In 2017, The Ringer called Anthony Rendon baseball’s “unknown superstar.” A year later, at the conclusion of the 2018 season, Beyond the Box Score described Rendon as “constantly overlooked.” I’m pretty sure there’s a law somewhere that says that when you write about Rendon, you have to describe him using the word “underrated” or one like it. But rules were made to be broken, and this one has run its course. Rendon is too good to be underrated any more. He has a strong case as being the best third baseman in baseball — which is an incredibly deep field — and an even better case as one of the top 10 players in the game overall.

Let’s start with the top-line figures and then get into the mechanics. Here are baseball’s WAR leaders since 2013, when Rendon made his debut for the Nationals:

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The Yankees and Astros both won over 100 games in the regular season but nobody beats Mother Nature. When a rainstorm causes cool terms like “bomb cyclone” or “explosive cyclogenesis” to be bandied about, you know you’re not expecting a light drizzle. Yankee Stadium is currently dry, but with a system the size of the mid-Atlantic barreling up the coast, it didn’t make sense for MLB to pretend that tonight’s ALCS Game 4 was going to take place. Just look at the radar, courtesy of the National Weather Service:

Yikes. The rain provides the Yankees and Astros with an extra off-day now at the expense of losing an off-day between a possible Game 5 and Game 6. This isn’t a big deal for the hitters, but it will result in some revised pitching plans. In a five-game divisional series, teams can generally muddle through with a three-man rotation. Due to the 2-2-1 format, no team plays on three consecutive days, and while the Game 1 starter would have to pitch Game 4 on short rest, the Game 2 starter can pitch in a possible rubber match on normal rest. This extra rest gives teams the flexibility to either stretch their best three starters or, as the Nationals demonstrated, use starting pitchers in relief more aggressively.

But short of baseball going to some kind of impractical 2-2-1-1-1 format, that doesn’t quite work in a seven-game series. So unless you’re going to have your entire rotation do it 1930-style, you’ll need to use a fourth starter. That isn’t an ideal situation for either the Yankees or the Astros. From a pure projection standpoint, it’s actually doesn’t move the probabilities. The Astros get an immediate benefit in that they avoid a Bullpen vs. Bullpen Game 4; ZiPS takes bullpen depth into consideration and Yankees enjoy a significant projected edge in any such bullpen game. Before the rainout, ZiPS projected the Yankees to have a 56%-44% edge in a home bullpen duel, so it’s a nice game to delay if you’re Houston.

The problem you run into with this model is that the rainout doesn’t really add an extra day of rest, it simply moves it. Since there are only two days of rest for a Game 4 starter to pitch in Game 7 now, both teams end up repeating the dilemma of either using a fourth starter — particularly problematic for the Astros — or going with a bullpen game. Read the rest of this entry »

This could be the story of a kid with an awkward swing getting cut from his junior college ball team and never playing again, but it isn’t.

This could be the story of a rookie who debuted with the Angels by starting a slick double play, but never learned to hit, got sent back to the minors, and lived out the rest of his baseball days eating peanut butter and jelly and not hearing the phone ring.

But it’s not that either.

This could be the story of a young player who got spread too thin as his team experimented with playing him all over in the infield. “Things happen everyday in baseball,” Howie Kendrick told the L.A. Times in 2006. “One day I might be an outfielder. I’m open to moving anywhere.” And he did. He’s played 190 games in the outfield, so far.

This could be the story of a talented hitter trapped behind a middle infield logjam at the top of the Angels’ farm system. Or buried in their lineup under 700 pounds of struggling sluggers named Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton, and Mark Trumbo.

Or a debatable starter who became the smiling face on the poster for “Batting Average Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story.” Or a veteran infielder relegated to the corners, sideswiped by strained hamstrings and a sore abdomen.

But it’s not any of things. Not entirely, anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

With their sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals, capped off by a 7-4 win last night, the Washington Nationals are bringing the World Series back to the nation’s capital for the first time since 1933.

No team gets to the World Series without their fair share of luck, and the Nationals certainly have seen things go their way so far this October. But at the end of the day, talent reigns supreme. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that the Nationals were a superior team to the Cardinals. They produced 48.3 WAR this season, more than 10 wins above the Cardinals’ aggregate of 37.9. Washington’s hitters produced a wRC+ eight points higher than St. Louis’; their pitchers produced a FIP- six points lower. The Nationals were simply better across the board. What’s arguably most exciting for fans in Washington is that their top talent has stepped up when things have mattered most.

One of my favorite statistics to follow during the postseason is Championship Win Probability added, or cWPA, housed on the website The Baseball Gauge. It’s very similar to WPA in that it calculates how each plate appearance during every game has changed each team’s odds of winning the World Series. The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh has covered cWPA in the past, such as in this piece about players who made late-season debuts and contributed to a postseason run, or in this one when analyzing the relative “mundanity” of the 2018 World Series. As you might expect, Nationals players are dominating in cWPA this postseason. Four of the top five individual cWPA leaders don the Nationals’ red, white, and blue: Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Nationals are World Series bound following Tuesday night’s sweep-completing 7-4 win over the St. Louis Cardinals. They couldn’t be much hotter. Since a September 18 loss to the team they just vanquished, the Dave Martinez-managed Nationals have won 18 of their last 21 games.

How remarkable was their turnaround from the 19-31 start that had Martinez firmly in the crosshairs? The 2005 Houston Astros, the 1973 New York Mets, and the 1914 Boston Braves are the only other teams to have made it to the World Series after being 12 games under .500 at any point during the season.

The Cardinals deserve some credit of their own. The Mike Shildt-skippered squad went 47-27 in the second half, then beat the favored Braves in the NLDS. They simply had the misfortune of running into a pitching-rich Nationals team that has now punched its ticket to the Fall Classic.

Here are perspectives from participants on each side, gathered prior to, and after, Games 3 and 4.

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Following Game 3, I asked Martinez about team’s confidence level, which is undoubtedly the highest it’s been all season. With the early-season struggles in mind, just how important is confidence to a team’s success? Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week, I wrote about some intentional walk decisions that merited further scrutiny. One of them was pretty bad and one of them was a little bad, but both managers advanced to the NLCS — and now, like clockwork, we have more intentional walk decisions to analyze. Playoff baseball is predictable like that, even as it’s unpredictable in other ways.

Let’s take these two chronologically. The Yankees had their backs against the wall, down 2-0 against Gerrit Cole to start the seventh. It got worse quickly, with two of the first three runners reaching base. That gets us to our situation; second and third, one out, and Alex Bregman at the plate facing Adam Ottavino. Aaron Boone put up four fingers; he chose to face Yuli Gurriel rather than Bregman.

The surface level math on this one doesn’t look that bad for Boone. The trail runner here simply doesn’t matter that much; if Bregman scores, it’s 5-0, and three innings to score five runs is a tall task against Gerrit Cole and the best relievers the Astros can muster. To approximate the lower run-scoring environment they’re facing, I lowered the run environment in our WPA Inquirer to 4.5. The decision hardly hurt the Yankees; their odds of winning fell from 12.3% before the walk to 12.0% afterwards.

When an intentional walk only costs 0.3% of win expectancy when ignoring batters, it’s more often a good one, and a cursory look at Bregman and Gurriel’s wOBA agrees with that. That doesn’t even add in platoon splits; Gurriel has a reverse split in his major league career, and even regressing it back to the mean leaves him only 3% better against lefties than righties. Bregman, meanwhile, clocks in at 6.8% better against lefties than righties post-regression.

Put that all together, and Gurriel’s projected wOBA against Britton (accounting for Britton’s own splits) comes out to .314, while Bregman’s is .372. Given that the Yankees gave up so little win expectancy by putting Bregman on, the back-of-the-envelope math makes the decision obvious. The team would need to face a batter who projected to be at least 31 points of wOBA worse than Bregman to make the decision worth it, and Gurriel is 58 points worse. Good intentional walk! Read the rest of this entry »

There was only a moment during Game 4 of the NLCS on Tuesday when it felt as though whatever weird hex had enveloped the last seven years of Washington Nationals baseball might be ready to rear its ugly head once more. It was in the top of the eighth inning, when the St. Louis Cardinals loaded the bases with two outs and a three-run deficit. Washington had once led 7-0, but a rally by the Cardinals in the middle innings more than halved that advantage, and now, they actually had the tying run on base. It was on this same field, seven years ago, that the Cardinals had erased a 6-0 deficit to win a do-or-die Game 5 in the NLDS, and it was on this same field that the Nationals’ bullpen had let so many games slip away over the years. For a minute, one could see the narrative beginning to snap back into place. But then, Daniel Hudson forced Matt Carpenter to roll over on a groundball to second base, and Washington inched closer to one of the most dominant series victories in recent memory.

The Nationals defeated St. Louis by a score of 7-4 on Tuesday, completing a four-game sweep that secured the first pennant in franchise history. They outscored the Cardinals 20-6 in the series, with their pitchers yielding just five earned runs, seven walks, and one home run while striking out 48 in 36 innings. That works out to a 1.25 ERA, 12 K/9, 1.75 BB/9, and 0.25 HR/9 in the four biggest games of their season. It was the first NLCS sweep since the Mets defeated the Cubs in 2015, and just the third NLCS sweep of the last 24 years.

Patrick Corbin was the latest Washington starting pitcher to baffle Cardinals hitters. He struck out the side in the first inning, and went on to fan seven of the first nine batters he faced and a total of 12 in just five innings of work. He also allowed three walks, along with four runs on four hits. Corbin got swings and misses on 24 of the 94 pitches he threw, giving him a whiff rate of 25.5% that stands as the highest he’s ever registered in a start in his career according to Baseball Savant. Of those 24 whiffs, 16 came against his slider, which he threw a total of 42 times. Just one of those sliders was put into play by a Cardinals batter. Read the rest of this entry »

“Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.” – Tom Lehrer

Coming off of three consecutive NL East titles from 1990 to ’92, the Pirates lost Bobby Bonilla and Barry Bonds in back-to-back offseasons and quickly descended into the divisional basement. Unlike Chuck Cunningham in Happy Days, the Pirates didn’t just take the stairs and disappear forever. Vanishing from history would probably have been more merciful than what actually happened; the Pirates became the justified butt of baseball jokes. Run by Cam Bonifay and Dave Littlefield for the 15 years that followed, Pittsburgh filled out the entire Bingo Card of Incompetence. They drafted poorly, and gave bizarre contracts to players like Pat Meares and Kevin Young, who couldn’t even be called tertiary talent, and appeared to be on a mad quest to trade any developed star for as little as possible.

Unlike many organizations, which have one single, horrific move worth mocking, it’s difficult to decide which situation was the most embarrassing for the Pirates. Was it the time they signed Meares to a one-year contract after he was non-tendered, then gave him a four-year deal after a week of a .508 OPS? Was it trading Aramis Ramirez and not getting a single real prospect in return? Was it picking up Matt Morris and his contract for no particular reason? Or was it paying Derek Bell $4.5 million to live on his boat? I’d be hard-pressed to choose when the Pirates were the most de-pantsed.

Overcoming 15 years of haplessness was the challenge set to Frank Coonelly and Neal Huntington when they took over the Pirates’ day-to-day operations in September 2007. They cleaned the Augean stables, remaking the organization from top-to-bottom and turning it into one that looked like its more modern contemporaries. They brought in analysts, integrated contemporary sabermetric approaches, and found a pitching coach in Ray Searage who could help them turn straw into gold. And for a while, it worked. Blowing through the .500 threshold, the Pirates won 94, 88, and 98 games, making three consecutive postseasons for only the second team in the team’s history. Read the rest of this entry »