In the Beforetimes, mid-September brought my annual check-in on the potential for end-of-season chaos in the playoff races via the Team Entropy series. With last year’s introduction of an expanded and restructured postseason, however, Major League Baseball did away with the potential for scheduling mayhem in favor of a larger inventory of playoff games. Along with the expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12 and of the Wild Card round from a pair of winner-take-all games to a quartet of three-game series, MLB also eliminated all winner-take-all regular-season tiebreaker games. In the name of efficiency, we have no more Games 163 and no more potential Bucky Dents. Instead, ties, even for spots where the winner would receive a postseason berth and the loser would go home, are decided by mathematics. It’s enough to make a fan want to shout, “Hey, Manfred, pull your head out of a spreadsheet and watch an elimination game!”

The untangling of the often-chaotic scenarios by which those one-game tiebreakers could come about was Team Entropy’s raison d’etre. But particularly with so many close races, there’s still enough untangling to do in potentially complex tie scenarios that I’ve chosen to continue a version of this exercise, pouring out a cold one for what might have been. If what we’re left with isn’t exactly chaotic, you can thumb your nose at the commissioner as you take a seat on the Team Un-Tropy bandwagon. 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 »

The Rangers have been sputtering, losing 15 of their last 19 since August 15 to turn a 3.5-game AL West lead into a three-game deficit, with the Astros, who just swept a three-game series from them at Globe Life Field, and Mariners both above them. Yet even as the team’s offense has dried up, Corey Seager has been on a tear. Since returning from a sprained right thumb at the beginning of August, the Rangers shortstop has homered 13 times in 30 games; this past week, he finally accumulated enough plate appearances to take over the AL leads in both batting average and wRC+. If not for Shohei Ohtani, Seager would have a pretty decent case for an MVP award, even with his absences.

Seager only missed nine games due to his thumb sprain, which he suffered on July 21 sliding into second base in a game against the Dodgers. That was his second trip to the injured list this year, as he also missed 31 games from April 12–May 17 due to a left hamstring strain. Yet the interruptions haven’t hindered him at all. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a month of upheaval in the AL West. As Jay Jaffe detailed, the Mariners are playing their best baseball of the season right now. A 9-1 stretch has carried them to the top of the division, turning what had been a two-team race all year into a three-way showdown. It’s the most competitive division race remaining, so a lot of people searching for a jolt of excitement down the stretch will be looking west.

Of course, Seattle’s climb to the top of the division didn’t happen in a vacuum. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and at the moment, that reaction is happening in Texas. The Astros spent the last week treading water, which allowed the Mariners to roar past them. The Rangers did them one worse; they’ve fallen into a 3-9 tailspin that turned a season-long lead in the division into a deficit.

It’s always tempting to turn a 3-9 stretch – or a 4-8 stretch, or really any stretch that takes a team out of first place – into a referendum on the squad. The Rangers should have seen this coming, the thinking goes. This team? With these weaknesses? It was always going to happen. But let’s withhold judgment for a few minutes and break it down like this: What’s going on in Arlington, and what has to change to turn the team’s fortunes around? Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, the Rangers and Diamondbacks played a classic at Chase Field. It started as a pitcher’s duel between Jordan Montgomery, who pitched beautifully over eight scoreless frames, and a cadre of Diamondbacks pitchers led by bulk man Slade Cecconi, who allowed the only run of the first eight innings on a solo shot off the bat of Adolis García. Then, things got chaotic. From the ninth inning on, the game swung from an 88.4% chance of a Texas win to an 81.3% likelihood for Arizona, then back to 95.1% odds in favor of the Rangers before a final swing back to the D-backs on a Tommy Pham walk-off double. Not to be confused for the heart rates of each team’s fans Monday evening, the win probability chart came out looking like this:

Last week, Ben Clemens wrote about how neat Win Probability Added is, and its merits as a part of the MVP discussion. While Ben’s piece made the great point that WPA is not “just a storytelling statistic,” lobbying for its use in measuring value over a season, its storytelling powers are indeed pretty remarkable. So much of the drama within Monday’s game was made quantifiable by measuring the shifts in win probability. Ketel Marte’s game-tying homer in the ninth was worth .467 WPA, or 46.7 percentage points of win probability; Nathaniel Lowe’s go-ahead double was worth .454; Tommy Pham’s walk-off was worth .754, the 11th-highest WPA value for any single play this year. That’s three hits that turned the game on its head, and then back on its feet, and then back on its head again. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Scherzer was 26 years old and pitching for the Tigers when I first interviewed him. Thirteen seasons and three Cy Young awards later, he’s taking the mound for the Rangers, the sixth team he’s played for in what has been an illustrious career. Scherzer’s accolades include eight All-Star berths, and just this week, he moved into 11th place on MLB’s all-time strikeout list. Already at 72.0 WAR, he has a Hall of Fame plaque in his future.

In our initial interview, which ran on today’s date back in 2010, Scherzer described himself as “a power pitcher” and “a very mathematic guy” who appreciated, but didn’t overly rely on, analytics available at that time. How does the veteran right-hander approach his craft all these years later, and how has he evolved along the way? I caught up with him to address those questions shortly before he was dealt from the Mets to the Rangers at the August trade deadline.

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David Laurila: We talked pitching in 2010. How differently do think about your craft 13 years later?

Max Scherzer: “Way different, but the game is also way different. In 2010, it was much more based on what the human eye can see, what’s going on in the field, and listening to the pro scouts. We were understanding some of the numbers back then, but nowhere near what it has blossomed into. It’s almost the inverse now. In 2023, so much of the game is just number, number, number, number, number. I actually think it’s gone too far, that we’ve forgotten some of the human aspects that go into baseball. It’s become, ‘Follow the numbers, they have to be right.’ But no. There is actually a human component that doesn’t get enough credit.”

Laurila: Can you elaborate on that?

Scherzer: “There are times where what you’re seeing on the field matters more than what the data says. There are times to execute based on what you see. For me, that’s been a maturation process over the course of my career.

“I’ve evolved in what I’m looking for and what I’m trying to ascertain. I’m always trying to figure out what I actually want to know on the mound. There is a limit to how much thought you can have about the hitter before you start taking away from yourself. There is a limit to how much bandwidth… like, you want to know what the hitter hits and what he doesn’t hit, but you also need to know what you do well. You need to understand, ‘When I execute this pitch, that’s when I’m at my best,’ and ‘When I put these sequences together, that’s when I’m at my best.’ As much as you want to scout your opponents, scouting yourself is just as important.” Read the rest of this entry »

No team has come out of the August 1 trade deadline hotter than the Texas Rangers. Not only did they make substantial additions to their roster — most notably by adding Max Scherzer and Jordan Montgomery to their rotation — but they’ve reeled off a season-high eight-game winning streak to start this month, enabling them to expand their AL West lead over the Astros to three games. Alas, they suffered a substantial blow along the way, as rookie third baseman Josh Jung fractured his left thumb in Sunday’s game. He’ll undergo surgery to stabilize the injury, which could sideline him for the next six weeks, but fortunately the Rangers have the depth to withstand his absence.

The 25-year-old Jung injured himself while knocking down a 109-mph line drive off the bat of the Marlins’ Jorge Soler in the sixth inning of Sunday’s game. The ball hit the base of the thumb of his glove hand and squirted out, but he had the presence of mind to recover it and step on third base for a force out, then throw to second to complete a double play.

One batter later, Jung left the game, to the surprise of manager Bruce Bochy. “I went out to the mound, I had no idea he got hurt on that play,” said Bochy. “The calmness that he showed picking up the ball, stepping on third … he didn’t grimace, he didn’t do anything to make us think that he was hurt.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Jobe has added a cutter to the power arsenal that helps make him one of the top pitching prospects in the Detroit Tigers system. Every bit as importantly, he’s returned to full health following a back ailment that landed him on the shelf from early April to mid June. The recently-turned 21-year-old right-hander had incurred an L5 (i.e. bottom left vertebra) stress fracture, an injury he attributed to “rotating fast and throwing hard at a young age when I wasn’t really strong enough to support that.”

The pitch now augmenting his fastball/slider/changeup combination was portended in a conversation I had with him last August. As his second full professional season was concluding, Jobe told me that he wanted to develop something new, “probably a cutter,” and he went on to do just that.

“I added it in the offseason, and on paper it’s a really good pitch,” the third-overall pick in the 2021 draft explained prior to his last start, which came on Friday with the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. “I dive into all the TrackMan stuff — the vertical movement, horizontal movement, the spin efficiency, the tilt — and use the data in pitch-design. The cutter has performed pretty well.”

Asking the analytically-minded hurler about the metrics on his cutter elicited a response that was preceded by a pregnant pause. Read the rest of this entry »

With their team in last place in the AL East at 55–51 and 3.5 games back of the Blue Jays for the third Wild Card, the Yankees’ front office teetered back and forth between “buyer” and “seller” in advance of the trade deadline. The truth is, the Bombers’ playoff odds had been in a tailspin since the beginning of July; it would have been unthinkable for them to sell on July 4, when they reached their monthly high of 75%, but at 23.1% at the end of the month, their decision should have been just as clear.

Instead, the Yankees did little of anything. Apparently, they were looking to be “bowled over” for their rentals, per The Athletic’s Marc Carig, and they never were, so they largely stood pat. The last team to enter the deadline foray, their “headliner” acquisition was Keynan Middleton; as detailed in our reliever roundup, he cost them 21-year-old lottery ticket Juan Carela. While New York’s bullpen scuffled to the tune of a 4.01 ERA and 4.82 FIP in July, the unit has pitched to solid 3.10/3.93 marks on the season, good for first and tied for sixth, respectively, in the majors. Acquiring a reliever was unlikely to move the needle for a fringe contender in the first place, but it also represented only a marginal improvement compared to the Yankees’ in-house options, especially with Jonathan Loáisiga’s return on the horizon.

That said, even though their acquisition of Spencer Howard from the Rangers for cash can be thought of as a “buy” in the literal sense and another addition of a reliever at that, it’s a different beast than adding Middleton. For starters, all it cost the Yankees was money, which they have oodles of. Howard is also under team control for another four years. The hurler is optionable and poised to begin his tenure in pinstripes at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, but it’s easy to see him getting some play toward the end of the season either in the wake of injuries or if the Yankees fall further in the standings. Read the rest of this entry »

There are 2,841 players who have received at least 2,000 major-league plate appearances in baseball history. Only 13 of them — including two Hall-of-Fame pitchers, Cy Young and Warren Spahn — have had a lower wRC+ than Austin Hedges. This year, he’s turned in one of his worst lines yet, a .180/.237/.230 slash good for a 28 wRC+. So what do the first-place Rangers want with him?

There are 473 players have appeared at catcher since the advent of Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) in 2003. Only four — Yadier Molina, Russell Martin, Buster Posey, and Jeff Mathis — have a higher DRS than Hedges. This year, he’s tied for fifth among backstops in DRS and tops in our framing runs metric.

Thus far, the Rangers have the majors’ second-best offense by wRC+ with a 120 mark. Their defense hasn’t been shabby — they’re tied for fifth in DRS — but I suppose it’s more in need of an upgrade than their offense. Then again, it’s not as if the Rangers had much of a choice: aside from Alex Jackson and Korey Lee, who have all of 211 major league plate appearances between them, no other backstops were traded this deadline. And Texas needs a known commodity to serve as depth behind the plate right now; incumbent Jonah Heim was placed on the IL Friday, destabilizing the position. Read the rest of this entry »