After nine seasons, three division titles, a pennant and an historic World Series championship, Theo Epstein is saying goodbye to the Cubs. That surprising news came Tuesday afternoon, announced jointly by the team and its outgoing president of baseball operations. “I believe this is the right decision for me even if it’s a difficult one,” Epstein wrote in a statement released to the press. “And now is the right time.” Chicago will now be under the control of Jed Hoyer, the team’s general manager and Epstein’s long-time second in command, but the fate of both the franchise and its departing boss is less clear.

Taking over the Cubs in October 2011 after leaving the Red Sox under a cloud (and disguised as a gorilla), Epstein helped transform Chicago from National League also-ran and frequent cellar dweller into a juggernaut, culminating in the 2016 World Series win that ended a century-long title drought. He and his lieutenants drafted, developed or acquired virtually every important piece of that ‘16 roster, from Kris Bryant to Anthony Rizzo to Kyle Schwarber to Jon Lester to Jake Arrieta, and set the stage for what looked to be a dynasty. But diminishing returns and short postseason stays have left the Cubs in the championship cold over the last four seasons, and now their architect is moving on.

Those recent struggles may be part of Epstein’s decision to leave, though in a letter he sent to team employees and acquired by The Athletic, he claims that a decade at the helm was all he had in mind from the start. “Bill Walsh’s theory that in the sports industry a change in leadership after about a decade can be beneficial for both the organization and the individual has always resonated with me,” Epstein writes. Those of you blessed with the gift of being able to do basic math will note that 2020 minus 2011 equals nine, not 10. But per Epstein’s letter, a number of factors came into cutting his reign short by a year, including the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the team’s finances; the presence of Hoyer, who joined the club as GM when Epstein arrived; and, as Epstein put it, “decisions this winter that carry long-term consequences … best made by someone who will be here for a long period.” 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 »

There was a philosophical quandary after Miami’s 2–0 Game 2 win over Chicago: Is it really an upset loss if the higher seed never looked like the favorite? The Cubs — NL Central champs, No. 3 in the postseason field, blessed with talent — are gone. The Marlins — bottom feeders the last several years, season nearly ended by COVID before it got started, built out of spare parts and held together with string, in the postseason by virtue only of its expansion — are moving on. And after two games in an empty and chilly Wrigley Field, that result doesn’t feel like a fluke.

The numbers on Chicago’s side of things are grizzly: 18 innings played, one run scored, that coming on a single hit: Ian Happ’s solo homer off Sandy Alcantara in the fifth inning of Game 1. Since then, no runs in 13 straight innings, most of them quiet and all of them frustrating. You saw plenty of that in Game 2: After struggling to get the measure on rookie righty Sixto Sánchez and his booming fastball early on, Cubs hitters seemed to figure something out the second time through the order. In the fourth, Willson Contreras and Kyle Schwarber drew back-to-back walks to open the frame. One out later, Jason Heyward cracked a broken-bat single to right, and perhaps feeling pressure to get on the board, third base coach Will Venable sent Contreras — not a glacier like most catchers, but no one’s idea of Billy Hamilton — from second. The play was close, but a strong throw from Matt Joyce and a nice tag by Chad Wallach got him at home to end the threat and keep things scoreless. Read the rest of this entry »

The Miami Marlins haven’t had a winning season since 2009, and coming into the year, there was every reason to think that the club’s playoff drought would eventually extend into a second decade. But with an expanded field, key contributions from rookies, and unexpectedly solid play around the infield, Miami slipped past the velvet ropes for the first time in 17 years.

Amusingly, the Marlins are the only franchise in baseball to never lose a playoff series. After a 5-1 victory in Game 1 of the Wild Card round, they’re just one win from extending their perfect record.

The importance of any one playoff game underscores how differently most of us watch them than regular season fare. Granular events — a single at-bat, a pitch even — take on much more resonance. In the regular season, a failure to execute in the early innings will be forgotten minutes later. Watching closely though, you recognize how missed opportunities shape a game every bit as much as the highlights shown on SportsCenter. Viewed under the microscope, baseball becomes a game of chances taken and chances missed.

For the Marlins, the early part of the game was dominated by the latter. Take Garrett Cooper’s at-bat in the fourth. With one out and a runner on third, Cooper had a great opportunity to plate the game’s first run. On a windy day, against a pitcher with below-average strikeout numbers, this was an opportunity to hunt for a ball he could hit in the air. Instead, he swung at the first pitch and grounded to third. Jesús Aguilar couldn’t advance, and was ultimately stranded after another ground out.

An inning later, the Marlins spurned another chance. With two on and nobody out, light-hitting Chad Wallach was ordered to bunt. The run expectancy table suggests swinging away is the better option here, but it’s very close, and given Wallach’s weak bat and the quality of his opponent, the bunt seemed like a reasonable option. He couldn’t get it down though, and eventually tapped into a rally-killing double play. Read the rest of this entry »

Seventeen years ago, the Cubs and Marlins met for the first and, until now, last time as postseason opponents in the 2003 NLCS, a series that then-Florida took en route to its second World Series title after a grisly Game 6 collapse by Chicago. The goat will always be Steve Bartman, who even in a Wrigley Field devoid of fans will be mentioned on the series broadcasts somewhere between 15 and 20,000 times, but plenty of players deserve a fair share of blame for the way the Cubs’ dreams of ending a long championship drought fell apart.

But that was then, and the failings of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood and Dusty Baker and Alex Gonzalez have little to do with whatever happens between these iterations of the Cubs and Marlins. The former are here by virtue of winning the NL Central, a mud fight of a division with four playoff teams that Chicago led virtually wire-to-wire; the Cubs are seeking to reverse a run of diminishing October returns. The Marlins, however, are here as predicted by roughly no one — literally no one, in the case of your humble FanGraphs staff — and thanks in large part to the rest of the National League East, the Braves excepted, being the equivalent of a stopped toilet. Even a long stoppage of play caused by over a dozen positive COVID-19 tests and the loss of nearly half the roster for multiple games wasn’t enough to slow down the Marlins, who snapped a playoff drought stretching back to that fateful 2003 season. (Fun fact: Every year the Marlins have made the playoffs, they’ve won the World Series, so get your bets in now.) Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, Trevor Bauer made a rather emphatic statement not only on behalf of his team, which is in the playoff hunt, but also for himself in the National League Cy Young race. Bauer pitched eight innings, striking out 12 against one walk and just a single run as the Reds moved above .500 to move into the eighth and final playoff spot heading into today’s action. Meanwhile, though it’s not yet clear if Jacob deGrom or Yu Darvish will get another outing to stake their claims, but Corbin Burnes pitches tonight against the Cardinals. Below you will find the NL WAR leaders among pitchers through last night’s contests:

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If I told you at the start of the 2020 season that the Cubs would win the division by a comfortable margin, you probably would rightly make some assumptions about the events that led to this result. Probably the most obvious is that a National League Central victory would involve big years from the three biggest names in the lineup: 2016 MVP Kris Bryant, 2018 MVP runner-up Javier Báez, and three-time All-Star and Gold Glover Anthony Rizzo. But that most obvious of assumptions would be wrong in this case. Through Tuesday’s games, these key contributors to the team’s success over the last five years have combined for just 1.1 WAR in 581 combined plate appearances, about the same WAR as players such as Kevin Pillar and Victor Reyes. In 2016, the year the Cubs won the World Series, this trio combined for 15 WAR, or 4.8 WAR per 581 plate appearances.

All three are eligible for free agency no later than the end of the 2021 season and their poor performances have changed their outlooks enough to potentially have consequences for both their career trajectories and future contracts. With their performance this year, the Cubs have gotten a taste of what the team’s future might hold if all three depart Chicago. There are mitigating factors all over the place — the shortened, odd 2020, Bryant’s plethora of injuries — but the fact remains is that for stars, the risk is fairly one-sided. What this means is that for the best players in baseball, it’s far more likely that events will reduce their value than increase their value; I can think of a lot of scenarios that would cause Mike Trout to underperform his WAR projection by five wins, but very few in which he’d exceed it by the same margin. Poor baseball is one thing, but uncertainty is also a problem for a superstar. How have the outlooks for these three changed over 2020? Let us count the ways. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s column leads with three perspectives on minor-league contraction, which is slated to occur once the current CBA expires at the end of this month. At least 40 teams are expected to lose affiliated status when that happens, with entire regions of the country finding themselves devoid of professional baseball. A wide-ranging look at the business side of the proposed contraction was provided here at FanGraphs, courtesy of SABR CEO Scott Bush, earlier in the week.

Today we’ll hear from a pair of broadcasters, each of whom paid his dues down on the farm before reaching the big leagues, and from an MLB general manager.

Joe Block, Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster:

“It’s a two-way street, because I can see where the economics makes sense for Major League Baseball. They’re trying to streamline the minor leagues, and I can see the rationale for that. There maybe are too many teams; there are so many organizational players, as opposed to actual prospects. Realigning some of the leagues makes sense for easier travel. From a business standpoint, those things make a lot of sense to me.

“At the same time, I worked in Billings and in Great Falls. Those were two of the greatest experiences of my life, and not just my baseball life. I was living in Montana during the summers. I know how important [baseball] is to folks that live there. The winters are brutal, so having a ball game to watch, a family event… the team is a fabric of the communities in those particular towns.”

Dave Raymond, Texas Rangers brodcaster

“Contraction will be very tough on young broadcasters. Minor League Baseball is the training ground. [Play-by-play] takes time to figure out, to become comfortable with your voice, how to present the game every night. how you control that action. There are executives at the Major League level who, when I’ve applied for jobs, told me, ‘I’ve got to see at least a minimum of 500 games in the minor leagues before we would really even consider a guy.’ It might be 1,000 games.

“Now we’ll be dealing with a smaller pool of potential broadcasters. The guy who would have had a job for a team that gets contracted might have been the next Vin Scully. If he never gets the opportunity, we’ll never know. Plus, even if it doesn’t materialize in the ultimate — a big-league play-by-play job — for so many people, simply getting to call games is a realization of a dream. It would be disappointing for young guys, and gals, to miss out on that opportunity if there is indeed contraction. Read the rest of this entry »

No-hitters are unlikely feats. Navigating 27 outs against a group of professional hitters without allowing a single hit takes a tremendous amount of skill. Still, the list of pitchers with a no-hitter might appear to be somewhat random, with hurlers like Hisashi Iwakuma, Mike Fiers, and Chris Heston making an appearance. Since that Heston no-hitter in 2015, there have been 14 complete game no-hitters. Of those 14, five have been thrown by Cy Young award winners: Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Jake Arrieta (twice). Former ace Cole Hamels has a no-hitter, ace-when-healthy James Paxton has one, and current ace Lucas Giolito just completed another. Recent history suggests about half of the pitcher who throw no-hitters are aces or something close to it, while half were aces for a single day. Alec Mills’ no-no against the Brewers on Sunday falls in the latter category, a journeyman righty who pitched his way to history.

Mills’ story deserves telling, though because he’s been an afterthought for much of his career, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you hadn’t heard it before. He was a walk-on at Tennessee-Martin before developing into their ace. Heading into the 2012 draft, Baseball America noted his good “control of an upper-80s fastball that bumps 90 mph at times” as well as “a slurvy breaking ball and nascent changeup.” He was drafted in a round — the 22nd — MLB would prefer doesn’t exist and sent to a rookie-league likely to be disbanded come 2021. He moved slowly through the minor leagues, needing Tommy John surgery early on, but pitched well all the way up through Triple-A in 2016 and made three appearances for the Royals that season.

As spring training began in 2017, the Royals designated Mills for assignment to make room for Jason Hammel on the 40-man roster. He was traded to the Cubs a day later and then missed most of the season with bone chips in his elbow. Mills was never ranked too highly on prospect lists, and the “pitchability righty” and “back-end starter” designations that appeared on the Cubs’ 2019 prospect list run pretty consistently with reports dating all the way to the draft eight years ago. Mills pitched well in a multi-inning relief role and had two good late-September starts against the division-winning Cardinals last season. If not for Jose Quintana’s injury before the start of the 2020 campaign, Mills wouldn’t have made the rotation, though Paul Sporer did mention that “a pair of breaking balls, including a new slow curve (67.6 mph)… [had] yielded a career-best 13% swinging strike rate” in our pre-season Positional Power Rankings.

Entering Sunday’s game, Mills had played pretty much as advertised. He wasn’t striking out many hitters, but posted a slightly above-average walk rate and solid groundball rate. He used his sinker to get those groundballs, but left the pitch up enough to surrender five of his eight homers on a pitch he throws about a third of the time. Those homers and a lack of strikeouts meant a 5.22 FIP entering Sunday, 14% below league average, though perfectly acceptable for an end-of-the-rotation starter. His 4.74 ERA was better and pretty close to league average, though the difference between his ERA and FIP was likely due in large part to a solid Cubs’ defense that has also helped Yu Darvish, Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks and the rest of the Cubs’ staff to lower figures than their Statcast data expects. Read the rest of this entry »

Lou Brock was a catalyst, not only for the Cardinals — whom he invigorated upon being traded from the Cubs in 1964, in one of the most infamously lopsided deals in major league history — but for all of baseball. Along with the Dodgers’ Maury Wills and the White Sox’s Luis Aparicio, Brock helped restore the stolen base to prominence as an offensive weapon, one that was particularly valuable during a low-scoring era. A cerebral, intensely competitive, and electrifying speedster who was ahead of his time in using film to study pitchers, Brock sparked the Cardinals, who hadn’t won a pennant in 18 years, to three in a five-year span and carved himself a niche in October while helping the team win two World Series. In his 19-year career (1961-79), he went on to set the single-season and career records for stolen bases, surpass the 3,000 hit milestone, have his uniform number (20) retired by the Cardinals, and earn first-ballot entry into the Hall of Fame.

Brock died on Sunday, September 6, having battled multiple health issues for several years. He had his lower left leg amputated in 2015 due to complications related to Type 2 diabetes, underwent treatment for multiple myeloma in ’17, and suffered a stroke the following year.

A six-time All-Star, Brock finished his career with a .293/.343/.410 (109 OPS+) line and 3,023 hits, a total that ranks 28th all-time; he also hit 149 homers. He hit .391/.424/.655 with four homers and a record 14 steals in 92 plate appearances spread over three World Series. He led the NL in stolen bases eight times, finished second an additional three times, and ran up impressive records. His 118 steals in 1974, when he was 35 years old, broke Wills’ modern record of 104, set in ’62. He surpassed Ty Cobb‘s modern record of 892 steals in 1977 and then 19th century star Slidin’ Billy Hamilton’s total (believed to be 937 at the time) two years later, finishing with 938. Rickey Henderson eventually surpassed Brock’s single-season and career marks, swiping 130 bases in 1982 and blazing past Brock on May 1, 1991, en route to a whopping total of 1,406 steals.

“The numbers can hardly tell the full story of Louis Clark Brock,” wrote New York Daily News reporter Phil Pepe on August 9, 1979, as Brock closed in on 3,000 hits. “They cannot tell you of the enthusiasm he possessed, the zest for the game, the excitement he generated, the joy of watching him. If you have not seen him play, you have missed one of the great joys of sport.”

“Watching Lou Brock taking a lead off first base is the best fun in baseball,” wrote Roger Angell in The New Yorker in 1974. Read the rest of this entry »