For a moment, it seemed like Aaron Judge might not reach 62 home runs. After hitting his 61st in Toronto last Wednesday, he fell into what counts as a slump for him these days: four games, two hits, and a handful of walks. After feeling inevitable for most of September, 62 suddenly felt tenuous.

What a foolish sentiment. Judge, as we’ve seen all year, is a home run machine. He’s an offensive machine, in fact, blowing away the rest of the league with the kind of performance not seen since Barry Bonds in his prime. Unlike most single-season home run chases, Judge’s season isn’t defined by a single round number. His offensive greatness is so robust, so all-encompassing, that treating this accomplishment as the crowning achievement of his season is unfair.

The single-season home run record in major league baseball is 73. It was set in 2001, by Barry Bonds. Sixty-one has a ring to it, of course, because it was the record for so long. It was also the American League and Yankee record, two marks that feel weighty even if they aren’t quite as impressive as “best of all time.” Plenty of the fanfare around Judge comes from the sheer rarity of seeing so many homers, but plenty also comes from the fact that some fans would prefer to ignore everything that happened from 1998 to 2001 and make the record 61 again.

I’m giving you permission to tune all of that out. Sixty-two home runs is cool regardless of what the all-time record is. Only six players have ever accomplished the feat of hitting 60 home runs, and you know all of their names: Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Maris, Babe Ruth, and now Judge. That alone is mind-blowing; baseball has been around an impossibly long time, through periods of high and low scoring, and yet only six players have ever cracked 60 home runs in a year throughout it all.

Does that mean hitting 62 is anti-climactic? I’ll leave that interpretation up to you. But more so than any one increment – would it be special at 63? 65? – I’m impressed by how handily Judge has lapped the league today. Is it cool to pass Maris? Undoubtedly. If nothing else, now Judge’s future offspring can traipse around the country and opine about someone else’s homers hit in the far-off future. More pressingly, though, Judge has left the rest of baseball behind in a way not seen for many years.

Home runs aren’t hit in a vacuum. The majors go through home run droughts and booms for myriad reasons, including pitcher talent, park dimensions, pitching style, and baseball composition. It’s hard to say whether 2022 Judge or 1961 Maris hit under easier conditions, but one way to look at it is to consider how many home runs separate the major league leader from their closest challenger at the end of each season. By that standard, Judge is in impressive company. Here are the top 11 seasons (including a 10th place tie) by home run gap since the dawn of the 20th century:

First, yeah, that Babe Ruth guy was pretty good. Since the 1920s and ’30s, though, no one has done what Judge is doing. The only player to come close was Willie Mays, not exactly shabby company. Last year, Shohei Ohtani won an MVP by playing the way people think Babe Ruth did – pitching and hitting. This year, Judge is likely going to win an MVP by playing like Ruth actually did: with a ludicrous string of home runs that makes everyone else playing look like a weakling by comparison.

Even without that gap between Judge and Kyle Schwarber, though, this season would be an all-timer. The great arrow of baseball time points inexorably towards more uniformity and more talent. It’s a professional game; even the up-and-down bullpen arms and utility infielders of today work year-round at their craft, honing their bodies and minds in pursuit of fame and riches. In a sport where we measure success relative to a league baseline, that means it’s harder than ever to stand out.

This arc of progress isn’t some new phenomenon. Stephen Jay Gould, the late and celebrated biologist, wrote about it in 1986, though he framed it in terms of the extinction of .400 hitters. Standing out from the field simply gets harder with every generation because even the lesser lights of baseball now search for every possible edge.

To wit: wRC+, our marquee offensive statistic here at FanGraphs, considers a player’s production relative to his peers. A 150 wRC+ has no fixed statistical translation. It merely means that a player’s overall batting line is 50% better than the league as a whole. Judge’s mark – 208 heading into today’s action – means that he’s 108% better than the overall league.

In Ruth’s day, when dinosaurs walked the earth and many of baseball’s best players weren’t allowed to play in the same league as him, a 200 wRC+ wasn’t particularly uncommon. But as competition increased, players lapped the rest of the field less often. Ruth and Ted Williams each had career wRC+ marks that approached 200. Since 1972, though, there have only been nine individual seasons that eclipsed 200:

Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas, and Juan Soto all accomplished their feats in shortened seasons. Bonds – well, he’s Barry Bonds. That just leaves Judge and McGwire out of the last half-century. Heck, order every season by wRC+ and exclude Bonds, and that gives Judge the best single season relative to his peers since Williams (223) and Mickey Mantle (217) posted similarly absurd seasons in 1957.

If I had my druthers, that’s how Judge’s season would be remembered. Sixty-two home runs is neat, and I’m glad he got there. A 16-homer lead on the field is spectacular, the stuff that only long-forgotten icons of the game have ever even dreamed of. But putting together an offensive season that blows away the rest of the league to this degree, at a time when his peers are as good as they are? Goodness gracious. We probably won’t see another season like Aaron Judge’s 2022 in our lifetimes. Let’s appreciate it.

With the first 12-team postseason in MLB history right around the corner, we’re hearing a little bit of griping. The playoffs, like your dad’s hand-me-down sport coat, are too big. Look at the race for the last Wild Card spot in the NL, in which the Phillies and Brewers have spent the past two weeks bumbling around like a pair of somnambulant dachsunds investigating a cricket. Eventually one sneezes and forgets what he was doing in the first place, and the other gets tired and plops over for a nap. The cricket escapes unharmed. Surely these are not playoff-quality teams. Surely they’re nothing but an inconvenience to a champion-elect like the Dodgers. But they’ll get a full three-game audition nonetheless. What a waste of time.

And by and large, I agree. While the current playoff structure seems to incentivize regular-season competition and could lead to some exciting October action, all things being equal I’d rather go back to an eight-team playoff bracket. Maybe because that’s the way things were when I was a kid, which is the overriding logic behind about 95% of people’s opinions about baseball, art, or society at large, but that’s how I feel.

But go back and consider, for a moment, that hand-me-down sport coat from your dad. You’re a teenager, fresh off a growth spurt, all tendons and hormones. The jacket, made for a man, looks weird on the frame of what is essentially a very tall child. But the problem is not that the jacket is too big; it’s that you are too small. On a bigger person, with a more fully developed frame, it would look just fine.

So while a 12-team playoff is probably too big for a 30-team baseball league, a 30-team baseball league is preposterously small for the size of the audience it serves. America, like Leon from Airplane, is getting larger. MLB should do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball is unique among major American sports for its lengthy schedule. For six months a year, there’s a game nearly every day. Every. Dang. Day. Working for the weekend? There’s no such thing; Saturdays and Sundays are for games. Want to have a lazy one and “work from home” with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and an eye on your emails? Yeah, uh, that’s not going to work, though you can at least wear pajamas in the dugout.

We marvel at the physical prowess of players all the time, but I’m interested in their mental fortitude. It’s hard to keep grinding day in and day out for half a year. It’s harder still when there’s no postseason carrot dangled in front of you. I’ve never personally been in a pennant race, but I imagine a chance at a hunk of metal is a great motivator. Without that powerful incentive, spending a few months with no mental breaks is beyond my ken.

Earlier this year, I observed that down-and-out teams perform worse than expected late in the season. That seems entirely reasonable. I’ve always wondered where that effect comes from, though. Every time I try to look for hitting or pitching performance relative to expectations late in the season, I find a whole lot of nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday wasn’t Charlie Morton’s best night, though it was hardly his worst. Fresh off the announcement of a contract extension for next season, and with nothing less than the Braves’ full control of their own destiny in the NL East race on the line against the Mets, the 38-year-old righty bent but didn’t break before manager Brian Snitker pulled him with a 4–3 lead and one out in the fifth inning. His performance was still better than opposite number Chris Bassitt, who was chased in the third inning. And for the third straight night, the Braves got home runs from both Dansby Swanson and Matt Olson and a save from Kenley Jansen. Their magic number to clinch the division and the NL’s second seed is down to one.

With victories over Jacob deGrom on Friday and Max Scherzer on Saturday, the Braves had taken a one-game lead in the NL East race — their largest of the season — and evened the season series with the Mets at nine games apiece. A victory on Sunday night meant that they would possess not only a two-game lead with three games left to play but also the upper hand in a tiebreaker scenario via their 10–9 record in head-to-head games. Under the new postseason format, so long as they do anything but lose all three of their remaining games against the Marlins in Miami along with the Mets winning their three against the Nationals at home, the Braves would get a first-round bye and face the winner of the best-of-three Wild Card series between the Cardinals and the sixth seed (currently the Phillies, who have a magic number of one over the Brewers). The fourth-seeded Mets would face the fifth-seeded Padres, with the winner moving on to face the top-seeded Dodgers in the Division Series.

So there was a lot riding on Sunday’s contest, to say the least. As a 15-year veteran who’s pitched for teams that have been to the playoffs in eight of the past nine seasons (plus this one) and who has appeared in three of the past five World Series (most notably closing out Game 7 for the 2017 Astros), Morton is no stranger to big games. It appears that he has more in store, not only because the Braves are playoff-bound but also because on Saturday they announced a one-year, $20 million extension with the righty, with a $20 million club option (and no buyout) for 2024. It’s essentially a rollover of Morton’s previous deal, in that he’s making $20 million this year and had a club option for $20 million next year. Read the rest of this entry »

I once spent what felt like a lifetime arguing with a colleague who hated the German soccer player Mesut Özil and would not be moved no matter what statistical evidence, stunning highlights, or expert analysis he consumed. For years, my friend insisted Özil was trash, and for years he was wrong.

Then, Özil finally lost a step, fell out with his coach, and got benched. Rather than admit circumstances had changed, my friend claimed victory, as if he’d prophesied the truth instead of stumbling into it after the fact. Which I’m totally fine with, by the way, and in no way still so pissed about that I’m bringing it up for an audience that likely knows or cares little about semi-retired European soccer playmakers and even less about my onetime debate partner. No, sir. Anyway, this experience taught me an important lesson about sports takemanship: If you hold on to an opinion long enough, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, sometimes the mountain comes to Mohammed.

In that spirit, I’m declaring that I was right about Ryne Stanek all along. Back in 2012, I was a huge Stanek fan. In his days at the University of Arkansas, he was one of the top candidates to go first overall in the 2013 draft. I saw his fastball velocity and wipeout slider and imagined him as a future no. 1 starter. And when Stanek continued to worry scouts his junior year — he fell all the way to no. 29 in the draft, despite posting a 1.39 ERA as a starter in the SEC — I was unmoved. Stanek would come good, I insisted.

For nine years, I kept the faith. Through injuries, through command problems, through a move to the bullpen. When Stanek finally started a handful of major league games, it was as an opener, the Blaster to Jalen Beeks’s Master. He was effective in short bursts, but a trade to the Marlins in mid-2019 and a month-long bout with COVID in 2020 brought his career to the brink of dissolution.

Suffice it to say, things have changed. Last year, Stanek became a key part of the Astros’ bullpen, appearing in 13 of Houston’s 16 playoff games, holding batters to a .139/.184/.333 line, and posting a positive WPA in the first 12 of those outings. This year, well, here’s a list of the top reliever ERAs in baseball this season:

It took nine years, but Stanek is finally as dominant as he was at Arkansas. A 1.17 ERA in 58 appearances for the top seed in the American League might not be a 200-inning Cy Young season, but it’s close enough that I can claim to have triumphed in the marketplace of ideas.

Many of these names above will be familiar to you from a piece Ben Clemens wrote last week about how the top relievers in baseball are especially dominant. Among the players he mentioned are the ones you’ll remember in several years’ time: Helsley chucking the rock at 104 mph, Díaz storming in to trumpet fanfare like a Roman consul, Clase cuttering through opponents like Mariano Rivera, plus six ticks. But Stanek, who’s second among relievers in ERA, didn’t merit a mention. As if he’s not actually elite.

The Astros don’t seem to think so either, or at least they’re not using him that way. Among the six Astros relievers with at least 40 innings pitched, Stanek is only fourth in gmLI, at 1.22, which places him in the range of important middle relievers, but hardly a high-leverage fireman or closer. Some of that is down to Houston having a loaded bullpen: in addition to closer Ryan Pressly, the Astros have invested significant resources in the past 18 months to sign or trade for Héctor Neris, Will Smith, Phil Maton, and Rafael Montero. They’ve all pitched well, as has Bryan Abreu. And Houston’s surfeit of rotation arms will bolster the bullpen in the playoffs — Justin Verlander acolyte Hunter Brown has already moved over, and one or both of José Urquidy and Luis Garcia is likely to join him there as October rolls on.

The other reason Stanek’s exceptional run prevention season is going unnoticed is that it’s most remarkable in one specific way: The sheer number of fluky season red flags he’s managed to hit. In an era when the best relievers are striking out tons of batters and walking no one, Stanek is a throwback to the Matt Mantei–Armando Benitez-type relief ace who gets outs but walks so many guys you end up watching his appearances through your fingers. I’m not complaining — everything that was cool when I was a middle schooler is coming back into style, it seems. Just today I saw a TikTok about how to make your hair look like Shawn’s from Boy Meets World. But I digress. Let’s take a look at some of Stanek’s stats:

The Statcast-derived metrics are no more flattering:

Calling Stanek’s season fluky feels unkind, and it’s certainly not my intention to denigrate the fine work he’s done this year. The F-word is usually tagged to players whose superficial stats look good but are actually bad. Stanek, based on the underlying numbers, is a good reliever whose ERA makes him look like Dennis Eckersley.

What is he, then? Well, basically the same pitcher he was last year: A good middle reliever with an above-average strikeout rate and a slightly concerning walk rate. He’s much less homer-prone this year, but that’s about it. His improved LOB% and inherited runner strand rate (up to 41% from 19% in 2021) come despite very similar performance with runners on base (.257 opponent wOBA in 2021, .267 this year). But it bears repeating that he was a workhorse in the playoffs for an Astros team that nearly won the title, and with the LDS and LCS both losing an off day, more of this postseason than ever will be decided by teams’ fourth- and fifth-best relievers.

Players like Stanek, in other words. As much as the Astros need star performances from Verlander, Pressly, and so on, they need their entire pitching staff to show up. Lucky for them, for the seventh and eighth innings they have an ace, just as I predicted all those years ago.

Riley Greene was 18 years old and only three months removed from being drafted fifth-overall when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in September 2019. Harking back to our earlier conversation, I asked the Detroit Tigers rookie outfielder what he knows now that he didn’t know then.

“When I first started, I didn’t really think about much,”replied Greene, who celebrated his 22nd birthday four days ago. “I kind of just went up there, and was free-swinging almost. I was a young kid who didn’t really know anything. Since then, I’ve come up with a routine and am more educated on what I need to do at the plate. I have a plan. Whether it works or not is up the baseball gods.”

The extent to which the baseball gods have been on his side is relative. Greene isn’t exactly setting the world on fire — he has a 100 wRC+ and five home runs in 400 plate appearances — but again, he’s been old enough to take a legal drink for barely over a year. He also came into the season with just 198 professional games under his belt, only 55 at the Triple-A level. His potential far exceeds his present.

In some respects, Greene is much the same player Detroit drafted in the first round out of Oviedo, Florida’s Paul J. Hagerty High School. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday night, I watched Ryan Helsley face the middle of the Brewers order in the bottom of the eighth inning. It went roughly how you’d expect – strikeout, groundout, strikeout. He came back out for the ninth, and after an inning-opening walk, closed out the frame with another two strikeouts and a groundout. It didn’t feel surprising; that’s just what great relievers do at the end of games.

That wasn’t always the case. The game has changed over the years. Relievers are pitching fewer innings per appearance, and doing so in better-defined roles. Strikeouts are up everywhere. Velocity is up everywhere. Individual reliever workloads are down, which means higher effort in a given appearance despite bullpens covering more aggregate innings. I’m not trying to say that the current crop of relievers doesn’t have structural tailwinds helping them excel. But seriously – top relievers now are so good.

Look at the top of this year’s WAR leaderboard for relievers – either RA9-WAR or FIP-based WAR will do – and you’ll see a veritable wall of strikeouts. Edwin Díaz, Devin Williams, A.J. Minter, Helsley, and Andrés Muñoz are all in the top 10 and all run preposterous strikeout rates. They’re good in an in-your-face way. Since I’ve watched baseball, dominant late-inning relievers have succeeded by striking batters out, but that trend has accelerated in the past decade or so. Here, take a look at the strikeout rate of the 10 top relievers in baseball, as determined by fWAR, every year since integration:

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have any reason to suspect that Sandy Alcantara is a sadist or a misanthrope, but if he is, the next week will be quite entertaining.

Certainly the Marlins right-hander has caused no end of pain or suffering, inflicting failure and frustration upon National League hitters to a level unmatched this season. Alcantara’s strikeout and walk numbers haven’t been exceptional this year. Nevertheless he’s done the most important thing a pitcher can do — prevent runs — at a conspicuously high level; his 2.32 ERA is second among qualified NL starters. Combined with the staggering volume of his work (he leads the league with 220 2/3 innings pitched in a season when no one else has broken 200 yet), Alcantara is among the favorites for NL Cy Young.

That individual hardware would obviously be the biggest prize for a pitcher who’s done great work for a fourth-place club. But with two series left in the regular season, Alcantara could — if he so chooses — have a greater impact on the remaining pennant race than any other player. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, did that title get your attention? I thought it might. Bad news, though! It was just a trap to get you to read this. I’m here to talk about the same thing we talk about around this time every year: projections offending people. I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s just the name of the game when October comes around. We post playoff odds before the season, which means we’re always missing on some team or other. That’s right: as best as I can tell, Cleveland fans are upset that we gave their team a 93.3% chance of making the playoffs in 2019, only to have them miss out on the postseason.

Okay, fine. I’m actually talking about the Guardians making the playoffs this year after starting the season with a 7.5% chance of winning their division, as the league helpfully noted on Twitter earlier this week:

That's why they play the games. ? pic.twitter.com/X0KkQwgPr1

— MLB (@MLB) September 26, 2022

I brought up the 2019 example to make a point: our odds miss in both directions. They’re not biased for or against the Guardians specifically. I thought it might be useful to look into a few things our model doesn’t handle particularly well that might have understated the Guardians’ chances, a few things the team did well to improve its odds, and a few breaks along the way that Cleveland deftly took advantage of. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, on your way to your local coffee shop or the train station, you probably passed two guys writhing around on the sidewalk, one screaming “Aaron Judge!” while trying to wrap up his counterpart in a figure-four leg lock; the other, attempting valiantly to squirm out of his predicament and refusing to tap out, shouting “Shohei Ohtani!”

Such is the nature of this year’s AL MVP discourse, the most spirited awards debate since the halcyon days of Mike Trout vs. Miguel Cabrera a decade ago. And that’s appropriate — these are two of the most recognizable names in the sport, both accomplishing things we only see once every few decades, and both doing it in major markets. (I’m framing it this way on purpose in order to provoke a second argument: Is Anaheim really part of the Greater Los Angeles area, or is it something else?)

But they name three MVP finalists, not two, which leaves us a little less than two months from a hilarious television moment: Judge and Ohtani, on MLB Network, awaiting the results of this contentious election while the host runs down the credentials of some joker with no shot at all of taking home the hardware.

So who should that joker be? Read the rest of this entry »