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Baseball Operations Trainee
Baseball Analytics Trainee

Baseball Operations Trainee

Department: Baseball Operations
Reports To: Coordinator, Baseball Operations and Coordinator, Baseball Operations and Player Development
Job Purpose: Provide support to all members of the Baseball Operations Department in a wide range of both administrative and baseball-related tasks and projects.

This posting will be used to recruit both full-year and summer-start candidates.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Perform qualitative and quantitative research and analysis in support of salary arbitration, roster management, player evaluation, player development, amateur draft, and trade deadline efforts.
• Introductory level player evaluation, including scouting and writing reports on assignment.
• Assist in preparation of advance scouting documents and video for players and coaches during season.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Independent judgment and ability to multitask is required to plan, prioritize, and organize diversified workload.
• Strong work ethic and willingness to work long, flexible hours including weekends and holidays.
• High level of attention to detail.
• Must be trustworthy and comfortable with managing sensitive information.
• High level of interpersonal skills and be able to effectively communicate with wide range of departments, seniority levels and personalities.
• Understanding of typical baseball data structures, plus knowledge of current baseball research and traditional baseball statistics and strategy.

Experience, Education, and Licensure:

• Bachelor’s degree or pursuit of degree or equivalent experience in a quantitative field, such as statistics, mathematics, engineering, and/or economics preferred.
• Experience playing/working in college and/or professional baseball/softball preferred.
• Demonstrated experience and proficiency with:
  • Database querying (e.g., SQL) and statistical software (e.g., R, Python) preferred.
  • BATS video system preferred.
  • Microsoft Office Suite (e.g., Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) required.

Requirements:

• Spoken and written fluency in English.
• Ability to travel within the United States and internationally.
• Willing to relocate.

Expectations:

• Adhere to Cincinnati Reds Organization Policies and Procedures.
• Act as a role model within and outside the Cincinnati Reds Organization.
• Perform duties as workload necessitates.
• Demonstrate flexible and efficient time management and ability to prioritize workload.
• Meet department productivity standards.
• Willingness to learn. Open to new methodologies.

Equal Opportunity Statement:
The Cincinnati Reds are an Equal Opportunity Employer. It is the policy of the Cincinnati Reds to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion or creed, sex, age, military or veteran status, disability, citizenship status, marital status, genetic predisposition or carrier status, sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected by law.

Disclaimer:
The statements herein are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by the employee in this position. The above description is only a summary of the typical functions of the job, not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all possible job responsibilities, tasks, and duties. Additional duties, as assigned, may become part of the job function. The duties listed above is, therefore, a partial representation not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required of a person in this position.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

Baseball Analytics Trainee

Department: Baseball Analytics
Reports To: Baseball Analytics Leadership
Job Purpose: Assist Baseball Operations decision-making through the analysis of various sources of baseball information. The specific day-to-day responsibilities of this position will vary depending on current needs from our stakeholders along with the baseball calendar but will revolve around analyzing various sources of baseball data.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Learn and communicate analytical products across departments.
• Build upon analytic initiatives by creating new statistical models, applications, and reports.
• Introductory level player evaluation, including scouting and writing reports on assignment.
• Iterate on existing products and processes already established by the Baseball Analytics Department.
• Present analysis and research results to stakeholders with various levels of analytic knowledge.
• Conduct ad-hoc research projects when requested.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Independent judgment and ability to multitask.
• Strong work ethic and willingness to work long, flexible hours including weekends and holidays.
• High level of attention to detail.
• Creative approach to problem solving
• High level of interpersonal skills to effectively communicate baseball analytic concepts with a wide range of departments, seniority levels, and personalities.
• Knowledge of current baseball research, data, and technology.
• Strong technical and statistical acumen.
• Passion for the game of baseball.

Experience, Education, and Licensure:

• Bachelor’s degree or pursuit of degree or equivalent experience in a quantitative field that emphasizes technical and analytical problem-solving skills such as statistics, mathematics, engineering, and/or economics preferred.
• Specifically seeking diverse candidates who bring a unique perspective and thoughtful, creative problem solving.
• Understanding of advanced statistical techniques is strongly preferred
• Demonstrated experience and proficiency with Database querying (e.g., SQL) and statistical software (e.g., R, Python) is strongly preferred.
• Ability to learn other programming languages as needed.

Requirements:

• Spoken and written fluency in English.
• Willing to relocate to Cincinnati, OH during the summer/baseball season.

Expectations:

• Adhere to Cincinnati Reds Organization Policies and Procedures.
• Act as a role model within and outside the Cincinnati Reds Organization.
• Perform duties as workload necessitates.
• Demonstrate flexible and efficient time management and ability to prioritize workload.
• Meet department productivity standards.
• Willingness to learn. Open to new methodologies.

Technical Questionnaire:
The Baseball Analytics Department of the Cincinnati Reds requires all applicants to complete a technical questionnaire hosted on Coderbyte to be considered for this role. The technical assessment has a time limit of 2 hours. Many prior applicants complete the assessment in 1 hour.

The URL to complete the required technical assessment is listed below (Please copy/paste into a new tab): https://coderbyte.com/sl-candidate?promo=cincinnatireds-sqyjd:sql-assessment–4p1f-hlojtad&invb=userweij5h2w

Equal Opportunity Statement:
The Cincinnati Reds are an Equal Opportunity Employer. It is the policy of the Cincinnati Reds to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion or creed, sex, age, disability, citizenship status, marital status, genetic predisposition or carrier status, sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected by law.

Disclaimer:
The statements herein are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by the employee in this position. The above description is only a summary of the typical functions of the job, not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all possible job responsibilities, tasks, and duties. Additional duties, as assigned, may become part of the job function. The duties listed above is, therefore, a partial representation not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required of a person in this position.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Cincinnati Reds.

Pete Rose died on Monday at his home in Las Vegas, closing the book on an 83-year life that included an incredible, record-setting 24-year major league career that was soon followed by three and a half decades of wandering in a desert of his own making. Handed down by commissioner Bart Giamatti in 1989, his permanent banishment from organized baseball for gambling — a prohibition that dates back to predecessor Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis’ effort to clean up the game in the wake of the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal — prevented the all-time leader in hits and games played from cementing his legacy with enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, and from working within baseball in any capacity.

Backed by a sizable contingent of admirers and apologists — and a smaller faction of truthers, a group that at one point included Bill James — Rose spent decades denying his transgressions, lying to the public, to baseball officials, and to himself. Deprived of the financial windfall that would have come with election to the Hall, “The Hit King” chose instead to try making a buck with anything he could put his name on. That included everything from a 2004 no. 1 best-selling autobiography, My Prison Without Bars, in which he admitted in print to gambling while managing the Reds (he had done so in pre-publication publicity as well) to autographed balls with the inscription “I’m sorry I bet on baseball.”

That assertion rang hollow given Rose’s apparent lack of contrition, his unwillingness to reconfigure his life as a precondition of his reinstatement by MLB, and his continued lies. Not until 2015 did he admit to gambling during his playing career, after ESPN’s Outside the Lines obtained copies of documents verifying his bets in 1986 while serving as the player-manager of the Reds. Elsewhere during the last decade of his life, a credible allegation of statutory rape dating to the 1970s, uncovered by prosecutor John Dowd during his investigation into Rose’s gambling, undermined his latter-day reinstatement effort while further chipping away at his public standing. It’s been a fall from grace without parallel, at least among baseball’s icons. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday and Saturday, the Cincinnati Reds routed the Pittsburgh Pirates in back-to-back games by a combined score of 15-4. The Reds were 74-80 when the Pirates came to town for the three-game series, and their chances of finishing above .500 and matching last year’s 82-80 record were slim, but they kept those hopes alive over those two games.

Then Paul Skenes took the mound. On Sunday, the Pirates pulled off a shutout on the back of five brilliant innings from their first-year ace. It was the third time the rookie phenom has dominated the Reds this season. Cincinnati managed just three hits and one walk all afternoon, striking out 13 times (nine against Skenes). After Jonathan India, Elly De La Cruz, and Tyler Stephenson went down one-two-three in the bottom of the ninth, the Reds fell to 76-81, assuring they would finish with a worse record than they did last season.

Around 6:30 that evening, president of baseball operations Nick Krall informed manager David Bell that his services were no longer required. Bench coach Freddie Benavides was named the interim manager for the five games remaining in the 2024 season. This was Bell’s sixth season as the Reds manager. He also managed in their minor league system from 2009-12, giving him just under 10 years of service with the club. Although he’s the only member of the Bell family’s three generations of major leaguers to never play for the Reds — his grandfather, father, and brother all suited up for the family team – David is the Bell who spent the most time with the club. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

If you’ve read even a couple installments of this column, you know that roster changes are my favorite things in baseball. Free agents, trades, extensions, IL stints… I don’t really care; they’re all interesting and fun to follow! My love for such machinations isn’t limited to players, though. I’m also a big fan of managerial and coaching changes, so much so that I have a personal Excel workbook that contains nothing but a list of the current coaching staffs.

So, now that we’ve reached the point of the season when the managerial carousel starts spinning — David Bell’s firing by the Reds on Sunday was the latest move — this is a great time to look over who teams could have on their candidate lists. At least three teams will be in the hunt for managers: the White Sox, Reds, and Marlins. Miami hasn’t officially moved on from Skip Schumaker, but he’s already discussing his tenure in the past tense. Teams with a managerial vacancy almost always cast a wide net, so I’ll do the same in running down some options. Read the rest of this entry »

While the book isn’t completely shut on the 2024 Cincinnati Reds, with a 0.3% projected chance of making the postseason entering this week, only a plot twist out of left field could change the story. At 82-80, the 2023 Reds weren’t exactly good, but after entering the season with a bleak outlook, they comfortably beat most expectations. Given that their improvements last year largely came from their young talent rather than short-term signings, it wasn’t unreasonable back in March to believe this team could contend for a postseason berth. Five months later, as the Reds look more likely to play the role of spoiler in September than make it to October, now seems like a fine time to consider where they should go from here.

The first step would be to ask ourselves what were the reasonable expectations for the Reds in 2024. The ZiPS projections gave them an 80-82 record, but with enough uncertainty that if things broke their way, they could make a playoff push (35.1% odds). One man’s digital monstrosity isn’t the only fair outlook, of course, but our depth charts and Baseball Prospectus both had Cincinnati in a similar position, at 79 wins.

Right now, our depth charts and ZiPS have the Reds finishing with a 77-85 record, a disappointing result, but not exactly a massive miss relative to the projections above. If we’re going to figure out where the Reds go from here, we first have to understand how they got to this point, and that means looking back at the lessons they drew from their 82 wins last year.

Based on their offseason moves, it appears the organization decided – no doubt some unknown combination of ownership and the front office – that the general approach was to stay the course with their young talent and make mid-tier free agent signings to fill the team’s most pressing holes. The Reds made no significant trades over the winter, unless you count sending pitcher Daniel Duarte to the Rangers for cash in January after designating him for assignment as significant. It wasn’t until nearly Opening Day that the team made a move that would have an actual effect on the roster, picking up Santiago Espinal from the Blue Jays in the aftermath of the Noelvi Marte suspension.

Excluding the Espinal trade, the players signed in free agency made up the entirety of the external improvements from 2023 to 2024. Suffice it to say, I was not a fan of the specific signings they made. To sum up my general feelings at the time, I thought Jeimer Candelario was the right player for the wrong team. It doesn’t make much sense for a team overloaded with third basemen to sign a player who is most valuable as a third baseman and then make him a mediocre first baseman. On the pitching side, Emilio Pagán was a disaster waiting to happen, and $13 million was a lot to give Nick Martinez. Other pitcher signings made more sense: Brent Suter was a good addition and Frankie Montas was a reasonable gamble. The signings didn’t go exactly as I expected – some were worse, some were better – but they certainly didn’t do much to improve the club.

As a group, the free agents have performed a bit worse than projected, but not alarmingly so. By the end of the year, we project these nine free agents to be worth 5.1 WAR to the Reds, compared to the 7.3 WAR that was predicted. Two wins would not have salvaged Cincinnati’s season.

Injuries to some of the young talent has certainly hindered the Reds. Matt McLain, who made a convincing case for being one of the team’s foundational talents last year, injured his shoulder in the spring and has yet to play for Cincinnati this season. Christian Encarnacion-Strand didn’t get the chance to make up for his cold start because he underwent season-ending surgery in July after fracturing his right wrist in May, and while it’s not an injury, the team went without Marte for 80 games after he was suspended for performance-enhancing drugs.

However, the Reds also got some impressive breakouts on the flip side to compensate. For as exciting as they are, Elly De La Cruz and Hunter Greene weren’t expected to be in this year’s MVP and Cy Young races, though that’s where they stand in late August.

Moreover, injuries alone didn’t stop Cincinnati in its tracks. I ran the numbers on time lost to injuries two weeks ago, and the Reds ranked 11th out of 30 teams in potential value lost to injury, at 6.46 wins, right in line with the mean (6.5 wins) and a half-win more than median (six wins).

That leaves us with the conclusion that the Reds didn’t struggle this season because they were unlucky; rather, they did so because they were a roughly .500 team in terms of talent and didn’t get lucky. The path forward, then, is for ownership and the front office to recognize this so they can work to improve the team in the offseason instead of staying the course again and hoping for better results.

One part of this year’s plan — relying on the young talent — was justified and is worth doing again next season, as long as the Reds reinforce their core with more impactful veterans. Looking at the projections for 2025 now versus where they were six months ago, the Reds have lost a few wins, but their foundation is still quite solid.

(Rhett Lowder is not included here because he didn’t get a preseason ZiPS projection this year for 2025, so there would be nothing to compare with his current projection for next season.)

When I run some very preliminary projections for the NL Central in 2025, based on players who are under team control for next season, the division looks a lot like it did in this year’s the preseason projections, with all five teams roughly clustered around the .500 mark. That indicates that, with the right moves, the Reds could boost their playoff odds considerably this offseason.

Their plan to paper over holes this season by moving third basemen around has not been successful: The team ranks 25th in outfield WAR and 28th both in first base WAR and designated hitter WAR. Upgrading those positions with players who actually play them would go a long way toward turning things around. The rotation hasn’t been bad this season, but it is not good enough as it’s currently constructed.

It’s worth mentioning that the Reds did spend money on their roster entering this season, but they just didn’t do so effectively. Signing mid-tier free agents again this offseason won’t remedy the team’s woes. Yes, ownership almost certainly would balk at the idea of giving Juan Soto a blank check to play for Cincinnati, but it would be even more preposterous to spend the same amount to sign six players who are slightly above replacement level, which is kind of what the Reds did last winter.

Looking ahead, even though the upcoming class of free agents isn’t particularly deep, Cincinnati’s front office needs to strike the right balance of quality and quantity. Corbin Burnes is one of the best players available, and the Reds should make a serious push to sign him. Blake Snell has been on such a roll after his rough start to this season that it seems nearly certain that he will opt out of his Giants contract. The Braves have yet to extend Max Fried, so he seems bound for free agency, too. And while they might fall short, why shouldn’t the Reds go after Roki Sasaki if he gets posted this winter? After all, they made a bid to land Shohei Ohtani back when he was coming over from Japan.

On the offensive side, Anthony Santander would give the Reds the legitimate middle-of-the-order bat in the outfield that they currently lack, as would Tyler O’Neill and Teoscar Hernández

We currently have the Reds with a guaranteed payroll of just under $50 million for 2025, though that’s not including arbitration awards. They certainly have the ability to go after players who would make a real difference and still have a payroll well below that of the average team. A repeat of last winter’s approach would be a disaster; more of the same will likely lead to more of the same. The Reds quite possibly have more upside than any other team in the NL Central, but the time’s come for them to pick a direction rather than treading water.

While Shohei Ohtani hasn’t pitched this year after undergoing UCL reconstruction surgery last fall, he has found another area of the game in which he could excel while terrorizing opposing pitchers. The 30-year-old superstar blew past his previous career high in stolen bases in late July, and on Friday night against the Rays he swiped his 40th bag of the year. Five innings later, he collected his 40th home run to join the 40-40 club in spectacular style, when he clobbered a first-pitch, walk-off grand slam. Unfortunately, Ronald Acuña Jr.’s torn ACL deprived him of a chance to follow up last year’s unprecedented combination of 41 homers and 73 steals, but it’s not out of the question we could have another 40-40 player this season, namely José Ramírez, and at least a couple more 30-30 ones.

I’ll get to those, but first, it’s Sho time. Prior to this year, Ohtani had reached 40 homers twice (46 in 2021 and a league-leading 44 last year) but had stolen just 20 bases or more twice (26 in 2021 and 20 last year). Unburdened by the demands of pitching this year, and playing for a new team with much higher aspirations than the Angels, he’s been able to withstand more wear and tear on his legs, has had more time to study opposing pitchers, and has come to appreciate the extra dimension he can add to his new team.

“I think he has bought into stealing bases, understands the value of the stolen base, getting 90 feet,” manager Dave Roberts told The Athletic earlier this month. “He’s in a pennant race now. And I don’t think he’s been in a pennant race in his big-league career. So his enhanced focus is not a surprise to me.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, Joey Votto officially announced his retirement from a major league career that spanned parts of 17 seasons, all with the Cincinnati Reds. He hit free agency for the first time last winter before signing a minor league contract with the Toronto Blue Jays, his hometown team. During his first spring training game with Toronto, he stepped on a bat and twisted his ankle, and it took him until June to get back into games. He eventually reached Triple-A at the start of this month but struggled there, hitting .143/.275/.214 with 22 strikeouts in 51 plate appearances with Buffalo.

“Toronto + Canada, I wanted to play in front of you,” Votto wrote on Instagram. “Sigh, I tried with all my heart to play for my people. I’m just not good anymore. Thank you for all the support during my attempt.”

“Anymore” is the key word there, because for the bulk of his career, Joey Votto banged. He retires with a .294/.409/.511 slash line, a 145 wRC+, 58.8 WAR, 356 home runs, and 2,135 hits. He made six All-Star teams, won the NL MVP award in 2010, and ranks 40th all-time in career MVP shares at 3.08.

I will be very surprised if Votto isn’t inducted into the Hall of Fame fairly quickly after he debuts on the ballot in four years. (He didn’t play in the majors this season, so for the purposes of eligibility, he retired after 2023.) Assuming he does, he’ll mainly get in on the basis of his tangible career accomplishments, with no controversy to counterbalance. My vote for him, so long as I haven’t prematurely shuffled off to eternity, will be based on his accomplishments as a player, but when it comes to Votto, his legacy is more than just his on-field performance.

As a baseball player, Votto was very much a 21st-century slugger, rather than the classic power hitter archetype. A phenomenally disciplined hitter, Votto swung at just 19% of pitches thrown to him outside the strike zone from 2012 to ’20 (using the Sports Info Solution data), second only to Alex Avila. It’s no coincidence that Votto was one of the most disciplined hitters around; you would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t think of Votto as one of the game’s most thoughtful people. Whether hanging out at chess clubs, learning Spanish just to communicate better with teammates, or using his Players’ Weekend nickname to pay tribute to Canadian soldiers who died in World War I — by way of Canadian poet John McCrae’s famous poem, “In Flanders Fields” — he was always interesting, in the best possible way. Votto was a constant tinkerer of his swing and his approach at the plate, and when his career was on the definite downslope, he took the bold step of becoming more aggressive at the plate, a pretty big change for a player in his late 30s, squeezing out one last great offensive season in 2021 (36 homers, 140 wRC+).

Votto also spoke out about his experiences with grief and anxiety, back in 2009, when it was taboo for an athlete to talk publicly about their mental health. As Julie Kliegman reported in her recent book, Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, players today are more open about their struggles with mental illness and more willing to seek the help that they need than they were 10-15 years ago; that’s because of stars like Votto and Zack Greinke, among others from across the sports landscape, who came forward at a time when mental-health conversations in sports were rare. This kind of thing has always resonated with me because my dad was severely psychologically affected by his experiences in Vietnam, and rather than being able to accept assistance — no matter how often and vigorously it was offered to him — he spent 25 years trying to drink away his memories, which he managed to do permanently in 1997. I’ll always have a very soft spot for someone who speaks up so that others can get help.

It’s bittersweet when a beloved player retires. It represents a sudden change in a player’s life, but also in ours. Suddenly, athletes have to accept that they will never again do the thing that they were best at doing for so long, and we realize we’ll never get to watch them do it again, either. As was the case with Buster Posey, Votto’s retirement hit me harder than I expected it would. There’s a real feeling of mortality when people you were writing about as young players are now old (in baseball terms) and out of baseball.

Okay, that’s enough sentimentality for this stathead; back to Votto’s career and Hall of Fame profile. Let’s look at his career numbers and see how they compare to other first basemen. Classifying players by position is never neat, but for the purposes of this piece, any player who appears on Jay Jaffe’s First Base JAWS leaders list will be considered a first baseman. However, I’ve removed any data from before 1901, simply because professional baseball in the 1800s was as much carnival sideshow as competitive sport. You could argue for a later – or even much later – starting point, but this deep into an article about Joey Votto isn’t the best place to have that fight.

By career WAR alone, Votto’s résumé isn’t that overwhelming, and it doesn’t help his case that he has just over 2,000 hits and fewer than 400 homers at an offense-first position, but one has to take peak performance and career length into consideration. I’m a big believer in looking at peak value — how good they are at their best over an extended period, divorced from the bulk counting stats at the start and end of their careers — so long as we’re talking about a peak that’s beyond just a couple of years. I think Aaron Judge is a Hall of Famer right now, and had I been a voter at the time, I would have cast my vote for Johan Santana. I’m also not positive that Félix Hernández shouldn’t be a Hall of Famer. It isn’t a flaw in the data that Jack Morris has more career WAR than Sandy Koufax, but if you’re using WAR to make the case that Morris was just as good as or better than Koufax, the flaw is how you’re using the tool.

The Hall is about greatness, so I tend to prefer measures that include a peak run — such as WAR7 — and/or focus on wins above average rather than replacement. The table above is sorted by our version of WAR, but for the rest of this piece, I’m going to use Baseball Reference’s WAR, which ranks Votto slightly higher (64.5, 11th) than ours does, because that’s what Jay uses for JAWS. I am also using Baseball Reference’s wins above average to keep things consistent. Excluding anything that happened before 1901, Votto ranks seventh at the position in both WAA (37.7) and WAR7 (46.9) and ninth in JAWS (55.7). Except for those who were busted for performance enhancing drug use, all of the Hall of Fame-eligible players who rank in the top 15 by First Base JAWS have been inducted. Simply, Votto belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Votto’s fairly rapid decline kept him from gaudier WAR numbers. After a big drop-off in his power in 2018, his age 34 season, his resurgent 2021 campaign was a real outlier. But as Orson Welles once said, in one of my favorite quotes – and my desired epitaph – if you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop the story. Yes, many of us wanted another chapter, but Joey Votto’s career amounts to a banger of a story.

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

As we’ve covered in this column a few times, the only way to acquire major league players from other teams for the rest of the season is via waivers. We have yet to see an Angels-level dumping of impact players en masse this season, but there has still been some movement since the trade deadline passed. Let’s take a look at some of the notable players who changed teams recently, as well as some guys in DFA limbo who could get claimed in the coming days.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

Last week, I explained how players can still change teams even as trades are no longer allowed. Now that we’re a week-plus into August, I’d like to run down the list of players who could be placed on irrevocable waivers before the month ends, which is the latest that a team can claim them and still have them be eligible for the playoffs. Players placed on waivers are first offered to the worst team in the league, then to the other clubs in ascending order all the way up to the one with the best record at the time of the waiver placement.

I’ll be focusing on teams with playoff odds below 5%, though contending teams teams could see if a rival wants to bite on an onerous contract. (Spoiler alert: they will not.) As a reminder, when a player is claimed off waivers, it’s a straight claim. The team that loses the player gets nothing more than salary relief, as the new team is responsible for the remainder of the contract. Read the rest of this entry »