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 »

Nobody can accuse the Mariners of skimping on frontline pitching in an effort to end their epic playoff drought. After signing Robbie Ray to a five-year, $115 million deal last winter, they traded a quartet of prospects for Luis Castillo on July 30. Already this was no mere rental, as the 29-year-old righty still has another season under control before free agency. Or rather had another season under control, because on Saturday, the Mariners announced they had agreed to terms with Castillo on a five-year, $108 million extension.

With the ink on the new deal barely dry, Castillo threw five solid innings against the Royals on Sunday, but faltered in the sixth and was charged with the first three runs of what turned out to be a gruesome 11-run rally that three other relievers tried in vain to contain. The Mariners, who led 11-2 before the onslaught, lost 13-12, dropping them to 3-7 on a 10-game road trip from hell, during which they lost series to the Angels, A’s, and Royals, and sent both Eugenio Suárez and Julio Rodríguez — their two most valuable players by WAR — to the injured list, the former with a fractured right middle finger, the latter with a lower back strain. Sunday’s loss dropped the Mariners to 83-69 overall, but fortunately for them, both the Rays (84-69) and Orioles (79-73) lost on Sunday as well, leaving Seattle four games ahead of Baltimore for the final American League Wild Card slot, and half a game behind Tampa Bay for the second slot.

The outing was the third rough one out of the last four for Castillo, who gave up six runs (three earned) to the White Sox on September 7, and four runs in 4.2 innings to the A’s on September 20. Even so, he’s pitched to a 3.34 ERA and 3.12 FIP in 59.1 innings over 10 starts since the trade, and a 3.06 ERA and 3.17 FIP in 144.1 innings overall. He didn’t make his season debut until May 9 due to a bout of shoulder soreness that sidelined him in the abbreviated spring, but among all pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 76 ERA- is 21st in the majors and his 78 FIP- is 12th; regardless of innings, his 3.4 WAR is in a virtual tie for 23rd among all starters. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in June, Ben Clemens noticed that Braves reliever A.J. Minter had taken a big developmental step, specifically by cutting his walk rate basically in half from 2021. Through some statistical trial-and-error, Ben discovered that Minter had revamped his approach after falling behind in the count, pitching in and around the zone almost exclusively in two- and three-ball counts:

“All he did was make one adjustment — before he ever got to a 3–0 or 3–1 count, he’d dial in and throw something competitive — and presto, walks were gone overnight.”

Three and a half months later, Minter’s walk rate has bumped up a little, but only to 5.2%. That’s still a fraction of his previous career low, 8.5%, and even more impressive given his 34.9% strikeout rate. There are other pieces to what makes a good reliever, like preventing home runs (Minter has allowed only four in 65 innings this year) and limiting hard contact, but based just on those strikeout and walk rates, one would assume that Minter has been one of the best relievers in baseball this season. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the 1950s, Hall of Fame slugger Ralph Kiner famously said that “singles hitters drive Fords and home run hitters drive Cadillacs.” Michael Massey’s grandmother may or may not have been familiar with the quote, but she did her best to send the 24-year-old Kansas City Royals rookie down the right road. I learned as much when I asked Massey about his first big-league blast, which came on August 18 against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field.

“What I thought of when I hit it was my nana,” said Massey, who grew up in the Chicago area and went on to play his college ball at the University of Illinois. “She passed away toward the end of last season — she was 93 — and growing up she’d always give me a hundred bucks for every home run I hit. She loved it when I hit home runs, and did that for every league I played in.”

Massey has never tallied up his earnings from over the years, although he does acknowledge that the benevolence was bountiful. Along with his homers in youth leagues, high school, and college, he left the yard 21 times in High-A last year.

His grandmother — his mother’s mother — escaped Illinois winters by vacationing in Florida, and eventually became a snowbird. That the Sunshine State became her “favorite place in the world” made Massey’s first MLB home run even more special. And the memories include much more than money. The family matriarch regularly played whiffle ball with him when he was growing up, and she wasn’t just a fan of her grandson. She loved baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, mid-September brought my annual check-in on the potential for end-of-season chaos in the playoff races via my Team Entropy series. With the new Collective Bargaining Agreement and the restructured postseason, however, Major League Baseball has done away with tiebreaker games and the scheduling mayhem that they could cause in favor of greed a larger inventory of playoff games. Along with the expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12 and the Wild Card round from a pair of winner-take-all games to a quartet of three-game series, MLB did away with all winner-take-all regular season tiebreaker games. In the name of efficiency, we have no more Game 163s. Instead, ties will be decided by the excitement of… mathematics. Boooooooo!

The untangling of the often-complex scenarios by which those tiebreakers could come about was Team Entropy’s raison d’etre, though we were able to make do in 2020, when in the name of minimizing travel and keeping the schedule compact to accommodate an expanded field, MLB similarly opted to dispense with the on-field tiebreakers. That wasn’t nearly as much fun, but at the very least, it feels appropriate to sketch out what’s at stake while pouring one out in memory of what’s been lost.

As you’re probably aware by now, each league’s playoff field will consist of six teams, namely all three division winners plus three Wild Cards with the best records from among the remaining teams. The top two division winners by record get first-round byes, while the third division winner (no. 3 seed) plays host for all three games against the third-best Wild Card team (no. 6 seed) and the top Wild Card team (no. 4 seed) hosts all three games against the second-best Wild Card team (no. 5 seed). Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday night, the White Sox and Guardians played to a standstill over the first eight innings of a game that would help decide the fate of the American League Central. Of course, getting late into the game with a chance to win suits both teams just fine. The White Sox have Liam Hendriks anchoring their bullpen, while the Guardians have Emmanuel Clase in the same role in theirs.

Hendriks pitched a scoreless top of the ninth. But even with the Guardians’ two best setup men, Trevor Stephan and James Karinchak, out of the game, Clase cooled his heels in the Cleveland bullpen while Enyel De Los Santos matched Hendriks out for out. What was Terry Francona up to?

He was, in fact, playing the percentages. “Never save your closer” is a modern analytical truism, but it wasn’t designed for the zombie runner rule. When every inning works the same, you should always get your best pitchers into the game post haste. The only difference between the ninth and 10th innings used to be that you might not get to play the 10th. That’s not the case anymore.

As I examined in 2020, making the 10th inning a higher-scoring affair than the ninth changes optimal pitcher usage. When all the action is in the 10th, it follows that you want your best arm pitching then. Walking the tightrope in extra innings and escaping without a run allowed is quite difficult; it’s an inherently higher-leverage spot, which means using your best reliever pays off.

The easiest way to think about it is with someone like Ryan Helsley or Edwin Díaz, a pitcher who frequently ignores runners on base thanks to strikeouts. Outs aren’t all created equal. With a runner on first and less than two outs, a groundout is the best kind of out thanks to the chance of a double play. With a runner on third and less than two outs, strikeouts and popups reign supreme. With the bases empty, everything is the same. The base/out state determines a lot about the optimal style of pitching. Read the rest of this entry »