Even the Supposed Powerhouses Have Struggled Lately

On any given day in the not-too-distant past, the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Dodgers, and Phillies might have laid claims to the best record in their respective leagues, yet all of them have also gone through recent stretches where they’ve looked quite ordinary — and beatable. To cherrypick just a few examples, at the All-Star break the Phillies had the major’s best record at 62-34 (.646), but since then, they’re 11-17 (.393). They were briefly surpassed by the Dodgers, who themselves shirked the mantle of the NL’s top record. Over in the AL, on August 2 the Guardians were an AL-best 67-42… and then they lost seven straight. The Yankees and Orioles have been trading the AL East lead back and forth for most of the season, but over the past two months, both have sub-.500 records. And so on.

At this writing, not a single team has a winning percentage of .600, a pace that equates to just over 97 wins over a full season. If that holds up, it would not only be the first time since 2014 that no team reached 100 wins in a season — excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, of course — but also the first since ’07 that no team reached 97 wins.

In the 25 seasons shown (excluding 2020), that’s a total of 72 teams with at least 97 wins, an average of 2.88 per season, and 41 with at least 100 wins, an average of 1.64 per season. The distribution isn’t consistent; rather it appears we can separate these seasons into three periods:

We’ve had a lot more 97- and 100-win teams in recent years, which makes the lack of such teams playing up to that standard stand out. Here’s the top of the table for 2024, with our Playoff Odds-projected win totals included:

That’s some kind of parity, and it could very well make for exciting races to determine which teams get first-round byes and which must run the gauntlet of the Wild Card Series. The parity itself comes as a mild surprise given that we don’t lack for doormats, as the White Sox, Rockies, and Marlins are all on pace to lose at least 100 games. Then again, the 2021–23 seasons each featured four teams losing 100 games, and some of those teams — the Orioles, Diamondbacks, Pirates, and Royals — are finally battling for playoff spots now, a reminder that much of what’s going on here is cyclical.

Checking in on the annual standard deviation of winning percentages — a quick-and-dirty measure of competitive balance — we see that while it has been relatively high in recent years (at its highest during the shortened 2020 season, which I left in for illustrative purposes), this year’s mark of 0.079 is the lowest it’s been since ’17.

It might be tempting to ascribe that downturn to some of the measures put in play via the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, such as the steeper Competitive Balance Tax penalties, the expanded playoff format (which can influence the decision of whether to hold a late-July fire sale or attempt to remain on the fringes of the Wild Card races), and the draft lottery (which disincentivizes taking the express route to the basement). I don’t think we have enough data or a strong enough signal to confirm that, particularly given that for all of the years in the 2018–24 span, the standard deviations of winning percentages are still higher than they were every year during the ’05–17 span, long before those particular incentives were put in place. Those spans don’t line up exactly with the ones I broke out for that 97- and 100-win table, but you can see the way that competitive balance ebbs and flows — and of course, it’s influenced by the prolonged periods of tanking, er, rebuilding, whether we’re talking about the Astros and Cubs in the 2011–14 period, or the current A’s, to say nothing of the ongoing performance art project that is the Rockies.

Anyway, while all of the teams I mentioned in the opening of this article are pretty good ones, none of them appear to be powerhouses. Each club has vulnerabilities, some of which are increasingly glaring and capable of masking even the strongest of performances. Take the Yankees, who after losing Sunday night’s game to the Tigers are 73-52, tied with the Orioles for the AL’s best record. Even with 2023 AL Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole sidelined for the first 75 games of the season, they ran up a 51-24 (.680) record without him by cranking out 5.04 runs per game on offense and holding opponents to 3.36 runs per game, with unexpectedly strong performances from Luis Gil and Clarke Schmidt. With Cole back in the fold, they’ve gone 22-28 (.440) even while their offense has pumped out 5.14 runs per game, because they’ve surrendered a honking 5.34 runs per game, and while Cole hasn’t been in top form, he’s suddenly the least of the rotation’s problems:

That June 19 date marks Cole’s return. You don’t have to be a mathemagician to see the problems here. Everybody is giving up too many homers, and everybody besides Cole and Cortes is averaging fewer than five innings per turn. That’s taxed the bullpen, which has allowed a 4.15 ERA and 4.21 FIP in that span, and which has been slightly worse since the start of the second half. While the offense has its holes (the Yankees’ first, second, and third basemen all made my Replacement Level Killers lists), it has produced a 121 wRC+ since Cole’s return, and a 134 wRC+ since the start of the second half, led by the two best hitters on the planet, Aaron Judge (265 wRC+) and Juan Soto (224 wRC+).

Back to the bullpen, closer Clay Holmes has a respectable 2.88 ERA and 2.46 FIP across 50 innings thus far, right in line with his past two seasons, and he’s already set a career high with 26 saves. Yet thanks in large part to a .350 BABIP, 49 points higher than last year’s mark and 88 points higher than he posted in 2022, he’s been dinked to death. On Sunday night he blew his 10th save of the season. Called on to protect a 1-0 lead, he served up a sizzling one-out double to Colt Keith, then an 81-mph dribbler off the bat of rookie Jace Jung that plated the tying run. The Yankees retook the lead in the 10th, but Mark Leiter Jr., one of their deadline acquisitions, similarly gave up a game-tying hot smash by Zach McKinstry and then an 81-mph opposite field single by Parker Meadows. Holmes, who didn’t allow his first run of the season until May 20, has converted just seven of his past 13 save chances dating back to July 5, and is just two blown saves away from tying the Wild Card-era record, which Leiter’s father incidentally shares with the Guardians’ Emmanuel Clase (2023) and the Royals’ Ambiorix Burgos (12). Manager Aaron Boone reiterated after Sunday’s loss that he has no plans to remove Holmes from the closer role. In fairness, when the alternatives such as Michael Tonkin, Luke Weaver, and Jake Cousins have such short track records of success, you can at least understand the position Boone is in.

The Orioles don’t want to hear about the Yankees’ pitching problems. Dial back to that same June 19 date — which incidentally was also the day that Kyle Bradish had Tommy John surgery, and two days after Tyler Wells had an internal brace procedure, and just over two weeks after John Means had his second TJ — and they’ve gone 26-27 with a staff that’s posted a 5.20 ERA and 4.48 FIP. Corbin Burnes has been decidedly un-ace-like (4.57 ERA, 4.29 FIP) over that 10-start span, Dean Kremer and the now-injured Grayson Rodriguez have been similarly ineffective, and one of the two starters they acquired at the deadline, Trevor Rogers, has been worse, with a 7.53 ERA and 4.78 FIP through his first three turns. Fortunately for Baltimore, the other deadline addition, Zach Eflin, has been great (2.13 ERA, 2.98 FIP through four turns), as has reliever Seranthony Domínguez, who has stepped in at closer now that the Craig Kimbrel Annual Walkathon has come around; Kimbrel has walked 12 men and allowed four homers, 13 runs, and a 1.060 OPS in his past 9 2/3 innings. The team’s offense has almost kept pace with the poor pitching by cranking out just shy of five runs per game during that span, but the Orioles have a -22 run differential dating back to June 19, compared to the Yankees’ -10.

Shall I continue? You can’t stop me. The Dodgers were 29-16 (.644) when Max Muncy played his last game before landing on the injured list with a strained oblique. They’re 44-36 (.550) since then, with the NL’s fourth-best record, and within their own division, the Padres (48-31, .608) and Diamondbacks (48-33, .593) have closed the gap, each climbing to within two games of the NL West lead, a margin unseen since April 24.

Injuries to Mookie Betts, Ryan Brasier, Brusdar Graterol, and a powerhouse rotation’s worth of starters have been a major factor in the Dodgers’ doldrums. Even setting aside the knowledge that Clayton Kershaw would miss half the season while recovering from shoulder surgery, and that Tony Gonsolin would miss all of it due to Tommy John surgery, the absences of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Dustin May, Bobby Miller, and Walker Buehler — the last two of whom have struggled mightily in their returns to the point of ineffectiveness — for significant stretches have led the team to dig deep into their depth chart. One of the more promising rookies they unearthed, River Ryan, left his August 10 start shaking his right wrist, a telltale sign of elbow trouble, and sure enough he’s heading for Tommy John surgery as well. Muncy’s long-awaited activation may be accelerated by a day due to concerns about Freddie Freeman’s jammed right middle finger; one can’t help but think the Dodgers are collectively ready to raise both middle fingers and direct them toward the baseball gods.

The $300-million-plus payrolls of the Dodgers and Yankees make it easy for some to justify their schadenfreude, but the Phillies, who rank fourth in payroll at $247 million, aren’t exactly shoe-stringing their way to a division title. They still have a seven-game cushion in the NL East, one game less than at the close of June, when they were 55-29 (.655), but they’re 18-22 (.450) since, with a pitching staff that’s yielded a 5.08 ERA and 4.78 FIP. Aside from Zack Wheeler and a somtimes-wobbly Aaron Nola, their rotation has been a mess over that stretch:

The big blow has been the loss of Suárez to lower back soreness. He carried a major-league best 1.83 ERA (and a 2.64 FIP) into late June before getting hammered in four starts that ended his hopes of sneaking away with the Cy Young; incidentally Sánchez had the majors’ third-lowest FIP (2.51) at that point. Suárez threw a simulated game last Tuesday, his first time facing hitters since going on the IL, and he’s tentatively lined up to return this weekend. As for the bullpen, which owns a 5.67 ERA and 5.10 FIP since July 1, Domínguez was struggling mightily in the weeks before being traded, and co-closers José Alvarado and Jeff Hoffman have both lost their job. Hell, the team has just two saves in the entire second half, and of its 10 relievers with at least eight innings since the start of July, more have ERAs above 5.00 than below 4.00 (the margin is 5-3). Sure, the sample sizes in there are small, but that lack of reliability isn’t making manager Rob Thomson’s life any easier.

In case you thought I’d avoid picking on the Guardians, whose $101 million payroll is on par with that of the Orioles among the bottom five in the majors, they held a nine-game lead in the AL Central as of June 25, when they were a major league-best 51-26 (.662), but they’re just 21-26 (.447) since, and their lead is now down to two games over the Twins and three over the Royals. Cleveland’s biggest problem over the latter span is an offense that’s slipped from scoring 5.09 runs per game (107 wRC+) over the first span to 3.77 per game (86 wRC+) over the second. Steven Kwan’s hot start has been offset by his .238/.291/.354 (84 wRC+) slash line since June 25, and Andrés Giménez has been even worse (.259/.287/.309, 67 wRC+); in fact only three Guardians (Josh Naylor, Jhonkensy Noel, and José Ramírez) have a wRC+ above 95 over that stretch. The lack of offense from shortstop, center field, right field, and DH has become particularly glaring, and their rotation has a 4.99 ERA and 4.90 FIP since June 25 as well. Yikes.

Small samples, arbitrary endpoints, cherrypicked stats — this thumbnail guide to the top of the table may as well be sponsored by them. With Playoff Odds of at least 92.8% all the way around, none of these teams is in real danger of missing the postseason, and with the exception of the Orioles, all have a better than a coin toss of a chance of winning their divisions. Yet none is filling the niche of a powerhouse, which may feel unsatisfying and at the very least seems jarring, if not actually a problem.

The baseball season is a grind, full of streaks and slumps that in isolation aren’t always representative of the aforementioned players and teams, and this blurry snapshot taken during the dog days of August (more or less) may not be the most flattering. But while the lack of dominant teams may look like a problem when viewed from some vantages, it does set us up for some exciting races over the final six weeks. We’ll see which of these clubs shakes free of their recent miseries, or if we get some very unexpected results when the playoff brackets are finally drawn up.