For the fifth consecutive year, the Astros are headed to the American League Championship Series to face an opponent from the AL East. With a 10–1 win over the White Sox in Tuesday’s ALDS Game 4, they eliminated the Central winners and clinched a date with the Red Sox, who knocked out the Rays on Monday. Up for grabs for Houston: the franchise’s third pennant and World Series trip in that span.

Over the first two innings of Game 4, it looked as if the White Sox were going to send the series back to Houston. Starter Carlos Rodón lit up the radar gun in the opening frame, touching as high as 99.4 mph with his fastball on his 10th pitch of the afternoon. Though he had a stellar regular season overall, he struggled with diminished velocity and shoulder soreness down the stretch; starting him seemed like a gamble for the Sox, especially considering the extra day of rest afforded to them by Monday’s rainout. Even Astros skipper Dusty Baker acknowledged that the lefty’s health would play a huge role, telling reporters that Game 4 “all depends on which Rodón we’re facing.” Read the rest of this entry »

Needing to win two consecutive games to advance to the American League Championship Series, the Chicago White Sox got a bit of a breather on Monday thanks to storms that swept through the area, postponing Game 4 until Tuesday afternoon. The extra day of rest gave the White Sox an interesting option: do you stick with the previous rotation plan and start Carlos Rodón for Game 4 or do you take the opportunity to use Lance Lynn or Lucas Giolito, the Game 1 and 2 starters? White Sox manager Tony La Russa opted to stick with Rodón. Is that the right choice?

The first step in answering that question is to see if the projections give any obvious guidance. As it currently stands, with Rodón starting Tuesday and Lynn going in a possible Game 5, ZiPS projects the White Sox with a 25.2% chance of winning the final two games of the series. Moving Lynn and Giolito into those spots increases Chicago’s win probability to 26.6%. That’s is a relatively minor change. The Astros get a larger boost from their decision to move Lance McCullers Jr. up to Game 4, skipping José Urquidy and then likely turning to Framber Valdez for Game 5.

A percentage point or two doesn’t make a move obvious, and while projections are highly useful, they cannot always take the whole micro situation into account, no matter how clever their developers imagine themselves to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Regardless of where he and the White Sox go from here — at this writing, they’re on the brink of elimination against the Astros, down two games to one in the Division Series — the 2021 season has already been the best of Carlos Rodón’s major league career. On April 14, the 28-year-old lefty threw the season’s second no-hitter (nearly a perfect game). In July, he made his first All-Star team, and he finished the season having set career bests in ERA (2.37), FIP (2.65) and WAR (4.9), numbers that all led the staff of the AL Central champions. Under normal circumstances, the availability of such a pitcher to start such an important game would be a godsend, but the combination of Rodón’s late-season bout of fatigue and Monday’s postponement due to rain gave manager Tony La Russa the option to reverse his previous decision and bring back Game 1 starter Lance Lynn on regular rest, a choice that Dan Szymborski tackled elsewhere on the site.

It’s been quite a comeback for Rodón, who just over a year ago appeared as though he might have reached the end of his run with the organization that drafted him with the number three overall pick out of North Carolina State in 2014. To one degree or another, he’s been beset by arm problems for nearly all of his major league career, to such a point that only once has he thrown enough innings to qualify for the ERA title.

Rodón reached the majors less than a year after being drafted, but spent his first four seasons with performances that were right around league average in terms of ERA and FIP; he posted a 97 ERA- and 101 FIP- for the period and only once made more than 23 starts, topping out at 28 in 2016, a season in which he missed three weeks due to a left wrist sprain. The arm troubles showed up in 2017, when biceps tendinitis and bursitis in his shoulder limited him to 12 starts; recurring bursitis led to surgery that cost him the first two and a half months of 2018. Five weeks into the 2019 season, he wound up needing Tommy John surgery, and while he was ready to go to start the long-delayed, pandemic-shortened ’20 season, he made just two starts before being felled by shoulder soreness, then pitched just two innings in late September upon returning. The White Sox included him on their postseason roster, but in his lone appearance in Game 3 of the Wild Card Series against the A’s, he failed to retire any of the three Athletics he faced when summoned to protect a 3-2 lead with two outs in the fourth inning; the A’s took the lead, and while the White Sox came back to tie the game, they were ultimately eliminated. Read the rest of this entry »

Most sports fans likely would’ve guessed that the weirdest thing they would see Sunday had already occurred. Hapless NFL kickers, a bizarre ground rule double, and an unlikely walk-off home run had peppered the first two-thirds of the day. Then the Astros and White Sox combined to score fifteen runs during the first four innings of their Game 3 tilt in Chicago, with an epic and somewhat controversial crescendo packed into a wild 90 minutes at a boisterous Guaranteed Rate Field.

Dylan Cease blazed through the top of the first inning, which ended with an emphatic 100-mph fastball blown past Alex Bregman. After that moment, the game became a grinding, roller coaster affair, with several haymakers thrown over the next few innings, culminating in a five-run third and three-run fourth for the White Sox, respectively the largest and the decisive blow in their 12–6 victory to keep the season alive for a Game 4 on Monday.

Chicago chipped away immediately as part of a high-stress first inning for Astros starter Luis Garcia, who was constantly blowing into his pitching hand as if he were cold. Turns out, he was. A Tim Anderson leadoff single would eventually score via an Eloy Jiménez knock to center field, but there were signs of danger beyond that. Garcia fell behind hitters, got away with a grooved 2–0 fastball to José Abreu, and watched Yasmani Grandal crush a ball into foul territory, as all three outs he got in the first were put in play at 95 mph or above. The White Sox only got one run out of it, but the 25-pitch first inning for Garcia, lasting nearly 30 minutes, was a portent of doom for Houston.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Tucker enjoyed a breakout season this year, bashing 30 homers and leading the Astros with a 147 wRC+. Yet he’s been hitting as low as seventh in Houston’s order in an attempt to maximize the number of runners on base ahead of him in one of the game’s deepest lineups, a strategy that Owen McGrattan examined late last month. In Game 2 of the Division Series against the White Sox on Friday, that strategy paid off handsomely, with the 24-year-old slugger driving in three runs that bookended the Astros’ scoring, as well as making a key defensive play, in a 9–4 victory that will send the Astros to Chicago with a chance to sweep.

Thursday’s series opener featured Houston quickly getting ahead and Lance McCullers Jr. holding Chicago scoreless on one hit over the first six innings en route to a 6-1 victory. By contrast, Friday’s game was a wild back-and-forth affair, featuring four lead changes in the first seven innings. The Astros broke it open with a five-run seventh that was keyed by a couple of managerial moves that backfired and capped by Tucker’s two-run shot into Minute Maid Field’s Crawford Boxes.

Starters Framber Valdez and Lucas Giolito both dealt with considerable traffic as they worked through the opposing lineups the first two times, but things quickly unraveled as each attempted a third pass. While both bullpens allowed inherited runners to score, the Astros kept the White Sox scoreless the rest of the way as their offense went to town for those five runs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into the American League Division Series, the Chicago White Sox faced a tough task: controlling the tireless Houston Astros offense, which paced the majors in scoring. They’re a nightmarish matchup; high on-base hitters up top, power in the middle, and enough firepower that Carlos Correa (134 wRC+) bats sixth and Kyle Tucker (147 wRC+) seventh.

Chicago’s plan? Fastballs. That’s less by design and more because Lance Lynn, their Game 1 starter, throws more of them than anyone else in baseball. Is that a smart plan against the Astros? No, it is not — they were the third-best fastball-hitting team in baseball this year by run value. On the other hand, they were also the third-best team against breaking pitches and the second-best against offspeed offerings, so it’s not as though there were easy choices. But fastballs? In this economy? It felt like it might be a long afternoon.

For an inning, Lynn managed it. He mixed four-seamers and cutters, keeping Houston hitters off-balance. His cutter could almost be called a slider, and it’s key to keeping opponents uneasy; it’s the only pitch he throws with glove-side movement. He set the side down in order — but even then, Alex Bregman smashed a line drive directly at Leury García for the third out. The cutters weren’t doing enough to keep Astros hitters from sitting on other fastballs.
Read the rest of this entry »

Both the Astros and White Sox dominated their respective divisions in 2021. For Houston, this was the team’s fourth division title in five years; for Chicago, its first since 2008. With the Rays having run away with the AL’s best record, these two clubs have been in each other’s sights for a while now. Both teams are filled with offensive stars, hard-throwing pitchers, and deep rosters; on paper, this looks like an even matchup.

The Astros are vying for their fifth consecutive trip to the American League Championship Series, which they’ve won twice, first in 2017 and again in ’19. They backed into the expanded playoffs last year as the only AL team with a record below .500 but came alive in the playoffs and nearly completed an 0–3 series comeback against Tampa before falling in Game 7. As for the White Sox, they’ve now made the playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time in their franchise history — appearances that are the culmination of a long rebuilding cycle that began more than half a decade ago. And this series will be a rematch of the 2005 World Series, Chicago’s last title and back when Houston was still a National League club.

For the third time in the last five years, the Astros led the majors in wRC+ and also finished first in runs scored, batting average, on-base percentage, and strikeout rate. That last statistic is perhaps most important to their playoff success. As previous research has shown, high-contact teams do well against high-velocity pitchers, which every postseason team has in spades. A team’s regular-season strikeout rate also tends to correlate well with postseason success, as Eno Sarris found over at The Athletic. That tracks with the foundation of the Astros’ success over the last half-decade.

Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox have been so consistently the class of their division this year that it’s easy to lump their individual performances together. The offense? Scintillating. The starters? Carlos Rodón and Dylan Cease have been pleasant surprises that turned the rotation from good to one of the best in baseball. The bullpen? It’s been great, and almost forgettable in its greatness, with a top-10 ERA, a top-five FIP, and piles of strikeouts, grounders, and pop-ups.

You probably know that Liam Hendriks is the ringleader. He was a key offseason addition, coming off of a superb 2020 for Oakland. But you might not have noticed how good his three-year run has been. He has been one of the best handful of relievers in the game — again. He’s done it while throwing a ton of innings — again. Put it all together, and this recent run of excellence gives him a strong claim as one of the best relievers of the 21st century.

One way you could try to contextualize Hendriks’ string of excellence is by looking at three-season stretches by relievers. The king of this metric is, naturally enough, Eric Gagne. From 2002 to ’04, he was a machine, throwing 82.1 innings each year and delivering an aggregate 1.79 ERA, 1.57 FIP, and a whopping 11.7 WAR. That number hardly sounds like a reliever, but most relievers don’t deliver seasons like Gagne’s. He’s head and shoulders above the rest of the list:

Hendriks places a solid 23rd in all three-season totals this century. It’s hard to crack this list, though. For one thing, plenty of relievers double up by having two excellent seasons sandwiched by two okay seasons. Gagne isn’t the only name on there more than once; there are plenty of Kimbrels, Riveras, Chapmans, and the like in the top 25.
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, my colleague Kevin Goldstein shared his experience of scouting José Abreu back in 2013 as a member of Houston’s front office. Kevin suggested that if Abreu had been able to play his entire career in the majors, I would be writing pieces about the slugger’s chances of reaching even bigger milestones. And since I probably would be, why not actually do that?

Abreu’s not the first player whose success in a foreign league and long enough career in MLB have compelled us to ask what if? Ichiro Suzuki is another such player, and in 2016, I ran his NPB translations alongside his actual major league statistics. I’ve since added his final MLB numbers to this chart:

The translations bring him tantalizingly close to Ty Cobb and Pete Rose, giving us an even better understanding of his abilities over his full career. Joining the 4,000-hit club is cool and all, but Ichiro aged so well and continued to play for so long that you don’t really need his NPB career to give him a Cooperstown case. Abreu’s a different story. Unless he proves to be as amazingly durable as Ichiro did and cranks out another six or seven years of 30-plus homers, he’s not going to hit the important thresholds for home run hitters when it comes to Hall voting. ZiPS projects a fairly normal decline path for a mid-30s slugger:

Eighty-nine additional homers (85 in those projections and four more in 2021) get Abreu to 316 MLB home runs, and I don’t think that quite does it, leaving him in the mythical Hall of Very Good along with sluggers like Joe Adcock and Torii Hunter. But what if? We have Abreu’s stats from his time in Cuba and a history of players who have gone from Cuba to other professional leagues, so we can at least estimate what his performance would have looked like in the majors:

Even with the Serie Nacional de Béisbol playing just over half the games per season as MLB when Abreu was playing there and some pretty steep adjustment factors, the translations still add another 117 homers to the tally. While this is speculative, it feels right for Abreu, given that he basically played at the level of his final Cuban two-year average in the US. His projections at that point look like a typical Abreu season:

Abreu has actually been a little better than ZiPS expected, so it’s hard to say the translations overrate him. ZiPS had him at 24.3 WAR through 2021, which is pretty darned close to the 23.1 he is at now (and ZiPS didn’t know about COVID in 2014!):

Combined, while I’m still not sure I’d vote for José Abreu for the Hall — his is a career that looks like Jim Rice’s, who also a very borderline candidate for me — it’s a case I’d have to seriously consider before not ticking the box next his name. With an excellent reputation both generally and for mentoring other Cuban players specifically, and with no suspensions for PEDs hanging over his head, I think this version of Abreu gets into the Hall of Fame.

Along those same lines, we talked a bit about Yuli Gurriel on our Twitch watch-along of last week’s Mariners-Astros game. Gurriel didn’t even get the advantage of playing his late 20s in the majors; Abreu was in his sixth season of MLB play at the same age Yuli debuted with the Astros. He’s proven to be amazingly resilient to the vagaries of aging, showing little indication of decline, and at 37, Gurriel is arguably having his best season in the majors, hitting .315/.385/.467 in 125 games for 3.3 WAR. ZiPS has regularly been low on his projection for the simple reason that the computer doesn’t understand why the fourth dimension doesn’t apply to him!

Given that we know he could play in MLB, and that he was already a legend in Cuba by the time he came to the US, it makes sense to give his Cuban numbers the same treatment. With his translations, ZiPS projects another 317 hits from Gurriel, putting him at 1,028 hits starting at age 32:

Even with the huge hit in the numbers from a translation, Gurriel still ends up with just under 2,500 hits despite never getting to a play in a 100-game season until he was in his 30s.

This kind of exercise brings up some philosophical issues with our conception of the Hall of Fame. We wouldn’t put Mark Prior in Cooperstown for projections, but projections and translations aren’t really the same thing. Translations just try to adjust for context, no different than park-adjusting or league-adjusting stats, even though the calculations are trickier. A career projection for Prior involves giving him credit for seasons he never played, but Abreu and Gurriel actually played those years of baseball; through little fault of their own, that play just happened to be in leagues that MLB does not consider to be major leagues.

But when you examine MLB’s history, what constitutes a major league is quite gray, especially in the early years. While we can say that today’s Triple-A leagues are not the majors, I’d argue that from a competitive standpoint, 19th-century baseball didn’t consist of major leagues either, a state of affairs even perhaps stretching into the 1910s and ’20s. The standard deviations of numbers for starters around the league didn’t start to resemble those of modern baseball until the mid-1920s (you expect more competitive leagues to have tighter spreads of ability than less competitive leagues do). And even if we say “No, the American League from 1901 and the National League before that are still major leagues,” MLB gives credit for stats from the Players League, the Union League, and the Federal League, all extremely uneven leagues, with the first two also being very unstable (as was the early American League).

If we have a good faith basis to believe that Yuli Gurriel and José Abreu didn’t suddenly become awesome baseball players the minute they were able to play in the US, why should the performances that pre-date their debuts here be summarily ignored when bestowing baseball’s highest honor? I’m not sure either Gurriel or Abreu have the career numbers to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but let’s make sure we’re considering all the times they played this grand game. It’s messy to estimate what could have been, but just because answering a question is difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

A couple of weeks ago, White Sox manager Tony LaRussa called first baseman José Abreu “one of the great players in major league history.” That’s certainly a strong statement — probably too strong, but that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with a manager praising his players.

Abreu’s season has been defined by streaks, but he’s getting hot down the stretch for Chicago, and when he’s hot, he’s an aircraft carrier in terms of the ability to put the team on his back if needed.

As he heats up, he’s now on track to lead the American League in RBIs for the third consecutive season, and while that statistic is exceptionally lineup dependent, it still speaks to his value in the middle of the order, as well as his exceptional durability and consistency. His career wRC+ is 133, and his lowest mark in a season is 114, back in 2018. He’s had off years, but only in the context of his own career; he’s never approached anything that could be called bad. Most of his ability comes from his massive strength, as he ranks in the 90th-plus percentile among major leaguers in most any advanced power measurement stat. And while he’s a bit of a free swinger, he barrels balls up at an elite rate, and they tend to have more oomph on them than when your average player squares a ball up.

Is he one of the greatest players in history? He is not, but he’s certainly high on my Cuban-What-Could-Have-Been list. While most baseball fans have only been aware of Abreu since his 2014 rookie season, for many inside the game, last year’s MVP campaign was a long time coming.

Read the rest of this entry »