Kirby Yates had all but closed the door on the NL East, but he couldn’t quite get the latch to click. Tasked with preserving a 4–1 lead on the road against the Phillies, Yates set down Alec Bohm and Bryson Stott without much undue fuss, but Brandon Marsh just would not go away.

Yates has two punches to throw: a hard-fading four-seam fastball, and a splitter that drops out of the air like a goose that’s run into a power line. Down 2–0 to Marsh, he threw one blow after another: fastball up, splitter down. Marsh kept parrying the ball away — five foul balls in a row. Finally, the 36-year-old righthander ground the ball into his mitt and initiated the herky-jerky delivery that once made him one of the best relief pitchers in baseball, stabbing his arm down behind his right leg before bringing it up and around as he leapt forward off the rubber. Another splitter — and finally, Marsh swung over this one.

The kings of the NL East are celebrating in Philly ? pic.twitter.com/uol9pb0Upt

— Bally Sports: Braves (@BravesOnBally) September 14, 2023

Yates picked up the save. The Braves, for the sixth year in a row, were NL East champions. Read the rest of this entry »

Just in case Max Scherzer’s season-ending injury wasn’t enough pitcher-specific tragedy for the week, baseball’s deities have handed down a tale of woe to another of the game’s top pitchers. Sandy Alcantara, last year’s NL Cy Young award winner, may miss the remainder of the season as well. While you could argue that teammate Jesús Luzardo has surpassed Alcantara as a top-of-the-rotation weapon, Alcantara’s history as one of the NL’s top workhorses makes his absence extremely ill-timed for the Marlins, who are currently fighting for their playoff lives against the Diamondbacks, Reds, and Giants.

Alcantara first landed on the IL about a week ago after experiencing discomfort in his forearm. Baseball people take forearm pain as seriously as the denizens of Middle-earth regard inscribed poems on mysterious rings, so Alcantara was shut down for further diagnosis. While he felt healthy enough to play catch on Wednesday, an MRI revealed that his forearm strain stems from a sprained UCL. While the worst-case scenario — namely, a Tommy John surgery that would cost him the rest of this season and likely all of 2024 — does not appear to be the immediate course of action, his 2023 status remains uncertain. When asked specifically about Alcantara’s return, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker avoided being too bullish on the prospects of getting him back this year, saying, “I don’t know. I can’t say yes. I can’t say no. I’ve just gotta be positive. I just gotta keep telling myself day by day and try to take advantage of the opportunity.”

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize Alcantara as having a rough season — I think something like Alek Manoah’s disastrous 2023 better fits that bill — but I can’t deny that it’s been a bit disappointing compared to his 2022. This year, Alcantara has posted his highest ERA as a Marlin, as well as his highest home run allowed rate and lowest strikeout rate. He’s been hit harder than usual, so none of these numbers are pure flukes. But while Statcast’s xERA isn’t happy about his season, ZiPS sees him as have a 3.60 zFIP, reflecting that the declines in his strikeout rate don’t quite match the smaller declines seen in his plate discipline data. It would be hard to say he’s been an ace this year, but the fact that Alcantara is able to eat so many innings has kept his value strong, and he was likely headed for his third-straight season of 200 innings and at least 3 WAR. The Marlins have a young rotation and many of their pitchers have significant injury histories. That makes it extra nice to have one of baseball’s dwindling number of pitchers who can casually go seven innings most nights.

In losing Scherzer, ZiPS estimated that the Rangers lost two percentage points in the playoff race and 0.4 percentage points in World Series probability. ZiPS likes Alcantara slightly better as a pitcher and feels more confident about the replacement options in Texas, so the impact on Miami’s fate is a skosh larger. First, I ran ZiPS assuming that Alcantara would miss the rest of the season:

If we ignore the Padres, who are on the verge of rounding to zero, the Marlins have the toughest road of any of the Wild Card contenders without Alcantara. Now, let’s assume the Marlins get one of those aforementioned Tolkienian rings, use its little-known power to heal elbow and forearm problems, and get Alcantara back into the rotation when he’s eligible on Tuesday:

In a very tight race, getting Alcantara back for a couple starts is still enough to snag the Marlins nearly four percentage points of playoff probability, about twice what a healthy Scherzer would have done for the Rangers. And as importantly, having him for the playoffs would change the top of the rotation enough to give Miami a much better chance of making a deep postseason run.

Naturally, the worst-case scenario would have a significant effect on Alcantara’s long-term outlook:

While the odds still favor Alcantara returning, if worst came to worst, there would be a lot of concerns. Would Alcantara’s changeup still be as devastating if he came back with a 95 mph fastball instead of a 98 mph one? Would the loss of an entire year reduce the chances of him finally finding the strikeout upside of his solid stuff, as Nathan Eovaldi eventually did? What are the chances he could return and still be one of the few pitchers who’s a good bet to throw 200 innings?

Thankfully, we’re not yet at the point where we have to answer those questions. Mason Miller suffered an UCL sprain in May, but has been able to come back with conservative treatment thanks to the A’s showing an abundance of caution in terms of hurrying him back. But if Alcantara’s 2023 is indeed over, the Marlins face a tougher path to the playoffs, certainly a tougher one than when both ZiPS and the FanGraphs playoff odds had them with an over 70% chance of making the playoffs back in July.

With the season the Atlanta Braves are having, there isn’t that much spotlight to go around. Ronald Acuña Jr. is rewriting the record book, Matt Olson has an outside shot at 60 home runs, and beyond that Atlanta literally has an above-average starter at every position on the field:

And because these guys never seem to get hurt or take a day off, there hasn’t been a story about an unsung hero picking up the slack when a star goes down. So Michael Harris II, a 22-year-old center fielder with a plus-plus glove and a 115 wRC+, goes under the radar a little. Read the rest of this entry »

All season, the Rangers have been fighting gravity. They stormed out to a lead in the AL West, but they lost Jacob deGrom in the interim. The Astros lurked not far off the pace. But the Rangers persevered and held their lead until the trade deadline. Reinforcements were on the way! Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Aroldis Chapman — they made more improvements than any other team in the league.

They needed it, too, because Nathan Eovaldi hit the IL the next day. Josh Jung followed not long after. As they slogged through August, the Mariners charged into the AL West race, making it a three-way fracas. No sooner did Eovaldi return than Adolis García succumbed to injury. And now, with the playoffs hanging in the balance and every win at a premium, this:

Right-hander Max Scherzer is expected to miss the remainder of the regular season with a strained teres major — a muscle that connects the scapula to the humerus. Scherzer is, Texas GM Chris Young told reporters, "unlikely" to pitch in the playoffs.

Brutal news for the Rangers.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 13, 2023

What rotten luck. For those of you who aren’t anatomists, the teres major is a muscle in the rear shoulder that gets stressed by pitching. It’s been in the news quite a bit this year, in fact. Justin Verlander missed the first month of the season with a low-grade teres major strain. Triston McKenzie missed the first two months of the season with a strained teres major. John Means’ return from Tommy John surgery was delayed by a teres major injury. None of these injuries have seemed to linger, and none required surgery, but the timeline is unfortunately immutable: there’s no chance of Scherzer making it back for the regular season, and little shot of him pitching in the playoffs either. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have much in the way of groundbreaking analysis for you today. I’m here to write about something that’s pretty obvious: Brandon Woodruff is still awfully good. You probably knew that already without fancy stats or gory math. The Milwaukee right-hander owns a career 3.08 ERA and 3.18 FIP. He has been good at just about every point since his rookie year in 2017. Still, I’d like to address a few of the reasons that his continued success is a big deal. So until I get to the part where I can dazzle you with numbers, I will at least try to drop in some fun facts here and there.

Woodruff originally hit the IL with shoulder inflammation back in April, after making just two starts that were — stop me if you’ve heard this before — very good. His shoulder inflammation turned out to be a Grade 2 subscapular strain. The subscapularis is the largest muscle in your rotator cuff, and doctors can diagnose a subscapular tear using three tests with excellent names: the lift-off test, the bear hug test, and the belly press test. Sadly, none of these tests is quite as fun as it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

In the moment, the home run was huge. With the Mariners trailing 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning against the Angels on Monday night, needing a win to stay half a game ahead of the Rangers in the race for the third AL Wild Card spot, Julio Rodríguez chased a low sinker from José Marte and swatted it over the center field wall into the No Fly Zone, the personal cheering section of T-Mobile Park where the J-Rod Squad sits. The 402-foot blast was Rodríguez’s 30th of the year, meaning that it not only tied the game, it made the 22-year-old center fielder the third-youngest player to join the 30-homer, 30-steal club.

Counting to the point where the players joined the club by reaching the second milestone, only Mike Trout (21 years, 54 days in 2012) and Ronald Acuña Jr. (21 years, 248 days in 2019) reached 30 homers and 30 stolen bases in the same season at a younger age. Alex Rodriguez, like Julio Rodríguez, reached the mark in his age-22 season — and is the only other Mariner to accomplish the feat, but he was 23 years and three days old when he notched his 30th steal in 1998. Read the rest of this entry »

If I were an image-conscious billionaire with a disappointing baseball team on my books and unlimited financial resources, David Stearns is one of the first people I’d call to run it. The Mets won 101 games in 2022, and while 2023 represents a monumental step back for the franchise, this team still has tons of talent both in the majors and high minors. It’s also better-funded than any other team in the league.

So with Stearns due to join the Mets as president of baseball operations, we get a talented, rich team being run by one of the top executives in the sport. I don’t know if it will work, because nothing with the Mets is straightforward, but I see no obvious better idea. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you at the start of this: I never quite bought into what Luis Arraez was doing. When he won the batting title last year, I was skeptical. When he was traded from Minnesota to Miami before the season, I loved the Twins’ side of the deal. When he was flirting with a .400 batting average at the All-Star break, I relegated him to Honorable Mention status on our top 50 trade value list. He just perpetually flummoxed me, slapping singles while I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Arraez has been downright putrid of late. He’s been below replacement level since the start of August. He’s batting .262 with a .282 OBP in that span, which is hard to fathom for a guy who is still only striking out 6.7% of the time. This isn’t a victory lap article, though. It won’t last. It can’t last. I don’t believe in this version of Arraez any more than I believed in the .400 hitter from June.

In trying to solve this mystery, I let other people guide me. Honestly, I’m not the person to figure out what Arraez is doing wrong, because I never quite understood what he was doing right. So instead, I read a bunch of articles about the good times. Then I looked to see whether Arraez had stopped doing the things that had so recently made him special. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Rockies and starting pitcher Germán Márquez agreed on terms to a two-year contract extension worth a guaranteed $20 million. This was a lost season for Márquez, as an elbow injury and eventual Tommy John surgery resulted in him only making four starts. Unsurprisingly for a pitcher suffering a major injury, the second year of his new deal is heavily incentivized, with two roster bonuses and three inning bonuses. Márquez is expected to miss the first half of the 2024 season, but if he throws 160 innings in 2025, he’ll net a cool $22 million for the season. The contract also includes a $1 million assignment bonus, paid by his new team if the Rockies should trade him.

An elbow injury that requires a scalpel is never a welcome sign for anyone, but for Márquez, originally a free agent this fall, it was a particularly hard blow. The hope had been that he would bounce back from a pedestrian 2022 season that saw his FIP balloon to nearly five and his strikeout rate fall about 10% from 2021. While my thoughts on how the Rockies have been run since, well, 1993 are well-known, he was one of their biggest coups in franchise history. It’s hard to prove the Rays wrong on a young pitcher, but that the Rockies did, picking up Márquez and Jake McGee from Tampa Bay for Corey Dickerson and Kevin Padlo in 2016. Despite being only 28, he already looms large in Rockies history.

Jiménez’s three-year peak as an elite pitcher makes him the king of the mountain, but Márquez is only a couple good months behind him. When you consider offense as well (Márquez was once a Silver Slugger), the latter is already the leader. And while I can’t expect anyone in Denver to appreciate this, it certainly matters to me that my most recent memory of Márquez isn’t Buck Showalter throwing him into a playoff game for no particular reason.

Lest you think Márquez’s lofty standing is me damning the Rockies with faint praise, he’s long been one of the best-projected young pitchers in ZiPS WAR:

Naturally, his position in the rankings dropped as he failed to maintain his 2018 strikeout rate, but some of the decline is natural due to having fewer tomorrows remaining. With the kind of bounceback that ZiPS expected, he would have been looking at a pretty good payday in free agency. Here’s what his long-term projections for 2024 and beyond looked like before the start of 2023. I’m using a neutral park for this one since Coors Field is… complicated.

Based on that projection, ZiPS recommended a seven-year, $126 million extension or $116 million over six years. That’s not Gerrit Cole money and reflects the increased risk stemming from his 2022, but nine figures can buy an impressive haul of goods and/or services. It certainly would have been a better use of money than, say, signing an aging third baseman from the Cubs to play left field for $182 million.

I went ahead and told ZiPS that Márquez has missed time due to Tommy John surgery (I normally do this after the season) and re-ran the numbers.

ZiPS would have suggested two years at $18.2 million, but the difference between that and $20 million, in the context of MLB, is basically nothing. In any case, the fact that he is a pitcher who has survived Coors Field is almost certainly worth a bit more cash, even if ZiPS isn’t specifically valuing that here. In other words, the Rockies made a move that I cannot complain about.

Where does Márquez fit into the future of the Rockies? That’s a much trickier question. While the best result for him is that he makes a grand return next July and returns to his 2017–21 peak form, resulting in him getting that $100 million contract in a couple of years, I’m not sure the Rockies will take fullest advantage of this sunny scenario. If the organization is going to become competitive again, it has a lot of work to do, and Márquez rocking the NL inside out in 2025 likely makes him more valuable to the Rockies in terms of who they can acquire for him rather than his actual performance.

Trading veterans, especially veterans who had an important past in the story of the franchise, always appears to be psychologically difficult for Colorado’s ownership. But that’s a problem for the future Rockies. The team made a good move in extending Márquez to a low-risk, high-upside contract, and that’s good enough for me to pause my grumbling.

Apparently, the Yankees can’t have nice things even after shifting their focus to next season. Less than two weeks into his major league career, and just two days after he hit the fourth home run of his brief stay with the Yankees, long-awaited prospect Jasson Domínguez — nicknamed “The Martian” for his otherworldly collection of tools — has been diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. He’ll soon undergo season-ending surgery that will likely sideline him for part of 2024 as well.

The 20-year-old Domínguez, who has been on prospect hounds’ radars since he signed out of the Dominican Republic for a $5.1-million bonus in 2019, entered the season ranked 50th on our Top 100 Prospects list and third on the Yankees list as a switch-hitting 50 FV prospect with a projected ETA of 2025. He did not figure in the Yankees’ immediate plans for this season, having split his 2022 campaign between A-level Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley. He finished the year with a 10-game cameo at Double-A Somerset; the last five of those games were in the Eastern League playoffs, capped by a two-homer, six-RBI performance in the championship series clincher.

This season, Domínguez hit .254/.367/.414 (117 wRC+) with 15 homers, 37 steals, and a 15.2% walk rate at Somerset, albeit with a dramatic improvement from the first half to the second. Before the All-Star break he scuffled, batting just .204/.345/.346 (95 wRC+) with 10 homers, 23 steals, and a 28.4% strikeout rate, numbers mitigated somewhat by his plate discipline (17.7% walk rate) and his age in a league where he was nearly four years younger than the average position player. He caught fire after the break, doing a better job of making contact and translating his 65-grade raw power into game power, hitting .354/.416/.549 with five homers and 13 steals from July 14 through August 20 while trimming his strikeout rate to 19.3%. He not only netted Player of the Week honors in the final week of his run at Somerset, he earned a promotion to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Read the rest of this entry »