In the final 2019 standings, fourth-place teams in their respective divisions finished an average of 30 games behind the first-place team. In 2018, that number was about 22, and in 2017, it was about 25. The distance between your average fourth-place team and their division’s first-place team fluctuates a bit year-to-year depending upon how super that season’s super-teams are, but it’s never close. The worse team will sneak in a few victories against the superior team over the course of 18 or so matchups throughout the season, but the two really aren’t supposed to be on the same level. One of these teams has a good chance of hosting a playoff series, and the other is having trouble selling tickets in September.

Our preseason playoff projections tend to reflect that space. Before the season was postponed and the schedule still ran 162 games, our projected fourth-place finishers in four of the six divisions were given a 1% chance or less at finishing first. The Phillies, the presumed fourth-place finishers in the NL East, were given less than a 5% chance of winning their division. Then there was the NL Central, where the Cardinals were pegged for fourth but given a 17% chance to finish on top, with a projected record that was within four games of the first-place Cubs. That would have been the tightest grouping of the top four teams in any division since the AL East in 1988.

When the new 60-game season was done, just five games wound up separating the top four teams in the NL Central, and from the looks of our Depth Charts projections, the race figures to be incredibly tight again in 2021. While the Pirates lag far behind the pack, the top four teams in the division stand incredibly close in talent level.

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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2018 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

“A hard-charging third baseman” who “could have played shortstop with more range than Cal Ripken.” “A no-nonsense star.” “The perfect baseball player.” Scott Rolen did not lack for praise, particularly in the pages of Sports Illustrated at the height of his career. A masterful, athletic defender with the physical dimensions of a tight end (listed at 6-foot-4, 245 pounds), Rolen played with an all-out intensity, sacrificing his body in the name of stopping balls from getting through the left side of the infield. Many viewed him as the position’s best for his time, and he more than held his own with the bat as well, routinely accompanying his 25 to 30 homers a year with strong on-base percentages.

There was much to love about Rolen’s game, but particularly in Philadelphia, the city where he began his major league career and the one with a reputation for fraternal fondness, he found no shortage of critics — even in the Phillies organization. Despite winning 1997 NL Rookie of the Year honors and emerging as a foundation-type player, Rolen was blasted publicly by manager Larry Bowa and special assistant to the general manager Dallas Green. While ownership pinched pennies and waited for a new ballpark, fans booed and vilified him. Eventually, Rolen couldn’t wait to skip town, even when offered a deal that could have been worth as much as $140 million. Traded in mid-2002 to the Cardinals, he referred to St. Louis as “baseball heaven,” which only further enraged the Philly faithful.

In St. Louis, Rolen provided the missing piece of the puzzle, helping a team that hadn’t been to the World Series since 1987 make two trips in three years (2004 and ’06), with a championship in the latter year. A private, introverted person who shunned endorsement deals, he didn’t have to shoulder the burden of being a franchise savior, but as the toll of his max-effort play caught up to him in the form of chronic shoulder and back woes, he clashed with manager Tony La Russa and again found himself looking for the exit. After a brief detour to Toronto, he landed in Cincinnati, where again he provided the missing piece, helping the Reds return to the postseason for the first time in 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll admit it: I think about Corbin Burnes way more often than is healthy. Not in a Swimfan way, or anything; his blowup 2019 and standout ’20 are just my favorite example of a pitcher adjusting his pitch mix to match his natural talents, and Burnes has no shortage of talent. His fastball sits in the mid-90s with a naturally robust spin rate, and his slider turns batters into pretzels. He also posted a 6.09 FIP in 2019, driven by allowing 17 home runs in only 49 innings.

What was Burnes’ problem? While his fastball has a lot of spin, it’s not the same kind of spin as your average fastball. His fastball is heavy on gyroscopic spin — the football spin that gives sliders and cutters their signature “dot” — and light on transverse (or “active”) spin, which imparts movement. Of the 601 pitchers who threw at least 250 fastballs in 2019, Burnes’ active spin percentage ranked 585th.

That’s not a death knell for pitchers. The bottom of the list is dotted with sinker-ballers (the two types of fastballs are grouped together), and sinkers are unlike four-seamers in two ways. First, they have less transverse spin in general. Second, they don’t need as much transverse spin, because the effect they produce is a pitch that rises less than a batter expects. As they’re still thrown with backspin, less movement means less rise. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball, which has just gotten underway, and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West, AL East, and Central. Below is my assessment of the , covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Gibson, who died of pancreatic cancer on Friday, October 2 — the fourth Hall of Famer to die this year, after Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, and former teammate Lou Brock — was as tough and intense as they came. In 1967, about midway through his 17-year run with the Cardinals (1959-75), he was hit on the right shin by a Roberto Clemente liner. He pitched to three more batters before his already-cracked fibula snapped, sending him to the disabled list for over seven weeks. In the 13 months following his return, he was as dominant as any pitcher since the dead ball era, a run that included a 1.12 ERA during the 1968 regular season, still the lowest of any qualifier since 1914.

The indomitable Gibson possessed a mental toughness as well, one founded in a reserve of self-confidence that was the equal of his 95-mile-an-hour fastball and menacing glare. He dealt in intimidation, asserting his ownership of the inside corner of the plate and taking pride in his ability to “mess with a batter’s head without letting him into mine.” In his 1992 autobiography, Stranger to the Game, he described his repertoire: “I actually used about nine pitches — two different fastballs, two sliders, a curve, a change-up, knockdown, brushback, and hit-batsman.”

“He’d knock down his own grandmother if she dared to challenge him,” Hank Aaron once counseled teammate Dusty Baker. In one oft-told story, Gibson plunked former roommate Bill White after he was traded from the Cardinals to the Phillies:

Bob Gibson on hitting his friend Bill White. pic.twitter.com/6jxLF2MB5e

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 3, 2020

“I wanted to own the outside part of the plate. And the only reason you throw in here is to keep a guy from going out there,” said Gibson. Read the rest of this entry »

The 0-0 score in the middle of the fifth inning in Friday’s decisive Wild Card series Game 3 between the Padres and Cardinals was, technically speaking, accurate. It was true that neither team had tallied a run to that point in the contest. But the thing about scores is that they hide things, details that influence the way a fan actually feels while watching the game. In this case, the score conveyed a tie — a situation in which neither team had yet gained the upper hand. It probably would have been difficult to find a Padres fan who agreed, however. St. Louis had their ace on the mound going strong, and had yet to even warm up a second pitcher. San Diego, meanwhile, had already used up five pitchers in the game. Even without allowing a run, it felt the team was playing from behind. It had been that way ever since they lost their two best starters the final weekend of the regular season, and when they lost Game 1 of the series, and when they literally named Craig Stammen their starter in a win-or-go-home playoff game.

I’m not sure when it is that feeling went away. Maybe it was when the Padres scored their first run in the bottom of the fifth, or when they added two more in a seventh inning full of defensive miscues from St. Louis. Maybe it wasn’t until the end of the game that it finally set in that the Padres had accomplished something stunning — a 4-0 win carried out by nine bullpen pitchers that advanced the team to an NLDS standoff with the rival Los Angeles Dodgers next week. It is the most pitchers ever used in a shutout during the live-ball era, and the first playoff series win for San Diego in 22 years.

It was the second-straight day the Padres used nine pitchers, after doing so in the team’s 11-9 victory in Game 2 on Thursday. The day before that, the team had used eight pitchers. In both of those games, however, the conga line marching in from the bullpen was the result of starting pitchers who allowed the game to slip away from them early. In Game 1, Chris Paddack only made it 2.1 innings before allowing six runs on eight hits. In Game 2, Zach Davies went just two innings and allowed four runs on five hits. With Dinelson Lamet and Mike Clevinger already ruled out of the series because of injuries suffered last weekend, the Padres’ options for Game 3 were limited. It wasn’t until just a few hours before first pitch that the team announced Stammen — who last started a game in 2010, and held a 5.63 ERA in 24 innings this season — would get the ball in the first inning.

But Stammen got the first five outs of the game while allowing just a single hit, and each arm that followed simply continued to put up zeroes. Padres pitchers allowed just four hits and three walks, striking out eight and enjoying stellar defensive work from the infield behind them. Read the rest of this entry »

Within the context of the abbreviated 2020 season, both Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado produced electrifying highlights and eye-opening numbers while helping the Padres to the National League’s second-best record. But with the team on the verge of elimination against the Cardinals in the best-of-three Wild Card Series, the two MVP candidates spent the first five innings of Thursday night’s game unable to get the big hit that would take a tattered pitching staff off the hook. And then with two swings of the bat, the pair’s fourth set of back-to-back home runs this season changed everything, erasing a four-run deficit. Additional fireworks followed — enough to summon the ghosts of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, even — and ultimately, the Padres outlasted the Cardinals for an 11-9 win, forcing a Game 3 to be played on Friday.

For the first five and a half innings, this one had the feel of déjà vu. Already without Mike Clevinger and Dinelson Lamet due to arm injuries suffered during the final week of the regular season, and having gotten just 2.1 innings from Chris Paddack in Game 1 as they fell into a 6-2 hole from which they never escaped, the Padres fell behind early. Sinkerballer Zach Davies simply could not get the Cardinals — who finished in a virtual tie with the Padres for the lowest swing rate in the National League (43.6%) — to play his game by swinging at pitches below the strike zone. During the regular season, nobody threw a higher percentage of such pitches:

In two innings of work totaling 55 pitches, Davies got just 19 swings. Just four were whiffs, while seven were foul balls; of the eight put into play, four were hit for exit velocities in excess of 100 mph, three of them hits in the second inning. Read the rest of this entry »

In a perfect world for the San Diego Padres — or even a still-imperfect, slightly better world — Dinelson Lamet would have been on the mound in Game 1 of their Wild Card Series against the Cardinals. In that better world, Mike Clevinger would have been waiting in the wings for a Game 2. But that’s not the world that the Padres got. Instead, Lamet and Clevinger, both injured, were left off the series roster; Chris Paddack was the hastily-announced starter for the series opener. And without their two best pitchers, the Padres find themselves already staring down elimination after a grueling 7-4 loss in Game 1 that took nearly four hours and saw each team use more than six pitchers.

From the first batter of the game, the Cardinals lineup — which ranked 19th in wRC+ and is coming off one of the most brutal stretches of non-stop baseball that we’ve ever seen — was all over Paddack. It’s been a tough sophomore season for the 24-year-old, largely due to the ineffectiveness of his fastball: What was, in his rookie season, a strength of his repertoire has been a weakness in 2020, with decreased movement and poor command resulting in a lot of hard contact. Paddack was one of baseball’s hardest-hit pitchers this year, and today the damage against him started almost immediately. After a leadoff popup off the bat of Kolten Wong, five consecutive hits — single, home run, double, single, double — put the Cardinals ahead 3-0. A sacrifice fly made the score 4-0 before Kwang Hyun Kim had faced a single batter. Three out of those five hits had exit velocities above 100 mph, including the home run crushed off the bat of Paul Goldschmidt. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s grimly fitting that San Diego’s playoff drought would end in a year like this. After nearly 15 years of baseball as forgettable as the half-dozen jerseys they cycled through in that time, of course the Padres snapped their October skid in such an exciting matter — and in such killer threads — right when nobody could come watch them do it. Par for the course for arguably the country’s most luckless sports city.

But for any Friars fan who can overcome the first half of “bittersweet,” the deck is actually stacked pretty well for them here. While any fair bracket would slot them in the two-seed most years, this season’s weird format actually plays to their advantage. Anything can happen in a short series but at least this set isn’t as short as it would have been normally: Were this any of the past eight seasons, San Diego would have suffered the misfortune of posting the league’s second-best record and getting a trip to the coin-flip round for their trouble.

Instead, they’ll live to fight another day if Game 1 goes south, an extra benefit given their opponent. Few clubs would be at a significant disadvantage in a best of three, but if you were looking to tip the scales toward one side, you’d have their foe limp into the series physically and mentally drained. Such is the case here, where the Padres battle the beleaguered St. Louis Cardinals, who are still catching their breath from playing 10 double headers over the past 45 days.

A baseball season is said to be a marathon, not a sprint; for St. Louis in 2020, it was arguably both. Given their daunting schedule, the Redbirds can be slightly forgiven for mediocre underlying metrics. I’ll buy the idea that they’re a little better than they played. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re a day away from the start of a bizarre, expanded postseason, one with an abnormally large field of teams, a short Wild Card round that makes the better ones unusually vulnerable, and a five-game Division round without an off day. The postseason’s new structure presents one-time advantages and disadvantages that could impact series outcomes. I’ve considered which aspects of roster construction might suit this unique situation (some more familiar than others) to determine which lower-seeded teams are especially strong and are perhaps teed up to make a sneaky deep October run.

For this exercise I’m only considering teams that currently have a winning percentage under .550, since while the Yankees and White Sox are currently seeded fifth and seventh respectively in the American League, I think they’re quite good and relegated to a lower seed purely due to the quality of their divisions. They’re not sleepers, they’re just a lower-seeded contenders. Let’s begin by looking at the obvious criteria.

It’s a tale as old as time, but having starters who can twirl a gem gives you a puncher’s chance in a playoff series. Even if your offense does nothing, a dominant start means you’re, at worst, in a close game with a chance to squeak out a victory despite scoring few runs.

I’m certain this category is the one already most familiar to even casual baseball fans, let alone FanGraphs readers, who can all point at Trevor Bauer, Luis Castillo and Sonny Gray and know the Reds are especially dangerous in this respect. But I wanted to apply some amount of rigor and objectivity to this to make sure I’m not either overrating or overlooking anyone. So I turned to Game Score Version 2. It’s a nice shorthand more than it is a precise, meaningful stat, but while FIP (which I’ve also included in the following table) is a better proxy for overall pitcher quality, I wanted a measure that indicates a pitcher’s capacity to have a dominant and/or elite-level start. As such, in the table is each pitcher’s 2020 FIP, as well as how many times they’ve had a Game Score v2 start of 65 (Strong Starts) or better, and how many they’ve had at 72 (Elite Starts) or better. Read the rest of this entry »