The playoffs start today, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its National League counterpart break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite being second and third in record among AL clubs and sporting the top two run differentials in the Junior Circuit, the Rays and Rangers will meet in the wild card round as the fourth and fifth seeds, respectively. Tampa Bay secured the top wild card spot after losing a close division race, finishing just two games behind the first-place Orioles, the only 100-win team in the AL, and will play host to the Rangers. Their 90 wins tied them with the Astros for first place in the West, but they lost the division crown via tiebreaker under the new rules that sent Game 163 into extinction. These two squads may be a bit above the caliber of the average wild card series, but only one will be on a flight to Baltimore this weekend for the ALDS. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in August, my colleague Ben Clemens crafted an article titled Wait, Zack Littell is a Starter Now?! It was an apt headline. Not only had the 27-year-old right-hander been DFA’d by the Red Sox a few months earlier — Boston having been his third organization in as many years, and his sixth overall — he’d logged a 4.08 ERA over 145 big-league appearances, all but four out of the bullpen, with just three saves. As Clemens pointed out, Littell “wasn’t even a dominant reliever.”

Of course, this was the Tampa Bay Rays who’d moved him into their rotation. Much for that reason, Clemens qualified his skepticism by saying, “What else can we do but wait and see the results?”

The results have remained largely positive. Littell has a not-so-great 6.75 ERA in 14 appearances out of the bullpen this year, but in the same number of outings as a starter his ERA is 3.41. Moreover, he’s consistently gone five-plus innings. As Rays beat writer Marc Topkin told me for an article that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. the under-the-radar righty “has basically saved the starting rotation.”

How did the opportunity come about? Read the rest of this entry »

“Let’s Talk About Underrated 2023 Orioles” was the subtitle of my Sunday Notes column on September 10, with the opening section having featured a combination of Baltimore broadcasters and scribes opining on that very topic. Today, we’ll head south and talk about underrated Tampa Bay Rays — arguably an even more subjective exercise. Few teams in any sport have enjoyed as much success while getting contributions from as many players who largely fly under the radar from a national perspective.

The six people quoted below — four Tampa Bay broadcasters and a pair of the team’s beat writers — offered their perspectives on Wednesday when the Rays played the Red Sox at Fenway Park.

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Brian Anderson, Rays broadcaster:

“The guy who had the big game tonight: Josh Lowe. Coming into the season, it was Vidal Bruján, Jonathan Aranda, Luke Raley, and Josh Lowe — those four guys for two spots — and it was a battle right to the end of spring training. Raley and Lowe got them. Not only did [Lowe] fight for a roster spot and get it, he turned it into .290 with 20 home runs, and he’s 32-for-35 in stolen bases. He’s third on the team in runs driven in. He plays a good outfield. I mean, he’s gone through the roof for a guy who, until the end of camp, didn’t know if he was going to make the team or not. To be able to do what he did… I don’t think anyone saw him putting together the kind of year he’s put together.” Read the rest of this entry »

In many aspects of the game, Harold Ramírez simply doesn’t look like a big leaguer. His 47.5% chase rate ranks 193rd out of the 194 hitters with at least 400 plate appearances this year. Among that same population, his line drive rate ranks in the 14th percentile. Ramírez hits twice as many groundballs as fly balls and has homered in just 2% of his plate appearances, worse than league average. As a DH, he doesn’t provide value with his glove, and in his first two full seasons with Miami and Cleveland, he was worse than replacement level.

Now let’s talk about how good Ramírez is. He has some of the best raw power in the game, once hitting a ball 114.8 mph, something the likes of Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and José Ramírez have never accomplished. He avoids strikeouts at an above-average clip and can make the most of the balls he puts in play as a 64th-percentile runner. Ramírez is one of just three hitters with a batting average above .300 in each of the past two seasons, along with Freeman and Luis Arraez. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like the Rays have been trying to ditch Tropicana Field since they got there, and apparently it’s finally going to happen. The Royals are likewise pursuing plans to build a replacement for Kauffman Stadium, though the club announced Wednesday that the planned reveal of a new ballpark site was being postponed for the time being.

Both clubs want to replace their aging, arguably obsolete concrete bowls with something more modern — more glitzy. The unspoken promise is that the Royals and Rays — two small-market teams that ranked 25th and 27th in payroll this season, respectively — would turn their new taxpayer-funded playgrounds into an economic engine that would not only boost community welfare but also allow the team to compete economically with the Yankees, Dodgers, and so forth.

We all know this is bunk. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, I took a look at the Rays pitching staff. Despite having the best offense in the league, the team had fallen back to earth after a red-hot start to the season. Surprisingly, their biggest weakness was relief pitching, an area where the team has long had a reputation for excellence. Even with strong offensive showings and a league-leading wRC+, their revolving door of bulk guys and back-of-the-bullpen options simply wasn’t keeping runs off the board. Headed down the stretch, the Rays boast the fourth-best record in baseball and sit just three games back of the AL-leading Orioles in the East. The bullpen has turned it around in a big way. When I last checked in on them in June, their relievers ranked 29th in FIP. Since then, they’ve been in the top five:

One of the biggest reasons for this improvement has been greater stability in the starting rotation. Despite Shane McClanahan going down with a torn UCL after the early-season losses of Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs, this is the closest thing the Rays have had to a regular rotation all year. After missing two months with an oblique injury, Tyler Glasnow has returned to form, with a sub-three ERA and a 34% strikeout rate. They’ve also made the most of Zach Eflin’s elite command; he currently ranks fourth among AL pitchers in WAR and has almost doubled his previous career high. They moved aggressively at the deadline, trading top slugging prospect Kyle Manzardo for Aaron Civale, who’s improved his K-BB% by nine points since leaving Cleveland. And finally, they’ve converted up/down reliever Zack Littell into an effective starter, because what can’t they do? Since being added to the rotation at the end of July, his 5.8 innings per start ranks in the top quarter of all starters. Read the rest of this entry »

With Instructional League underway in Arizona (casts look of disappointment toward Florida) and Fall League rosters likely about two weeks out, the time has come to line the coffers with data and re-worked scouting reports in preparation for another round of farm system audits. Especially at the up-the-middle positions, defense is both very important and also a bit of a black box for readers, as there aren’t many publicly available minor league defensive stats and so much of evaluating defense is visual. I’ve recently been working on a video deep dive on the position players currently graded as 50 FV prospects or better, specifically to evaluate their defense in detail. Here I’ve taken a pass at the shortstops, providing video supplements for the prospects who I’ve evaluated in the 55 FV tier and above. I’ve made changes to their defense and arm tool grades over on The Board as a result of this exercise, and highlight the instances where this has caused a change to the player’s overall FV grade in the analysis below.

I’ve cut the videos in such a way that you can see each shortstop making similar plays one right after another. The videos feature plays to their left where I want to see them flip their hips and throw, plays that show the extreme end of their range, backhand plays in the hole to their right, plays coming in on the grass, and double play attempts. The fewest balls in play I watched for an individual player was 36 (Colson Montgomery and Dyan Jorge) and the most was closer to 70 (Jackson Holliday, Carson Williams and Marcelo Mayer). Read the rest of this entry »

In the 1991 comedy King Ralph, an American lounge singer becomes the King of England when the entire royal family is electrocuted in a freak photography accident. Despite its Academy Award-winning screenwriter and a cast of well-respected actors, the film fell flat, making it an apt comparison for the 2023 Mets, although that’s not why I bring it up today. After a series of unfortunate and unexpected injuries, Aaron Civale finds himself a key cog with the Rays and, therefore, in the race for the AL East crown. Tampa Bay’s rotation doesn’t have much in common with the British monarchy (there’s far too much turnover and not nearly enough silly hats), but just like Ralph Jones, Civale wouldn’t be in this position if so many others in front of him hadn’t bit the dust.

The Rays entered the season with one of the best rotations in the American League: Shane McClanahan, Tyler Glasnow, Drew Rasmussen, Jeffrey Springs, and Zach Eflin. No other team could boast a projected ERA and FIP under 3.80 for all five of its primary starting pitchers. On top of that, no. 37 overall prospect Taj Bradley was nearing his big league debut, and Josh Fleming, Yonny Chirinos, and Luis Patiño were around to provide depth. Our positional power rankings had the Rays rotation third in the AL and eighth overall.

On the other side of the equation, the Guardians entered the season under no pressure to trade Civale. On Opening Day, their postseason odds sat at 44.7%. Two-thirds of the FanGraphs staff picked them to make the playoffs, myself included. Now, this is the Guardians we’re talking about, so high postseason odds won’t stop them from trading a talented, young player, but Civale was set to make only $2.6 million this season, and he’s arbitration-eligible for two more years. Cleveland had little incentive to trade him unless the offer was too good to refuse. Considering his injury history, his 4.92 ERA last season, and the oblique strain he suffered this April, the chances of such an offer materializing seemed slim. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember the springtime? We were so young and carefree, so full of hope. We hadn’t even breathed in our first lungfuls of Canadian wildfire smoke. Pitchers were full of hope, too. They’d spent the whole offseason in a lab, or playing winter ball, or maybe just in a nice condo, trying to figure how to get better.

Amazingly, a lot of them settled on the exact same recipe for success: start throwing a cutter. You couldn’t open up a soon-to-be-shuttered sports section without reading an article about some pitcher whose plan for world domination hinged on whipping up a delicious new cut fastball. Now that we’re in the dog days of summer, it’s time to check and see how those cutters are coming along. Are they browning nicely and just starting to set? Or have they filled the house with smoke, bubbling over the sides of the pan and burning down to a carbonized blob that needs to be scraped off the bottom of the oven with steel wool?

I pulled data on every pitcher who has thrown at least 400 pitches in both 2022 and ’23, focusing on the ones who are throwing a cutter at least 10% of the time this year after throwing it either infrequently or not at all last season. These cutoffs did mean that we missed some interesting players like Brayan Bello and Danny Coulombe, but we’re left with a list of 25 pitchers.

So did their new toys turn them into peak Pedro? The short answer is no. Taken as a whole, they’ve performed roughly as well as they did last season. As you’d expect from any sample, roughly half our pitchers got better, and half got worse. Of the pitchers who improved from last year to this year, I don’t think I can definitively say that any of them reached new heights specifically because of the cutter. Read the rest of this entry »