I have the honor of casting a Hall of Fame ballot for the first time this year. Jay Jaffe does as well, each of us having joined the BBWAA in 2010 while colleagues at Baseball Prospectus. A decade later — and in Jay’s case, countless words written on the subject at hand — we are the first FanGraphs writers to be granted voting privileges.

I’m sharing my ballot in this column, but before doing so, it’s only appropriate that I tip my hat to my fellow first-time voter. As most everyone reading this knows, Jay’s JAWS system is invaluable when assessing Hall of Fame credentials, as is his must-read Cooperstown Casebook. Given his extensive research and analysis, there may not be a greater authority on the subject.

That being said, the question of what defines a Hall of Famer is inherently subjective. Following Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker will tell you as much. With barely over a dozen made public, we’ve already seen ballots with 10 checkmarks, while others have been left blank. As a “Big Hall” guy, I’m clearly not in accord with the latter camp.

Jay and I disagree on at least one player. Barring an earth-shaking surprise, Omar Vizquel won’t get his vote. Conversely, the iconic-yet-polarizing shortstop was a no-brainer for me. The first names I checked on my ballot were Vizquel and Scott Rolen. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, when the Marlins announced they had hired Kim Ng as their new general manager, they set off a tidal wave of celebratory reactions from people both inside and outside baseball. That’s to be expected when a glass ceiling is broken. Her success was a triumph for women who have always had to fight for their place in the sport.

As soon as the news of Ng’s hiring went public, a question quickly gained prominence: How do you pronounce Ng? Media outlets reporting her hiring revealed a checkered understanding of the answer. The worst offender went with the extremely phonetic interpretation of “N-G.” Most got close, and those familiar with her work in baseball got it right. (To be clear, she pronounces it “ang,” which differs from the pronunciation of some Chinese Americans, who might pronounce it “ing.”

The widespread confusion about something as basic as Ng’s name is an extension of a few all too common questions most Asian Americans are familiar with: What are you? Where are you from? These reductive questions flow from the perpetual perception of foreignness that colors the experience of many Asian people in America. And it shows why Ng’s ascent to the top position in the Marlins organization is so important for Asian Americans, too.

Ng is the second Asian person to hold the position of general manager in major league baseball, and the first Asian American as well as the first Chinese American to rise to the top. Farhan Zaidi, who is of Pakistani descent, is Canadian-born and became the first Asian person to hold the title of general manager when he reached that position with the Dodgers in 2014. Ng also became just the second Asian American to become the GM in any of the major men’s North American professional sports — Rich Cho was the first when he was named GM of the Portland Trail Blazers in 2010. This dearth of Asian people in leadership positions extends to the field as well. There have been just two field managers of Asian descent in baseball, and there are just a handful of others across the other major men’s sports. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Marlins announced that Kim Ng would be assuming the role of general manager. It was a historic move for a number of reasons: She’s the first woman and first Asian-American to be hired as a GM in the major leagues, and is indeed the first woman in any major American men’s pro sport to hold that role. It was also a move that was long foretold, as many pointed out, linking to various blog posts and lists of years and decades past that included Ng’s name as one to watch in the world of high-ranking baseball executives. She’s been at least an assistant GM for as long as I’ve been alive. “When I got into this business,” her statement posted to the Marlins’ social media read, “it seemed unlikely that a woman would lead a major-league team, but I am dogged in the pursuit of my goals.”

It was a celebratory day for many women in baseball, a sign of how far they have come and how far they could still go, and a testament to Ng’s individual drive and ability, which, given her history, is undeniable. It was also a celebratory day for Asian-Americans in baseball. What once seemed unlikely, and before that unimaginable, is now real, tangible, and true — not only for Ng individually, not only for the other people who have blazed trails in this industry, and not only for all the historically underrepresented people she might inspire to pursue careers in the game, but also for literally everyone, apparently, in the entire sport. All those heavy-hitters and decision-makers who for the decades upon decades prior to this day were fine with maintaining the status quo — this moment was, somehow, their achievement to celebrate as well.

When you’re a kid, you can dream of being all kinds of ridiculous, incredible things. The first person to create a cat-to-human translation system. The first person to walk on Mars. A kajillionaire, a world-peace creator, an undersea explorer — all at the same time, all existing within the same realm of possibility. You get older, of course, and with your increasing ability to understand the world around you, to grasp what is expected of someone like you, the dreams get scaled and hedged accordingly. You absorb information and adjust your ideas of what is possible. Kajillionaire becomes maybe a full-time job and your debt paid off by the time you’re 50. World-peace creator becomes maybe you survive another year of being exploited by your racist boss. The moon becomes a tiny room in a shared house for $900 a month. It’s good, after all, to have goals that are actually possible to reach. That’s what you’re taught in career planning classes and therapy sessions: achievable, real, tangible. The bounds of the imagination shrink. Read the rest of this entry »

Torey Lovullo didn’t have a lot of game-changing hits over the course of his career. The Arizona Diamondbacks manager finished his playing days with just 60 RBIs in parts of eight big-league seasons as a utility infielder. But he did have a handful of memorable knocks, three of which he recounted in a conversation earlier this week.

The first of Lovullo’s standout moments came in his second-ever game. Called up by the Detroit Tigers in September 1988, he plated a run with an 18th-inning single against the New York Yankees. Adding to the thrill was the fact that the Tigers were in a three-team pennant race with the Bombers and the Boston Red Sox. The balloon burst in short order. Claudell Washington walked off Detroit southpaw Willie Hernandez with a two-run shot in the bottom half, negating Lovullo’s heroics in blunt fashion.

Five years later, the Santa Monica native turned the tables with an extra-inning walk-off of his own. Lovullo had signed with the California Angels — a team he’d grown up cheering for — prior to the 2013 season. On a July afternoon, he made the most of a second chance.

“In the bottom of the 11th inning, [Yankees manager] Buck Showalter walked the bases loaded in front of me and I popped up with one out,” recalled Lovullo. “We ended up going deeper into the game, and in the 14th inning he did the exact same thing [issued two intentional walks to load the bases]. This time I got a base hit. That was a proud moment for me, because I didn’t want it to happen again. A manager targeted me, and I came through.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves finished sweeping the Miami Marlins on Thursday afternoon, issuing a 7-0 shellacking to knock the Fish out of the postseason. After holding Cincinnati’s bats firmly in check in two Wild Card games, the Braves’ bats exploded in Games 1 and 3, with a generally ineffective Miami lineup struggling to keep up.
Coming into the 2020 season, one of the big question marks surrounding the Marlins was just how effective they’d actually be at scoring runs. In 2019, the team finished last in the National League in runs scored, nearly half a run per game behind the 14th-place San Diego Padres. The Marlins added some veteran depth to the lineup in the form of Jesús Aguilar, Jonathan Villar, Corey Dickerson, and Matt Joyce last offseason — which feels like it was about five years ago at this point — and the hope was that with the team’s impressive stable of young pitching improving, they’d score just enough runs to become relevant. With an assist from a 16-team playoff format, that’s exactly what happened; the offense managed to support a generally solid rotation, and the weak bullpen (5.65 FIP) didn’t sink the team enough to drop it below .500.

That blueprint worked against the Cubs and their 10th-ranked offense and thanks to Sandy Alcantara and Sixto Sánchez, seven runs in two games still left Miami with significant room to spare. But shutting out the Braves is a trickier proposition and when Atlanta’s run-scoring machine ramped up, the Marlins failed to match it, leading them to be the first team eliminated from the round of eight. Read the rest of this entry »

This time there wasn’t much offense. On the heels of a Game 1 that finished 9-5, the Atlanta Braves took a commanding two-games-to-none lead in the NLDS by pushing past the Miami Marlins by a score of 2-0. Ian Anderson and four relievers combined for the shutout, with a pair of solo home runs providing just enough run-support for a suddenly-stellar pitching staff.

What scoring there was came early. Dansby Swanson took Pablo López deep in the second inning with what was his second home run in his last two at-bats. In Game 1, the 26-year-old shortstop — given name James Dansby Swanson — had homered his final time up to cap a six-run Atlanta seventh.

Travis d’Arnaud, who’d preceded Swanson’s Game 1 blast with one of his own, then went yard against López in the fourth. Seven plate appearances into the NLDS, 31-year-old backstop — given name Travis E. d’Arnaud — now had a single, a double, and a pair of walks to go along with his two dingers.

Anderson wasn’t giving up anything. A suddenly-feeble Marlins lineup managed just three hits off him in five-and-two thirds innings — a near copy-cat of his no-runs-on-two-hits, six-inning performance last week in the Wild Card round. Read the rest of this entry »

By and large, today’s NLDS Game 1 between the Braves and Marlins followed a predictable script. Atlanta came in having lost just once all year with Max Fried on the mound, and while the southpaw wasn’t sharp, he held the fort long enough for his homer-happy teammates to take control. Rallying behind long balls by Travis d’Arnaud and Dansby Swanson — and buoyed by the usual strong bullpen effort — the Braves prevailed by a score of 9-5.

The top of the first didn’t portend what was to follow. Fried’s first inning comprised just 11 pitches — it would have been eight had third baseman Austin Riley not committed a two-out throwing error — and all of them were strikes. A repeat of last week’s pitch-efficient, cruise-control effort versus the Cincinnati Reds looked to be in the works.

Looks can be deceiving, though Miami’s starter didn’t exactly string together goose eggs either. Two pitches into Sandy Alcantara’s outing, Atlanta led 1-0. Reminding everyone that he’s one of baseball’s best players, Ronald Acuña Jr. deposited an outside fastball into the right-field seats at Houston’s Minute Maid Park. (Hello bubble.) The tale of the tape was 428, the bat flip was just juicy enough, and Alcantara was anything but happy. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Rojas has come a long way since signing with the Cincinnati Reds out of Venezuela in 2005. Six years removed from being acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers, the 31-year-old shortstop is the heart and soul of a Miami Marlins team that is playing in October for the first time since 2003. A plus defender, Rojas is coming off a season where he slashed .304/.392/.496 and put up a 142 wRC+.

His off-the-field presence is every bit as impactful as what he provides between the white lines. Equal parts engaging and cerebral, Rojas isn’t just a leader in the clubhouse — he’s the Marlins’ player representative. That respect is well-earned, and it’s also a subject well-worth addressing. This interview, which took place at the end of September, focuses on precisely that.

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David Laurila: You went from a 16-year-old kid in Venezuela to not only a big-league shortstop, but also your team’s player rep. What was that path like for you?

Miguel Rojas: “It was a long road, man. You become a professional baseball player — that’s what you want to do — and you want to be a complete professional. You want to cover every area, and for me one of those areas was learning a new culture in the United States. It was learning the language and being able to have relationships with guys from different parts of the world. That’s something I focused my attention on, early in my career, when I was with the Reds.

“I had an opportunity to be with a great organization — the Reds — and after seven years with them I went to the Dodgers, who are another great organization. Then I got traded here. So my path kind of helped me to become the player, and person, that I am right now. It’s not just the baseball player, or the starting shortstop, that I always envisioned [myself] to be… I always wanted to be a starting shortstop, but all of a sudden I began earning the respect from my teammates, and from the people who run the organization. I think that’s because I put the time in to get to know the people that I work with.” Read the rest of this entry »

The National League East was stacked this year. The Braves were one of the best teams in the NL last year, the Nationals won the World Series, the Mets have talent, and the Phillies signed Zack Wheeler during the offseason. It’s no surprise, then, that two NL East teams are meeting in the NLDS. The Braves were again one of the best teams in the National League, and the Marlins… wait, sorry, the Marlins?!?

This preview isn’t a rehash of Miami’s remarkable regular season campaign. It’s about the five games that will be played to determine a spot in the NLCS. Both of these teams will come into the series rested and ready, at least to the extent that anyone is rested and ready at this point in the year. That doesn’t mean the regular season performance of both teams doesn’t matter, though, because it provides a window into both how these clubs are built and who is likely to win.

The Braves are built around a dynamic offense. Freddie Freeman is a leading candidate for NL MVP, and he may not even be the best hitter on his own team; Ronald Acuña Jr. has a solid claim to that crown. Acuña took a step forward this season, and he was already one of the brightest stars in the game. He added plate discipline and power, walking a career-high 18.8% of the time and clobbering 14 homers in just 202 plate appearances.

We’d be talking more about Acuña’s season if it weren’t for Freeman, who took his normal controlled aggression to a new level. He walked more often than he struck out for the first time in his career, batted a video-game-on-easy-mode .341/.462/.640, and had the underlying batted-ball metrics to back it up; a career-high barrel rate and hard hit rate were backed by a ludicrous 31.1% line drive rate. His 187 wRC+ was second only to Juan Soto’s 200 mark across all of baseball.

Behind Freeman and Acuña, the Braves have yet more pop. Marcell Ozuna is having a bounce-back season after two years of middling numbers for the Cardinals. Ozzie Albies is more than just a favorable contract; he’s also a solid hitter with above-average defense. Travis d’Arnaud, a castoff only a a year ago, hit a BABIP-aided .321/.386/.533 this year. Maybe you can’t count on d’Arnaud to keep that up, but the rest of the lineup — Austin Riley, Adam Duvall, Dansby Swanson, and even Nick Markakis — provides admirable depth to go along with the headliners.

The job of stopping the dynamic Atlanta offense will fall to a precocious Marlins pitching staff. Sixto Sánchez would be my choice for NL Rookie of the Year if I had a vote; he made only seven starts, but he immediately looked like he belonged. His four-seam fastball averaged 99 mph, a remarkable number for a starter even in velocity-mad 2020. His changeup and sinker were excellent as well; they combined to prevent opposing hitters from putting anything in the air, a key part of his phenomenal 0.69 HR/9 rate.

After Sánchez, Sandy Alcantara and Pablo López will both certainly make starts. Alcantara took a step forward this year after some inconsistent performances in 2018 and 2019. He set a career high in strikeout rate (excluding an 8.1 inning stint with the Cardinals in 2017), a career low in walk rate, a career high in groundball rate, and career lows in FIP, xFIP, and SIERA. Alcantara has always lived off of his fastball, and he’s throwing his sinker more than ever this year to good effect.

López is a clear third in the hierarchy at the moment, but he too gets a ton of grounders while still missing bats — his 24.6% strikeout rate this year doesn’t look like a fluke, as he got more chases and missed more bats than any of his previous major league seasons. After López, it gets dicey — Daniel Castano will probably make a start, and both José Ureña and Trevor Rogers are acceptable fifth starters.

Those starters would be well served to go deep into games, because Miami’s bullpen was abysmal this year. They looked excellent in two games against the Cubs, but Brandon Kintzler, Brad Boxberger, and friends were terrible on the year as a whole, and Braves batters hit .315/.395/.589 against them in 10 meetings this year, good for an 8.69 ERA and 6.65 FIP. The less the Marlins have to rely on their ‘pen, the better.

On balance, Atlanta has the edge when they’re batting. Their powerful lineup doesn’t need to win against Miami’s rotation, merely fight them to a draw and get to the bullpen. Most of the time, the playoffs would allow a more focused bullpen, minus the chaff, which might make Miami’s weakness less glaring. In their case, however, the entire bullpen is made up of chaff — only Yimi García pitched 15 or more innings with an above average xFIP or strikeout rate.

If the Marlins want to win, then, they’ll need to do it with generous contributions on the offensive side of the ball. This season, that production has come mainly from Miguel Rojas, Brian Anderson, and Garrett Cooper. Rojas, a glove-first shortstop who had never displayed much power before, cracked 10 doubles, a triple, and four homers in only 143 PA. Nothing in his batted ball data backs up the breakout, however, and even the Marlins don’t seem to believe it — he has batted seventh and eighth in their two playoff games.

Anderson, on the other hand, looks like the real deal. For a third straight season, he put up solid offensive numbers in relative obscurity. His only real shortcoming this year was a troubling uptick in swinging strike rate that ballooned his strikeout total, but he made up for it with more barrels and more power in general.

Cooper has flown under the radar in Miami, but he’s looked like a diamond in the rough this year; a bruising righty slugger who hits too many balls on the ground but makes up for it by spraying those grounders and making the most out of the balls he does hit in the air. He’s one of the rare hitters in baseball who doesn’t suffer against breaking balls; he does far more damage on contact against bendy stuff. That could pose a problem for any pitchers who like to spot in-zone breaking balls as a way to get ahead in the count.

Miami has some other hitters capable of hurting the Braves. Jesús Aguilar can still take mistakes out of the park and just posted the lowest strikeout rate of his career, albeit in only 216 PA. Matt Joyce still hits righties. Jon Berti provides league-average hitting and wow-he’s-fast speed. Corey Dickerson is a member of the Marlins.

One key question for Miami’s offense remains unanswered: what will become of Starling Marte? Marte was the team’s big deadline acquisition, likely the best offensive player on the team. He suffered a fractured pinkie when Dan Winkler hit him on the hand in Game 1 of the Wild Card series, and his availability is as of yet unknown. The Marlins played Magneuris Sierra in center field to replace Marte, a tough blow for an offense that was already short on difference-makers.

Atlanta has dealt with injury issues of their own; Mike Soroka and Cole Hamels, two of their top three starters, are both out for the year. Even pickled pepper picker Philip Pfeifer, a pitching prospect who was expected to be depth in case of injury, is out. That leaves Max Fried and Ian Anderson as the last two impact starters, with some combination of Kyle Wright, Huascar Ynoa, and maybe even Fried on three days’ rest to fill out the rest of the rotation.

The Braves didn’t allow a single run in their two games against the Reds, and while Fried and Anderson won’t get to pitch in every game of the NLDS, the bullpen will. Atlanta’s bullpen was excellent this year; Mark Melancon and Chris Martin led the way for a deep unit. Tyler Matzek, A.J. Minter, Shane Greene, and even Josh Tomlin all had excellent seasons. Will Smith was abysmal, but anyone can be abysmal in 16 innings — he struck out 29% of opposing batters but was victimized by a brutal 33.3% HR/FB; a full third of the fly balls he surrendered left the yard, and that probably won’t continue.

If the Braves are hoping to fight to a standstill against Marlins starters and then thrive against the bullpen, Miami needs to thread a trickier needle. They’ll be at a disadvantage against the high-octane parts of the Atlanta bullpen, and if Fried and Anderson are in late-season form, that’s no great shakes either. The latter part of the starting rotation is the best place to strike, but — curse you, math — it won’t come into play in the first two games of the series.

I’m not exactly going out on a limb here by saying that the Braves are heavily favored in this series. ZiPS sees Atlanta as 76.8% to win the series, about as lopsided as a five-game series can get. The Marlins have never lost a postseason series, as you might have heard once or 50 times during last week’s broadcasts, but they’ll need to pull off an upset against an opponent far more formidable than the Cubs to keep that streak going.

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 »