Which characteristics cause a team to either excel or struggle in the postseason? It’s a long-standing debate, and most baseball fans have a preferred theory. Some think it’s having an ace. Others think good contact hitting, or a team’s momentum, is what pushes a club over the top. Some people — the ones most likely to get annoyed when they read my work — think that clutch performances or having veterans with playoff experience on the roster is what causes a club to shine in October. Sadly, the best answer is rather boring: What makes a team play well in the postseason is simply being the better team overall. In 2022, I examined 63 team characteristics throughout baseball history to see if any of them presaged clubs’ fall fates. Outside of leaning more heavily on home runs to score — top pitchers who struggle in the playoffs are far more likely to be felled by homers than issuing walks or failing to strike hitters out — and a barely significant tendency for younger teams to overperform, there just wasn’t much there, there.

But that’s not to say that playoff baseball is identical to regular season baseball. After all, the former is a sprint while the latter is a marathon, and the challenges in each scenario are different. When I ran the numbers for the aforementioned article, the focus was on how the playoff teams played, rather than who played. I specially used a playoff model that estimated team quality as being different in the regular season due to roster construction considerations. Teams are better able to leverage their front-end talent over a few crucial weeks than a six-month period. The qualities of a team’s fifth starter (not to mention their sixth, seventh and eighth) are less crucial to their success come October, and the key bats in the lineup (if healthy) are almost always going to be playing, thanks to the additional days off that clubs get in the postseason. As the 2019 Washington Nationals demonstrated, you can even paper over half your bullpen being a train wreck. Read the rest of this entry »

Even if you’re not a Braves fan, you probably know the rough contours of what’s gone down for them this season. The preseason World Series favorites have had horrid injury luck all year. The reigning MVP, Ronald Acuña Jr., scuffled for 50 games before tearing his ACL. Spencer Strider blew out his elbow. Austin Riley broke his hand, Ozzie Albies and Sean Murphy each missed two months, Michael Harris II has been banged up; you’ve heard it all before. And the stars who have been around haven’t played up to their potential. Only Chris Sale and Marcell Ozuna, two past-their-prime retreads the Braves expected to be support pieces, have given the team a fighting chance.

That was a good description of the Braves for part of the season, but it doesn’t capture their recent form. Harris started the year in a horrendous slump; he has a 122 wRC+ since the All-Star break. Riley brought the power before his injury. Jorge Soler has been a nice addition. But perhaps most importantly, Matt Olson is back.

Olson put up the best season of his career in 2023, and it wasn’t particularly close. He launched 54 homers, got on base at a career-best rate, and played every game en route to a gaudy 6.6 WAR. He finished fourth in MVP voting, his first top-five finish, and led the majors in homers and RBI. Our projections thought he’d be one of the best hitters in baseball this year, and they weren’t alone. Read the rest of this entry »

With six days left in the regular season — and six games for most teams — three teams have clinched their respective divisions (the Brewers, Guardians, and Phillies), and two others have clinched playoff berths (the Dodgers and Yankees). That leaves 10 teams fighting for seven spots, but even with the playoff field not fully set, we thought it would be a fun and worthwhile exercise to highlight various facets of the potential October teams by going around the diamond to identify the strongest and weakest at each position in each league.

This is something of an offshoot of my annual Replacement Level Killers series, and in fact even some confirmed October participants have spots that still fit the bill as true lineup sinkholes — think first base for the Yankees and Brewers, to pick one position from among the aforementioned teams — but this time with no trade deadline to help fill them. For this, I’ll be considering full-season performance but with an eye to who’s best or worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Unlike the Killers series, I’ll also be considering pitching, with the shortening of rotations and bullpens part of the deliberations.

For the first installment of this series, I’ll focus on each position’s best among the remaining National League contenders. In this case that limits the field to the Phillies, Brewers, Dodgers, Padres, Mets, Diamondbacks, and Braves, with the last three of those teams fighting for two Wild Card spots. Read the rest of this entry »

I feel a little bad for Shota Imanaga. The Cubs left-hander is sixth among qualified starters in ERA and ninth in K-BB%. He’s thrown 173 1/3 innings, which is a bunch by modern standards, and while we don’t put much probative value in pitcher record in this day and age, Imanaga is still 15-3 for a pretty mediocre Cubs team. After Imanaga threw seven scoreless innings on Sunday — the second time he’s done that this month — I saw a little bit of Twitter chatter from people wondering where his Rookie of the Year buzz went?

FIP doesn’t like Imanaga that much, because he gives up a bunch of home runs, but even after getting dinged for that, Imanaga has put up a 3.1-WAR season as a rookie. There are years where that, in addition to his pretty uncontroversially awesome traditional stats, would be good enough to win Imanaga some hardware.

Unfortunately, Imanaga is the third competitor in a pretty thrilling two-man race between Paul Skenes and Jackson Merrill. Do you want the flashy giant with triple-digit heat and an unhittable off-speed pitch that defines classification? Or do you want the guy who learned a brand new position basically overnight at age 20, and oh by the way is nearly hitting .300 with power in a park that’s unfriendly to hitters?

Me? I’d go with Skenes, but would have a hard time mounting a negative argument against Merrill. Either one would be a deserving winner. As for Imanaga, I’m actually not sure he’d be the third man on my ballot if I had one. That’d probably be Jackson Chourio, who would have a legitimate case if Merrill hadn’t broken the curve. Tyler Fitzgerald isn’t a sexy name, but he’s got a 135 wRC+ in 90 games, mostly as a shortstop. Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s case was undone by injuries, but he’s nearly equaled Imanaga’s WAR total in roughly half as many innings. He’ll get down-ballot votes as well.

The thing is, Rookie of the Year is a volatile competition. The MVP and Cy Young classes vary in quality from year to year, but not by much. The list of best players in baseball is pretty stable from one season to the next.

Best rookies, however? That’s another question. Future MVPs and Hall of Famers don’t bubble up from the minors in a steady stream. Sometimes they come two and three at a time. Sometimes they come in April, other times in August, too late to influence the Rookie of the Year race. Sometimes there are several in one league but none in the other.

Some years, well, they mint a new plaque for each league every year, and you’ve got to give it to somebody. And that’s not even counting flash-in-the-pan cases who won the award on merit but fizzled out later. For instance: Bob Hamelin is easy to mock because he was a pudgy guy who wore glasses and was a replacement-level player for bad teams for almost all of his short career. But the man raked in 1994: .282/.388/.599, with 24 homers and 56 walks in just 374 plate appearances. He earned his spot as a historical footnote, don’t let anyone tell you different.

But in other cases the first great season of a superstar career goes completely unrewarded. Or a relatively underhyped rookie puts in a big first season and barely gets noticed. Which is what will happen to Imanaga, in all likelihood.

At times like this, I think of Jaime García. Like Imanaga, García was an unassuming-looking lefty for an NL Central team who would’ve had a real shot at Rookie of the Year if he weren’t up against two monsters. In 2010, García posted a 2.70 ERA in 163 1/3 innings. And this was back when a 2.70 ERA meant something — that was a 69 ERA-. He did get a single first-place Rookie of the Year vote, but only one, because Buster Posey and Jason Heyward were also in that class. Posey took his first step toward Cooperstown with that season, and Heyward set himself up for a lifetime of disappointment by posting a career-high .393 OBP. It takes a lot to get noticed in that environment.

I went back through the Rookie of the Year races since 1980, which is when voting went from one player per ballot to (brushing off my old comparative politics textbooks) ranked choice voting. And I’ll say this: As much as the BBWAA voters went through a rough time during the Fire Joe Morgan era, and as much as the Hall of Fame continues to be a contentious battlefield pitting the forces of reason against the forces of silliness, the writers have gotten to the right answer most of the time. There are always cranks and outliers (I was amused to discover Ichiro was not a unanimous Rookie of the Year in 2001, and that five voters chose Miguel Andujar over Shohei Ohtani in 2018), but the collective has been solid.

So, in addition to García himself, I present the Jaime García All-Stars:

A key characteristic of the Jaime García All-Stars is that they did not actually deserve the award. So while Orel Hershiser was awesome in 1984, posting a 2.66 ERA in 189 2/3 innings split between the rotation and the bullpen, he had the misfortune of coming up against Samuel, who hit .272 and stole 72 bases. And also Gooden, who put up one of the greatest rookie seasons of all time. Tough beat.

Brown had a case to win Rookie of the Year by WAR, but Olson was a reliever and we all know WAR doesn’t count for relievers. What does count: a 1.69 ERA and 27 saves. It’s fine. But this was the start of Brown — for reasons I still don’t understand — being wildly underrated by awards voters. He never won a Cy Young and really only came close once, in 1998, when he lost a three-way battle with Tom Glavine and Trevor Hoffman. (Glavine, at the risk of reiterating an opinion that’s gonna get me yelled at, is the most overrated pitcher of his generation, which makes Brown being snubbed for him all the more fitting.) And, of course, Brown lasted a single year on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot. When I’m dictator of baseball, Brown will get the respect he deserves.

Ichiro and Pujols were two of the most obvious Rookies of the Year ever, and then backed it up by putting on lengthy Hall of Fame-worthy careers. But their success obscures how good the rest of that rookie class was: a future Hall of Famer in Sabathia, several Hall of Very Gooders in Oswalt, Soriano, and Rollins. Plus Adam Dunn. And a David Eckstein sighting! Oswalt is the only one who really ought to feel aggrieved at not winning Rookie of the Year — everyone else burst into the league with decent-but-not-great campaigns — but this is quite a list of names to have beaten back so resoundingly.

The WAR totals make this look like a miscarriage of justice, but it’s important to remember that Braun hit 34 home runs and stole 15 bases in just 113 games, while Tulowitzki played 155. Also, the defensive metrics have Tulowitzki an astonishing 49.1 runs ahead of Braun. Based on the what happened to both players later in their careers, I’m inclined to believe that Braun was a bad third baseman and Tulo a very good shortstop, but I have a hard time trusting that big a gap based on data from 2007.

Either way, poor Hunter Pence got lost in the shuffle. A literal shuffle, one might say, given Pence’s unorthodox running style. Even so, a 132 wRC+ in 108 games is a great rookie season — hardware is routinely won with less.

García, Imanaga, Ryu… I’d argue J.A. Happ in 2009, though he finished second in a pretty forgettable class. Voters like left-handers without elite velocity enough to notice them, but not enough to give them serious consideration for the top of the ballot. I get Ryu’s falling down the pecking order because he was a 26-year-old KBO veteran, and because he was overshadowed not only by Clayton Kershaw, but by Puig, who was the most buzz-worthy player in the league at the time. The only person who came close was, well, Fernández.

I remember this race between Acuña and Soto being much closer than it was. That happens sometimes in award voting (the Jose Altuve vs. Aaron Judge race for AL MVP in 2017 was like this too) where there’s a clear closely matched top two, but rather than that manifesting in an even split of votes, everyone comes down on the same side of a close call.

Either way, Buehler, despite his single first-place vote, was a distant third. It’s in keeping with a career where Buehler was always among the best on his team, or in the league, or whatever cohort you want to choose, but never clearly the best.

Another close race with a lopsided result. And in contrast to the 2018 NL race, where Acuña had the better season, I think the voters missed on this one. Not that Rodríguez wasn’t special — or that he didn’t turn into an absolute superstar — but I think the difficulty of posting a 135 wRC+ from behind the plate, as Rutschman did as a rookie, continues to be wildly underrated. Even so, the true hard case here is Kwan, who hit .298/.373/.400, stole 19 bases, and still wound up an afterthought. Behind his old college teammate, no less! What an indignity.

This was an even stronger rookie class than that, with Bobby Witt Jr., George Kirby, and Jeremy Peña also getting down-ballot votes. Kirby didn’t have a huge workload, Witt had not fully crystallized into what he would become (he hit 20 homers and stole 30 bases, but posted an OBP of just .294), and your opinion of Peña probably depends on which defensive metrics you believe.

Kwan was incredible as a rookie by anyone’s standards, but was still clearly the third-best player in his class.

This being a highly subjective exercise, this is not — and cannot be, really — an exhaustive list. (Please share your favorite forgotten rookie season in the comments.) But the larger point is this: Imanaga is still having a great rookie campaign, even if he doesn’t get any hardware to show for it. Sometimes there’s just a better rookie.

As we head into the final week of the regular season, 15 teams still show signs of life when it comes to claiming a playoff berth. On the one hand, that sounds impressive — half the majors still contending — and it’s on par with last year and better than 2022. Nonetheless, it still boils down to just three teams falling by the wayside, and just one of the six division leads having a greater than 1% chance of changing hands. As noted previously, since the adoption of the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement and its four-round playoff system, the options for scheduling chaos have been replaced by the excitement of math. On-field tiebreakers are a thing of the past, with head-to-head records usually all that are required to sort things out.

On Friday I checked in on the race to secure first-round byes, which go to the teams with the top two records in each league, so today I’ll shift focus to what’s left of the Wild Card races. Thankfully, there’s still enough at stake for both leagues to offering some amount of intrigue. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, a veteran right-hander was designated for assignment. Not long ago, this pitcher was one of the best relievers in baseball. In fact, through the first half of the 2024 season, he maintained an ERA and FIP under 3.00. Yet, over the past couple of months, he has produced some of the ugliest numbers of any reliever in the sport. Following what was arguably the single worst appearance of his career, his team – the eighth he’s been a part of in his big league career – decided enough was enough. His club added him with the intention that he would play a key role in the postseason, but he quickly fell so far down the bullpen depth chart that he dropped off the roster entirely.

Oh, and no, it’s not the guy you’re thinking of. I’m talking about Dylan Floro. Less than two months after scooping him up at the trade deadline, the Diamondbacks DFA’d Floro on Sunday. They released him two days later. His 2024 season almost certainly has come to an early close.

Floro isn’t Craig Kimbrel. He’s never been the Rolaids Reliever of the Year, nor the DHL Delivery Man of the Year, nor the GameStop Late-Game Stopper of the Year, though admittedly, I made the last one up. Floro has been cut from his team’s 40-man roster more times (six) than Kimbrel has been left off the All-Star roster (five). You can tell as much from the headshots on their player pages. Floro looks utterly forlorn, resigned to play another meaningless season of Major League Baseball. Kimbrel is smiling like he thinks he’s pulling off that haircut. That’s the kind of confidence that only comes with nine All-Star appearances: Read the rest of this entry »

Prior to talking to him in Wrigley Field’s home clubhouse in late August, my knowledge of Ethan Roberts mostly consisted of his being a 27-year-old, right-handed reliever with limited big-league experience and a high spin rate. I also knew he’d had Tommy John surgery in 2022 as that was mentioned, along with his spin, when he was blurbed as an honorable mention on our 2023 Chicago Cubs Top Prospects list.

The 2018 fourth-round pick out of Tennessee Technological University has added to his résumé since we spoke and now has 27 appearances for his career, 18 of them this year. His numbers in the current campaign include a 2.66 ERA and 23 strikeouts over 23-and-two-thirds innings. Three days ago he tossed a scoreless frame against the Washington Nationals and was credited with his first big-league win.

Roberts learned that he spun the ball well upon entering pro ball. Not long thereafter, he learned that not all spin is created equal.

“It was my first time around technology,” explained Roberts. “I threw a bullpen and my fastball was spinning pretty high. It was spinning like 2,800 [RPMs] —right now it’s more 2,600-2,700 — and I actually throw it very supinated. It’s kind of like a natural cutter. But yeah, when I got on technology there, in Arizona [at the Cubs spring training complex], I was like, ‘I don’t know what any of this means, but thanks for telling me.’”

Which brings us to his spin characteristics, as well as to pitch classifications. Read the rest of this entry »

In retrospect, of course he was going to do it. On Thursday, Shohei Ohtani became the first player in history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season, and he did it loudly. His 6-for-6, three-homer, two-steal game would be among the best single-game lines by any player all year even if it hadn’t simultaneously helped him achieve a feat that no one has ever done before. Sometimes you just have to marvel at the greatness.

Ohtani wasn’t supposed to be at his peak this year. He’s rehabbing from UCL repair surgery and thus not pitching. His two-way prowess has always been part of the Ohtani mystique, and 2024 felt like a warmup for next year, his first fully operational campaign with the Dodgers. But instead, Ohtani reached new heights as a hitter this year. He’s already set career bests for every counting stat imaginable. He’d have highs in every rate stat too, if it weren’t for his offensive breakthrough in 2023 (.304/.412/.654 for a 179 wRC+).

Ohtani always felt like a threat to hit 50 homers – he hit 46 in 2021 and 44 last year — but 50 steals felt like a pipe dream; he’d swiped only 86 total bases in 716 games before this year, and even with last year’s rule changes that increased stolen base attempts and success rates, he swiped only 20 bags in 135 games.
Read the rest of this entry »

Craig Kimbrel lost his job as the Orioles’ closer back in July due to his erratic performance. Now he’s out of a job completely. With just 11 games remaining in the regular season, the Orioles designated the 36-year-old righty for assignment on Wednesday, guaranteeing that he won’t be a participant in this year’s postseason, either for the playoff-bound Orioles or anyone else.

The decision came less than 24 hours after the worst outing of Kimbrel’s career. Called upon in the ninth inning of Tuesday night’s game with the Orioles trailing the Giants 4-0, Kimbrel struck out Patrick Bailey, but then all hell broke loose: a single, a steal, a wild pitch, a walk, a sacrifice bunt for which the throw home was too late, another walk, a strikeout, a two-run single, and an RBI double. After he departed, Matt Bowman yielded another two-run single, with both runs charged to Kimbrel’s ledger. It was the first time in 837 major league outings that he had allowed six runs; he’d never even allowed five before, but it was the eighth outing out of his last 11 in which Kimbrel was scored upon, raising his ERA to an unsightly 5.33.

On the one hand, this is a somewhat shocking turn of events for a player who made his ninth All-Star team just last season and plausibly could have this year as well. On the other hand, Kimbrel has been so ineffective lately that without his gaudy résumé — he’s fifth on the career saves list with 440, and may one day wind up in Cooperstown — and his big salary, he might have lost his roster spot awhile ago, particularly on a team whose bullpen has been a problem for months.

“We have so much respect for Craig and his career and what he’s done for the game, how long he’s pitched, how long he’s pitched well,” manager Brandon Hyde told reporters on Wednesday. “So it’s never easy to say goodbye to someone that’s done a lot. A heck of a first half for us, helped us win a ton of games. He’s an amazing teammate. He’s incredible in the clubhouse and just a class, class act.”

With closer Félix Bautista slated to miss the season after undergoing both Tommy John surgery and a follow-up ulnar nerve transposition and scar tissue cleanup, the Orioles signed Kimbrel to a one-year, $13 million contract in December, a deal that included performance bonuses as well as a $13 million club option for 2025, with a $1 million buyout. Baltimore represented Kimbrel’s fifth stop in four seasons; he pitched for the Cubs and White Sox in 2021, the Dodgers in ’22, and the Phillies last year. Throughout that nomadic run — and before that, dating back to his time with the Cubs (2019 to mid-2021) and Red Sox (2016–18) — he led something of a Dr. Jeckyl/Mr. Hyde existence, at times dominating opponents the way he did during his stellar run in Atlanta, but sometimes falling into bad habits mechanically. “Too rotational” is a phrase that has surfaced multiple times over the years to describe Kimbrel’s tendency to get out of whack. By getting down the mound too quickly instead of staying back, he has struggled with his release point and sacrificed deception, command, and unpredictability.

In 2019–20, a span during which Kimbrel threw just 36 innings due to a prolonged free agency and the pandemic, he posted a 6.00 ERA and 6.29 FIP. He bounced back to make the NL All-Star team in 2021, posting an 0.49 ERA and 1.01 FIP in 36 2/3 innings for the Cubs, but then a 5.09 ERA and 4.56 FIP after being traded to the White Sox on July 26. He put in serviceable seasons for the Dodgers and Phillies, combining for a 3.49 ERA and 3.54 FIP, but lost his closer’s job in Los Angeles in September 2022 and was left off the postseason roster. Last October, he was one of the goats as the Phillies were upset by the Diamondbacks, taking losses in Games 3 and 4 of the NLCS.

Kimbrel began his tenure with the Orioles in inauspicious fashion, blowing a save but collecting a win against the Royals on Opening Day. He blew two more saves in April, but none in May and just one in June. On July 7, he converted his 16th save in 17 attempts since the start of May, and 23rd in 27 attempts overall, lowering his season ERA to 2.10 and his FIP to 2.47. To that point, he had been scored upon just twice in his past 22 games, with one of his two runs allowed (across a total of 21 innings) an unearned run, a Manfred man who scored the game-winner for the Blue Jays in the 10th frame on June 5.

After that July 7 save, Kimbrel didn’t pitch again for a week, and when he did, the bottom began to drop out. Protecting a one-run lead against the Yankees at Camden Yards on July 14, he began the ninth by waking Trent Grisham and Oswaldo Cabrera, the Yankees’ eighth and ninth hitters, then served up a three-run homer to rookie Ben Rice. The Orioles got him off the hook with a three-run ninth against Clay Holmes. The decision had been made before that sad Sunday, but Holmes, who finished the first half with a 2.77 ERA and 2.74 FIP, made the AL All-Star team, while Kimbrel, who had a 2.80 ERA and 2.97 FIP by the end of that outing, did not. Just sayin’.

Kimbrel threw a scoreless inning in his next outing, against the Rangers on July 20, but he was scored upon in his subsequent three games, blowing another save and taking a loss as well. He didn’t get another save chance, as the Orioles traded for Seranthony Domínguez, his former Phillies teammate, on July 26. In fact, Kimbrel rarely got another high-leverage opportunity — just three of his final 15 appearances had a leverage index over 0.41, and one of those was 0.88.

Even in mostly low-leverage situations, Kimbrel didn’t perform up to major league standards. Across his 18 innings from July 14 onward, he was lit for an 11.50 ERA with a 7.45 FIP. He allowed five home runs in that span, walking 17.5% of hitters while striking out 21.6%. It was uncomfortable to witness, even when he pitched in games that had more or less been decided.

Overall, Kimbrel’s 4.18 FIP and 4.24 xERA suggest that he’s pitched better than that 5.33 ERA. He’s struck out 31.5% of batters, but he’s walked 13.4%, a mark he exceeded in both 2016 and ’20 (small sample alert). That said, his 54.3% first-pitch strike rate, 24.1% chase rate, and 11.8% swinging strike rate are his lowest marks for any season in which he’s thrown more than 21 innings. Looking to Statcast, his velocity loss particularly stands out. His four-seam fastball has averaged just 93.9 mph, down about two miles per hour from last year, and fading further as the season has gone on, with his results predictably going south as well:

The lower velocity cost Kimbrel about an inch of horizontal break relative to last year, in exchange for an inch of vertical break, and both of our pitch modeling systems capture the decline, both from year to year and in-season. Here’s a look at Kimbrel via Stuff+:

Note the huge falloffs in Location+ and Pitching+, as well as the overall grade. From last year to the latter half of this season, that’s about one full standard deviation of decline in Stuff+, and two standard deviations of decline in Location+ and Pitching+.

Kimbrel’s other main pitch, his knuckle curve, didn’t fall off as drastically as his fastball. Batters have hit the pitch for a decent .261 average, but he’s limited them to a meager .283 slugging percentage and a .252 wOBA with it, to go along with a 34.8% whiff rate. Those numbers aren’t quite as good as they were last year (.219 wOBA, 38.8%), but they’re more than serviceable. The problem is that from July onward, batters slugged .593 with a .416 wOBA against the fastball and slugged .385 with a .335 wOBA against the knuckle curve, leaving him without an effective weapon in what has basically been a two-pitch arsenal. He did have some success with a sweeper, throwing it 5.1% of the time overall and inducing a .114 wOBA and 44.4% whiff rate, but the pitch — which he generally threw to righties — all but disappeared from his repertoire in August and September.

The Orioles ran out of time to fix Kimbrel, and they’ve had myriad other problems to confront as they look to October, whether they rally to erase their current five-game deficit in the AL East or hold onto the top Wild Card spot. The O’s have gone just 31-37 since July 1, and haven’t posted a winning record in any calendar month since then. From July 1 through Tuesday, their bullpen was lit for a 4.94 ERA, fourth worst in the majors, with four relievers in addition to Kimbrel throwing at least 10 innings with ERAs above 5.00: Bryan Baker (5.73 in 11 innings), Burch Smith (5.74 in 26 2/3 innings), Gregory Soto (16.59 in 13 2/3 innings), and the since-departed Cole Irvin (8.50 in 18 innings). Domínguez hasn’t been great (3.26 ERA, 5.14 FIP), but Yennier Cano, Keegan Akin, and Cionel Pérez have been pretty good. The right-handed Cano and the left-handed Pérez are the top setup men, generally available for the occasional save chance based on matchups or if Domínguez is unavailable, though Cano has apparently been dealing with forearm tightness and wasn’t available in Wednesday’s loss to the Giants. The rotation, which has dealt with the losses of Kyle Bradish, John Means, and Tyler Wells to UCL-related surgeries, and Grayson Rodriguez to a lat strain, delivered just a 4.41 ERA (111 ERA-) and a 4.15 FIP (102 FIP-) from the start of July through Tuesday.

Yet the pitching hasn’t been the problem during this month’s 6-9 slide. Instead it’s been an offense that’s managing just an 89 wRC+ and 3.47 runs per game while missing the injured Ryan Mountcastle, Ramón Urías, and Jordan Westburg. “The testing of our depth, and a lot of depth we’ve lost, is not something I anticipated in this degree in the second half on the position player side,” executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s turned out here that’s not necessarily been the crisis we were expecting in the second half, and we’ve been paying for it.”

As for Kimbrel, he’ll likely go unclaimed as he passes through waivers and then get released, leaving the Orioles on the hook for the remainder of his salary and his buyout. While I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him, we’ve probably seen the last of his big contracts.

As for whether this rough stretch will affect Kimbrel’s Hall of Fame chances, I hardly think the matter is as simple or the situation as dire as one writer suggested on Twitter while pointing out that Kimbrel’s 18-inning rough patch lowered his career ERA+ from 171 to 158. That current mark (off of a 2.59 ERA) is higher than seven of the eight Hall of Fame relievers: Hoyt Wilhelm (147), Trevor Hoffman (141), Bruce Sutter (136), Lee Smith (132), Goose Gossage (126), Rollie Fingers (120), and Dennis Eckersley (116, including his time as a starter). The rub is that each of those seven (and Mariano Rivera, the eighth) has pitched at least 232 1/3 innings more than Kimbrel (809 2/3), with some of those enshrinees having more than double his total. Even Billy Wagner, who’s on the doorstep of Cooperstown after getting 73.8% of the vote last year, threw 903 innings (with an elite 187 ERA+).

Kimbrel’s case — which like that of Wagner is driven by exceptional rate stats rather than volume — does have some things in his favor. His nine All-Star selections is tied with Gossage for second behind Rivera’s 13. His 38.8% strikeout rate is the highest of any pitcher with at least 800 innings, well ahead of the second-ranked Kenley Jansen (35.5%) and third-ranked Wagner (33.2%). Likewise, his .167 opponents batting average has supplanted Wagner (.184) for the lead at the 800-inning cutoff, with Jansen (.182) sneaking ahead of him as well. His postseason body of work isn’t particularly pretty (4.50 ERA with 10 saves in 30 innings), and his performance during the Red Sox’s 2018 championship run led to Alex Cora’s choosing Chris Sale to close out the World Series against the Dodgers, but his lone ring and modest postseason stats surpass Wagner’s postseason résumé.

Turning to my Reliever JAWS metric, here’s the top 25:

When I checked in last November while covering Wagner’s Hall of Fame case, Jansen ranked 14th, Kimbrel 15th, and Robertson 23rd. Jansen has had a solid season for the Red Sox (3.42 ERA, 3.04 FIP, 27 saves). He’s gained 1.7 points of R-JAWS, enough to vault him into the top 10; he’s also climbed from seventh in saves (420) to fourth (447). Though he’s notched just two saves to run his career total to a comparatively meager 177, Robertson has pitched well for Texas (3.22 ERA, 2.59 FIP), adding 1.6 points as well to jump seven places. Meanwhile, Kimbrel has lost 1.3 points due to his sub-zero bWAR (-1.2) and WPA (-2.3), costing him a couple spots in the rankings.

If Kimbrel were on the ballot today, I don’t think he’d be elected, but then Eckersley and Rivera have been the only relievers to gain entry on the first ballot; aside from Fingers (elected in his second year) and Hoffman (third year) it’s been a slog for most of the others. As with Wagner, who’s heading into his 10th and final year on the writers’ ballot, one facet of the candidacies of Kimbrel and Jansen that I expect will become more clear over time is the high attrition rate of their peers and the wave of stars that has followed them. Chapman, who has 330 saves, is almost certainly done as a full-time closer, and while Edwin Díaz and Josh Hader are more or less halfway to 400 saves (223 for the former, 196 for the latter), each has already endured lengthy bouts of ineffectiveness, hanging full-season ERAs above 5.00 — and they’re in just their age-30 seasons. It’s nearly impossible to remain a top-flight closer for, say, a decade, and a viable one for a decade and a half. It’s even harder, obviously, to do the same as a starter, and if you want to take umbrage over Wagner’s possible election while Mark Buehrle has yet to clear 11% percent of the vote, I get it, but that’s a beef for another day.

Again, I don’t think this will be the last we hear from Kimbrel, though the book on him is probably closed for this year, which could save all of us some agita as we watch him walk two guys and have to wriggle out of another jam. When he’s on, he still has the swing-and-miss stuff to nail down the ninth inning. Here’s hoping he finds it again.

It’s entirely possible, dear sir, that I simply misheard you given the permeating hubbub in this, our fair city’s modern-day Colosseum, but just a moment ago I was left with the odd impression that you might have pronounced me out. At the risk of contravening such an esteemed authority as yourself, I aver that I must have misheard you, owing to the fact it surely was clear to one and all that the only sensible course of action under a circumstance such as this one would be to adjudge the ball foul. The only fair call is a foul ball (if you’ll forgive the indulgence), but as I say, these ears love nothing so much as to play their little tricks on me from time to time, so if the issue at hand is a simple case of misapprehension, then simply say the word and off I’ll scurry. It would be my genuine pleasure to gather my lumber, as it were, and assume once more the ready position here in the right-hand rectangle, for I do adore a tussle. Read the rest of this entry »