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 »

While Shohei Ohtani hasn’t pitched this year after undergoing UCL reconstruction surgery last fall, he has found another area of the game in which he could excel while terrorizing opposing pitchers. The 30-year-old superstar blew past his previous career high in stolen bases in late July, and on Friday night against the Rays he swiped his 40th bag of the year. Five innings later, he collected his 40th home run to join the 40-40 club in spectacular style, when he clobbered a first-pitch, walk-off grand slam. Unfortunately, Ronald Acuña Jr.’s torn ACL deprived him of a chance to follow up last year’s unprecedented combination of 41 homers and 73 steals, but it’s not out of the question we could have another 40-40 player this season, namely José Ramírez, and at least a couple more 30-30 ones.

I’ll get to those, but first, it’s Sho time. Prior to this year, Ohtani had reached 40 homers twice (46 in 2021 and a league-leading 44 last year) but had stolen just 20 bases or more twice (26 in 2021 and 20 last year). Unburdened by the demands of pitching this year, and playing for a new team with much higher aspirations than the Angels, he’s been able to withstand more wear and tear on his legs, has had more time to study opposing pitchers, and has come to appreciate the extra dimension he can add to his new team.

“I think he has bought into stealing bases, understands the value of the stolen base, getting 90 feet,” manager Dave Roberts told The Athletic earlier this month. “He’s in a pennant race now. And I don’t think he’s been in a pennant race in his big-league career. So his enhanced focus is not a surprise to me.” Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Kopech didn’t even crack the headline in our coverage of the three-way July 29 trade involving the Dodgers, Cardinals, and White Sox that sent him to Los Angeles, and we were hardly alone. Just about everywhere outside of Chicago and Los Angeles, the focus of the trade landed upon Tommy Edman and Erick Fedde, and rightfully so given the expectations that both would be starters in one sense or another. A fireballing reliever with a 4.74 ERA and -0.2 WAR switching teams may not have been a footnote given Kopech’s history and stuff, but he rated as more of a project than an obvious solution.

Yet even then it wasn’t hard to appreciate that there might be some method to the Dodgers’ madness. After all, in recent years the team has gotten strong results from similarly underwhelming pickups ranging from starters Tyler Anderson, Andrew Heaney, and Alex Wood to relievers Anthony Banda, Ryan Brasier, and Evan Phillips. As Noah Syndergaard’s tenure showed, not all of their salvage jobs were successful. “But more often than not,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Mike DiGiovanna in January, “the Dodgers have revitalized the careers of middling pitchers and optimized the production of pitchers they have, their ability to identify and acquire those with untapped potential and implement plans to maximize performance helping to fuel their run of five 100-win seasons in the last seven years.”

While the fact that he has one year of club control remaining probably factored into his acquisition, Kopech has paid immediate dividends. In the three weeks since the trade — a small sample of work all the way around, admittedly — he’s easily been the most productive of the five big leaguers in the three-way deal (the Cardinals’ Tommy Pham and the White Sox’s Miguel Vargas being the others apart from Edman and Fedde). The 28-year-old righty has flat out dominated opponents, allowing just one hit and one walk in 9.1 scoreless innings for the Dodgers, earning the trust of manager Dave Roberts. Last week, with their NL West lead whittled down to two games by the surging Padres and Diamondbacks, Roberts called upon Kopech to close out a pair of one-run games against the Cardinals, and he converted both chances. With the team concerned about overusing a “gassed” Kopech, Phillips and Daniel Hudson have been tapped for the two save situations since (both of them protecting three-run leads). Nonetheless, it’s clear that Roberts has another late-inning weapon, and a much-needed one at that. 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 »

As the man who inspired Brad Pitt’s most memorable role once said, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.” Assuming Billy Beane wasn’t explaining an October Metamucil purchase to a grocery store cashier who simply asked how his day was going, what Beane likely meant was that the statistics used to construct his major league rosters don’t accrue large enough samples during postseason series to eventually even out in his favor. Over the course of 162 games, a team’s production settles into a reasonable representation of the squad’s true talent. But zoom in on any random seven-game stretch and the team on the field might look like a bunch of dudes in baseball player cosplay.

What applies to team outcomes applies just as well to player outcomes. A player with a perfectly respectable stat line in the regular season might morph into a pumpkin as the calendar shifts to fall, or on the flip side, an unlikely hero may emerge from the ashes of a cruel summer and put the whole team on his back.

With the law of averages in mind, I’d always assumed that the more consistent hitters would be better positioned to perform well in the playoffs. My thinking went like this: The natural variation in these hitters’ performances would never wander too far from their season-long average, making them the safer, more predictable options. Whereas streaky hitters — the ones with high highs, low lows, and steep transitions between the two — would be too reliant on “getting hot at the right time” to be the type of hitter a front office should depend on in the postseason.

Reader, I was incorrect. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the trade deadline, this is a quiet time of the year for transactions, but baseball’s injured list is always hopping, and Tuesday was sadly no exception. First came the announcement that Dodgers pitching prospect River Ryan, our 21st-ranked prospect on the Top 100, would require Tommy John surgery, ending his 2024 season, and at best keeping him out for the vast majority of 2025. Not to be left out of the UCL injury party, Jazz Chisholm Jr. injured his left elbow on a slide into home plate on Monday night. The exact severity of Chisholm’s injury is still unknown, but with the season rapidly reaching its conclusion, any significant time on the shelf could imperil his ability to help the Yankees in their playoff push this year.

Chisholm was easily the biggest addition the Yankees made at the deadline, a flexible offensive player who the team hoped would bring some emergency relief to an extremely top-heavy offense that has received an OPS in the mid-.600s from four positions (first base, second base, third base, and left field). And Chisholm was more than fulfilling that expectation, with seven home runs in 14 games on the back of a .316/.361/.702 slashline. As noted above, the full extent of his injury isn’t yet known, but in a tight divisional race with the Baltimore Orioles (and with a playoff bye at stake), every run is precious. The Yankees have had a curious amount of misfortune when it comes to the health of their deadline acquisitions in recent years; between Frankie Montas, Scott Effross, Lou Trivino, Andrew Benintendi, and Harrison Bader, you might get the idea that they mostly acquire medical bills in their trades. 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.

Another year, another frenetic trade deadline. This year’s bonanza was light on top talent relative to recent years, but it made up for that in volume. With tight races in both leagues and plenty of teams looking to shore up clear weaknesses, it was a seller’s market, particularly when it came to pitching. Now that the dust has settled, I’m here to hand out some judgment.

These are going to be inherently subjective, but that doesn’t mean I don’t put a little rigor into my system. I’m focusing on two things here when I look at individual teams. First, and more important: Did a team’s moves match up with its needs? This is easy to gauge, and since it’s the whole point of the deadline, it carries the most wait. Second: How’d teams do on the trades they made? I think this part is inherently more subjective – there’s no unified prospect ranking or database where we can see how traded players will do the rest of the season, and we’re working with less information than teams have. That doesn’t mean I’m not crediting teams for trades I like or docking them for moves I don’t, just that I’m weighting it slightly less than the first category. Let’s dive right in.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, when the Dodgers designated lefty starter James Paxton for assignment, general manager Brandon Gomes spoke of the team targeting “an impact-type arm” ahead of the trade deadline. Gomes and president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman hit their target shortly before the 6 p.m. ET deadline on Tuesday, landing Tigers righty Jack Flaherty in exchange for a pair of prospects. Separately, the Dodgers also fortified their outfield depth by acquiring Kevin Kiermaier from the Blue Jays for lefty Ryan Yarbrough.

For all the talk about the top-of-the-line starters who could be moved before the deadline, the most discussed ones besides Flaherty — the Tigers’ Tarik Skubal, the Giants’ Blake Snell, and the White Sox’s Garrett Crochet — all stayed put, making the Dodgers’ addition of the 28-year-old Flaherty feel that much more impactful. To acquire the Los Angeles native — who was traded on deadline day for the second year in a row, after being dealt from the Cardinals to the Orioles last August 1 — the Dodgers parted with 21-year-old catcher Thayron Liranzo and 24-year-old shortstop Trey Sweeney.

After years of injuries capped by a subpar campaign that included the aforementioned change of address, Flaherty is in the midst of his best season in half a decade. Because he’s skipped a couple of turns due to injections of painkillers (not cortisone) to address recurrent lower back pain (one on June 10, the second on July 2) and then had Monday’s turn scratched in anticipation of his being dealt, his 106.2 innings is 1.1 short of the threshold to qualify for the ERA title, but his numbers are impressive. Among AL pitchers with at least 100 innings, he ranks seventh with a 2.95 ERA and sixth with a 3.11 FIP. Among all AL pitchers, he’s tied for 11th with 2.5 WAR, and among the pitchers traded this month, he’s second only to the more contact-oriented Erick Fedde (2.7). Flaherty’s numbers are a huge improvement from last year’s 4.96 ERA and 4.36 FIP in 144.1 innings. While putting up a 6.75 ERA post-trade, he was bumped from the Orioles’ rotation in mid-September and finished the season in the bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

Today the White Sox made a three-team trade with the Cardinals and Dodgers that sent Erick Fedde and Tommy Pham to St. Louis and Tommy Edman to Los Angeles. In exchange for Edman, the Dodgers picked up the prospect tab in the deal, sending Miguel Vargas and teenage Low-A infielders Jeral Perez and Alexander Albertus to the other side of the Camelback Ranch complex. You can read about the Cardinals and Dodgers parts of the trade here.

The White Sox had mostly gotten pitching back in their previous trades made under new GM Chris Getz, but in this one they turned to hitting, receiving three batters whom I have been a little lower on than the prospect-watching consensus. I like all three players but don’t love any of them, though I think Vargas has a feasible shot to be a decent everyday player, and soon.

The seeds of this deal were planted when Chicago signed Fedde during the offseason. After a lackluster tenure in Washington, Fedde remade himself in a Scottsdale pitching lab and had an incredible 2023 season for the KBO’s NC Dinos, posting a 2.00 ERA in 180.1 innings while striking out 209 and walking just 35. He was named the KBO’s MVP and won their equivalent of the Cy Young. Getz and the White Sox bet a very modest amount ($15 million over two years) that Fedde’s improvements would translate to the big leagues, and they were right. Fedde has pitched well and turned into a prospect piñata. Pham’s salary was a little over $2 million. Essentially paying to acquire prospects (especially hitters) is exactly what a team like the White Sox should be doing, and over the course of about eight months they’ve executed that with Fedde and Pham.

A big part of the reason I was lower on prospect-era Miguel Vargas than my sources and peers was because I didn’t think he could play the infield well, if at all. That has turned out to be true and, after trying a few infield positions besides his native third base, Vargas moved to left field this season. This occurred even as the Dodgers had big league injuries on the dirt, which I think is telling. He isn’t great out in left either, but it’s conceivable he could improve as he continues to play there. I haven’t heard from anyone in the org as to whether the White Sox will revisit the infield with Vargas. If they do it would strike me as a 2025 spring training task rather than something they ask Vargas to do right away.

Vargas is lacking the raw power typical of a great left fielder. He’s not an especially explosive swinger and depends on his feel for sweet-spot contact to generate extra-base power. The combination of Vargas’ plate discipline and this slick barrel feel create enough offense for him to be a lower-impact everyday left fielder. Here’s how some of his performance and talent-indicating metrics compare to that of the average MLB left fielder:

These are solid numbers that back up the visual scouting report that this is a skills-over-tools type of hitter. I think he will have produced close to 20th at the position (give or take) when we look back at all the left fielders across the league five years from now. The outfielders in front of Vargas in Los Angeles blocked him from the big league playing time that his minor league performance merited for most of the last two seasons, and he should be given a big league opportunity immediately in Chicago. Andrew Benintendi is under contract until… (checking Roster Resource… holy shnikes) until 2027, and so the White Sox have to figure out what they’re going to do about that. Benintendi is not playing well enough to block Vargas.

The other two infielders in the trade, Alexander Albertus and Jeral Perez, were both playing at Low-A Rancho Cucamonga until Albertus was diagnosed with a lower leg fracture a little over a week ago and put on the IL. Albertus’ name has been bandied about each of the last couple trade deadlines because he does stuff that appeals to both scouts and analysts. The soon-to-be 20-year-old infielder is a career .303/.449/.415 hitter (mostly at the rookie level) who puts the bat on the ball and controls the strike zone. He takes a hellacious cut and has been athletic enough to do so while maintaining strikeout rates down in the 14-18% range the last two seasons (MLB average is 22%). As hard as he swings, Albertus doesn’t generate a ton of power and his swing path runs downhill. He’s a much cleaner defensive fit at third base than at shortstop, and he might end up being quite good there. (He’s played all three non-1B infield spots the last couple of seasons.) This is the Yandy Díaz branch of the infield prospect tree (OBP and contact skills, third base fit, less power than you want) where Díaz is what happens when the athlete becomes very, very strong deep into his twenties. Paths to an everyday role will probably require that of Albertus. He is more likely to be a utility guy.

If you want evidence of Albertus’ shot to get strong, look no further than Jeral Perez. Perez has already become much more physical than I would have guessed having watched him a ton in Arizona last year when he was a compact Others of Note-type player in the Dodgers system. He now has average big league raw power at age 19 and, physically, looks maxed out. Perez’s compact build and strong top hand through contact allow him to be on time with regularity, but his feel for moving the barrel around is not great. Though he’s posted above-average contact rates so far, I do worry that he is a candidate to be exposed by better fastballs in the upper minors, ones located on the upper-and-outer quadrant of the strike zone. Perez is a similarly a mixed bag on defense; he has acrobatic actions and can really turn it around once he’s secured the baseball, but he too often struggles to do that. He has flub-prone hands (which will probably get better) and mediocre range (which likely will not as he ages). This is the sort of second baseman who lacks range but who is great around the bag and basically average overall. I like his chances of getting to power enough that I have a priority grade on Perez (a 40+ FV is like a mid-to-late second round prospect in a typical draft), but I consider his profile to have a good amount of risk and variance. This is not the type of athlete who ends up with defensive versatility, so he’s going to have to keep hitting.

You can see how these guys stack in the White Sox system here.

In addition to Edman, the Dodgers also picked up 17-year-old DSL pitcher Oliver Gonzalez in this trade. He had worked 21.1 innings in a piggyback role before the deal. He’s a very projectable 6-foot-4 or so, and his fastball currently sits 89-93 mph with around 20 inches of induced vertical break and just over 7 feet of extension. His curveball has a nice foundation of depth and shape, but he doesn’t have feel for locating it. It’s a pretty good starting spot for any teenage pitching prospect. Again, the draft is a nice way to gauge the way we should think about Gonzalez, who would probably get about $750,000 to $1 million in bonus money. He has been added toward the bottom of the Dodgers list.