In 2023, the Braves didn’t just lead the league in basically every offensive category, they posted historic numbers. They followed up that performance with a more middle-of-the-pack showing in 2024. Some of that downturn can be classified as regression to the mean, while some of it was definitely injury-related, with key contributors such as Ronald Acuña Jr., Ozzie Albies, Sean Murphy, and Austin Riley missing large chunks of the season. Moving forward, those theories imply that a healthy Braves lineup should perform somewhere in between their historically great 2023 and their exceptionally mediocre 2024. So far, however, the 2025 Braves have posted a gaunt 82 wRC+ as a team, creating anxiety that 2024 wasn’t just an unlucky draw from the low end of the range of possible outcomes, but rather something representative of a new normal, an indication that the range of possible outcomes in Atlanta has shifted downward. Of course, it’s too early to say for sure, especially since Acuña hasn’t made his 2025 debut, but batted ball and swing data, as well as changes in opponent pitching strategy, may offer insight into how pitchers have regained the upper hand when facing the Braves’ lineup.
If the extreme discrepancy in outcomes between 2023 and 2024 really was just variation within the error bars around Atlanta’s true talent level, then we’d expect to observe some amount of luck (good or bad) in their batted ball outcomes, which would lead their expected stats to diverge from their actual numbers, but the table below indicates their expected stats align pretty closely with reality:
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Every year, most teams hold some sort of team bonding, social event during spring training. The specifics of the event vary from team to team, but frequently they include renting out a movie theater and showing some cloying, inspirational movie like The Blind Side, Cool Runnings, Rudy, or better yet, a documentary like Free Solo. Regardless of the team’s outlook on the year, the goal is to get the players amped up for the season and ready to compete on the field, even if the competition in question is for fourth place in the division.
But what if instead of taking the clichéd route, teams actually tried to select a movie that fits their current vibe, one that’s thematically on brand with the state of their franchise? They won’t do this because spring training is a time for hope merchants to peddle their wares, even if they’re selling snake oil to sub-.500 teams. But spring training is over now, the regular season has begun, and it’s time to get real. So here are my movie selections for each National League team, sorted by release date from oldest to newest.
If you’re interested in which movies I selected for the American League teams, you can find those picks here. Read the rest of this entry »
Daphne Lemke/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Every year, most teams hold some sort of team bonding, social event during spring training. The specifics of the event vary from team to team, but frequently they include renting out a movie theater and showing some cloying, inspirational movie like The Blind Side, Cool Runnings, Rudy, or better yet, a documentary like Free Solo. Regardless of the team’s outlook on the year, the goal is to get the players amped up for the season and ready to compete on the field, even if the competition in question is for fourth place in the division.
But what if instead of taking the clichéd route, teams actually tried to select a movie that fits their current vibe, one that’s thematically on brand with the current state of their franchise? They won’t do this because spring training is a time for hope merchants to peddle their wares, even if they’re selling snake oil to sub-.500 teams. But spring training is over. It’s time to get real. So here are my movie selections for each American League team, sorted by release date from oldest to newest.
In the not-so-distant past, the shortstop position was dominated by defense-first players who hit at the bottom of the lineup. Pitchers loved to see them coming because it meant they could mentally check out for a batter. Meanwhile, if a shortstop could hit, he probably played pretty clumsy defense. I find it a bit trite to declare anything a renaissance while it’s still happening, and I don’t have the historical baseball authority to do so anyway, but I do want to acknowledge how impressive it is that such a strong majority of the starting shortstops on this list can legitimately hit and defend. Well-rounded shortstops are no longer unicorns or “nice to have.” Well-rounded shortstops are the standard. Glove-only shortstops are the aberration. Read the rest of this entry »
Y’know that point in the last few rounds of every fantasy football draft when kickers and defenses start flying off the board? We’ve reached the MLB offseason version of that, when teams start making sure their bullpens are composed of relievers more akin to Brandon Aubrey than the Panthers’ defense. With the rush on relief pitching officially on, the Tigers and Mets both agreed to one-year deals with right-handed, back of the ‘pen types on Wednesday. Detroit signedTommy Kahnle at a salary of $7.75 million for 2025, while New York guaranteedRyne Stanek $4.5 million for his services this year, with another $500,000 available in incentives.
In 2024, Detroit’s starters threw 753 innings, while the team’s relievers nearly matched that number with 694 innings — a league-best mark for innings thrown among major league bullpens. Maintaining success while covering such a large quantity of innings is tricky business. “One of our great strengths last year was our ability to throw different looks at hitters and try to limit the number of times a hitter saw the same type of look or shape or slot in a given series.” Tigers GM Scott Harris told reporters after the Kahnle signing, “Tommy gives us a look we didn’t have.”
Alongside Kahnle, the main characters in the Tigers bullpen are likely to be right-handers Jason Foley, Beau Brieske, and Will Vest, with Tyler Holton, Sean Guenther, and Brant Hurter making up the left-handed contingent. Foley and Holton handled most of the late-inning, high-leverage work last year, with Vest and Brieske next in line to get crucial outs. Now Kahnle offers an additional option in close-game scenarios. And as one would expect from such a bullpen-reliant team, a full cast of contributors sits waiting in the wings, be they starters asked to handle a long relief role, such as Matt Manning, Ty Madden, and Kenta Maeda, or minor leaguers with options and big league experience, such as Brenan Hanifee and Alex Lange (who is working his way back from a season-ending lat injury). Read the rest of this entry »
“It’s better not to know so much about what things mean.”
– David Lynch in Rolling Stone, September 1990
A few friends and I have a recurring movie night where we take turns choosing the featured film for the evening. Because one friend has decided to make his picks in the “campy horror” genre, last week we wound up watching Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (yes, THAT Peter Jackson). Rotten Tomatoes describes it as a “delightfully gonzo tale of a lovestruck teen and his zombified mother,” while Wikipedia goes with “zombie comedy splatter film.” It deals in absurdity and surrealism and its favorite tool of the trade is fake blood. The production reportedly went through about 80 gallons of the stuff.
Absurdist storytelling launders its messaging through exaggerated extremes and by defying or subverting logic in ways frequently so morbid or dark that they surpass tragedy and come all the way back around to comedy. Extremes that defy logic exist in baseball too. A particularly rich source being players’ home/road splits. I went searching the 2024 season for the most extreme differences in player performance (minimum 200 plate appearances) between their home parks and road venues across a variety of offensive metrics. In my own act of defying reason, I don’t really have an explanation for choosing hitters over pitchers. Maybe I’ll do pitchers in the future. Maybe I won’t. Who needs symmetry or balance in the universe? Anyway, I found the largest disparities, and ignored the boring, expected ones like Rockies hitters clubbing a bunch more homers at Coors Field, and instead, locked in on the truly bizarre.
Certain occurrences earn their bizarre status not because of their unexpected nature, but rather because they take an expected outcome to such an extreme as to feel over the top, or a bit “on the nose,” as an editor might put it. Dead Alive depicts Lionel, a young adult man, still living at home with his mother, an overbearing type who domineers his life. Lionel and his mother portray the standard “momma’s boy” archetype, but exaggerated to nth degree — the film culminates with the supercharged zombie version of Lionel’s mother inserting her son back into her womb, where she can finally regain complete control over his life.
Like an overbearing mother, certain ballparks have a strong influence on the type of hitter who thrives under their care. Some encourage power, or prefer a certain handedness, while others look down on hitting and choose instead to emphasize pitching and defense. Petco Park in San Diego does not favor offense in general, but it is among the least friendly ballparks for lefties who hit a bunch of singles. Enter Luis Arraez, the singles hitter of all singles hitters.
The infielder/DH was traded to the Padres from the Marlins last May 4. Like Lionel, who in the early scenes of Dead Alive meets a nice young woman named Paquita and takes her on a date to the zoo, Arraez continued to do his thing for the month of May, hitting 38 singles, compared to the 30 he hit during the first month of the season. But then Lionel’s mother interrupts the date, gets bit by a Sumatran Rat Monkey, and chaos ensues, just as the influence of Petco Park eventually exerts its will on Arraez. He ended the season with a .268 average at home and a .359 average on the road, due in part to his hitting about 20% fewer singles (71 vs. 90) and almost 50% fewer doubles (11 vs. 21) at home compared to on the road. This placed him at the extreme end of Petco Park’s offense dampening effects, so extreme as to feel like the stadium stuffed Arraez inside her womb until he learned his lesson about hitting all those singles.
Batting average is one thing, but there are other stats that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to have extreme home/road splits; similarly, you wouldn’t necessarily expect a scene at the beginning of a movie that depicts the main character mowing the lawn at the behest of his mother to foreshadow a momentum shift in the big fight scene at the end. Nevertheless, Brice Turang’s stolen base success rate was 15 points higher at home than on the road, which was the largest differential among base stealers with at least 30 attempts (omitting Jazz Chisholm Jr. who was around 20 percentage points better on the road, but also switched home stadiums in late July). The Brewers second baseman stole 28 bases at American Family Field and was caught just one time there, while in away parks he stole 22 bases and was caught five times. The discrepancy becomes all the more notable when considering Turang reached base less frequently at home, posting a .290 OBP in Milwaukee compared to a .341 OBP everywhere else.
There aren’t too many data points to suggest why Turang was better at swiping bags at home, but as a player with just over 1,000 big league plate appearances, it makes sense that some of his visual timing and positioning cues might be more locked in at AmFam than they are elsewhere in the league. Things like the first base cutout in the infield grass and the sightlines behind the pitcher as he’s taking his lead from first are likely more dialed in at the place where Turang has taken the majority of his reps in the majors. Using one of his strongest tools (94th percentile sprint speed) and the comforts of a familiar environment, Turang almost completely compensated for his otherwise negative contributions on offense, just as Lionel, in defending his home from a horde of zombie partygoers, turned to a trusted tool — his lawnmower and its sharp, speedy blade — to mow through the walking dead.
The largest split I could find with respect to wRC+, which is already adjusted for park factors, belongs to Luis García Jr., who after several up and down seasons with the Nationals, spent 2024 as Washington’s primary second baseman. The lefty logged a 156 wRC+ at home and a 63 wRC+ on the road, a 93-point spread. This is where it’s helpful to know exactly how the park adjustment is applied to wRC+ and why that might make a fairly neutral hitting environment like Nationals Park seem like an oasis for one hitter in particular. Or, in other words, why a young lady like Paquita might continue to see someone even after his zombie mother ate her dog.
Anyway, the park factor applied to wRC+ is a single value that captures the run environment in the stadium overall, as opposed to the more granular component level park factors that consider the stadium’s influence on the individual components of offense, such as singles, doubles, triples, home runs, etc. Component park factors that take into consideration the batter’s handedness are also available. Digging into the components of García’s home/road splits reveals that when in D.C., he struck out less and hit more singles and homers. Component park factors explain part of why García might benefit more from hitting in Washington than an average hitter: Nats Park does suppress strikeouts relative to its peers, and left-handed hitters get a boost with respect to singles. Fewer strikeouts means more balls in play at a ballpark where a ball in play off the bat of a lefty is more likely to lead to a hit. However, Washington remains neutral on home runs for those hitting from the left side. Looking at García’s splits with respect to batted ball characteristics reveal his home run-to-fly ball rate drops from 19.2% at home to 6.7% on the road. But it’s not just that the ball is carrying better because, additionally, his hard hit rate increases from 24.1% on the road to 38.4% at home. That García’s strikeout rate drops 10 percentage points in his home ballpark relative to everywhere else, in conjunction with his improved contact quality on fly balls, seems to suggest he sees the ball better at Nats Park than anywhere else. And for what it’s worth, a special aptitude for vision is what kept Lionel’s girlfriend from abandoning him, as she believed the tarot reading done by her seer/grandmother that foretold a fated, long-term romantic entanglement with Lionel.
Many don’t believe in fate and instead subscribe to the nihilistic view that the universe is composed of randomness, which at times manifests as utter, uninterpretable chaos. T-Mobile Park in Seattle is one of the worst ballparks for hitters, both overall and across all individual components, unless, by chance, you happen to be Luke Raley. The Mariners outfielder/first baseman defied the natural order of the universe (to the extent that there is one) and posted a .393 wOBA, 166 wRC+, and hit 15 home runs across 229 plate appearances at home, with a .295 wOBA, 91 wRC+, and seven homers over 226 PA on the road. Looking at component factors does absolutely nothing to explain Raley’s performance at T-Mobile Park, since as a lefty, all of Seattle’s horrible hitting juju applies even more so than it does for righties. His BABIP hovered around .300 both at home on the road, suggesting that if there’s luck in his performance, it was distributed evenly at home and on the road. In terms of his batted ball profile, Raley did have a higher hard hit rate at home, and he also pulled the ball more and put it in the air more, which collectively signals an overall higher quality of contact. Perhaps like the tarot-reading grandmother, Raley possesses some special sight that allows him to see the ball in a way that no one else has mustered at T-Mobile Park, or perhaps, as is the messaging of much absurdist art, we must simply submit to the random, chaotic winds of the universe, blowing some fly balls over the fence and leaving others to die on the warning track.
Whatever force is tasked with inflicting chaos upon the masses, it seems to enjoy unleashing Yordan Alvarez as often as possible. It’s true that Houston’s lefty DH/left fielder was not involved with the Astros’ banging scheme scandal, but he nevertheless is a frequent recipient of boos at away ballparks due to his uncanny ability to launch game-winning, soul-crushing moonshots in front of opposing fans. Though the booing is more of a vibes-based response, the data show that Alvarez does tap into his power more frequently on the road, hitting both doubles and home runs at a much higher rate, leading to a road wRC+ that is 62 points higher than his mark at home (a road advantage topped only by J.P. Crawford of the Mariners).
Again, wRC+ already accounts for the overall run environment, but not the components by which a particular player might be more heavily impacted. Houston’s ballpark, which is now called Daikin Park, grades out as neutral to hitters overall and with respect to left-handed home runs, but for doubles, a lefty hitter should have an easier go of it (though it’s worth noting Alvarez pulls the ball at a below average rate for lefties). But despite the neutral or better home park environment, in 2024, Alvarez hit 12 doubles and 13 homers across 315 plate appearances at home, while hitting 22 doubles and 22 homers across 320 plate appearances on the road. Alvarez also walked slightly more on the road, while holding his strikeout rate constant, suggesting a more patient approach that led to higher quality contact; this is reinforced by his higher home run-to-fly ball rate (20.4% vs. 11.7%) and hard hit rate (46.1% vs. 36.1%) away from Houston.
As with some of the other extreme splits, the increased patience and improved contact might mean that Alvarez doesn’t see the ball as well at Daikin Park as he does elsewhere. Or this instance of absurd home/road splits might be trying to send a different message. Absurdist art and its close relative, surrealism, frequently serve to defy logic, or at least quantifiable logic. At the end of Dead Alive, Lionel cuts his way out of his mother’s womb using a talisman that Paquita’s grandmother gave him for good luck. She probably thought its magical properties would prevent anything bad from happening to him, rather than its physical properties allowing him to puncture zombie flesh. Even magic follows no logical order.
Meanwhile, when asked to describe the experience of playing in a big league stadium in front of a packed crowd during the highest leverage moments of the game, players frequently use the word surreal. And in the surreal world, there wouldn’t necessarily be a logical explanation for why Alvarez becomes more powerful on the road, why he happens to be holding a talisman that can puncture the hearts of opposing fans. Maybe he feels less pressure away from the home fans. Maybe he takes a twisted pleasure in making a stadium full of fans fall silent. Maybe, like the zombies in the movie, he takes a poison intended for animals that has the unintended effect of supercharging his abilities. I’m mixing my talisman and poison metaphors now, but as previously established, there are no rules and nothing matters, so just roll with it and instead linger on the thought that if Alvarez ever leaves the Astros, he may morph into a supercharged monster permanently.
While we’re defying logic, I did stumble upon one member of the Colorado Rockies with a home/road split worth mentioning. In 228 plate appearances at Coors Field, Michael Toglia hit eight home runs; in 230 plate appearances away from Coors Field, he hit 17 home runs. So, in nearly the same number of opportunities, Toglia smacked more than twice as many home runs on the road as he did at Coors Field, a park notorious for juicing fly balls. My best guess is that the stadium’s reputation is doing psychic damage to a 26-year-old first baseman with just one full season under his belt. His hard hit rate is still higher at home, suggesting maybe he thinks that all he needs to do is swing out of his shoes and the thin air will do the rest. Meanwhile, his Med% is higher on the road and he hits the ball to the opposite field more often, suggesting a more controlled, purposeful swing away from the influence of Colorado. Maybe he’s overthinking the atmospheric conditions, or maybe he made a deal with an evil imp that granted him 60-grade raw power everywhere except the Mile High City.
Sometimes chaotic occurrences exist purely for comedic relief, offering no larger societal lesson or commentary on humanity. At one point in Dead Alive, Lionel visits his mother’s grave because he knows she’s a zombie and, therefore, not actually dead, so his master plan is to administer sedatives to her indefinitely in order to keep her safely in the ground. When he gets jumped at the cemetery by a band of local hooligans, he’s saved by a priest (literally, not spiritually), who seems to have exactly one skill, which is, as the priest puts it, to “kick ass for the Lord.” He does single-handedly wipe out the hooligans with what appears to be self-taught kung fu, but then promptly gets conscripted to the zombie ranks. The kung fu priest of baseball is Mike Yastrzemski, right fielder for the Giants, whose extreme singular skill is striking out way less at home than on the road. All of his other splits are as expected, but when batting at Oracle Park, he strikes out 19.7% of the time, compared to 32.6% everywhere else. It’s the most extreme strikeout difference in the bigs by a couple of percentage points.
In the movie’s next scene, Lionel has rounded up the current group of zombies, including the priest and a nurse, who was originally dispatched to look into his mother’s ailments before her transition to undead was complete. The priest and the nurse take a liking to one another and wind up birthing a baby zombie. This leads to a scene that was not in the original script and serves no purpose to the larger narrative; really, it’s just there for the jokes. Jackson decided to add it after they’d finished filming everything else, because they were still under budget, and since then, he has called it his favorite scene in the movie. For no comprehensible reason, Lionel takes the baby to the park, pushing it along in a stroller and mimicking the actions of the mothers he observes interacting with their babies. Perhaps Lionel thought that a change of scenery and treating the baby like a regular human baby would coax it into acting like a regular human baby, but it did not. Instead the viewer is treated to a series of hijinks, where the baby drags Lionel all over the park, and Lionel has to act like tackling a baby is perfectly normal behavior.
New Orioles outfielder Tyler O’Neill is the zombie baby hoping that a change of scenery does prompt a transformation. O’Neill experienced an even stranger flavor of Yastrzemski’s strikeout split. It’s not particularly unusual for hitters to strike out less in San Francisco (though not to the extreme reached by Yastrzemski), and the same holds true for Boston, where O’Neill played his home games last year. But O’Neill flipped the script; instead of striking out less at Fenway Park, he struck out significantly more frequently, posting a rate of 39.7% as opposed to 27.9% on the road. O’Neill hasn’t always struck out more at home than on the road. For example, during his final two years with the Cardinals, he was better in St. Louis than he was away from it, which is interesting considering that Fenway is a much more hitter-friendly park than Busch Stadium. It’s pretty funny to think that Fenway of all places could act as one hitter’s kryptonite, but the Orioles are hoping that was the case here. Perhaps getting O’Neill into a different park will do for him what Lionel couldn’t do for the zombie baby. If O’Neill’s overall line winds up resembling something closer to last year’s road performance, he’s much more likely to be a productive contributor in Baltimore. The spike in strikeouts caused his on-base percentage to crater to .301 in Boston, compared to .369 everywhere else.
For as much as we’d like for everything in baseball and life to follow some logical, rational, and quantifiable natural order, it doesn’t always work that way. There are too many lurking variables, agents of chaos, and forces we don’t yet understand. Sometimes it’s incredibly funny when something happens that we can’t explain. Sometimes it teaches us something completely separate from what we set out to divine. Sometimes we just have to accept that we don’t know what a weird thing is really about.
The Orioles finally got tired of being poked with a stick to choruses of “Do something!” and signed Charlie Morton to a one-year deal worth $15 million. Will this move silence those voices? Probably not! But as Baltimore’s GM, Mike Elias seems impervious to external feedback, so those still crowing may as well be talking to a wall. Then again, maybe a wall would have a better understanding of the importance of balance when it comes to construction, making it better equipped to construct a big league roster. But more on that in a minute.
In a vacuum, signing Morton to an affordable, short-term deal is a positive addition. Though 2025 will be his age-41 season, Morton has logged at least 160 innings in each of the last four years and put up league average (or better) numbers. Given the scarcity of healthy, quality pitching over the last few years, pitchers who post are extremely valuable. And if one didn’t know Morton had already crested 40, scanning his production wouldn’t yield any obvious giveaways. He has become more of a finesse pitcher, relying on command and weak contact over strikeouts, but the shift has been subtle. Over the last four seasons, he’s thrown his curveball more than his four-seamer and his groundball rate has gradually grown, while his strikeout rate has slowly dwindled. Morton’s curve is easily his best pitch by Stuff+ at 122, and that’s what he uses to induce whiffs and groundballs. His other offerings have Stuff+ scores ranging from 72 to 86, but he locates them well and they mirror the spin of his curveball to keep hitters off balance.
As a pitcher relying on his ability to keep the ball on the ground, it would make Morton’s life easier to take the mound in front of a strong infield defense. In 2024, the Orioles infielders logged -20 OAA and -14.3 defensive runs, but there is reason to think they’ll do better moving forward. Last season’s numbers include a lot of Jordan Westburg playing second base instead of third, where he’s a much stronger defender, and Ramón Urías looking at times overcooked while covering the hot corner after Westburg went down with a fractured hand. Meanwhile, this is a young team that still has room for growth. Ryan Mountcastle’s defense at first has seen small year-over-year improvements since 2022, when he made the move from the outfield permanent. Ideally, Jackson Holliday will get settled in at second, and though Gunnar Henderson’s play at shortstop is the least of anyone’s concern, given that he’s still only 23, there’s no reason to think he’s done leveling up his game. Read the rest of this entry »
For the first time since the Eisenhower Administration, women dreaming of playing baseball professionally in the United States will have the opportunity to see that dream realized with a league of their own.
Last October, the Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) issued its first press release to announce the founding of the country’s only professional women’s baseball league, which is set to launch in the summer of 2026. The league is co-founded by Justine Siegal — who is best known for founding Baseball For All, “[A] girls baseball nonprofit that builds gender equity by creating opportunities for girls to play, coach, and lead in the sport” — and Keith Stein, a businessman, lawyer, and member of the ownership group for a semiprofessional men’s baseball team in Toronto. The league has also brought in former Toronto Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston and Team Japan’s two-time Women’s Baseball World Cup MVP Ayami Sato as special advisors.
Women’s baseball has a long, but unfortunately sparse, history dating back to the late 1800s, when colleges in the Northeast, such as Vassar, fielded teams. Since then, women have largely accrued playing time by representing their country’s national team at the Olympics, playing on barnstorming teams – from the Dolly Vardens in the 1870s to the Colorado Silver Bullets in the 1990s – or by earning roles in leagues primarily created for men, from the amateur ranks to the pros (see Mo’ne Davis, Toni Stone, Lizzie Arlington, and more recently, Kelsie Whitmore, among many others). Aside from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed during WWII to fill a void left by the male ballplayers fighting overseas, women in the United States have not had a dedicated professional league.
So after all these years without a league, why now? “The past was the right time,” Stein says in a recent interview with FanGraphs. “Thirty years ago was the right time. Four years ago was the right time. Definitely, definitely, now is the right time.” As evidence, he notes, “There’s now a professional women’s hockey league that’s thriving, a professional women’s soccer league, a professional women’s basketball league. They’re all thriving because of the appetite, the incredible appetite, for women’s sport.” Read the rest of this entry »
Every year when the postseason rolls around, we enjoyers of baseball try our best to make sure we’re properly appreciating the history unfolding on the field before us. We want to acknowledge when we’ve just watched a game so magical that it will be spoken of in tones of awe and disbelief for years to come. Downstream of that, we like to evaluate whether a game, a series, or even an entire postseason was a good one, mentally sorting them into tiers with other postseasons we’ve watched. Some measures of “good” are subjective, coming down to our personal preferences for certain strategies, styles of play, narratives, teams, or players. Other measures are more universally agreed upon and objectively quantifiable. In particular, most neutral observers value a close, exciting game, one that features both tension and action to keep observers engaged.
Win Probability Added (WPA) provides a reasonable proxy for measuring both tension and excitement. At the plate appearance level, it uses the score, inning, and base-out state (i.e. runner on second, two outs) to calculate a team’s win expectancy based on historical outcomes. The difference in a team’s win expectancy after a plate appearance relative to what it was before it represents the WPA during the plate appearance in question. WPA will be negative for the team whose odds of winning decreased while being positive for their opponent, but in this context, we’re going to focus on the magnitude of the change in win expectancy. Without a rooting interest, it’s less about which team wins and more about seeing big plays that impact the outcome of the game. Games with a large quantity of WPA have a lot of high-impact plays and lead changes that allow teams to pass win probability back and forth between one another.
Using WPA, we can evaluate the quality of the action in a given game by both looking at the average WPA per plate appearance and by adding up the game’s total WPA. Both methods provide useful insight. Average WPA per plate appearance controls for the variable number of plate appearances in a game, since games with more plate appearances have more opportunities to accumulate WPA. Sometimes that accumulation constitutes empty calories; other times it’s more substantial. Ultimately, we want the games that top the charts from both perspectives. Read the rest of this entry »
Ice Cube opened Game 2 of the World Series in Los Angeles by manifesting a “Good Day” for the Dodgers. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Dodgers bullpen put the Yankees offense in a freezer, while the Los Angeles bats got to Carlos Rodón. But in the seventh inning the sun set on the good day when Shohei Ohtani injured his shoulder on a stolen base attempt. After the game, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Ohtani suffered a subluxation of the shoulder and that further testing would be required, but his strength and range of motion were good. With the severity of the injury still unclear, a 4-2 win and 2-0 series lead for now is clouded by uncertainty.
Prior to the vibe shift, the game began with Yamamoto on the mound for his fourth start of the postseason. His performance in his prior starts was shaky – allowing five runs in three innings in his first meeting with the Padres, zero runs in five innings in a second face off with San Diego, and two runs in 4 1/3 innings against the Mets. The Dodgers have been managing Yamamoto’s workload since his return from a right rotator cuff strain on September 10, and he hadn’t pitched more than five innings in a start since June 7, when he silenced the Yankees in the Bronx for seven scoreless innings. In Game 2, Yamamoto’s second start against the Yankees, he was nearly as effective as he was in that first outing: He one-hit New York over 6 1/3 innings, allowing just one earned run on a Juan Soto home run. Soto, who scored both Yankees runs in Game 2, was their only player whose bat avoided the deep freeze.
For Yamamoto to reach the level of effectiveness he showcased on Saturday night, he relies on a variety of offspeed pitches to keep hitters from sitting on his four-seamer, which is his worst pitch by Stuff+ with a grade of 84. He kept the Yankees off balance by disregarding standard sequencing practices. Instead he deployed his curveball, splitter, slider, and cutter to trap the Yankees offense in a web of sequencing chaos. Read the rest of this entry »
