The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.
That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that.
Does this mean the Tigers shouldn’t have traded Skubal and Mize? I’m not here to opine on that (OK, fine I’ll opine at the end of the article, but you have to read it first). But they did make those trades, and they did go on that hot streak, so here we are. The Tigers can’t un-trade those guys. MLB doesn’t have a takebacks rule. But I can’t help but wonder how the Tigers would look if they hadn’t made any moves at the deadline, and so I decided to write about it. Read the rest of this entry »
If you want to understand the history of the Milwaukee Brewers over the past 15 years, you could do worse than the following graph.
In January 2018, the Brewers traded four talented prospects to the Marlins for Christian Yelich. Three of those players were athletic up-the-middle guys with power potential but serious questions about their hit tools. None of them panned out. Yelich, who had been a supporting player on some indifferent Marlins teams, took to the Juiced Ball era like a duck to water. In the first two seasons after the trade he won two batting titles, hit a total of 80 home runs, and finished first and second in the MVP voting. Read the rest of this entry »
With the trade deadline having come and gone, we’ve officially entered the homestretch of the 2026 season. And while teams surely want to avoid tempting the fury of the fates by assuming they’re postseason-bound, they’d be lying if they said they weren’t thinking about October baseball at least a little bit. And why shouldn’t they? Winning the World Series is the ultimate goal, and many of the league’s playoff-relevant teams made deadline moves for the express purpose of improving their postseason chances.
Before you set out on a vacation, it’s natural, even prudent, to contemplate your trip, though it might mean making plans for a destination you never reach. If you’re heading to the beach, you’re likely going to think about the sun and the sand, even though there’s always a chance the alternator in your 1988 Ford Tempo dies on U.S. Route 50 near Easton, Maryland, forcing you to call your friend Alan on your janky 1990s Motorola “car phone,” only for him to gormlessly drive right past you despite your hazard lights and frantic waving. Baseball has its own broken alternators, injuries and losing streaks that render October plans suddenly irrelevant. Still, teams have good reason to think about what will happen if they get there; after all, it’s important that someone remember to pack sunscreen. And since we’re nerdy baseball fans and have access to a projection system, we might as well look ahead too. So which teams are actually built to be the most dangerous in October, and which ones might be better or worse postseason teams than their regular-season records suggest?
When it comes to projecting October, we have to think about teams somewhat differently than we do during the regular season. Projecting the regular season and a playoff series are two very different tasks. Not because of any playoff-related mythology, or because a team possesses specific characteristics that work better or worse in the postseason, but simply because teams use players very differently in October. It’s not quite as extreme as, say, the difference between how 100m gold medalists and 500m gold medalists are built, but it at least rhymes. In the playoffs, you get to ride your top talent hard since you no longer need to keep them fresh and healthy for a six-month marathon. And because of the postseason’s frequent off days, you also get to have a higher proportion of your innings pitched by the pitchers you actually want in the game. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday morning, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal did what he does best. He unleashed a major trade deadline scoop. As it was a full week after the deadline, though, Rosenthal’s scoop wasn’t about who got traded where for what. It wasn’t about how the trades came together. It was, in fact, the opposite of the breathless deadline reporting and transaction analysis that can so often encourage us to view ballplayers as commodities rather than human beings who have little control over where they live and work. Rosenthal wrote about the emotional and logistical toll of being traded.
There’s a lot of that going around these days. The day after the deadline, Jacob Calvin Meyer of the Baltimore Sun reported that Adley Rutschman, Colton Cowser, Ryan Mountcastle, and Gunnar Henderson had been at the theater, about to see the new Spider-Man movie, when Rutschman found out he’d been traded to the Red Sox. “It was pretty emotional,” Cowser said. The foursome decided against watching the movie, which was probably for the best, as it’s about a talented young man with a powerful swing whose best friends have forgotten about him entirely after a move to Boston. Rosenthal’s article was about the team the Orioles faced the very next day.
On Sunday, August 2, the Angels broke a five-game losing streak with a win over the Brewers, then flew down to Baltimore. Monday, the day of the deadline, was an off day for both the Orioles and the Angels. Roughly a dozen Angels, plus assorted coaches and staffers spent the day in Vineland, New Jersey, playing a round of golf at Trout National – The Reserve. At Mike Trout’s golf course, they had what would no doubt have been a delightful day of fun in the sun if not for the fact that every couple holes, storm clouds showed up in the form of interim GM John Mozeliak, who was calling up another player to inform him that he’d been traded away. Oh, and there were literal storms too, so reliever Ryan Zeferjahn got his call while everybody was packed in a hut to stay out of the rain.
Those are just the Cliff’s Notes. You should read the whole article, and I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s wild, and Rosenthal managed as well as anybody could have to report the facts and avoid editorializing without downplaying the over-the-top absurdity of the situation. Instead, what I’m going to do here is answer some of the more pressing, sillier questions raised by the story. It’s a sad story, but it’s also deliciously awkward. It’s absurdist comedy of the highest order. A third of the players who made the trip to Millville found out on the golf course that they’d been traded, because Trout planned a team-bonding event for the exact time when the team’s bonds would be dissolved with hydrochloric acid. Let’s get into it.
Mike Trout has a golf course?
No. Mike Trout doesn’t just have a golf course. In April, he opened a world-class, invitation-only golf club two miles from where he grew up. It cost $100 million. Tiger Woods designed it. It’s got a state-of-the-art training center, a lighted par-3 course named The Bullpen, and a 30,000-square-foot putting area. It’s got a spa, a barber shop, a bowling alley, a 2,500-bottle wine cellar, and a fitness center designed by Trout. It’s got a clubhouse named The Clubhouse. It’s got five-star accommodations that include two lodges, five cottages, and at least one hut. It’s got two comfort stations. One of them is called The Dugout, and it’s designed to look like a major league dugout (without the sunflower seeds, presumably). It’s got a freaking helipad.
It’s important to set the scene, but this is actually the least fun part of the story. As much as Millville loves Mike Trout, it does not love his 288-acre Shangri-La. Just a few weeks ago, Patrick Lanni of NJ.com wrote a deeply reported story highlighting the disconnect involved in building such a thing in Cumberland County, “widely considered New Jersey’s poorest county, with the state’s highest poverty rate, lowest median household income and an 8% unemployment rate.” Trout hasn’t necessarily gone out of his way to integrate Trout National – The Reserve into the community either. “It’s pure golf,” he told Golf.com. “You don’t see any houses.”
To be clear, the golf course is situated right next to many houses. You don’t see them because Trout National is surrounded by a stone wall that stands 15 feet tall. It’s built on an old silica salt mine and onetime farmland, but that wasn’t quite enough space. The developers also bought up at least 15 single-family homes for their land. Many neighbors now have a giant wall bordering their backyards. Some residents who refused to sell found their properties walled in on three sides. The Old Vineland Tavern sticks out like a sore thumb, but luckily Danny’s Pizza Pizzazz across the street is safe.
Google Maps
One resident told Lanni, “I’ve heard from the city council that everything is going to be so good for the community…. The club is its own thing. You go there, and you stay there. You don’t go to downtown Millville.” It’s hard to imagine the golfers arriving and departing by helicopter are going to spend all that much time outside walls of the compound, except maybe to duck into Danny’s for a pizza (and some pizzazz).
It may sound like the name of a fish stick company that went bankrupt in 1989, but Trout National has staked its brand on exclusivity and opulence. Its website doesn’t feature all that much copy, but whoever wrote it raided the thesaurus for “curated,” “luxurious,” “luxury,” “private,” “upscale,” “masterfully crafted,” “refined,” “secluded,” “custom,” “high-end,” and “luxury” one more time. Rosenthal didn’t provide any details about the hut where Zeferjahn found out he’d been traded, but I think we can safely assume it’s one of the fancier huts ever constructed.
Another Vineland resident told Lanni, “I think everyone understands that none of us will ever see inside of those walls.” Doing so would take quite an investment. Membership is limited to 227 people, a nod to Trout’s uniform number, 27. Mike’s brother Tyler told Golf.com that membership will be composed of athletes, young business professionals, and entrepreneurs. The fees aren’t public, but comparable ultra-exclusive courses have reported initiation fees in the vicinity of half a million dollars, along with annual membership fees around $200,000. And the place is literally called The Reserve; you know, as in an area that people are kept out of.
Mike Trout and his partners bought out more than a dozen people in his hometown in order to build a five-star golf paradise that no one in his hometown will ever be able to see. He surrounded it with a 15-foot wall so that none of his customers, 227 of the richest people on the planet, would be subjected to the sight of his hometown. You don’t have to be a resident of Millville to be offended by this kind of excess.
This is the setting for the day’s events. This is Trout’s fantastical chocolate factory, and much like Willy Wonka, his visitors kept getting whisked away one by one throughout the day. I’m sure you have more questions.
Oh yeah, when exactly did all the trades go down?
I’m so glad you asked. Not only can we timestamp the day’s events based on when the trades broke, but Rosenthal also told us what hole everyone was on when they got traded. Let’s update our scorecard, shall we?
First Hole: Brent Suter to the Braves
Suter got the first call right before everyone teed off. Some players were still warming up on a putting green; some were at the first tee box. ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news at 11:26 AM. As Passan said on Effectively Wild last year, he never breaks trade news until he’s sure the players involved have already been informed, so Mozeliak must have called Suter to deliver the news a bit beforehand. “Can I finish the round?” Suter asked. “Can I golf?” Mozeliak said yes, which makes him sound very magnanimous until you realize that he was no longer Suter’s boss.
Seventh Hole: Jo Adell to the Guardians Jon Heyman broke this news at 12:19 PM. “I was in shock,” Adell said. He finished out the front nine, then left. I honestly don’t know where Adell went or how he got there. I can’t imagine he went all the way back to Baltimore. The Guardians were at home at the time, so maybe he called an Uber for the 45-minute ride to Philadelphia, then caught a flight to Cleveland.
Hole Indeterminate: Reid Detmers to the Cubs (Not Real)
So an incorrect report had Detmers going to the Cubs around 2:45 PM. That rumor made it to Detmers, but his foursome, which included Trout, quickly gathered that it was inaccurate. “I think it was good he was golfing,” said Trout. “It took his mind off it.” Detmers, however, told MLB.com that even after confirming with his agent that no trade had taken place, he didn’t feel safe until 30 minutes after the trade deadline. Based on the timing, we can assume Detmers was somewhere around the 10th hole.
Twelfth or 13th Hole: Ryan Zeferjahn to the Cubs (For Real)
At 3:46 PM, Passan broke the news that Zeferjahn really would be traded to the Cubs. As you know, when Zeferjahn got the call, he was gathered in a hut with all his teammates to avoid the rain. He had no privacy. On the bright side, all his teammates who had played in Chicago were able to brief him about his new organization.
Nineteenth Hole: Kirby Yates to the Pirates
This was the buzzer-beater move of the day. It came just as everyone had finished up the round and was getting ready to leave. Rosenthal broke it himself (along with colleague Will Sammon) at 6:00 PM. “I didn’t think I had a chance,” Yates told Rosenthal. “I did not think there was a market for a 39-year-old throwing 90 mph.” In the final ironic twist of the day, the Pirates were about to kick off a series against the Brewers, so Yates had to fly right back to Milwaukee. He ended up making three straight appearances against the Brewers.
This must have all been so weird.
Uh, yeah.
So… did Mike Trout not know when the trade deadline was?
Well, Trout planned the outing back in the spring. He saw a day off on the east coast on the schedule, and he went for it. It’s not surprising that he didn’t immediately realize it was the trade deadline. August 3 is unusually late, a result of the fact that August 1 fell on a Saturday and the deadline can’t be on a weekend. It probably wasn’t top of mind anyway. He couldn’t know that early on that the Angels — a team that despite being bad for years has never embarked upon the type of teardown we saw this season — would be selling at the deadline. Plus, he’s Mike Trout. He’s never had to worry about getting traded.
But he figured it out eventually, right?
Yes. Mike Trout learned that the trade deadline was on August 3 prior to the morning of August 3. In fact, Mozeliak briefed him on the team’s deadline strategy a few days beforehand.
Oh yeah! Trout was part of the trade deadline war room, right? Didn’t he know his teammates were going to get traded away?
Trout has said this report was blown out of proportion, but… yes. Mozeliak and Trout met a few weeks before the deadline and established that he wouldn’t be traded, Then, a few days before the deadline, he was invited into the war room. “People were blowing it up,” he told MLB.com. “It wasn’t what everybody’s saying. Basically, just going over everything. It wasn’t like I was telling him, ‘Oh, trade this guy, trade that guy.’ It was basically just a plan. It was just Mo trying to build a relationship with me in the couple weeks he’s been here. Just being transparent. I think that’s the biggest thing.”
All of this would seem fairly standard. Trout is the face of the franchise, and he’s under contract through 2030. It only makes sense to get him on board with the vision for the future of the team, especially before a teardown. But it gets weird when you factor the golf outing into the equation. By Trout’s own admission, Mozeliak told him the team’s plan for the deadline, which clearly involved trading everything that wasn’t nailed down. They went over everything – Trout’s own words – so at the very least, he had to have had an idea that some of his guests would cease to be his teammates.
So why didn’t he cancel?
That’s the hundred-million-dollar question, and only Mike Trout knows the answer. Rosenthal described the situation in hilariously deadpan language. “Trout came to realize, as he organized the outing, that it might be an unusual day. The group, he said, had an idea that trades were coming.” All the same, I can think of plenty of reasons that might have pushed to keep this particular tee time on the books.
If I’ve learned one thing about Mike Trout in researching this article, it’s that the dude really loves golf. When baseball was shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, he would finish his baseball workout, then go play 36 holes of golf, then hit the driving range or the putting green to work on his game.
Trout National took years to build, and I’m sure Trout is very, very proud of it. He was probably really excited to show all his buddies his opulent little city-state. He planned this whole trip, and he was reluctant to give it up.
Remember when I mentioned that Trout saw a day off on the schedule and he jumped on it? That’s a bigger deal than you might realize. Last year, the Angels didn’t have a single off day on the east coast. You can understand why he wanted to hold onto this one.
I don’t subscribe to this notion, but if you want to be really, really cynical, you could also posit that he viewed this little trip as a recruiting venture for prospective members.
I imagine that baseball works a little differently for Mike Trout than for most players. He’s never been traded. He’s never been at risk of being traded. Considering how terrible they’ve been during his tenure, the Angels have done a surprisingly small amount of selling at the deadline. I don’t want to accuse him of a lack of empathy or anything, but the toll of this particular part of the game may just be a bit harder for Trout to grasp than for players who have lived through it or who enjoy less job security.
In that same vein, I’m sure Trout didn’t pressure anybody into coming on the trip – José Soriano found out he’d been traded in his hotel in Baltimore because he’s not a golfer – but he also may not have realized how hard it would be for his teammates to turn down that invitation. That’s just human nature. He may not fully comprehend the amount of authority he has in the clubhouse simply by virtue of being Mike Trout.
Trout may well have figured that cancelling would have just traded one form of awkwardness for another. He couldn’t exactly go around the clubhouse telling everyone they were uninvited because the deadline was going to be a bloodbath. But it would have been really weird to cancel without giving some excuse. Everybody knew he’d been briefed on the team’s deadline plans. They probably would have figured it out.
Maybe he just thought spending the day golfing with your buddies would be a better way to deal with the stress of getting traded than moping around Baltimore and waiting for your phone to ring (though he’d have probably felt differently if he had known about Bergers cookies, the Baltimore delicacy that can turn any rough day around). “I guess if you’re going to get news like that,” Mozeliak told Rosenthal, “you might as well be having fun.”
Now that it’s over, does Trout wish he’d just cancelled the whole thing and organized a team outing to go see the new Spider-Man movie?
We’ll never know for sure, but my guess is no. Rosenthal came as close as he could to asking this question without being rude. Asked whether the day went as he had envisioned it, Trout said, “It was just different. We were all enjoying a round of golf. It was different, for sure.”
Can we back up and talk logistics for a second? Is Millville even convenient to get to?
Millville is extremely convenient to get to. From Philadelphia.
From Baltimore, not so much. Assuming there’s no traffic whatsoever, it’s a two-hour drive away from Baltimore. The team flew from Milwaukee to Baltimore, then roughly a dozen players hopped on a bus bound for New Jersey. Several coaches and staffers arrived on their own bus in the morning. I’ve run all the numbers here, and this was a hectic day for the Angels.
Here’s the most optimistic timeline I can possibly imagine. Sunday’s game in Milwaukee ended at 2:45 PM Central. Let’s say everybody really hustled in the shower and the bus left the ballpark at 3:15. It’s a 15-minute drive to the airport, and we’ll assume no traffic (not even airport traffic) and just 15 minutes to get the plane loaded and the wheels up. The flight from Milwaukee is an hour and 55 minutes long, and you lose an hour to time zones. We’ll give everybody another five minutes to get off the plane and on the bus, and then it’s a two-hour bus ride to Millville (again assuming no traffic whatsoever). That would put everyone in Millville at 8:45 PM Eastern at the very earliest. In reality, I’d bet they arrived closer to 11 or 12. This timeline doesn’t even account for the fact that they presumably ate dinner at some point.
Then they had a full day of golf, starting around 11:00 AM and wrapping up a bit before 6:00 PM, which means they didn’t get back into Baltimore until 8 at the earliest.
So where did everybody spend the night? At the golf club?
No. Rosenthal reported that the dozen or so players “stayed overnight at Trout’s home.”
Must be a pretty big home.
Yeah, Trout’s New Jersey home is a house in the same way that the White House is a house. It’s a custom-built mansion that took a year to design and more than two years to construct. Nobody was sleeping on a futon.
Something’s been bothering me for a while now.
I’m pretty sure I know where you’re going with this.
It’s the rain.
Yeah.
It rained in the middle of Mike Trout’s big day and everybody was stuck in a hut. Did Mike Trout fail to check the weather report?
I feel confident that Mike Trout knew it was going to rain. In fact, I feel confident that Mike Trout spent most of Sunday and Monday talking about the chance of precipitation to anybody who would listen and several people who weren’t listening. Surely, this was his big chance to call off the event without raising suspicion or hurting any feelings. “Sorry, guys, can’t do the big golf day. It’s going to rain in Millville. Next year for sure, though.” Easy-peasy. He must have just really, really wanted to do it.
Did the Angels get to finish their round of golf, or did the rain ruin it?
It sounds like they finished, but this has got to be the funniest part of the whole situation. Even Mike Trout’s one true love, the weather, was in on the plot to ruin his big day.
So this doesn’t sound like a very restful day off. Did the Angels win the next day?
The Angels might be as adrift as ever, shedding players at the deadline, but they need someone — anyone — to throw enough innings to close out the season.
The biggest void in their pitching staff was left by José Soriano, who was traded to the Blue Jays a week ago on Monday. Soriano throws incredibly hard and gets a huge number of groundballs. This solidly built right-hander’s triple-digit fastball doesn’t get many whiffs — and his strikeout and walk rates are both cause for concern — but he does have a potent sinker-offspeed combination and a good breaking ball.
How do you replace that guy? Good news: The Angels don’t have to, because they’ve had another Soriano all along. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the weekend, a friend of mine asked if ABS challenge data gets incorporated into WAR. (I have extremely cool friends.) It doesn’t, and I explained that while an individual challenge can absolutely change the course of an inning (or a game, or even a season), a single ball-strike call is of negligible run value out of context. If anything, we should be adding challenges to WPA, not WAR, except WPA only gets calculated on a per-plate-appearance basis, rather than a per-pitch basis.
At any rate, challenges aren’t like catcher framing in the early days. In 2008, the first year for which we have framing data, the difference between the best framer in baseball (Brian McCann) and the worst (Ryan Doumit, the poor guy) was 97.7 runs. At 10 runs per win, well, you can do the math on your own. Read the rest of this entry »
Even by the standards of his recent, injury-marred seasons, Max Scherzer’s 2026 campaign has been a rough one. The 42-year-old righty has made two trips to the injured list, and through the end of July had taken just seven starts and allowed more than a run per inning. Even on a Blue Jays team destined to be retooled ahead of the trade deadline, he was clearly in no shape to be any contender’s hired gun. Nonetheless, Scherzer’s last two starts have been bright spots, and on Saturday evening, he notched career strikeout 3,516, officially moving him into the all-time top 10.
Scherzer wasn’t the only pitcher who reached a strikeout milestone this weekend. Aaron Nola, who started for the Phillies opposite Scherzer at Citizens Bank Park, collected his 2,000th career strikeout. Elsewhere, in a matchup that pitted the third- and fourth-ranked pitchers on the active strikeouts leaderboard, namely Chris Sale and Gerrit Cole, the latter notched his 1,000th strikeout since joining the Yankees. Then on Sunday, Jacob Misiorowski became the first pitcher to notch his 200th strikeout of the season.
I’ll get to all of those pitchers, but first Scherzer. After holding Philadelphia scoreless through five innings while scattering three hits and striking out three, he returned for the sixth inning and faced leadoff hitter Kyle Schwarber, who entered the day as the major league leader in strikeouts (172) and who on June 10 in Toronto was the victim of Scherzer’s career strikeout no. 3,500. That outing was the only major league start Scherzer took between April 24 and July 27; first he was sidelined by a combination of forearm tendinitis and left ankle inflammation, and then — after lasting just 3.1 innings against the Phillies while being tagged for five runs — a bout of back spasms. He was in much better shape on Saturday evening, and in his previous two plate appearances against Schwarber had limited the slugger to a groundout and an infield single. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 30
“There’s no weekend.” I remember thinking that night after night in the early going, as I held Derek Jr. in my arms while everyone else slept. There’s no weekend. In baseball, they talk about the grind of a long season. Even the off days are rarely actual days off because there’s so much travel involved. Everyone’s banged up. Everyone’s fighting to get proper nutrition and enough sleep. I don’t know if it’s true, but I remember reading somewhere that ballplayers consider a day game followed by a night game essentially a day off, just because they finally get an evening to themselves. Anyway, that’s what I used to think in the dark in the wee hours of the morning, feeling new aches in my arms or my neck or my back or all three. There is no weekend. There is no day off. Saturday has come and gone, and I’m up in the middle of the night with Derek Jr. Sunday will come, and I’ll again be up in the middle of the night with Derek Jr. Read the rest of this entry »
Davis Martin had a first inning to forget on Tuesday. Pitching at Fenway Park, the Chicago White Sox right-hander was torched for six runs by a scorching-hot Red Sox team that went on to prevail 14-2. He settled down after the tumultuous frame — only one more runner crossed the plate before Martin departed in the sixth — but by then the damage was done.
What happened in the fateful first inning? I asked him that question the following day, but before we get to his thoughts, a quick recap:
With two on and one out, Willson Contreras singled home a run. Two batters later, Caleb Durbin launched a grand slam. Jarren Duran then followed with a solo shot on Martin’s 20th pitch of the game.
The hurler’s take?
“First, there is a lot to be said about how good this Red Sox team is, and what they’ve been doing,” said Martin, who is 9-6 with a 4.13 ERA and a 3.48 FIP over 122 innings on the season. “We studied the scouting report, and there weren’t a lot of pitches that I would want to take back. But yeah, I felt that they were one step ahead. They were doing a really good job of keeping me off balance.”
Red Sox hitters had clearly been more aggressive than the White Sox expected. Half a dozen runs coming on 20 pitches thrown to seven batters is notable, especially when you consider that Contreras saw six of them. His at-bat was arguably the key to the inning. After fouling off consecutive two-strike offerings, the slugger got his RBI knock on a breaking ball that was well wide of the plate. Read the rest of this entry »
On Friday, the Boston Globeran a story by Red Sox beat writer Alex Speier on the concept of momentum. I can hear the collective groans of our Members now. Haven’t we gone over this enough? We’ve already established that there’s no such thing as momentum! Or, if there is, its effect is minimal. Our readers would be the first to point out that the month-and-a-half long surge up in Boston is mostly a matter of a talented, drastically underperforming Sox team experiencing some serious positive regression, bringing its overall record back up to about where we expected it to be all along. I get that, of course. We cannot conclusively prove the effect of momentum in baseball — and it’snotforlackoftrying — and so therefore cannot definitively say that it exists. Yet when it comes to the Big Mo, a palpable feeling rather than a tangible metric, I tend to subscribe to what I call the Robert Graysmith Theory: Just because you can’t prove it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
What’s interesting about Speier’s piece is that he, along with Globe staffers Julian Benbow and Daigo Fujiwara-Smith, looked for data to support the impact of momentum on winning and losing streaks. Speier, an analytically savvy writer, said in his Bluesky post sharing the story that he “was skeptical” that their search would lead to anything. Instead, he was astonished to learn that, as he writes in the story, “A Globe analysis of Retrosheet data that includes the outcome of every MLB game from 1901 through 2025 revealed a striking pattern: The longer a winning streak lasts, the higher a team’s winning percentage in the next game.” The inverse is true for losing streaks. Speier mentions several factors unrelated to momentum that help to explain why “baseball streaks tend to be somewhat self-sustaining,” most notably that team quality probably plays a major role in enduring stretches of winning or losing. That alone is enough of a reason to maintain any skepticism you may have toward the idea of momentum. But at the same time, we should acknowledge that many players believe in the power of momentum, and if that belief influences how they feel, and how they feel contributes to how they perform, then it stands to reason that momentum — or at least, their belief in momentum — has at least some impact on performance.
That’s the last we’ll be discussing momentum here, though I’d encourage you to read the entirety of Speier’s story after you’ve finished reading this mailbag. Instead, today we’ll be answering your questions on players to be named later, the teams that most improved (or diminished) their 2027 playoff odds with their moves at this season’s trade deadline, and where Pete Crow-Armstrong would stack up on the five-star catches leaderboard if we had Statcast data going back through baseball’s history. But before we do, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »
