This week, the baseball world turns its attention to the first round of the playoffs. It’s what we’ve spent the past six months waiting for. Nevertheless, the past 48 hours or so have brought a flurry of news events involving people and teams that (cue sad trombone sound effect) will not be taking part. Since the season ended on Sunday, seven teams made announcements about managers who were on the hot seat and/or wobbly chair:

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With just 12 days left to go in the regular season, two teams — the Brewers and Phillies — have clinched playoff berths, and on Monday the latter became the first to win its division. From among the four other division races, only in the AL West and NL West are the second-place teams closer than five games out, putting the chances of a lead change in the range of low-fat milk. With the exception of those two races, the lion’s share of the remaining drama centers around the Wild Card races.

Once upon a time, this space would be filled with my reintroduction of the concept of Team Entropy, but through the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, Major League Baseball and the players’ union traded the potential excitement and scheduling mayhem created by on-field tiebreakers and sudden-death Wild Card games in exchange for a larger inventory of playoff games. The 12-team, two-bye format was designed to reward the top two teams in each league by allowing them to bypass the possibility of being eliminated in best-of-three series. Often, however, things haven’t worked out that way, because outcomes in a best-of-five series are only slightly more predictable than those of a best-of-three.

Aside from the Dodgers beating the Padres in last year’s Division Series, every National League team that has earned a first-round bye under the newish system had been bounced at the first opportunity, with the Dodgers themselves falling in rather shocking fashion in both 2022 and ’23. The AL has had only one such upset in that span: the 2023 Rangers, who beat the Orioles and went on to win the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. You might think that this September is a poor one for baseball drama. The playoff spots in both leagues are fairly decided, give or take a bit of wobbliness from the perpetually star-crossed Mariners and Mets. Few division titles are in play – maybe the NL West or AL East, but neither feels all that likely to flip. But that’s okay, because even the teams that are probably out of it can be fun to watch, and even the teams that are already in it still have seeding to vie for. This week, I’ve turned my eye to a few teams with intriguing storylines in the month to come. I’m focusing my baseball viewing on playoff hopefuls, and there’s plenty to like. So with our customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, let’s talk baseball.

1. McLean (and Horton and Waldrep and…) Fever
One of my favorite baseball archetypes is the shooting star rookie ace. You know what I’m talking about if it’s happened to your team. Some rookie, often a heralded prospect, makes a mid-season debut and just has it. Their fastball? Unbeatable. Their breaking stuff? It just disappears! And that poise – it’s like they’ve been pitching in the majors for years, not weeks.

Whether you want to harken back to Fernando Valenzuela or rely on a more personally resonant example – 2013 Michael Wacha is my touchstone here – there’s just something special about these meteoric talents. At some point, they’re due for a downturn. How could they not be? It happens to everyone eventually. But until then, we might as well enjoy the ride. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers really can’t catch a break. Just after I wrote about Nathan Eovaldi’s sneaky great season, the 35-year-old righty briefly took over the official AL ERA lead. Before he could make another start, however, the Rangers announced that Eovaldi would likely miss the remainder of the season due to a rotator cuff strain. As if losing their most effective starting pitcher wasn’t enough, the Rangers also announced on Thursday that Corey Seager, their top hitter, had undergone an appendectomy, putting the rest of his season in doubt.

With his seven-inning, nine-strikeout, one-run effort against the Guardians last Friday, Eovaldi lowered his ERA to 1.73 in 130 innings, exactly enough to qualify based on the Rangers’ 130 games to that point. With that, he snuck ahead of Tarik Skubal (2.32), Hunter Brown (2.36) and Garrett Crochet (2.46) on the AL leaderboard, completing a game of catch-up caused primarily by his missing nearly all of June due to posterior elbow inflammation. Unfortunately, post-start soreness led Eovaldi to shut down his regularly scheduled bullpen session and get an MRI, which revealed a rotator cuff strain.

The 31-year-old Seager has hit .271/.373/.487 for a team-high 136 wRC+; his 21 homers and 3.9 WAR are also tops on the Rangers. He already made two trips to the injured list in April and May for a recurrent right hamstring strain and so has played just 102 games, that after being limited to 123 last year by a sports hernia and 119 in 2023 due to a left hamstring strain and a right thumb sprain. He’s been replaced on the roster by infielder Dylan Moore, who was recently released by the Mariners, but the likely replacement for him in the lineup is superutilityman Josh Smith, who has hit .256/.333/.378 (101 wRC+) while playing every position besides pitcher and catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

The Texas Rangers placed second baseman Marcus Semien on the injured list with a broken left foot over the weekend, retroactive to Thursday’s games. The result of a foul ball hitting the top of his foot, Semien was initially diagnosed with a contusion, but after getting multiple additional opinions, that diagnosis was revised to a fracture of the third metatarsal and a Lisfranc sprain. Semien, who turns 35 next month and whose last injury that merited an IL stint was a wrist contusion back in 2017, is having one of his weaker offensive seasons, with a .230/.305/.364 triple slash line, but thanks to his still-solid glove, he’s still amassed 2.1 WAR. The injury likely ends Semien’s regular season, and given where Texas is in the standings, probably his 2025.

I can’t think of many good times to break your foot. Just speaking for myself, I might consider a broken foot preferable to, say, going to a wedding I really don’t want to attend. But Semien is a professional athlete, not an introverted middle-aged baseball analyst who writes from home surrounded by computers and cats, and his team is on the brink. Texas is coming off a sweep of the Cleveland Guardians, but those three wins only got the team back to the .500 mark, with a 9-13 record for August. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, my colleague Jay Jaffe touched a bit on Jacob deGrom and his Hall of Fame case. Since the world can always use more sentences describing how awesome deGrom is, and because I’m fascinated by how his Hall of Fame case will look to voters sometime in the mid-2030s, I decided to dig a little more into his future candidacy and reasonable expectations for what the end of his career can add to his record. I also wanted to explore what deGrom’s case means for 2010s/2020s Hall of Fame starting pitcher representation more broadly.

This has been a concern of mine for a while, and I talked a bit about it last year in the context of Chris Sale’s marvelous comeback season. This piece has stuck with me as it was one of those rare articles in which the act of writing it changed my opinion somewhat. At the start, my thought process was “with a less than 50% chance of finishing with 200 wins, Sale probably won’t be in the Hall of Fame, and may be too borderline for even me.” But then I projected the rest of the league, and for the first time ever in ZiPS, not a single pitcher who hadn’t already passed 200 wins was projected to have a 50% chance of reaching that milestone. So, perhaps Sale should get to Cooperstown even if he falls short of that threshold, because if the writers don’t vote for him on the grounds that he didn’t get to 200 wins, how could we justifiably elect any future starting pitcher?

When I wrote last year’s piece, there were only 11 pitchers between 100 and 200 wins, a shockingly tiny number. And of those 11, only one is in a better position to win 200 games now than he was then: Sonny Gray, who has added 12 wins and is having a fairly typical season by his standards. As far as the other 10 are concerned… Gerrit Cole is out until well into 2026 due to elbow surgery, and Sale has missed a bunch of time this year from injuries. Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson have both since retired, Johnny Cueto has all but officially done the same, and Carlos Carrasco and Dallas Keuchel are in the minors and, for the purposes of this exercise, might as well be retired. Wade Miley has one win this season and is currently out with forearm pain in his comeback from Tommy John surgery. Yu Darvish, who didn’t make his season debut until July, has moved only two wins closer to 200 in his age-38 season. As a Baltimore native, I’m not psychologically prepared to talk about Charlie Morton’s progress.

The good news is eight new pitchers have joined the 100-win club this season, but none of them look to be on a path to 200 wins right now.

Of these eight, only Nola projects with a 50% chance to get to even 150 wins. While it’s theoretically possible for most of the eight to get to 200 wins, it would require an unusually robust late-career surge. During the Wild Card era, only 10 pitchers have amassed 90 wins after their age-34 season, and almost all of them were in the early part of the era; pitcher workloads have continued to drop, and starting pitchers get fewer decisions than ever.

ZiPS projects only four other pitchers to have a 50% shot at reaching 150 wins: Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, George Kirby, and Paul Skenes.

Rewind ZiPS a decade, and it gave 17 active pitchers a 50% chance to win 200 games. Nine eventually did hit that milestone, and Cueto, the only member of the other eight who is still technically active, isn’t going to do it.

So, let’s run the ZiPS projections for the remainder of deGrom’s contract with the Rangers, beginning in 2026 and running through 2028 — assuming Texas picks up his club option for that season. ZiPS was really worried about his health entering the season, for very obvious reasons, and while he just missed his most recent scheduled start due to shoulder fatigue, the injury is not believed to be a long-term issue. His projected workloads in future seasons have increased now that he’s stayed mostly healthy in 2025.

Give deGrom the 21 projected wins for 2026-28 and a couple September wins this year, and that gets him to 123 for his career. In his piece, Jay brought up Sandy Koufax while discussing deGrom, and I think it’s an apt comparison.

Koufax’s peak was more concentrated and more impactful in individual seasons than deGrom’s, but as I said about Johan Santana when he was on the Hall of Fame ballot, if your best years are being mentioned in conversation with those of Koufax, you must have been a dynamite pitcher. To me, from a pure dominance perspective, Peak deGrom isn’t that far behind Peak Koufax; certainly, the gap isn’t wide enough to keep deGrom out of Cooperstown considering pretty much everyone views Koufax as a no-doubt, inner-circle Hall of Famer.

Of course, it’s an inauspicious sign for deGrom that I’m using Santana as the other not-quite-Koufax comp, given that Santana went one-and-done on the ballot. But I’m hopeful that time is on deGrom’s side here. Santana was knocked off the ballot in the 2018 election, and the demographics of BBWAA members who stick around long enough to earn a Hall of Fame vote have changed a lot over the last decade. In fact, the BBWAA didn’t open up membership to internet-based writers — a group that tends to be more versed in analytics — until after the 2007 season, and many of these stathead members couldn’t vote when Santana was eligible. That will be different by the time deGrom hits the ballot in roughly eight or so years.

By then, it’ll be nearly 20 years of writers seeing starter workloads change, and maybe voters will have figured out how to account for the fact that the role of a starting pitcher is very different in the 2020s than it was in the 1990s, let alone in the days of Old Hoss Radbourn. The trio of former Cy Young winners in their 40s — Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Zack Greinke — will likely be in Cooperstown by the time deGrom hits the ballot. Clayton Kershaw is only three months older than deGrom, but considering the Dodgers icon debuted six years earlier, it feels all but guaranteed that he will be the first of the two to retire, meaning he will also enter the Hall before deGrom becomes eligible. If that happens, Kershaw will be the last of his kind to be voted in by the writers, setting the stage for a new standard for starters to make it to Cooperstown. That is, unless Kershaw is to be the last-to-debut Hall of Fame starting pitcher.

I can’t imagine that will be the case, but it is true that over the next decade, the BBWAA has some interesting philosophical questions to answer about the nature of starting pitcher greatness. I’m not sure what those answers will be, but I do know that deGrom will be instrumental in determining them.

Nathan Eovaldi is flying under the radar. Unless you’re particularly attuned to the Rangers’ battle to get back to .500 — they’re 63-65 after a recent 1-8 skid — or doing more than a casual perusal of our leaderboards, you might miss that the 35-year-old righty is carrying a 1.76 ERA into the final third of August. A bout of elbow inflammation that sidelined him for a month has left him just short qualifying for the American League lead, but even so, he’s in the midst of one of the best seasons of his career.

It’s an unlikely, out-of-nowhere season, at that. Eovaldi has e(o)volved a great deal since he debuted with the Dodgers in 2011, but even in the second, more successful leg of his career — the years since his 2017 Tommy John surgery (his second), during which he’s won a pair of World Series rings and made two All-Star teams — he’s never posted a full-season ERA lower than 3.63 (2023 with the Rangers) or an ERA- lower than 82 (2021 with the Red Sox). From 2018–24, he put up a 3.94 ERA (91 ERA-) for the Rays, Red Sox, and Rangers, including a 3.80 mark for Texas last year, which was right at the park-adjusted league average (100 ERA-). That recent work led the Rangers to re-sign him to a three-year, $75 million deal this past winter.

Eovaldi has been on this particular run for a while. After his six-inning, two-run effort against the Red Sox on Opening Day, the highest his ERA has been at any point (setting aside in-game fluctuations) was 2.64, on April 19. Beginning with his next start on April 25 against the Giants and running through his turn on August 5 again the Yankees, he put up an 0.90 ERA and a 2.16 FIP while allowing just 52 hits in 80.1 innings. That stretch probably would have garnered more attention had he not departed his May 27 start after two innings due to what was initially described as right triceps fatigue and later diagnosed as posterior elbow inflammation. He didn’t pitch in the majors again until June 27, when he allowed three runs in three innings against the Mariners, the only time during that 3 1/2-month span in which he allowed more than one run. Read the rest of this entry »

Beginning last Thursday and continuing through the weekend, several key rehabbers made appearances in the upper levels of the minor leagues. A few might have a meaningful impact on playoff races, while others are scuffling. I dish on eight pitchers below. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the deadline dust has settled – or at least, started to settle – it’s time to start making sense of it. The Padres, Twins, and Orioles were everywhere. Top relievers flew off the board. Both New York teams spent all day adding. But who did well? Who did poorly? Who was so frenetic that they probably belong in both categories more than once? I tried to sort things out a little bit. This isn’t an exhaustive list. There were 36 trades on deadline day, a new record, and more than a dozen before it. Nearly every team changed its trajectory at least a little, and this is just a brief look into the chaos. Here are the trends that most stood out to me.

Winner: Teams Trading Top Pitchers
This year’s crop of rental players was lighter than usual, but deadline activity didn’t slow. Instead, it simply spilled over into relievers under contract for a while. Mason Miller, Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, and David Bednar are under contract for a combined nine more years after 2025. That drove the prospect price up on all four. Having long-term control of relievers might be less valuable than at other positions, but it’s still valuable.

Most of the best prospects who swapped teams at the deadline were involved in a trade for top pitching. Leo De Vries, the consensus best player of the 2024 international signing period, was the big name here, but both the Phillies and Yankees offered up multiple good minor leaguers in exchange for Duran and Bednar. Taj Bradley, whom the Twins got back for Jax, is a former top prospect who won’t be a free agent until 2030. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 30, the Rangers lost to fall to 41-44, 10th place in the American League. Then they turned it on. Since the calendar flipped to July, they’ve gone 16-8 and rocketed into the playoff picture. They’re tied with the Mariners for the last AL Wild Card spot. With their sights now set on thriving in October, they needed to reinforce a pitching staff that has been quite good up top but got shakier as you went down the depth chart, and the Diamondbacks were happy to oblige. As Ken Rosenthal first reported, the Rangers are getting Merrill Kelly in exchange for Kohl Drake, Mitch Bratt, and David Hagaman. They also acquired Danny Coulombe and Phil Maton in separate deals to shore up the middle of their bullpen.

Texas has a famous starting rotation. The two stars, Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi, need no introduction. Second on the team in innings, slightly ahead of Eovaldi? That’d be World Series winner Patrick Corbin, famous both for his high highs and low lows. The back of the rotation? Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker, famous college teammates before they were famous prospect teammates. But Leiter and Rocker have been flat this year, and Corbin was bad enough for long enough that I’d be a little scared of counting on him. Tyler Mahle, another celebrated Rangers starter, has been out since June. Jon Gray is headed for free agency and has perhaps been banished to the bullpen for the remainder of 2025. And it’s not like deGrom has been the paragon of health over the last few years.

Kelly lengthens the playoff-ready portion of Texas’s rotation immediately. His career 3.74 ERA and 3.97 FIP are accurate representations of his work, as are his 22% strikeout rate and 7.4% walk rate. In other words, he’s a perfect mid-rotation arm, better than average (he’s managed a 3.22 ERA and 3.53 FIP this season) but squarely short of an ace. He’s 36 and a free agent after this year, which limits his return somewhat, but he’s a dependable playoff starter and thus a very desirable deadline target. Read the rest of this entry »