Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first chat of September. I apologize for that — this current time slot hasn’t worked out well lately with dad duties and so I’m going to explore moving to a 12 pm time slot
Jay Jaffe: A lot of times that I miss the chat it’s because I have to pick up my daughter from school or (in the summer) camp. Just tough to get around needing to happen in the middle of a chat.
The Twins still have a hold on the third AL Wild Card spot — for the moment. After blowing a 3-0 lead against the Guardians in Monday’s series opener in Cleveland, they’ve lost 18 of their past 27 games. They haven’t won a series against a team with a winning percentage of .500 or better in over a month, and now lead the surging Tigers by just a game and a half in the Wild Card standings. This past weekend, Minnesota activated both Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa from the injured list following lengthy absences, but the two stars by all accounts are playing at less than 100 percent, and sadly for manager Rocco Baldelli, they aren’t likely to provide innings out of the bullpen when they’re not in the lineup.
As of August 17, the Twins were 70-53, a season-high 17 games above .500. At the time, they were running second in the AL Central, two games behind the Guardians, and second in the Wild Card race, a game and a half behind the Orioles but two games ahead of the Royals, from whom they’d just taken two out of three (that aforementioned last series victory against a winning team). Since then, the Twins have gone just 9-18 (.333), outdoing only the White Sox (5-21, .192) and Angels (7-19, .269) among all major league teams; even the worst NL team in that span, the Marlins, has gone 10-17 (.370). The slump has pretty much closed the door on Minnesota’s chances of claiming the AL Central, and meanwhile, the Tigers have gone 17-9, tied for the majors’ best record in that span, to poke their noses into the Wild Card picture.
Twins Change in Playoff Odds
Date
W
L
W%
Div GB
WC GB
Div
Bye
WC
Playoffs
Win WS
August 17
70
53
.569
2
+5*
36.8%
33.9%
55.6%
92.4%
6.4%
September 17
79
71
.527
7.5
+1.5*
0.2%
0.1%
76.6%
76.7%
3.2%
Change
9
18
.333
-36.6%
-33.8%
+21.0%
-15.7%
-3.2%
* = lead over top non-Wild Card team.
During this slide, the Twins have lost series to the Padres, Cardinals, Braves, Royals, and Reds, splitting one with the Rays, and beating only the Blue Jays and Angels — not exactly a performance befitting a playoff-bound team. In that span, the offense has scored just 3.81 runs per game while the pitching staff has allowed 5.22 per game. It’s not what you want. Read the rest of this entry »
Heading into the year, everyone thought this would be the season that Shohei Ohtani, rehabbing from elbow surgery and DHing only, stepped aside and yielded MVP to someone else before resuming his place as the de facto favorite for the award in 2025. Instead, Ohtani decided to make a run at the first ever 50-homer, 50-steal season. The other primary competitor for NL MVP is Francisco Lindor, who isn’t chasing any statistical milestones and plays for a team whose most interesting narratives involve an amorphous fast food mascot, the musical endeavors of a part-time utility infielder, and the failure to extend Pete Alonso. And yet, Lindor’s position atop the NL WAR leaderboard demands consideration.
The marginal difference between Lindor and Ohtani’s WAR totals (7.4 and 7.0, respectively, at the time of this writing) creates a virtual tie to be broken based on the personal convictions of voters and anyone else with an opinion and an internet connection. For most, the choice between the two distills down to whether Ohtani’s 50/50 chase overrides his DH-only status. I’m not here to disparage Ohtani for not playing defense, but if you find that disqualifying for MVP recognition, I feel that. Then again, WAR includes a positional adjustment that does ding Ohtani with a significant deduction for not taking the field, and he’s still been keeping pace with Lindor on the value front anyway, so there’s not much more analysis to do there.
Instead, I want to explore how Ohtani’s one-dimensional role interacts with the value of a roster spot and the limitations that it places on how Los Angeles constructs and deploys the rest of its roster. In a two-way Ohtani season, he brings tremendous value to an individual roster spot as a frontline starter and an elite hitter who takes 600 or so plate appearances. But this year he contributes only as an offensive player. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
After taking a look at the qualifying offer decisions that have to be made shortly after the conclusion of the World Series, I figured now would be as good a time as any to run down the team and player option decisions. We’ll start with the National League, with the American League following on Friday. Here’s what’s on the table. Read the rest of this entry »
With just two weeks left in the regular season, the two Wild Card races look like they’ll be the only source of drama down the stretch. Entering this week, the top team in the closest divisional race has an 87.8% chance to finish in first — that’s the most uncertain winner, according to our playoff odds.
This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.
To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps. Read the rest of this entry »
The Diamondbacks won a wild game against the Brewers at Chase Field on Sunday, one in which they built and then squandered a 5-0 lead, overcame an 8-5 deficit to send the game to extra innings, fell behind 10-8 in the 10th inning, and finally, won in walk-off fashion, 11-10. Eugenio Suárez was at the center of much of the excitement. The 33-year-old third baseman drove in the game’s first run, and later plated both the tying and winning runs as well. It was the latest stellar performance of the player who’s been the NL’s hottest hitter since the beginning of July, digging his way out of an early-season slump.
Suárez began his Sunday afternoon by slapping a one-out RBI single off DL Hall through the right side of the infield, bringing home the first of three runs that the Diamondbacks scored in that frame. Facing Hall again, he struck out in the third before Arizona mounted a two-out, two-run rally that extended its lead to 5-0. Suárez grounded out against Joe Ross to end the fourth, and struck out again, against Aaron Ashby, to end the sixth, by which point the Brewers had pulled ahead 7-5 after chasing Zac Gallen and roughing up reliever Kevin Ginkel.
After the Diamondbacks scored two runs to cut the lead to 8-7 in the seventh, Suárez hit a sacrifice fly that brought home Corbin Carroll — who had walked, stolen second, and taken third on a wild pitch — in the eighth. Milwaukee scored two in the top of the 10th, but in the bottom of the frame, four straight Diamondbacks reached base, via three singles and a hit-by-pitch, before Suárez swatted a towering 100.5-mph fly ball that bounced off the right-center field wall, driving home Ketel Marte with the winning run. Read the rest of this entry »
Colton Cowser is a leading contender for American League Rookie of the Year honors, and his power numbers are among the reasons why. The 24-year-old Baltimore Orioles outfielder has 20 home runs to go with a .240/.321/.431 slash line and a 115 wRC+. San Diego’s Jackson Merrill (23) is the only rookie in either league to have left the yard more times.
That Cowser is clearing fences with some regularity is in many ways unsurprising. At a listed 6-foot-2, 220 pounds, his build is that of a basher. That said, his profile going forward wasn’t entirely clear when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in February 2022. Drafted fifth overall the previous summer out of Sam Houston State University, Cowser had propelled just a pair of baseballs over outfield barriers in 149 low-level plate appearances. Moreover, as I related to him in our offseason conversation, Baseball America had recently cited his “impressive walk-to-strikeout ratio,” adding that his swing path is “presently more geared toward contact versus power.”
The numbers suggest that Cowser is no longer the same style of hitter. After having more free passes than Ks in college and in his first taste of professional action, the left-handed-swinging slugger has fanned a team-worst 157 times this season with a 30.5% strikeout rate and a 9.5% walk rate. He’s also hitting more balls in the air, as evidenced by his 38.2 FB%. That number was just 26.9 in his two-plus years down on the farm.
Cowser’s thoughts on making less contact as he settles in to what promises to be a productive MLB career? Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and R.J. Anderson of CBS Sports debate whether Jackson Holliday, Jackson Chourio, or Jackson Merrill will be the best player long term, discuss the addition of ads to batting helmets and continued MLB ad creep, and ponder the possibility of publicly owned ballclubs. Then (55:52) Ben talks to Mojo Hill about covering Derek Bender, the Twins minor league catcher who was released for telling opposing hitters which pitches were coming. Finally (1:27:09), Ben brings on Frequent Stat Blast Correspondent Ryan Nelson for Blasts about runs scoring on three consecutive wild pitches, players who faced the same opponent with the most teams in a single season, the most and least consistent start lengths, team games with the same number of hits, walks, and runs, and bad bullpen support.
Even in an age in which baseball – and most sports to an extent – has become an extremely data-driven enterprise, the stew of conventional wisdom, mythology, and storylines could still feed a pretty large family. That’s not to say that this is a bad thing; even an old, jaded stat nerd like me gets excited to enjoy such a stew from time to time. But at the end of the day, an analyst has to focus on what’s true and what is not, and very few bits of baseball orthodoxy are more persistent than that of the sophomore slump. Coined for underperforming second-year high school or college athletes, the meaning in baseball is roughly parallel it: After a successful rookie season, a player finds it difficult to maintain the performance from their debut and are weighed down by the greatly increased expectations. As an analyst, the inevitable follow-up question is whether the sophomore slump is actually real.
While I entered this article with some rather developed skepticism, there’s no denying that high-performing rookies do occasionally have pretty wretched follow-up campaigns. Every longtime baseball fan can probably rattle off a dozen or so names instantly after reading the title of the article. For me, visions of Joe Charboneau, Pat Listach, Mark Fidrych, Jerome Walton, and Chris Coghlan dance in my head. And the list goes on and on. However, a second-year skid doesn’t mean there’s a special effect that causes it. The fact of the matter is that you should expect a lot of regression toward the mean for any player in baseball who can be optioned freely to the minors. The way baseball’s minor league system works accentuates the selection bias; underperforming rookies are typically demoted while the ones crushing reasonable expectations get to stay.
Looking at the sophomore slumpers, the story is typically more complicated than the cautionary tale. ZiPS has minor league translations going back to 1950 at this point, and while Super Joe (Charboneau) hit very well in the season before his debut (.352/.422/.597 for Double-A Chattanooga), at 24, he wasn’t young for the level, and ZiPS takes enough air out of that line to drop his translated OPS below .800. ZiPS thought he’d be an OK lefty-masher, but not much more than that.
ZiPS Projection – Joe Charboneau
Year
BA
OBP
SLG
AB
R
H
2B
3B
HR
RBI
BB
SO
SB
OPS+
WAR
1980
.290
.350
.454
449
74
130
26
3
14
66
41
69
4
118
1.5
1981
.276
.335
.421
463
72
128
25
3
12
63
40
71
3
119
1.8
1982
.284
.348
.456
465
76
132
29
3
15
64
45
72
3
119
1.8
1983
.296
.360
.481
466
79
138
31
2
17
69
46
68
3
124
1.9
1984
.297
.361
.461
462
79
137
27
2
15
71
46
72
3
124
1.7
1985
.273
.337
.429
443
69
121
26
2
13
62
42
72
3
109
1.4
1986
.275
.342
.443
411
66
113
23
2
14
67
42
72
2
114
1.2
1987
.290
.359
.483
373
63
108
23
2
15
56
40
70
2
118
1.1
1988
.268
.334
.406
355
53
95
20
1
9
42
35
62
2
102
0.6
1989
.274
.341
.398
299
44
82
17
1
6
32
30
54
1
106
0.5
1990
.269
.336
.408
238
35
64
13
1
6
32
24
44
1
108
0.3
1991
.267
.330
.390
172
23
46
10
1
3
16
16
31
1
98
0.1
Charboneau had a solid offensive rookie season, winning the AL Rookie of the Year award, but in his case, the fates didn’t really give him a fair opportunity to repeat that season. He injured his back in spring training and played through the injury, as was the style of the time. Across a couple of stints in the majors after his rookie breakout, he combined to bat .210/.247/.362 over 147 at-bats, and he was never healthy or trusted enough to make good. He didn’t hit again in the minors, either, with the only exception a walk-heavy .791 OPS as a 29-year-old in A-Ball (!).
As quick as Charboneau’s fall from grace was, it was far from the biggest rookie WAR drop-off. Using the definition of rookie in our leaderboards, which doesn’t know about roster service time days but is suitable for the approach of identifying rookies rather than specific Rookie of the Year eligibility, here are the biggest sophomore slides by WAR since 1901.
Some of these players recovered to have solid major league careers and some of these slumps resulted from serious injury, such as Kerry Wood’s, but for some of the players, that was the end of the road for them in the big leagues. As for Super Joe, his skid was the 100th worst in history among hitters!
So, how do we extract a sophomore-slump effect from simple sophomore slumps? At this point, I’ve been running projections for two decades, so I have a decent-sized database of projections calculated contemporaneously (as opposed to backfilling before ZiPS existed). I certainly haven’t told ZiPS to give a special penalty to solid rookies having bad follow-up campaigns, so I went back and looked at the projections vs. realities for every hitter with a two-WAR rookie season and every pitcher who eclipsed 1.5 WAR. (Rookie pitchers tend to have more trouble grabbing playing time.) That gave me 166 hitters and 207 pitchers. Let’s start with the hitters.
ZiPS Projections – Two-WAR Rookie Hitters
Rookie WAR
#
Average WAR
Average Projection, Next Year
Actual Average, Next Year
4.0+
26
5.13
3.54
3.71
3.0-4.0
44
3.50
2.51
2.30
2.0-3.0
96
2.41
1.79
1.90
All 2.0+
166
3.12
2.26
2.29
The 26 players in the top bucket averaged 5.1 WAR in their rookie seasons and 3.7 WAR in their sophomore seasons. That’s a pretty significant drop-off, but they were projected for an even steeper decline. The next group — 44 players who accumulated 3-4 WAR as rookies — underperformed its projection by about two runs per player, while the 96 rookies who finished with 2-3 WAR slightly overperformed their projections, but it was very close. As for the entire sample of 166 hitters, ZiPS projected a decline from an average 3.1 WAR as rookies to 2.3 in their sophomore seasons. Their actual average in their second year was… 2.3 WAR. Let’s look at the pitchers.
ZiPS Projections – 1.5-WAR Rookie Pitchers
Rookie WAR
#
Average WAR
Average Projection, Next Year
Actual Average, Next Year
3.5+
17
3.92
2.35
2.51
2.5-3.5
51
2.87
2.10
2.10
1.5-2.5
139
1.91
1.37
1.48
1.5+
207
2.31
1.63
1.71
This is the same story, with the decline for pitchers being about as predictable as it was for hitters: ZiPS underestimated their second-year WAR by about 0.08 wins on average.
That’s not the end of it, however. I wanted to see if ZiPS has projected a similar decline for players who were coming off their second through fifth seasons, because that would determine whether ZiPS was capturing a sophomore-slump effect or if this was just a more general regression to the mean for players with less major league experience.
Average ZiPS Projection Decline by Service Time for Hitters
Service Time
Average Projection Decline
Rookie
0.86
Sophomore
0.88
Third Year
0.73
Fourth Year
0.89
Fifth Year
0.92
Average ZiPS Projection Decline by Service Time for Pitchers
Service Time
Average Projection Decline
Rookie
0.68
Sophomore
0.59
Third Year
0.72
Fourth Year
0.63
Fifth Year
0.66
In sum, ZiPS didn’t knock more performance off high-performing rookies than it did for sophomores, juniors, seniors, and guys who stayed a fifth year because they had to drop too many 8 a.m. classes that they slept through. That’s because the sophomore-slump effect doesn’t exist.
So yes, projections will likely project fewer WAR next season from this year’s standout rookies, such as Jackson Merrill, Jackson Chourio, and Masyn Winn. But that dip is likely to be the result of the typical regression toward the mean that any high performer with a limited track record is expected to experience.
If I’ve learned anything from the new Statcast bat tracking data, it’s that bat speed alone isn’t sufficient to produce a high-quality major league hitter. Johnathan Rodriguez, Trey Cabbage, Zach Dezenzo, Jerar Encarnacion — all of these guys, at this early stage of their major league careers, swing hard but miss harder. Bat speed only matters when you make contact.
When you do hit the ball, however, it’s nice when your swing is as fast as possible. Swinging fast while making good contact most of the time — it’s hard to do, but if you can do it, you’re probably one of the best hitters in baseball.
The reason it’s rare is because these two variables — swinging hard and making solid contact — are negatively correlated. As some probably remember from when these stats originally dropped, Luis Arraez swings the slowest and squares up everything, while Giancarlo Stanton swings the fastest but seldom connects. A slow swing is a more precise swing, and so the group of hitters who can swing precisely while letting it rip are uncommon.
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first chat of September. I apologize for that — this current time slot hasn’t worked out well lately with dad duties and so I’m going to explore moving to a 12 pm time slot
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