Man, am I tired of writing about the Dodgers and Phillies. I mean some of that narrowly – this is my second recap of these two financial juggernauts facing off in the past 24 hours, which means I’ve spent more time pondering these two teams than sleeping lately. I mostly mean it broadly, though. We get it, the Dodgers and Phillies are the best two teams in the NL every year. I hear you, they each have a slugging lefty DH who hit 50 homers and has a rabid following. It’s true, they have a former MVP lefty first baseman who departed his longtime NL East team and got a big sack of money for it. Oh, how original, a slight-of-stature righty shortstop who is a dynamic offensive player anyway. A slugging right-handed right fielder who honestly shouldn’t be playing defense? Yup. Endless stacks of pitchers? Sure thing, buddy, nothing but the best for these two.

Maybe it’s my lack of attachment to either team that makes me so tired of seeing them in October. Philadelphia’s “Oh, we’re a bunch of plucky underdogs” act? Exhausting. The Phillies have a $300 million payroll. Dodgers Baseball And Capital Appreciation Corporation employees executing carefully workshopped “dances” to simulate “fun” after base hits? No one’s buying it. But I don’t think it’s just the neutrals. My guess is that even fans of these clubs are sick of it at this point. Everything that annoys you about your opponent in this series is exactly what annoys the rest of us about your team. They even have obnoxious fanbases – not every fan, obviously, but come on, even Dodgers and Phillies partisans will agree with me on this one. Can’t we have someone else?

We can’t, of course. These teams have all the stars! Of course they’re always in the playoffs! And even more confusingly for me, you’re presumably here because you find this series interesting. If you just wanted to know the score, well, they publish those right away. So bear with me. The teams might be overexposed and easy to root against, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a good recap. Just follow Emperor Palpatine’s advice and let the hate flow through you. Read the rest of this entry »

Shutting down the Dodgers offense has been one of the toughest assignments in baseball this October. A series of great opposing pitchers, including Cy Young candidates aplenty, surrendered 27 runs in their first four playoff games. Sure, the Los Angeles pitching has been great too, but you can score on the Dodgers. The difficulty has been with stopping their unending procession of base-clearing prowess.

The Phillies seemed to be well suited to stopping the Dodgers, but that was before Los Angeles won the first two games in Philadelphia. Even worse, the Dodgers sent ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the mound, so limiting the offense figured to be even more important than normal. That’s too much work for one starter, so Rob Thomson turned to Aaron Nola and Ranger Suárez looking for a tandem performance. As it turned out, that decision was inspired. Along with two Schwarbombs, the Nola-Suárez piggyback propelled the Phillies to an 8-2 win at Dodger Stadium and postponed elimination for at least one more night.

Nola has had a rough year. He missed three months with injury, and looked much diminished when he did pitch en route to posting the worst single-season ERA (6.01) and FIP (4.58) marks of his long, decorated career. He wasn’t in this game for a long time, but he was in it for a good time. He came out absolutely jacked, with his velocity up two to three ticks and a snapping knuckle-curveball that hearkened back to his form of a few years ago. It didn’t click right away – Shohei Ohtani scorched a line drive for an out and then Mookie Betts tripled – but Nola buckled down, blew away Teoscar Hernández with a beautiful curve, and escaped the inning unscathed. He kept it going through a perfect second, perhaps as far as he was ever expected to go. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – If the lesson to learn from Game 1 of the NLDS is that nobody’s perfect, the lesson to learn from Game 2 is that some pitchers come close. Blake Snell and Jesús Luzardo delivered the kind of pitchers’ duel to warm the hearts of dyspeptic ex-pros who should have to drop a quarter in the swear jar whenever they start a sentence with, “Back in my day…” Snell allowed only a single hit against four walks and nine strikeouts in six innings of work; Luzardo, after a tricky first inning, recorded 17 straight outs.

After watching a blank scoreboard for the first two-thirds of the game, both teams cracked under the strain in the endgame. The two clubs followed this pair of near-perfect pitching performances with a manifestly imperfect bottom of the ninth, as both teams committed blunders in tactics and execution that threw a settled game into chaos.

The final score: Dodgers 4, Phillies 3. In this heavyweight bout, the Dodgers are one win away from a knockout victory. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – It’s dangerous to draw conclusions from one game of a playoff series, but after Game 1 of the NLDS, you can take this lesson to the bank: Nobody’s perfect.

Cristopher Sánchez was on the verge of completing six imperious innings, until the last three batters he faced — the last pitch he threw, really — sent the Phillies into a spiral. Teoscar Hernández committed a borderline-unforgivable defensive gaffe, then atoned with interest by the end of the night with a game-winning three-run homer.

Shohei Ohtani, making history by leading off a playoff game as a starting pitcher, looked not just like a two-way player but like two different people. Ohtani has seldom looked so hapless at the plate, striking out in each of his first four plate appearances. He made a slightly less glorious brand of history, becoming the sixth player in the pitch tracking era to strike out looking three times in a playoff game.

But on the other hand. Ohtani came out the winning pitcher: nine strikeouts in six innings, with just four baserunners allowed. Hernández’s seventh-inning homer off Matt Strahm made the difference in a 5-3 Dodger win. Read the rest of this entry »

Meat + bread + mess are one of the most iconic food combinations known to humanity. Two of my favorites are classics of Philadelphia and Los Angeles, wonderful amalgamations that make a sloppy mess of whiz or jus go down my chin and, too often, the shirt that I’m wearing. I’ve always lived in the eastern part of the United States, so I have more practical experience with cheesesteak locations (I’m partial to Dalessandro’s and John’s Roast Pork). But the French dip is wonderful as well — I have at least gotten to try it at Philippe the Original — and I also love its cousin, quesabirria. Whichever you prefer, you’re choosing from two of the heavy hitters in good, casual food.

I’m not talking about deliciousness because I’m hungry, even though it’s almost dinnertime, but because the Dodgers and Phillies play a similar role in baseball: They’re not everyone’s favorites, but they’re two of the most successful franchises of the last 15 years, and if you’re an NL team, there’s a good chance you’ll have to go through one or both of these teams en route to a championship. Read the rest of this entry »

Dansby Swanson brought home back-to-back Gold Gloves in 2022 with the Braves and ’23 with the Cubs while leading the majors in Statcast’s Fielding Run Value in both seasons. Although he hasn’t added any hardware to his collection since then, and while his defensive metrics have slipped, he still grades out as comfortably above average in both FRV and Defensive Runs Saved. His defensive acumen was on display in Tuesday’s Wild Card Series opener between the Cubs and Padres, as he made a couple of pivotal, run-saving plays in Chicago’s 3-1 victory.

The Padres had taken the lead in the second inning, when Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts opened the frame with back-to-back doubles off Matthew Boyd; Bogaerts took third when center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong’s relay spurted away from Nico Hoerner at second base. Ryan O’Hearn then hit a sizzling 101-mph groundball, and Swanson, who was shaded up the middle, dove to his right to stop it. He looked Bogaerts back to third base, then threw to first for the out. The play loomed large as Bogaerts ended up stranded.

The Padres threatened again in the fourth, when Manny Machado drew a leadoff walk and took second on Merrill’s sacrifice bunt. Bogaerts legged out a chopper into the no-man’s land to the right of the mound for an infield single, and San Diego appeared poised to capitalize when O’Hearn hit a flare into shallow center field. Swanson had other ideas, making a great over-the-shoulder snag of the ball, then in one motion turning to fire home to keep Machado honest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about my favorite award non-frontrunners this season, and there was a mini-discussion in the comments about the sustainability of Trea Turner’s defensive improvements. As we have more years of OAA/FRV, we’re better able to study long-term fielding questions with the data, so I wanted to do a quick look at FRV improvements/declines and see if those changes have held. And since there isn’t quite enough to this topic for me to give this article the full-length treatment — at least not now, while I’m trying to get my playoff predictor utility ready for 2025 — and too long for a comment 10 people will notice, this seemed like a good time for an underutilized InstaGraph©.

I started with every defensive season in which someone played 800 innings at a position in consecutive seasons. I treated corner outfield positions as different positions here, just to keep this as clean and simple as possible. Statcast defense is still a relatively new thing, so we have only 583 two-year runs for individual players. Not enough to break it down further by age or position or component in a meaningful manner, but enough to look at the bottomline numbers. When we look at three-year runs, we drop down to 277 individual players. Thanks 2020!

Of the players who had 800 innings at the same position in three consecutive seasons, here are the 30 largest gainers from the first year to the second. I used FRV/1200 instead of raw FRV.

Nearly two-thirds of the biggest improvers had negative FRV numbers the first season, and averaged a 10.8-run improvement in the second season. While FRV is obviously a volatile number, these players successfully retained a large portion of their one-year gains in the third season, averaging a 6.4-run improvement, with only five players going back into negative territory.

Turner’s 2024-2025 improvement in FRV/1200 is 11.7 runs, which would rank him ninth on this list, and the second-largest improvement among shortstops, behind Tim Anderson from 2017-2018. Turner doesn’t feature here because this is specifically for three-year runs, and the 2026 season hasn’t happened yet. His current Year 1-to-Year 2 gain for 2023-2024 is 4.5 runs — from -8.0 to -3.5 — and therefore not enough to make the top 30. It’s worth noting, though, that ZiPS projects him to be worth about 4.0 FRV/1200 in 2026, meaning he’d maintain about half his improvement from last year to this season.

Now, the decliners:

The story here is similar. The 30 biggest decliners averaged an 11.7-run slide from Year 1 to Year 2. All but two of the 30 were initially in positive territory, and only two players (Trevor Story and Evan Longoria) rebounded to positive territory in Year 3. Compared to the change of -11.7 runs in the first two seasons, Year 3 was still at -7.9 runs below the first year. So again, the biggest declines generally still displayed significant deterioration of their defensive performances.

Despite my sample size misgivings, I also look at the stickiness by age or position. Unfortunately, the results weren’t terribly interesting; the sample sizes were simply too small to draw meaningful conclusions from this part of the exercise.

So, what does this mean? While you shouldn’t take the most recent FRV of a player as some magical this-is-their-true-ability number, large changes in performance are very meaningful going forward. That’s good news for Turner and Phillies fans.

PHILADELPHIA — Let’s get one thing clear off the top: A splitter is not a fastball. Any confusion about this topic is understandable, seeing as the full government name of the pitch is “split-finger fastball.” Don’t be a captive to the inflexibility of language. The splitter is lying to you about its very nature.

The origin story of the splitter begins in 1973, when a Cubs minor leaguer named Bruce Sutter was recovering from offseason elbow surgery and struggling to regain his fastball velocity. A pitching instructor named Fred Martin approached the sore-armed 20-year-old with a new pitch. This would be a variation on the familiar forkball, held with index and middle finger spread as far apart as possible in order to impart downward movement.

But while the forkball came out of the hand with an identifiable knuckleball action, Martin had Sutter grip the baseball ever so slightly forward, getting similar action with fastball-like spin. Read the rest of this entry »

Does anybody want to win the National League batting title? Granted, with all these statheads devaluing batting average and instead offering fancier stats that identify more productive hitters, batting titles ain’t what they used to be. Nonetheless, with less than three weeks to go in the regular season, it bears noting that just one NL qualifier has a batting average of .300 or better, namely Trea Turner — and he just landed on the injured list.

The 32-year-old Turner left Sunday’s game against the Marlins in the top of the seventh inning after running to first base, where he was safe on a throwing error by shortstop Otto Lopez. He felt his right hamstring “grabbing on me,” as he described it afterwards, and was replaced by a pinch-runner. An MRI on Monday showed that he’d suffered a Grade 1 hamstring strain — thankfully not as serious as the Grade 2 left hamstring strain that knocked him out of action for six weeks last season; the Phillies think he could be back after just a 10-day IL stint. Even so, the move came on the same day that the team also placed third baseman Alec Bohm on the IL due to a cyst in his left shoulder; suddenly the Phillies are down half an infield. Luckily for them, they now own an nine-game lead in the NL East.

Thanks in large part to a 4-for-5 night on Friday, Turner is currently hitting .305/.356/.458 (125 wRC+). That’s the highest his batting average has been since June 17 (.308); he was as low as .281 as recently as August 13 but had been on fire over the past four weeks, batting .420/.448/.620 (197 wRC+) since then to overtake Will Smith (who at the time led the NL at .312), Xavier Edwards (.308), Freddie Freeman (.300) and everyone else vying for the title. Turner already has a batting title, having led the NL with a .328 mark in 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

Every morning, I go to FanGraphs and pull up a few leaderboards. One of my favorites these days shows trailing 30-day plate discipline statistics. Ever since Michael Harris II dug himself a huge hole by swinging at everything and then dug himself out of it by swinging some more, I’ve been checking to see whether he’s reined in his swing-first tendencies. Never fear, he’s still up there hacking — his swing percentage ranks 18th in the majors over the last month — but this isn’t an article about Harris. Here are the top 10 hitters in baseball by swing percentage over the last 30 days:

This generally isn’t a ranking you want to be at the top of. Ezequiel Tovar is on there because he’s never seen a slider he doesn’t like. In the aggregate, this group is hitting horribly over the last month. But there are two exceptions to that statement. Ozzie Albies is having a resurgent stretch, and as you can see from his low swinging strike rate, he’s operating pretty differently from the rest of this group. That’s neat, but Albies also isn’t the focus of today’s article. No, that would be Bryce Harper, who seems to defy everything I know about patience and power.

Sluggers wait for their pitch. I’ve known that for as long as I’ve followed baseball. I grew up on Barry Bonds’ perfect idea of the zone, A-Rod and David Ortiz taking tough pitches off the outside corner, Albert Pujols walking more often than he struck out. And this isn’t some SEAGER issue, either. That metric is about measuring controlled aggression, the ability to swing frequently without bad chases. Corey Seager’s career chase rate is 27.1%. The last time Harper showed that much restraint was 2018. How does he do it?! Read the rest of this entry »