Dave Dombrowski held a press conference yesterday following the Red Sox’ announcement that John Farrell won’t be returning as the club’s manager next year. He wasn’t particularly forthcoming when asked to explain why. Nor was he willing to address whether it would have happened had the Red Sox gone deeper into the postseason. The latter is an especially compelling question, as Dombrowski cited a need for change multiple times during the 30-minute media session.

Would Farrell have been retained as a reward for playoff success, even though the front office believed a different voice was needed? Or would that dynamic have changed with a World Series berth? In other words, does an October run transform a manager’s ability to lead in the forthcoming season?

I decided that Dombrowski’s deflection of the “what if” scenario deserved a follow-up. Well after the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier initially posed the question, I barked up the same tree, using distinctly different verbiage:

When acquiring or retaining a player, the future is more important than past performance. To what extent is that true for a manager, and does success or failure in the postseason impact a manager’s effectiveness going forward?

The extent to which his answer shed light on the Farrell decision is debatable.

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The Indians are the last team of their kind standing, the last small-market club remaining in the playoff field, and it may not be all that surprising.

On Friday, this author wondered whether we might be entering an era of super teams. One reason to think that might be the case? This year, for the first time since 1999, six teams produced run differentials of 140 or greater (the equivalent of about 0.9 runs per game). Also: all eight teams that advanced to the divisional round of the playoffs posted run differentials of 100 or greater. Maybe it’s just an outlying season, maybe it’s nothing. On the other hand, it’s a rare event, fueled also in part by the quantity of non-competitive teams in the sport.

That a lot of those non-competitive teams also possess only modest spending power oughtn’t come as a surprise. In a post last month, Craig Edwards found that baseball’s age of parity was over, that the relationship between wins and payroll has grown stronger.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Necessity is said to be mother of all invention. It continues to be the impetus for creativity and movement away from tradition in Major League Baseball.

Jeff and I participated in the first postseason chat, a four-hour and three-minute affair Tuesday night that had moments of comedy, drama, soberness — and which featured 2,300 questions from a wonderfully engaged and spirited FanGraphs audience.

The subject of bullpen-ing came up early in the game. This isn’t surprising: it’s been a story of some interest heading into this postseason. I, for example, recently proposed that the Yankees ought to bullpen the Wild Card game. The Yankees, of course, have a dominant bullpen, the first major-league relief corps to feature five arms to have recorded strikeout rates of 30% or better. Aroldis Chapman looks like he’s back, hitting 103 mph, and he’s supported by Dellin Betances, Chad Green, Tommy Kahnle, and David Robertson.

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CLEVELAND — While a lot of talk here and elsewhere has focused on bullpen-ing (not such a bad idea, right, Yankees?) and creatively leveraging pitching staffs early in the postseason, the Indians appear to be pursuing a different kind of unconventional strategy.

The club announced yesterday that, while staff ace and AL Cy Young candidate Corey Kluber will be fully rested for Game 1, he will not pitch Thursday against the Yankees. Trevor Bauer, one of the game’s best starters in the second half, will get the ball instead.

In this unexpected scenario, Kluber will start Game 2 and, if necessary, Game 5. Carlos Carrasco will start Game 3 in New York. Carrasco has been a significantly better road pitcher than home pitcher for his career (3.13 road ERA vs. 4.45 home ERA, 3.86 home FIP vs. 2.98 road FIP). He could face Luis Severino in that game, with Severino on regular rest. Or, since Sevenrino didn’t make it through an inning Tuesday, he could perhaps be available in Game 2. Josh Tomlin is penciled in as the tentative starter in Game 4 for Cleveland

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For fans of 10 (and soon to be eight) teams, finding a club for which to root in the playoffs presents little difficulty: just keep doing what you’ve been doing for the last six months. For the rest of us, though, manufacturing some interest in a team or two can be a useful device for cultivating drama in the postseason.

There are a few ways to go about this, of course. For some, the solution is just as simple as rooting against a rival. For others, supporting a team with lengthy curse or championship drought — like the Red Sox or Cubs in recent years or Cleveland, still, this season — might make sense. Backing an underdog is always popular, obviously, as is pulling for all the small-market teams to beat the larger-market ones. There’s no wrong way to do this. What I’d like to discuss here is another alternative, though — namely, rooting for a specific player.

Perhaps you’ve been already been doing this in some capacity. There’s a player who maybe used to play for your favorite team or one whom you always wished would wear your team’s uniform. For me, the easy answer in year’s past has been Adrian Beltre. He’s a future Hall of Famer and a joy to watch. Add in that he was oh-so-close to a title in 2011, and it’s easy to actively support a scenario in which Beltre finally gets a ring. The Rangers failed to qualify for the playoffs this year, though, so rooting for Beltre isn’t an option.

While the Rangers third baseman will be absent from the postseason, there are a handful of other future Hall of Famers who have yet to win a World Series title and will be playing games that count this October.

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The 2017 regular season is officially in the books. We didn’t get any kind of dramatic finishes, with the No. 1 pick the only thing decided on the final day of the season; Pablo Sandoval remained a net negative for his employers by costing the Giants the top pick with his season-ending walk-off.

Despite the lack of pennant-race drama, however, this was still a pretty fun season, with a lot of spectacular individual performances and the emergence of a few true powerhouse teams. So, let’s take a look at a few players who helped define the 2017 season.

While Giancarlo Stanton captured the home-run title, Aaron Judge is the new face of what power looks like in baseball. He not only became the first rookie ever to hit 50 home runs, he was also arguably baseball’s best overall player this season; he was the only guy in the game to crack +8 WAR this season. Unlike the last time power spiked in MLB, this one is defined less by hulking one-dimensional designated hitters and more by the most freakish athletic specimens ever to play the game.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Although it’s not yet completely certain, it looks like the Rockies are going to earn a trip to the playoffs. Should they get there, they’re going to need someone who looks like an ace. And, you know what, even if the Rockies somehow miss the playoffs, there’s still going to be more baseball, in 2018 and beyond. In those years, the Rockies are going to need someone who looks like an ace. Even in this era where starting pitchers have slightly diminished importance, there’s no substitute for a No. 1. Every team could use one; every team badly wants one.

The Rockies might thank their lucky stars for Jon Gray. Not that it’s all been luck, of course — the Rockies drafted Gray in the first round, and the Rockies developed him. But, with pitching prospects, anything can happen, for almost any reason. There would’ve been countless opportunities for Gray’s career to veer off the tracks. Still could, I suppose. Nothing’s for sure. But where Gray is, now, a few weeks shy of his 26th birthday — he seems to be becoming the best starting pitcher the Rockies have ever had.

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The 2017 season has seen offensive levels rise to a height unmatched in major-league baseball for quite some time. Overall this year, teams are averaging 4.65 runs per game, the highest mark since 2007 — though not quite the five runs per game teams averaged in 1999 and 2000. Most of the offensive increase can be traced to a juiced ball. There’s also been a lot of talk about the role of a fly-ball revolution of some sort or another in the establishment of a new league-wide seasonal home-run record.

An increase in PED use has now been raised as an issue, as well. MLB has administered both PED testing and PED-related suspensions since 2004; both have existed in the minors since 2001. Even with those measures in place, however, power continues to be associated with steroid use, and unfounded rumors have hounded the authors of every breakout season over the last decade. With the rise of power in recent years, the whole league is under suspicion. But how similar is this version of the league to the one now known as the “steroid era”? Let’s take a look at what the latter actually looked like and how it compares to now.

Our split tools are very expansive going back to 2002. This is convenient because 2002 was the last season that lacked PED testing of any kind. It might not have been quite the height of that period now regarded as the “steroid era” — that was probably 1999 and 2000 — but the league looked quite different before testing and suspensions were permitted.

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