San Diego’s 2021 season has become a campaign of devolving questions. From the preseason’s burning query of whether or not the Padres could best the Dodgers, we’ve gone from wondering whether they could top the Giants to whether they would make the playoffs at all. Now, as we head into the final week of the regular season, it’s unclear if San Diego can even beat the .500 mark.

Even if you’re hopeful about the team — and you probably don’t feel very optimistic after watching this weekend’s games or reading Jay’s piece on second-half collapses — finishing with a winning record is an open question. All of the Padres’ remaining games are against teams that would make the playoffs if the season ended today, and none of them can set cruise control; the Dodgers and Giants are fighting for the division, and the Braves still haven’t put away the Phillies.

The unraveling of the Padres became even more pronounced over the weekend. A three-game sweep at the hands of the Cardinals pushed San Diego 3.5 games out of a playoff spot, and in dramatic fashion. A clearly frustrated Manny Machado got in a public shouting match with Fernando Tatis Jr. after the latter became visibly angry about umpire Phil Cuzzi’s strike zone; fortunately for the team, manager Jayce Tingler took over the argument and was the one ejected instead of Tatis. Just as ugly was Tatis’ dropped pop-up in the first inning of Sunday’s game, compounded by a throw home instead of to second base for the force.

Coming into the season, the ZiPS projections pegged San Diego as a 98-win team, the second-best in baseball — the first time ZiPS had ever projected the franchise to win 90 games, the previous bests being 86 wins in 2007 and ’20 (before the season was pared down to a 60-game schedule). To finish 98–64 at this point, the Padres would have to go 23 and -9, which quite obviously will not happen unless MLB invents some new, bizarre rule.

Technically, there’s a path to the Padres ending 2021 on a satisfying note, but the odds are quickly becoming less “roll a double to get out of Monopoly jail” and more Dumb and Dumber-esque “so you’re saying there’s a chance.”

Coming into the season, ZiPS had the Padres with a one-in-eight chance of winning the World Series; now, it’s one-in-1,607. Perhaps if the season were 200 games, they would have time to right the ship somewhat and make the playoffs, but given how this year has gone, maybe an extended season would have them falling behind the Rockies, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

Given his rise from dark horse to odds-on NL MVP favorite, it’s not a huge surprise that Bryce Harper has been the best hitter in baseball since August 1. Through Sunday’s action, he slashed.346/.464/.795 in 198 plate appearances, good for a 216 wRC+. That performance has catapulted him to the very top of the race, moving ahead of Fernando Tatis Jr. in betting markets as of Monday. A lot thus has been said about Harper, but much less has been written about the second-best hitter over this stretch (among the 251 players to amass at least 100 plate appearances). That hitter, as you could probably guess from this piece’s title, is Red Sox infielder Bobby Dalbec, whose .316/.409/.737 line nearly matches Harper’s, though it has come without the associated fanfare.

That’s understandable given Dalbec’s start to the season. Unlike Harper, who posted very good numbers before his recent stretch of sheer fire, Dalbec nearly found himself without a spot on Boston’s roster following the team’s trade for Kyle Schwarber. Through July 31, Dalbec was slashing just .216/.260/.399, with a 4.4% walk rate, a 37.5% strikeout rate, and 11 homers in 296 trips to the dish. That, coupled with less-than-stellar defense (it’s still rated as a negative), gave the Red Sox every reason to option him to Triple-A. Indeed, as Peter Abraham at The Boston Globe wrote on September 12, “That Schwarber was on the injured list at the time may have been what kept Dalbec on the roster.”

The hot start to Dalbec’s career last season — a 152 wRC+ and eight homers in just 92 plate appearances — seemed unsustainable given the small sample size, 42% strikeout rate, and .394 BABIP. As a result, ZiPS projected him for a 91 wRC+ this season, though Steamer was more bullish at 103. The poor start and the hot stretch since have resulted in season stats — a .245/.306/.497 slashline and 111 wRC+ — roughly in line with what I’d peg as his true talent level. Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Houck’s signature pitch is a sweeping slider. The 25-year-old Boston Red Sox right-hander has gone to it 35.5% of the time this season, and with good results. There is little question that the offering is the most lethal weapon in his arsenal. That said, it’s arguably not his most important pitch going forward — particularly if his future is in the starting rotation, and not out of the bullpen.

Bedeviled by an inability to master a conventional changeup, Houck began learning a split-finger fastball last year. The pitch remains something of a work-in-progress, yet he’s begun throwing it more frequently. Houck’s splitter usage is up to 7.5% on the season, a percentage that promises to rise if he can fine-tune it further. Four years after he was drafted 24th overall out of the University of Missouri, Houck is hoping that his newest pitch will take him to the next level.

———

Tanner Houck: “I had trouble throwing a changeup. I would constantly baby it — I would get on the side of it and just push it — so it was really inconsistent. They came to me and said, ‘Hey, we want you to throw a splitter.’ This was in spring training 2020, four days before we got canceled. It was a heck of a time to start learning a new pitch.

“They wanted me to keep working on the change, but also attempt to throw the splitter, and I was like, ‘OK, fine; I’ll give it a shot.’ I threw a bullpen the next day, and for every five, maybe one of them wasn’t too bad. At that time it was still 90-93 [mph]; it was essentially just a little bit worse of a two-seam. But I didn’t think anything of it. I was like, ‘This is literally day one of throwing this pitch, so it’s not a big deal.’ Then COVID happens, so I go home. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

Noah Campbell, UTIL, Milwaukee Brewers
Level & Affiliate: Low-A Carolina Age: 22 Org Rank: NR FV: 30
Line: 0-for-4, BB, 1 IP, SV, played all nine positions

Notes
Campbell has played mostly 1B/3B/LF this year but also has had a handful of games at either middle infield spot; yesterday was the fourth time this season he has pitched but his first action in center field. A likely org guy more than a prospect, Campbell is wrapping up a nice first pro season, slashing .270/.388/.387 with 20 steals and one big, rare feather in his cap because of yesterday’s game.

JP Sears, LHP, New York Yankees
Level & Affiliate: Double-A Somerset Age: 25 Org Rank: NR FV: 35
Line: 6 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 1 R, 7 K

Notes
Sears was drafted by Seattle in 2017 and traded to New York later that year as part of the package (with Juan Then) for Nick Rumbelow. He began the year as a swingman, pitching multiple innings out of the Double-A bullpen and making an occasional spot start. By July, Sears grabbed hold of a rotation spot and held it amid a promotion to Triple-A, where he has a 3.05 ERA and a 51-to-9 K-to-BB ratio in 41 innings. Sears is throwing a little harder this season, averaging just a shade over 93 mph on his fastball after sitting 90-92 and topping out at 93 in 2019. He works with flat fastball angle at the top of the zone, his slider has utility as a backfoot offering to righties, and Sears’ changeup is passable. He’s a perfectly fine spot starter candidate, the sort the Yankees rarely rely on but often find a trade outlet for. Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox have been so consistently the class of their division this year that it’s easy to lump their individual performances together. The offense? Scintillating. The starters? Carlos Rodón and Dylan Cease have been pleasant surprises that turned the rotation from good to one of the best in baseball. The bullpen? It’s been great, and almost forgettable in its greatness, with a top-10 ERA, a top-five FIP, and piles of strikeouts, grounders, and pop-ups.

You probably know that Liam Hendriks is the ringleader. He was a key offseason addition, coming off of a superb 2020 for Oakland. But you might not have noticed how good his three-year run has been. He has been one of the best handful of relievers in the game — again. He’s done it while throwing a ton of innings — again. Put it all together, and this recent run of excellence gives him a strong claim as one of the best relievers of the 21st century.

One way you could try to contextualize Hendriks’ string of excellence is by looking at three-season stretches by relievers. The king of this metric is, naturally enough, Eric Gagne. From 2002 to ’04, he was a machine, throwing 82.1 innings each year and delivering an aggregate 1.79 ERA, 1.57 FIP, and a whopping 11.7 WAR. That number hardly sounds like a reliever, but most relievers don’t deliver seasons like Gagne’s. He’s head and shoulders above the rest of the list:

Hendriks places a solid 23rd in all three-season totals this century. It’s hard to crack this list, though. For one thing, plenty of relievers double up by having two excellent seasons sandwiched by two okay seasons. Gagne isn’t the only name on there more than once; there are plenty of Kimbrels, Riveras, Chapmans, and the like in the top 25.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles are a very bad baseball team. In fact, by the available evidence, they’re the majors’ worst, owners of the lowest winning percentage by a narrow margin and the lowest run differential by a country mile. Yet when the book is finally closed on the 2021 season, they will have left a sizable footprint on the American League playoff picture. For as dreadful as they’ve been, they’ve played quite the spoilers — and could continue to do so.

The O’s have already lost more than 100 games for the third time in the past four seasons; obviously, they couldn’t pull that off during last year’s pandemic-shortened campaign, though had it been played to completion, they might have given the century mark a run for its money, as their their record prorated to 68-94. At 47-102 (.315) this year, they’re one game worse than the Diamondbacks (48-101, .322), and on pace to lose 111 games, second only to their 2018 team’s 115 losses in terms of the franchise’s run in Baltimore. Because they’ve surrendered a ghastly 6.00 runs per game, they’ve been outscored by 276 runs, and could become the fifth team of the post-1960 expansion era to be outscored by at least 300 runs.

The Orioles have been even worse within their division (18-52, .257) than outside it (29-50, .367), but while they lost 18 out of 19 games to the Rays — becoming the third team of the division play era to do that, after the 2019 Tigers (1-18 versus Cleveland) and Mariners (1-18 versus the Astros) — they went 8-11 versus the Yankees. Without that difference, the AL East race would be a four-team pileup:

Read the rest of this entry »

Louie Varland has been one of the best pitchers in the Minnesota Twins system this season. In 20 appearances — 10 with Low-A Fort Myers and 10 with High-A Cedar Rapids — the 23-year-old right-hander is 10-4 with a 2.10 ERA and a 2.81 FIP. Moreover, he has 142 strikeouts to go with just 30 walks in 103 innings.

In some respects, Varland has come out of nowhere. A 15th-round pick in 2019 who took the mound at a Division II school, he entered the current campaign well under the radar. His name was nowhere to be found on top-prospect rankings.

The relative obscurity doesn’t include the Twin Cities’ baseball community. The St. Paul native played close to home at Concordia University, as did his older brother, Gus Varland, who was drafted by the Oakland A’s in 2018.

The emerging Twins prospect has upped both his velocity and his pitching acumen since he toed the slab with the Golden Bears. Low-90s as a collegian, he’s now sitting 94 and topping out at 98. Varland shared that his four-seam fastball spins between 2,300 and 2,500 RPM and gets 17 inches of rise. Calling the pitch his “greatest gift right now,” he added that its effectiveness is due in part to “vertical approach angle, the riding illusion that hitters see.” Read the rest of this entry »

The A’s are nearly on the outside looking in. With about two weeks left in the season, there’s still room for a pair of AL East cold streaks to swing things around, but the odds of Oakland reclaiming a Wild Card spot and making the playoffs for a fourth straight year are slim.

Those odds cratered in the past month; some of that collapse is more succinctly summarized here. Any four-year playoff run is impressive, but the Oakland teams of the past three years, including two 97-win squads, have been devoid of the quality of starting pitching that their record would suggest. This season will be the first the A’s have had in that stretch with any starting pitcher compiling 3-plus WAR, let alone three of them. But while the gains in starting pitching are most certainly helpful, there has been a considerable dip in the quality of Oakland’s relievers.

Read the rest of this entry »

On April 14, 2016, Vince Velasquez took the mound for his second start as a member of the Phillies, having come over in an offseason trade with the Astros that sent Ken Giles to Houston. In an afternoon matchup against the Padres, he twirled one of the best-pitched games of the last decade, striking out 16 and walking none in a complete game shutout, allowing just three hits to boot. In the last 10 years, just 11 pitchers have struck out 16 or more in a game, and in these 13 performances (Max Scherzer has done it thrice), just five were complete game shutouts. He started his Phillies career on the highest of notes.

Fast forward more than five years, and Velasquez has now signed with those very Padres on a minor league deal in name only. As San Diego desperately tries to find pitching depth to stay afloat in the NL Wild Card race, Velasquez will start on Friday night in a pivotal series against the Cardinals, though he will not be eligible for postseason play if the Padres do secure a spot in October since he signed after the start of September.

The fact that a starting-caliber arm became available in free agency in the middle of the last month of the season tells you two things, both obvious. For the Padres, it shows just how dire their need for pitching is. But I want to focus on the second obvious reality: To get released at this point in the year is proof that Velasquez hasn’t been particularly good. Indeed, in 81.2 innings, he’s posted a 5.95 ERA and 5.59 FIP, production that has been exactly replacement-level.

Velasquez has shown flashes of productivity, but his time with the Phillies ran thin after continually falling short of expectations. In May, Matt Gelb of The Athletic covered what he referred to as the righty’s last stand in Philadelphia and how he hoped to reinvent himself to increase his effectiveness. One thing stood out: He came into this season wanting to mix his pitches more effectively, reflecting on that April 2016 start to explain his change in mindset for 2021.

“Cool, I had 16 strikeouts,” Velasquez said. “But I fucking threw all fastballs. OK, that’s unique. But it’s not part of pitching. It’s not pitching. It’s not sustainable at all.”

As the Padres look to tinker with Velasquez, it is interesting to consider where they may start. Was his plan of throwing fewer fastballs working? Might he have just been choosing the wrong pitches to put in the four-seamer’s place? What is the way forward here? Read the rest of this entry »

It didn’t explicitly come up in the Effectively Wild podcast spot I did highlighting this year’s Team Entropy series, but one reason why the Wild Card races that I covered in my second installment early this week are so wild — with five teams chasing two spots in the AL, and five more chasing one spot in the NL — is a handful of prominent collapses. The Mets, Padres, and Red Sox all spent a good chunk of the season occupying playoff positions, with New York and Boston occupying the top spots in their respective divisions for more days than any of their competitors. Yet all three teams could miss out on October baseball thanks to some of the most drastic first half-to-second-half drop-offs we’ve seen in recent years.

The Mets, despite a slew of injuries, led the NL East — at times with company in first place — for nearly four months, from April 13 to August 6, with a slight return after falling out of first that stretched the window to August 13. They somehow did that by posting winning records only in May (17-9) and July (14-13), and even after being overtaken, they remained within striking distance for about half of a dreadful August during which they went 9-19. Since the July 30 trade deadline, when they acquired Javier Báez but arguably didn’t do enough to bolster their rotation — a decision that was exacerbated by Jacob deGrom’s subsequent setback, which came to light almost immediately after the deadline passed — they’ve gone just 17-28. At this writing, they’re 72-75, 5 1/2 games behind the Braves in the NL East, and five behind the Cardinal for the second NL Wild Card spot, with cumulative playoff odds of 2.1%. I’m skeptical they’ll be relevant by the time I next cover Team Entropy.

The Red Sox had an on-and-off relationship with first place in the AL East, occupying at least a share of it from April 8 through May 23, and then again for most of a stretch that ran from June 19 through July 30. They’ve gone just 20-24 since the deadline passed, for the third-worst record in the AL; they did so while the Rays (29-14), Blue Jays (31-16), and Yankees (29-16) peeled off the AL’s top three records in that span. A wave of COVID infections has played a part, knocking 12 players — including Xander Bogaerts, Enrique Hernández, Chris Sale, and Matt Barnes — out of action since August 27; notably, the Red Sox are one of the six teams that has failed to reach the 85% vaccination threshold to loosen protocols, though the majority of those infected were vaccinated. They’re now 8 1/2 games back in the AL East, but occupying the second Wild Card spot, a percentage point behind the Blue Jays and half a game ahead of the Yankees, with Playoff Odds of 75.3%.

The Padres were projected to be one of the NL’s two best teams, albeit in a division occupied by the other one, the Dodgers. But while the defending champions have indeed been one of the top two, it’s been the Giants, not the Padres, who have provided their closest competition; San Diego has spent just 14 days in first place in the NL West. Even so, they spent nearly three-quarters of the season with Playoff Odds of 75% or better, but have gone just 16-25 since the deadline, and 10-21 since August 10. Having just won back-to-back games for the second time in the past five weeks, they’ve closed the gap behind the Giants to, uh, 18 1/2 games, but their Playoff Odds have dwindled to 32.0%.

As you can see, there’s a pretty wide spread when it comes to these three teams’ chances of playing October baseball, but each has fallen significantly from the spots they occupied earlier in the season. Depending on where I set the endpoints, their slumps might appear even more acute, which works for storytelling purposes, but is harder for comparative analysis. Since all three were riding rather high in early July, I decided to see how their declines in winning percentage from the first 81 games — a point the Padres reached on June 29, the Red Sox on June 30, and the Mets on July 4 — to the second compared to those of other teams in recent years.

As it turns out, the Padres’ drop from a .593 first-half winning percentage — the first 81 games of the season, not the uneven “halves” defined by proximity to the All-Star break — to a .422 second-half mark so far is the fourth-largest since 2012, the start of the two Wild Card team era; their dip ranked second until this two-game hot streak. Meanwhile those Red Sox and Mets rank among the dozen largest drop-offs, with yet another team from this year, one I hadn’t even considered for this piece given my apparent East Coast bias, in the top 20:

That’s not really a list you want to be on, judging by the minimal postseason impact of those teams. Obviously, we don’t yet know the playoff fates of the Padres, Red Sox, Mets (well, I think we know that one), and A’s (welcome to the party). Of the other 16 teams, seven made the playoffs; four won Wild Card games (the 2013 Pirates, ’15 Astros, ’16 Giants, and ’18 Yankees), but the only one that won a Division Series or a later round was the ’17 Astros, who, well, you know. Only one team with a drop-off of at least 87 points and a sub-.500 record in the second half won so much as a Wild Card game, namely the 2015 Astros.

Since the A’s turn up here, their arc is worth retracing as well. Despite being outscored in both April and May, strongly suggesting that they were playing over their heads, they climbed to the top of the AL West, and spent all but a single day of the next two months there, from April 20 to June 20. Despite their stellar June (17-9), an Astros team that had been lurking just behind them overtook them, and while the A’s were just 1 1/2 games back at the 81-game mark, and just 2 1/2 back at the 115-game mark (August 14) after some ups and downs, they’ve lost 18 of their last 29 and fallen seven games back. Their Playoff Odds peaked at 76.9% on June 18, and spent the next two months mostly in the 40-60% range, but they’ve plummeted from 62.5% on August 12 to just 4.3%.

So that’s two AL and two NL teams that have each taken rather dramatic tumbles this season. As you can see from the table above, it’s the second time within this span we’ve seen four teams from a single season take such falls; in 2018, the Yankees and Mariners both crumbled, as did the Phillies and Diamondbacks, with Philadelphia even sliding below .500 for the season to finish 80-82.

Not surprisingly, all four of these teams that have crashed in 2021 have underachieved relative to their Pythagenpat records during the second half. The Padres are the only ones who were underachieving during the season’s first half as well:

For the Padres, this has mainly been about the collapse of a rotation projected to be the majors’ best coming into the season; it’s been lit for a 5.52 ERA and 4.82 FIP in this second half. Yu Darvish has been battered for a 7.67 ERA and 5.74 FIP in 54 innings during this slide, that while landing on the injured list twice, for left hip tightness and lower back tightness. Ryan Weathers has completely collapsed (9.00 ERA, 7.55 FIP in 38.1 innings) after a promising beginning, Chris Paddack (5.74 ERA, 4.13 FIP in 42.1 innings) has had some bad luck, and even Joe Musgrove has regressed (3.79 ERA, 4.31 FIP). On the other hand, Blake Snell (3.03 ERA, 3.34 FIP) turned his season around, but a groin strain forced him out during the first inning of his September 12 start against the Dodgers. Adding insult to injury, the Padres reportedly were close to acquiring Max Scherzer at the deadline, only to watch as the Dodgers snatched him away, and he’s been brilliant. Scrapheap pickup Jake Arrieta? Not so much.

Run prevention has become a major issue for the Red Sox as well, with both the rotation and bullpen (4.42 ERA and 4.59 ERA, respectively) underperforming their FIPs by about four-tenths of a run. High-leverage guys such as Barnes, Adam Ottavino, and Hansel Robles have been particularly lousy. On the offensive side, the Sox have been a juggernaut, but while they’ve received a 100 wRC+ or better from nine out of the 11 players with 90 or more PA since July 1, Bogaerts (107 wRC+) and J.D. Martinez (108) haven’t been themselves, and rookie center fielder Jarren Duran (50) was over his head before landing on the COVID-19 injured list.

The Mets have continued to show holes on both sides of the ball. Offensively, Jeff McNeil (91 wRC+), James McCann (66), and Dominic Smith (56) have come up notably short even while the arrival of Báez (156), the return of J.D. Davis (118), and the upswing of Francisco Lindor (139) after a dreadful beginning to his season have helped; the last of those made the 36 games he missed due to an oblique strain a particularly big thumbs down. While late July additions Rich Hill and Trevor Williams have been pretty good, they don’t add up to a deGrom; meanwhile, the much-awaited arrival of Carlos Carrasco (5.59 ERA, 4.38 FIP) hasn’t really panned out, and Taijuan Walker (7.04 ERA, 6.90 FIP) has turned into a pumpkin. Key relievers such as Seth Lugo, Trevor May, Jeurys Familia, and Edwin Díaz have taken steps backwards of varying size at the wrong time as well.

By runs scored and allowed, the A’s have produced the same Pythagenpat winning percentages in both halves, but have gone from overachieving by 37 points to underachieving by 59 points, making for both the largest second-half shortfall and the largest overall swing relative to their expected record. The second-half fades of Sean Manaea and James Kaprielian and the frightening loss of Chris Bassitt (who’s still rehabbing his way back) have loomed large in the rotation. The bullpen — particularly Lou Trivino, Sergio Romo, and Yusmeiro Petit, three of the most four heavily-used relievers in the second half — has proven shaky as well.

For as much as these four teams have in common in terms of the severity of their second-half slides, and for as crowded as they’ve made the Wild Card races, it’s clear by now that the A’s and Mets are just hanging on, while the Red Sox are odds-on favorites to make it through, and the Padres are hardly out of it. Still, when the playoff slate is finally set, at least some of these teams will look back and wonder what might have been, and how they fell so far.