With one swing of his bat on a hanging slider from Aroldis Chapman, José Altuve untied Game 6 of the ALCS and sent the Astros to their second World Series in three years. In doing so, he joined some select company, becoming the fifth player in 50 years worth of League Championship Series to hit a pennant-winning walk-off home run, after current Yankees manager Aaron Boone (2003 against the Red Sox) as well as the Yankees’ Chris Chambliss (1976 against the Royals), the Tigers’ Magglio Ordonez (2006 against the A’s), and the Giants’ Travis Ishikawa (2014 against the Cardinals).

Altuve’s shot had an air of inevitability about it. While he has been surpassed by Alex Bregman as the team’s top position player — the two-year WAR totals for the pair are 16.1 for Bregman, 8.4 for Altuve — even at just 29 years old, he’s become something an elder statesman as well as a leader. He’s the longest-tenured Astro, having debuted in 2011, when the team was still in the National League and before Jeff Luhnow was general manager. His first three seasons featured a combined total of 324 losses, and while he was spared the first half of 2011 (he debuted on July 20), that’s a lot of losing for one person to endure, regardless of how one feels about the team’s choice of rebuilding strategies. Now he’s been part of teams that have won a combined total of 311 games over the past three years. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Scott is currently one of four people running Boston’s baseball operations department. Along with Raquel Ferreira, Brian O’Halloran, and Eddie Romero Jr, the 16-year member of the team’s front office is keeping a chair warm while the search for Dave Dombrowski’s replacement continues. His core responsibilities remain largely the same. Scott’s title is Senior Vice President/Assistant General Manager, and per the Red Sox media guide, he “oversees the club’s Baseball Analytics and Baseball Systems departments.”

What is the current state of Boston’s analytics department, and how much has it changed since the University of Vermont graduate (B.S. in Mathematics) joined the organization in 2004? I addressed those questions with Scott following the completion of the Red Sox season.

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David Laurila: How much has the Red Sox analytics department grown over the years?

Zack Scott: “There’s been a lot of growth, not just with us, but in the industry. As you know, there’s been an explosion of data. Throwing out round-number estimates, when I started there were around 10,000 data points, and now it’s more like 10 billion data points. And a lot of that has been the last five years. So the need to grow is apparent; there’s only so much you can do with a short staff.”

Laurila: How many people are currently in the department?

Scott: “We added five new employees last offseason. Overall, our R&D team is 15 people. It’s around half analysts, half software developers/technology-implementation.”

Laurila: There’s a perception that the Red Sox went from one of the top analytics teams in baseball to one that is below the top tier. Is that accurate? Read the rest of this entry »

After what was otherwise a fairly quiet affair punctuated by the occasional home run, the Houston Astros won Game 6 of the American League Championship Series 6-4 on a walkoff home run from José Altuve. Houston takes the series four games to two, and avoids a high-stakes Game 7 that would have left Gerrit Cole unavailable in the World Series until the third game.

The evening got off to an inauspicious start for the Yankees as Houston’s first entrant in the bullpen battle, Brad Peacock, quickly dispatched DJ LeMahieu, Aaron Judge, and Gleyber Torres with seven pitches. Chad Green opened for New York and didn’t perform as well in his half of the inning as Peacock did in his. Green was perhaps fortunate to escape a rather pedestrian slider to Altuve with only a double, but he was less lucky with a high, very inside fastball to Yuli Gurriel, which the first baseman turned on for a home run to give the Astros an early 3-0 lead. That high, inside fastball isn’t usually that dangerous for a pitcher; there were only 13 home runs hit this year by right-handed hitters swinging at a four-seamer in Statcast’s inside and high-inside “chase” zones. Coincidentally enough, Gurriel had one of those home runs, comfortably turning on a sorta-fastball from Trevor Williams. This might have been one of the highest-leverage of those since Kit Keller’s.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the lowdown on Tyler Rogers: A 6-foot-5 right-hander from Littleton, Colorado, he’s the twin brother of a left-hander closer, he made his MLB debut this past August, and he’s a submariner. Moreover, he kills a lot of worms. The 1.02 ERA that Rogers put up in 17 games out of the San Francisco Giants bullpen was augmented with a 69.4% ground ball rate.

Unlike his traditional-arm-slot sibling, he’s not a power pitcher. Taylor Rogers — fittingly, a Minnesota Twin — features a 95-mph fastball and an 83-mph slider. Tyler features an 82-mph sinker and a 73-mph slider. The latter pitch, which the atypical hurler throws roughly a third of the time, is atypical in itself.

“I call it a slider, but it’s almost a curveball,” Rogers said in September. “I kind of curl it like people do when they throw a curveball overhand. It’s the same thing, I’m just bent over doing it. So yeah, basically it’s just a normal curveball grip that I throw from underneath.”

Rogers began dropping down his freshman year of junior college. He did so at the suggestion of a coach, and from there progressively got lower and lower. The transformation to an actual submarine-style delivery came after the Giants took him in the 10th round of the 2013 draft. Irony being what it is, the genesis of the more-extreme verticality was horizontal in nature. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — The Yankees may not win this year’s American League Championship Series. They may not become the 14th team to rally from a three-games-to-one deficit in a best-of seven, or the eighth to do so by finishing the job on the road — particularly against an Astros team with the majors’ best record and an historically powerful offense. But in the wake of a demoralizing Game 4 loss full of missed opportunities, sloppy defense, and the sudden end of CC Sabathia’s career, they met manager Aaron Boone’s immediate goal of sending the series back to Minute Maid Park with a 4-1 victory that featured strong work by starter James Paxton and a four-run first inning against Justin Verlander, featuring a pair of homers by DJ LeMahieu and Aaron Hicks.

“He’s got to go out and pitch well and set the tone for us,” Boone said of Paxton prior to the game, “because we’ve got to get on that plane and go back to Houston.”

The tone early on Friday evening was all too reminiscent of Thursday’s late-inning sloppiness. Second baseman Gleyber Torres, who made errors in each of the final two innings of Game 4, mishandled leadoff hitter George Springer‘s grounder, which had slipped under Paxton’s glove, though the ball was scored a single. Springer then took second on a passed ball by Gary Sánchez, advanced to third on Jose Altuve’s grounder, and scored on a wild pitch. It was an all-too-familiar story for Paxton, whose 29 first-inning runs allowed in 29 starts tied for the major league lead.

That was all the Astros would get from him, however. Both Alex Bregman and Yuli Gurriel scorched line drives to the outfield —  98.4 mph for the former to left, with Brett Gardner chasing it down, and 96.8 for the latter to center, but right at Hicks — and so Paxton escaped by allowing just one run. He’d failed to get ahead of any of the five batters he faced, gotten just one swinging strike on a total of 23 pitches, and his defense looked anything but sharp. With the Yankees desperately needing length given their plans for an all-bullpen Game 6, it was not an encouraging beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

As Justin Verlander takes the mound tonight, he’ll do so with 240.1 innings pitched this season between regular season and playoffs. In the last three seasons, Verlander’s 2019 campaign is just the second to go at least 240 innings; his 242.2 inning in 2017 is the other. Since 2011, there have been 26 seasons during which pitchers have thrown at least 240 innings. Verlander accounts for five of them. If he makes a decent start tonight and Houston advances to the World Series, he’ll likely be the first pitcher to go over 250 innings in a season since 2014, when James Shields, Madison Bumgarner, and David Price all eclipsed that mark. Verlander’s quality deservedly receives the bulk of the attention when analyzing the ace, but the quantity deserves accolades as well.

If we look a single player’s career and then compare his totals to his peers only during those seasons when he was active, it is bound to be misleading, as it cuts off the careers of others at the beginning and end where fuller comparisons are better made. For example, Justin Verlander’s 72 WAR is first among all pitchers since 2006 when he pitched his first full season. That Verlander was the best pitcher in baseball over that time is a defensible argument, but it should be noted that Clayton Kershaw is just seven wins behind Verlander and five years younger. If we looked at the leaders from 2006-2026, Verlander might not be first. Similarly, if we go back to 1996, we see Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez jump ahead of Verlander. If we go back to 1986, Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux are more than 40 wins ahead of him, with Mike Mussina, Curt Schilling, John Smoltz, and Kevin Brown also in possession of a higher WAR. This isn’t to take away anything from Verlander — the other pitchers discussed are all great. But it is a reminder that selectively choosing seasons can skew the results. Read the rest of this entry »

Yordan Alvarez is the favorite to win the AL Rookie of the Year Award. He completely demolished opposing pitching this year, first in Triple-A (170 wRC+), then in the majors (178 wRC+) after being called up in early June. Between the two levels, he launched 50 home runs while showing elite plate discipline. But this October, he’s been a non-factor for the Astros.

He showed some life against the Rays, going 6-for-19 with three doubles in that five game series. But against the Yankees, he’s been completely shut down. He collected his first hit of the Championship Series last night, a broken bat single off Chad Green. He’s reached base just three other times against Yankees pitching, drawing two walks and reaching on an error. Overall, he’s slashing just .206/.270/.294 in nine postseason games.

What’s even more concerning is his elevated strikeout rate. He struck out just over a quarter of the time he came to the plate during the regular season. That’s jumped up to 37.8% in the postseason. During the regular season, Alvarez never had a nine-game stretch as poor as this one.

There was a nine-game stretch ending on September 6 during which he posted a strikeout rate of 36.6%. But he also launched three home runs over that span, something he hasn’t been able to do during the postseason. Obviously small sample caveats apply here, but it appears as though both the Rays and the Yankees have found similar approaches to neutralizing the 22-year-old rookie. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees’ 8-3 loss in Game 4 of the ALCS did not eliminate them, but between their missed opportunities early (stranding five runners in scoring position in the first five innings) and their sloppiness late (four errors over the final four innings), the game had an air of finality about it. Nowhere was that more true than in the case of CC Sabathia, who departed due to a shoulder injury in what will stand as the final appearance of a 19-year major league career that may well be capstoned by a plaque in Cooperstown.

On Friday morning, the Yankees announced that Sabathia had experienced a subluxation of his shoulder joint and replaced him on the roster with righty Ben Heller. The move means that he would not be allowed to be reactivated for the World Series, almost certainly a moot point given the condition of his shoulder, to say nothing of the Yankees’ precarious position. Sabathia, who appeared to be in good spirits during a pregame press conference on Friday despite pain that he described as “pretty intense,” said that he would “maybe get an MRI after we get back from Houston” and that he doesn’t know yet whether he will need surgery.

Dropped into a difficult situation in his second relief appearance of the series and just the fourth of his career — runners on second and third with no outs in the top of the eighth, with the Yankees already down 6-3 — Sabathia was victimized by the first of Gleyber Torres‘ two errors when Yordan Alvarez’s chopper deflected off the second baseman’s right hand as he positioned himself to throw home; Alex Bregman scored on the play, and Alvarez was safe at first. After retiring Carlos Correa on a soft liner to right field, one in which Aaron Judge nearly doubled Yuli Gurriel off second base, Sabathia hit Robinson Chirinos on the left elbow with a pitch, loading the bases. He got Aledmys Diaz to pop up to shallow right, keeping Gurriel from scoring, but after missing inside on a 1-1 cutter to George Springer, Sabathia grimaced, and both manager Aaron Boone and head athletic trainer Steve Donohue came to the mound.

According to Sabathia, his shoulder popped during his last pitch to Diaz: “I just felt like when I released the ball, my shoulder kind of went with it.” In other words, he pitched through a partial separation when he faced Springer, throwing a first-pitch cutter that reached 91.2 mph.

After throwing one warm-up pitch to check if he could continue, Sabathia told Boone and Donohue, “I’m done,” shook his head, and then departed to a heartfelt ovation from the Yankee Stadium crowd as well as both dugouts. The FS1 broadcast showed both Springer and Gerrit Cole paying their respects, then a slump-shouldered Sabathia covering his face with his glove, understandably overcome with emotion but — and maybe this is just a scribe projecting — ever so slightly tipping his cap to the crowd even as he did. It wasn’t easy to watch, and you’re by no means obligated to, but here’s the whole scene: Read the rest of this entry »

Last offseason, the Yankees gave Adam Ottavino a three-year, $27 million contract, a move that added yet another high octane arm to their already-loaded bullpen. And unlike some reliever contracts, it has worked out quite well thus far.

Ottavino had a solid first year in New York. His 1.90 ERA was a career-best, as was his 2.5 RA9-WAR. His 3.44 FIP (74 FIP-) and 4.32 xFIP (94 xFIP-) suggested that he was probably quite a bit worse than his ERA indicated, due to a year-over-year strikeout rate that fell from 36% to 31% and a walk rate that ballooned from 12% to 14%. So, yes, Ottavino wasn’t nearly as dominant in 2019 as he was the year before, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t useful in the Big Apple. His 1.3 WAR ranked 22nd among all relievers and second on the team.

We could dig deeper into Ottavino’s 2019 campaign if we so desired, but that’s not why he’s relevant right now. The 66 and third innings he pitched during the regular season were important, but they are not nearly as meaningful as the two and one-third innings he’s pitched so far this postseason. Ottavino has faced just 18 hitters this October, but the Yankees have already been ridiculed for “making a big mistake” in sticking with him.

Perhaps this is a fair argument; Ottavino’s October results certainly reflect the rationale behind the criticism. Of the 18 batters he has faced, seven of them have recorded hits, three more have walked, and just seven have made outs. The slash line against Ottavino is ugly: .467/.556/.800.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros beat the Yankees 8-3 last night, moving within a win of their second World Series berth in three years, but the night didn’t have to turn out that way. The victory was comprehensive — Houston out-homered the Yankees, had more non-homer hits, struck out less than half as often, and committed three fewer errors. Five runs is an odd lead, but it’s also the first truly safe lead in baseball. The Astros could have spotted the Yankees a grand slam before the game and still come out ahead.

But baseball doesn’t really work that way. If the Yankees had started the game ahead 4-0, things would have gone differently. Batters wouldn’t have gotten the same pitches, different Yankees relievers would have thrown, A.J. Hinch would have been forced to manage differently; the things that happened last night weren’t deterministic, destined to play out in the same order regardless of circumstance.

So with that in mind, let’s look at a few places where the Yankees could have changed history. They might have lost anyway, and they might have won — but they had their chances to do something, and simply didn’t make the most of them.

Gary Sánchez Bats in the First
Gary Sánchez bats seventh for the Yankees, so when he appears in the first inning, something has gone very right. Not only that, but he came up with the bases loaded; Zack Greinke looked shaky, with three walks on the night already, and Sánchez had a chance to deliver a decisive blow early. Read the rest of this entry »