The Brewers clinched a playoff spot on Wednesday afternoon, with the Cubs’ loss to Oakland early in the afternoon. The Brew Crew themselves waited until after their game against Philadelphia later in the evening to celebrate properly — turns out that a pregame champagne bacchanal is frowned upon in this day and age — but by golly, they sure did seem to enjoy themselves.

The team set out a stroller full of non-alcoholic offerings for underage outfielder Jackson Chourio, confetti was tossed around, music played, and so forth. Bob Uecker was thrilled to the point of incontinence. It will surprise no one to learn that when it comes to clinching parties, I am strictly opposed to acting like you’ve been there before.

Some fuddy-duddies, angered by the realization that anhedonia is not a universal condition, will say there’s still work to be done for the Brewers, a team that’s now made the playoffs six times in seven years but has connived to win only a single postseason series in that span. That’s surely true, and should Milwaukee repeat its traditional low-scoring first-round flameout, I’ll be right there in line to level appropriate criticism.

But let’s not overlook the fact that winning the division requires months of hard work by hundreds of people throughout the organization. It would be disrespectful to those who put in that effort not to take a moment, for one night, to celebrate the product of all that labor. Read the rest of this entry »

In retrospect, of course he was going to do it. On Thursday, Shohei Ohtani became the first player in history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season, and he did it loudly. His 6-for-6, three-homer, two-steal game would be among the best single-game lines by any player all year even if it hadn’t simultaneously helped him achieve a feat that no one has ever done before. Sometimes you just have to marvel at the greatness.

Ohtani wasn’t supposed to be at his peak this year. He’s rehabbing from UCL repair surgery and thus not pitching. His two-way prowess has always been part of the Ohtani mystique, and 2024 felt like a warmup for next year, his first fully operational campaign with the Dodgers. But instead, Ohtani reached new heights as a hitter this year. He’s already set career bests for every counting stat imaginable. He’d have highs in every rate stat too, if it weren’t for his offensive breakthrough in 2023 (.304/.412/.654 for a 179 wRC+).

Ohtani always felt like a threat to hit 50 homers – he hit 46 in 2021 and 44 last year — but 50 steals felt like a pipe dream; he’d swiped only 86 total bases in 716 games before this year, and even with last year’s rule changes that increased stolen base attempts and success rates, he swiped only 20 bags in 135 games.
Read the rest of this entry »

Craig Kimbrel lost his job as the Orioles’ closer back in July due to his erratic performance. Now he’s out of a job completely. With just 11 games remaining in the regular season, the Orioles designated the 36-year-old righty for assignment on Wednesday, guaranteeing that he won’t be a participant in this year’s postseason, either for the playoff-bound Orioles or anyone else.

The decision came less than 24 hours after the worst outing of Kimbrel’s career. Called upon in the ninth inning of Tuesday night’s game with the Orioles trailing the Giants 4-0, Kimbrel struck out Patrick Bailey, but then all hell broke loose: a single, a steal, a wild pitch, a walk, a sacrifice bunt for which the throw home was too late, another walk, a strikeout, a two-run single, and an RBI double. After he departed, Matt Bowman yielded another two-run single, with both runs charged to Kimbrel’s ledger. It was the first time in 837 major league outings that he had allowed six runs; he’d never even allowed five before, but it was the eighth outing out of his last 11 in which Kimbrel was scored upon, raising his ERA to an unsightly 5.33.

On the one hand, this is a somewhat shocking turn of events for a player who made his ninth All-Star team just last season and plausibly could have this year as well. On the other hand, Kimbrel has been so ineffective lately that without his gaudy résumé — he’s fifth on the career saves list with 440, and may one day wind up in Cooperstown — and his big salary, he might have lost his roster spot awhile ago, particularly on a team whose bullpen has been a problem for months.

“We have so much respect for Craig and his career and what he’s done for the game, how long he’s pitched, how long he’s pitched well,” manager Brandon Hyde told reporters on Wednesday. “So it’s never easy to say goodbye to someone that’s done a lot. A heck of a first half for us, helped us win a ton of games. He’s an amazing teammate. He’s incredible in the clubhouse and just a class, class act.”

With closer Félix Bautista slated to miss the season after undergoing both Tommy John surgery and a follow-up ulnar nerve transposition and scar tissue cleanup, the Orioles signed Kimbrel to a one-year, $13 million contract in December, a deal that included performance bonuses as well as a $13 million club option for 2025, with a $1 million buyout. Baltimore represented Kimbrel’s fifth stop in four seasons; he pitched for the Cubs and White Sox in 2021, the Dodgers in ’22, and the Phillies last year. Throughout that nomadic run — and before that, dating back to his time with the Cubs (2019 to mid-2021) and Red Sox (2016–18) — he led something of a Dr. Jeckyl/Mr. Hyde existence, at times dominating opponents the way he did during his stellar run in Atlanta, but sometimes falling into bad habits mechanically. “Too rotational” is a phrase that has surfaced multiple times over the years to describe Kimbrel’s tendency to get out of whack. By getting down the mound too quickly instead of staying back, he has struggled with his release point and sacrificed deception, command, and unpredictability.

In 2019–20, a span during which Kimbrel threw just 36 innings due to a prolonged free agency and the pandemic, he posted a 6.00 ERA and 6.29 FIP. He bounced back to make the NL All-Star team in 2021, posting an 0.49 ERA and 1.01 FIP in 36 2/3 innings for the Cubs, but then a 5.09 ERA and 4.56 FIP after being traded to the White Sox on July 26. He put in serviceable seasons for the Dodgers and Phillies, combining for a 3.49 ERA and 3.54 FIP, but lost his closer’s job in Los Angeles in September 2022 and was left off the postseason roster. Last October, he was one of the goats as the Phillies were upset by the Diamondbacks, taking losses in Games 3 and 4 of the NLCS.

Kimbrel began his tenure with the Orioles in inauspicious fashion, blowing a save but collecting a win against the Royals on Opening Day. He blew two more saves in April, but none in May and just one in June. On July 7, he converted his 16th save in 17 attempts since the start of May, and 23rd in 27 attempts overall, lowering his season ERA to 2.10 and his FIP to 2.47. To that point, he had been scored upon just twice in his past 22 games, with one of his two runs allowed (across a total of 21 innings) an unearned run, a Manfred man who scored the game-winner for the Blue Jays in the 10th frame on June 5.

After that July 7 save, Kimbrel didn’t pitch again for a week, and when he did, the bottom began to drop out. Protecting a one-run lead against the Yankees at Camden Yards on July 14, he began the ninth by waking Trent Grisham and Oswaldo Cabrera, the Yankees’ eighth and ninth hitters, then served up a three-run homer to rookie Ben Rice. The Orioles got him off the hook with a three-run ninth against Clay Holmes. The decision had been made before that sad Sunday, but Holmes, who finished the first half with a 2.77 ERA and 2.74 FIP, made the AL All-Star team, while Kimbrel, who had a 2.80 ERA and 2.97 FIP by the end of that outing, did not. Just sayin’.

Kimbrel threw a scoreless inning in his next outing, against the Rangers on July 20, but he was scored upon in his subsequent three games, blowing another save and taking a loss as well. He didn’t get another save chance, as the Orioles traded for Seranthony Domínguez, his former Phillies teammate, on July 26. In fact, Kimbrel rarely got another high-leverage opportunity — just three of his final 15 appearances had a leverage index over 0.41, and one of those was 0.88.

Even in mostly low-leverage situations, Kimbrel didn’t perform up to major league standards. Across his 18 innings from July 14 onward, he was lit for an 11.50 ERA with a 7.45 FIP. He allowed five home runs in that span, walking 17.5% of hitters while striking out 21.6%. It was uncomfortable to witness, even when he pitched in games that had more or less been decided.

Overall, Kimbrel’s 4.18 FIP and 4.24 xERA suggest that he’s pitched better than that 5.33 ERA. He’s struck out 31.5% of batters, but he’s walked 13.4%, a mark he exceeded in both 2016 and ’20 (small sample alert). That said, his 54.3% first-pitch strike rate, 24.1% chase rate, and 11.8% swinging strike rate are his lowest marks for any season in which he’s thrown more than 21 innings. Looking to Statcast, his velocity loss particularly stands out. His four-seam fastball has averaged just 93.9 mph, down about two miles per hour from last year, and fading further as the season has gone on, with his results predictably going south as well:

The lower velocity cost Kimbrel about an inch of horizontal break relative to last year, in exchange for an inch of vertical break, and both of our pitch modeling systems capture the decline, both from year to year and in-season. Here’s a look at Kimbrel via Stuff+:

Note the huge falloffs in Location+ and Pitching+, as well as the overall grade. From last year to the latter half of this season, that’s about one full standard deviation of decline in Stuff+, and two standard deviations of decline in Location+ and Pitching+.

Kimbrel’s other main pitch, his knuckle curve, didn’t fall off as drastically as his fastball. Batters have hit the pitch for a decent .261 average, but he’s limited them to a meager .283 slugging percentage and a .252 wOBA with it, to go along with a 34.8% whiff rate. Those numbers aren’t quite as good as they were last year (.219 wOBA, 38.8%), but they’re more than serviceable. The problem is that from July onward, batters slugged .593 with a .416 wOBA against the fastball and slugged .385 with a .335 wOBA against the knuckle curve, leaving him without an effective weapon in what has basically been a two-pitch arsenal. He did have some success with a sweeper, throwing it 5.1% of the time overall and inducing a .114 wOBA and 44.4% whiff rate, but the pitch — which he generally threw to righties — all but disappeared from his repertoire in August and September.

The Orioles ran out of time to fix Kimbrel, and they’ve had myriad other problems to confront as they look to October, whether they rally to erase their current five-game deficit in the AL East or hold onto the top Wild Card spot. The O’s have gone just 31-37 since July 1, and haven’t posted a winning record in any calendar month since then. From July 1 through Tuesday, their bullpen was lit for a 4.94 ERA, fourth worst in the majors, with four relievers in addition to Kimbrel throwing at least 10 innings with ERAs above 5.00: Bryan Baker (5.73 in 11 innings), Burch Smith (5.74 in 26 2/3 innings), Gregory Soto (16.59 in 13 2/3 innings), and the since-departed Cole Irvin (8.50 in 18 innings). Domínguez hasn’t been great (3.26 ERA, 5.14 FIP), but Yennier Cano, Keegan Akin, and Cionel Pérez have been pretty good. The right-handed Cano and the left-handed Pérez are the top setup men, generally available for the occasional save chance based on matchups or if Domínguez is unavailable, though Cano has apparently been dealing with forearm tightness and wasn’t available in Wednesday’s loss to the Giants. The rotation, which has dealt with the losses of Kyle Bradish, John Means, and Tyler Wells to UCL-related surgeries, and Grayson Rodriguez to a lat strain, delivered just a 4.41 ERA (111 ERA-) and a 4.15 FIP (102 FIP-) from the start of July through Tuesday.

Yet the pitching hasn’t been the problem during this month’s 6-9 slide. Instead it’s been an offense that’s managing just an 89 wRC+ and 3.47 runs per game while missing the injured Ryan Mountcastle, Ramón Urías, and Jordan Westburg. “The testing of our depth, and a lot of depth we’ve lost, is not something I anticipated in this degree in the second half on the position player side,” executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s turned out here that’s not necessarily been the crisis we were expecting in the second half, and we’ve been paying for it.”

As for Kimbrel, he’ll likely go unclaimed as he passes through waivers and then get released, leaving the Orioles on the hook for the remainder of his salary and his buyout. While I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him, we’ve probably seen the last of his big contracts.

As for whether this rough stretch will affect Kimbrel’s Hall of Fame chances, I hardly think the matter is as simple or the situation as dire as one writer suggested on Twitter while pointing out that Kimbrel’s 18-inning rough patch lowered his career ERA+ from 171 to 158. That current mark (off of a 2.59 ERA) is higher than seven of the eight Hall of Fame relievers: Hoyt Wilhelm (147), Trevor Hoffman (141), Bruce Sutter (136), Lee Smith (132), Goose Gossage (126), Rollie Fingers (120), and Dennis Eckersley (116, including his time as a starter). The rub is that each of those seven (and Mariano Rivera, the eighth) has pitched at least 232 1/3 innings more than Kimbrel (809 2/3), with some of those enshrinees having more than double his total. Even Billy Wagner, who’s on the doorstep of Cooperstown after getting 73.8% of the vote last year, threw 903 innings (with an elite 187 ERA+).

Kimbrel’s case — which like that of Wagner is driven by exceptional rate stats rather than volume — does have some things in his favor. His nine All-Star selections is tied with Gossage for second behind Rivera’s 13. His 38.8% strikeout rate is the highest of any pitcher with at least 800 innings, well ahead of the second-ranked Kenley Jansen (35.5%) and third-ranked Wagner (33.2%). Likewise, his .167 opponents batting average has supplanted Wagner (.184) for the lead at the 800-inning cutoff, with Jansen (.182) sneaking ahead of him as well. His postseason body of work isn’t particularly pretty (4.50 ERA with 10 saves in 30 innings), and his performance during the Red Sox’s 2018 championship run led to Alex Cora’s choosing Chris Sale to close out the World Series against the Dodgers, but his lone ring and modest postseason stats surpass Wagner’s postseason résumé.

Turning to my Reliever JAWS metric, here’s the top 25:

When I checked in last November while covering Wagner’s Hall of Fame case, Jansen ranked 14th, Kimbrel 15th, and Robertson 23rd. Jansen has had a solid season for the Red Sox (3.42 ERA, 3.04 FIP, 27 saves). He’s gained 1.7 points of R-JAWS, enough to vault him into the top 10; he’s also climbed from seventh in saves (420) to fourth (447). Though he’s notched just two saves to run his career total to a comparatively meager 177, Robertson has pitched well for Texas (3.22 ERA, 2.59 FIP), adding 1.6 points as well to jump seven places. Meanwhile, Kimbrel has lost 1.3 points due to his sub-zero bWAR (-1.2) and WPA (-2.3), costing him a couple spots in the rankings.

If Kimbrel were on the ballot today, I don’t think he’d be elected, but then Eckersley and Rivera have been the only relievers to gain entry on the first ballot; aside from Fingers (elected in his second year) and Hoffman (third year) it’s been a slog for most of the others. As with Wagner, who’s heading into his 10th and final year on the writers’ ballot, one facet of the candidacies of Kimbrel and Jansen that I expect will become more clear over time is the high attrition rate of their peers and the wave of stars that has followed them. Chapman, who has 330 saves, is almost certainly done as a full-time closer, and while Edwin Díaz and Josh Hader are more or less halfway to 400 saves (223 for the former, 196 for the latter), each has already endured lengthy bouts of ineffectiveness, hanging full-season ERAs above 5.00 — and they’re in just their age-30 seasons. It’s nearly impossible to remain a top-flight closer for, say, a decade, and a viable one for a decade and a half. It’s even harder, obviously, to do the same as a starter, and if you want to take umbrage over Wagner’s possible election while Mark Buehrle has yet to clear 11% percent of the vote, I get it, but that’s a beef for another day.

Again, I don’t think this will be the last we hear from Kimbrel, though the book on him is probably closed for this year, which could save all of us some agita as we watch him walk two guys and have to wriggle out of another jam. When he’s on, he still has the swing-and-miss stuff to nail down the ninth inning. Here’s hoping he finds it again.

We try to spread things out here at FanGraphs Dot Com, so it’s unusual for us to have articles about the same player on consecutive days. But yesterday, we ran a story by Davy Andrews on Victor Robles, who’s been one of the rare bright spots for the Seattle Mariners this season. Robles was released by the Washington Nationals in early June — which is itself a pretty dark omen — but in 68 games with Seattle, he’s performed at a superstar level, and… you know what, just go read Davy’s piece.

Something this unexpectedly positive is probably not going to last forever. Even if Robles has rediscovered himself after years of hitting like a pitcher, I’d take the under on his OBP staying in the .400s for the long term. Which is the inherent irony of a story like that: By the time a hot streak is worth writing about, it’s usually closer to the end than the beginning. But even by those standards, Davy got a really terrible break. On Tuesday night, Robles pulled off the baseball equivalent of flying his hang glider into a set of high-tension wires. He got lifted in the third inning due to a hand injury, but not before he made one of the more baffling baserunning gaffes I can remember. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s entirely possible, dear sir, that I simply misheard you given the permeating hubbub in this, our fair city’s modern-day Colosseum, but just a moment ago I was left with the odd impression that you might have pronounced me out. At the risk of contravening such an esteemed authority as yourself, I aver that I must have misheard you, owing to the fact it surely was clear to one and all that the only sensible course of action under a circumstance such as this one would be to adjudge the ball foul. The only fair call is a foul ball (if you’ll forgive the indulgence), but as I say, these ears love nothing so much as to play their little tricks on me from time to time, so if the issue at hand is a simple case of misapprehension, then simply say the word and off I’ll scurry. It would be my genuine pleasure to gather my lumber, as it were, and assume once more the ready position here in the right-hand rectangle, for I do adore a tussle. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Santander might be the most underrated hitter in the American League, at least from a national perspective. Overshadowed by the young talent on his own team, the 29-year-old Baltimore Orioles outfielder has 102 home runs and a 123 wRC+ over the past three seasons. This year’s numbers are especially impressive. A reliable cog in manager Brandon Hyde’s lineup — he’s played in 145 of the team’s 151 games — the switch-hitter from Margarita, Venezuela, has hit 41 homers while putting up a 129 wRC+ and a club-best 95 RBI this season.

The degree to which he remains under the radar is relative. Santander enjoyed his first All-Star selection this summer, and he is currently getting increased attention due to his forthcoming free agency. Accolades have nonetheless been in shorter-than-deserved supply, and that includes our own coverage here at FanGraphs. As evidenced by his player page, Santander’s name isn’t in the title of any piece we’ve published prior to the one you’re reading. As good as he’s been, that is something that needed to be corrected.

Santander sat down to talk hitting one day after smacking his 40th home run of the season last week at Fenway Park.

———

David Laurila: How did you first learn to hit, and what has been your development path from there?

Anthony Santander: “My dad introduced me to baseball when I was 4 years old, and when I was young I was a pure right-handed hitter. I didn’t start switch-hitting until I started working to become a pro when I was 15 or 16. That took a little bit, because it was new for me.”

Laurila: Why did you start switch-hitting? Read the rest of this entry »

I was writing from the heart. When the Nationals designated Victor Robles for assignment back in May, I wrote about what it was like to wait for him to make it to the big leagues; and then, once he arrived, to wait for him to turn into a star; and then, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to turn into a star, to wait for him to turn into a solid contributor; and then, as the likelihood of that outcome grew more and more faint, just to wait.

Fans reserve a special kind of affection for players like Robles. They don’t do it on purpose; it’s just how people tend to work. Superstars, with their reliable excellence, are easy to love. They’re big, warm Labrador retrievers with their tails waggling like Gary Sheffield’s bat as they wait impatiently for you to open the front door every night. They give you exactly what you want, and the love they inspire is beautiful and simple. When they move on to another organization, the loss you feel is deep, yes, but its edges are clearly defined because something pure has been taken from you.

When you’ve been watching and waiting and hoping for a player to figure things out for the better part of the decade, the feelings involved are a lot messier. Even if your love and your loss aren’t as profound, their edges are a lot more ragged. You’ve spent years pinballing between highs and lows, hopes and fears, anxiety and joy and despair, sometimes all at once. In other words, it’s a lot more like real life and real love. By the time a player like that moves on, you’ve invested way too much of your well-being in them to simply stop caring. It’s hard to imagine a single Nationals fan anywhere who wasn’t rooting for Robles to finally figure things out once the Mariners gave him the change of scenery he so clearly needed, who wasn’t truly happy to see him get off to a hot start in Seattle. But we all have our limits.

Back on August 6, over at Baseball Prospectus, Mikey Ajeto broke down all the mechanical adjustments that Robles has made since he joined Seattle. (Yes, the same Mikey Ajeto who writes exclusively about pitchers. Honestly, the biggest miracle that Robles has performed isn’t magically going supernova the moment that he turned the W on his hat upside down; it’s getting Ajeto to pay attention to a hitter for once.) He’s dropped his hands, ditched his leg kick, and added a scissor kick and a mini-squat before the pitch. Because Ajeto covered those more technical topics, I can continue to focus on the surface-level numbers. And you know what happened to the surface-level numbers after the publication of that article, which was entirely devoted to documenting Robles’s sudden improvement as the plate? They didn’t just keep getting better, they exploded.

I was wishing as hard as anyone for Robles to succeed with the Mariners, but I didn’t mean like this. I was thrilled to see him land a two-year extension worth a guaranteed $9.75 million, but he wasn’t supposed to instantly turn into the best player in baseball, like moving moving from a district named Washington to an actual state named Washington was all it took to break a powerful curse cast by some old Issaquah-based witch who fell into the Reflecting Pool during her mock trial team’s trip to DC in ninth grade and never got over the humiliation. And no, I’m not exaggerating. From June 5 to August 17, Robles turned his season around, running a 118 wRC+. Since August 18, Robles has literally been the best player in baseball: He’s put up a 230 wRC+ and accrued 1.8 WAR, more than whichever Cooperstown-bound MVP candidate you’d care to name. Sure, it’s fair to point out that he’s running a comically high .527 BABIP over that period, but his .386 xwOBA still ranks 19th among qualified players during that stretch. It’s starting to look like the simplest explanation for why Robles never lived up to his potential is that cherry blossoms are his personal kryptonite.

Somehow Robles left this ragged hole in the hearts of Nationals fans, but arrived in Seattle a gleaming superstar. The chaos has only reared its head lately. Robles is playing through a hip issue, and left his last two games due to different injuries: leg soreness on Sunday and a right hand contusion after getting hit by a pitch to lead off last night’s game, an 11-2 loss to the Yankees. Before Robles was removed against New York, his wildness on the basepaths finally caught up with the Mariners, with whom he’d previously gone 25-for-25 on stolen base attempts. He was caught stealing home in the bottom of the first inning, taking the bat out of Justin Turner’s hands with the bases loaded, two outs, and a 3-0 count.

I’m not saying all this is going to last, no matter how much Robles loves the Puget Sound. Since he arrived in Seattle, he’s run a 34.4% hard-hit rate and an 86.7-mph average exit velocity. The former is much better than Robles has put up in any previous season, but the latter isn’t and both are still well below league average. The real change is his barrel rate of 8.6%, which is miles above anything he’s accomplished in previous years. But keep in mind that we’re talking about just 13 barrels out of 151 balls in play, and neither his launch angle nor his GB/FB rate represents much of a departure from his career numbers. We’ve moved past any-batter-can-do-just-about-anything-over-60-plate-appearances territory, but we’re not all that far off either.

Robles has made some honest-to-goodness adjustments to his swing that have had an immediate, dramatic effect — frankly, the effect was so immediate and so dramatic that the Nationals should be looking closely at every single one of those adjustments and asking themselves what the Mariners saw that they didn’t — and we should probably adjust our priors going forward. But I haven’t seen anything (yet) to convince me that he’s going to keep running a BABIP above .500 from here on out. Further, Robles has been dealing with a hip issue in addition to the leg soreness (which is a separate ailment) and the hand injury that forced his early exit from the last two games. As someone who spent something like a quarter of my life rooting for Robles to finally put it all together, I sincerely hope his nagging injuries turn out to be no more than just that, and that when Robles finally does come down to earth, he finds a comfortable spot that’s situated well above sea level. But as long as he’s spending whole months with a wRC+ above 200, I reserve the right to be a little jealous.

Projecting the future is always difficult and full of inevitable misses, and I’m not just saying this because I have a vested interest in having you think I’m good at my job. We have a vague idea of a player’s broad future, enough so that nobody would trade Jackson Holliday for, say, Patrick Corbin. However, there’s always a great deal of uncertainty in prognosticating, and assuming for the sake of this opening paragraph that multiverse theory is correct, there will be planes of existence in which Corbin wins the NL Comeback Player of the Year award in 2025 when the Dodgers somehow fix his slider after a five-minute conversation. That’s not the way to bet, of course, and it’s likely that struggling rookies, especially ones with immaculate pre-2024 credentials — such as Holliday — will see this season as a bump in the road rather than a nasty car-destroying pothole.

Turns out, this was the season for longshot Rookie of the Year picks, especially in the American League. Of the top 17 AL rookies based on the preseason Rookie of the Year betting odds, only two players, Colton Cowser and Wilyer Abreu, ever had a plausible argument for being in the conversation once games started. Luis Gil and Austin Wells were nowhere to be found. For the table below, I’ve included 15 of the 17 players who were given AL Rookie of the Year awards odds by DraftKings before the season, sorted by their preseason ranking in descending order, along with their actual 2024 stats. I’m citing these rankings to get a general sense of who the favorites were back in March, not because I think they are more or less accurate than any other sportsbook odds.

(I’ve excluded the two other players, outfielder Everson Pereira and pitcher Ricky Tiedemann, because neither of them have reached the big leagues this season.)

Only six of these 17 players played even a half-season’s worth of games in the majors. It’s not just sportsbooks and bettors that got it wrong; by the time voting is official, we will have gone 0-for-25 here at FanGraphs.

I’ve done the same thing for the 19 NL players who were given preseason Rookie of the Year odds, with one table for hitters and another for pitchers. (All of the AL rookies who received preseason odds and actually played in 2024 are position players.) Things went significantly better for senior-circuit rookies.

So, what’s next for the rookies who are out of the awards picture? To get an idea of the change in their futures, I re-ran their projections for the next five years to compare to what their outlooks were during the preseason, using data as of Tuesday morning. I left out the players who have at least two WAR in 2024, as well as Matsui, who is a reliever and performed right in line with expectations, giving us a group of 21. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a National League Rookie of the Year voter this year, so I will not express any of my personal feelings regarding who should win that award.

In the projections, Evan Carter took the biggest hit. With a rather short, walk-heavy pedigree, ZiPS already saw him as riskier than the other top projected rookies, and then he had a rough early-season performance and a back injury that ruined his 2024. Taking all of this into account, ZiPS drops his 2025 line to .244/.338/.399; with a decent glove, that’s enough to be an average corner outfielder in this offensive environment, but well short of his preseason .259/.358/.412 projection. Carter’s teammate, Wyatt Langford, was a source of much projection disagreement entering the season, with Steamer and ZiPS quite excited, and THE BAT being rather meh about the situation. So far, meh has been closer, though he has hit much better (.258/.326/.424 in 91 games) since returning from an injury in late May.

Jasson Domínguez mainly makes this list for two reasons, more time on the injured list, causing ZiPS to take a foggier view of his health, and the fact that he didn’t have the major breakout yet, which is one of the things that ZiPS was banking on for him. His performance in Triple-A was good, but minor league offense is still crazy; ZiPS has his minor league translation at .263/.320/411, compared to his actual .309/.368/.480 line. That said, Domínguez should be starting every day for the Yankees over Alex Verdugo.

ZiPS is definitely bearish on Nolan Schanuel, and it’s increasingly confident that he won’t develop enough power, or enough secondary skills to compensate for his lack of power, to be a real plus at first base. The projections never bought into Hunter Goodman; he hit even worse than expected this year, and is not particularly young. I’m actually surprised DL Hall didn’t take an even bigger hit; back in a starting role, the walks came back with a vengeance, to the extent that returning to the bullpen for good might be the far better fit for him now.

Jackson Holliday’s numbers didn’t take a big hit for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, despite a really lousy debut in the majors, he played well enough in the minors — plus he’s so young and his résumé is so strong — that his small-sample struggles barely register. By reverse-o-fying Holliday’s major league woes into an untranslated minor league line and including it in his overall Triple-A production, ZiPS estimates that he would’ve had a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A this season, down from his actual mark of 142. A 20-year-old shortstop with a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A would still top everybody’s prospect list.

Several of these players simply didn’t get enough playing time to make a real impression. Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad never really had significant chances to grab starting roles with the Orioles this year, and James Wood and Dylan Crews were both midseason call-ups. Even so, the two Nationals rookies received some of the biggest bumps in their new projections. For Crews, the improvement was massive, largely because ZiPS has very little to go on and didn’t translate his college numbers as positively as Wyatt Langford’s, meaning that with a good first impression, Crews had a lot of room to grow in the eyes of ZiPS. Wood added nearly 200 points of OPS at Triple-A from his previous season — a combined .874 mark between High- and Double-A — at the time of his call-up; it was such a drastic improvement that if I had re-done the ZiPS Top 100 prospect list then, he would have come out on top.

None of these 21 players is in contention for the Rookie of the Year awards that will be announced in a few months. But for most of them, the lack of hardware in 2024 doesn’t represent a setback that changes their future outlooks too much.

The Twins still have a hold on the third AL Wild Card spot — for the moment. After blowing a 3-0 lead against the Guardians in Monday’s series opener in Cleveland, they’ve lost 18 of their past 27 games. They haven’t won a series against a team with a winning percentage of .500 or better in over a month, and now lead the surging Tigers by just a game and a half in the Wild Card standings. This past weekend, Minnesota activated both Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa from the injured list following lengthy absences, but the two stars by all accounts are playing at less than 100 percent, and sadly for manager Rocco Baldelli, they aren’t likely to provide innings out of the bullpen when they’re not in the lineup.

As of August 17, the Twins were 70-53, a season-high 17 games above .500. At the time, they were running second in the AL Central, two games behind the Guardians, and second in the Wild Card race, a game and a half behind the Orioles but two games ahead of the Royals, from whom they’d just taken two out of three (that aforementioned last series victory against a winning team). Since then, the Twins have gone just 9-18 (.333), outdoing only the White Sox (5-21, .192) and Angels (7-19, .269) among all major league teams; even the worst NL team in that span, the Marlins, has gone 10-17 (.370). The slump has pretty much closed the door on Minnesota’s chances of claiming the AL Central, and meanwhile, the Tigers have gone 17-9, tied for the majors’ best record in that span, to poke their noses into the Wild Card picture.

During this slide, the Twins have lost series to the Padres, Cardinals, Braves, Royals, and Reds, splitting one with the Rays, and beating only the Blue Jays and Angels — not exactly a performance befitting a playoff-bound team. In that span, the offense has scored just 3.81 runs per game while the pitching staff has allowed 5.22 per game. It’s not what you want. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into the year, everyone thought this would be the season that Shohei Ohtani, rehabbing from elbow surgery and DHing only, stepped aside and yielded MVP to someone else before resuming his place as the de facto favorite for the award in 2025. Instead, Ohtani decided to make a run at the first ever 50-homer, 50-steal season. The other primary competitor for NL MVP is Francisco Lindor, who isn’t chasing any statistical milestones and plays for a team whose most interesting narratives involve an amorphous fast food mascot, the musical endeavors of a part-time utility infielder, and the failure to extend Pete Alonso. And yet, Lindor’s position atop the NL WAR leaderboard demands consideration.

The marginal difference between Lindor and Ohtani’s WAR totals (7.4 and 7.0, respectively, at the time of this writing) creates a virtual tie to be broken based on the personal convictions of voters and anyone else with an opinion and an internet connection. For most, the choice between the two distills down to whether Ohtani’s 50/50 chase overrides his DH-only status. I’m not here to disparage Ohtani for not playing defense, but if you find that disqualifying for MVP recognition, I feel that. Then again, WAR includes a positional adjustment that does ding Ohtani with a significant deduction for not taking the field, and he’s still been keeping pace with Lindor on the value front anyway, so there’s not much more analysis to do there.

Instead, I want to explore how Ohtani’s one-dimensional role interacts with the value of a roster spot and the limitations that it places on how Los Angeles constructs and deploys the rest of its roster. In a two-way Ohtani season, he brings tremendous value to an individual roster spot as a frontline starter and an elite hitter who takes 600 or so plate appearances. But this year he contributes only as an offensive player. Read the rest of this entry »