By the time Shane Bieber recorded his first out in Tuesday night’s American League Wild Card Series opener, the Yankees had already done what teams failed to do in seven of the 25-year-old righty’s 12 starts in 2020: score two runs. With a DJ LeMahieu bloop and an Aaron Judge blast, the Yankees staked themselves to an instant lead, and they continued to beat up on the presumptive AL Cy Young winner, cuffing him for seven runs before chasing him in the fifth inning. The marquee matchup between Bieber and Yankees ace Gerrit Cole turned into a one-sided rout, with the Yankees rolling to a 12-3 win in Cleveland.

Bieber, for as otherworldly as he was this year — he not only won the AL pitching triple crown by leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA, but also led in FIP, WAR, K%, and K-BB% — did allow seven home runs, as if to hint that he was merely human. Two of those were on fastballs, one in the center of the strike zone, hit by the Reds’ Eugenio Suárez on August 4. In fact, that was the only hit out of the 28 fastballs Bieber threw down Broadway, just 11 of which were put into play. Judge didn’t have to know how rare it was for Bieber to leave one there to do business with it:

The home run — 108 mph off the bat, with an estimated distance of 399 feet — was Judge’s first since August 11, the same day on which he strained his right calf muscle. To that point, he led the majors in homers, but he landed on the Injured List a few days later, and re-injured the calf in his first game back on August 26. Since the initial injury, he hit just .205/.326/.231 in 46 plate appearances spread out over 47 days. While his exit velocity remained respectable, he didn’t elevate the ball with the same consistency, or come close to doing the same kind of damage:

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As the final day of the season dawned, there were no fewer than six possible matchups for this series, with the Twins, White Sox, and Indians all having paths to second place in the AL Central and the number four seed, and likewise for the Yankees and Blue Jays in the AL East and the number five seed. The Yankees fell to the Marlins, 5-0, their sixth loss in the past eight games, but because the Blue Jays blew a 4-1 lead and lost to the Orioles, New York finished 33-27, barely holding onto second. Meanwhile the Indians dug their way out of a 6-2 hole against the Pirates, and only when the White Sox’s comeback from a 10-1 deficit stalled at 10-8, with the tying run at the plate in the bottom of the ninth on a questionable called strike was this matchup set.

The Indians finished with the better record, going 35-25, but a slightly worse run differential (+39 versus +45), but how the two teams got there is very different. The Yankees led the AL in scoring (5.25 runs per game) and wRC+ (116) while ranking sixth in run prevention (4.50 runs per game). The Indians, on the other hand, tied for second-to-last in the AL in scoring (4.13 runs per game) and were second-to-last in wRC+ (86), but they were the stingiest team in the AL, allowing just 3.48 runs per game. As this series will be played entirely at Progressive Field, the Yankees’ offensive advantage may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Worth noting: Indians manager Terry Francona has been sidelined by gastrointestinal and blood clot issues for most of the season, managing just 14 games, during which his team went 8-6. First base coach Sandy Alomar Jr. has been serving as acting manager since mid-August and will likely remain in that capacity through the postseason, though Francona has entered the bubble to keep that option in play. The team has gone 28-18 on Alomar’s watch.

Rotations

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Even though he’s still got one start to go and several other pitchers will also see playing time over the next few days, the American League Cy Young race is all but over. Last year, it was a two-horse race between Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander. This year, Shane Bieber has been so dominant that no other AL pitcher can come close to his accomplishments with less than a week remaining. He leads the league in strikeouts by 25 through Monday’s games, with the distance between first and second the same as the distance between second and 18th. His 41% strikeout rate is the best in baseball, and his 2.13 FIP and 1.74 ERA pace the league as well. There isn’t a credible argument against Bieber winning the award and he should even garner support for MVP. As for second place, there are a ton of candidates.

To try to wade through the potential two-through-five slots on voters’ ballots, let’s take a quick look at pitcher WAR through Tuesday night’s games:

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With less than a week to go in the regular season, writers will soon vote on end-of-season awards, and the shortened season makes for some very tight races. That’s certainly true for American League MVP. Through play on Sunday, here’s the WAR Leaderboard for American League position players:

That’s a fine list of players, to be sure, but it doesn’t include one of the top players by AL WAR at the moment. Shane Bieber has made 11 starts and pitched 72.1 innings good for a 2.13 FIP, 1.74 FIP, and 2.9 WAR. He’s struck out 41% of batters, given up three runs in three starts, two runs in two starts, one run in one start, and no runs in five starts. He pitched at least six innings in every start but one, when he threw five frames against the Brewers on September 6, striking out 10 against one walk, giving up a single run. Given Bieber’s runs’ allowed, there is no real difference between his FanGraphs’ WAR and his mark at Baseball-Reference. He also leads the league in xwOBA over at Baseball Savant. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Clint Frazier is no longer the future of the Yankees outfield — or, as it has sometimes seemed over the past few years, of somebody else’s — he’s the present. The 26-year-old righty-swinging redhead, who began the season toiling at the Yankees’ alternate training site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, homered for the second straight night on Wednesday, helping the Yankees overtake the Blue Jays for second place in the AL East. During a season in which Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have played a combined total of 35 games due to injuries, in which age has finally caught up to Brett Gardner, and in which the 2019 magic has worn off of Mike Tauchman, Frazier has shown that both his lightning-quick bat and much-maligned glove are ready for prime time.

On Tuesday and Wednesday night in the Bronx while facing the Blue Jays — who came to town half a game ahead of the Yankees in the AL East standings — the Yankees erupted for 33 runs, winning by lopsided scores of 20-6 and 13-2 while hitting at least six homers in back-to-back games for the first time in franchise history; they added another 10 runs and six homers on Thursday night. While Stanton and Judge went hitless in their respective returns from injuries, and AL wRC+ leader (!) DJ LeMahieu and major-league home run leader (!) Luke Voit produced their share of fireworks on both nights, Frazier was right in the middle of the action, collecting two hits, two walks, and a homer in each game. Using MLB.com’s fantastic new Film Room feature, we can play the hits from those two nights in one clip:

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NEW YORK — On Wednesday night, DJ LeMahieu got it started for the Yankees, as he has so often done since arriving from Colorado in January 2019. Blue Jays starter Tanner Roark, having missed the strike zone with his first pitch of the night, left a 90.5 mph four-seam fastball in the upper outside corner of the zone — an area where the right-handed LeMahieu rarely swings — and this time the 32-year-old second baseman reached out and poked it onto the short porch in Yankee Stadium’s right field for a solo home run. The Yankees, who had dropped 20 runs on the Blue Jays on Tuesday night while retaking second place in the AL East, added another 13 more on Wednesday via a season-high season seven homers, including three by backup catcher Kyle Higashioka and another by LeMahieu. They did all of this despite Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge going hitless in their respective returns from injury.

“DJ just continued to set the tone for us,” said manager Aaron Boone, a night after LeMahieu had gone 4-for-6 with a homer and five RBI. Here’s the first-inning shot:

LeMonster pic.twitter.com/yq2OZDz2vY

— New York Yankees (@Yankees) September 16, 2020

The home run was LeMahieu’s fifth to lead off his team’s half of a game, moving him into the major league lead:

It was the 11th time LeMahieu has hit a leadoff homer in his two seasons as a Yankee; in that time, only Springer (15) has more, though until Wednesday, Acuña and Joc Pederson had as many in the same span. Read the rest of this entry »

The last time we saw Gerrit Cole in an Astros uniform, he wasn’t actually in an Astros uniform. He was, instead, in a Boras Corporation cap, ready to chart his own course through the league after a dominant run in Houston. When he signed with the Yankees, it felt almost preordained — one of the bright stars of baseball, either the best pitcher in the league or a close second, on the most storied franchise in the game. We get it — great players like the Yankees, and the Yankees like great players.

One look at the surface-level statistics will tell you that something hasn’t panned out in 2020. A 3.63 ERA? A 4.69 FIP? Thirteen home runs allowed in only nine starts?! He’s allowed a home run in each start, which is about as disastrous as it sounds. Heck, even his record tells you something is up; he’s 4-3 this year on an underachieving Yankees team, and while wins and losses are silly contextual statistics, Cole went 35-10 the last two years. Something is clearly up.

Far less clear? What that “something” is. There are some easy ways pitchers fail, ones you can see from a mile away. They lose velocity, and their fastballs become newly hittable. That hasn’t happened to Cole, though, at least not really:

Starters can also lose feel for one of their pitches, and change their pitch mix to compensate. That hasn’t happened either:

Uh… maybe he’s the victim of a poor early-count approach. He’s throwing fewer fastballs this year to start batters off, but just as many pitches in the zone. He’s not doing it by throwing more curveballs and sliders in the zone, either:

In other words, Cole is throwing fastballs less often to start, but he’s making up for it by throwing them in the strike zone more often. Sounds dangerous. Are batters suddenly teeing off on him on 0-0? Nope! They’re actually swinging less than ever, and the whole thing is too small-sample to matter anyway. He’s getting to 0-1 54.5% of the time, in line with his dominant 2019. Next! Read the rest of this entry »

On August 17, the New York Yankees finished up a 6-3 victory against the Boston Red Sox and extended their win streak to six games. The team was 16-6 on the season and had the best record in baseball. They then commenced a seven-game losing streak on their way to a three week stretch during which the club went 5-14, bringing its season mark to 21-20. In a 162-game season, 19 games is less than 12% of the season, but this year, it represents nearly a third of the season and nearly half of the team’s games played thus far. With just 19 games left to go, another 5-14 stretch would push the Yankees out of the playoffs. While that scenario isn’t likely — our Playoff Odds have the Yankees at 89% odds entering games today — it’s worth exploring what’s gone wrong and whether we can expect it to continue.

To take a broad view, here are the Yankees’ major-league ranks with the season split between their good and bad stretches:

The offense and relief pitching have fallen off a cliff while the starting pitching has remained middle of the pack. It’s fair to say that the rotation should be better, but it has been about as effective during the free fall as it was when things were going well. Gerrit Cole has had a run of bad starts and James Paxton has been dinged up; Michael King has had one good start and one bad one during this stretch, while Jordan Montgomery has had some clunkers, too. Still, Masahiro Tanaka has pitched well and Deivi García and J.A. Happ have turned in some decent starts. The rotation has underperformed expectations the entire season (Yankees starters ranked first on our preseason Positional Power Rankings), but they’ve been more average than bad pretty consistently. Given that the Yankees have had four doubleheaders in the last three weeks, the rotation has arguably held up pretty well. If Paxton were healthy and Cole was pitching as expected, the rotation would be one of the best in baseball. That they aren’t is hurting the team, but it’s hardly the sole source of New York’s troubles. Read the rest of this entry »

To look at the New York Yankees roster, as is typically the case, is to gaze upon a dizzying number of potential star hitters. But as the last couple of seasons have shown us, the roster of players in the Yankees organization doesn’t often match up with the guys they actually have available to take the field. In 2019, the team had a large chunk of its starting rotation and lineup on the IL by the second week of the regular season, and the problem never got much better. Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Aaron Hicks, Didi Gregorius and others all missed substantial time during the season.

The injury bug has continued to bite them in 2020, with Stanton back on the IL alongside Gleyber Torres and DJ LeMahieu while Judge only recently returned from missing time himself. In spite of all of this, the team has remained extremely competitive thanks to the contributions of role players who have consistently stepped into the spotlight. Last year it was Gio Urshela and Mike Tauchman leading the charge in keeping the Yankees afloat. This year, the man stealing the spotlight is Luke Voit.

After appearing in 118 games for the Yankees last season, Voit has secured the job as the team’s starting first baseman in 2020. The longer he plays, the harder it is for the Yankees to justify handing his spot in the lineup over to someone else. Voit has seemed to get hotter each week he’s been on the field — over the Yankees’ first 14 games, he carried an OPS of .816. Over their next seven, he had an OPS of .945. Last week, he began to go berserk, going 8-for-20 over his last six games with six homers, three walks and three strikeouts.

He started his most recent tear by clubbing two homers in a game against the Red Sox last Monday: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy to make light of the job of a baseball manager. Fill out a lineup card, pull your pitchers when they’re tired, and don’t call for any bunts? It often feels like we could all do that. Whenever I start feeling like it’s a cinch to manage, I think back to something my dad told me when I was younger: the manager’s job is to put his team in the best position to win.

Granted, that was before the sabermetric revolution, so managers weren’t necessarily doing a great job of it, but putting their team in the best position to win has always been the point of the job. If that sounds easy, so be it, but there are plenty of ways to mess it up, which means every decision a manager makes has the potential to be the thing they did that led to a loss.

With that theory of managing in mind, I did a double-take when I saw the Astros’ lineup on Sunday. Facing lefty Justus Sheffield, Dusty Baker submitted this lineup:

In a lot of ways, that’s a satisfying lineup against a left-handed pitcher: seven righties against just two lefties after accounting for switch-hitting Abraham Toro, and some big boppers among those righties. Seeing Josh Reddick batting second set alarms off in my mind, though. Read the rest of this entry »