The last week of the regular season isn’t quite as fun as the first week of the playoffs, but it’s close. Everyone’s scoreboard-watching, doing back-of-the-napkin math to track who can clinch when and under what circumstances, and also wondering how on Earth the Mariners are still technically alive. It’s the time of year when Jay Jaffe turns a warm, rich copper color and transforms into a glowing orb.

Since 2022, the last week of the season has been a little less interesting. Up until that point (with one or two exceptions), MLB had taken a unique view toward ties in the standings. Where other leagues in other sports would settle a deadlock by going down a list of tiebreakers, MLB teams would settle ties on the field, with a (usually one-game, sometimes three-game) playoff before the actual playoffs.

For generations, this system made sense. In a league with either two or four divisions and only one or two playoff rounds, the stakes were incredibly high, and time was abundant. And it produced some incredible moments: the Bucky Dent homer, the Giants soaking the infield to slow down Maury Wills, the Matt Holliday slide… oh, and the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, probably the most famous non-World Series play in baseball history. Read the rest of this entry »

This all started because I hate losing. Especially to Ben Lindbergh.

Just before the season started, I took part in the annual Effectively Wild preseason predictions game, in which Meg Rowley, the Bens (Lindbergh and Clemens), and I each made 10 bold predictions about the 2024 campaign. The listeners voted on which ones they thought would come true, and we’d be awarded points accordingly — the more outlandish the prediction, the greater the reward if it happened.

One of my 10 predictions was that Spencer Strider would strike out 300 batters in 2024. As my predictions go, this one felt pretty conservative. Strider had struck out an absurd (and league-leading) 281 batters in only 186 2/3 innings last season. I attended Strider’s Opening Day start in which he debuted a new breaking ball and punched out eight Phillies in just five innings. I was feeling good.

Then Strider’s elbow started barking in his next start, and by mid-April it was announced that he’d need Tommy John surgery and would take no further part in the 2024 season. Scorekeeper Chris Hanel marked that prediction down as incorrect, and took 42 points from my score. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 7, Randy Arozarena slashed a double to right. He came into second base at a trot, so evidently safe that he didn’t need to sweat it. As the camera focused on him, he turned and hyped up the dugout. There was nowhere else to look; there had been no runners on base and thus no other action to follow.

Things weren’t so sunny 10 days later. Arozarena batted with two on and two out, and a double would have been absolutely glorious. The runners would be off on contact, which meant the difference between a double and an out was two-plus runs — the two that would actually score, plus some chance of Arozarena himself scoring. But Arozarena struck out on a 1-2 slider from Bailey Falter, and the inning ended.

Advanced statistics don’t assess the value of a play in just one way. You can think about these two moments extremely differently depending on which metric you’d prefer to use. Our main offensive statistic, wRC+, ignores context on purpose. It works out the average value of a home run across all home runs hit in the majors in a given year, and uses that as the value for every home run. It does the same for every offensive outcome, in fact. Read the rest of this entry »

Programming note: I’m taking a break from my Five Things column this week, as I’m traveling to Chicago for Saberseminar. Five Things will return next week with events from the last two weeks. In the meantime, please enjoy a ridiculous hypothetical.

This week, someone in my chat asked me an interesting hypothetical: How different would baseball be if the fences were the same distance from home plate all the way around? It would obviously be wildly different from how the sport currently works. Center field is the deepest part of the park by far, of course, and it’s hard to picture exactly what an equidistant fence would look like. You might think it’s a triangle, but that’s not right – it looks more or less like an arc, which is what an actual stadium looks like, only with a much sharper curvature.

That sounds so darn weird that I wanted to see what it would mean for offense. I don’t have any strong analytical reason for doing so. We aren’t plumbing the depths of smart baseball analysis here; we’re making up a dumb world and wondering what kinds of dumb things would happen in it.

First things first: There would be more home runs. I picked 370 feet as the distance because it feels reasonably close to the real world average of fence depths. I picked a 10-foot tall wall for similar reasons; if we’re getting weird in some ways, I’d prefer to standardize the others. There’s an easy math trick you can use here; baseballs tend to fall at roughly a 45 degree angle by the time they’re descending, their forward momentum getting slowly blunted by air resistance. That means that a ball that clears the wall by a millimeter would travel 10 more feet before hitting ground that was at field level – in an outfield bullpen, say. In other words, every ball that travels 380 or more feet in the air is going to be a home run now. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a saying: “God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers.” I guess it started as an earnestly encouraging axiom, but like everything in 2024 it’s gone through a car wash of irony and post-irony, emerging on the other side as something only an expert in semiotics could trace from the Christian bookstore to the Something Awful forum.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking about leverage index. (Most things get me thinking about leverage index.) “There’s nothing so much like a god on earth as a general on a battlefield,” Michael Shaara once wrote. Are the generals of baseball — managers — like God in this respect? Do they give their toughest battles to their strongest soldiers?

The age of managing a bullpen to fit the save rule is, if not over, then at least waning. Today’s relievers are young enough to have grown up mocking Jerome Holtzman, and they accept that the most important inning is frequently not the ninth. That makes the manager’s job a little trickier: Rather than lining up his best bullpen arms by inning, he has to feel the game out. To guess whether the time to use A.J. Minter is with two lefties coming up in a two-run game in the seventh, or to hold on for a higher-leverage situation that may or may not come. How are they doing? Read the rest of this entry »

One of my enduring memories of watching the All-Star game as a child — a child who became a baseball fan in a time before high-speed internet, social media, or even interleague play — was learning about all the players I’d been unable to see throughout the regular season. That included the American League and West Coast stars, but also a parade of forgettable pitchers, and yes, it always seemed to be pitchers, from crappy teams.

For some reason, Royals right-hander José Rosado is the guy who sticks out in my mind. Rookie of the Year vote-getter in his age-21 season, All-Star at 22 and 24, done in the majors at 25. If he hadn’t shown up in pregame intros between Justin Thompson and Jeff Cirillo that one time, I might never have been aware of him. Read the rest of this entry »

One advantage of living in an age where the wealth of human knowledge is at one’s fingertips is that no curiosity need go unsatisfied. I was just sitting around wondering idly about the relationship between how hitters get pitched and how well they do against certain types of pitches. So I ran a couple of Baseball Savant searches and played around in Excel over lunch and ended up with something that would surely have made Henry Chadwick soil his trousers.

Which probably overstates the impact of these findings, such as they are. One of my major takeaways is that Aaron Judge is a preposterously good hitter, which I feel like we all knew going in. Still, it’s a fun journey to go on, so let’s take it together. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with a disclaimer: I don’t expect this to happen. If a Scott Boras client turned down a reported $150 million over six years from the Yankees, he’s not going to settle for a one-year contract. Blake Snell is 31, coming off a Cy Young season, with a less-than-encouraging track record for durability. He should ring the bell now; he’s never going to be more valuable. And he probably will. There will be a lucrative long-term deal for him somewhere, at a high enough dollar figure that Boras can sell it as some kind of record.

But it’s the last proper week of the offseason, and the reigning NL Cy Young winner is still out of work. So let’s speculate a little. More than speculate: Let’s imagine what would happen if Snell and Boras decided to throw caution to the wind and try to max out on a one-year contract. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday afternoon, the Astros had an off day before the start of a series in Baltimore, so they did what most defending World Series champions have done under those circumstances, and swung by the White House. There, Dusty Baker and his merry men were fêted by President Joe Biden, who commiserated with the beloved Astros manager over having to wait decades to reach the pinnacle of their respective professions.

What a lovely event, one that raises two questions. First: What the hell, Mr. President, I thought you were a Phillies fan? Between this and the similar ceremony for the Braves a year ago, Biden has used two of his three championship soirees to celebrate a hated division rival and the team that beat the Phillies in the World Series. The Bidens are already on thin ice after the First Lady showed up to watch a white-hot Phillies team in Game 4 of the World Series, only for them to get no-hit and lose three straight to end the season.

That leads into the second question: Encountering a sitting president has to be a provocative experience, even for a professional athlete. What effect does going to the White House have on a defending World Series champion? Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Strider currently leads all qualified starters in strikeout rate. When I learned that bit of information, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, that tiny little guy’s on track to throw enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, good for him!”

But Strider is way out in front of the field. His K% is 38.9%; Kevin Gausman is second at 32.6%, with a small group of pitchers clustered behind him in the low 30s. Strider isn’t particularly walk-averse — his BB% is 40th-lowest among 67 qualified starters — and yet his K-BB% of 31.4% would be the fifth-best strikeout rate in the league.

I don’t want to say this is happening without anyone batting an eye — here we are, after all, batting our eyes at Strider’s strikeout rate. But we’ve become so inured to this kind of performance, and so quickly, that it’s worth taking a step back to consider the gravity of what he’s doing. Read the rest of this entry »