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The San Francisco Giants have 23 wins on the season. One week ago today they won for the 20th time, with the decision going to Caleb Baragar. It was the rookie left-hander’s second W in two days, and his fifth on the year to go with one loss. This isn’t 1972 Steve Carlton we’re talking about either. Baragar is a reliever who has pitched all of 17-and-two-thirds big-league innings.

Has a pitcher ever recorded six decisions — moreover five wins — in so few innings to begin a career? I wasn’t able to find an answer in time for this column — a call to the Elias Sports Bureau went for naught — but there is a pretty decent chance that Baragar holds a unique distinction.

The 27-year-old Jenison, Michigan native is taking his newfound habit of gobbling up Ws with a grain of salt.

“It’s a stat — ‘winning pitcher’ — that doesn’t always tell the whole story,” said Baragar, who has received some good-natured ribbing from Giants starters. “It’s not something where I’m walking around saying, ‘Hey, I have five wins in the big leagues.’ For me, they’re important because the team won, and this is a shortened season where every game matters. It’s by no means a personal stat that I’m holding my hat on.”

The first of his wins came in his big-league debut on August 25. Notably, it came against the best team in baseball. Having no fans in the stands worked to his advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I came up with a simple idea: estimate home runs based on exit velocity. That sounds pretty straightforward, and it mostly is. For example, here are your odds of hitting a home run at various exit velocities when you put the ball in the air in 2020:

Of course, some caveats apply. I’m only looking at batted balls between 15 and 45 degrees, and the sample size is still small. But for the most part, and excluding the vagaries of that small sample, the conclusion makes sense. Hit the ball harder, and you’ll find more home runs.

Of course, real life is notoriously fickle. Sometimes you mash the ball and it’s a degree too low, or you hit it to the wrong part of the ballpark, or a gust of wind takes it. Sometimes you play in Yankee Stadium and get a cheapie, or smoke a line drive that leaves a dent in the Green Monster. Sometimes you make perfect contact, and it’s at 15 degrees instead of 25 so it’s a smashed single to right instead of a bat flip highlight.

Wait — hit it at the wrong angle? That seems like something in a batter’s control. It partially is, but I’ve chosen to exclude it for two reasons. First, I’ll point again to this excellent Alex Chamberlain article. You should really read it, but the conclusion is basically this: batters control exit velocity and pitchers control launch angle. That’s not exclusively true, and there are obviously fly ball and groundball hitters, but if you start giving batters credit for the exact angle of their batted balls instead of just generally saying “in the air” or “not,” you might be going too far.

Second, this way is simpler! Simplicity has value. Overspecify a model, and you can get very precise results that are also hard to interpret, or that depend heavily on small fluctuations in initial conditions. That’s not to say that such a model is a bad idea — merely that it’s not strictly upside to add more and more gadgets and whizbangs to it. You also risk losing the signal you’re looking for, which in this case is the ability to absolutely hit the snot out of the ball, sending it skyward at stupid speeds. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a sentence you can find, on this very website, about Nelson Cruz: “Age and injuries have sapped Cruz’s speed in the outfield… Cruz has always struck out more than the average player, but his walk rate has dropped back below average the last few seasons. Cruz also has a durability problem, only playing in more than 130 games once in his career.” The fact that an outfield position is even in consideration should give you a clue that this isn’t current, but what year would you guess? 2016? 2017?

Here’s a further clue: the next line was “His (last year) was of course shortened by a drug suspension, which adds its own peculiar twist to his projection.” Yes, this was his 2014 writeup, penned just before he signed with the Baltimore Orioles. If that feels forever ago, that’s because it was. It’s two Cruz contracts, and 26.1 WAR, ago. Whoops!

That’s no slight on Matt Klaessen, who wrote that fantasy profile. Predicting Cruz’s age-related decline is a yearly tradition at this point. Here we are, though, in 2020, and the decline is still nowhere to be seen. Cruz is hitting .343/.432/.685, good for a 193 wRC+, the fulcrum of Minnesota’s offense. Naturally, then, I’m going to predict that Cruz is in for a decline… kind of. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball on the pro side and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I’m starting with the National League East. Players who have appeared in big league games are covered below, as are a few players who have been at the offsite camps all season. The results of changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.

Atlanta Braves

In an August post, I talked about how I was moving away from hitters who swing recklessly but failed to mention that I’d slid Drew Waters from the back of the 55 FV tier — around 50th overall — down to 76th overall, near a bunch of the high ceiling/high variance hitters grouped toward the back of the top 100.

I also slid Kyle Wright (now a 40+ FV — I know he has graduated off of other publications’ lists but even after counting his time on the roster I still have him classified as rookie-eligible, though perhaps I’m miscounting?) and Bryse Wilson (45+ FV). Both of them are throwing hard (Wilson up to 96 over the weekend, Wright up to 97 yesterday) but because they’re of the sink/tail variety, their fastballs don’t have margin for error in the strike zone and both of them too often miss in hittable locations. Each has the secondary stuff to start, but neither has seized a rotation spot even though Atlanta desperately needs someone to. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Block knows the Central. Not only do the Pittsburgh Pirates, the team he serves as a play-by-play announcer for, compete in the National League Central, their inter-league schedule this year is solely comprised of the American League Central. As a result, Block has been getting regular looks at two of the game’s most evenly-matched divisions. Neither had a clear-cut favorite coming into the season, and by and large there haven’t been many surprises.

How would Block rank the teams and players he’s seen this season? That was the crux of a conversation I had with the TV (and sometimes radio) voice of the Pirates prior to Sunday’s game.

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David Laurila: Which is the best team you’ve seen this year?

Joe Block: “I think it’s a tossup between the three AL Central teams we’ve seen: the White Sox, the Twins, and Cleveland. Cleveland wasn’t hitting when we saw them, although when you look at that lineup they should hit. I don’t know that I can put them lower than anyone else because of their elite pitching. It seems like their bullpen is complete. Their rotation is obviously very good, even with the trade of Mike Clevinger, which happened since we saw them. I’m of the belief that pitching wins in the postseason. You can argue whether it’s relief pitching, or starting pitching like we saw with Washington last year, but I think they have what it takes to go deep in the postseason.

“Minnesota is coming off a great year. They’ve added to their rotation, and they also have a good bullpen, especially the back end. Romo–Rogers is a really nice one-two. They obviously hit, and they’re not a team that’s all-or-nothing. They have some good hitters, just plain ‘hitters’ as opposed to softball-style home run, swing-and-miss-type cats. So they’re very much a big part of the picture in the AL Central. If you look at their numbers, they haven’t hit to the degree they have in the past, but they’re dangerous.

“Then there are the White Sox, who we’ve seen for two games. Lucas Giolito threw a no-hitter, and we also saw Dallas Keuchel. They’ve clearly added to their team. It’s always an en vogue selection when you have a bunch of young players coming up at the same time, and go out and get a few key free agents, and in this case it’s warranted. The only possible flaw is that they’ve got a very right-handed lineup, but other than that they don’t have a lot of weaknesses. They’ve got a lot of good young players who — I’m going to use a cliché here — don’t know how to lose. I kind of buy into that a little bit. They’re new, they’re exciting, they’re good — and the veterans they got make sense for that team. They’re very balanced. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 17, the New York Yankees finished up a 6-3 victory against the Boston Red Sox and extended their win streak to six games. The team was 16-6 on the season and had the best record in baseball. They then commenced a seven-game losing streak on their way to a three week stretch during which the club went 5-14, bringing its season mark to 21-20. In a 162-game season, 19 games is less than 12% of the season, but this year, it represents nearly a third of the season and nearly half of the team’s games played thus far. With just 19 games left to go, another 5-14 stretch would push the Yankees out of the playoffs. While that scenario isn’t likely — our Playoff Odds have the Yankees at 89% odds entering games today — it’s worth exploring what’s gone wrong and whether we can expect it to continue.

To take a broad view, here are the Yankees’ major-league ranks with the season split between their good and bad stretches:

The offense and relief pitching have fallen off a cliff while the starting pitching has remained middle of the pack. It’s fair to say that the rotation should be better, but it has been about as effective during the free fall as it was when things were going well. Gerrit Cole has had a run of bad starts and James Paxton has been dinged up; Michael King has had one good start and one bad one during this stretch, while Jordan Montgomery has had some clunkers, too. Still, Masahiro Tanaka has pitched well and Deivi García and J.A. Happ have turned in some decent starts. The rotation has underperformed expectations the entire season (Yankees starters ranked first on our preseason Positional Power Rankings), but they’ve been more average than bad pretty consistently. Given that the Yankees have had four doubleheaders in the last three weeks, the rotation has arguably held up pretty well. If Paxton were healthy and Cole was pitching as expected, the rotation would be one of the best in baseball. That they aren’t is hurting the team, but it’s hardly the sole source of New York’s troubles. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: An abridged version of this study appeared at FiveThirtyEight on August 17, 2020 under the title “What Really Gives Left-Handed Pitchers Their Edge?”

Left-handed pitching has long been one of the most prized commodities in professional baseball. Teams strive to obtain lefty pitchers, and those pitchers recognize their competitive edge. Two-sport athlete Tom Glavine explained his career choice this way: “I love both sports, but the deciding factor was, being a left-handed pitcher, I had a huge advantage in baseball because of that, and I didn’t have that type of advantage in hockey.” Even a century ago, Tris Speaker expressed the sport’s reverence for southpaws – if falling short as a trade analyst – when he opined that “taking the best left-handed pitcher in baseball and converting him into a right fielder is one of the dumbest things I ever heard.”

Major league rosters reflect this preference for lefties today. Although just 10% of American men throw with their left hand, fully 28% of innings thrown by major league pitchers come from the left side. And before you blame lefty relief specialists for this disparity, consider that southpaws also make 29% of starts. Any way that you cut the data, lefty pitchers make it to the big leagues about three times as frequently as righties, given their share of the general population. What accounts for this huge surplus of southpaws? Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Grieve had a relatively nondescript playing career. From 1970-1979, the now-72-year-old former outfielder logged 474 hits, 65 of which left the yard, and a 100 wRC+. Those numbers came primarily with the Texas Rangers, who had drafted Grieve out of the University of Michigan while the franchise was still located in Washington DC.

Grieve is a product of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and while he grew up rooting for the New York Yankees, one of his biggest thrills came in his home state’s most-famous sports venue. The date was May 5, 1974, and the event itself was proceeded by a certain amount of trepidation.

“Billy Martin was the manager at the time,” explained Grieve, who is now a TV analyst for the Rangers. “Jim Fregosi and I had been playing against left-handed pitchers, and Mike Hargrove and Jim Spencer had been playing against right-handed pitchers. Anyway, the people of Pittsfield had called the Red Sox and were somehow able to set up ‘Tom Grieve Day’ at Fenway Park between games of a Sunday doubleheader. Usually when there’s a day for someone at a ballpark, it’s for a Hall of Fame player, so I can remember going to Boston knowing that it was going to happen, and being a little bit embarrassed.”

Not to mention wary of what his manager might think. Not only was Grieve a 26-year-old platoon player, Martin had donned pinstripes for much of his own playing career. Moreover, Martin was notoriously as combative as they come. Read the rest of this entry »

Not for nothing did they call Tom Seaver “The Franchise.” When he debuted in 1967, the Mets lost 101 games, their fifth time in triple digits in six seasons of existence. Two years later, he led the team not only to its first winning record but to an upset of the powerhouse Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. A month shy of his 25th birthday, he had given “the Miracle Mets” a leg up against the crosstown Yankees, who were going through a fallow period after dominating baseball for four and a half decades, and in doing so he became an all-American icon. Uniting a powerful, efficient “drop and drive” delivery with a cerebral approach and impeccable command, he would go on to check virtually every important box in his 20-year major league career, winning three Cy Young awards, making 12 All-Star teams, leading his league in a triple crown category 11 times, tossing a no-hitter, surpassing the 300-win and 3,000-strikeout milestones, and setting a record with the highest share of a Hall of Fame vote when he became eligible in 1992.

Last summer, in celebrating the 50th anniversary of that championship, the Mets announced that they would officially designate the address of Citi Field as 41 Seaver Way (after his uniform number, which they retired in 1988), and dedicate a statue to “Tom Terrific.” Alas, by that point, Seaver’s family had gone public with the news that he had been diagnosed with dementia and was retiring from public life; he had battled health problems for years, including multiple bouts with Lyme disease. He missed the anniversary festivities and never lived to see the statue’s completion. Seaver passed away on Wednesday at age 75. According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he died peacefully in his sleep from complications of Lewy body dementia and COVID-19.

Seaver spent 11 1/2 of his 20 seasons with the Mets, departing in rather traumatic fashion first on June 15, 1977, in a trade to the Reds that was dubbed “The Midnight Massacre,” and then again in 1983, when after returning to New York via a trade and spending a season back in Queens, he was left unprotected in what was called the free agent compensation draft. He spent 2 1/2 years with the White Sox and his final half-season aiding the 1986 Red Sox’s pennant push, though a late-season knee injury kept him off the postseason roster and he could only watch as his former team won its second World Series.

Seaver was so durable that he made at least 32 starts and threw at least 200 innings in the first 13 seasons of his career and in 16 in all, the last at age 40. He finished with an ERA+ of at least 100 while qualifying for the ERA title in 18 of those seasons, including his final one at age 41; that’s tied with Walter Johnson for fourth behind only Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, and Cy Young, all with 19. His 3,640 strikeouts still rank sixth all-time, while his 311 wins rank 18th. He’s seventh in shutouts (61), 15th in starts (647), 19th in innings (4,783), walks (1,390) and home runs allowed (380), and in a virtual tie for 22nd among pitchers with at least 2,500 innings in ERA+ (127).

On the advanced statistical front, his 109.9 bWAR (including offense) ranks sixth behind only Johnson, Young, Clemens, Pete Alexander, and Kid Nichols. His seven-year peak score is “only” 20th, but his 84.6 JAWS is eighth; every pitcher ahead of him save for Clemens last pitched in the majors prior to World War II. Read the rest of this entry »

Even in a wackily truncated season like this one, the trade deadline serves as an important landmark in the playoff hunt. While players will still be released and signed, lose their jobs and get injured, the dramatic changes in team quality are largely over. For a projectionist such as myself, it also comes as a relief as I no longer have to worry about spending time crunching the numbers only to have a 14-player, three-way trade go down just after I file an article. The players teams have on their rosters now are more or less the ones they have at their disposal over the rest of the season.

Before we get to the division-by-division standings updates, let’s take a quick look at how the last few days altered teams’ playoff odds. I projected the rest of the season for each team based on both their roster prior to the deadline’s moves and their roster as it stands post-deadline. I then compared the results to see which club saw the biggest rest-of-season gains and losses.

Read the rest of this entry »