The following article is part of a series concerning the 2022 Golden Days Era Committee ballot, covering managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 5. For an introduction to this year’s ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Roger Maris

Casual baseball fans know Roger Maris mainly for his toppling of Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961, when he beat out teammate Mickey Mantle and hit 61 homers. The more hardcore fans might know that Maris actually won back-to-back AL MVP awards with the Yankees in 1960 and ’61, and helped the team to five straight pennants and a pair of championships. While it’s sometimes presumed that these achievements are enough to merit Maris a spot in Cooperstown, a closer look at the slugger’s 12-year career (1957-68) suggests that he’s exactly where he should be with respect to the Hall of Fame: on the outside. Read the rest of this entry »

In the first notable signing of the offseason, the Dodgers and left-handed starting pitcher Andrew Heaney reportedly agreed to terms on one-year, $8.5 million contact. Though Heaney was not listed on our top 50 free agent rankings, Joel Sherman of the New York Post reported on Sunday that he had quickly generated a hot market. Multiple teams were interested in the southpaw; in Sherman’s words, they were hoping to find the “next Robbie Ray.”

There are some similarities. Like Heaney, Ray signed quickly last winter, inking a one-year, $8 million pact with the Blue Jays on November 7. In Toronto, he found the strike zone for the first time in his career and turned in a Cy Young-caliber season (he’s one of the AL’s three finalists) with a 2.84 ERA, 3.69 FIP and 3.9 WAR in 193.1 innings pitched. The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal also likened the contract to Ray’s deal from last offseason, if only because the general premise (an attempt at fixing a broken pitcher) and terms (Heaney signed for just $500,000 more than Ray) are quite similar.

That’s where the similarities between the two hurlers end. Heaney had a rough 2021 season, but the issues facing the two pitchers could not be more different. Ray struggled to harness his excellent stuff; Heaney, on the other hand, posted a 7.3% walk rate in 2021, a tick above his career-average into this past year (6.5%). While both pitchers flashed the potential for much more upside than their results had shown, how the Blue Jays fixed Ray and how the Dodgers will have to fix Heaney will deviate significantly. Read the rest of this entry »

After a one-year hiatus due to the oddity and non-celebratory feeling of a season truncated by a raging pandemic, we’re bringing back the Elegy series in a streamlined format for a 2021 wrap-up. Think of this as a quick winter preview for each team, discussing the questions that faced each team ahead of the year, how they were answered, and what’s next. Do you like or hate the new format? Let me know in the comments below! We’ve already tackled the AL and NL Central; now it’s on to the East, starting with the American League.

Tampa Bay Rays (100-62)

The Big Question

The Rays are one of the best teams in history at competing on a year-in, year-out basis with a budget dwarfed by their rivals, right up there with Connie Mack’s, Charlie Finley’s, and Billy Beane’s A’s. But in a very tough division, they walk a very high player churn tightrope without a safety net. Would the Blake Snell trade finally be the one to knock Tampa Bay off that tightrope? The team has to stay smarter than its rivals, which is a lot tougher to do than it was in the heyday of any of the other teams listed above. It’s not so much of a question of if they got good value for Snell — they got real players in return — but whether the team’s rotation depth, already relatively thin with Charlie Morton‘s departure and Tyler Glasnow’s injury history, would be sufficient to prevent the Rays from having another down period. Read the rest of this entry »

In what might be the most-thrilling play we’ll see all October, Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Randy Arozarena successfully executed a straight steal of home in Game One of the ALDS. Moments later, I shared the following on Twitter:

“Instead of calmly throwing a ball right down the middle for strike three to end the inning, Taylor panicked.”

Journalist friend Bruce Schoenfeld responded as follows:

“That is exactly right. I kept waiting for the announcers to say it. I wrote a [Sports Illustrated] piece on straight steals of home & talked to every active player who’d done it. They agreed that nobody should ever try with two out and two strikes, All the pitcher has to do is throw a strike.”

In other words, Arozarena’s theft could have been nullified.

I checked with a rules expert to make sure Bruce and I weren’t mistaken. According to Chris Welsh — a former big-league pitcher and current Cincinnati Reds radio and TV analyst who runs the website Baseball Rules Academy — we had it right. Had Red Sox reliever Josh Taylor simply remained on the rubber and thrown a pitch that landed in strike zone, the batter would have been out and the inning would have been over. Instead, he made the mistake of stepping off, thereby making himself a fielder and not a pitcher. His hurried heave toward home plate wasn’t nearly in time.

Again, there were two outs and two strikes on the batter. Read the rest of this entry »

After finishing first or second in in the American League in scoring in each of the past four seasons, the 2021 Yankees were supposed to be yet another iteration of the Bronx Bombers. Yet this time around, they scored just 4.39 runs per game, good only for 10th in the league. When they lined up for their do-or-die appearance in the Wild Card Game behind Gerrit Cole, they did so with a lineup featuring just four hitters with a wRC+ of 100 or better, two of whom didn’t join the organization until the trade deadline. After an abrupt exit from the playoffs at the hands of the Red Sox, the question of where the Yankees go from here looms particularly large, but for all the “if the Boss were alive” shrieking from some quarters — fans and media hot-take artistes alike — a radical overhaul of the roster this winter doesn’t appear likely.

For years, the Yankees have relied upon a model of power and patience for their offense, accepting the high strikeout rates that come with it as the cost of doing business. The model worked well enough when juiced baseballs were flying out of parks at record rates; they set single-season team home run records in both 2017 and ’18 and blew past those marks in ’19 even as the Twins edged them by a single dinger.

Amid the backdrop of the de-juiced ball, the Yankees still placed third in the league in homers, but their overall offense was far less potent. Where the major league rate of home runs per plate appearance declined by about 5.5% relative to 2020, theirs dipped by 12%, and that’s with a reasonably full season from Giancarlo Stanton, who clubbed 35 homers in 139 games after being limited to 23 games in 2020. Even with that rebound, injuries deprived the team of some big bats and led to inferior replacements.

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Yankees signed Gerrit Cole to a nine-year, $324 million deal in December 2019, they envisioned him contending for Cy Young awards and pitching do-or-die games in October. They likely didn’t imagine those would be Wild Card games, however, nor did they foresee the ace right-hander taking an early exit before things really got out of hand, but that’s just what happened on Tuesday night in Fenway Park. On the heels of a strong but uneven season that may yet garner him a Cy Young award, Cole fizzled, surrendering a pair of homers and retiring just six of the 12 Red Sox he faced before departing with a 3-0 deficit. The Yankees’ offense was kept at bay by opposite number Nathan Eovaldi and the four relievers that followed, and the Red Sox advanced with a 6-2 victory.

Cole pitched about as well as any American League starter this year, posting the highest strikeout rate (33.5%) and strikeout-to-walk differential (27.8%) among ERA qualifiers, and finishing second in both flavors of WAR, trailing only Eovaldi in FanGraphs’ version, 5.6 to 5.3, and the Blue Jays’ Robby Ray in Baseball Reference’s version, 6.7 to 5.6. His 2.92 FIP ranked second behind Eovaldi’s 2.79, while his 3.23 ERA placed third behind Ray’s 2.84 and Lance McCullers‘ 3.16. Cole also had the lowest xERA of any AL qualifier (3.15).

Even so, the 31-year-old righty entered Tuesday night with at least some cause for concern. He left his September 7 start after 3.2 innings due to tightness in his left hamstring, and while he was solid enough in his return a week later — five innings, seven strikeouts, and one run on 108 pitches against the Orioles — he was cuffed for five homers and 15 runs in 17.2 innings over his final three starts. One of those was actually solid enough; he threw five shutout innings against the Red Sox in Fenway Park on September 24 as the Yankees built a 7-0 lead, then allowed a three-run homer to Rafael Devers in his final inning of work.

The late-season funk was deep enough to generate questions about which version of Cole would show up on Tuesday night, but unfortunately for the Yankees, the question was settled early. Kyle Schwarber sent a 103-mph rocket to center field on Cole’s fifth pitch, a 98.2-mph four-seam fastball that was more or less in the middle of the plate. Brett Gardner caught it for an out, but the missed location and the quality of contact didn’t bode well for the pitcher. After getting Enrique Hernández to pop out, Cole avoided the strike zone altogether against Devers, and walked him on six pitches. He then fell behind Xander Bogaerts, 2-1, before leaving a changeup in the middle of the zone; the slugging shortstop hammered the ball 427 feet to dead center for a two-run homer:

Per Baseball Savant, it was just the third time in his career that Cole served up a home run to a right-handed hitter on a changeup, and the first time in over four years. His first two came while pitching for the Pirates, first on May 5, 2014 against the Nationals’ Ian Desmond, and then on September 17, 2017 against the Reds’ Eugenio Suárez.

Pitch choice and location aside, it was an all-too-familiar spot for Cole to wind up in. During the first inning of his starts this year, batters hit .265/.317/.521 for a .354 wOBA against him, accounting for seven of the 24 homers he served up. His ERA in the first inning was 4.80, compared to 2.91 in all other frames. Tuesday was a bad time to hold form in that regard.

In the second inning, Cole had to work around a one-out double by Kevin Plawecki, who hit a 105-mph rocket off the center field wall on a 98.5 mph fastball that again caught too much of the zone. Cole recovered to strike out both Bobby Dalbec and Christian Arroyo, the former looking at a 3-2 slider that was actually off the outside corner, and the latter swinging at high cheese. To start the third, he got ahead of Schwarber 0-2, but after missing way outside with a changeup, he came back with a 97.4 mph four-seamer above the zone. The Boston slugger went and got the cheese, schwarbing it to right field at a 110.3-mph clip for a solo homer.

After a soft infield hit to the third base side by Hernández, and then a six-pitch walk to Devers, Cole’s night was done; manager Aaron Boone pulled the plug before the Yankees’ inconsistent offense, which managed just six runs during the team’s final three games of the regular season as it squandered home-field advantage for this game, had to dig out of a bigger hole. Clay Holmes extricated the Yankees from the jam with a strikeout of Bogaerts and a double play ball off the bat of Alex Verdugo. The Yankees made a game of it, trimming the lead to 3-1 in the sixth, but a bad send by third base coach Phil Nevin and a great throw by Bogaerts left Aaron Judge hung out to dry at home plate on the second of Giancarlo Stanton’s two long singles off the Green Monster. The Red Sox never let them get any closer.

It wasn’t that Cole lacked his typical velocity; his 97.8 mph average four-seamer was a whisker ahead of his season average. His 18% swinging strike rate and 34% CSW rate were both above his season averages as well. Yet his command was lacking; he threw far too many noncompetitive pitches, particularly fastballs:

Worse, when Cole got to two strikes, he couldn’t close the deal:

Hitters had a .405 OPS vs. Cole when the #Yankees ace got to 2 strikes during the season. Cole got to 2 strikes 8 times vs. the #RedSox. They had a 1.667 OPS. 2-for-6 with a HR, 2b, 2 BBs. #Yankees #RedSox

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) October 6, 2021

Ouch. Three of the four batted balls of 100 mph or higher that he allowed came with two strikes.

Afterwards, Cole refused to blame his hamstring or his bout of COVID-19 for his late-season woes, telling reporters, “At the end of the season, we are all going through and wearing whatever we’ve had to overcome to get to this point. You know, the other team is dealing with the same kind of situation.” He noted that it wasn’t so much that his fastball command was unreliable, as he generated three popups with it; that Schwarber had to expand his zone to reach the homer; and that his changeup got hit hard. “When it’s all said and done, there wasn’t one pitch that was good enough because we didn’t get the job done,” he said.

Asked whether he could put his finger on what happened over the last month, Cole didn’t offer a blanket explanation, saying “Evaluate each game individually… It just wasn’t the same answer every time.”

In terms of batters faced, Cole’s start was the sixth-shortest in Wild Card game history:

Four of those six starts involved the Yankees, who have made too much a habit of traveling this route into October by playing in four of the last six AL Wild Card games. Two of the above starts came in the same game in 2017; after the Twins chased Severino, the Yankees chased Santana and rallied to win while the bullpen held Minnesota to a single run over 8.2 innings.

That list is no place to be, and a start like Cole’s will be a tough one to live down given that it occurred within one of the game’s most heated rivalries, and against the backdrop of the Yankees’ relative lack of postseason success in recent years. They’ve exited before the ALCS in seven of the past nine seasons, and haven’t won the World Series since 2009, an eternity by the franchise’s standards.

Cole’s start will be cited as evidence of his fall from grace after a strong first two months to 2021, though the reality is a bit more complicated. Undoubtedly, his season was a clear step down from 2019, when he delivered a 2.50 ERA, 2.64 FIP, 39.9% strikeout rate, and 7.5 WAR for an Astros team that came within one win of a championship. But judged by everything except his 2.84 ERA, Cole’s 2021 season was a step up from last year’s shortened campaign; driven by a home run rate that ballooned to 1.73 per nine between seasons of 1.2 per nine on either side, his FIP rose to 3.89 in 2020 while his strikeout rate dipped to 32.6%, still good for third in the AL.

Cole’s 2021 season had two obvious points of inflection that conveniently segment his body of work into thirds, more or less: the crackdown on pitchers’ use of foreign substances, which was first reported on June 3, though enforcement didn’t begin until a few weeks later, and the pitcher’s positive test for COVID-19, a breakthrough infection that was reported on August 3 and that sidelined him for over two weeks.

Here’s how his season looks by the basics:

One could argue that the hamstring issue marked another point of inflection, but I’m not sure how useful breaking the last part into segments of four and five starts — the first of which featured a lights-out 0.73 ERA and 1.02 FIP between his return from illness and his early exit — is in the grand scheme.

All of Cole’s numbers declined after the specter of sticky stuff enforcement reared its head, but as you can see, his ERA was half a run worse than his peripherals suggested, owing something to a lousy defense that ranked 27th in the majors in DRS (-63) and 25th in OAA runs prevented (-13); by the latter, Cole’s -3 runs placed him in just the 16th percentile among all pitchers.

Getting back to the leaderboard comparisons, Cole’s 31.5% strikeout rate and 24.6% strikeout-walk differential form June 3 onward both would have ranked third in the AL, his 3.66 FIP seventh, 16 percent better than league average, his 2.2 WAR tied for eighth. Relative rankings of that order would have registered as something of a disappointment had they been maintained over the course of a season, as the Yankees aren’t paying Cole to be merely a top-10 AL pitcher — and the team would have finished outside the playoff picture.

And now, a closer look at his Statcast numbers:

There’s no getting around the fact that Cole’s four-seam fastball spin rate dropped conspicuously after news of the crackdown emerged; his spin-to-velocity ratio (SVR) dropped from 26.3 to 24.4 in that same span. Even before the league began enforcing the ban on foreign substances via the umpire checks, he made headlines first for his awkward answer when asked directly whether he used Spider Tack on June 8, and then for his complaints about the difficulty of gripping the ball on June 16. Cole, who serves on the executive subcommittee of the Players Association and has spoken up about various labor matters such as service time manipulation and competitive balance, was hardly alone in discussing grip issues, or in calling for the league to incorporate player input into the new rules; among frontline hurlers, the likes of Tyler Glasnow, Max Scherzer, and (ugh) Trevor Bauer spoke up as well.

Among pitchers with at least 150 four-seam fastballs thrown before June 3 and 300 after that date, Cole had the 16th-largest spin rate drop, putting him in the 89th percentile of that group:

Cole’s drop in four-seam spin rate from June 3 onward was about 2.5 times the major league average of 68 rpm (from 2,319 rpm to 2,251). Similarly, his drop in SVR was about 2.6 times the major league average of 0.7 (from 24.7 to 24.0). Cole isn’t the only awards candidate on that leaderboard, as the names of Buehler and Ohtani stand out. As you can see, the changes affected pitchers with more fastball spin than Cole (who ranks in the 91st percentile in that category) and with much less. In terms of SVR — a category in which Cole placed in the 82nd percentile among qualifiers during the first part of the season — his drop was the 10th largest (93rd percentile).

Results-wise, the numbers in the table prior to that one show that Cole’s velocity actually increased beyond the first leg of his season, and his spin rate rebounded somewhat. Both his average exit velocity and hard-hit rate fell relative to that first leg, though his barrel rate did rise substantially. What’s more, where his actual batting average and slugging percentage were higher than his expected numbers during the first leg, they were lower during the other two legs save for a slightly higher batting average than expected in the third leg. Taken as a whole, his gaps between actual and expected stats were very small and right in line with his career norms, suggesting that at least some of the fluctuations had less to do with any particular changes than to sample size and randomness:

Crackdown-wise, this is not meant to be an indictment of Cole given the number of pitchers who were apparently using foreign substances, or who experienced spin drop-offs from the first third of the season to the remainder, whether with regards to their fastballs or other pitches. He had points in his season following the ban where he pitched brilliantly, and he was hardly facing a cupcake schedule; by Baseball Reference’s RA9Opp calculations, which measure the park-adjusted scoring rates of the teams a pitcher faces in the service of that version of WAR, his opponents’ 4.96 runs per game was the highest among AL ERA qualifiers.

Still the performance numbers are what they are, and taken together with the disappointing end to Cole’s season, we — and he and the Yankees, more to the point — are left with more questions than answers as to what happened, both on Tuesday night and in the bigger picture, and where his performance goes from here. Like Clayton Kershaw, the only pitcher with four losses in potential elimination games (Cole is tied for second with three alongside eight other pitchers including CC Sabathia, Max Scherzer, and Hall of Famers Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson), he may have to endure the weight of the can’t-win-the-big-one tag until he wins one.

In a league where the last five Cy Young winners either didn’t pitch enough innings or were entirely out of the league, and where no one pitcher dominated enough categories to make a clear-cut case, Cole may yet bring home the award that eluded him in 2019, when teammate Justin Verlander narrowly beat him out. Such hardware could be cold comfort in the aftermath of the Yankees’ elimination. He’s hardly alone in terms of blame for the team’s precarious entry to the playoffs or its swift exit, but of all the players in pinstripes, Cole’s upcoming winter might feel the longest.

BOSTON — The American League Wild Card matchup that few fanbases wanted turned out to be… well, not quite everything that anyone could have asked for. There were big plays and some sixth-inning drama, but by no means did it qualify as a Red Sox-Yankees classic. As much as anything, it was an Alex Cora-managed team showing that it was worthy of a postseason berth despite the skepticism that came with an up-and-down second half. In front of 38,324 fans at Fenway Park, Boston beat New York by a score of 6-2 Tuesday night.

The tone was set early.

Giancarlo Stanton came into the game with a .389/.451/.689 slash line and a 208 wRC+ in 102 career plate appearances at Fenway Park. He’d gone deep six times, and two outs into the first inning it looked like that number would become seven. Stanton certainly seemed to think so; standing in the box, he briefly admired what ended up being a 345-foot single — exit velo 94.8 mph — off the Green Monster. Joey Gallo then fanned to end the inning.

The top half served as an omen. Instead of an early New York lead, the game remained scoreless. But not for long. With a runner on in the bottom half, Xander Bogaerts blasted a Gerrit Cole offering 427 feet into the center field bleachers, a bomb that was preceded by a bit of mano-a-mano electricity. Rafael Devers swung out of his shoes early in the count during his at-bat, and the veteran right-hander responded by buzzing him with a fastball on the next pitch. Undaunted, the young slugger kept his composure and worked the Yankees ace for what turned out to be a fruitful walk. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a moment on Sunday when Randy Arozarena had just stolen second base in the eighth inning of a scoreless game. Wander Franco stood at the plate while Nelson Cruz waited in the on-deck circle; the Yankees hadn’t yet recorded an out. Meanwhile, 250 miles down I-95, the Nationals had just wrapped up a three-run fifth, pushing their lead over Boston to four runs. Making his major league debut, effectively wild youngster Joan Adon struck out Rafael Devers on perhaps his best breaking ball of the day. The Blue Jays were cruising. This was the moment when extra baseball felt most likely. Perhaps not All of the Extra Baseball, because of the Mariners’ deficit against the Angels, but some. Instead, to the annoyance of baseball hipsters everywhere, we’re left with a boring ol’ Yankees/Red Sox playoff game at Fenway Park featuring two Cy Young candidates.

This is only the second time the two franchises have met in the postseason since their heated, knuckleball-crushing, curse-breaking epic tilts of the early 2000s, with the other coming when Boston dispatched the Yankees 3-to-1 in the 2018 ALDS, a series that featured many of the same players we’ll see Tuesday, though not the ones directly involved in that series’ extracurricular activity. It feels like we see these teams play one another on national TV constantly (it’s convenient to haul equipment from Bristol, Connecticut to either Boston or New York), but they’ve only faced off six times in the last two-and-a-half months. The Yankees won all of those games, including the last two in dramatic fashion (not that that means anything). Our announced starters finished the season ranked one-two in American League pitcher WAR: Gerrit Cole is set to take the mound for New York, while Boston will start 11-year veteran Nathan Eovaldi. Here are your starting pitcher scouting reports:

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the sixth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

As noted in the boilerplate introduction above, it is the primary goal of the Team Entropy project to root for extra baseball beyond the 162-game regular season. While the complicated scenarios involving more than a single isolated head-to-head tiebreaker game may be farfetched, appreciating the sense of possibility for greater things as events unfold is part of the package. This is as much about the journey as it is the destination, which so often remains abstract. There have been just three winner-take-all tiebreaker games played since I began this project in 2011.

The secondary goal of the Team Entropy project, and part of appreciating that sense of possibility, is to have at least some portion of the playoff picture at stake on the final day of the season. On that note, we have already achieved some level of success, as we enter the final day of the 2021 season with four teams still battling for the two AL Wild Card berths — one of which is attempting to make its first postseason in 20 years — and with the NL West title still in doubt as teams with 106 and 105 wins attempt to avoid a do-or-die Wild Card game. Read the rest of this entry »

Quick Sunday update. The Yankees lost on Saturday, furthering the potential for chaos, and the four-way tie is an increased possibility, at 6.5%. The chances of bonus baseball overall now stand at 57.6%. Good news for us and good news for the Rays, who will play one of these four teams later this week. It’s not something that’s captured in projections, but it’s interesting that if the Rays go full B-team, it reduces the chances of a tie, and as a result, a slight reprieve for the team they eventually play. Jameson Taillon is back in as the starter and Joan Adon looks to be Washington’s starter, which is to Boston’s benefit according to the projections.

The NL West remains unresolved, but simple: if the Dodgers win and the Giants lose, they play a tiebreak game. ZiPS has a 19.8% chance of a tiebreaker game, with the overall division as San Franciso 90.0%, Los Angeles 10.0%. Freddy Peralta is being held back for the playoffs with Brett Anderson going today. It makes sense too; it’s in Milwaukee’s interest to leave one of these teams more susceptible to getting knocked out of the playoffs by the Cardinals later this week.

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Below you’ll find today’s ZiPS stretch run update. For details on just what’s going on here, please refer to my original article describing all these mathnanigans.

American League Wild Card

The Yankees and their bats were largely quiet against the Rays on Friday, but they still basically control their own destiny as the team in the first Wild Card spot, albeit the one with by far the toughest opposition. The Blue Jays fended off a late-inning Baltimore rally and held on to the win, but the Red Sox winning was just as damaging to Toronto’s playoff hopes as the Jays’ win was helpful. Toronto’s still one-in-five to make the postseason, but needs some help now; since the Blue Jays are already assumed to be strongly favored to beat the Orioles, they get an even larger boost from a Nationals win. Read the rest of this entry »