Quick: Who are the best five hitters in baseball this year? Take a quick gander at the leaderboards, if you’d like, before answering. There’s the WAR leaderboard:

That’s not what you want, though, because defense gets involved there. How about a wRC+ leaderboard instead? That should keep the Xander Bogaerts’s and Marcus Semien’s of the world from intruding on our hitting party:

Trout, Yelich, Bregman, Bellinger, and Rendon. That’s a pretty solid five. It’s also missing an obvious name: Yordan Alvarez, quite possibly the best hitter in baseball this year.

Why isn’t Alvarez on the list? It comes down to the tyranny of the qualified hitter. Setting a plate appearance minimum is a reasonable idea: without it, the best wRC+ this year would belong to Oliver Drake, who singled in his only plate appearance. No one wants that, except perhaps Oliver Drake.

That doesn’t mean that it’s always right to ignore everyone who falls short of the qualification minimum, though. Alvarez has 320 plate appearances this year, a far cry from Drake territory. Because he wasn’t called up until June, he won’t qualify for the batting title this year, but that shouldn’t distract you from the fact that he’s one of the best hitters in the major leagues, full stop. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 19, 2018, Carlos Santana was in the Phillies’ lineup, playing third base. It was an experiment that sparked speculation about his role in Philadelphia going forward. After all, he had just signed a three-year, $60 million contract. But after Rhys Hoskins had one of the worst defensive seasons by a left fielder this decade, it was clear that Santana’s usage would need to be adjusted. Having him play first — thus relegating Hoskins to the outfield — would not work long term, especially for a team trying to contend.

Santana’s brief stay in Philadelphia was mixed. He drew walks in 16.2% of his plate appearances, hit for power at about his then-career-average, and was about average defensively. With that information, you’d probably think that Santana had a good year, but reality was different. He was BABIP’d to death; no qualified hitter in 2018 posted a lower BABIP than Santana’s .231. His slash sat at .229/.352/.414 with a 108 wRC+, a decent-yet-unspectacular season. He also made headlines this past March when it was reported that, near the end of the 2018 season, he had smashed a clubhouse TV after witnessing his now-former teammates playing Fortnite during games.

The Phillies went on to have a memorable offseason, to say the least. They signed Bryce Harper, Andrew McCutchen, David Robertson. They traded for J.T. Realmuto and Jean Segura. Once all of the dust settled, Carlos Santana was no longer wearing red and white pinstripes. The seemingly tumultuous relationship lasted one season. Santana was back in Cleveland, the same place where he had spent the first eight seasons of his major league career. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2017 Arizona Diamondbacks were an unexpected delight, an eventual playoff team that was projected to be near the bottom of the NL West before the season. They had star power to burn; with Paul Goldschmidt and A.J. Pollock anchoring the lineup and Zack Greinke and Robbie Ray at the front of the rotation, the team had a top four to rival any team in baseball. After that, though, the drop off was severe. Maybe you could squint and see greatness in Jake Lamb, maybe you believed in the Shelby Miller bounce back, but the depth simply wasn’t there.

Those Diamondbacks made the postseason and won the Wild Card game, fueled by a deadline trade for J.D. Martinez, but their stars-and-scrubs construction was worrisome. Pollock missed time with injury, David Peralta didn’t take a step forward, and the cupboard generally looked bare. While the team’s pitching staff looked more promising thanks to breakouts from Patrick Corbin and Zack Godley, it wasn’t built to last. Corbin was only a year from free agency, Greinke was getting older, and Godley was more league average than a star in waiting.

By the end of 2018, that iteration of the Diamondbacks was no more. Pollock and Corbin left in free agency, Goldschmidt was a Cardinal, and the team made no secret that it was shopping Greinke. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s all their stars other than Ray, and he had underperformed massively in 2018. We baseball fans are pattern matchers, and this pattern is an easy one to spot: it was time for a tank and rebuild.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the bottom of the standings. The Diamondbacks, projected for the fourth-worst record in the NL before the season, are clinging to the fringes of the playoff hunt, with a 5.3% chance of reaching the Wild Card game. They’re 75-71, on the verge of putting together their third straight winning season. Most impressively, they’re doing it with an entirely new cast of characters. Read the rest of this entry »

September has been a cruel month when it comes to contending teams losing key players. On Tuesday alone, the Twins placed Byron Buxton on the injured list with a left shoulder subluxation for which he subsequently underwent season-ending surgery, and the Brewers lost Christian Yelich for the duration due to a fractured right kneecap. The day before that, the Cubs found out that Javier Báez would not return before the end of the regular season due to the severity of the fractured left thumb he suffered on September 1, though at least the door is open for him to return at some point in the postseason. Each of those losses compound other injury woes — at this time of year, everybody hurts — but for the Cubs the loss of Báez is particularly acute, as the team has slid from first place into a tie for the second NL Wild Card spot in the span of five weeks.

On August 8, the Cubs’ season reached its high-water mark in terms of both their division lead (3 1/2 games ahead of the Cardinals) and playoff odds (90.8%). Since then, they’ve stumbled to a 14-16 record, and at 77-68, find themselves tied with the Brewers with 17 games remaining. Here’s the graph of the NL Central teams’ playoff odds over the course of the season, with the aforementioned date highlighted:

The 26-year-old Báez initially injured his thumb while sliding into second base in the third inning following a pickoff attempt by the Brewers’ Gio Gonzalez. Though visibly shaken up on the play, he did not depart until the seventh inning:

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The Cleveland Indians front office places a high value on organizational culture. From the lowest rungs of the minors to the big leagues, they want their managers, coaches, and players to embrace both a collaborative process and a forward-thinking mindset. For that reason, they also highly value leadership skills. Luke Carlin, a 38-year-old former big-league catcher with a Bachelor of Science degree from Northeastern University, possesses those attributes in spades.

Carlin has managed in the Cleveland system for each of the past four seasons, most recently the Lake County Captains in the Low-A Midwest League. He’s viewed by many as a future major league coach or manager, and his interpersonal skills, paired with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge — analytics-based and otherwise — is a big reasons why. In a nutshell, he exemplifies what one might dub, “The Cleveland Way.”

Carlin shared his thoughts on leadership and teaching following the conclusion of the Captains’ season.

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Luke Carlin: “To me, managing and player development go hand in hand. I’m passionate about teaching, and it’s an awesome feeling when you have a clubhouse firing on all cylinders and pulling in the same direction. When you’re trying to earn the trust of the team, it’s not just interpersonal skills; it’s also a bunch of content-based stuff. Can you get the guys better? Can you help them develop? I think that really clicks within the information-rich environment that players today are coming up in.

“I’m finishing my master’s right now, at Northeastern, in organizational leadership. And it’s not just leadership theory, but also organizational-behavior theory and team dynamics. Piggyback that with what I’m learning here with the Indians. There are biomechanics, motor learning, teaching-and-coaching pedagogy… we’re basically trying to create a recipe to where we can interact with the people around us, and do a better job of developing high-performance than everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »

In Tuesday’s game between the Padres and Cubs, the two teams entered the bottom of the 10th inning tied up. Steve Cishek came into the game and induced a groundball out from Ty France; Luis Urías followed with an infield single. Then, things got out of control.

Austin Hedges, who at the time had a 52 wRC+ on the season, walked on five pitches. The first three pitches were all borderline, but outside the zone and were called balls. After a pitch right down the middle, Cishek couldn’t make a competitive pitch:

Then in stepped Travis Jankowski, with a career 79 wRC+ in nearly 1,000 major-league plate appearances, but also a robust 10% walk rate. After working the count to 2-2, Jankowski was nearly hit by a pitch. The play was reviewed and it was called a ball. After a 3-2 four-seamer down the middle was fouled off, Cishek threw a sinker well out of the zone:

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“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” – H.L. Mencken

The Marlins are a franchise with exactly two modes: brief moments of contention, and long stretches that punish anyone who would want to root for them. Miami is currently in the latter mode. Parity’s alive and well in the National League, with 14 of the league’s 15 teams spending significant time in 2019 playing the role of legitimate wild card contenders. The 15th team was these Marlins, the Star Trek redshirt of the Senior Circuit.

The Setup

The troubling truth for Marlins fans is that most winters’ offseason activity involves guessing who the team will get in return for its best players who are approaching free agency; if the 2018-2019 winter offered less consternation for fans, it’s only because the team had already traded away their entire outfield the year before. Without the ability to replace their lost stars with effective minor league talent — the formula that has kept the Rays frequent contenders despite their part-feigned penury — there was little chance the Marlins would be competitive enough to justify hanging on to J.T. Realmuto. In fairness, a lot of the blame for this is due to the previous regime, which made moves like trading away Chris Paddack and Luis Castillo for Fernando Rodney and Dan Straily.

Two years away from free agency, and with the Marlins unlikely to be competitive during that stretch, it was all but assured that Realmuto, an All-Star for the first time in 2018, would start the season in another city. A week before spring training started, he departed for the Phillies in exchange for Sixto Sanchez, Jorge Alfaro, Will Stewart, and, in a surprising move for a Marlins team to make, the right to spend more money in the form of international bonus space. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite being a near lock to make the playoffs, the Twins are facing plenty of challenges on their way to October. Over the weekend, Michael Pineda was hit with a 60-game suspension for violating the MLB’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. That seriously hurts the Twins starting rotation considering he’s been their best starter since June. But that’s not the only problem the Twins are facing now. Yesterday, news broke that center fielder Byron Buxton had labrum surgery, knocking him out for the rest of the season.

Buxton had been on the injured list since early August, but before that, he was putting together the best season of his career. In addition to his elite defense in center field, his bat had finally risen to meet the high expectations his prospect pedigree placed on him. He had cut his strikeout rate to 23.1% and pushed his isolated power up to .251, helping him post a 111 wRC+ in just under 300 plate appearances. If given a full year on the field, he was on pace to post a five-win season.

Buxton had been making progress rehabbing his shoulder with the hope of a late-September activation with an eye towards helping the team in the postseason. His return was never guaranteed, but now that he’s entirely out of the picture, it pushes the Twins outfield depth to its limit. Three other outfielders on the Twins roster have battled nagging injuries recently, leaving them critically short-handed despite the expanded rosters in September. Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Doolittle threw 10 pitches to Billy Hamilton on Saturday. Every one of them was a fastball, and all but one of them were in the upper third of the strike zone or higher. That’s what Doolittle does. No one in baseball throws a higher rate of fastballs than Doolittle’s 89.2%, and no one throws a higher rate of them in the upper third of the zone or higher than his 54.2%. He wears hitters out there, and that’s what he did to Hamilton. After a lengthy battle, the Braves’ new speedster didn’t have enough in the tank to get a piece of this last pitch.

That was a good outing for Doolittle. He retired all three hitters he faced, two of them on strikeouts. Even though Washington failed to rally in the top of the ninth, losing 5-4 to Atlanta, that kind of inning might have left a few Nationals fans feeling a bit more encouraged about their team’s overall outlook than they did before the game. That’s because recently, a dominant inning of work from Doolittle has no longer been the near-guarantee it used to be.

From 2017-18, Doolittle was incomprehensibly great. He threw 96.1 innings between Oakland and Washington and held a 2.24 ERA with a 2.27 FIP. He struck out 122 batters while walking 16. In terms of the game’s elite relievers, Doolittle was practically without equal. But this season, he hasn’t packed nearly the same punch. His ERA is 4.09, and his FIP is 4.23. His xFIP, which was a jaw-dropping 2.68 just last year, is now 5.05. He’s striking out two fewer batters per nine innings and issuing walks at his highest rate since 2015. After allowing just eight homers over the previous two seasons combined, he’s surrendered 10 this season. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers didn’t win the World Series in 2018, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a successful year. After several frustrating seasons of rebuilding, a division title (in a one game playoff against the hated Cubs, no less!) and a trip to the NLCS felt like huge strides in the right direction. It seemed as though the team had arrived a year early in a manner reminiscent of the 2015 Cubs, with better-than-expected seasons from young players and star turns from big offseason additions. In 2019, their young pitching staff would have another year of experience, and by adding Yasmani Grandal, the front office kept the talent pipeline primed.

144 games later, things haven’t gone as planned. The Brewers are out of playoff position, though they have lately gained ground, with only a 25% chance of reaching the postseason. Christian Yelich’s season-ending fracture adds injury to insult — a second straight MVP season would be a fun September storyline, and without Yelich’s bat, the team’s chances seem even more remote. Before his injury, however, Yelich was absolutely carrying the Brewers, improving on his MVP 2018 nearly across the board. Grandal has been magnificent as well, walking and slugging his way to a 123 wRC+ in addition to his usual excellent framing.

If those two have done so well, why aren’t the Brewers having a better season? Injuries have taken their toll. The pitching staff hasn’t developed as hoped, but that’s hardly shocking given how volatile pitching can be. More surprisingly, Lorenzo Cain has gone from down-ballot MVP contender to merely another guy, and on a team without much outfield depth, the decline has been particularly tough to deal with. While he’s been slowed by a knee injury since early August, his season was hardly better before then — his wRC+ has actually increased since sustaining that injury. What’s wrong with Cain?

One look at that oldest of statistics, batting average, will tell you something’s not right. From 2014 to 2018, Cain hit .300 or better four times and had an overall .301 average to pair with a .361 OBP. His .253 and .321 marks in 2019 are near career lows. The last time he was hitting like this, he wasn’t Lorenzo Cain, star outfielder. He was simply Lorenzo Cain, Royals prospect with a good glove. The gap between this Cain (0.9 WAR) and star-turn Cain (5.7 WAR in 2018) is so wide that it’s hardly believable.

Batting average isn’t the most valuable statistic, but the three components that make it up are all trending in the wrong direction for Cain. First, there’s strikeout rate. Strikeouts count against average without giving you a chance for a hit, so limiting strikeouts is a key component to hitting for a high average. It’s a part of the game that Cain has often excelled at — he hasn’t struck out more than the league average since 2014, and he actually got better at it as the league has gotten worse, posting a career-low 15.2% rate last year. This part of Cain’s game is worse, but that’s hardly surprising given the high bar he set last year, and his 16.9% strikeout rate is still tremendous.

If it’s not the strikeouts, is it the home runs? Home runs are hits that don’t give fielders any play on the ball, an automatic outcome not subject to the vagaries of defense and luck. If Cain lost a lot of home run power, we’d see it in batting average, and it would also sap his overall value tremendously. Read the rest of this entry »