“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra

In 2017 and ’18, for the first time in franchise history, the Colorado Rockies made the playoffs in consecutive seasons. The team didn’t play deep into October in either season, but for an organization that hadn’t even had back-to-back winning seasons since the mid-90s, it was a wonderful result. Problem is, the team gave little thought as to how they got there or the weaknesses that could prevent them from doing so again in the future. The strengths Colorado rode in 2017 and 2018 were absent in 2019, and left the team high-and-dry with no real Plan B.

The Setup

The Rockies clearly believed that 2019 would be another year of contendership. But I’m not sure they realized how dependent they had been on the production of a few stars every season. 91 wins are nothing to scoff at, but to get to the point of barely making the playoffs, the Rockies had to have two legitimate MVP contenders and two legitimate Cy Young candidates. All told, Colorado received 19 WAR from their top four players in 2018, an identical sum as in 2017. In both years, that figure represented more than half the team’s value, a ratio far worse than every other postseason team from 2017, 2018, and now 2019.

In 2017, the Rockies made the playoffs despite an offense that ranked 26th in the league in wRC+. To fix this lack of run-scoring — the team ranked third in baseball in runs scored, but a good offense in Colorado should be crushing the league in runs, even given the most generous application of the Coors Field Hangover — the Rockies did, well, not much. They signed a 35-year-old catcher and given the opportunity to upgrade from fading veteran Carlos González, he of an 85 wRC+ and 0 WAR, decided to upgrade to…Carlos González. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Rendon and Ketel Marte have both had very good seasons, but all year long they’ve been a few beats behind Christian Yelich and Cody Bellinger. With only a few days left in the regular season, Marte has already been shut down and Rendon would need a historic week to match the two favorites. While Yelich’s season is unfortunately over, his work already done clearly puts him, along with Bellinger, in the top two for the MVP. With the numbers on offense creating a substantial edge for Yelich, who deserves MVP comes down to a question nobody really likes answering: How much better is Cody Bellinger on defense than Christian Yelich?

It’s possible some voters will ding Yelich for his injuries and playing time lost, though it didn’t stop Mookie Betts and Mike Trout from finishing 1-2 in the AL MVP last year, or keep Josh Hamilton from winning in 2010 when he missed almost all of September. Historically, there haven’t been very many MVPs with around 130 games and 600 PAs, though that likely has less to do with voters being unwilling to vote for players who have missed some of the season and more to do with it just being incredibly difficult to be the best player in the league when other candidates have an extra three weeks to compile numbers.

Since 1931, there have only been 22 position player seasons of at least 7.5 WAR and fewer than 600 plate appearances. Of those 22 seasons, only 10 topped the league in WAR. Six of those 10 players won the MVP that season. In 2009, the under-appreciated Ben Zobrist topped the league in WAR, but Joe Mauer, behind by 0.3 WAR, won the trophy. In 1989, Lonnie Smith played in 134 games and tied Will Clark for the league lead in WAR at 8.1, but it was Clark’s teammate Kevin Mitchell and his 49 homers that took home the MVP. In 1985, Pedro Guerrero topped the NL in WAR at 7.8, but Willie McGee’s 7.1 WAR won him the award thanks in no small part to a .353 batting average. Finally, way back in 1954, Ted Williams topped the AL in WAR, but the Yankees’ Yogi Berra won the vote. Yelich’s situation isn’t unprecedented, but it is fairly rare; players in his position have won MVP around half the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Far from the bright lights of the pennant chase, history was made last August when Oliver Drake came in to pitch the ninth inning of an 8-2 Twins victory. That appearance marked the fifth major league team Drake had appeared for in 2018 alone. He wasn’t done there; Drake changed teams a further three times in the offseason, with some of the transactions just seeming silly:

Drake was good-natured about the whole ordeal, appearing on Effectively Wild to talk about his odyssey. Still, he was clearly eager to put the past behind him and find a home on a single roster. No one gets into baseball in hopes of endlessly bouncing between teams, good enough to play in the majors but replaceable enough to frequently be a roster crunch casualty.

If you haven’t been following closely this year, you might not have heard anything about Drake. Did he slip off the edge of major league relevance, stuck in the purgatory of Triple-A Durham? Nope! Neither did he continue his travels across the major leagues. Instead he got better, and he now figures into the Rays’ bullpen plans for the rest of the regular season and beyond.

How did a reliever who had previously defined the word journeyman turn into a key cog in one of the best bullpens in baseball? For lack of a better way to say it, Drake essentially took every part of his game and made it better. In a world of nonstop player development and video-aided pitch design, no player is ever truly a finished product, and even marginal ones are seemingly a tweak away from being effective; Drake is the perfect example of that. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the third installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but at the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

You’ll be shocked to learn that when it comes to chaos, some teams just don’t want to cooperate. That’s the story of Team Entropy this year. Since I last checked in on September 13, our chances of seeing complex scenarios necessitating multiple tiebreakers have more or less gone in the direction of the Cubs’ season, which is to say sharply downward at cartoonish speed.

Chicago has not only lost 11 of its last 17 games since September 5, it’s lost six straight, including five in a row by one run and four in a row to the Cardinals, three of which featured the Cubs holding the lead or being tied in the ninth inning. Craig Edwards had the gory details on Monday. This isn’t all on the Cubs’ shoulders, however. With just six days of regular season baseball remaining, four of the six divisions have been clinched, and the Wild Card hopes of the Mets and Phillies are on life support; the Diamondbacks are done. Fortunately, the possibility of at least one tiebreaker in each league still looms. So let’s take a closer look at what’s left.

Contrary to the previous installments of this year’s series, the greater excitement is now in the American League. While the Indians (92-64) trail the Twins (96-60) by four games and have an elimination number of three in the AL Central race, Cleveland is just half a game behind Tampa Bay (93-64) for the second AL Wild Card spot, and two games behind Oakland (94-62) for the first. The chances of three teams winding up tied are just 2.0%, but that’s actually higher than they’ve been for most of the time since July 1. Sean Dolinar was kind enough to supply me with an archive of our tiebreakers page, and since July 1, there have only been four days that ended with greater odds of such a tie, all in the span from September 11-14. Woohoo! Read the rest of this entry »

Yu Darvish’s 2018 could hardly have gone any worse. Fresh off of signing a six-year, $126 million contract with the Cubs, he made just eight starts before triceps tendinitis and a stress reaction in his right elbow ended his season. The Cubs made the playoffs, but Darvish could only watch their maddening 13-inning loss to the Rockies and wonder what could have been.

When Darvish struggled to start 2019, the situation seemed to go from frustrating to dire. His first eight starts were horrendous, rife with walks and home runs. He had been one of the most exciting pitchers in all of baseball, all strikeouts and gadget pitches, a highlight waiting to happen. He’d been a thrilling rookie, a prized deadline acquisition, and a top-tier free agent. Was he now on the downswing of his career, adding expensive journeyman to his list of accomplishments?

As it turns out, he wasn’t. As Devan Fink chronicled, Darvish turned his walk problems around, going from the pitcher with the most walks in baseball to the pitcher with the least. Since a disastrous outing in early May where he walked six Marlins, he’s been the third-best pitcher in baseball by xFIP, fourth-best by strikeout rate, and in the top 15 in WAR. In the second half, he’s been even better than that, combining a 37.2% strikeout rate with a 2.2% walk rate. His ERA, FIP, and xFIP are all in the mid-twos.

This fully actualized version of Darvish is what his flashes of brilliance through the years had always hinted at. The bottomless arsenal of pitches — he picked up Craig Kimbrel’s knuckle curve in a week — made him a delight to watch, the strikeouts coming from every conceivable angle, fastball following cutter following curve. The Cubs were off to a hot start, 22-13 even after Darvish’s disastrous turn against the Marlins, and now they were adding one of the best pitchers in baseball.

But while Darvish returned to form, the Cubs backslid. The team has gone 60-61 since that date, falling from the top of the division to nearly eliminated from postseason play. Darvish has made 23 starts in that time, and the team has gone 9-14 in those games. Wins and losses are no measure of pitcher quality, but Darvish has gone 4-5 over that timeframe. Even in the second half of the season, when Darvish went full supernova, the team was only 6-6 in his starts heading into this past Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

When ESPN’s Buster Olney reported on Friday that Yankees right-hander Domingo Germán will not pitch again this year, either in the regular season or the postseason, in the wake of a reported violation of the Joint MLB-MLBPA Domestic Violence Policy and a likely suspension, it was a instance of the league and the players’ union lucking into the right outcome. While players suspended for violating the Joint Drug Agreement by taking performance-enhancing drugs have been ineligible to participate in that year’s postseason since 2014, that’s not the case for those suspended under the DV policy introduced in August 2015. Not only does that make for a jarring incongruity given the relative severity of those transgressions, allowing recently suspended players to participate in the playoffs can lead to unsavory behavior on the part of teams, as we’ve seen multiple times since the policy was introduced. It’s time for the players and the league to close this loophole.

Germán was placed on administrative leave on Thursday in connection with an incident that reportedly took place at the pitcher’s residence late Monday or early Tuesday, after the pitcher and his girlfriend appeared at CC Sabathia’s charity gala. The 27-year-old righty, who in his first full major league season has emerged as a viable rotation cog, had pitched in relief of Sabathia on Wednesday night in preparation for a more flexible role come the postseason. The announcement of his placement on leave dimmed some of the luster of the Yankees’ victory over the Angels later that night, which not only marked their 100th win but clinched their first AL East title since 2012.

No police report was filed in connection with the incident at Germán’s residence, and no charges were filed. The incident was reported directly to the league, which, according to The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler, conducted a preliminary investigation on Tuesday and Wednesday, interviewing people around the team. While Yankees manager Aaron Boone said he heard “whispers” of an investigation on Wednesday, the team was not informed until Thursday morning that the pitcher had been placed on administrative leave. Via Adler:

“I learned on the drive in that he was going on administrative leave,” Boone said Thursday afternoon. “Heard some of the whispers and whatnot, but this is a Major League Baseball investigation and issue. We’re just trying to be as cooperative as we can while this goes on.”

A player can be placed on administrative leave for up to seven days, though that period can be extended; during that time, he is paid but not allowed to have any contact with his team. By inference, the mere placement of a player on leave means that the league and the union agree that the allegation in question is substantive — that there is enough evidence to merit preventing him from playing. As Adler noted, “[S]ources told The Athletic the union had the option to appeal his immediate placement on administrative leave but did not take the opportunity to do so.”

Not every player suspended under the policy was placed on leave beforehand, but it is worth noting that the only two of the 14 players investigated who were not suspended, Yasiel Puig and Miguel Sanó, did not require any leave, as the allegations pertained to incidents that took place in the offseason. Neither was ultimately disciplined due to insufficient evidence that they violated the policy. Read the rest of this entry »

On the surface, Justus Sheffield’s developmental journey looks pretty smooth. He was a first-round pick back in 2014. He’s been a consensus top 50 or so prospect since the Obama administration — never much higher than that, but only rarely lower (Eric and Kiley had him ranked 60th overall and first in the Mariners system preseason; he’s since dropped to 109th and seventh respectively). His velocity has not materially changed. He’s suffered a few bumps and bruises, but nothing ever sidelined him long. Twenty-three years old now, he’s cracked a big league rotation right on schedule for a high school draftee of his caliber.

Statistically, he’s been consistent as well. With the exception of a very poor early season spell this year, he’s maintained an ERA under 3.40 at every minor league stop. His strikeout numbers have almost always hovered just above a batter per inning, his walk totals around 3.5/9. He typically generates more grounders than flies. Every year, a new level; every year, the same successes.

Yet Sheffield’s path has actually meandered a bit. As a high schooler, the lefty was seen as an athlete who would have no trouble throwing strikes and a guy who could develop three plus pitches. Two years into his career, he effectively pocketed one of them, shelving his curve in favor of a hard slider. He also grew quite a bit soon after the draft. Between the added weight, a new pitch mix, and a difficult delivery to repeat, his control suffered and whispers about a bullpen role grew louder even as he continued missing bats. His velocity, while stable in the aggregate, has periodically fluctuated on either side of the low-90s. We’ve learned that Sheffield’s fastball has a very low spin rate (more on that later).

He also got traded twice. On the one hand, Sheffield has had the opportunity to hone his craft under the tutelage of two of the sport’s finest pitching development staffs. On the other, those same clubs ultimately decided to work with different pitchers. As he’s matured, and as his fastball looks less like a bat-misser and his changeup remains a work in progress, he’s increasingly relied on his slider. The soothing consistency in his production belies a conflict between the quality of that slider and the reality that he must throw something else eventually. How that conflict resolves itself will shape his ultimate role.

The bullpen has long been the logical end point here. As a starter, Sheffield sits in the low-90s, touching 95 or a tick better at his strongest. In relief, he’d throw even harder. Pair increased velocity with a slider that earns a whiff nearly a quarter of the time he throws it, and you’ve got a late-inning reliever. Lefties, even ones with serviceable changeups, usually peak as eight-inning guys out of the pen. But on paper, Sheffield’s cocktail is good enough to close. Read the rest of this entry »

Luke Carlin learned a lot in his rookie season, and the lessons began in full force when he made his MLB debut on May 10, 2008. Adorned in the tools of ignorance and a San Diego Padres uniform, Carlin caught both “The Professor” and a closer who entered to the sound of “Hell’s Bells.”

An orientation session with the former preceded his first game. It was then that the Northeastern University graduate discovered that being familiar with Greg Maddux is one thing; understanding how he went about schooling big-league hitters is another.

“When I got called up, Buddy Black was like, ‘Hey, make sure you talk to Greg, because you’re going to catch him on Saturday,’” recalled Carlin. “So I had a day or two to get with Greg, but the funny thing was, everything I’d learned about game-calling and reading swings was basically useless until I started watching video with him. He had a simple, deliberate process. Greg was patient with me, making sure that I was on his page as much as possible.”

Carlin, who now manages in the Cleveland Indians system, used military and football analogies to describe Maddux’s tactical-planning acumen. And going into a game with nuanced knowledge of his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses was only part of his M.O. Read the rest of this entry »

Over in the American League, there’s a pretty clear top tier of Cy Young contenders in Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole, followed by a solid group of candidates likely to garner down-ballot support. In the National League, there looks to be a top tier of Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom followed by a cascading set of secondary candidates, but that first look doesn’t quite tell the entire story.

To provide some idea of the statistical disparities voters must contend with when making their decision, I looked at our FIP-based WAR as well as the RA9-WAR also available here at FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference’s WAR, and Baseball Prospectus’ WARP. I included for consideration any player in the top five of any of those lists. That search returned nine pitchers for the potential five slots on a Cy Young ballot. Those players are listed below, with a mix of traditional and advanced statistics:

We have Scherzer and deGrom in first and second by about a win over the next-best candidate, with deGrom pitching tonight. After those two, we have a lot of innings from Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin, and fewer innings, but better peripherals, from Walker Buehler. After those three, we have four candidates who haven’t thrown a ton of innings, but all have much lower ERA’s than FIPs. As for how these candidates came to be considered, here are their WAR totals:

Read the rest of this entry »

When you think of 2019 baseball, there’s probably a definite picture in your mind. Contact is rare but dangerous. Home runs fly out of the park at record levels on fly balls, and line drives are smashed left and right. Strikeouts are abundant, baserunners scarce. And when those runners do get on, they don’t steal very frequently, leading to a station-to-station game.

That’s a great aggregate — but who do you picture when you picture 2019 baseball? Maybe you see Mike Trout or Christian Yelich in your mind’s eye, but that’s not really right. They might be the best of 2019, but they’re certainly not the embodiment of 2019. Yelich and Trout don’t have strikeout problems that sap their on-base percentage. They hit for average and for power; heck, Yelich ended his season batting .329, and it’s not out of the question that he’ll win the batting title. That’s about as far from typical 2019 as it gets.

Not only that, but they’re both fast boys, even if Trout doesn’t steal as much as he used to. Yelich was on pace for a 50/30 season before his season-ending injury, and the fact that it would be the first such season in history should tell you that he’s not anything approaching average. Trout and Yelich are the face of baseball in 2019, but they’re not a fair representation of it.

If it’s not the game’s stars, could it be some kind of boom-or-bust slugger, a watered-down version of Nelson Cruz who sends balls out of the park often enough to offset a cover-your-eyes strikeout rate? Oakland’s Khris Davis, the .247 batting average king, is having too down of an offensive year to qualify, but what about Justin Smoak, another true-outcome-centric batter who would just as soon take a walk as swing at a pitch? He’s not really representative either! He walks 16.3% of the time, double the league average — that’s clearly no good.

To answer this specifically and arbitrarily posed question, I settled on some rules. I chose average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, walk rate, strikeout rate, home run rate, and stolen bases per plate appearance as the statistics that I’ll use to define average. You could make an argument that including all triple-slash stats is focusing too much on batting lines, or that some batted ball data should be folded in, but for me, those don’t stand up. Read the rest of this entry »