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Officially, the Braves have sewn up the NL East, after having completed a four-game weekend sweep of the Phillies. The division was already more or less decided, but an unlikely Phillies sweep could’ve at least brought it down to the wire. Instead, the Phillies will play out the string, while the Braves get themselves set for the playoffs. On the one hand, the Phillies can’t be too disappointed — they would’ve been arriving a year or so ahead of time. On the other hand, the Braves arrived a year or so ahead of time. And this is a plot of the 2018 Phillies’ playoff odds:

As recently as August 7, the Phillies were in first place and 15 games over .500. Since then, they’ve gone an NL-worst 14-28, while the Braves have gone 27-19. Very obviously, when a team collapses, several components have to be involved. One thing I’ll highlight, though: dating back to August 8, according to Baseball Savant, Phillies pitchers have ranked seventh in baseball in expected wOBA allowed, while Braves pitchers have ranked 16th. And yet, Phillies pitchers have ranked 26th in baseball in actual wOBA allowed, while Braves pitchers have ranked third. Call it noise if you want. I’m certain that’s a part of it. The other part is defense. The Phillies’ team defense has let them down, and as the headline suggests, they’re on the verge of establishing a new record.

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Four of five NL Central teams were playoff-relevant for at least part of the 2018 season. The exception? The Cincinnati Reds. Despite having begun the season with hopes of emerging from their rebuild, the team will end the year having improved by only a couple of games over their 68-95 record from 2017.

The Setup

Cincinnati’s last period of competitive baseball burnt out quickly, the team’s most recent peak ending after the 2013 season and three playoff appearances in four years. The Reds weren’t exactly overeager to start rebuilding, an August trade of Jonathan Broxton to the Brewers (during one of Broxton’s ever-narrowing periods of effectiveness) representing the only nod to the future in 2014.

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In all likelihood, Tyler Clippard’s numbers are better than you realize. In 696 career appearances encompassing 752 innings, the 33-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander has a 3.17 ERA. Moreover, he’s allowed just 6.5 hits per nine innings, and his strikeout rate is a healthy 10.0. Add in durability — 72 outings annually since 2010 — and Clippard has quietly been one of baseball’s better relievers.

He also has 68 saves on his resume, and the fact that nearly half of them came in 2012 helps add to his under-the-radar status. It also helps explain the size of his bank account.

“My biggest jump in salary was the year I had 32 saves, and that was essentially the only reason,” explained Clippard, who was with the Washington Nationals at the time. “My overall body of work was pretty good, but numbers-wise it wasn’t one of my better seasons. I had a bad stretch where I had something like a 10.00 ERA, so I ended the year with a (3.72 ERA). But because I got all those saves, I received the big salary jump in salary arbitration.”

Circumstances proceeded to derail the righty’s earning power. The Nationals signed free-agent closer Rafael Soriano to a two-year, $22M contract, relegating Clippard to a set-up role. While Soriano was saving games, Clippard was being paid less than half that amount while logging a 2.29 ERA and allowing 84 hits in 141 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Javier Baez, Mookie Betts, Matt Chapman, Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, and Jose Ramirez are among the game’s best players. Together, they have averaged more than 6 WAR a piece this season. Six wins is the generally the point at which a player enters MVP contention. As a group, in other words, Baez and Betts and company have all played like MVP candidates.

Excellence in baseball isn’t the only trait shared in common among the aforementioned players, however. They’re all also basically the same age: each is currently competing in his age-25 season. If that seems like a lot of players all excelling at roughly the same point, it is: it’s quite possible, in fact, that we are witnessing the best group of 25-year-old position players the game has ever seen. The table below features the best seasons by a 25-year-old dating back to 1901.

This is a fascinating list, and I’ll ask you to note a few things. First is this: of the 33 players presented above, 18 of them are already in the Hall of Fame. Betts and Ramirez are obviously among the 15 who haven’t haven’t been elected to the Hall. Adrian Beltre, Buster Posey, and Albert Pujols are all probably bound for the Hall, but remain active. Aaron Judge isn’t as probably bound for the Hall of Fame but also remains active. That leaves just nine of 33 great 25-year-olds who both (a) are absent from the Hall but also (b) have finished their playing careers.

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The thing about the “opener” strategy is even the Rays couldn’t tell you exactly how much it’s helped. It’s hardly intended to make that dramatic a difference in the box score; it’s about slightly shifting the odds in a handful of matchups. If it didn’t affect the name of the starting pitcher, a strategy like this wouldn’t have made many headlines. But, the Rays knew what they were getting into. They knew that, in a way, they were turning baseball on its head when they started Sergio Romo. The Rays have stuck with the opener for a chunk of their starts ever since, and the evidence suggests it’s not not working.

As far as I can tell, the Rays have started 49 games with an opener. It’s not always easy to tell who’s an opener and who’s just a starter with a relatively low pitch count, but I feel reasonably confident about my selections. Over those 49 games, the Rays have gone 29-20. Overall, they’ve allowed 3.95 runs per nine innings in those contests, which would rank them fifth-best in baseball. They have a combined 14.8% K-BB% in those contests, which would rank them 11th-best in baseball. And remember, that’s pretty good, because the Rays don’t use an opener for, say, Blake Snell. This is what would be the back of their rotation, and the numbers are still easily better than average. We don’t know how the Rays would look *without* the opener, but the pitchers have pretty much all bought in. At least in Tampa, the opener doesn’t look like it’s going away.

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Historically speaking, pitchers don’t win MVP awards — or don’t win them often, at least. There are exceptions to the rule, but the honor historically has been reserved for a league’s top position player. The logic among voters generally follows a couple recognizable lines of reasoning. Pitchers don’t play every day, some voters argue. They have the Cy Young all to themselves, say others. Whatever the justification, the record reveals a preference for position players over pitchers. Consider: since reliever Dennis Eckersley won the American League MVP in 1992, only Clayton Kershaw and Justin Verlander have been recognized as their respective league’s most valuable player.

It’s possible that some voters aren’t using entirely sound logic to arrive at their conclusions. Even if they’re employing the wrong process, however, they’re still usually arriving at the correct result: pitchers simply aren’t the best players in their leagues all that often. Position players make an impact at the plate and on defense. They just have more opportunities to create value. Their roles give them a competitive advantage.

Or, they usually provide a competitive advantage. This season, however, that hasn’t been the case. This season, the best player in the National League is likely a pitcher. While a lot of obstacles stand between Jacob deGrom and an MVP award, he deserves consideration — and there’s a really good argument he deserves to win.

Before we get to the more compelling arguments in favor of deGrom’s MVP candidacy, it makes sense to entertain the less compelling ones, too. First among them is the Mets, who have been poor this year. While voters are explicitly told that the MVP needn’t come from a playoff team, voters have typically evaluated a player’s performance in the context of his team’s performance, the logic presumably being that the player in question has been an asset in the most important situations. While the Mets are heading for a high draft pick now, it would be unfair to say that deGrom hasn’t been pitching in meaningful games. Thanks to their strong start, the Mets’ postseason hopes were remained alive into mid-June. Even if you wanted to assess deGrom some sort of penalty for playing for a bad team — let’s say you discount his second-half WAR by 50% — he would still lead the National League by that measure. It’s also worth noting that deGrom leads all National League pitchers in win probability added. In the games he’s pitched, in other words, he has been incredibly helpful to the cause of potentially winning a game, even if the end result has been disappointing.

Ultimately, there will be voters who are dogmatic in their views on which players are eligible for the MVP award. To those who contend, for example, that pitchers oughtn’t win it or that it should go to a member of a playoff team, I have little to say other than the rules and ballot history suggest otherwise. For those who are prepared to entertain the possibility of such a thing, however, then Jacob deGrom has a really good case.

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Monday evening, the Pirates beat the Royals, 7-6. The Royals were up by two in the bottom of the eighth, but the Pirates rallied to tie, and then they walked it off an inning later. With Kevin Kramer leading off second base, Jacob Stallings sent a low line drive into left field, and Kramer beat Alex Gordon’s throw home. The Pirates rushed out of the dugout to celebrate the victory:

Now, this season, the Pirates are going nowhere. The Royals are even worse. The win did, I suppose, push the Pirates back over .500, but it’s worth remembering that every game is a competition. Every game features major-league baseball players trying to win, and so every actual win legitimately feels like an achievement. Especially for teams full of players just trying to make a good impression to extend their careers. Recently, the dreadful Royals walked off against the dreadful White Sox, after a throwing error on a would-be sac bunt. The Royals celebrated in regular fashion:

So part of this is just that a walk-off is fun. You never know when you’re going to be part of another. Seize happiness; it’s fleeting. Celebrate your achievements. Few people in the world ever get to participate in a win in the major leagues. What an incredible thing it is to experience.

There’s something else about the Pirates’ victory, though. None of the players would’ve known it at the time, but you can see their celebration as symbolic if you want. The win was the Pirates’ 75th of the season. But it was also the National League’s 151st win in interleague play. Every year, every team plays 20 interleague games. That means there are 300 interleague games in all. And for the first time since 2003, the American League isn’t going to win the majority of them. It won’t win exactly half of them. Interleague play, in 2018, belongs to the senior circuit.

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The Braves have won plenty of games, and Ronald Acuna has hit plenty of homers. A common analytical writer trick is to open with an anecdote, to suck readers in before hitting them with statistics. I am a common analytical writer, but for this intro I want to focus on a Ronald Acuna single, leading off a game the Braves lost. And honestly, I don’t even care so much about the single itself. The Braves lost to the Cardinals on Monday. Acuna led off the bottom of the first with a ground-ball single off Miles Mikolas. The ball was hit well enough, but to understand what Acuna has already become, it’s most important to look at the process.

Acuna took a first-pitch strike. Happens sometimes. Especially leading off games. Mikolas throws an awful lot of strikes. Acuna was behind 0-and-1, but then he took a close fastball for a ball.

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With the Texas Rangers, we get to the first team that’s actually rebuilding rather than Rebuilding™. While the prospect of contending at the same time didn’t exactly come to fruition — Texas is the sixth team in this series, after all — the Rangers are making a legitimate go at threading the needle between competing in the present and preparing for the future.

The Setup

Because they’re both based in Texas, it’s natural to think of the Rangers’ attempts to become relevant again in the context of the Astros’ own efforts. The two cases might not be precisely analogous, however: while Houston absolutely needed to take their own house down to the studs, Texas may be able to escape without going to such extremes. The Rangers had much higher payrolls baked into the cake in 2017 than Houston ever did, with little real hope of shedding most of those high-end costs. Texas has also never let the farm system sink to the levels of voiditude of those late Ed Wade Astros teams or recent rebuilders like the Orioles or Marlins.

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Consider this your periodic reminder of how awesome Mike Trout is. Including Sunday’s games, the best player in baseball has recorded a 192 wRC+, a career-high that leads all qualified hitters. He’s in the top 10 in the major leagues in homers (T-9th), walk rate (1st), BABIP (6th), isolated power (1st), batting average (5th), on-base percentage (1st), slugging percentage (3rd), and WAR (T-1st). He just crossed the nine-win mark for the fifth time in his career. He only just turned 27.

Based on reports, it appears as though the Angels expect this kind of production to continue for a while longer. Consider:

It’s not difficult to see Anaheim’s logic here. Mike Trout may very well end up as the greatest player ever, and that’s the sort of player you want to keep around because, well, he’s better than everyone else.

Of course, when Heyman use the word “lifetime” what he really means is “until that point at which Trout retires.” The Angels, presumably, would like one of baseball’s best ever players to end his career having played only for their team. There’s probably some value in that. How much value is a question for a different time, but “some” is an adequate answer for the moment.

But what if we were to understand “lifetime” in a more literal sense. What if, hypothetically, the Angels wanted to sign Mike Trout to an actual lifetime contract? Could they legally employ Mike Trout until he shuffles off this mortal coil, likely having hit 20 homers in each year of his 80s?

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