessed in my life.) The fan on the right was wearing ear buds the entire game and looking down constantly, either because he was checking his phone or because his left leg just happened to be really interesting.

In the bottom of the sixth, however, the best buddies switched seats. And just to make sure we all knew about it, ear buds guy waved directly at the camera.

Same seats, guys. Same seats! We’re trying to make the playoffs here.

Seventh Inning

Salvador Perez and Aaron Judge are the only current players in baseball who have attained the rank of captain. Judge doesn’t wear a C on his uniform because the Yankee pinstripes are sacrosanct and it would be a crime against nature to alter them in any way (unless it’s to add an enormous Nike swoosh). But look at Perez’s C when he comes up in the seventh. Where did they even find a C that small?

It’s minuscule, and I mean that in the most literal possible sense: It’s a lowercase C. It’s honestly so small that it seems disrespectful. It’s so tiny. Did they just run out and buy it from a Michael’s? It looks like it’s just the copyright symbol for the swoosh. When Jason Varitek captained the Red Sox back in the 2000s, he wore an enormous C. It was actually the same size as the team name emblazoned across his chest.

That thing needed its own parking spot! Don’t tell me nobody in the Kansas City clubhouse was capable of finding a big chunky C for their big captain. They definitely have one, and you know how I know? Because it’s right there on the jersey! Just take that one. Problem solved. Curse broken. You’re welcome, Kansas ity.

Eighth Inning

Fermin singled to lead off the top of the eighth, at which point first base coach Damon Hollins helpfully gave him some tips about the new pitcher on the mound. Before he could do so, however, Hollins needed to consult his notes.

That’s right, Hollins apparently doesn’t use one of those cool little positioning cards that the players get. He just walks out onto the field every inning with several sheets of computer paper folded hot-dog style and flapping around in his back pocket. When the situation calls for it, he pulls them out and searches for the proper page like a best man about to give the world’s longest, sweatiest toast. How is it possible that Hollins has so many notes that it requires multiple pages? Has he never considered folding the pages a second time so that they fit comfortably into his pocket without threatening to fall out? This whole situation is an affront to any number of gods.

Ninth Inning

Look, I came into the ninth inning thinking that I’d round things off with a classic blunder; some egregious, old-school infraction tailor-made to anger the baseball gods. And I got one too. David Bednar walked leadoff batter Maikel Garcia, who promptly stole second and third, and then Isbel, who promptly stole second. The Royals had runners on second and third with no outs, and then they couldn’t manage to scratch out a single run. The next three batters went: strikeout, intentional walk, double play. If only they’d hit the ball the other way or executed a safety squeeze, the baseball gods would have squealed with delight and showered them with championships.

So that should’ve been the end, but before it all went down, I saw something even more egregious. I saw something much more petty and not at all relevant to the game of baseball. But it was also so bizarre and outré that I couldn’t go without mentioning it. Behold, Tommy Pham’s snake-skin belt buckle, complete with a miniature American flag. I had to see it and now you do too.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I have never seen with my own eyes an object that was more certainly cursed. Still, Pham wore this abomination last night, when the Royals finally failed into a win, so now this accursed accessory might just be team’s lucky charm.

Which characteristics cause a team to either excel or struggle in the postseason? It’s a long-standing debate, and most baseball fans have a preferred theory. Some think it’s having an ace. Others think good contact hitting, or a team’s momentum, is what pushes a club over the top. Some people — the ones most likely to get annoyed when they read my work — think that clutch performances or having veterans with playoff experience on the roster is what causes a club to shine in October. Sadly, the best answer is rather boring: What makes a team play well in the postseason is simply being the better team overall. In 2022, I examined 63 team characteristics throughout baseball history to see if any of them presaged clubs’ fall fates. Outside of leaning more heavily on home runs to score — top pitchers who struggle in the playoffs are far more likely to be felled by homers than issuing walks or failing to strike hitters out — and a barely significant tendency for younger teams to overperform, there just wasn’t much there, there.

But that’s not to say that playoff baseball is identical to regular season baseball. After all, the former is a sprint while the latter is a marathon, and the challenges in each scenario are different. When I ran the numbers for the aforementioned article, the focus was on how the playoff teams played, rather than who played. I specially used a playoff model that estimated team quality as being different in the regular season due to roster construction considerations. Teams are better able to leverage their front-end talent over a few crucial weeks than a six-month period. The qualities of a team’s fifth starter (not to mention their sixth, seventh and eighth) are less crucial to their success come October, and the key bats in the lineup (if healthy) are almost always going to be playing, thanks to the additional days off that clubs get in the postseason. As the 2019 Washington Nationals demonstrated, you can even paper over half your bullpen being a train wreck. Read the rest of this entry »

Even if you’re not a Braves fan, you probably know the rough contours of what’s gone down for them this season. The preseason World Series favorites have had horrid injury luck all year. The reigning MVP, Ronald Acuña Jr., scuffled for 50 games before tearing his ACL. Spencer Strider blew out his elbow. Austin Riley broke his hand, Ozzie Albies and Sean Murphy each missed two months, Michael Harris II has been banged up; you’ve heard it all before. And the stars who have been around haven’t played up to their potential. Only Chris Sale and Marcell Ozuna, two past-their-prime retreads the Braves expected to be support pieces, have given the team a fighting chance.

That was a good description of the Braves for part of the season, but it doesn’t capture their recent form. Harris started the year in a horrendous slump; he has a 122 wRC+ since the All-Star break. Riley brought the power before his injury. Jorge Soler has been a nice addition. But perhaps most importantly, Matt Olson is back.

Olson put up the best season of his career in 2023, and it wasn’t particularly close. He launched 54 homers, got on base at a career-best rate, and played every game en route to a gaudy 6.6 WAR. He finished fourth in MVP voting, his first top-five finish, and led the majors in homers and RBI. Our projections thought he’d be one of the best hitters in baseball this year, and they weren’t alone. Read the rest of this entry »

With six days left in the regular season — and six games for most teams — three teams have clinched their respective divisions (the Brewers, Guardians, and Phillies), and two others have clinched playoff berths (the Dodgers and Yankees). That leaves 10 teams fighting for seven spots, but even with the playoff field not fully set, we thought it would be a fun and worthwhile exercise to highlight various facets of the potential October teams by going around the diamond to identify the strongest and weakest at each position in each league.

This is something of an offshoot of my annual Replacement Level Killers series, and in fact even some confirmed October participants have spots that still fit the bill as true lineup sinkholes — think first base for the Yankees and Brewers, to pick one position from among the aforementioned teams — but this time with no trade deadline to help fill them. For this, I’ll be considering full-season performance but with an eye to who’s best or worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Unlike the Killers series, I’ll also be considering pitching, with the shortening of rotations and bullpens part of the deliberations.

For the first installment of this series, I’ll focus on each position’s best among the remaining National League contenders. In this case that limits the field to the Phillies, Brewers, Dodgers, Padres, Mets, Diamondbacks, and Braves, with the last three of those teams fighting for two Wild Card spots. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday and Saturday, the Cincinnati Reds routed the Pittsburgh Pirates in back-to-back games by a combined score of 15-4. The Reds were 74-80 when the Pirates came to town for the three-game series, and their chances of finishing above .500 and matching last year’s 82-80 record were slim, but they kept those hopes alive over those two games.

Then Paul Skenes took the mound. On Sunday, the Pirates pulled off a shutout on the back of five brilliant innings from their first-year ace. It was the third time the rookie phenom has dominated the Reds this season. Cincinnati managed just three hits and one walk all afternoon, striking out 13 times (nine against Skenes). After Jonathan India, Elly De La Cruz, and Tyler Stephenson went down one-two-three in the bottom of the ninth, the Reds fell to 76-81, assuring they would finish with a worse record than they did last season.

Around 6:30 that evening, president of baseball operations Nick Krall informed manager David Bell that his services were no longer required. Bench coach Freddie Benavides was named the interim manager for the five games remaining in the 2024 season. This was Bell’s sixth season as the Reds manager. He also managed in their minor league system from 2009-12, giving him just under 10 years of service with the club. Although he’s the only member of the Bell family’s three generations of major leaguers to never play for the Reds — his grandfather, father, and brother all suited up for the family team – David is the Bell who spent the most time with the club. Read the rest of this entry »

I feel a little bad for Shota Imanaga. The Cubs left-hander is sixth among qualified starters in ERA and ninth in K-BB%. He’s thrown 173 1/3 innings, which is a bunch by modern standards, and while we don’t put much probative value in pitcher record in this day and age, Imanaga is still 15-3 for a pretty mediocre Cubs team. After Imanaga threw seven scoreless innings on Sunday — the second time he’s done that this month — I saw a little bit of Twitter chatter from people wondering where his Rookie of the Year buzz went?

FIP doesn’t like Imanaga that much, because he gives up a bunch of home runs, but even after getting dinged for that, Imanaga has put up a 3.1-WAR season as a rookie. There are years where that, in addition to his pretty uncontroversially awesome traditional stats, would be good enough to win Imanaga some hardware.

Unfortunately, Imanaga is the third competitor in a pretty thrilling two-man race between Paul Skenes and Jackson Merrill. Do you want the flashy giant with triple-digit heat and an unhittable off-speed pitch that defines classification? Or do you want the guy who learned a brand new position basically overnight at age 20, and oh by the way is nearly hitting .300 with power in a park that’s unfriendly to hitters?

Me? I’d go with Skenes, but would have a hard time mounting a negative argument against Merrill. Either one would be a deserving winner. As for Imanaga, I’m actually not sure he’d be the third man on my ballot if I had one. That’d probably be Jackson Chourio, who would have a legitimate case if Merrill hadn’t broken the curve. Tyler Fitzgerald isn’t a sexy name, but he’s got a 135 wRC+ in 90 games, mostly as a shortstop. Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s case was undone by injuries, but he’s nearly equaled Imanaga’s WAR total in roughly half as many innings. He’ll get down-ballot votes as well.

The thing is, Rookie of the Year is a volatile competition. The MVP and Cy Young classes vary in quality from year to year, but not by much. The list of best players in baseball is pretty stable from one season to the next.

Best rookies, however? That’s another question. Future MVPs and Hall of Famers don’t bubble up from the minors in a steady stream. Sometimes they come two and three at a time. Sometimes they come in April, other times in August, too late to influence the Rookie of the Year race. Sometimes there are several in one league but none in the other.

Some years, well, they mint a new plaque for each league every year, and you’ve got to give it to somebody. And that’s not even counting flash-in-the-pan cases who won the award on merit but fizzled out later. For instance: Bob Hamelin is easy to mock because he was a pudgy guy who wore glasses and was a replacement-level player for bad teams for almost all of his short career. But the man raked in 1994: .282/.388/.599, with 24 homers and 56 walks in just 374 plate appearances. He earned his spot as a historical footnote, don’t let anyone tell you different.

But in other cases the first great season of a superstar career goes completely unrewarded. Or a relatively underhyped rookie puts in a big first season and barely gets noticed. Which is what will happen to Imanaga, in all likelihood.

At times like this, I think of Jaime García. Like Imanaga, García was an unassuming-looking lefty for an NL Central team who would’ve had a real shot at Rookie of the Year if he weren’t up against two monsters. In 2010, García posted a 2.70 ERA in 163 1/3 innings. And this was back when a 2.70 ERA meant something — that was a 69 ERA-. He did get a single first-place Rookie of the Year vote, but only one, because Buster Posey and Jason Heyward were also in that class. Posey took his first step toward Cooperstown with that season, and Heyward set himself up for a lifetime of disappointment by posting a career-high .393 OBP. It takes a lot to get noticed in that environment.

I went back through the Rookie of the Year races since 1980, which is when voting went from one player per ballot to (brushing off my old comparative politics textbooks) ranked choice voting. And I’ll say this: As much as the BBWAA voters went through a rough time during the Fire Joe Morgan era, and as much as the Hall of Fame continues to be a contentious battlefield pitting the forces of reason against the forces of silliness, the writers have gotten to the right answer most of the time. There are always cranks and outliers (I was amused to discover Ichiro was not a unanimous Rookie of the Year in 2001, and that five voters chose Miguel Andujar over Shohei Ohtani in 2018), but the collective has been solid.

So, in addition to García himself, I present the Jaime García All-Stars:

A key characteristic of the Jaime García All-Stars is that they did not actually deserve the award. So while Orel Hershiser was awesome in 1984, posting a 2.66 ERA in 189 2/3 innings split between the rotation and the bullpen, he had the misfortune of coming up against Samuel, who hit .272 and stole 72 bases. And also Gooden, who put up one of the greatest rookie seasons of all time. Tough beat.

Brown had a case to win Rookie of the Year by WAR, but Olson was a reliever and we all know WAR doesn’t count for relievers. What does count: a 1.69 ERA and 27 saves. It’s fine. But this was the start of Brown — for reasons I still don’t understand — being wildly underrated by awards voters. He never won a Cy Young and really only came close once, in 1998, when he lost a three-way battle with Tom Glavine and Trevor Hoffman. (Glavine, at the risk of reiterating an opinion that’s gonna get me yelled at, is the most overrated pitcher of his generation, which makes Brown being snubbed for him all the more fitting.) And, of course, Brown lasted a single year on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot. When I’m dictator of baseball, Brown will get the respect he deserves.

Ichiro and Pujols were two of the most obvious Rookies of the Year ever, and then backed it up by putting on lengthy Hall of Fame-worthy careers. But their success obscures how good the rest of that rookie class was: a future Hall of Famer in Sabathia, several Hall of Very Gooders in Oswalt, Soriano, and Rollins. Plus Adam Dunn. And a David Eckstein sighting! Oswalt is the only one who really ought to feel aggrieved at not winning Rookie of the Year — everyone else burst into the league with decent-but-not-great campaigns — but this is quite a list of names to have beaten back so resoundingly.

The WAR totals make this look like a miscarriage of justice, but it’s important to remember that Braun hit 34 home runs and stole 15 bases in just 113 games, while Tulowitzki played 155. Also, the defensive metrics have Tulowitzki an astonishing 49.1 runs ahead of Braun. Based on the what happened to both players later in their careers, I’m inclined to believe that Braun was a bad third baseman and Tulo a very good shortstop, but I have a hard time trusting that big a gap based on data from 2007.

Either way, poor Hunter Pence got lost in the shuffle. A literal shuffle, one might say, given Pence’s unorthodox running style. Even so, a 132 wRC+ in 108 games is a great rookie season — hardware is routinely won with less.

García, Imanaga, Ryu… I’d argue J.A. Happ in 2009, though he finished second in a pretty forgettable class. Voters like left-handers without elite velocity enough to notice them, but not enough to give them serious consideration for the top of the ballot. I get Ryu’s falling down the pecking order because he was a 26-year-old KBO veteran, and because he was overshadowed not only by Clayton Kershaw, but by Puig, who was the most buzz-worthy player in the league at the time. The only person who came close was, well, Fernández.

I remember this race between Acuña and Soto being much closer than it was. That happens sometimes in award voting (the Jose Altuve vs. Aaron Judge race for AL MVP in 2017 was like this too) where there’s a clear closely matched top two, but rather than that manifesting in an even split of votes, everyone comes down on the same side of a close call.

Either way, Buehler, despite his single first-place vote, was a distant third. It’s in keeping with a career where Buehler was always among the best on his team, or in the league, or whatever cohort you want to choose, but never clearly the best.

Another close race with a lopsided result. And in contrast to the 2018 NL race, where Acuña had the better season, I think the voters missed on this one. Not that Rodríguez wasn’t special — or that he didn’t turn into an absolute superstar — but I think the difficulty of posting a 135 wRC+ from behind the plate, as Rutschman did as a rookie, continues to be wildly underrated. Even so, the true hard case here is Kwan, who hit .298/.373/.400, stole 19 bases, and still wound up an afterthought. Behind his old college teammate, no less! What an indignity.

This was an even stronger rookie class than that, with Bobby Witt Jr., George Kirby, and Jeremy Peña also getting down-ballot votes. Kirby didn’t have a huge workload, Witt had not fully crystallized into what he would become (he hit 20 homers and stole 30 bases, but posted an OBP of just .294), and your opinion of Peña probably depends on which defensive metrics you believe.

Kwan was incredible as a rookie by anyone’s standards, but was still clearly the third-best player in his class.

This being a highly subjective exercise, this is not — and cannot be, really — an exhaustive list. (Please share your favorite forgotten rookie season in the comments.) But the larger point is this: Imanaga is still having a great rookie campaign, even if he doesn’t get any hardware to show for it. Sometimes there’s just a better rookie.

I’d like to think that I’ve become a more “enlightened” baseball watcher over my years as a writer. I’d like to think that I understand the game’s nuances and know how to look for what really matters instead of getting distracted by the superficial, and that I know how to focus on the big picture rather than getting swamped by small-sample noise. But for all that fancy schmancy talk, one thing gets my blood boiling as much as it used to: uncompetitive pitches in hitters’ counts.

I’m pretty sure you can picture it. There’s a runner on first in a close game, and a 2-0 count with a slugger at the plate. Your team’s high-octane reliever peers in for the sign – a fastball. He takes one or two deep breaths, maybe flutters his glove a few times to calm the nerves, then winds and delivers. A foot outside, ball three. Even Javy Báez wouldn’t swing at that thing. Ugh, this inning is already spiraling away.

There might not be a more maddening experience in all of baseball. Come on! Buddy! Just throw a strike! How hard can it be? You know the hitter isn’t going to swing if you can’t at least get the ball near the plate. A lot of the time, baseball is a game of inches, with fine margins separating success from failure, but not when a pitcher misses by a ton in a count where they should have been trying to throw a strike.
Read the rest of this entry »

As we head into the final week of the regular season, 15 teams still show signs of life when it comes to claiming a playoff berth. On the one hand, that sounds impressive — half the majors still contending — and it’s on par with last year and better than 2022. Nonetheless, it still boils down to just three teams falling by the wayside, and just one of the six division leads having a greater than 1% chance of changing hands. As noted previously, since the adoption of the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement and its four-round playoff system, the options for scheduling chaos have been replaced by the excitement of math. On-field tiebreakers are a thing of the past, with head-to-head records usually all that are required to sort things out.

On Friday I checked in on the race to secure first-round byes, which go to the teams with the top two records in each league, so today I’ll shift focus to what’s left of the Wild Card races. Thankfully, there’s still enough at stake for both leagues to offering some amount of intrigue. Read the rest of this entry »