With just 10 days left to go in the regular season, four teams — the Brewers, Dodgers, Guardians, and Yankees — have clinched playoff berths, and while just one division race has been decided, only two others have even a faint pulse. There’s still plenty of drama to be had with regards to the Wild Card races, which essentially boil down to a pair of four-to-make-three scenarios; Seattle might have been a stronger fifth in the AL if certain Mariners who reached third base didn’t insist upon taking very strange walkabouts. Beyond that, it’s also worth checking in on the jockeying for position to claim the first-round byes that go to the top two teams in each league.

Once upon a time, this space would be filled with my reintroducing readers to the concept of Team Entropy, but through the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, Major League Baseball and the players’ union traded the potential excitement and scheduling mayhem created by on-field tiebreakers and sudden-death games in exchange for a larger inventory of playoff games. The 12-team, two-bye format was designed to reward the top two teams by allowing them to bypass the possibility of being eliminated in best-of-three series. So far, however, things haven’t worked out that way, because outcomes in a best-of-five series are only slightly more predictable than those of a best-of-three.

In fact, the National League teams who have received byes under the newish system have lost all four Division Series since, two apiece by the Dodgers and Braves. The 111-win Dodgers were ousted by an 89-win Padres team in 2022, and then last year’s 100-win team was knocked off by the 84-win Diamondbacks. In 2022, the 101-win Braves fell to an 87-win Phillies team, and last year, after winning 104 games in the regular season, Atlanta once again was eliminated by a Philadelphia club that had finished 14 games behind the Braves in the standings. American League bye teams have had more success, going 3-1, with last year’s 90-win Rangers beating the 101-win Orioles for the lone upset. The Astros have taken care of business in both years, with their 106-win club sweeping the 90-win Mariners in 2022 and their 90-win team beating the 87-win Twins last year. Read the rest of this entry »

Craig Kimbrel lost his job as the Orioles’ closer back in July due to his erratic performance. Now he’s out of a job completely. With just 11 games remaining in the regular season, the Orioles designated the 36-year-old righty for assignment on Wednesday, guaranteeing that he won’t be a participant in this year’s postseason, either for the playoff-bound Orioles or anyone else.

The decision came less than 24 hours after the worst outing of Kimbrel’s career. Called upon in the ninth inning of Tuesday night’s game with the Orioles trailing the Giants 4-0, Kimbrel struck out Patrick Bailey, but then all hell broke loose: a single, a steal, a wild pitch, a walk, a sacrifice bunt for which the throw home was too late, another walk, a strikeout, a two-run single, and an RBI double. After he departed, Matt Bowman yielded another two-run single, with both runs charged to Kimbrel’s ledger. It was the first time in 837 major league outings that he had allowed six runs; he’d never even allowed five before, but it was the eighth outing out of his last 11 in which Kimbrel was scored upon, raising his ERA to an unsightly 5.33.

On the one hand, this is a somewhat shocking turn of events for a player who made his ninth All-Star team just last season and plausibly could have this year as well. On the other hand, Kimbrel has been so ineffective lately that without his gaudy résumé — he’s fifth on the career saves list with 440, and may one day wind up in Cooperstown — and his big salary, he might have lost his roster spot awhile ago, particularly on a team whose bullpen has been a problem for months.

“We have so much respect for Craig and his career and what he’s done for the game, how long he’s pitched, how long he’s pitched well,” manager Brandon Hyde told reporters on Wednesday. “So it’s never easy to say goodbye to someone that’s done a lot. A heck of a first half for us, helped us win a ton of games. He’s an amazing teammate. He’s incredible in the clubhouse and just a class, class act.”

With closer Félix Bautista slated to miss the season after undergoing both Tommy John surgery and a follow-up ulnar nerve transposition and scar tissue cleanup, the Orioles signed Kimbrel to a one-year, $13 million contract in December, a deal that included performance bonuses as well as a $13 million club option for 2025, with a $1 million buyout. Baltimore represented Kimbrel’s fifth stop in four seasons; he pitched for the Cubs and White Sox in 2021, the Dodgers in ’22, and the Phillies last year. Throughout that nomadic run — and before that, dating back to his time with the Cubs (2019 to mid-2021) and Red Sox (2016–18) — he led something of a Dr. Jeckyl/Mr. Hyde existence, at times dominating opponents the way he did during his stellar run in Atlanta, but sometimes falling into bad habits mechanically. “Too rotational” is a phrase that has surfaced multiple times over the years to describe Kimbrel’s tendency to get out of whack. By getting down the mound too quickly instead of staying back, he has struggled with his release point and sacrificed deception, command, and unpredictability.

In 2019–20, a span during which Kimbrel threw just 36 innings due to a prolonged free agency and the pandemic, he posted a 6.00 ERA and 6.29 FIP. He bounced back to make the NL All-Star team in 2021, posting an 0.49 ERA and 1.01 FIP in 36 2/3 innings for the Cubs, but then a 5.09 ERA and 4.56 FIP after being traded to the White Sox on July 26. He put in serviceable seasons for the Dodgers and Phillies, combining for a 3.49 ERA and 3.54 FIP, but lost his closer’s job in Los Angeles in September 2022 and was left off the postseason roster. Last October, he was one of the goats as the Phillies were upset by the Diamondbacks, taking losses in Games 3 and 4 of the NLCS.

Kimbrel began his tenure with the Orioles in inauspicious fashion, blowing a save but collecting a win against the Royals on Opening Day. He blew two more saves in April, but none in May and just one in June. On July 7, he converted his 16th save in 17 attempts since the start of May, and 23rd in 27 attempts overall, lowering his season ERA to 2.10 and his FIP to 2.47. To that point, he had been scored upon just twice in his past 22 games, with one of his two runs allowed (across a total of 21 innings) an unearned run, a Manfred man who scored the game-winner for the Blue Jays in the 10th frame on June 5.

After that July 7 save, Kimbrel didn’t pitch again for a week, and when he did, the bottom began to drop out. Protecting a one-run lead against the Yankees at Camden Yards on July 14, he began the ninth by waking Trent Grisham and Oswaldo Cabrera, the Yankees’ eighth and ninth hitters, then served up a three-run homer to rookie Ben Rice. The Orioles got him off the hook with a three-run ninth against Clay Holmes. The decision had been made before that sad Sunday, but Holmes, who finished the first half with a 2.77 ERA and 2.74 FIP, made the AL All-Star team, while Kimbrel, who had a 2.80 ERA and 2.97 FIP by the end of that outing, did not. Just sayin’.

Kimbrel threw a scoreless inning in his next outing, against the Rangers on July 20, but he was scored upon in his subsequent three games, blowing another save and taking a loss as well. He didn’t get another save chance, as the Orioles traded for Seranthony Domínguez, his former Phillies teammate, on July 26. In fact, Kimbrel rarely got another high-leverage opportunity — just three of his final 15 appearances had a leverage index over 0.41, and one of those was 0.88.

Even in mostly low-leverage situations, Kimbrel didn’t perform up to major league standards. Across his 18 innings from July 14 onward, he was lit for an 11.50 ERA with a 7.45 FIP. He allowed five home runs in that span, walking 17.5% of hitters while striking out 21.6%. It was uncomfortable to witness, even when he pitched in games that had more or less been decided.

Overall, Kimbrel’s 4.18 FIP and 4.24 xERA suggest that he’s pitched better than that 5.33 ERA. He’s struck out 31.5% of batters, but he’s walked 13.4%, a mark he exceeded in both 2016 and ’20 (small sample alert). That said, his 54.3% first-pitch strike rate, 24.1% chase rate, and 11.8% swinging strike rate are his lowest marks for any season in which he’s thrown more than 21 innings. Looking to Statcast, his velocity loss particularly stands out. His four-seam fastball has averaged just 93.9 mph, down about two miles per hour from last year, and fading further as the season has gone on, with his results predictably going south as well:

The lower velocity cost Kimbrel about an inch of horizontal break relative to last year, in exchange for an inch of vertical break, and both of our pitch modeling systems capture the decline, both from year to year and in-season. Here’s a look at Kimbrel via Stuff+:

Note the huge falloffs in Location+ and Pitching+, as well as the overall grade. From last year to the latter half of this season, that’s about one full standard deviation of decline in Stuff+, and two standard deviations of decline in Location+ and Pitching+.

Kimbrel’s other main pitch, his knuckle curve, didn’t fall off as drastically as his fastball. Batters have hit the pitch for a decent .261 average, but he’s limited them to a meager .283 slugging percentage and a .252 wOBA with it, to go along with a 34.8% whiff rate. Those numbers aren’t quite as good as they were last year (.219 wOBA, 38.8%), but they’re more than serviceable. The problem is that from July onward, batters slugged .593 with a .416 wOBA against the fastball and slugged .385 with a .335 wOBA against the knuckle curve, leaving him without an effective weapon in what has basically been a two-pitch arsenal. He did have some success with a sweeper, throwing it 5.1% of the time overall and inducing a .114 wOBA and 44.4% whiff rate, but the pitch — which he generally threw to righties — all but disappeared from his repertoire in August and September.

The Orioles ran out of time to fix Kimbrel, and they’ve had myriad other problems to confront as they look to October, whether they rally to erase their current five-game deficit in the AL East or hold onto the top Wild Card spot. The O’s have gone just 31-37 since July 1, and haven’t posted a winning record in any calendar month since then. From July 1 through Tuesday, their bullpen was lit for a 4.94 ERA, fourth worst in the majors, with four relievers in addition to Kimbrel throwing at least 10 innings with ERAs above 5.00: Bryan Baker (5.73 in 11 innings), Burch Smith (5.74 in 26 2/3 innings), Gregory Soto (16.59 in 13 2/3 innings), and the since-departed Cole Irvin (8.50 in 18 innings). Domínguez hasn’t been great (3.26 ERA, 5.14 FIP), but Yennier Cano, Keegan Akin, and Cionel Pérez have been pretty good. The right-handed Cano and the left-handed Pérez are the top setup men, generally available for the occasional save chance based on matchups or if Domínguez is unavailable, though Cano has apparently been dealing with forearm tightness and wasn’t available in Wednesday’s loss to the Giants. The rotation, which has dealt with the losses of Kyle Bradish, John Means, and Tyler Wells to UCL-related surgeries, and Grayson Rodriguez to a lat strain, delivered just a 4.41 ERA (111 ERA-) and a 4.15 FIP (102 FIP-) from the start of July through Tuesday.

Yet the pitching hasn’t been the problem during this month’s 6-9 slide. Instead it’s been an offense that’s managing just an 89 wRC+ and 3.47 runs per game while missing the injured Ryan Mountcastle, Ramón Urías, and Jordan Westburg. “The testing of our depth, and a lot of depth we’ve lost, is not something I anticipated in this degree in the second half on the position player side,” executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s turned out here that’s not necessarily been the crisis we were expecting in the second half, and we’ve been paying for it.”

As for Kimbrel, he’ll likely go unclaimed as he passes through waivers and then get released, leaving the Orioles on the hook for the remainder of his salary and his buyout. While I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him, we’ve probably seen the last of his big contracts.

As for whether this rough stretch will affect Kimbrel’s Hall of Fame chances, I hardly think the matter is as simple or the situation as dire as one writer suggested on Twitter while pointing out that Kimbrel’s 18-inning rough patch lowered his career ERA+ from 171 to 158. That current mark (off of a 2.59 ERA) is higher than seven of the eight Hall of Fame relievers: Hoyt Wilhelm (147), Trevor Hoffman (141), Bruce Sutter (136), Lee Smith (132), Goose Gossage (126), Rollie Fingers (120), and Dennis Eckersley (116, including his time as a starter). The rub is that each of those seven (and Mariano Rivera, the eighth) has pitched at least 232 1/3 innings more than Kimbrel (809 2/3), with some of those enshrinees having more than double his total. Even Billy Wagner, who’s on the doorstep of Cooperstown after getting 73.8% of the vote last year, threw 903 innings (with an elite 187 ERA+).

Kimbrel’s case — which like that of Wagner is driven by exceptional rate stats rather than volume — does have some things in his favor. His nine All-Star selections is tied with Gossage for second behind Rivera’s 13. His 38.8% strikeout rate is the highest of any pitcher with at least 800 innings, well ahead of the second-ranked Kenley Jansen (35.5%) and third-ranked Wagner (33.2%). Likewise, his .167 opponents batting average has supplanted Wagner (.184) for the lead at the 800-inning cutoff, with Jansen (.182) sneaking ahead of him as well. His postseason body of work isn’t particularly pretty (4.50 ERA with 10 saves in 30 innings), and his performance during the Red Sox’s 2018 championship run led to Alex Cora’s choosing Chris Sale to close out the World Series against the Dodgers, but his lone ring and modest postseason stats surpass Wagner’s postseason résumé.

Turning to my Reliever JAWS metric, here’s the top 25:

When I checked in last November while covering Wagner’s Hall of Fame case, Jansen ranked 14th, Kimbrel 15th, and Robertson 23rd. Jansen has had a solid season for the Red Sox (3.42 ERA, 3.04 FIP, 27 saves). He’s gained 1.7 points of R-JAWS, enough to vault him into the top 10; he’s also climbed from seventh in saves (420) to fourth (447). Though he’s notched just two saves to run his career total to a comparatively meager 177, Robertson has pitched well for Texas (3.22 ERA, 2.59 FIP), adding 1.6 points as well to jump seven places. Meanwhile, Kimbrel has lost 1.3 points due to his sub-zero bWAR (-1.2) and WPA (-2.3), costing him a couple spots in the rankings.

If Kimbrel were on the ballot today, I don’t think he’d be elected, but then Eckersley and Rivera have been the only relievers to gain entry on the first ballot; aside from Fingers (elected in his second year) and Hoffman (third year) it’s been a slog for most of the others. As with Wagner, who’s heading into his 10th and final year on the writers’ ballot, one facet of the candidacies of Kimbrel and Jansen that I expect will become more clear over time is the high attrition rate of their peers and the wave of stars that has followed them. Chapman, who has 330 saves, is almost certainly done as a full-time closer, and while Edwin Díaz and Josh Hader are more or less halfway to 400 saves (223 for the former, 196 for the latter), each has already endured lengthy bouts of ineffectiveness, hanging full-season ERAs above 5.00 — and they’re in just their age-30 seasons. It’s nearly impossible to remain a top-flight closer for, say, a decade, and a viable one for a decade and a half. It’s even harder, obviously, to do the same as a starter, and if you want to take umbrage over Wagner’s possible election while Mark Buehrle has yet to clear 11% percent of the vote, I get it, but that’s a beef for another day.

Again, I don’t think this will be the last we hear from Kimbrel, though the book on him is probably closed for this year, which could save all of us some agita as we watch him walk two guys and have to wriggle out of another jam. When he’s on, he still has the swing-and-miss stuff to nail down the ninth inning. Here’s hoping he finds it again.

Anthony Santander might be the most underrated hitter in the American League, at least from a national perspective. Overshadowed by the young talent on his own team, the 29-year-old Baltimore Orioles outfielder has 102 home runs and a 123 wRC+ over the past three seasons. This year’s numbers are especially impressive. A reliable cog in manager Brandon Hyde’s lineup — he’s played in 145 of the team’s 151 games — the switch-hitter from Margarita, Venezuela, has hit 41 homers while putting up a 129 wRC+ and a club-best 95 RBI this season.

The degree to which he remains under the radar is relative. Santander enjoyed his first All-Star selection this summer, and he is currently getting increased attention due to his forthcoming free agency. Accolades have nonetheless been in shorter-than-deserved supply, and that includes our own coverage here at FanGraphs. As evidenced by his player page, Santander’s name isn’t in the title of any piece we’ve published prior to the one you’re reading. As good as he’s been, that is something that needed to be corrected.

Santander sat down to talk hitting one day after smacking his 40th home run of the season last week at Fenway Park.

———

David Laurila: How did you first learn to hit, and what has been your development path from there?

Anthony Santander: “My dad introduced me to baseball when I was 4 years old, and when I was young I was a pure right-handed hitter. I didn’t start switch-hitting until I started working to become a pro when I was 15 or 16. That took a little bit, because it was new for me.”

Laurila: Why did you start switch-hitting? Read the rest of this entry »

I first learned of the kick change while in Chicago for Saberseminar in late August. Chatting with Garrett Crochet and Jonathan Cannon in the White Sox clubhouse prior to a Saturday game, I heard the term from Cannon, who was describing a new pitch that one of their rotation mates, Davis Martin, had recently begun throwing. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

The following day, I learned even more about the atypical offering. Brian Bannister presented at Saberseminar that Sunday, and the kick change was one of the subjects he brought up. Moreover, the White Sox Senior Advisor to Pitching subsequently spoke about it in more detail while taking questions from the audience, this particular one coming, not surprisingly, from my colleague Michael Rosen.

As luck would have it, two opportunities to hear even more about the kick change were right around the corner. The White Sox visited Fenway Park this past weekend, and with Boston being my home base, I was able to sit down with Martin to get his perspective on the pitch, as well as the story of why and how he learned it. Then the Orioles arrived in town, so I talked to reliever Matt Bowman, who not only has something similar in his arsenal, but he also is Bannister-esque when it comes to the art and science of pitching. I spoke to the veteran right-hander about the kick change and its close-cousin relationship with the better-known split change.

Here are my conversations, lightly edited for clarity, with Martin and Bowman.

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David Laurila: What is the kick change?

Davis Martin: “It’s basically for supinators. I’ve never been a pronator. It’s for guys that have really good spin talent and have always had the ability to get to that supination plane. But pronating is very unnatural for us from a physiological standpoint. Read the rest of this entry »

The English language is full to overflowing with sailing idioms: Obvious ones, like “even-keeled,” and others, like “three square meals,” that hide in plain sight. And there’s a good reason. Our language originates from a nation of sailors. England’s global empire was built on, and maintained by, the strength of its navy and commercial shipping industry — naturally the jargon of that foundational trade came to dominate the language.

Hundreds of years and a Revolutionary War later (up yours, Charles Lord Cornwallis!), we Americans have built a language on baseball. Three strikes and you’re out. Home run. At least three different pitch types — fastball, curveball, screwball — have distinct non-sporting connotations these days.

I barely remember a time before I knew the ins and outs of baseball, and I suspect that most of you, reading this specialized website for baseball enthusiasts, have similar experiences. But even Americans who are indifferent to or mostly ignorant of the national pastime tend to know the basics just by osmosis. Read the rest of this entry »

At the trade deadline, all fans are equal. No matter their age, location, partisan commitments, gender, religion, emotional disposition, or level of statistical curiosity, they have one thought: “Man, our bullpen stinks. Our GM really needs to do something about it.”

By and large, the GMs agree. That’s why a quick survey reveals that roughly a bajillion pitchers got traded this deadline season. OK, it’s not that many. Between July 1 and July 30 this year, I counted 44 major league pitchers who were traded to a playoff contender. For transparency’s sake, I judged “major league pitcher” subjectively. Some of these trades amount to one team sending the other a Low-A no-hoper or a bag of cash in order to jump the waiver line for a guy they like. And then the team in question waives the guy they traded for three weeks later.

In short, I love you, Tyler Jay, and we’ll always have that killer Big Ten regular season in 2015, but you don’t count as a major league pitcher for the purposes of this experiment. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

While esteemed FanGraphs writer Michael Baumann has spent this season anchored to South Jersey, the same can’t be said about the right-handed pitcher of the same name. Since that linked interview from July 2023, pitcher Mike Baumann (hereafter referred to as “Baumann”) has thrown 60 innings with a 5.10 ERA, with his 49 strikeouts, 26 walks, and 11 home runs producing a similar 5.39 FIP. Nothing special, and certainly nothing either Baumann is too happy about.

Read the rest of this entry »

Usually, with a baseball trade, you want to avoid rushing to judgment. Like, did the Rays get fleeced when they traded David Price to Detroit in 2014, considering that the third piece they got in that deal, Willy Adames, was a starter for three years in Tampa Bay, then got traded again, and is still under team control in Milwaukee? Always in motion, said the great philosopher, is the future.

Usually.

Sometimes you need about three weeks to find out if a trade worked out for your team. So say the Orioles, who on Thursday demoted their big deadline acquisition, left-hander Trevor Rogers, to the minor leagues. The 2021 NL Rookie of the Year runner-up made four starts for Baltimore, totaling 19 innings in which he allowed 16 runs, as well as an opponent batting line of .338/.404/.514. For a presumptive playoff starter, it’s not ideal. Read the rest of this entry »

On any given day in the not-too-distant past, the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Dodgers, and Phillies might have laid claims to the best record in their respective leagues, yet all of them have also gone through recent stretches where they’ve looked quite ordinary — and beatable. To cherrypick just a few examples, at the All-Star break the Phillies had the major’s best record at 62-34 (.646), but since then, they’re 11-17 (.393). They were briefly surpassed by the Dodgers, who themselves shirked the mantle of the NL’s top record. Over in the AL, on August 2 the Guardians were an AL-best 67-42… and then they lost seven straight. The Yankees and Orioles have been trading the AL East lead back and forth for most of the season, but over the past two months, both have sub-.500 records. And so on.

At this writing, not a single team has a winning percentage of .600, a pace that equates to just over 97 wins over a full season. If that holds up, it would not only be the first time since 2014 that no team reached 100 wins in a season — excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, of course — but also the first since ’07 that no team reached 97 wins.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s quite a lot of bickering in sports, and not many things bring out more vehement disagreement than discussions involving who should get various awards. Even now, nearly 30 years later, when I think about Mo Vaughn beating out Albert Belle for the 1995 AL MVP, or Dante Bichette finishing second in that year’s NL race despite putting up just 1.8 WAR, I have to suppress a compelling desire to flip over a table. This year, thankfully, it’s hard to imagine the MVP voting results will be anywhere near as egregious as the ones we saw in ’95. That’s because the way MVP voters in the BBWAA evaluate players has changed dramatically since then.

Aaron Judge has easily the best traditional case for the AL MVP award if the season ended today. He leads the league in two of the main old-school batting stats: home runs and RBI. Bobby Witt Jr. and his .347 batting average is all that would stand between Judge and the Triple Crown. For what it’s worth, Judge would win the MLB Triple Crown, with twice the emeralds, rather than the AL one.

For most of baseball history, beginning with the first time the BBWAA handed out the award in 1931, numbers like these usually would’ve been good enough to win MVP honors. It also would’ve helped Judge’s case that the Yankees have one of the best records in baseball. If this were 30 years ago, Judge would all but officially have this thing wrapped up, barring an injury or the worst slump of his career.

But it’s the 2020s, not the 1990s, and I doubt anyone would dispute too strenuously the notion that ideas on performance, and their related awards, have shifted in recent years. Now, when talking about either an advanced offense statistic like wRC+ or a modern framework statistic like WAR, Judge certainly is no slouch. He currently leads baseball with 8.3 WAR, and his 218 wRC+ would be the eighth-highest seasonal mark in AL/NL history, behind only seasons by Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. But by WAR, his lead is a small one, roughly two-tenths of a run (!) over Bobby Witt Jr., who has surged since the start of July (.439/.476/.803, 247 wRC+ in 33 games) to supplant Gunnar Henderson as Judge’s main competition for the award. Henderson was right there with Judge for much of the early part of the season, and though he’s fallen off a bit, he’s still fourth in the majors with 6.4 WAR and capable of catching fire again at any time. With a month and a half left, Juan Soto can’t be completely counted out either.

A similar dynamic persists in the NL. Shohei Ohtani has looked a lot like the obvious MVP choice for much of the season, as he’s done, well, one half of the Shohei Ohtani thing: He is murdering baseballs and pitchers’ dreams. But as with Judge, there’s some serious competition when you look at WAR. Ohtani stands at the top, but by a fraction of a run ahead of Elly De La Cruz. Ketel Marte and Francisco Lindor are both within five runs of Ohtani, and nobody serious has ever claimed you can use WAR to conclusively settle disputes on differences that small. De La Cruz has more WAR than Ohtani since the start of June, and the latter two have more than the Dodgers slugger since the beginning of May. Marcell Ozuna, who has strong traditional stats (.302 BA, 35 HR, 90 RBI) shouldn’t be completely discounted if the Braves show signs of life; those numbers still matter, just not to the extent that they once did. With a fairly wide open race, there are plenty of stars with name power lurking just behind the leaders, such as Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman.

The answer of who should win the MVP awards is one we probably can’t answer beyond me giving my opinion, which I won’t do given the likelihood that I will be voting for one of the awards. But who will win the MVP awards is something we can make a reasonable stab at predicting. It’s actually been a while since I approached the topic, but I’ve long had a model derived from history to project the major year-end awards given out by the BBWAA. It was due for some updates, because the voters have changed. Some of the traditional things that voters prioritized, like team quality, have been de-emphasized by voters, though not completely. And the biggest change is the existence of WAR. Whatever flavor you prefer, be it Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, or the smooth, creamy swirl that can be scooped by our display window, this general stat has changed a lot about how performance is perceived.

There have been 47 MVP awards presented to position players who finished their seasons with fewer than 6.0 WAR; that’s more than a quarter of all hitter MVP seasons. However, excluding 2020, a hitter has not won an MVP without reaching that threshold since ’06, when both winners fell short: the NL’s Ryan Howard had 5.92 WAR, while AL winner Justin Morneau had 3.77 WAR.

When modeling the data, I use all the votes, not just the winners, and WAR is a pretty lousy variable when predicting voter behavior throughout most of history. That’s not surprising on its face since we’ve had WAR to use for only the last 15 years or so, making it impossible for most awards to have explicitly considered it. But there also appears to be only marginal implicit consideration, in which voters based their votes on the things that go into WAR without using the actual statistic. There’s a great deal of correlation between winning awards and high WARs in history, but that’s only because two of the things that voters have really liked, home runs and batting average, also tend to lead to higher WAR numbers. As an independent variable, WAR doesn’t help explain votes very well. That is, until about the year 2000.

If you only look at votes since 2000, all of a sudden, WAR goes from an irrelevant variable to one of the key components in a voting model. Voters in 2002 may not have been able to actually look at WAR, but even before Moneyball was a thing, baseball writers were paying much more attention to OBP, SLG, and defensive value at least partially because of analysts like Bill James, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, depending on your approach, once you deal with the correlations between variables, WAR comes out as one of or the most crucial MVP variable today. Could you imagine a world, even just 20 years ago, in which owners would propose paying players based on what sabermetrics nerds on the internet concocted?

The model I use, which I spent most of last week updating, takes modern voting behaviors into consideration. I use all three WAR variants listed above because it’s not clear which one most voters use. Here is how ZiPS currently sees the two MVP races this season:

This model thinks Judge is the favorite, but his odds to lose are nearly a coin flip. Witt is the runner-up, followed by Soto, Henderson, and the somehow-still-underrated José Ramírez. If we look at a model that considers all the BBWAA-voting years rather than just the 21st century results, this becomes a much more lopsided race.

Over in the NL, the updated ZiPS model sees a race that’s far more uncertain than the one in the AL.

Ohtani comes out as the favorite, but he has less than a one-in-three chance to win it. Behind him are the other WAR leaders, plus Ozuna.

Some of the WAR leaders without strong Triple Crown numbers, like Lindor, drop off considerably based on the entire history of voting, while Ozuna becomes a co-favorite with Ohtani. I haven’t talked about pitchers much in this article; they’re still included in the model, but none make the top 10 in the projected probabilities. Simply put, the willingness to vote pitchers for MVP seems to have declined over time. ZiPS doesn’t think any pitcher has been as dominant this season as the two most recent starters to win the award, Clayton Kershaw in 2014 and Justin Verlander in ’11, and closers these days typically can’t expect to get more than a few stray votes at the bottom of ballots.

It’ll be interesting to see how voting continues to change moving forward. In any case, no matter who you support for the MVP awards, strap in because there’s still plenty of baseball left to be played.