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 »

By and large, the new rule set for this season has led to more exciting baseball. Stolen bases are more common than they’ve been at any point this century. The average time of game is down more than half an hour from its peak in 2021, and lower than it’s been in almost 40 years. There’s less dead time between pitches and fewer annoying delays.

But as much as these rules represent a considered effort to goose the entertainment value of the sport, there wasn’t a mechanism to preserve baseball’s most exciting play: the triple. So concurrent with a rise in stolen bases, we’re down to 0.12 triples per team per game. According to the historical data on Baseball Reference, that’s an all-time low:

Read the rest of this entry »

Alexis Díaz is having a great season. He’s struck out 30 of the 61 batters he’s faced and held opponents to a .113 batting average. In most cases, that would make him the best pitcher in his own nuclear family. Unfortunately, he has an older brother. Last season, Edwin Díaz led all relievers in strikeout rate. This season, Alexis has the best strikeout rate among relievers. Edwin led the league in reliever WAR last season, and Alexis is currently tied for second. If Yennier Cano ever gives up a run, which does not look likely to happen anytime soon, Alexis could take over the league lead in that category as well.

The Díazes are the Sultans of Swing-and-Miss. I bet you thought I was going to go for “Brothers in Arms,” which is the reference that’s been busted out for every family of pitchers since humanity first discovered Mark Knopfler back in the 1970s. But no, Dire Straits has a wide and venerable catalog of songs appropriate for this situation. You might say that because Edwin’s return from knee surgery is So Far Away, the Mets are paying him Money for Nothing this season. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday afternoon, a friend of mine was straight up not having a good time watching his favorite baseball team. The Phillies, defending NL champions and consensus favorites to return to the playoffs this year, were losing to the Rockies. They’d already done that once this weekend and are heading into the last week of April under .500. So he came up with an interesting theory: With so many players leaving Phillies camp to play in the World Baseball Classic, perhaps the interruption in spring training had a deleterious effect on the team’s preparation and/or chemistry.

Then he asked me if I knew of anyone who’d studied the issue. I said no and almost let the matter drop right there. Looking at the statistical leaderboards, playing in the WBC didn’t throw Shohei Ohtani off his schwerve. (Or Ronald Acuña Jr., or Randy Arozarena, or Xander Bogaerts)

Most of all, there are more direct explanations for the Phillies’ slow start: Bryce Harper is hurt, they’re down to something like their fourth-string first baseman, and there’s a specific Phillies fan who’s done something to anger the baseball gods and call down their wrath. His name is Nick, he lives in Christiana, Delaware, and the baseball gods will not relent until he is found and sacrificed upon a stone altar. Hurry, there’s no time to lose. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the things that happened in baseball this weekend, the only one I cared about was a Double-A game between the Chattanooga Lookouts and the Rocket City Trash Pandas. Now, I know what you’re thinking. If an April Double-A game is worth caring about at all, it must be a real doozy. To have it overshadow a weekend of MLB action — the Rays went to 9-0, Jordan Walker tied Ted Williams’ record for longest career-opening hitting streak, Oneil Cruz got hurt — well surely I must be exaggerating.

Try this on for size: The Trash Pandas led 3–0 heading into the seventh and final inning of the game, having not allowed a hit. They went on to lose that game 7–5, still not having allowed a hit. “You can’t predict baseball” is a bit of a cliché; baseball has been around for more than 150 years. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. But allowing seven runs while preserving a no-hitter? That’s worthy of detailed examination. Read the rest of this entry »