Two opposing things can be true, I believe. Superstar players are probably the last to know when they’ve come to the end of the line. Declines can be so gradual they’re tough to detect if you’re just taking things day by day. If you listen to the players, they’ll insist they remain capable, even after they’re probably not. On the other side of the coin, no one loves to bury good players too early more than writers. We’ve all probably done it at some point. I did it way too early to Raul Ibanez. Countless people did it way too early to David Ortiz. We start looking for any signs of age-related decline, and then when one or two show up, we tend to assume that’s it. Good players know how to make adjustments. That’s what allows them to be good players.

So with Alex Rodriguez, right now, we’re…somewhere. Rodriguez says he’ll be okay, and he says he loves to prove doubters wrong. Not that Alex Rodriguez has much of a history of being doubted, but, anyway. Rodriguez has his pride, and he also has terrible numbers. He’s 40 years old! But then, the Yankees’ best hitter is 39 years old. It would be very easy to conclude that Rodriguez is finished. The Yankees have started to put him on the bench. We should probably be more patient — this is still Alex Rodriguez we’re talking about. The talent is in there. It’s just, the numbers paint a picture, and it’s a picture of a changed and worse ballplayer. That much cannot be argued.

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Conventional wisdom dictates that, when signing a free agent to a multi-year deal, the signing team will receive most of the value from that player at the beginning of his contract. Ideally, the team receives a surplus in the early stages of the agreement. But even then, as the player ages and declines, the club is likely to pay more than a the player is worth for the final years.

Given the effects of age-related decline, it was troubling when, after signing a three-year deal as a 37-year-old, Carlos Beltran proceeded to record a poor 2014 campaign. After Beltran began the 2015 season with a terrible April, at least one writer reasonably (foolishly?) wondered if Beltran was finished. He’s done nothing but hit since then.

In Carlos Beltran’s first 14 seasons, from 1998 to 2011, he played in nearly 1,800 games and hit .283/.361/.496, conspiring to produce a career 120 wRC+ as he entered his age-35 season. Then, just when he should have been exhibiting real signs of decline, he recorded a .282/.343/.493 and 127 wRC+ between 2012 and -13 with the Cardinals. His walk rate did decline a bit, but with the general suppression of offense in baseball, his performance relative to the league improved. While his defense no longer represented an asset, he had sufficiently staved off a decline on offense. So it’s not surprising that, when the Yankees gave him three years and $45 million before 2014, they had reason to believe that possessed at least one more good year in him.

It would be a bit melodramatic to call 2014 a disaster for Beltran, but the season didn’t go well. No stranger to a variety of maladies over his career, Beltran ended up on the disabled list for bone spurs in his right elbow in May, and then went on the seven-day DL in July due to a concussion he sustained when a batted ball hit him in practice. He hit .233/.301/.402 on the season, leading only to a 96 wRC+. While not so poor in itself, the battin line was coupled with poor base-running numbers and below-average defense in right field, leaving him with a negative WAR on the season. He had elbow surgery after the during the 2014-15 offseason to relieve the discomfort he was feeling, but the first month of 2015 could not have gone any worse.

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Can you name the starting pitcher with the lowest ERA in the month of May this year? If you paid attention to the Pitcher of the Month awards announcements yesterday, you might know the answer. If you’ve been paying attention to Major League Baseball at all over the past five years, you can definitely guess it. The answer, to nobody’s surprise, is Clayton Kershaw, who posted a ridiculous 0.91 ERA over six starts. What’s infinitely less intuitive and more thought-provoking is the identity of the pitcher who is second on the May ERA leaderboard: CC Sabathia.

In the interest of full disclosure, a bit of leaderboard manipulation is necessary in order to find Sabathia’s ERA ranked ahead of every pitcher not named Kershaw. A groin strain sent Sabathia to the disabled list after his start on May 4th and limited him to just four starts and 26 innings pitched for the month. So, if we’re being technical, Sabathia’s 1.04 ERA was second in the majors among starting pitchers with a minimum of 20 innings pitched. But the arbitrary nature of month-long splits isn’t why we need to talk about Sabathia. We need to talk about Sabathia because that great month contributed to his ERA doing this:

Sabathia closed out his 2015 season with a 2.86 ERA over his final nine starts. The difficulties he experienced off the field — and which immediately followed that impressive run — have been well-documented and are outside the scope of this analysis. Let’s focus entirely on what we know has happened on the field, which is that Sabathia has picked up right where he left off, recording a 2.85 ERA through his first eight starts of 2016. Considering Sabathia turns 36 years old next month and is coming off a disappointing three-year stretch during which he posted a 4.81 ERA, there are two obvious questions here. First: how did this happen? And second: will it last?

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Michael Pineda is having a hard time right now. Not when it comes to plate appearances ended by the umpire — his strikeout minus walk percentage is 21st in the big leagues, just ahead of Jake Arrieta’s. Usually that’s good enough, since K-BB% was once shown to be the best in-season predictor, and because it’s hard to be bad if you’re striking a bunch of guys out and not really walking anyone.

Usually. But not right now. Not in the Bronx, at least. Because, since 2000, nobody has recorded a K-BB% over 15% (Pineda is at 17.7% currently) and suffered from a worse batting average on balls in play. Nobody has allowed more homers per nine innings in that group, either. After contact, the ball has not been Pineda’s friend.

Still, we might just chalk it up to luck and call it a day. We might, if it wasn’t so obvious from watching Pineda that he’s having trouble with command and that things aren’t quite right.

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Most of what I do here is provide you with fun facts. Let’s be real — you already have a decent idea of which players are good and which players are bad. A healthy portion of my job, then, is to tell you what you already know, but in some new and different way. When it works, I think we all get to come away feeling smart! Hopefully it continues to work.

What I have for you here is an Andrew Miller fun fact. Not just a fun fact — my absolute favorite Andrew Miller fun fact, at least of the moment, at least as long as it’s factual. It’s not like you didn’t already know that Andrew Miller is good. We all came to terms with that years ago, and Miller hasn’t gotten any worse. He’s gotten better! Boiled down, this post is just “Andrew Miller is great at pitching.” But there’s this thing, see. He turns hitters to brain-dead mush.

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Yesterday, we tackled the best final seasons for pitchers. Today, let’s tackle the position players, so we can get to the heart of the question of just how good David Ortiz needs to be to crack one of these lists. The rules and breakdowns are the same as before, so I would encourage you to read yesterday’s post to peep those. Once again, big ups to Jeff Zimmerman for data help.

30-39 WAR

Best Final Season, Position Players with 30-39 WAR

Player	Final Season	Age	WAR	Career WAR
Roy Cullenbine	1947	33	4.4	33.8
Chick Stahl	1906	33	3.7	33.1
Tony Cuccinello	1945	37	3.0	32.2
Gil McDougald	1960	32	2.8	39.7
Joe Adcock	1966	38	2.5	34.2
Elbie Fletcher	1949	33	2.4	30.7

The guys on this list are definitely not household names, but there are some interesting, if also tragic, stories here. Let’s deal with the tragic first. There are six players here because one of them, Chick Stahl, committed suicide during spring training of the 1907 season. He had been named the Americans’ (Red Sox) player/manager over the winter, and something drove him to take his own life. This was surely a big loss for the team, as they had been counting on him to help lead them. He was the fifth-best hitter in the game just a couple years earlier in 1904.

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A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

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The Yankees have called up 23-year-old Dominican-born catching prospect Gary Sanchez from the minor leagues. Sanchez was off to an excellent start in Triple-A this year, slashing .288/.336/.541 in 27 games. Heading into the year, he ranked 21st on KATOH’s top 100 list, second to only Chance Sisco among catchers. Sanchez’s 2016-to-date performance has only served to improve his prospect stock. He figures to serve as New York’s designated hitter for the time being with Alex Rodriguez on the shelf. Read the rest of this entry »

Originally I wanted to sit here and write about the Reds’ godawful bullpen. But then the research started bumming me out, so I turned my focus to the opposite of the Reds’ godawful bullpen, which is Andrew Miller. I find Miller to be much more pleasing, so here comes stuff about him.

You might remember that, before the year, Miller sustained a fracture in his non-throwing wrist. So there was concern that he’d have to be sidelined for a while, which would deal a blow to the Yankees’ biggest strength, but Miller opted to play through the discomfort. He’s so far allowed an OPS of .273. He has an xFIP- a little over 0, an ERA- of exactly 0, and an FIP- somehow under 0. No less deliciously, Miller is presently the only pitcher in baseball who’s gotten a higher rate of swings at pitches out of the zone than at pitches inside of the zone. Andrew Miller basically turns hitters into pitchers, except he turns them into pitchers who have to be hitters. To make matters worse for them, they’re effectively pitcher-hitters at the highest-leverage spots. Andrew Miller is good.

There are so many ways to demonstrate how Andrew Miller is good. That paragraph demonstrates it. Everything after this demonstrates it. I decided to pull up Miller’s log of plate appearances on the year, and sort them by leverage. I looked to see how Miller has done in the toughest of the tough situations. Miller so far has 33 batters faced. Here are the 10 most important showdowns.

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Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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