The Tampa Bay Rays’ season came to an end yesterday, and as a result, so did Stan Boroski’s coaching career. An underrated part of the A.L. East club’s success for over a decade, Boroski joined the staff prior to the 2010 season — he’d previously tutored pitchers in the Houston Astros organization — and became the bullpen coach in November 2011. He announced last month that he’d be retiring at the end of the season.

I recently asked members of Tampa Bay relief corps about their highly-regarded coach. What’s made him so good at his job?

“I really think it’s his presence,” said Pete Fairbanks, a mainstay in the Rays bullpen for the past three-plus seasons. “It lends itself to the environment that we’re in down there. It’s a very loose and unfocused group, and Stan does a great job of managing that. There is also his ability to put across our message of attacking the strike zone, and just how valuable that is. That’s something he has preached all of the time I’ve been here, It’s like beating a dead horse, but it’s a horse that needs to continue to be hit, over and over again. It’s that important.”

The message has resonated well. Rays relievers walked just 2.79 batters per nine innings this year — only the Dodgers were better — and their 2.96 walk rate since 2018 is the lowest in either league. In order to reach base against Boroski’s bullpen, you’ve typically needed to hit your way on. Read the rest of this entry »

On ESPN2’s Phillies-Cardinals broadcast, Michael Kay and Alex Rodriguez — like everyone has at some point this postseason — explained why baseball has become a Three True Outcome-driven sport. You know the gist: Pitchers have become so good it’s hard to string together sequential offense. Better to wait for a mistake and swing like hell when it comes.

For the first time since 2010, the Philadelphia Phillies have won a playoff series, and Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina have taken part in a meaningful professional game for the last time. These things are so because of mistakes: Who made them, which ones went unpunished, and which ones decided a tense 2-0 game. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after playing the fastest postseason game since 1999, the Rays and Guardians combined for a game more than twice as long, lasting 15 innings and four hours and 57 minutes. Dominant pitching was the name of the game as both teams were held scoreless until the 15th inning — the longest scoreless postseason game in major league history. The decisive blow came when Oscar Gonzalez blasted a Corey Kluber cutter deep into left-center field for the walk-off win.

Between the two teams, 16 different pitchers combined for 39 strikeouts, eight walks, and 11 hits. They threw 432 pitches, 68% of which were strikes. Just 15 of the 58 balls in play were hard hit. No matter how you slice it, it was simply a masterclass in modern pitching by both teams:

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You bring in star pitchers for games like this. Cost? That’s for the accountants. You can’t put a price on a lockdown playoff start, the kind that sucks the air out of the opposing offense one out at a time. Bring in an ace, find your way to the playoffs, and the dominance will flow.

Oh, this is awkward. Did you think I was talking about Max Scherzer? I meant Yu Darvish, who the Padres acquired before the 2021 season in a blockbuster trade. Darvish didn’t harness his usual swing-and-miss stuff Friday night, but he’s spent the entire 2022 season learning how to succeed without it. He’s never run a lower strikeout rate or missed fewer bats, but it hasn’t mattered: He’s having his best season in eight years thanks to a raft of soft contact and no walks to speak of.

Darvish has been a cutter-first pitcher for years, and he leaned into it to the tune of 39 cutters in 101 pitches against the Mets. It’s still Yu Darvish we’re talking about, so he threw six different pitch types, but cutters and four-seamers comprised 65% of his offerings. Add in his slider, and the count climbs to 90%. We think of Darvish as overpowering opposing hitters, but he’s become adept at keeping them off balance, with equally offense-suppressing results. The Mets were eternally in a 1-2 count, eternally popping up pitches they were just too early or too late on. Read the rest of this entry »

Playoff baseball is a game of rapid reversals and slow-motion disasters. When heartbreak comes, it will either slap you in the face or gradually immure you in slime.

We saw both at Busch Stadium on Friday afternoon, as the Cardinals struck a lightning blow against the Phillies, then — just two outs from a commanding series lead — turned around to find out that the world was ending at a walking pace. A 2-0 ninth-inning lead turned into a 6-3 loss over the course of one bizarre half-inning. The Phillies are now, improbably, merely one win from advancing to the NLDS. Behold the fallout, a win probability chart that looks like a slide whistle sounds:

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12:00

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to our Wild Card Game 1 chat-a-thon

12:01

Jay Jaffe: I’lll be joined here shortly by Dan Szymborski and David Laurila, and then at some point, the bullpen will open up and we’ll get some fresh arms in here as well

12:02

David Laurila: Greetings all. Happy postseason baseball.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: it’s time to play “Which Channel is That Game On Anyway,” and if  you’re asking about the Rays and Guardians opener about to begin, it’s on ESPN

12:04

Jay Jaffe: For me? Yes, but that’s because I’m working. you’re free to crack one open but I suggest pacing yourself

Read the rest of this entry »

The expanded postseason field made for a distinct lack of drama as the regular season wound down. Most of the field was set by mid-September, with just a few races lasting into the final weeks of the season. But the board has been reset in the postseason. With the new Wild Card round set to begin today, here’s a look at the 12 teams in the playoffs and how they stack up against each other.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. Since regular season records don’t matter in the playoffs, I’ve removed the factors for win percentage and expected win percentage from the calculations.

Despite winning 111 games during the regular season, the Dodgers’ World Series odds sit below the Astros — and the Braves too! On paper, they have a juggernaut of a team, but their deep roster is more suited to the grueling pace of a long regular season. During a short series, that depth is wasted to a certain extent. The other reason why the projection systems are discounting their chances is some uncertainty in their pitching staff. Los Angeles won’t have Walker Buehler this postseason, and Dustin May could miss the Division Series. That means leaning on Tyler Anderson and Tony Gonsolin to make critical starts. Both had phenomenal regular-season numbers, but the projections don’t fully trust them as top-tier starters, and Gonsolin only just returned after a month-long absence due to a forearm issue. There’s also some uncertainty in the bullpen, as Craig Kimbrel lost his ninth-inning role during the final month of the season. It’s never a good sign when a team enters the postseason with high-leverage roles in flux.

The Astros have fewer questions to work through. They ran away with the best record in the American League en route to their sixth consecutive playoff appearance, and the only player they’ll be missing from their roster is Michael Brantley, who injured his shoulder in June and will be sidelined until next year. To replace him, Houston acquired Trey Mancini from the Orioles at the trade deadline, though he hasn’t been able to replicate his previous success in his new digs, with a mere 77 wRC+ as an Astro. The pitching staff is once again led by Justin Verlander, who missed the team’s last two October trips. Lance McCullers Jr. will likely play a significant role as well. He injured his forearm during the 2021 postseason and was sidelined for the majority of the regular season but made eight solid starts down the stretch. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite spending 175 of the season’s 182 days atop the NL East, building a 10.5-game lead by the end of May, and winning 101 games, the New York Mets lost out in the division race to a red-hot Atlanta Braves team that has played at a .696 clip since the start of June — and lost out via a tiebreaker, a 10-9 season series disadvantage. Now they’ll have to take the long route through the new postseason format, one that includes a potential matchup with the top-seeded, 110-win Dodgers if they advance beyond the Wild Card Series.

That can’t be taken for granted. Even with Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom available to start in this best-of-three series, all of which will be played at Citi Field, they can’t overlook the Padres, who can offer some top-notch starting pitching themselves and who beat the Mets in four of the six meetings between the two teams. Not that such results are predictive — and it’s worth noting that the aforementioned pair combined for one start in the six games (Scherzer in a 4-1 loss opposite Yu Darvish on July 22) — but they do illustrate the range of possibilities here. The ZiPS Playoff Odds pegged this as the biggest mismatch of the Wild Card round, narrowly edging out the Mariners-Blue Jays series, but with the Padres still having a 42.4% chance of scoring an upset.

Both deGrom and Scherzer looked all too human last weekend during the Braves’ division-s(t)ealing sweep, combining to allow five home runs and seven runs in 11.2 innings. If there’s good news, it’s that manager Buck Showalter didn’t have to send deGrom to the hill in Game 162 in hopes that the Mets would win and the Braves would lose, because that would have ruled him out of the Wild Card round had they lost. Read the rest of this entry »

Who was the Nationals’ best player in 2022? Before you try to answer, I should acknowledge that this is not a fair question to ask. For starters, it’s a trick question. More importantly, you haven’t been watching the Nationals. You’ve been doing the best you can to avoid even thinking about the Nationals. That’s called self-care, and I commend you for it. Even the Nationals’ general manager called it “a daily grind to come here and lose baseball games.” He also called trading Juan Soto a “courageous move by ownership,” so maybe don’t listen to him.

Regardless, go ahead and give it a shot! Keibert Ruiz would be a reasonable guess. The promising young catcher posted 1.7 WAR this season. You could also be forgiven for going with Joey Meneses, who put up 1.5 WAR in just 228 plate appearances since his promotion in August. Read the rest of this entry »

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.