Last week I covered the American League half of the flurry of transactional activity that occurred as a result of the 40-man roster and non-tender deadlines. Is any one move here as impactful as signing a Yoshinobu Yamamoto or a Matt Chapman? No, but when your favorite team experiences a rash of injuries in June, whether or not they have the depth to scrap and compete is often dictated by the people and processes that surround this day. Below are my thoughts on the National League, with some quick scouting snippets on most of the added players and thoughts about roster construction where I had something to say.

Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks lone addition was lefty Blake Walston, a former $2.5 million high school signee who, despite being young for his class and physically projectable as an amateur, has seen his fastball velocity plateau and slightly decline since he signed. He’s had fits and starts where he’s thrown harder, but for the most part, Walston’s fastball still sits 89-92 mph and his performance peripherals took a nosedive in 2023, though part of that was likely because of the PCL hitting environment. The lanky 22-year-old is still a fair long-term prospect because of his age and what one could reasonably hope will still be late-arriving physicality, but for now, I’d consider him at the very back of Arizona’s 40-man starting pitching depth chart. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series covering the 2024 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Executives/Umpires ballot, covering candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. For an introduction to the ballot, see here. The eight candidates will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Nashville on December 3, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 21, 2024 along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

In the rules for Era Committee voting published on the Hall of Fame’s web site, the provision regarding eligible candidates reads in part, “Those whose careers entailed involvement in multiple categories will be considered for their overall contribution to the game of Baseball; however, the specific category in which these individuals shall be considered will be determined by the role in which they were most prominent.” In theory, this makes sense, but in practice, the various Era Committees have produced rather inconsistent results when it comes to weighing candidates with contributions in multiple areas.

For example, the elections of Gil Hodges and Jim Kaat as players via the 2022 Golden Days ballot suggest an additive effect via their additional contributions — the former as a manager, the latter as a broadcaster — atop long, good-to-great playing careers that didn’t quite measure up as Hall-worthy in the eyes of BBWAA voters or previous committees (to say nothing of JAWS). Yet managers haven’t been treated similarly in the recent past, with Davey Johnson and Lou Piniella each falling short twice and seeming to get less credit for solid playing careers atop stronger (but hardly unassailable) qualifications as skippers. Should those careers put them ahead of similarly qualified managers with no major league playing experience, such as this ballot’s Jim Leyland? Does Felipe Alou, whose career WAR is greater than those of Johnson and Piniella combined but whose managerial record is limited by years spent with the impoverished Expos, belong in the same discussion? You can see how this quickly gets messy. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, the Giants won 107 games, and Gabe Kapler was voted NL Manager of the Year. Last year, the Mets won 101 games, and Buck Showalter was voted NL Manager of the Year. But both teams were bounced out of the postseason in their first playoff series nonetheless, and with both teams struggling to return to such heights thereafter, the two managers lost their jobs this past weekend after their teams asked in effect, “What have you won for me lately?” The Giants fired Kapler on Friday with the team holding a 78–81 record; the Mets (then 74–86) announced before Sunday’s finale that they were moving on from Showalter.

Kapler and Showalter were the first two managers to lose their jobs in 2023, but not the last, as the Angels decided to move on from Phil Nevin, who was in the last year of his contract, on Monday after a 73–89 finish. The Padres and Yankees haven’t officially confirmed the status of their incumbents, but Bob Melvin and Aaron Boone remain under contract through next season, with the Yankees holding an option on Boone for 2025 as well. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Beforetimes, mid-September brought my annual check-in on the potential for end-of-season chaos in the playoff races via the Team Entropy series. With last year’s introduction of an expanded and restructured postseason, however, Major League Baseball did away with the potential for scheduling mayhem in favor of a larger inventory of playoff games. Along with the expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12 and of the Wild Card round from a pair of winner-take-all games to a quartet of three-game series, MLB also eliminated all winner-take-all regular-season tiebreaker games. In the name of efficiency, we have no more Games 163 and no more potential Bucky Dents. Instead, ties, even for spots where the winner would receive a postseason berth and the loser would go home, are decided by mathematics. It’s enough to make a fan want to shout, “Hey, Manfred, pull your head out of a spreadsheet and watch an elimination game!”

The untangling of the often-chaotic scenarios by which those one-game tiebreakers could come about was Team Entropy’s raison d’etre. But particularly with so many close races, there’s still enough untangling to do in potentially complex tie scenarios that I’ve chosen to continue a version of this exercise, pouring out a cold one for what might have been. If what we’re left with isn’t exactly chaotic, you can thumb your nose at the commissioner as you take a seat on the Team Un-Tropy bandwagon. Read the rest of this entry »

Late on Tuesday night, baseball fans all over the world tuned their dials to the ninth inning of the Giants and Reds’ matchup in San Francisco. Through eight innings and 25 batters, Giants starter Alex Cobb had allowed just a single baserunner on a Casey Schmitt error, while setting down the other 24 in order. In the ninth, Cobb sandwiched a walk between two routine fly outs before leaving a splitter over the heart of the plate to Spencer Steer, who crushed an opposite-field liner past the outstretched glove of right fielder Luis Matos to end the no-hitter and the shutout. While a splitter ended Cobb’s no-hit bid tantalizingly close to completion, it’s also the reason his attempt got that far in the first place. Even independent of Cobb’s brilliant outing, his splitter made history in its own way on Tuesday night.

Before going into the splitter, let’s talk about Cobb’s general approach to pitching. He’ll try to catch you off guard with a knuckle curveball on the first pitch, hoping to steal strike one (nine of the 11 curveballs in his complete game were on first pitches), but after that he almost exclusively throws sinkers and splitters in near-equal proportion. These two pitches operate similarly – both leverage the power of seam-shifted wake to maximize arm-side movement, missing barrels and getting batters to hammer the ball into the ground when they make contact. But a quick look at the plate discipline metrics shows his distinct goals in utilizing each pitch:

Like many pitchers who throw splitters, Cobb uses his as a weapon to get hitters to chase below the zone. He’ll get hitters into uncomfortable counts by filling the zone with sinkers, then throw a split that looks nearly identical before diving beneath their barrels. Splitters are pretty uncommon in the majors – while 2023 has represented a peak in splitter usage, they still only represent about 2% of total pitches. While there are others who throw splitters, including Kevin Gausman, Taijuan Walker, and most notably former NPB players like Shohei Ohtani, Kodai Senga, and Shintaro Fujinami, what separates Cobb from the rest of the pack is the sheer frequency with which he throws them. In the past three seasons, he’s ranked first, first, and second in splitter usage rate among starting pitchers, throwing them 38% of the time this year. This splitter, dubbed “The Thing,” ranks second among splitters to Gausman’s in pitch value since Cobb’s debut in 2011. The Thing isn’t just Cobb’s main secondary pitch, it becomes his only secondary pitch in deep counts. And sometimes, he’ll make it his primary pitch.

Cobb threw 83 splitters on Tuesday. Since the pitch tracking era began in 2008, no one else had ever thrown 80 splitters in a single game. Or 70, for that matter. Heck, besides a lone Brad Penny start in 2010 with 66 splitters, no one else had even thrown 60. Cobb’s shattering of the single-game splitter record wasn’t just a result of his pitch count (his 131 pitches thrown is the highest since Mike Fiers‘ no-hitter in 2019); he ranks behind only Penny in single-game splitter percentage, as they comprised 63.4% of his total offerings. Even throwing 50% splitters in a game is a rare occurrence, though it’s unsurprising to see Cobb dominating that leaderboard as well. In fact, all nine of his majority-splitter games have come in the past two seasons:

Cobb’s splitter-first approach in this game offered many advantages over his typical plan of attack, which involves using sinkers to set up the splitter. The first – and most obvious – can be seen from a quick glance at his splits (no pun intended). His splitter is a darned effective pitch, leading his arsenal in chases, swinging strikes, ground balls, wOBA against, and overall run value. If you have a pitch that can do almost everything well, why not throw more of them?

Second, this change in pitch usage was likely a result of advance scouting on the Giants’ part. While the Reds’ offense is middle of the pack versus sinkers, they rank 13th in the NL in wOBA against offspeed pitches. One hitter who particularly struggles against offspeed stuff is TJ Friedl, hitting just .167 with a 34% whiff rate. Cobb capitalized on this weakness by throwing him 11 splitters compared to just four sinkers, three of which came on his first pitches of the game. Friedl’s 0-fer brought his line against splitters to a measly 1-for-19. Reds hitters swung and missed 18 times in their effort to muster up one hit, a season high for Cobb. Unsurprisingly, all 18 whiffs came against The Thing.

Finally, scaling back the sinker in favor of the split has made the sinker even more effective, especially in taking free strikes when hitters were expecting a splitter to dive beneath the strike zone. While Cobb’s surface-level results have been shockingly consistent in the past three years, posting ERAs in the mid-threes, he’s experienced extreme levels of variance under the hood. After posting an impressive 2.80 FIP and 3.15 xERA in his debut season with the Giants, his FIP has climbed by a full run and his xERA has jumped to a scary 4.64. While he’s earning fewer whiffs than before, the most noticeable difference from last year is a near doubling of his home run rate. While it’s easy to point to an outlier HR/FB rate and claim bad luck, his barrel rate has spiked at a rate proportional to the increase in dingers.

The sinker has regressed the most, allowing nine homers so far (compared to just four last year) and a .365 xwOBA, the highest of any of his pitches. On average, he’s thrown his sinkers higher than any other season in his career, preventing it from working its magic as a groundball pitch. And while a difference of a couple inches may not seem significant, just a few mistake pitches can have an outsized effect on barrel and home run rates. Indeed, his sinker’s Location+ has fallen from 105 to 102 over the past two seasons, as higher sinkers tend to be hit harder and on a line. In this start, he missed spots with both pitches along his arm’s path through the zone, but his ability to draw chases on low splitters kept him out of dangerous hitters’ counts:

If hitters are doing more damage to the sinker than they used to, then it’s in Cobb’s interest to get as few swings as possible against it. This is where the splitter comes in. Batters thinking of the splitter as the primary pitch may give up on offerings that they expect to move out of the zone, instead watching them flutter over the plate, even when located suboptimally. In the seventh inning, both Steer and Elly De La Cruz took first-pitch sinkers in the nitro zone, setting the table for a barrage of splitters chased outside the zone that led to a strikeout and groundout. Of Cobb’s 36 sinkers thrown, 17 were taken for strikes, giving him the upper hand in countless plate appearances. While the average hitter swings at about two-thirds of the pitches they see in the zone, Reds hitters saw 23 in-zone sinkers and swung at just six of them. Even when they did swing, none of the balls put in play against it had an xBA higher than .200. In total, Cobb racked up 28 called strikes on the night, tied for the second most of any pitching performance all year.

Leading with the splitter allowed Cobb to maximize the strengths of his wipeout pitch, while simultaneously shielding the weaknesses of his sinker. The synergy of his arsenal, along with added velocity, has brought Cobb to a new career apex at an age when many pitchers are in decline. And he’s doing this despite recovering from two major injuries and temporarily losing feel for his signature pitch. Yet, his 3.20 FIP over the past three seasons is the best stretch of his career, and he’s recently added his first All-Star appearance to the mix. Losing a no-hitter just two strikes away from glory can be heartbreaking, but he’s only come back stronger from adversity before. That’s just The Thing about Alex Cobb.

John Michael Bertrand is an under-the-radar pitching prospect with multi-sport bloodlines and a good backstory. Moreover, he’s performing above expectations in his first full professional season. Drafted in the 10th round last year by the San Francisco Giants out of the University of Notre Dame, the 25-year-old left-hander is 10-5 with a 3.17 ERA in 99-and-a-third innings across three levels. Bertrand began the campaign at Low-A San Jose and has since progressed to High-A Eugene and Double-A Richmond.

Growing up in Alpharetta, Georgia, the 6-foot-3, 225-pound hurler aspired to play college basketball, but it eventually became apparent that baseball would provide him with the better long-term opportunity. The decision proved prudent, but only after a bumpy beginning. Bertrand’s Blessed Trinity School prep days were followed by a pair of disappointments that might easily have ended his career before it even started.

“I went to the University of Dayton for a camp, and they told me that I didn’t throw hard enough,” Bertrand explained. “I was around 82 [mph] and had a loopy curveball, so it was basically, ‘Thank you for your time.’ After that, my guidance counselor suggested Furman [University]. It was closer to home, and purple happened to be my favorite color, so I was like, ‘Perfect, I’ll go.’ I walked on to their baseball team, but ended up getting cut my first fall. The coaches told me that I wasn’t good enough to play Division One baseball.”

Undeterred, and more determined than ever, Bertrand decided that not only would he return the following year and make the team, he intended to go on to play professionally. As he put it, ‘God kind of called me to go back to that campus and work even harder.’ That started that train, started my journey.” Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone loves a beginning — the christening of a new battleship, the birth of a new zoo giraffe, the major league debut of a top pitching prospect. On Tuesday night in Philadelphia, San Francisco Giants lefty Kyle Harrison emerged from his pupal stage. It went… pretty well: 3 1/3 innings, two earned runs, five hits, one walk, five strikeouts, one hit batter.

In a short start, Harrison pared his repertoire down to — with very few exceptions — just his fastball and slider. He gave up lots of hard contact, including a home run, but also, said manager Gabe Kapler, Harrison “missed a lot of bats. He missed bats in the zone. His fastball was carrying.”

Harrison entered the night as the no. 17 overall prospect on The Board, and the no. 5 overall pitching prospect. Every team in the playoff hunt could use a fresh, talented starter, the Giants more so than just about anyone. San Francisco is running a rotation out of the mid-20th century: Two very good starting pitchers and then a lot of improvisation. Webb, Cobb, and pray for fog. Or something like that. If you can do better than a slant rhyme, I’m all ears. Read the rest of this entry »

Because I was raised on Saturday morning cartoons of a certain vintage — some of which I’ve recently shared with my going-on-seven-year-old daughter — I have Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner zooming through my brain with alarming frequency. In nearly every episode, there’s a moment when the coyote runs off a cliff and then, improbably, hangs in midair for several seconds before plummeting several hundred feet to the desert ground. Welcome to the 2023 Giants.

At 65-60, the Giants entered Tuesday occupying the NL’s third Wild Card spot, half a game behind the Cubs (65-59) for the second spot, and half a game ahead of the Diamondbacks (65-61), a game ahead of the Reds (64-61), and a game and a half ahead of the Marlins (64-62). Somehow, they’ve hung on this long despite playing sub-.500 ball for nearly the last two months with an offense so comically inept you’d think it came out of an ACME crate.

Dial back to June 10, when the Giants were a middling 32-32, seven games out of first place in the NL West and a game and a half back in the Wild Card race, with an offense that had hit for a 101 wRC+ (.246/.321/.413) while averaging 4.52 runs per game to that point. Two days and two wins later, they moved into a tie for the third Wild Card spot with the Brewers, and save for a brief span from July 6–8, they’ve remained in the playoff picture ever since; as recently as August 8, they were 62-52 and had a claim on the top NL Wild Card spot. Read the rest of this entry »

One day before the trade deadline, the Mariners kept busy by swinging a couple of trades with a pair of NL West contenders. They dealt closer Paul Sewald to the Diamondbacks in exchange for a three-player package — infielder Josh Rojas, outfielder Dominic Canzone, and middle infield prospect Ryan Bliss — that should help fill some holes in their lineup. To create the space necessary to fit the first two of them onto their 40-man roster, they also sent outfielder AJ Pollock, infielder Mark Mathias, and cash considerations to the Giants for a player to be named later.

Neither of the moves are blockbusters, and it’s worth noting the extent to which these three teams are clustered by record but have divergent Playoff Odds. A year after breaking their 20-season playoff drought, the Mariners (55–51) have played sluggishly; even with a 17–9 July, they’re a longshot for the playoffs, with 18.8% odds entering Tuesday morning. They’re fourth in the AL West, five games out of first place, and 3.5 back in the Wild Card race, with five teams ahead of them and in a tie with the Yankees. The moves they made could help them this year, but aren’t impactful enough to change their fate; they may help more down the road.

The upstart Diamondbacks (57–50), who were in sole possession of first place in the NL West as recently as July 8, made the more aggressive of the deals, befitting their need to improve their lot. They’re third in the NL West, 3.5 games out of first and in a three-way tie with the Brewers and Marlins for the third Wild Card spot. The Giants (58–49) are in the most comfortable position of the three teams: second in the NL West, 2.5 games out of first, and occupying the top NL Wild Card spot. Their trade might not amount to much more than taking a couple of flyers with comparatively little risk involved, and the possibility that a more substantial deal on Tuesday may make this one a footnote. Read the rest of this entry »

Strength up the middle is important to any contender, but with so many teams still in the hunt for a playoff spot, it’s no surprise some of them are have some weak spots. Perhaps it’s easier for a team to convince itself that the metrics aren’t capturing the entirety of a weak-hitting player’s defense if they’re playing a premium position, which seems to be the case at both catcher and center fielder.

While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. Interestingly enough, two of the seven teams below the WAR cutoff for right field also make the list for left field: one because it’s far below, and the other because it’s right on the line. I’m listing the capsules in order of their left field rankings first while noting those two crossover teams with an asterisk. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the August 1 deadline, but these are teams to keep an eye upon. Unless otherwise noted, all statistics are through July 26, but team won-loss records and Playoff Odds are through July 27. Read the rest of this entry »