For a moment, it looked like Will Smith would be the hero. In the bottom of the ninth, sandwiched between the two cataclysmic half-innings that abruptly ended the 106-win Dodgers’ season, they had a brief flicker of hope when with one out and one on, Smith hit a drive off Daniel Hudson that looked as though it might — might — make him the hero, with a walk-off home run that sent the Dodgers to the NLCS. It was hardly implausible given that the 24-year-old rookie had hit two of the Dodgers’ major leauge-leading seven walk-off home runs this year, or that nearly half the drives hit to the specifications of which he struck Hudson’s hanging slider — 100.3 mph, at a 26 degree launch angle — have left the yard over the past five seasons.

It wasn’t to be.

Smith’s drive fell short as, ultimately and in more gruesome fashion, did the Dodgers. There will be plenty of time to dissect the larger situation but for the moment, consider the batted ball, which had a 69% of becoming a hit and a 46.1% chance of going out based on similarly struck spheroids. When it didn’t, it was just the latest in the genre of hold-your-breath moments that wound up producing mutterings that maybe the baseball has been de-juiced this October — that is, that the postseason ball is different from what’s been used in the regular season.

It’s not hard to understand why this notion has taken hold. So far this month, we’ve seen home runs hit at a lower frequency than during a regular season that set all kinds of records for long balls, and scoring rates have fallen as well. In the blur of Division Series games, many a hard-hit ball appeared bound to go out — at least based upon the way our brains have become calibrated to this year’s nearly-numbing frequency — only to die at the warning track. Yet it’s harder to make the case that something is different given a closer look at the numbers, both traditional and Statcast, at least if you’re not Baseball Prospectus’ Rob Arthur, whose model to calculate the drag on the baseball by measuring a pitch’s loss of speed does suggest something is afoot. More on his latest findings below, after I present my own analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

The ball left Justin Turner’s bat at 70.3 mph, with a launch angle of 34 degrees. Per Statcast, batted balls with that exit velocity, hit on that plane, have an expected batting average of .550. A little better than a coin flip. There were two out, and nobody on base, and Sean Doolittle on the mound; there were thousands still left at Dodger Stadium willing the ball to fall, thousands more in the empty stadium in Washington praying for it to find a glove. The Washington Nationals had a 99.9% chance of winning the game. And also, Michael A. Taylor, out in centerfield, sprinting toward it — at the last moment, stretching out his glove — the ball, barely missing the ground, centimeters from escaping his glove.

Had the ball fallen, it barely would have made a difference. The Dodgers’ win expectancy would have improved to something like 0.5%. But that’s not what it felt like. Not for the Dodgers fans who had remained through the preceding disaster, looking for a sliver of hope, the slightest graze of cowhide against grass. Not for the Nationals fans, hoping for something they hadn’t yet seen — a glove closed around a ball for a series-clinching out, an end to the years of futility, the beginning of something completely new. This is where the postseason takes you: Years of your life, untold amounts of time and emotional energy spent, seeming to rest in the inches between a ball and a glove and a few blades of grass.

Taylor rose up and took the ball in his glove, a confused expression on his face. Turner, on the basepath 200 feet away, motioned to the dugout. But even as the game hung, for a few moments, in the purgatory of umpire review, the fans knew, and Sean Doolittle knew, jumping off the mound and into the stratosphere, and Adam Eaton knew, leaping in from right field. It was over. The Washington Nationals had won Game 5. They were advancing to the NLCS. And the Dodgers’ historic, 106-win season had ended. They were nine games too short, nine innings too short. A few runs, a few pitches, maybe. A few inches. Sometimes cliches are cliches because they’re true. Read the rest of this entry »

“Put all your eggs in one basket… the handle’s going to break. Then all you’ve got is scrambled eggs.” – Nora Roberts

For the Los Angeles Angels, 2019 looked a lot like most of the past decade. Despite starting off the roster with the best player they’ve ever had and probably the best player they ever will have in Mike Trout, Los Angeles finished below .500 for the fourth consecutive season.

In some ways, the Angels are baseball’s least interesting team. The organization’s 2002-2009 salad days are long in the past, and while these Angels are never spectacularly awful — 2019 was the club’s first 90-loss season since 1999 — it’s a team that’s blandly assembled to create indifferent results. Being truly awful would have at least elicited a kind of macabre fascination. But these Los Angeles Angels appear to be a franchise focused on blithely existing.

The Setup

Thanks to the presence of Trout, the Angels essentially start off every baseball season with a three-win head start over any team in baseball. Beginning every year with a guy who puts up nine- or 10-win seasons like clockwork is an amazing boon for a franchise. Suddenly, the challenge of building a 90-win team is simply assembling a .500 team using the other 24 players on the roster. It’s a bit like getting Gordon Ramsay for your elementary school’s bake sale; if you can’t sell cookies to your neighbors with the most famous chef in the world in your corner, you might want to double-check the recipe.

And it’s not as if those 10 wins are collected at a price that cripples the budget. With an average salary under $36 million for the next dozen years, the Angels couldn’t have gotten a better deal on Trout if he was bought in a shady marketplace after falling off a truck. Read the rest of this entry »

If this afternoon’s contest between the Cardinals and Braves was a game you were interested in watching, hopefully you tuned in early; if you’re a fan of the Braves, or competitive baseball, there wasn’t much worth watching after that. Here was the Cardinals’ top of the first inning:

Things could have gone differently for Mike Foltynewicz. There was an infield single by Paul Goldschmidt; Freddie Freeman committed an error. If Goldschmidt had hit that grounder at an infielder instead of in the hole, or if Freeman had caught Yadier Molina’s gounder, the Braves escape with a 1-0 deficit in the first. That isn’t what happened, though. After a walk and a double, Foltynewicz was done down by four and Max Fried came in to face the pitcher with the bases loaded. Fried walked Jack Flaherty, more damage was done, and by the time the inning finally, mercifully concluded, the Braves’ were in a massive hole, though not until after a wild pitch allowed Marcell Ozuna to reach, and Kolten Wong to score. Read the rest of this entry »

4:52	Craig Edwards: Cardinals lineup: St. Louis Cardinals @Cardinals For all the marbles #NLDS | #TimeToFly 9 Oct 2019

4:52	Craig Edwards: and Braves: Atlanta Braves @Braves Game 5. Winner takes all. #RELENTLESS 9 Oct 2019

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The postseason lends itself to all sorts of narratives. There are team triumphs and individual stories, but this postseason features something special you might not have noticed: a few teammates who have been playing together for nine seasons or more. When Adam Wainwright took the mound for his Game 3 start against the Braves and threw a first pitch sinker to battery mate Yadier Molina (Ronald Acuna Jr. would foul that first pitch off, but ultimately strike out swinging), it was hard to forget that this may well be Wainwright’s final season, marking the end of a career during which so many of the right-handers best moments have come with Molina behind the plate. That first pitch got me thinking: which playoff teammates have been together the longest?

To answer that question, I turned to the game logs here at FanGraphs to find the first day both teammates appeared in a game together at the major league level. I also looked at how many total games each pair has appeared in together, which includes pinch-hit appearances, pitching in relief, and defensive substitutions. This does not include any time spent on the Injured List and only includes games in which both teammates made an appearance. I excluded the postseason for parity; the data is updated through the end of the 2019 season. So, before the Dodgers and the Nationals and the Cardinals and the Braves play their Game 5’s, let’s take a look at the longest-tenured teammates we can watch this October.

No. 5: Freddie Freeman and Julio Teheran

Debut as Teammates: May 7, 2011

Kicking off our list is the pitcher/first baseman duo for the Braves. These two have been staples in Atlanta for several years now; this year Julio Teheran became the only pitcher in Braves’ franchise history to start six consecutive Opening Days. Freddie Freeman has been at first base for all of them.

Teheran was initially left off the Braves’ Division Series roster but when Chris Martin suffered an oblique injury, Teheran took his place. Now both he and Freeman are trying to push Atlanta into the Championship Series for the first time since 2001, though they’re likely both hoping for better individual performances in Game 5; Freeman, perhaps still hampered by an elbow injury, is slashing just .125/.222/.313 with a 38 wRC+ in 18 postseason plate appearances, while Teheran took the loss in Game 4 after giving up a walk-off sacrifice fly to Yadier Molina that scored Kolten Wong.

Total regular season games together: 200 Read the rest of this entry »

Over five postseason games, the Rays have had a plethora of heroes. Tommy Pham is batting .429/.455/.714, good for a scalding 213 wRC+. Willy Adames has been even better, with a 240 wRC+ and an actual cannon for an arm. Charlie Morton has thrown 10 innings and allowed only a single run. Nick Anderson and Diego Castillo have been lights out; the list goes on and on. Spare a thought, though, for Ji-Man Choi, who might not lead the team in batting but surely leads it in sheer delight.

If you want to understand how weird Choi’s contributions have been, a good place to start is the walk rate. He’s drawn six walks in 19 postseason plate appearances, good for a 31.6% walk rate. That’s second only to Giancarlo Stanton’s 36.4% among batters with 10 or more PA, and it’s the reason for his outrageous .154/.421/.385 batting line. When you see a slugging percentage lower than an on-base percentage, that usually means a batter has no power. Not so with Choi — he has a home run in the postseason and a solid .231 ISO. He just walks all the dang time.

But uh — a .154 batting average? Does he have a .000 BABIP or something? Not at all — it’s a reasonable .250. No, his batting average woes come down to a 42.1% strikeout rate, which is about as terrible as it sounds, even in the small sample theatre that is October baseball. It’s a strikeout world these days, but not that much of a strikeout world; the only players in the playoffs with a higher strikeout rate than Choi are A.J. Pollock (76.9%!), Miguel Sanó, Gavin Lux, and Brandon Lowe, and two of those guys have wRC+’s below zero.

In fact, Choi’s .250 BABIP is of the 1-for-4 variety, because 15 of his 19 plate appearances have ended in a strikeout, walk, or home run. That home run came in the Rays’ 10-3 pasting of Zack Greinke in Game 3, and it buoys Choi’s overall stats, so I might as well show it here:

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The 16-straight postseason losses is a story hard to ignore. So is the fact that 13 of those defeats — Monday night’s ALDS ousting being the latest in that inglorious stretch — have come at the hands of the Bronx Bombers. October has indeed been a cruel month for the Minnesota Twins.

Remember Prince singing, “Two thousand zero zero, party over”? Since the dawning of the 21st century, Kirby Puckett’s old club has been a playoff piñata.

That’s not going to be the primary focus here. Words will be spilled on the just-completed series — mostly from the mouths of the participants — but let’s not forget that the future is what matters most (not just for the Twins, but for all of us.) As Henry Ford once said, “History is more or less bunk… the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”

Back in 2004, with the Red Sox on the brink of elimination in the ALCS, Kevin Millar defiantly told the Yankees: “Don’t let us win today.” With the Twins facing their own lose-one-and-you’re-done scenario, I mentioned Millar’s proclamation to Trevor May in Sunday’s workout day press conference.

”Don’t give us an inch, because we’ll take a mile,” May responded. “That’s been something — when doors have been opened for us all year, we’ve exploded through them. That’s what we’re looking to do.”

That’s not what happened, of course. Monday’s 5-1 loss put Minnesota’s 2019 season in the history books, and what comes next is some meaningful tinkering. Without it, an implosion looms as a possibility. Read the rest of this entry »

In the fourth inning of Tuesday night’s Game 4, with José Altuve on first base, one out, and the Rays already up by three, Yordan Álvarez hit a deep fly ball to right-center field. You’d have been forgiven, in this home run-happy era, for thinking at first that the ball had left the park. You’d similarly have lost not one whit of credibility had you assumed that Kevin Kiermaier, one of the best center fielders of his era, might catch the ball on the run. But neither of those two things happened; the ball instead bounced beautifully off the right-center field wall and hung, for just a moment, in the air above Kiermaier’s head. That was the moment — when the ball hung briefly in stark contrast against dark blue — in which Gary Pettis, the Astros’ third-base coach since 2014, had to decide whether to send Altuve home.

As Ben Clemens pointed out in the game chat, our WPA Inquirer suggests that at the time Pettis made his decision, the Astros would have had about a 28.1% chance of winning the game had Altuve stopped at third, a 17.7% chance of winning the game if he went and was thrown out (which is what happened), and a 29.8% chance of winning the game had he run and scored. That distribution suggests, all other things being equal, that Pettis had to believe Altuve was likely to score at least 86% of the time in order to justify sending him (29.8 – 17.7 = 12.1; 12.1 * 0.86 + 17.7 = 28.1). Given that math, I find it hard to fault Pettis for his choice to run Altuve. It took two essentially perfect throws, from Keirmaier and Willy Adames in turn, plus a terrific tag from Travis d’Arnaud, to get Altuve at the plate by a hair. I know it won’t make the Astros feel better given the result, but it was fun to watch. Read the rest of this entry »