There’s quite a lot of bickering in sports, and not many things bring out more vehement disagreement than discussions involving who should get various awards. Even now, nearly 30 years later, when I think about Mo Vaughn beating out Albert Belle for the 1995 AL MVP, or Dante Bichette finishing second in that year’s NL race despite putting up just 1.8 WAR, I have to suppress a compelling desire to flip over a table. This year, thankfully, it’s hard to imagine the MVP voting results will be anywhere near as egregious as the ones we saw in ’95. That’s because the way MVP voters in the BBWAA evaluate players has changed dramatically since then.

Aaron Judge has easily the best traditional case for the AL MVP award if the season ended today. He leads the league in two of the main old-school batting stats: home runs and RBI. Bobby Witt Jr. and his .347 batting average is all that would stand between Judge and the Triple Crown. For what it’s worth, Judge would win the MLB Triple Crown, with twice the emeralds, rather than the AL one.

For most of baseball history, beginning with the first time the BBWAA handed out the award in 1931, numbers like these usually would’ve been good enough to win MVP honors. It also would’ve helped Judge’s case that the Yankees have one of the best records in baseball. If this were 30 years ago, Judge would all but officially have this thing wrapped up, barring an injury or the worst slump of his career.

But it’s the 2020s, not the 1990s, and I doubt anyone would dispute too strenuously the notion that ideas on performance, and their related awards, have shifted in recent years. Now, when talking about either an advanced offense statistic like wRC+ or a modern framework statistic like WAR, Judge certainly is no slouch. He currently leads baseball with 8.3 WAR, and his 218 wRC+ would be the eighth-highest seasonal mark in AL/NL history, behind only seasons by Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. But by WAR, his lead is a small one, roughly two-tenths of a run (!) over Bobby Witt Jr., who has surged since the start of July (.439/.476/.803, 247 wRC+ in 33 games) to supplant Gunnar Henderson as Judge’s main competition for the award. Henderson was right there with Judge for much of the early part of the season, and though he’s fallen off a bit, he’s still fourth in the majors with 6.4 WAR and capable of catching fire again at any time. With a month and a half left, Juan Soto can’t be completely counted out either.

A similar dynamic persists in the NL. Shohei Ohtani has looked a lot like the obvious MVP choice for much of the season, as he’s done, well, one half of the Shohei Ohtani thing: He is murdering baseballs and pitchers’ dreams. But as with Judge, there’s some serious competition when you look at WAR. Ohtani stands at the top, but by a fraction of a run ahead of Elly De La Cruz. Ketel Marte and Francisco Lindor are both within five runs of Ohtani, and nobody serious has ever claimed you can use WAR to conclusively settle disputes on differences that small. De La Cruz has more WAR than Ohtani since the start of June, and the latter two have more than the Dodgers slugger since the beginning of May. Marcell Ozuna, who has strong traditional stats (.302 BA, 35 HR, 90 RBI) shouldn’t be completely discounted if the Braves show signs of life; those numbers still matter, just not to the extent that they once did. With a fairly wide open race, there are plenty of stars with name power lurking just behind the leaders, such as Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman.

The answer of who should win the MVP awards is one we probably can’t answer beyond me giving my opinion, which I won’t do given the likelihood that I will be voting for one of the awards. But who will win the MVP awards is something we can make a reasonable stab at predicting. It’s actually been a while since I approached the topic, but I’ve long had a model derived from history to project the major year-end awards given out by the BBWAA. It was due for some updates, because the voters have changed. Some of the traditional things that voters prioritized, like team quality, have been de-emphasized by voters, though not completely. And the biggest change is the existence of WAR. Whatever flavor you prefer, be it Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, or the smooth, creamy swirl that can be scooped by our display window, this general stat has changed a lot about how performance is perceived.

There have been 47 MVP awards presented to position players who finished their seasons with fewer than 6.0 WAR; that’s more than a quarter of all hitter MVP seasons. However, excluding 2020, a hitter has not won an MVP without reaching that threshold since ’06, when both winners fell short: the NL’s Ryan Howard had 5.92 WAR, while AL winner Justin Morneau had 3.77 WAR.

When modeling the data, I use all the votes, not just the winners, and WAR is a pretty lousy variable when predicting voter behavior throughout most of history. That’s not surprising on its face since we’ve had WAR to use for only the last 15 years or so, making it impossible for most awards to have explicitly considered it. But there also appears to be only marginal implicit consideration, in which voters based their votes on the things that go into WAR without using the actual statistic. There’s a great deal of correlation between winning awards and high WARs in history, but that’s only because two of the things that voters have really liked, home runs and batting average, also tend to lead to higher WAR numbers. As an independent variable, WAR doesn’t help explain votes very well. That is, until about the year 2000.

If you only look at votes since 2000, all of a sudden, WAR goes from an irrelevant variable to one of the key components in a voting model. Voters in 2002 may not have been able to actually look at WAR, but even before Moneyball was a thing, baseball writers were paying much more attention to OBP, SLG, and defensive value at least partially because of analysts like Bill James, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, depending on your approach, once you deal with the correlations between variables, WAR comes out as one of or the most crucial MVP variable today. Could you imagine a world, even just 20 years ago, in which owners would propose paying players based on what sabermetrics nerds on the internet concocted?

The model I use, which I spent most of last week updating, takes modern voting behaviors into consideration. I use all three WAR variants listed above because it’s not clear which one most voters use. Here is how ZiPS currently sees the two MVP races this season:

This model thinks Judge is the favorite, but his odds to lose are nearly a coin flip. Witt is the runner-up, followed by Soto, Henderson, and the somehow-still-underrated José Ramírez. If we look at a model that considers all the BBWAA-voting years rather than just the 21st century results, this becomes a much more lopsided race.

Over in the NL, the updated ZiPS model sees a race that’s far more uncertain than the one in the AL.

Ohtani comes out as the favorite, but he has less than a one-in-three chance to win it. Behind him are the other WAR leaders, plus Ozuna.

Some of the WAR leaders without strong Triple Crown numbers, like Lindor, drop off considerably based on the entire history of voting, while Ozuna becomes a co-favorite with Ohtani. I haven’t talked about pitchers much in this article; they’re still included in the model, but none make the top 10 in the projected probabilities. Simply put, the willingness to vote pitchers for MVP seems to have declined over time. ZiPS doesn’t think any pitcher has been as dominant this season as the two most recent starters to win the award, Clayton Kershaw in 2014 and Justin Verlander in ’11, and closers these days typically can’t expect to get more than a few stray votes at the bottom of ballots.

It’ll be interesting to see how voting continues to change moving forward. In any case, no matter who you support for the MVP awards, strap in because there’s still plenty of baseball left to be played.

Here’s a little insight into my writing process. When I turn on my computer in the morning, my mind completely devoid of ideas apart from the knowledge that Meg is going to message me in a couple hours asking if I plan on working today, the first thing I do is look at our leaderboards. Maybe just seeing a name will jog something loose, or maybe I’ll learn about someone doing something exceptionally good or bad.

It’s fun to write about the extremities of baseball, and fun to read about them. It’s why we fight over who gets to write about Aaron Judge, or Paul Skenes, or the White Sox. We aim to please.

But I also have a soft spot in my heart for the unremarkable. My very first week on this job, I wrote an ode to Cal Quantrill, declaring him “the averagest pitcher north of the Rio Grande.” Well I’ve been noodling on averageness. Who’s the anti-Judge or anti-Skenes? The anti-Jose Altuve? Who is the least remarkable player in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »

This probably isn’t a problem for most people, but I’m plagued constantly by the memory of frustrating baseball arguments from days past. I probably get into these arguments more than most people, partially because of my (and I hope it doesn’t sound immodest to say this) vast knowledge of the sport, but mostly because I’ve lived most of my life in New Jersey, which his home to the most stubborn, tendentious people you’d ever have the misfortune of meeting.

One such argument took place probably close to 15 years ago, when I ruined what was supposed to be a relaxing Friday evening down the shore by getting into a shouting match over the issue of Alex Rodriguez vs. Derek Jeter. I preferred A-Rod, who would go on to finish his career with a slugging percentage more than 100 points higher than that of his Yankees teammate. I was arguing against someone whose case rested on Jeter being “more clutch.”

If you’re old enough to remember what “analytics bloggers” like me thought about that argument in the 2010s, you can understand my quickness to anger and probably imagine the colors my face turned. When the dust settled, Jeter — who, it turns out, was actually an exceptional hitter all along — did finish with a better career postseason wRC+ than A-Rod. But it was close: 121 to Jeter, 116 for Rodriguez. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies and Orioles consummated their second trade of the deadline period yesterday, as hard-throwing 29-year-old lefty Gregory Soto was sent to Baltimore in exchange for pitching prospects Seth Johnson and Moisés Chace. Soto has been having a pretty typical season, with a 4.08 ERA across 35.1 innings (43 appearances). He’s still throwing hard, and he’s accumulated a ton of walks and strikeouts having leaned more heavily on his incredible slider than in prior seasons. After a career-best year at avoiding free passes in 2023, Soto’s walk rate has ticked back up closer to his career norm of 12%; his fastball is also generating fewer swings and misses than ever before at a paltry 4.9% swinging strike rate, which is really low for a 98 mph heater.

Soto had mostly been squeezed out of high-leverage situations in Philly in deference to Matt Strahm and Jeff Hoffman, and was likely to see his opportunities further reduced by the recent acquisition of Carlos Estévez. While there’s nothing wrong with having a lefty who sits 98 as one of your lower-leverage guys, the way the market shaped up for multi-year relievers perhaps made it tempting for the Phillies to get more back in trade than is typical for a pitcher who is near the bottom of a bullpen depth chart. This one-for-two deal helps to build back a little of their farm system after the Estévez and Austin Hays trades.

In Baltimore, Soto joins Keegan Akin and Cionel Pérez as the lefties in the Orioles bullpen. He is under team control through next season. Any time an org like the Orioles acquires a pitcher whose results feel as though they’ve been far worse than his talent, you wonder if there’s something they might change about him that could help him be great. But Soto’s previous orgs, the Tigers and Phillies, have had recent success at improving pitchers, including late-bloomers like Hoffman. Perhaps there’s no low-hanging developmental fruit for the Orioles to reap here; Soto is 29 and might just be a semi-frustrating player who performs below what is typical for someone with his arm strength, let alone a lefty. That’s still constitutes a middle-inning upgrade for Baltimore. Will one of these teams be cursing themselves in a few months for having made the other more complete?

The Phillies got back two pitchers, one could help them as soon as next year, with the other being more of a developmental piece. Johnson, who is about to turn 26, had posted a 2.63 ERA (with a FIP and xFIP in the 4.13-4.26 range) as a starter at Double-A Bowie prior to the trade. The pandemic and an unfortunately timed Tommy John have prevented Johnson from posting a starter’s load of innings for consecutive seasons, and his 65 innings pitched as of the trade is already the most he’s thrown in a single season since 2021. Johnson sits 94-96 with riding life. An upper-80s cutter is his secondary weapon of choice, and he also has a mid-70s curveball with huge depth. There isn’t a platoon-neutralizing weapon here and the 2025 season will be Johnson’s last option year (unless the Phillies are given an extra option year because of his 2022 TJ), which together will probably squeeze Johnson into a bullpen role sometime next year.

Chace (pronounced CHA-say) is a medium-framed 21-year-old righty in his fourth pro season who has struck out more than a batter per inning each year of his career. Working in a piggyback role at Aberdeen prior to the trade, Chase has a good chance to develop a starter-quality pitch mix but probably not starter-quality command. He sits 93-96 with plus-plus vertical ride, he has a plus, 81-85 mph sweeper-style slider, and his changeup flashes bat-missing tail. Chace’s slider feel is advanced but that isn’t true of his other offerings. He’s Rule 5 eligible after this season and he’s going to be one of the more fascinating cases for protection. There are pretty clearly two viable big league pitches here right now, but Chace is quite far from the majors. Right now, I’d call him an unlikely add and bet that he doesn’t get Rule 5’d.

…

The Boston Red Sox added 12-year veteran big league reliever Luis García to the back of their bullpen, which to this point was in the bottom third of the league in combined reliever ERA and strikeout rate. Headed to Anaheim are four prospects, three of whom are relatively close to the big leagues. Former shortstop and current 23-year-old left fielder Matthew Lugo, 25-year-old first baseman Niko Kavadas, and 26-year-old reliever Ryan Zeferjahn were all at Triple-A Worcester, while 19-year-old pitcher Yeferson Vargas was promoted to Low-A just before the deal.

García has been one of the 50 most productive relievers in baseball since the 2021 season. He’s top 60 in WAR, FIP, ERA, strikeouts, and WHIP among relievers who’ve thrown at least 150 innings during that time, essentially a viable second-best reliever on a good team even as he climbed into his late-30s. García has a 1.17 WHIP this season even as his fastball velocity has declined two ticks from peak and a little more than one tick compared from last season. His sinker, splitter, and slider (especially the two secondaries, which are plus or better offerings generating huge swing-and-miss against big leaguers) remain good enough for García to play a relatively high-leverage role on a contender.

García hits free agency again this winter. It might feel like giving up four players is a lot for two months of a reliever, but if any team had a 40-man crunch this offseason it was going to be the Red Sox because of how many potentially serviceable position players they had in their system. Several of those players are now gone, including Kavadas, Lugo, Zeferjahn, Eddinson Paulino, and Nick Yorke. It’s good to have depth in the event of injury, but it’s plausible the Red Sox would either have lost a couple of these guys in the Rule 5 draft this offseason or clogged their roster trying to keep them.

Kavadas is striking out a third of the time at Triple-A, but he has enormous power and had a .975 OPS at the time of the trade. He’s posted a 57% hard-hit rate in Worcester and his swing is geared for lift in the extreme, with 20 degrees of launch on average. There will probably be a narrow window in Kavadas’ prime when he can get to enough power to be a relevant big league first baseman. A career trajectory similar to what Jared Walsh had with the Angels is feasible, where he enjoys one or two peak years of big power but over time is hindered by strikeouts in a way that is a problem for the overall profile of a 1B/DH athlete. Think Mike Ford.

A swing change and a more patient approach have unlocked an extra gear of power for Lugo and may have salvaged the former second round pick’s career, especially as he’s slid all the way down the defensive spectrum from shortstop to left field. His mistake-crushing style has him on pace to hit 30 homers in the minors this year. Hellbent on pulling the baseball, Lugo struggles to cover the outer third of the zone and swings inside a ton of pitches out there. Given his hit tool limitations and the way his defensive versatility has trended down, he looks more like an above-replacement up/down outfielder than a consistent role player.

Zeferjahn is a hard-throwing reliever who has averaged 96-98 with his fastball this year. He was utterly dominant at Double-A early in the season and was promoted to Worcester, where his command has returned to problematic career norms; he’s walking six batters per nine there. Zeferjahn’s fastball plays down because of poor movement and his lack of command, but he essentially has three average pitches and would be an up/down reliever in most orgs. He might play a more significant role for the Angels in the next couple of years. I expect he’ll be added to their 40-man roster this offseason.

Finally, Vargas is a stout, six foot righty who has cut his walks substantially compared to 2023 while also enjoying a two- or three-tick velocity spike. Vargas’ fastball averaged 92-93 last year and a scout who saw him earlier this spring had him sitting 93-95, but when I saw Vargas in June, he held 95-96 and touched 98 across three innings of work. He also has a snappy curveball in the 81-84 mph range that flashed plus on my look. At Vargas’ size, he’s perhaps more likely to be a reliever, but he’s made a ton of progress in the last year, especially in the strike-throwing department. He’s a hard-throwing developmental prospect with a good two-pitch foundation.

…

The Yankees acquired Enyel De Los Santos and Thomas Balboni Jr. from the Padres in exchange for 27-year-old Triple-A center fielder Brandon Lockridge. The 28-year-old De Los Santos was having a strange, homer-prone season in San Diego prior to the trade but has otherwise performed near his career norms. In 40.1 innings, De Los Santos has a 4.46 ERA, a 28% strikeout rate, and a career-best 7.6% walk rate. His stuff has also been consistent with career norms, but Enyel’s approach to pitching has changed. His slider usage is way up this year and his approach to locating his fastball has also shifted to the upper part of the zone. Here are De Los Santos’ fastball locations against lefties each of the last two years:

Seven of the 11 homers (in 40.1 innings!) De Los Santos has surrendered this year have been off his fastball, a pitch he’s throwing less than ever before. Especially in the Yankee Stadium bandbox, I’d expect some kind of fastball alteration to happen here, even if it’s just a return to more of an east/west style of pitching.

De Los Santos has been in the big leagues since he was 22 but because several of those have been partial seasons, he’s only just now in his arbitration years and will hit free agency after the 2026 season, at age 31. In addition to the other relief pitcher additions that crowded out De Los Santos on the roster, it’s possible the Padres’ more budget-beholden approach post-Peter Seidler made De Los Santos’ looming arb salary consequential. Perhaps the lack of leverage created by this is why the Padres had to attach a prospect to Enyel to get Lockridge. That prospect is the 24-year-old Balboni, a sidearm reliever who has had a two-tick velocity spike this season. Balboni now sits 93-96 and has a high-spin slider. He’s not a great strike-thrower, but he’s got good stuff and a pretty good shot to wear a big league uniform eventually.

Coming back to the Padres is Lockridge, a nice upper-level depth player who can really go get it in center field and who fortifies the Padres’ center field depth behind Jackson Merrill to a degree. Fernando Tatis Jr.’s injury has put pressure on the Padres’ outfield depth and forced David Peralta, who isn’t hitting, into action. Lockridge might be a better big league roster fit than Bryce Johnson, who isn’t as good a defender. Tim Locastro, Óscar Mercado, Cal Mitchell, Tirso Ornelas, and José Azocar are all in El Paso, too.

You didn’t really think teams were done swapping relievers after Friday and Saturday, did you? If you thought maybe they were tapped out for late relief help on Sunday and Monday, well, you thought wrong! If your bullpen doesn’t look like there are enough dudes to capture Helm’s Deep, you’re woefully short-armed.

The San Diego Padres acquired LHRP Tanner Scott and RHRP Bryan Hoeing from the Miami Marlins for LHSP Robby Snelling, RHSP Adam Mazur, 3B/2B Graham Pauley, and 3B/SS Jay Beshears

As one of baseball’s elite closers on an expiring contract, Tanner Scott was arguably the best short-term option available among relievers. His walk rate has peeked up a little to the numbers of the bad old days, but his first-strike percentage has stayed firmly in positive territory, which is an important indicator of where walk numbers will settle. Scott is likely to help the Padres in a very tight NL Wild Card race, but he’ll probably be even more important for them in the playoffs if they can get there. In San Diego, he teams up with Robert Suarez to asphyxiate opposing lineups late in the games. As far as elite closers who occasionally walk a few too many batters go, Scott is one of the less stressful of the genre, because he’s so hard to hit against with any authority, giving him a good shot at escaping jams following those free passes.

Bryan Hoeing is a sinker/slider reliever who has never quite clicked, as he’s never really been able to induce many swings-and-misses, nor has he mastered the art of inducing weak groundballs. He strikes me mostly as a depth guy who has plenty of years of club control left, and barring a breakout, he seems destined to be shuffled back and forth between San Diego and Triple-A El Paso a lot over the next few years. This trade is about Scott. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re barreling toward the trade deadline, which means it’s time for teams to decide if they’re in, out, or Tampa Bay. After picking which of those categories they fit into, the next move is obvious. In? Trade for a reliever. Out? Trade away your relievers. Tampa Bay? Make 10 moves, with more moving parts than you can possibly imagine. All of those types were on display this weekend, so let’s round up some reliever trades.

The Brewers and Rockies got the party started with a simple swap: Nick Mears to the Brewers, Bradley Blalock and Yujanyer Herrera to the Rockies. This one is basically what you’d expect from a deadline deal. The Brewers need relief help; they have nine pitchers on the IL, and while they just got Devin Williams back, they lost Bryan Hudson to injury earlier this week. It’s been an uphill battle to fill innings in Milwaukee this year. Mears slots right into the middle of the bullpen, helping to lengthen the number of innings the Brewers can cover with high octane arms. The Brewers have the fewest innings pitched by starters this year, so that depth really matters.
Read the rest of this entry »

I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it.
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Count me among those who worried that, with about 12 teams in the National League playoff hunt in the week before the trade deadline, there might not be enough sellers to kickstart a trade market. Well, the Philadelphia Phillies — who have the best record in baseball — and the Baltimore Orioles — who are tied for the best record in the American League — have come together and said, “To heck with all that.”

The Orioles are sending outfielder Austin Hays north in exchange for reliever Seranthony Domínguez and outfielder Cristian Pache. This being a transaction between Baltimore and Philadelphia, I assume there’s a quantity of Old Bay changing hands in the deal, but how much is as yet unspecified.

An exchange of three major leaguers between two first-place teams? Hallelujah, a challenge trade! Read the rest of this entry »

Today the Killers list turns the corner — or rather turns to the teams receiving less-than-acceptable production in the outfield corners. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I’ve batched the two corners together into one supersized roundup because three of the seven teams below the WAR cutoff for left field also make the list for right field, and because there’s plenty of crossover in play with regards to personnel. The capsules are listed in order of their left field rankings first, while noting those three crossover teams with an asterisk. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the July 30 deadline, but these are teams to keep an eye on. All statistics are through July 14.

Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Strahm making the All-Star team as a setup man with no saves is a bit of an anomaly. Especially because he didn’t take the Aaron Crow route — his team had its proverbial bases covered.

The Phillies are no. 1 in baseball in pitcher WAR. They’re no. 1 by a huge margin in starter WAR, and no. 2 (a tenth of a win behind a team that has both Emmanuel Clase and 16% more bullpen innings) in reliever WAR. So it’s no surprise that Philadelphia sent five pitchers to Texas among its NL record-tying eight All-Star representatives.

The fact that Strahm is third in his own bullpen in ERA, behind Jeff Hoffman and Orion Kerkering, is mostly a testament to how good that unit has been overall. Strahm is second among relievers in FIP and tied for third in WAR. It’s not bad for a player who was an afterthought when the Phillies acquired him on the free agent market in December 2022, the same week Trea Turner and Taijuan Walker joined the organization. Read the rest of this entry »