NEW YORK — They’ve won back to back National League pennants and clinched their seventh straight NL West title on September 10. They have a four-game lead over the Braves for the senior circuit’s best record. And yet, even as they close in on 100 wins and the top NL seed for the playoffs, the 2019 Dodgers are still a squad very much in flux. Lineup, rotation, bullpen — everywhere, key roles up for grabs, as manager Dave Roberts and his staff spend the remainder of September hoping to find a route through October that will end differently than the last two. 

This past weekend’s trip to Citi Field for a three-game series against the Mets, who had won four straight and nine out of their last 13, put all of that on display. Friday night’s 9-2 rout was keyed by a fourth-inning, three-run homer off Noah Syndergaard by rookie Gavin Lux, who despite having just 12 major league games under his belt at this writing is amid a successful audition for the starting second base job. Saturday’s lineup featured an outfield of familiar faces — A.J. Pollock, Cody Bellinger, and Joc Pederson — in a configuration that had been used on just two other occasions in the previous 149 games.

Saturday evening’s pitching matchup, though billed as as one between Cy Young hopefuls Jacob deGrom and Hyun-Jin Ryu, was in many ways a crucial test for the latter, who despite leading all major league starters in ERA had suddenly fallen into a four-start funk. He passed his test with flying colors, delivering seven shutout innings, but the bullpen that followed him did not, surrendering three eighth-inning runs that led to defeat. Sunday brought some familiar moving parts back into the mix, and the bullpen — particularly Kenley Jansen — fared much better in the team’s come-from-behind 3-2 victory.

To be clear, some of this was and will continue to be the usual September shufflings of a playoff-bound team trying to cover for injuries and rest some veterans before the postseason. With Justin Turner nursing a mild left ankle sprain, rookie Matt Beaty started on Friday and Saturday at third base, a position he hadn’t played at the major league level before September, though for as useful as he’s been off the bench, he’s no threat to unseat a healthy Turner. Ryu was starting on nine days of rest, while Walker Buehler, who started on Sunday, was pulled after 71 pitches (his fewest since his season debut on March 31) and five innings, pushing his season total to 171.1, 18 more than last year’s combined total in the minors and majors.

Of course, it helps to have expanded September rosters for such an endeavor, and with the Dodgers, Lux is no window dressing. By the time the team’s 2016 first-round pick made his major league debut on September 2, the Dodgers had already started six other players at second base, including July 31 acquisition Jedd Gyorko, who had debuted there on September 1. Led by Enrique Hernández (84 games, 63 starts) and Max Muncy (67 games, 59 starts) and limited somewhat by injuries to both, as well as to Chris Taylor (20 games, 13 starts), the group — including Lux — hasn’t fared badly, ranking ninth among all 30 teams in both WAR (2.9, led by Muncy’s 1.7 in that capacity) and wRC+ (104). But Lux’s torrid minor league season (.347/.421/.607 with 26 homers), his draft pedigree, and his prospect status (number nine on The Board, up from number 23 in February) earned him this shot, and Roberts has liked what he’s seen. “I see composure,” said the manager of the 21-old rookie prior to Saturday’s game. “There’s a confidence. It’s a really good skill set. I see him starting tomorrow against [Zack] Wheeler. And if he continues to play well, the at-bats will be there.” Read the rest of this entry »

It was never going to be a fun year to be a Detroit Tigers fan. The hundred losses could tell you that, or the fact that the team’s lone All-Star was reliever Shane Greene, who now plays for the Braves. The joy in Tigers fandom was concentrated in the minors this year; in top prospect Casey Mize’s polish, in Matt Manning’s production, in Isaac Paredes showing he was ready for Double-A.

But the major league team wasn’t without its bright spots. Greene performed well enough to net two interesting prospects in a trade, Niko Goodrum scratched out a 2-WAR season, and Matthew Boyd had a first half so nice that the Tigers asked for the world in trade (they didn’t get it). In addition to those major leaguers taking a step forward, there’s one other Tigers performance to get excited about: Spencer Turnbull has quietly been an above-average pitcher in his rookie season.

There were signs that Turnbull could hack it in the major leagues before this year, but nothing decisive. He used his sinker/slider starter kit well in Double-A in 2018, racking up a 25% strikeout rate and 3.16 FIP over 100 innings of work. That sounds excellent, but the hidden downside of performing well in Double-A is that you’re pitching in Double-A rather than the big leagues. Turnbull was 25 then, older than the average age for the league and way past when most top prospects move on.

Still, good pitching is good pitching, and the Tigers were desperate for whatever they could get. After a single dominant outing in Triple-A, where he struck out 7 of the 13 batters he faced, Turnbull was summoned back to the major leagues, where he had had a brief previous cameo as a September call-up. Read the rest of this entry »

In the final moments of the 2019 trade deadline, the Astros shocked the baseball world with their trade for Zack Greinke. As Dan Szymborski put it at the time, “In a league in which money and prospects are meekly handed out when a team has an opportunity to strike a critical blow, Houston keeps demonstrating why they’re one of the best, most focused organizations in baseball today.”

Since the trade, Greinke has been good. He’s pitched 49.1 innings for Houston thus far, posting a solid 3.10 ERA, 3.50 FIP, and 1.2 WAR. His strikeout numbers have dipped (24.0% to 19.5%) since moving from the Diamondbacks to the Astros, but even with this dropoff in performance, it’s hard to say that he hasn’t been worth the cost so far. With that said, of course, the Astros didn’t acquire Greinke to help them get to the playoffs; they acquired him to get through the playoffs. The evaluation of that trade — along with many others made at the deadline — is far from complete.

While Greinke has been solid since the trade, he hasn’t been the best pitcher of those moved in July. That distinction belongs to Kolby Allard, even if it is by a razor-thin margin:

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Two years ago, 22-year-old Yoán Moncada, the White Sox’s much-heralded return for Chris Sale, put up a 105 wRC+ and 1.1 WAR in his debut season in Chicago. Eloy Jiménez, this year’s 22-year-old Southside rookie, has about a month left on the first year of his six year, $43 million contract. But his first year has looked familiar: His .259/.309/.489 line with 27 home runs translates to a 108 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR. Recurring hip injuries have limited his production, but it’s still been a mostly successful debut. A key part of Chicago’s future, Jiménez has played particularly well over the last month, and he just captured the AL Player of the Week award.

Long-time Jiménez watchers will recall that, as a prospect, he combined tremendous natural strength with unusually high contact rates, particularly during his years in the Cubs system. This year, he’s hit for plenty of power but his contact rate is just 70%, which is in the league’s 10th percentile among players with more than 450 plate appearances. It’s certainly possible to succeed with a low contact rate — Bryce Harper and Nelson Cruz each make less contact and have a wRC+ above 120 — but you either to need to walk a lot or hit for big power to pull it off; Harper walks 15% of the time, while Cruz has an ISO of .323. Jiménez, meanwhile has a .231 ISO and a 6.1% walk rate. He’s still a good hitter, if not yet a great one.

Fortunately, with his size and natural pop, he doesn’t have to sell out for power. Instead, he can focus on keeping his hands behind the ball and try to hit line drives. This more compact approach is an adjustment from his time in the Cubs’ minor-league system, where he used to hold his hands at helmet height and then need to torque his body violently around his upper half in order to reach pitches low away; typically, he’d either miss entirely or foul the ball off. Since coming to the South Side, Jiménez says he’s lowered his hands in an effort to make better contact on inside fastballs, and to get to pitches down and away from lefties. Read the rest of this entry »

The transition from the regular season to the playoffs inevitably leaves us with a stripped-down cast of the game’s best players, but this is getting ridiculous. After a week in which NL MVP candidate Christian Yelich was lost for the year with a fractured kneecap, Javier Báez was ruled out for the remainder of the regular season due to a fractured left thumb, and both Byron Buxton and Shohei Ohtani elected to undergo season-ending surgeries, we’ve now lost Mike Trout as well. The best baseball player on planet Earth will undergo surgery on his right foot later this week, according to the Angels, bringing to a premature end yet another remarkable season.

Trout had not played since making a pinch-hitting appearance on September 7, a day after he took an early exit from a game due to what was termed “right toe discomfort.” Two days later, he underwent a cryoablation procedure (the insertion of hollow needles filled with cooled, thermally conductive fluids) to alleviate a Morton’s neuroma, an inflamed nerve located between the bones at the ball of the foot. The condition is more common among women than men because of the way high heels put pressure on the toes or the ball of the foot, but any kind of repetitive, high-impact activity can cause it, particularly when tight shoes are involved.

Trout had been dealing with pain in the foot for nearly a month, according to the Los Angeles Times’ Maria Torres. Said the 28-year-old center fielder after the cryoablation, “Once it flares up, it doesn’t go away. It calms down at night and when you do baseball activity, it flares up again… This procedure today, they say it helps it.”

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Two weeks ago, Jay Jaffe ranked Luis Castillo fifth on his list of this season’s most improved pitchers, noting in the process Castillo’s ability to carry high strikeout rates (28.9%; eighth among NL starters) and groundball rates (55.3%; second) at the same time, thereby avoiding to some degree the harshest consequences of the major leagues’ home run boom. In this, Castillo’s third major league season, the 26-year-old Dominican has posted career-best marks in innings pitched (178 2/3), FIP (3.63), HR/9 (1.01) and the aforementioned strikeout rate. Last week, I caught up with him about the pitch he thinks has been key to his success: the changeup.

When Castillo made his debut for Cincinnati back in 2017, he threw his changeup 87-88 mph with modest break down and away to lefties and middle-in to righties. Eric Longenhagen, in ranking Castillo 10th in the Reds’ system coming into the 2017 season, rated the pitch a “below average” 40/45 but noted that it could improve with repetition, given Castillo’s arm speed and underlying talent. Each year since then has seen Castillo use the pitch more often than the season before:

Apparently the repetition has helped. In its present form, Castillo’s changeup — now with an inch more bite on each axis, thanks to mechanical changes between 2017 and 2018, while still sitting at 87-88 mph — ranks behind only Brad Keller’s as the most valuable pitch of its kind in the game (as measured by linear weights). And it’s gone a long way towards correcting one of Castillo’s obvious weaknesses coming into the season: an inability to put away left-handed hitters with anything near the same effectiveness he’s always displayed when dispatching righties (lefties put up a .373 wOBA against him last year, compared to a .256 from righties). Read the rest of this entry »

In the midst of what will go down as a disappointing season for the Phillies, an interesting detail about the front office’s thinking appeared. This morsel snuck into a Ken Rosenthal article: “…once the Phillies began to slump, their front office’s thinking was, ‘We don’t want to go all-out for the chance to play in the wild-card game and then face the Dodgers in the Division Series.’”

There are separate discussions to be had about whether that’s a defeatist attitude, or even whether the Phillies could have done more at the deadline. That’s for someone else to decide, though. What this statement got me, among others, wondering was: wait, would you actually rather play the Dodgers in a seven-game series than a five-game one? No one would argue that the Phillies are as good as the Dodgers — they’d clearly be underdogs no matter what. But does the extra chance of avoiding the juggernaut make up for the fact that you’re more likely to win in a shorter series?

To investigate this problem, I worked out a simplistic playoff win probability model. For each team, I took their projected rest-of-season runs scored. Then I projected a playoff rotation and how many innings each pitcher would pitch per game. Using those starters’ projected runs allowed per inning and adding in the projected runs allowed per inning by the bullpen (an admittedly inexact science that involves stripping out starters’ projections from the team’s total runs allowed projections), I was able to produce a runs allowed forecast for each starter on each team. Let’s take a look at the Phillies, for example:

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Hitting a baseball comes naturally to Riley Greene. That’s not to say the fifth-overall pick in this year’s draft doesn’t work on his craft — he does— but at the same time he likes to keep any tinkering to a minimum. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Prior to the Detroit Tigers’ calling his name on June 3, Greene had been labeled “the best pure hitter in the prep class” by Baseball America.

He hit the road running in pro ball. Greene scorched the Gulf Coast League to the tune of a 1.039 OPS in nine games, quickly earning a promotion to short-season Connecticut. While not nearly as prolific against New York-Penn League pitching — a .766 OPS in 24 games — he did show enough to get moved up to low-A West Michigan in early August. Playing against much-older competition in the Midwest League, Greene slashed .219/.278/.344 in 118 plate appearances.

When I talked to the 18-year-old Oviedo, Florida native in mid-August, he made it clear that his swing is already well-established.

“My dad has been doing baseball and softball lessons for 24 or 25 years, and he taught me to hit,” said Greene. “Growing up, most of my coaches never touched my swing. It was just my dad. He’s a simple A-to-B guy, not much movement, and that’s how I try to be.”

Greene told me his front foot is his timing mechanism, and that his setup at the plate has remained essentially the same. He “might be an inch taller with his body,” but that’s a matter of feel and comfort, not because of a calculated adjustment. He’ll maybe spread out at times, but “only by a centimeter or two.” Read the rest of this entry »

There hasn’t been much to celebrate this year in Miami, but the Marlins starting rotation has been a source of a few positive developments. Caleb Smith and Pablo López started off the season strong but faded in the second half. Zac Gallen and Jordan Yamamoto both made their major league debuts, and while Gallen was shipped out at the trade deadline, Yamamoto has shown some promise as a 23-year-old rookie. But the most exciting progress has come from Sandy Alcantara.

On the surface, Alcantara’s stat line doesn’t look that impressive. His park and league adjusted FIP sits just seven percent above league average but that’s more due to some luck in keeping the ball in the ballpark. His 18% strikeout rate is one of the worst in the majors among qualified starters despite a fastball that sits in the mid-90s. The biggest question mark attached to him as a prospect was his command of his repertoire. In his 42 major league innings prior to this year, he ran a walk rate above 15%. He’s managed to drop that down to 10.7% this year, but that’s still one of the worst walk rates in the majors.

The fourth ranked prospect in the Marlins organization and 127th overall at the start of the season, there were plenty of doubts that Alcantara could stick in a major league rotation as he developed. He’s likely going to make 30 starts this year, which has to be seen as a success for the Marlins player development group, shoddy peripherals be damned. But since the start of August, Alcantara has shown flashes of brilliance, giving Marlins fans another starting pitcher to dream on for next season.

In his seven starts since the end of July, Alcantara has posted a park and league adjusted FIP 19% better than league average. More importantly, his strikeout rate has jumped up to 22.3%, a nearly six point improvement from where it sat after the first four months of the season. The highlight of this stretch came in his last start at home against the Royals. He threw a complete game, holding Kansas City scoreless while allowing just six base runners and striking out eight. That was actually the second complete game shutout he’s thrown this year, his first coming back in May against the Mets. Read the rest of this entry »

Dallas Keuchel wasn’t supposed to still be on the market when the Winter Meetings commenced in December. He certainly wasn’t supposed to still be there as the calendar turned to 2019, and it was completely unthinkable that he would still be available at the start of Spring Training. It is only through the dark alchemy of a ghoulish lack of shame and self-awareness on the part of team owners mixing with Keuchel’s demands that he was still available after the conclusion of the Amateur Player Draft, but there he was, still waiting for a phone call from his agent, telling him a professional baseball franchise had made him a reasonable contract offer. That call finally came on June 7, when the Atlanta Braves signed Keuchel to a one-year, $13-million deal, which by that point was more of a three-and-a-half-month deal. At the very start of the free agency period, Kiley McDaniel predicted Keuchel would receive four years and $84 million on the open market. Instead, he couldn’t even secure a multi-year commitment.

Keuchel wasn’t the only player who endured this kind of unexpected wait. Former Red Sox closer Craig Kimbrel signed just one day before Keuchel, inking a three-year deal with the Chicago Cubs. Kimbrel’s season has been a disaster so far, with the 31-year-old holding a 5.68 ERA and 6.63 FIP in 19 innings. Keuchel, on the other hand, hardly missed a beat. In 16 starts after getting a late start in Atlanta, Keuchel owns an ERA of 3.35, with a FIP of 4.39 and an xFIP of 3.87. He leads the majors with a 61.5% groundball rate (min. 90 IP), with second-place Dakota Hudson well behind him at 57.2%. Of those 16 starts, 13 have ended with Keuchel surrendering three earned runs or fewer. He was pretty reliable in his first few games of the season, but after a brief blow-up in Miami of all places, he’s been totally lights-out.

In a 3.2-inning appearance against the Marlins on August 8, Keuchel allowed eight runs on 10 hits, including three homers. His ERA jumped from 3.86 to 4.83 that evening, and at the time, it seemed like it might be a sign of real danger for the 31-year-old southpaw and the rest of the Braves’ pitching staff. While his ERA had been fairly solid coming into that appearance, his 4.74 FIP was still a distressing reminder of the kind of pitcher Keuchel was, and the risk he poses. He wasn’t missing a lot of bats, with his K/9 sitting at just 6.75. Meanwhile, he had a BB/9 above 3.0 for what would have been the first time since 2012, and he was allowing a career-high HR/FB rate of 24%. Keuchel has consistently overcome low strikeout totals throughout his career thanks to excellent command, but suddenly, he was throwing strikes much less often than he used to (32% zone rate in 2019 vs. 38.6% for his career), and he was much easier to leave the yard against, even if the juiced ball has made preventing homers more difficult for everybody. That night in Miami could have altered Keuchel’s entire season, and damaged his future earning potential even further.

But that isn’t what happened. Keuchel has bounced back from getting torched in Miami to post his most dominant six-game run in years. Read the rest of this entry »