The news last night out of Anaheim landed like a punch to the gut of every reasonable baseball fan: Shohei Ohtani has a torn ulnar collateral ligament and at the very least is done pitching for the season, thus ending perhaps the greatest campaign we’ve ever seen. And in a double whammy that shouldn’t be dismissed, the team announced that Mike Trout is heading back to the injured list after playing just one game following a seven-week absence due to a fractured left hamate that required surgery.
Set aside the money for a moment; obviously this carries ramifications for Ohtani’s upcoming payday, which I’ll get to below. And forget the playoffs. The Angels went all-in in advance of the August 1 trade deadline but have gone an unfathomable 5-16 this month, plummeting out of the AL Wild Card race like an anvil without a parachute. Their Playoff Odds were already down to 0.3% before they were swept by the Reds in a bleak doubleheader on Wednesday. Even if Ohtani and Trout had both played at their peaks over the season’s final 34 games, the team’s fate was sealed. Read the rest of this entry »
Max Scherzer was 26 years old and pitching for the Tigers when I first interviewed him. Thirteen seasons and three Cy Young awards later, he’s taking the mound for the Rangers, the sixth team he’s played for in what has been an illustrious career. Scherzer’s accolades include eight All-Star berths, and just this week, he moved into 11th place on MLB’s all-time strikeout list. Already at 72.0 WAR, he has a Hall of Fame plaque in his future.
In our initial interview, which ran on today’s date back in 2010, Scherzer described himself as “a power pitcher” and “a very mathematic guy” who appreciated, but didn’t overly rely on, analytics available at that time. How does the veteran right-hander approach his craft all these years later, and how has he evolved along the way? I caught up with him to address those questions shortly before he was dealt from the Mets to the Rangers at the August trade deadline.
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David Laurila: We talked pitching in 2010. How differently do think about your craft 13 years later?
Max Scherzer: “Way different, but the game is also way different. In 2010, it was much more based on what the human eye can see, what’s going on in the field, and listening to the pro scouts. We were understanding some of the numbers back then, but nowhere near what it has blossomed into. It’s almost the inverse now. In 2023, so much of the game is just number, number, number, number, number. I actually think it’s gone too far, that we’ve forgotten some of the human aspects that go into baseball. It’s become, ‘Follow the numbers, they have to be right.’ But no. There is actually a human component that doesn’t get enough credit.”
Laurila: Can you elaborate on that?
Scherzer: “There are times where what you’re seeing on the field matters more than what the data says. There are times to execute based on what you see. For me, that’s been a maturation process over the course of my career.
“I’ve evolved in what I’m looking for and what I’m trying to ascertain. I’m always trying to figure out what I actually want to know on the mound. There is a limit to how much thought you can have about the hitter before you start taking away from yourself. There is a limit to how much bandwidth… like, you want to know what the hitter hits and what he doesn’t hit, but you also need to know what you do well. You need to understand, ‘When I execute this pitch, that’s when I’m at my best,’ and ‘When I put these sequences together, that’s when I’m at my best.’ As much as you want to scout your opponents, scouting yourself is just as important.” Read the rest of this entry »
Everyone loves a beginning — the christening of a new battleship, the birth of a new zoo giraffe, the major league debut of a top pitching prospect. On Tuesday night in Philadelphia, San Francisco Giants lefty Kyle Harrison emerged from his pupal stage. It went… pretty well: 3 1/3 innings, two earned runs, five hits, one walk, five strikeouts, one hit batter.
In a short start, Harrison pared his repertoire down to — with very few exceptions — just his fastball and slider. He gave up lots of hard contact, including a home run, but also, said manager Gabe Kapler, Harrison “missed a lot of bats. He missed bats in the zone. His fastball was carrying.”
Harrison entered the night as the no. 17 overall prospect on The Board, and the no. 5 overall pitching prospect. Every team in the playoff hunt could use a fresh, talented starter, the Giants more so than just about anyone. San Francisco is running a rotation out of the mid-20th century: Two very good starting pitchers and then a lot of improvisation. Webb, Cobb, and pray for fog. Or something like that. If you can do better than a slant rhyme, I’m all ears. Read the rest of this entry »
It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Jose Altuve is at it again. The man is running a wRC+ of 160 or better for the third time in his career; in one of those seasons, 2017, he was voted AL MVP. The other was just last year. Rumors of his demise, which circulated throughout a disastrous 2020 season, have long since subsided.
And not a moment too soon, I might add. The Astros, held in check by the Rangers most of the season, are back on their heels after a three-game sweep at the hands of division rival Seattle over the weekend. The pitching staff has taken a step back from its unhittable late-2022 apotheosis. Primary offseason acquisition José Abreu was hitting like a utility infielder before a back injury put him on the shelf. Jeremy Peña’s power stroke has deserted him, as has Cristian Javier’s unique brand of fastball-heavy trickeration.
Houston looks a little wobbly, for the first time since at least 2020; setting aside that season’s unique circumstances (and the Astros made it to Game 7 of the ALCS anyway), the team has not wobbled this much since 2016. But Altuve, hitting .327/.420/.529 since his return from a broken thumb suffered during the World Baseball Classic, has held things together.
You could be forgiven for viewing Julio Rodríguez’s follow-up to last year’s AL Rookie of the Year season as something of a disappointment — the numbers certainly bear that out. Even so, the 22-year-old center fielder had already appeared to turn a corner this month before going on a hitting binge for the ages. Over a four-game span from Wednesday through Saturday, Rodríguez collected 17 hits, a major league record. Those hits were hardly afterthoughts, as they helped the Mariners extend their latest winning streak to six games, a run that’s pushed them into a Wild Card spot.
Rodríguez began his jag by going 4-for-6 in Wednesday’s 6-5 win over the Royals. He led off the game with a double off James McArthur, sparking a three-run first inning, and added RBI singles in the second and ninth innings. Then he went 5-for-5 in Thursday’s 6-4 win against the Royals, driving in five runs via an RBI single off Angel Zerpa, an RBI double off Max Castillo, and a three-run eighth-inning homer off Carlos Hernández that turned a 4-2 deficit into a 5-4 lead. He added a solo home run on Friday off the Astros’ J.P. France in a 2-0 win, and then went 4-for-6 in a 10-3 rout of Houston on Saturday, coming around to score on two of his four singles. Read the rest of this entry »
Charlie Morton just keeps chugging along. Three months shy of his 40th birthday, and in his 17th big-league season, the right-hander is 12-10 with a 3.54 ERA over 24 starts with the Atlanta Braves. His most recent outing was especially impressive. Relying heavily on his knee-buckling bender, but also topping out at 96.9 mph with his heater, he dominated the New York Yankees to the tune of six shutout innings with 10 strikeouts.
How much longer can he continue to defy Father Time and excel against baseball’s best hitters?
“I don’t think about that,” Morton replied in response to that question. “I think about, ‘When am I going to go home?’ I always thought the game was going to dictate when I went home. If you look at my career, there was no reason why I wouldn’t think that. There was no reason to think that I was going to start having the best years of my career at age 33, or that my best years would be in my late 30s. There was no reason to think I would still be throwing the ball like I am now. It would have been illogical.”
Morton’s career has indeed followed an unforeseeable path. From 2008-2016, playing primarily with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he went 46-71 with a 4.54 ERA over 161 starts. Since his 2017 age-33 season, he has gone 82-40 with a 3.54 ERA over 185 starts. Morphing from “Ground Chuck” into more of a power pitcher played a major role in the turnaround, but whatever the reason, Morton went from mediocre to a mainstay in frontline rotations. Since his transformation, only six pitchers have started more games, and only two (Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer) have been credited with more wins. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello and welcome to another edition of Five Things, a collection of plays I had a blast watching. There was a lot to love in baseball this week: baserunning derring-do, great defense, and tons of exciting young players. There was so much to like, in fact, that I don’t have a single negative thing to say about what I watched on the field. The action was non-stop, and cool plays were everywhere, all the time. I left out an inside-the-park home run, for goodness sake. It might be the dog days of summer, but it was a spectacular week of baseball. So let’s get right to it. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re in a tiny lull in the baseball season, and honestly, I’m happy about it. July is jam packed with draft and trade talk, September and October are for the stretch run and the postseason, but the middle of August is when everyone catches their breath. There’s no divisional race poised on a razor’s edge, no nightly drama that everyone in baseball tunes in for; it’s just a good few weeks to get your energy back and relax.
For me, that means getting a head start on some things I won’t have time to do in September, and there’s one article in particular that I always want to write but never get around to. I’m not a BBWAA member, and I’ll probably never vote for MVP awards, but I spend a lot of time thinking about them every year nonetheless. When I’m looking at who would get my vote, I take Win Probability Added into account. Every time I mention it, however, there’s an issue to tackle. Plenty of readers and analysts think of WPA as “just a storytelling statistic” and don’t like using it as a measure of player value. So today, I’m going to explain why I think it has merit.
First, a quick refresher: Win Probability Added is a straightforward statistic. After every plate appearance, WPA looks at the change in a team’s chances of winning the game. We use our win expectancy measure, which takes historical data to see how often teams win from a given position, to assign each team a chance of winning after every discrete event. Then the pitcher and hitter involved in that plate appearance get credited (or debited, depending) for the change in their team’s chances of winning the game. Since every game starts with each team 50% likely to win and ends with one team winning, the credit for each win (and blame for each loss) gets apportioned out as the game unfolds. The winning team will always produce an aggregate of 0.5 WPA, and the losing team will always produce -0.5, spread out among all of their players. Read the rest of this entry »
If I have one criticism of Shohei Ohtani, it’s that he has singlehandedly ruined baseball’s great parlor discussions. Admittedly, this is the only valid criticism of Ohtani that I can think of. But questions like “Which player would you want to start a franchise with?” or “Who’s the most talented ballplayer you’ve ever seen?” are so much less fun now than they were a decade ago. First person to answer just says, “Ohtani,” and there’s a brief but grave silence until someone pipes up and asks if anyone is watching the new season of Billions.
Setting Ohtani aside, Fernando Tatis Jr. would be on my short list of most talented or dynamic baseball players I’ve had the good fortune to witness. In the past, I’d compared his physicality to that of a 3–4 outside linebacker, but watching him scramble around the diamond is like watching an alien who’s holding something in reserve so he doesn’t get outed by the humans. If that is his goal, Tatis is not doing a great job of blending in.
There haven’t been a lot of bright spots in St. Louis this year. The Cardinals are 14 games below .500, owners of the second-worst record in the NL. The bottom has fallen out for the franchise in a way that hasn’t happened in 30 years. I’d hardly blame fans for being a bit checked out; it’s hard to look for silver linings when the rain cloud is this dark.
If you’re so inclined, though, there are always things to be optimistic about. The obvious one: the Cardinals’ offense has performed at a high level despite the poor results. They have an aggregate 111 wRC+ on the year, the fifth-best in baseball, and underlying statistics that match that. As always in St. Louis, it’s an ensemble affair, but three stars stand out atop the WAR leaderboard: Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, and Lars Nootbaar.
Wait, Lars Nootbaar? I know what you’re thinking: I’m the chairman of the Nootbaar Nutbar fanclub, and my preposterously biased take should be ignored. But the leaderboards don’t lie: He’s tied with Arenado for the most WAR on the team, and that’s despite a 100-PA deficit caused by early-season injury issues. He has the best wRC+ on the squad. It’s not just smoke and mirrors; Statcast thinks he deserves the vast majority of his production.
In fact, let’s take it just one step further. Nootbaar has flown under the radar on a lot of broad sweeps of the best players in baseball because of two things: he’s not playing at a best-in-game level, and he’s missed a lot of time with injury. That puts him in the vicinity, WAR-leaderboard-wise, with guys who play more but aren’t as good on a rate basis. He’s tied with Luis Arraez, Christian Walker, and Bryson Stott, just to name a few, for 2023 WAR, but he’s played less than any of those guys. So let’s ignore health, just for a minute. Read the rest of this entry »
