Below you’ll find today’s ZiPS stretch run update. For details on just what’s going on here, please refer to my original article describing all these mathnanigans.

American League Wild Card

Seattle beat Oakland on Wednesday, sweeping the series and knocking the A’s out of playoff contention. As such, Oakland is no longer a participant in these charts. The Blue Jays won the second game of their series against the Yankees, preventing them from falling to fourth in the playoff probabilities, behind the Mariners. We’ll be a lot closer to knowing who makes the playoffs in the AL after tonight’s games, as those contests — the last contender vs. contender matchup, as well as the biggest creampuff game for a contender — are the two highest leverage games remaining. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I wrote about projections and the stretch run, using ZiPS to project each individual game and estimate its relative importance for the final standings. With just a few games remaining, most have the potential to drastically swing the disposition of the race. For example, the Mariners saw their playoff probability quintuple with last night’s win over the A’s! Let’s break down the latest and greatest.

AL Wild Card

This one is still very wide open, with the main difference from 48 hours ago being that the Mariners have pushed the A’s to the brink of elimination. Oakland can still make the playoffs, but the path is narrow and would require Oakland to win three or four games while Toronto, Boston, and Seattle mostly lose, and then perhaps survive a tiebreaker. Oakland can no longer catch the Yankees, so it’s in the A’s interest for the Yankees to finish a sweep of the Jays: Read the rest of this entry »

With five days remaining in the 2021 regular season, it’s abundantly clear that there won’t be much clarity offered in the National League Most Valuable Player race. Yes, Bryce Harper’s Phillies still have a mathematical shot at a postseason spot per our Playoff Odds, unlike Fernando Tatis Jr.’s Padres and Juan Soto’s Nationals, but not everybody is of the belief that an MVP needs to hail from a postseason-bound team or even a contender.

From a practical standpoint, it’s usually the case that an MVP does hail from such a team; in the Wild Card era (1995 onward), 42 of 52 (80.8%) have done so. The tendency shows an upward trend, the degree of which depends upon where one sets the cutoff. For example, three out of 18 MVPs from 1995-2003 missed the postseason, and likewise three of 18 from 2004-12, but four of 16 from 2013 onward; it’s just as accurate to say that from 1995-2004, four of 20 missed the playoffs, dipping to two of 20 from 2005-14 and then four of 12 since. Either way, all-time greats Larry Walker (1997), Barry Bonds (2001 and ’04), Albert Pujols (2008), Alex Rodriguez (2003) and Mike Trout (2016 and ’19) account for the vast majority of those exceptions, with Ryan Howard (2006), Harper (2015), and Giancarlo Stanton (2017) rounding out the group. That Rodriguez, Stanton, and Trout have doubled the all-time total of MVPs who have won while hailing from sub-.500 teams — a list that previously included only Ernie Banks (1958 and ’59), Andre Dawson (1987), and Cal Ripken Jr. (1991) — is perhaps the more notable trend, with Shohei Ohtani likely to increase that count this year. Effectively, that’s a green light for Soto’s late entry into the race, and also worth pointing out with regards to Tatis, as the Padres slipped to 78-79 with Tuesday night’s loss to the Dodgers.

From a practical standpoint, it’s also true that the notion of value is extensively tied to the things that can be measured via Wins Above Replacement. As old friend Eno Sarris noted at The Athletic (in an article on the value of Ohtani’s roster spot that’s well worth a read), in the past 14 years, only two MVP winners were not in their league’s top three by FanGraphs’ WAR, namely Jimmy Rollins in 2007, and Justin Verlander in ’11. Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Belt has had his fair share of freak injuries throughout his career; Monday evening brought news of yet another, as an X-ray on his thumb revealed a fracture that occurred Sunday afternoon when he was hit on the hand when squaring around to bunt against Rockies reliever Lucas Gilbreath. Some may question why Belt was bunting in the first place, but he sadly has a history of being on the wrong end of poorly thrown baseballs. Also, bunting has long been a tactic he’s successfully used as a heavily shifted upon hitter.

When it comes to Belt, you don’t often have to search for analogous injuries from around the league to get a sense of a timeline, because a similar injury has probably already happened to Belt himself. In fact, this exact same scenario is a repeat: In 2014, he was hit by a pitch and missed eight weeks with a fracture in his thumb. Recovery time from this latest injury is officially unknown, and a timetable will come out soon, but it’s possible if not likely that the Giants will be without Belt for the rest of the year.

That would be a huge loss for San Francisco. Not only has Belt been the team’s best hitter since the start of last season, but he’s also been one of the best in all of baseball over that span:

Throughout his prime, Belt was always a great hitter (a 136 wRC+ from 2013 to ’16), but his lack of homers and his injury history made him a rather contentious figure among Giants fans. When his production wavered from 2017 to ’19 (107 wRC+), like most of the team’s core, it seemed that the best was behind him. But as you saw in that chart, he has reached unforeseen heights thanks to a new diet of home runs that has his isolated slugging (ISO) at a career-high .323, up alongside the game’s best sluggers.

Read the rest of this entry »

With just under a week to go in the regular season, the Giants are still in prime position to capture the National League West. Hitting the century win-total mark on Friday, San Francisco’s meteoric rise from unlikely postseason contender to best team in the sport has been well-documented across baseball’s corner of the internet. The combination of the unlikely resurgence of seemingly past-their-prime franchise mainstays, near-100th-percentile outcomes from additions like Darin Ruf and LaMonte Wade Jr., and some successful tinkering with players’ tendencies to help them maximize their potential has all added up to one of the more remarkable surprise contender stories in recent memory.

Improve your player development, play the percentages better, enjoy some good fortune — the Giants have done it all. And as we march towards October, they deserve praise for it. But there’s one other thing that has piqued my interest, and though its relative importance may seem small, it’s a strategic decision that has added significant value at the margins: Giants pitchers are throwing a ton of first-pitch strikes. Just as Justin Choi praised the Blue Jays’ offense earlier this season for swinging in early counts, the Giants’ pitching staff deserves kudos for throwing pitches in the zone on the first pitch. They’ve done so more than any other team in baseball, though the other leaders here may surprise you: Read the rest of this entry »

9/28 Late Morning Update

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The original data and methodology are below.
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We’ve reached the final week of the 2021 regular season, and for fans of high-intensity, stretch-drive baseball — a group I think we can refer to as “everyone” — there’s still quite a lot to play for. Only five of the 10 playoff spots are claimed, with two of those five teams in a battle for a division title. And since there are just a handful of games left to play, we can move the ZiPS projections from the macro to the micro. In April, it’s always hard to project specific pitcher matchups, but with a week left to go in the season, it’s a more reasonable task of extrapolation. As a result, that allows me to adapt the ZiPS model into a game-by-game projection of the final week of the season for the relevant teams.

I’ve focused on three of the playoff spots, the two AL wild cards, and the NL East, along with the division versus wild card battle in the NL West. The Astros can still technically lose the division to the Mariners (one-in-about-1,800) or the Athletics (one-in-about-2,150), and the Cardinals could still have an epic collapse in which they lose six, the Reds win six, and they lose the tiebreaker (one-in-about-3,300). These could also become mathematical impossibilities quickly; if they become plausible rather than proverbial lottery tickets, I’ll update with the data.

Let’s start with the easy races.

NL East

The Braves enter the final week with a 2 1/2-game lead in the division but three games remaining against the Phillies. Their schedules are similar in strength, with Atlanta getting home games and Philadelphia on the road, something that’s largely canceled out by the former getting the slightly harder opponent (the Mets versus the Marlins). The edge comes from the cushion.

With the edge in the standings, ZiPS projects just over a four-in-five chance that the Braves will not have to play the Rockies in a makeup game on Monday. Overall, the Braves win the division 87.7% of the time without the makeup game, and the Phillies stick the Braves in at least a 1 1/2-game hole 1.0% of the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

LaMonte Wade Jr. was hardly a household name coming into this season, just another roster hopeful buried on the Giants’ depth charts. But like several other pickups by the Giants in recent years — players coming off lousy seasons elsewhere, or ones who had never gotten a full shot in their previous organizations — he’s become an essential contributor this season. Despite barely playing in the majors before the end of May, he’s tied for fourth on the team in home runs, and has shown a penchant for collecting timely late-inning hits.

Wade’s most recent big hit came on Tuesday night. Facing the possibility of dropping into a tie with the Dodgers atop the National League West, the Giants clawed their way back from an early 4-1 deficit against the Padres before Wade drove in the go-ahead run in the ninth inning with a bloop single off ex-Giant Mark Melancon:

That was the seventh time since June that a Wade hit put the Giants in the lead in the eighth inning or later, which is tied with five other players for the major league lead. All of them — namely Michael Conforto, Aaron Judge, Austin Meadows, Jorge Polanco, and Kyle Seager — have at least 96 more plate appearances than he does, and all of those hits helped the Giants win those games. Here’s the supercut:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always been a huge Darin Ruf fan, so getting to write about his 2021 success is a little bit more meaningful to me than it would be for almost any other player. Ruf is the last player I remember my grandfather singling out before he passed away, with the thought that Ruf, then a young prospect in the Phillies system, had the potential to be a productive big leaguer for our favorite team.

That was nine years ago. The Phillies promoted Ruf in late 2012 for his first cup of major league coffee, but he never amassed more than 297 plate appearances in any season for them. The bat was decent — Ruf posted a 105 wRC+ over 833 plate appearances, including a 125 wRC+ during his 2013 rookie season — but poor defensive numbers kept him barely above replacement-level in almost 300 games with Philadelphia. He was traded to the Dodgers in November of 2016, and even before he had an opportunity to make his organizational debut, Ruf’s contract was purchased by the Samsung Lions of the KBO. For three years, he raked in Asia, earning himself a minor league deal with the Giants for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. (I was pretty excited.) A year later, he’s now the best hitter on a playoff-bound team (Kris Bryant is a notable omission from this list — he has a 119 wRC+ in 128 plate appearances with the Giants so far):

It’s no secret that the Giants have been receiving incredible production across their entire lineup. Their position players have posted a collective 113 wRC+ this season, a figure that ranks second in the majors among teams’ non-pitchers. But even in a lineup filled with players having above-average offensive seasons, Ruf stands out with his .279/.401/.544 slashline and 155 wRC+. That wRC+ ranks seventh in the majors among players with at least 250 plate appearances overall, sandwiched between Juan Soto (156) and Shohei Ohtani (154). That’s pretty phenomenal company, and it inspires two obvious questions. First, how did Ruf become one of the best hitters in baseball, at least this season? And, of course, how sustainable is this? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s already September, and maybe you’re still processing that fact. I’ll do you one better by pointing out that the Dodgers and Giants are about to play each other for the final time in the regular season. This is the earliest in the year that these rivals’ last series has occurred since way back in 1968, when Willie Mays and Don Drysdale were fixtures of the rivalry.

With Los Angeles and San Francisco tied atop the division and both teams on pace for 100 wins for the first time since 1962, I thought it prudent to break down what we might expect in this big weekend series.

The Series So Far

The Dodgers and Giants have split their 16 games so far (with San Francisco winning five of the last seven), featuring stellar pitching, unlikely heroes, home run robberies and blown saves. A four-game series in mid-July was full of drama, including Tyler Rogers giving up a walk-off homer to Will Smith, his second three-run outing against the Dodgers this season.

The very next night — actually the next two nights — it was Kenley Jansen who was handed a ninth-inning lead but walked off to a booing home crowd both times after giving up seven combined runs.

That’s just how this series has gone; no lead is safe from a disaster.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we explored the roster depth of the American League playoff contenders, identifying the strengths and weaknesses that might prove decisive down the stretch for the teams whose playoff odds sit above 10%. Today, we’ll do the same for the National League squads with October ambitions.

National League East

Atlanta Braves
Strengths: Atlanta’s slow and steady climb into first place has involved a considerable amount of roster management. One side effect of all the maneuvers that have gotten them where they are is significant depth. During Travis d’Arnaud’s absence, the team learned that William Contreras is a capable big league catcher. They filled their considerable outfield holes with Joc Pederson, Jorge Soler, and Adam Duvall, while Cristian Pache, who flamed out early in the season, has finally gotten hot at Triple-A Gwinnett and should be a nice September addition. The Gwinnett infield is packed with players who have big league experience, like Jason Kipnis and Ryan Goins. The return of Huascar Ynoa, with Ian Anderson not far behind, creates a sudden bevy of rotation options. Read the rest of this entry »