The White Sox remain serious playoff contenders in 2022, but I doubt many would classify this season as a roaring success. With what appeared in the preseason to be the AL Central’s strongest roster, Chicago has not gone on a leisurely stroll to October. Instead, it’s locked in a brutal three-way clash with Cleveland and Minnesota and currently stands 1.5 games behind both.

The reasons for the team’s struggles are myriad. The entire offense failed to produce, especially early in the season, finishing April with a .212/.264/.348 line and an 8–12 record. When healthy, Yasmani Grandal and Yoán Moncada have not hit at all, leaving two offensive problems in unexpected places. Lance Lynn got a late start to the season and has generally been ineffective. The manager has an odd fetish for getting Leury Garcia into the lineup at every possible juncture. We can play this game all day, but we can now throw a new problem onto the pile in the loss of starting shortstop Tim Anderson to an injured ligament in his left middle finger that requires surgery. Anderson is expected to miss four-to-six weeks of play and make a full recovery, but with only eight weeks left in the regular season, that’s a lot of missed time.

After the trade deadline, I projected the White Sox as having the biggest loss in playoff probability of any team due to transactions made around baseball at the deadline. Whereas they would have been projected with a 59.5% shot at the postseason with the pre-deadline rosters, they came out afterward at 52.2%. Despite not actually losing any ground in the last week to their rivals in the standings, replacing Anderson with a combination of Garcia and Lenyn Sosa sends another chunk of the team’s playoff hopes into eternal oblivion.

For the first time this season, the Sox are projected to have a worse chance at taking the division than both the Twins and Guardians, and roughly a quarter of the scenarios in which they make the playoffs have evaporated. Losing a win is a very big deal for a team in such a tight race, and that gets even a bit worse for Chicago because of the change in MLB’s rules for divisional ties, with tiebreakers being used instead of bonus baseball. Right now, should there be a tiebreaker needed, ZiPS estimates that the Guardians will beat the Sox 74% of the time, and the Twins will come out on top in 69% (not nice!) of tiebreakers. And all that is with projections that assume that Anderson misses an average of five weeks. If he has a setback and can’t get back for the rest of the regular season, it obviously gets worse; in the simulations when he didn’t return (about 10% of sims), Chicago only made the playoffs about three times in ten. Read the rest of this entry »

Another trade deadline has come and gone, and I must say, this one was more exciting than I expected. I didn’t see the Yankees, Astros, or Dodgers making huge splashes, given that all three are in a daunting position both for first place in their divisions and a first-round playoff bye. There were also relatively few short-term rental options available; Juan Soto, Frankie Montas, and Luis Castillo, among others, could always be traded, but with none of them free agents after this season, teams could also pull them back if they didn’t like the offers. Meanwhile, players like Willson Contreras, Ian Happ and Carlos Rodón stayed put, also to my surprise. By and large, though, we had a whirlwind of a 48-hour period leading up to the deadline.

So, who won and who lost? That’s a bit of a loaded question, because the definition of winning and losing varies depending on each franchise’s goals. A contending team improving, a rebuilding team getting worse but acquiring a stable of prospects, or an indolent team only re-signing its 37-year-old closer are all things that can be considered a win in one way or the other. But we’re here to do some hardcore ranking, so let’s look only at who improved themselves the most in 2022.

To keep this all science-y rather than a somewhat arbitrary exercise, I first projected the entire league’s rest of season in ZiPS and then repeated the exercise with all trades since July 19 unwound. Since some teams primarily got overall playoff boosts and some teams saw improvement mainly in terms of World Series gains, I took each team’s rank in both categories and then ranked everyone by the harmonic mean of those two ranks. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the trade deadline. It’s the best time of the year for baseball chaos, rumor-mongering reporting, and of course, the main event: a million trades featuring relievers you’ve heard of but don’t know a ton about. The difference between a blown lead in the seventh inning of a playoff game and an uneventful 4-2 win might be one of these unheralded arms. Heck, they could be a better option but still give up a three-run shot in a crushing loss. Or they could be a worse option! There are no guarantees in baseball. Still, here are some relievers who contending teams think enough of to trade for and plug into their bullpens.

Yankees Acquire Scott Effross
Scott Effross wasn’t supposed to amount to anything in the big leagues. A 15th-round pick in the 2015 draft, he kicked around the Cubs system for years, frequently old for his level and rarely posting knockout numbers. Then in 2019, on the suggestion of pitching coach Ron Villone, he started throwing sidearm. Three years later, he’s carving through hitters in the majors.

“Carving” might undersell it. Since his 2021 debut, Effross has been one of the best relievers in the game. In 57.1 innings, he’s compiled a 2.98 ERA and 2.45 FIP. He’s striking out 29% of opposing batters and hardly walking anyone. With his new low arm slot, he’s adopted what I like to think of as the sidearmer’s basic arsenal: a sinker, a slider, and a break-glass-in-case-of-lefty changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. Interestingly enough, four of the six teams below the WAR cutoff for right field also make the list for left field: two of them because they’re far below, and the other two because they’re just a hair above, and we might as well acknowledge those situations within this context. As such, I’ve used the rankings of the right fielders to determine the order of the capsules; those that also cover left field include an asterisk. I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the August 2 deadline.

All statistics in this article are through July 27, though team won-loss records and Playoff Odds are through July 28.

Phillies

Bryce Harper was the National League’s Most Valuable Player last year, but he’s been limited to just 64 games overall and eight in right field due to a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right (throwing) arm and a fractured left thumb. The UCL injury limited him to designated hitter duty, but he continued to rake (.318/.385/.599, 167 wRC+ overall) until an errant fastball from Blake Snell hit him on June 25. He underwent surgery to implant pins to help heal the thumb, but as of Monday, doctors decided that he hadn’t progressed enough to have them removed; he’ll be reevaluated next Monday. Once Harper is cleared, he’ll likely need at least a couple of weeks to ramp up and complete a rehab assignment. If there’s good news, it’s that he has also been undergoing treatment on his elbow (he had a platelet-rich plasma injection in May) and plans to test his ability to throw once the pins are out.

Harper’s move to DH meant that Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos, the two defensively challenged sluggers whom the Phillies signed to big free-agent deals, had to play in the same outfield on most days; thus far, Schwarber has started in left field 89 times and Castellanos in right 84 times. The former has hit for a 119 wRC+ and leads the NL with 31 homers, but the latter has been terrible, batting just .246/.291/.365 (83 wRC+) with eight homers as well as [puts on protective goggles] -6.7 UZR, -7 RAA, and -12 DRS in 723.2 innings in right field. His -1.4 WAR is tied with Robinson Canó for last in the majors among position players. Ouch.

As NBC Sports’ Corey Seidman noted, pitchers have attacked Castellanos with low-and-away breaking balls that he has been unable to lay off. He owns a career-worst 45% chase rate (7.2 points above his career mark) and a corresponding career-high 57.8% swing rate, a combination that fits the pattern of a player pressing. Additionally, he has a career-high 42.7% groundball rate, about six points above his norm, and his .245 xwOBA on pitches outside of the zone is 33 points below his norm; his .103 xwOBA on low-and-away breaking pitches is an 81-point drop from last year and is 36 points below his norm. His overall Statcast numbers (87.8 mph average exit velocity, 7.1% barrel rate, 33.8% hard-hit rate, .299 xwOBA) are all career worsts, as is his 17.5% swinging-strike rate.

If you’ve been reading this series, you know that the Phillies have already made the list at shortstop, third base, and center field. More than likely they’re just going to gut it out here, hoping that either Harper can return to the field or Castellanos can get back on track. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a rule in baseball that allows managers to intentionally walk opposing batters automatically. More specifically, “following the signal of the manager’s intention, the umpire will immediately award first base to the batter.” Depending on who you ask, it’s either a minor time saver or completely pointless.

There is a generally accepted practice in baseball that intentional walks are either issued at the start of a plate appearance, after first base becomes open, or when the count begins to favor a batter. You won’t find that anywhere in the rulebook, but it’s true nonetheless. It’s a common-sense practice: the only other time you can walk a batter intentionally is after a pitch tilts the count in the pitcher’s favor, and if an intentional walk makes sense then, it probably made sense before that pitch was thrown.

Baseball conventional wisdom isn’t always correct. In the case of when to intentionally walk a batter, though, it follows straightforward logic. Allow me to make an analogy. Let’s say you and I have made a strange deal. I have 60 seconds to accomplish some task – call it untangling a knot. If I manage it, you’ll owe me $10. Before I start, I make you an offer: you can just hand me $5 now and we’ll call the whole thing off. You can trade the possibility of a $10 loss for the certainty of a $5 loss.

Let’s further say that you turn me down, and that the clock starts. For the first 10 seconds, I don’t do anything — maybe I stubbed my toe and am hopping around in pain. After those 10 seconds, I offer you the same deal: for $5, we can call the same thing off. You wouldn’t take me up on it, of course. You liked your odds enough that you didn’t opt out before, and now I’m less likely to accomplish my task.

Anyway, Tony La Russa intentionally walked José Ramírez yesterday. He did so automatically, in keeping with the rules of the game, by signaling to the umpire from the dugout. He did it in contravention of the generally accepted practices of the game, though, by issuing the walk while Ramírez was behind 0-1 in the count.

In an abstract sense, it’s pretty clear why you wouldn’t do this. The knot-untangling game is a clunky analogy but it gets the point across. There’s no reason to run the numbers: by the numbers, the walk doesn’t make sense. But abstractions don’t always tell the whole story, so let’s look at the specific circumstances around this walk and see if any of them can shed some light on what happened here.

First, the situation. Ramírez came to bat with two outs in the fifth inning. Amed Rosario, the previous batter, had doubled to make the score 4-0 and now stood on second base. Davis Martin, the White Sox starter, stayed in to face Ramírez. Pitching coach Ethan Katz came out for a discussion with Martin. After that meeting came this pitch:

From there, La Russa had seen enough: he walked Ramírez. Martin recovered to strike Franmil Reyes out, escaping the inning. It didn’t matter, in either case; the Sox only scored once all game, and Cleveland held on to win 4-1.

Rather than endlessly speculate, let’s hear what La Russa said about his decision:

“…Sometimes… they get themselves out. And if they get good patience, it’s like an unintentional intentional walk. So that’s what Ethan went out to say, and the first pitch was on the plate. He fouled it off, so I said, well, put him on. I just think it’s lack of experience for Davis and understanding more about that situation. Because he’s smart enough to know to pitch off the plate and he got it on, cost him two runs. He was supposed to do it again, and after one strike, said no.”

First things first: that explains the pitching meeting. Katz was out there to tell Martin to pitch around Ramírez. Ramírez had singled in two runs in the third inning, as La Russa alluded to above. Easy peasy, right? He wanted Martin to get Ramírez to chase, Ramírez didn’t, let’s face the next batter.

Only, that description glosses over the change in count, which is the most meaningful thing that happened on that first pitch. If you’re looking to record an out, a foul ball is a pretty good place to start. José Ramírez is one of the best hitters in baseball. For his career, he’s hitting .279/.356/.507, and he’s better than that now. Even after 0-1 counts, he’s hitting .266/.307/.472 for a perfectly acceptable 106 wRC+.

But again, the question isn’t whether walking Ramírez made sense. I think I would have walked him there from the start, but I don’t believe it’s an obvious choice either way. The question, instead, is whether the information in that foul ball tilted the balance in favor of an intentional walk.

We know La Russa’s case: the pitch being on the plate proved to him that Martin couldn’t follow his instructions. He wanted pitches out of the zone, he didn’t get them, and he didn’t need to see anything more. It’s not that Ramírez made devastating contact – per Statcast, that foul ball was 63 mph off the bat, though I’m not sure how accurate foul ball exit velocity readings are – but merely the location of the pitch that made an intentional walk a good option.

I can’t tell you what the odds of Ramírez getting a hit on a ball in the strike zone were. La Russa can’t either – but from the sound of his comments, it sounds deterministic. In the third inning, when Martin left a pitch over the plate, it “cost him two runs.” Let’s see the pitch in question:

Unquestionably, two runs scored on that play. Unquestionably, Ramírez hit a single. He even hit the ball pretty hard. But is that a process failure by Martin? I’m not so sure. He threw a well-located changeup that Ramírez put on the ground into the shift. Position your second baseman three steps to the right, and that might be an out instead. Ramírez is great – but he’s hardly a guaranteed base hit every time a pitch is in the strike zone.

There’s really not much more to say than that. In La Russa’s mind, a pitch in the strike zone was unacceptable. I don’t for a second think that Martin meant to throw that changeup in the zone. Pitchers miss their targets sometimes, and Reese McGuire was setting up fairly close to the zone anyway.

I’m just an analyst on the internet. I’ve never managed a team. I won’t claim to know any of the exact numbers here, or whether Katz came out to tell Martin that any pitch in the strike zone, regardless of outcome, would lead to an intentional walk. But if I were La Russa, I wouldn’t give that order.

I’m just projecting, but it seems to me that La Russa is substituting absolutes for probabilities. You can pitch Ramírez in the zone and get an out. You can try to miss the zone and hit it. It’s not black and white – sometimes a bad process leads to a good outcome, and vice versa. That’s baseball in a nutshell: the edges are small either way, and both sides can’t win. All you can do is give yourself the best chance to succeed – pitchers have singled against Jacob deGrom, and Mike Trout has struck out against bad relievers. There are no absolutes.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding La Russa’s logic. Maybe there’s a detail left out somewhere, or something lost in translation. I don’t think so, though. Sometimes, you have to take people at their word. La Russa didn’t care about the fact that the foul ball made the count 0-1. It didn’t enter into his decision making. It wasn’t a question of whether Ramírez’s odds of getting on base changed after the combination of a pitch in the zone and a foul ball. It was just: pitch in zone, walk.

If you like La Russa’s decision making this year, this one won’t change your mind. In fact, you probably agree with him that baseball can be reduced to a binary. Pitches in the zone when you want to throw them out of the zone turn into runs, and so on and so forth.

If you haven’t liked La Russa’s decision making, on the other hand, this is just more evidence. When you deal in absolutes, you miss out on the fact that hitters do worse after 0-1 counts than overall, or that getting the other team’s best hitter to ground the ball into the shift is an overall good thing. You might also inadvertently belittle your pitcher after the game; “he’s smart enough to know” is something people say about children or pets.

If you came here to see the math behind another unlikely intentional walk, I’m sorry. There really isn’t any. You either trust that Tony La Russa knows enough that when he makes a wildly counter-intuitive decision, it’s for good reasons, or you don’t. As best as I can tell, there have never been any similar intentional walks, though our pitch-by-pitch database only goes back to 2002 and it’s entirely possible I missed some anyway. Is your faith in La Russa’s genius enough to outstrip that? That’s for you to decide on your own.

Bashing the White Sox is commonplace these days, and you can’t say the negativity hasn’t been earned. Widely expected by fans, reporters, pundits, and computer projection systems (as well as their sarcastic creators) to steamroll one of the worst divisions in baseball, the Pale Hose have struggled to consistently stay at .500, let alone stay ahead of the Twins and Guardians. Yet there are still reasons to think that the Sox, if not the team they were believed to be, can still salvage the 2022 season without divine intervention.

They’re Still Relevant in All the Projection Systems

Yes, when you look at the White Sox, you see some major, gaping holes, many of which are problems of the team’s own making, whether because of poor evaluation or inaction. Coming into the season, they were near the bottom of the league in our positional power rankings at second base and right field despite an offseason that saw a plethora of good options at those positions. They also didn’t assemble much in the way of depth in places where they had injured players or underwhelming options. Similar to my approach to mowing my backyard, they did the bare minimum.

But all of this is already baked into the cake, so to speak. The projection systems still assume that Leury García is awful and that Chicago needs another bat; the forecasts for players like Yoán Moncada, Yasmani Grandal, Eloy Jiménez, and Lance Lynn have already taken major hits. As for the team’s lack of depth, the ZiPS projected standings use a methodology that attempts to properly discount teams with underwhelming Plan Bs. Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Cardinals played Friday night’s game in Boston with one catcher. Iván Herrera had been called up from Triple-A to replace the newly-sidelined Yadier Molina, but cancelled flights delayed his arrival. The highly-regarded prospect didn’t get to Fenway Park until the final inning of a 6-5 Red Sox win.

Asked who would have been used in an emergency had Andrew Knizner been injured, St. Louis manager Oliver Marmol named three possibilities: Edmundo Sosa, Brendan Donovan, and Nick Wittgren. That Marmol added, “Not necessarily in that order,” is intriguing, if not suggestive. Sosa and Donovan are infielders. Wittgren toes the rubber.

Might we have seen Wittgren, a 31-year-old pitcher with no professional experience at any another position, donning the tools of ignorance? It’s a definite possibility. Prior to the game, Marmol approached Wittgren and asked, “How do you think you’d do catching?” Wittgren replied that he’d be perfectly fine. Marmol responded with “I think so too.”

According to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold, Wittgren isn’t the first Cardinals pitcher to be designated (or at least hinted) as an emergency catcher. Jason Motte, who worked out of the St. Louis bullpen from 2008-2014 previously claimed that distinction. Even so, Motte had caught in the minor leagues. Wittgren would have been a novice.

He has little doubt that he could have done it. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought this week couldn’t get any better. I got to write about bunts, one of my favorite things to do, and about the Giants picking up tiny edges, another personal favorite. I got to write about Yordan Alvarez and how people underrate him; now I can cross that off my yearly to-do list. But Thursday took the cake. Have you seen this nonsense?

"When was the last time you saw somebody intentionally walked on 1-2?"

"Doesn't happen often."

*Boom* pic.twitter.com/LNR52guBkG

— White Sox Talk (@NBCSWhiteSox) June 9, 2022

I love writing about bad intentional walks. I love writing about bad managerial decisions. But I can’t really wrap my head around this one, hard as I try. Let’s try to do the math, such as it is, while keeping in mind that no amount of math is going to make this make sense.

Let’s start at the top. Trea Turner is an excellent hitter, and Bennett Sousa is a lefty. Turner boasts average platoon splits for his career. Sousa has hardly pitched in the majors, so let’s just consider him an average lefty. With a runner on second and two outs, passing up an excellent righty hitter against your lefty pitcher is standard operating procedure. Read the rest of this entry »

This season, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin will have periodic minor league roundup post that run during the week. You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.

I noticed what felt like an unusually high number of rehabbing big leaguers (and some prospects) in the box scores over the last several days, so I called around to get info on how these pitchers have looked on their way back from injury.

The Rays have two prominent members of their pitching staff currently working back through the minors: former top prospect Luis Patiño and current top prospect Shane Baz. Patiño, who was put on the IL on April 12 with an oblique strain, has only just begun his climb through the minors. He threw one inning in the Florida Complex League on Monday night and sat 94–96 mph with his sliders in their usual 84–87 range. He threw just one changeup. Baz, who is coming off of arthroscopic surgery of his right elbow, has been rehabbing at Triple-A since the end of May, working on four days rest and ramping up to about 80 pitches in his most recent outing, in which he struck out 10 hitters in 4.1 innings on Sunday. He looks like his usual self, sitting 94–97 and touching 99, and is poised to rejoin the Rays’ rotation within the next week.

(Another Rays note: former first rounder Nick Bitsko, who is coming off of a prolonged rehab from labrum surgery, was sitting 92–95 during his Extended Spring outings and has moved up into the 40+ FV tier now that he’s shown his arm strength is mostly back to pre-surgery form.)

Also set to return to a big league rotation is Nationals righty Stephen Strasburg, who has made three rehab starts with Triple-A Rochester, also on four days rest, recovering from thoracic outlet surgery. While he’s still showing plus secondary stuff, especially his changeup, his velocity has been way down, hovering in the 88–92 range with poor shape. Of all the pitchers who I’ll cover today, he’s the only one who hasn’t looked anything like himself. Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox have spent the first two months of the season meandering around .500 due to injuries and underperformance. Over the long holiday weekend, they offered reminders of both issues, first designating struggling starter Dallas Keuchel for assignment and then losing Tim Anderson to a groin strain. With Lance Lynn likely to return from a knee injury within the next couple of weeks, the rotation should remain a source of strength for the defending AL Central winners, but Anderson’s absence looms large in a lineup that’s missing several other key players and struggling to score runs.

The 34-year-old Keuchel had pitched poorly this season, with a 7.88 ERA and 6.20 FIP. He’s averaged just four innings per start, walked hitters at the same rate as which he struck them out (12.2%), and served up a career-high 1.69 homers per nine despite being one of the game’s top groundballers. He appeared to be righting the ship with a pair of solid starts against Red Sox and Yankees earlier this month, allowing two runs in 11 innings against the pair on May 8 and May 14, respectively, but both teams pummeled him upon getting a second look, with damage totaling 12 runs in six innings on May 21 (Yankees) and May 26 (Red Sox).

The White Sox signed Keuchel to a three-year, $55.5 million deal in December 2019, and he pitched well enough the following season (1.99 ERA, 3.08 FIP, 1.8 WAR) to place fifth in the AL Cy Young voting. But last year, even while the team ran away in the division race, he was little more than an innings-eater, pitching to a 5.28 ERA and 5.23 FIP in 162 innings and being left off the Division Series roster. Last year’s Statcast expected numbers (xAVG, xSLG, xwOBA, xERA) were actually worse than this year’s numbers:

Looking back, Keuchel’s 2020 expected numbers contained some warnings that his season wasn’t nearly as good as his ERA or even his FIP suggested. His results on his cutter, in particular, were way out of line with his expected results:

Note that those odd 2020 expected results, which no doubt owe something to the small sample, bore much closer resemblance to his xBA and xSLG for the following year than to his actual AVG and SLG from ’20. Long story short, Keuchel came out smelling like roses when his overall wOBA allowed was 58 points below his xwOBA, but when his barrel rate more than doubled and his wOBA rose 62 points above his xwOBA in 2022, he was out of a job. Read the rest of this entry »