Back in 1906, the Chicago Cubs won 116 games, lost just 36, and put up a .763 win percentage equivalent to 124 wins in a 162-game schedule. Over the next 50 or so years, three other teams won at least 110 games, and another 11 posted at least 105 wins in a season. In 1961, Major League Baseball added eight more games to the schedule, giving us the 162-game schedule that we have today. Over the next 55 years, only two teams won more than 110 games, with more teams equaling greater parity, making it tougher to put up gaudy win totals. The New York Yankees put up a modern-day record 114 wins in 1998 on their way to a World Series title, but they were bested by the 2001 Seattle Mariners, who tied the all-time record by winning 116 games on their way to not winning the World Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers are perhaps the first team since with a shot at topping the 1906 Cubs and 2001 Mariners. The Dodgers have a shot at 117.

After all the moves at the trade deadline, the Dodgers’ record stood at 74-31, a .705 winning percentage, best in all of baseball by a healthy margin over the Houston Astros. If we assume the Dodgers would just win games at the same rate going forward, the team would end up with 114 wins. Here are a few different scenarios for LA going forward:

• If they go roughly .500 (28-27), they will finish with 102 wins.
• If they hit their rest-of season projections (34-23), they will finish with 108 wins, which would be tied for fifth since 1961, and also behind the 1927 Yankees and a few teams from more than 100 years ago.
• If they continue at their current pace of wins (40-17), they will win 114 games, tied for third with the 1998 Yankees and behind only the 2001 Mariners and the 1906 Cubs.
• If they play their final 57 games like their most recent 57 games (46-11), they will finish with 120 wins, four more than any other team.

While outplaying their projections by the seven games necessary to tie the record and eight games better to beat the record isn’t exactly likely, their record thus far, especially since mid-May indicates it is something the team is capable of. Losing Clayton Kershaw for any amount of time is certainly a blow, but picking up Yu Darvish and getting massive reinforcements for the bullpen certainly lessens that loss and could make the team even better. Read the rest of this entry »

When you think of Adrian Beltre, the first thought that comes to mind might just be his defense. In the early parts of his career, that was his bread and butter. He does, after all, rank 19th all-time in Def, and 10th since the color barrier was broken in 1947. By the time he retires, top 15 in Def is well within his reach.

And yet, Beltre is just as prolific as a hitter! He’s been one of the best players ever on both sides of the ball. Yesterday, he became just the 31st member of the 3,000-hit club. That’s pretty amazing. It’s pretty much an automatic ticket to the Hall of Fame (don’t worry, Rafael Palmeiro will get there some day via some Veteran’s Committee). Beltre also ranks 15th in doubles, 38th in home runs, 21st in total bases and 21st in extra-base hits.

He doesn’t rank quite as high in rate statistics — his .195 ISO ranks 308th out of 3,953 qualified players, for instance. That’s still really, really good, but it doesn’t stand out quite as much. But he has been really good for a really long time. And he’s still playing well. If he’s not at the top of his game, he’s pretty close, and doing a lot better than a lot of other players at the time of their 3,000th hit. Let’s take a look:
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My first year covering Major League Baseball was in 2013, when I reported on the Pirates for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. If you recall, that was also the year that the Pirates ended the longest consecutive stretch of losing seasons — 20 of them — in major North American professional sports history.

Immediately after the non-waiver trade deadline passed that season, Pirates general manager Neal Huntington arrived at a makeshift podium in a conference room in the depths of PNC Park. He was asked to explain why he had not executed a trade to strengthen a club trying to secure not only its first winning season since 1992, but also its first playoff appearance since that season. Read the rest of this entry »

Rafael Devers will be called up to the majors on Tuesday. Well, I suppose he may technically be called up today, but he’s not expected to start Monday’s game, so it might not be until Tuesday. Whatever day he’s officially promoted, he’ll become the first 20-year-old position player promoted to the majors this season. While Travis Sawchik has already discussed Devers in the context of the Red Sox’ situation, I’d like to look at him in the context of 20-year-old call-ups.

I went back to 1985 in pulling info for 20-year-old call-ups, and there are some interesting things to be shared. Let’s start at the beginning: Devers will become just the 78th player since 1985 to be called up to the majors for his debut as either an 18-, 19- or 20-year-old. Here’s a breakdown of all the relevant players:

(Note: You get one attempt to guess who the 18-year-old was. If you get it wrong, you must serve a self-imposed banishment from FanGraphs for a period of 10-10.5 hours.)

As you can see, the last three years have represented a bit of a dry spell for young call-ups. From 1985 to 1994, there were 26 call-ups. There were also 26 from 1995 to 2004 and 24 more from 2005 to -14. This season is far from over, obviously, but if this holds, it will become the lowest three-year total since ’85. The current lowest periods are 2014-2016 and 1999-2001, at five. Teams are either more cautious these days or front offices are experiencing less pressure to produce winners — which may be an inevitable result of teams purposefully tanking.

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Some say it’s all been done before. That’s perhaps mostly true, but as something only mostly true, all of it has not actually been done before. This is especially true if you are willing to include qualifiers. Take this example: Before last weekend, no player had ever completed a cycle with a walk-off homer when the team was trailing at the time of the blast, per Baseball-Reference’s Play Index. Nolan Arenado has now eliminated that previous distinction.

Cycles are fairly rare, occurring 255 times, per Baseball-Reference, roughly once every 700 games, and this decade has been in line with that average. Since the beginning of last season, there have been 99 walkoff wins that ended in a homer, about one in 35 games. Of those 99 walkoffs, just 19 were come from behind homers, and only 13 came in the ninth, roughly one in 266 games. Put those two together, and we have about a one in 750,000 chance of both happening in a game. Given we’ve had about one quarter of that many games played over the last 100 years, it seems reasonable we’ve waited this long.

There have been a few other similar games over the years if you relax some of the requirements. There were only nine games in the Baseball-Reference Play Index where a player hit for the cycle and had the game winning hit in a walkoff. Many might have seen that the last player to hit a walkoff homer to complete a cycle was Carlos Gonzalez in 2010. He hit his shot to break a 5-5 tie against the Cubs. Hopefully the seven year difference between occurrences adds to the perceived rarity as opposed to making it seem commonplace. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a handful of reasons why Edinson Volquez’s no-hitter didn’t get a ton of attention. It happened on a weekend day in one of baseball’s least engaged markets (Miami). The pitcher involved was a journeyman in the midst of another just okay season. And as for making history and grabbing headlines, this particular Saturday wasn’t ideal, as one the greatest players of all time, Albert Pujols, was busy hitting a grand slam to record his 600th homer. So, yes, there were a lot of factors working against extensive coverage of this particular no-hitter. But it’s also possible that the no-hitter itself has lost a little bit of its cachet.

Some have lamented that Pujols’s 600th homer didn’t net the attention it should have garnered, given the rarity of such an event. It has actually been a while since a modern player — whether Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, or Jim Thome — hit their 600th home runs, and we might not see another player get there for quite some time. The home-run barrage of the 90s and early 2000s might have dampened the enthusiasm for career accomplishments like a 500th or 600th homer. As for a no-hitter, it’s more of a single-game oddity and, in terms of rarity, comes nowhere close to a big career home-run threshold. But Scooter Gennett’s four-homer game received a lot of attention, and that’s a single-game exploit, as well. (Although, in fairness, it’s probably closer to a perfect game in terms of frequency.) Whatever the case, it appears as though interest in the no-hitter has decreased and it’s quite possible that the volume of them over the last half-decade is the reason why.

From 2012 to -15, there were 20 no-hitters, an average of five per year and the greatest number over any four-year stretch in the last century. Here are the number of no-hitters by season over the past 50 years.

The past decade has produced four of the top 10 individual seasons for no hitters out of the last 50 years, and every single year of the past decade has seen at least three no-nos. In looking at things another way, let’s go back even further, and look at the period of time it took to get to the 20 no-hitters that we saw from 2012 to -15.

We get sort of close to the present rate in 1968 — a season literally known as the Year of the Pitcher — but otherwise the present is unrivaled by this standard. Perhaps that’s why most of us didn’t even notice we were going through the longest no-hitter drought in more than a decade when it was two seasons between Randy Johnson and Anibal Sanchez no-nos between 2004 and 2006. To find another drought longer, you have to go back to 1988 to 1990, when Randy Johnson ended a drought begun by Tom Browning.

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I got asked the question in my chat this week. Dave also got asked it in his. What do you do to solve Byron Buxton’s problems at the plate? This is essentially the question. People want to know. The answer, to me, is you let him play. It seems that we get these questions each April about a phenom struggling in his first taste of a full major league season. So while I’m writing this piece with Buxton in mind and as the lead example, it is also sort of universal.
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If you come to this site, or are something more than just a casual baseball fan, you likely know that Josh Donaldson is pretty great at this whole baseball thing. With four straight top-10 American League Most Valuable Player Award finishes, and one actual MVP Award in his trophy case, this should seem pretty straightforward. And yet, relative to how good he is, I feel he’s still a little underappreciated. So in that spirit, I wanted to dig in a little on just how good he is. The answer is that he’s been historically great.

Let’s start, as we often do, with a table.

Donaldson didn’t become a regular in the majors until his age-27 season. That was back in 2013, four seasons ago. Since then, he has been one of the best players of all-time for his age. Look at him right there, nestled between Greg Maddux and Mickey Mantle. What?

Before we get to the players who appear on this table, though, let me give you a quick sampling of the players who aren’t on it: Jeff Bagwell, Miguel Cabrera, Steve Carlton, Lefty Grove, Eddie Mathews, Mike Piazza, Cal Ripken, Alex Rodriguez, Tom Seaver, Duke Snider, Tris Speaker, and Cy Young, just to name a few. When was the last time you thought of Donaldson as superior to A-Rod? Obviously, I’m not saying that Donaldson’s career is better. In the time he’s been a regular, however, he been nearly as good as possible.

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While perhaps not universally accepted, it is generally acknowledged that Ozzie Smith is the greatest defensive player of all time. With 13 Gold Gloves at the most important defensive position that doesn’t require extra equipment, his ability to generate outs was second to none. Back when we had few defensive stats, eight times Smith led the league in assists and still has the record among shortstops with more than 8,000 in his career.

Omar Vizquel was not quite Ozzie Smith as a fielder. He did receive 11 Gold Gloves. He also played in 200 more games at shortstop than Smith, which is the record, and he’s third all-time in assists by a shortstop — around 700 behind Ozzie. Vizquel comes up on the Hall of Fame ballot a year from now, and he’s likely to be regarded as nearly, but quite, Smith’s equal as a defender.

Being nearly as good as Ozzie Smith might be enough to get Vizquel in the Hall of Fame, given just how good Smith was, but there are considerable questions regarding Vizquel’s bat.

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In one way, Mike Schmidt is the prototypical third baseman: he was a great hitter and provided excellent defense. In another way, though, he isn’t: a prototype is a model on which subsequent reproductions are based. But no other third basemen has ever reproduced Schmidt’s accomplishments. He’s the best third baseman ever.

There’s a view that’s prevailed for some time to the effect that third basemen are just like first basemen except slightly more mobile. This was never really the case, though — and, on offense, third basemen now have a lot more in common with second basemen than their counterparts on the other corner of the diamond. This view likely cost Ron Santo the chances to enter the Hall of Fame by way of the writers’ ballot and, ultimately, prevented him from living to see his own induction.

A very similar player, Scott Rolen, will appear on the ballot for the first time in 2017. Based on the value he provided both on offense and on defense, Rolen deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

Here are some mostly mainstream stats, with a few other metrics worked in, comparing Santo and Rolen:

That’s pretty darn close across the board. Rolen’s capacity for doubles resulted in a much higher slugging percentage. Because he played in an era defined by greater run-scoring, though, he sits slightly behind Santo in wRC+. Rolen closes the gap with superior defensive numbers, however — only Brooks Robinson and Mike Schmidt have more Gold Gloves than Rolen at third base, if you’re into that sort of thing — to end up with nearly identical WAR numbers.

Individual comparisons often make for a poor method for evaluating a potential Hall of Famer’s case. Going to the lowest common denominator will inevitably end up lowering standards for the Hall of Fame. (Consider what would happen if comparing every outfielder to Jim Rice, every first baseman to Orlando Cepeda, every second baseman to Red Schoendienst, etc.) That said, comparing a candidate to a clearly deserving member of the Hall can provide solid insight.

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