This is the fourth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

The final weekend of the 2019 season is upon us, and while five of the divisions and all of the super-complicated tiebreaker scenarios are off the table, with three games to play, each league has multiple scenarios that could result in at least one tiebreaker game. Seven hundred or so words is worth a picture, so first, behold this:

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Yesterday, Ned Yost announced that he would retire at the end of the season. While the news came as a surprise, the man himself has always kept a healthy perspective on the game. Based on Alec Lewis’s profile, he’ll leave the game feeling fulfilled and ready for the next chapter of his life. His departure, along with a juicy rumor that Royals special advisor and former Cardinals manager Mike Matheny will replace him, made for an eventful Monday morning in Kansas City.

As a skipper, Yost was never a visionary strategist. He’s not analytically inclined by nature, and he struggled in game states that require managers to play the percentages. Too often, his choices looked reflexive and dated: He liked having his fast shortstop lead off, OBP be damned. His good players bunted far too often. He didn’t always know when to deploy his closer. Managing the bullpen proved particularly challenging.

In one 2014 game, Yost summoned young Danny Duffy into a tied, extra-inning contest on the road, and then turned to Louis Coleman after the lefty loaded the bases. All that time, he had all-world closer Greg Holland ready to go, but he never got to pitch; Baltimore walked it off against Coleman. Later that year, Yost brought in a lefty specialist specifically to face (then) feeble-hitting Jackie Bradley Jr. with one on late in a one-run game; the Red Sox predictably inserted lefty-basher Jonny Gomes, who socked a two-run homer to give Boston a one-run win. After that episode, the manager memorably took responsibility, saying he’d “outsmarted himself.” Perhaps more than anyone over the last decade, Yost earned an almost anti-analytic reputation, becoming the face of what sabermetric seamheads spent so much time ranting about on Twitter.

But as Yost’s time in the dugout stretched on, the criticisms of his tactical acumen felt like an increasingly small slice of the story. For subscribers of the iceberg theory of managing, it’s clear that he compensated with other strengths. Yost always absorbed the blame whenever things went haywire, a point that both his bosses and charges acknowledged and appreciated. He also had a steady hand with young players. In Milwaukee and Kansas City, he helped turn perennially losing teams into playoff-caliber squads, happily shepherding young talents through the inevitable growing pains. Notably, a number of highly touted prospects who began their big league careers slowly — Eric Hosmer, Alex Gordon, Mike Moustakas, Jorge Soler, and Adalberto Mondesi among them — eventually blossomed. Might they have done so sooner under another manager? Perhaps, perhaps not. Regardless, most of the best prospects under Yost’s watch figured things out eventually. Read the rest of this entry »

With a four-game sweep that took Chicago’s playoff odds from likely to long-shot, the Cardinals put the Cubs’ season in the trash like an uneaten commemorative cake. Due to the Cubs’ recent run of success, and the painful way the club lost four, one-run games at home (while holding the lead or being tied in the ninth inning in three of those games), their fall is the most-attention grabbing aspect of the series (and we’ll get to that). But the sweep was massive for the Cardinals in its own right. Look at the Cardinals’ odds to win the division in the second half:

While the Cardinals still have some work to do, the division title is very likely theirs after failing to make the playoffs the last three seasons. At the beginning of the series, the team had some ground to cover, with a 58% chance at the division. Losing the first game of the series likely would have taken those odds below 50%. Despite the Brewers winning four straight, the Cardinals were able to push their chances upward due to their three-game lead over Milwaukee with just six games to go, while also eliminating their rival from division contention. The series might be viewed as microcosm of the season for St. Louis. The Cardinals offense was typically inconsistent, scoring nine runs in one game, and just nine total runs in the other three. Jack Flaherty pitched fantastically, continuing his run as the NL’s best pitcher in the second half. The bullpen was solid despite multiple short starts from the rotation, and the defense played its part, turning seven double plays.

A year ago, the Cardinals played the role of the Cubs. After going 39-23 in the second half after firing Mike Matheny just before the All-Star Break, the Cardinals got their playoff odds up to 79.5% with series against the Brewers and Cubs to close the season. But the Brewers swept the Cardinals in St. Louis, dropping the team’s playoff odds down to 19.6%. When they dropped the opener to the Cubs, those odds fell under 1% and their season was essentially over in four games. Speaking of a season essentially ending after four tough games:

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Across all full-season minor league affiliates in 2019, the list of the top three hitters in K%-BB% looked like this:

1) Nick Madrigal
2) Wander Franco
3) John Nogowski

Madrigal, of course, was the fourth overall pick in the 2018 draft out of Oregon State and is currently ranked as the No. 26 prospect in baseball on THE BOARD. Franco, an 18-year-old switch-hitting shortstop, was considered the top prospect in the 2017 July 2 international signing class, signed for $3.85 million, and is currently the game’s top prospect. Both Madrigal and Franco are high-profile minor leaguers who have been projected to make a future impact in the big leagues for some time.

And then there’s John Nogowski. Read the rest of this entry »

Over in the American League, there’s a pretty clear top tier of Cy Young contenders in Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole, followed by a solid group of candidates likely to garner down-ballot support. In the National League, there looks to be a top tier of Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom followed by a cascading set of secondary candidates, but that first look doesn’t quite tell the entire story.

To provide some idea of the statistical disparities voters must contend with when making their decision, I looked at our FIP-based WAR as well as the RA9-WAR also available here at FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference’s WAR, and Baseball Prospectus’ WARP. I included for consideration any player in the top five of any of those lists. That search returned nine pitchers for the potential five slots on a Cy Young ballot. Those players are listed below, with a mix of traditional and advanced statistics:

We have Scherzer and deGrom in first and second by about a win over the next-best candidate, with deGrom pitching tonight. After those two, we have a lot of innings from Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin, and fewer innings, but better peripherals, from Walker Buehler. After those three, we have four candidates who haven’t thrown a ton of innings, but all have much lower ERA’s than FIPs. As for how these candidates came to be considered, here are their WAR totals:

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For the second straight year, the NL Central crown is coming right down to the wire. I won’t belabor the details — Jay Jaffe has you covered with his Team Entropy series. I’m interested in a slightly different angle. There’s one outstanding feature of the current year’s setup — two of the contenders, the Cardinals and Cubs, happen to play each other in seven of their last 10 games.

That seems like an ideal setup for the trailing team — if you take care of business and win your games, you’ll win the league. None of this hoping the other team loses nonsense — emerge victorious, and you guarantee them a loss.

There’s a problem, though — the Cubs have a tenuous hold on the second Wild Card spot, and the Cardinals are pretty good. Perform poorly, as is entirely possible when seven of your last 10 games are against a good team, and you might miss the playoffs altogether.

That’s the schedule as it exists. What this article presupposes is, what if the schedule could play out a different way? I built a lightweight version of our playoff odds model using Depth Charts projections and starter and home field adjustments, using the same rules as my earlier article on Dodgers playoff scenarios. First, let me show you my model’s view of the 2019 NL playoff race, as it varies ever so slightly from the official FanGraphs odds:

With that out of the way, let’s have some fun! Let’s mess with reality and change some odds. Read the rest of this entry »

Stolen bases aren’t a priority in today’s game. Catchers and pitchers have taken to strategies that slow runners down as teams and players have stressed the value of baserunners and emphasized the risk and downside of making outs. When everybody is hitting home runs, getting from first to second matters a little bit less. But even accounting for that strategic shift, what the Cardinals are doing in preventing steals is impressive.

With 11 games to go, the Cardinals have given up 32 stolen bases. In the last 50 years, the lowest team stolen base total allowed was 31 by the Cincinnati Reds in 1971. Since the advent of the designated hitter in 1973, the 2005 Cardinals have the fewest stolen bases surrendered in a single season with 32.

This is not a new phenomenon for St. Louis. Since 2005, the Cardinals have boasted the lowest stolen base total six times; they’ve finished with the second-lowest seven times, fifth-lowest in 2006, and 17th-lowest in 2016.

As one might expect, the Cardinals have the fewest steals against them since 2005 when Yadier Molina took over full-time catching duties. Before getting to those numbers, though, here’s a graph showing team wild pitches plus passed balls since 2005.

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At the All-Star Break, the St. Louis Cardinals were an even 44-44 with an 11% shot at the division and a 21% chance at the playoffs. Since the All-Star Break, the team is an NL-best 37-18, just a half-game back of the Houston Astros during that time. The team has gotten great individual performances from Jack Flaherty, whose 3.0 second-half WAR trails only Justin Verlander among pitchers, and Kolten Wong, whose 2.2 WAR in the second half puts him in the top 20 for position players. The team has enjoyed a very good bullpen all season long, and it ranks fourth in baserunning, but on its face, this Cardinals team doesn’t have the look of a 90-plus win division winner. Sometimes a solid defense gets overlooked.

There are currently 47 players in the big leagues with at least four wins on the season. None play for the Cardinals. And St. Louis doesn’t really make up for a lack of star-power with high-end depth, either. Of the 102 players with at least three wins on the season, the Cardinals have just three (Wong, Flaherty, and Paul DeJong). Individually, they might look like the roughly average team they were at the All-Star Break. Even collectively, the numbers don’t impress. As a team, their 99 wRC+ from non-pitchers ranks 17th. Including their good baserunning numbers only ups their offensive rank to 16th in baseball. On the pitching side, their 9.6 WAR from their starters ranks 14th while their bullpen, with the unknown Giovanny Gallegos as their best pitcher, does better at seventh with 4.6 WAR, though the bullpen fails to make a dent overall; the staff still sits in 14th place.

The Cardinals have a thoroughly average offense and an average staff, but are currently projected to win 90 games and only need to go 9-10 the rest of the way to do so. We might chalk some of this up to luck, but their Pythagorean record based on run-differential equals their actual record, and their BaseRuns record is only two games behind their wins in the standings. That means that of the roughly 10 wins that would need to turn to losses to make the Cardinals a .500 team, only a couple have to do with sequencing and getting better results with runners on base than when the bases are empty. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into the All-Star break, the Cardinals were sitting in third place in the NL Central with an even record of 44-44. Even though they were just two games behind the division-leading Cubs, their playoff odds were sitting at just 21.2%, the seventh-best mark in the National League. Since then, they’ve posted the best record in the NL, winning 33 of their 49 games since the midseason break. One of the biggest reasons for their surprising turnaround has been the excellent play of Kolten Wong.

Wong has accumulated 2.2 WAR in the second half of the season alone, by far the most wins by a position player on the Cardinals in that time. His 165 wRC+ ranks 14th in the majors since the break and he’s continued to flash the leather at second base. He’s setting career highs across all three slash components, and is on pace to hit more home runs and steal more bases than ever before. Wong’s excellence and Jack Flaherty’s masterful pitching since the All-Star break have carried the Cardinals into the division lead and boosted their playoff odds to 91.0%.

I should quickly point out that Wong is running a BABIP of .434 during his hot streak. He’s not really hitting for any additional power and his walk-to-strikeout ratio hasn’t budged. He’s simply benefitted from a ton of his batted balls falling in for hits over the last couple of months. But it’s not just blind luck driving his hot streak. He’s made some real changes to his plate approach that have helped him earn some of those extra hits. Read the rest of this entry »

September call-ups, both high-profile and totally innocuous, have been trickling in over the transaction wire for the last several days. As always, there are some that will have real impact on the playoff race, some that are interesting for the purposes of player evaluation, such your usual spare lefty reliever and catcher (by far the most common types of September additions), and some teams with no new names at all. Below I’ve compiled notes on every player brought up by National League teams since the start of the month, no matter how inconsequential, and I slip some rehabbers and August 31st acquisitions in here, too. It’s a primer for you to get (re)acquainted with players who might impact the playoff race or seasons to come.

Contenders’ Reinforcements

Atlanta Braves — INF Johan Camargo, RHP Chad Sobotka, RHP Jeremy Walker, LHP A.J. Minter, RHP Bryse Wilson

Camargo didn’t hit with the big club at all this year, not even in late July or all of August when he was handed pretty regular at-bats filling in for an injured Dansby Swanson. But he hit .483 over the few weeks he was down in Gwinnett after Swanson returned and Camargo was optioned. He’ll be a versatile, switch-hitting bench piece for the stretch run, and he projects as that sort of premium bench player long-term.

Sobotka and Walker were optioned to make room for the multiple relievers Atlanta acquired at the deadline. Sobotka, who sits 94-98 with life and has a plus, 2900-rpm slider, posted a 16-to-2 strikeout to walk ratio at Triple-A since being sent down. You may see him pitching big innings this month. Walker has been throwing 25-pitch, 2-inning outings with three days of rest in between. He may be on mop-up or long relief duty. Read the rest of this entry »