The other week, I was talking to a friend as she fretted over her lack of productivity. Her struggle wasn’t with laziness or a lack of motivation, but rather a severe case of burnout, following her around the way No-Face follows Chihiro in Spirited Away. In the moment, I could see her desperately reaching for more energy to get through the day, like when the chip bag is nearly empty, so you bring it to your mouth and tilt your head back to suck down whatever salty goodness remains.

But instead of encouraging her to power through, I went a different way.

“Y’know, it’s okay to take a break.”

She laughed and said, “That’s what my therapist keeps telling me.”

If you’ve ever described yourself as a perfectionist or a people pleaser, or tied your self-worth to your measurable output, you know taking breaks can be hard.

Athletes learn from the beginning to idolize hard work. Hard work is the salve for every ailment. Wanna get stronger? Work harder. Wanna play better? Work harder. Wanna go pro? Work harder than everyone else. The hardest workers earn their own dedicated titles and recognition, separate from their actual production. Cal Ripken Jr.’s consecutive games played streak earned him the Ironman title. MLB gives out a Heart and Hustle award to whichever player’s heart tells him to hustle the hardest. And every year, we read stories about players and coaches who are the first to arrive to work each morning and the last to leave at night. Read the rest of this entry »

The A’s have been a bummer of a team to follow for a few years now. They’re moving to Vegas. The fans are protesting, but probably fighting a losing battle. They’re going to play in Sacramento, in withering heat, at a (really nice!) minor league stadium. The owner’s a walking punchline. They lost 112 games last year and then made almost no moves over the winter.

Something’s been brewing in the East Bay, though. Not in terms of a surprise playoff contender – they’re 47-68 on the year, and their playoff odds hit 0.0% on June 10. But nonetheless, this is a much better team than last year’s edition, and it’s mostly happened thanks to internal improvements. This version of the A’s looks downright frisky. Last year, playing them was basically a bye series; this year, they’ve almost matched their win total from ’23 and we’re in early August. How’d they do it? In one word, variance. In many words, well, read on and find out.
Read the rest of this entry »

This probably isn’t a problem for most people, but I’m plagued constantly by the memory of frustrating baseball arguments from days past. I probably get into these arguments more than most people, partially because of my (and I hope it doesn’t sound immodest to say this) vast knowledge of the sport, but mostly because I’ve lived most of my life in New Jersey, which his home to the most stubborn, tendentious people you’d ever have the misfortune of meeting.

One such argument took place probably close to 15 years ago, when I ruined what was supposed to be a relaxing Friday evening down the shore by getting into a shouting match over the issue of Alex Rodriguez vs. Derek Jeter. I preferred A-Rod, who would go on to finish his career with a slugging percentage more than 100 points higher than that of his Yankees teammate. I was arguing against someone whose case rested on Jeter being “more clutch.”

If you’re old enough to remember what “analytics bloggers” like me thought about that argument in the 2010s, you can understand my quickness to anger and probably imagine the colors my face turned. When the dust settled, Jeter — who, it turns out, was actually an exceptional hitter all along — did finish with a better career postseason wRC+ than A-Rod. But it was close: 121 to Jeter, 116 for Rodriguez. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Jesús Sánchez and the (perhaps) surprising longest-homer hitters of the Statcast era, the hot hitting of Victor Robles, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Tyler Fitzgerald, the competitive race for the (nonexistent) utility player of the year award, what lessons should be learned from the 2024 Padres’ clutchness correction, whether the Guardians have a clutchness correction coming too, whether we could have seen this White Sox season coming (and the mood of Miguel Vargas), follow-ups on team rivalry trophies and Mike Trout’s durability, and a question about ways to disrupt a Patreon pattern.

Audio intro: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Dave Armstrong and Mike Murray, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Sánchez homer
Link to Marlins salaries
Link to HR distance leaderboard
Link to Mazara record HR
Link to signature significance article
Link to study on single batted ball
Link to Statcast park factors
Link to BP piece on Robles
Link to wRC+ since 6/5
Link to wRC+ since 6/20
Link to Kikuchi changes article
Link to Rogers O’s tweet
Link to Castro positions tweet
Link to Rafaela positions tweet
Link to Ben on positional versatility
Link to Russell on switching positions
Link to wRC+ since 5/1
Link to wOBA-xWOBA since 6/20
Link to team wRC+ since 7/1
Link to World Series odds
Link to BaseRuns records
Link to Ben on the 2023 Padres
Link to EW on Padres postmortems
Link to Padres postmortem 1
Link to Padres postmortem 2
Link to FG Clutch stat
Link to Russell on one-run records
Link to Rob on one-run records
Link to Rob on one-run records 2
Link to Neil on the Guardians
Link to Vargas clip
Link to preseason win projections
Link to EW Sox team preview
Link to playoff odds changes
Link to Dan S. on the Sox
Link to Lone Star Series wiki
Link to Silver Boot press release
Link to Crosstown Cup Trophy wiki
Link to Pearson Cup wiki
Link to more on Pearson Cup
Link to Bay Bridge Series wiki
Link to MLBTR on Bean
Link to Bean EW episode
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Twitter Account
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

The Yankees’ acquisition of $750,000 worth of 2024 international bonus pool space at the trade deadline got my gears turning around the seemingly looming Roki Sasaki posting. There has been considerable reporting (such as this Chelsea Janes Washington Post jawn) to suggest that teams expect, or at least are planning for, Sasaki to be posted this offseason, and my sources tend to agree (though not universally). In this piece, I’m going to talk about how Sasaki looks (spoiler: not his best), how his posting will be different than that of most other Japanese players if he indeed comes over this offseason or next, the way teams have been behaving and preparing for his potential posting, and what shenanigans they might get up to as they continue to do so.

For those unfamiliar…

Sasaki has been the LeBron James of Japanese baseball since his junior year, a known generational high school talent who has gone on to deliver on and perhaps exceed expectations at the highest level of Japanese baseball. Sasaki turns 23 in November and his feats of strength are already legendary. He touched 101 in high school and once threw nearly 500 pitches in an eight-day span, including a 12-inning, 194-pitch complete game during which he also hit the game-winning two-run homer. He was the first pick in the 2019 NPB Draft by the Chiba Lotte Marines, had a sub-2.00 ERA in his 2021 rookie season, and then transcended the sport in 2022 when he threw 17 consecutive perfect innings that April. Read the rest of this entry »

With Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr. both out for the season, the Braves haven’t been anywhere close to full strength for awhile, and the injury bug has continued to bite, with Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies sidelined for extended periods as well. In a dispiriting sequence involving the rotation, Max Fried returned from the injured list on Sunday (and was roughed up), then Reynaldo López landed on the IL. With so many absences, the cracks are beginning to show. Where the Braves occupied the top National League Wild Card spot for a good long time, they entered Tuesday having fallen into a three-way tie with the Diamondbacks and Padres.

The not-so-well-kept secret about the Braves is that since finishing April with a 19-9 record, they’ve gone just 41-42, and haven’t been more than a game over .500 in any calendar month. They went 13-14 in May, 14-13 in June, and 12-13 in July; so far, they’re 2-2 in August. Here’s how they now sit via the standings and our Playoff Odds:

Read the rest of this entry »

2:01	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! It’s been awhile since I did one of these thanks to even more July chaos than usual — Replacement Level Killers, trade deadline and Hall of Fame stuff. Glad to finally squeeze one of these in.

2:02

Jay Jaffe: On Friday, I wrote about the Padres gaining ground not just in the NL Wild Card race but also the NL West race https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-padres-have-tightened-the-nl-west-race…. I mention that because I’ve got a piece on the Braves that’s about to run, looking at how they’ve slipped into a three-way tie atop the NL Wild Card standings.

2:03	Jay Jaffe: And yesterday I took a look at the news regarding yet another lost season for Mike Trout, which put me in mind of Ken Griffey Jr.’s rough run in his 30s https://blogs.fangraphs.com/with-another-lost-season-for-mike-trout-a-…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: (grateful for the ZiPS help from Dan Szymborski on that one and yes, i’ll take the over on the post-2024 Trout projection)

2:09

Jay Jaffe: As noted above, I wrote about the Padres on Friday. They’ve dealt with some significant injuries but this has turned out to be a deeper squad than last year, in part because they somehow lucked into a Jurickson Profar career year after a season that might have been a career-ender, and because the Jackson Merrill center field move has paid off so well. I thought they did very well in augmenting their bullpen at the deadline. Long story short, the Padres’ strength in scouting under Preller, and his philosophy about trading them instead of getting too attached to them, has allowed him to reinforce his rosters and remain competitive even while dealing with some limitations.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2024 season started absolutely terribly for the White Sox. After 25 games, the team’s record stood at 3-22, thanks in large part to an anemic offense that barely scored two runs per game. At the time – the Sox were 3-21 when I wrote the piece – I posed the question of whether the White Sox had a real shot at losing 120 games. I concluded that it was possible, with ZiPS projecting an 8.1% chance that Chicago would lose 120 games, better odds than even the Oakland A’s during their brutal 2023 season. That appeared to be the end of the story, at least until July.

After the awful start, things got slightly sunnier for the Sox for awhile. They swept the Tampa Bay Rays, a team expected to be a contender, and over the next not-so-nice 69 games, they went 24-45. While a .348 winning percentage isn’t in the same zip code as competence, that’s a 56-win pace, a level of lousiness that is fairly commonplace for the worst teams in the league, not the stuff of legend. But as the trade deadline approached, things again turned grim.

The White Sox won the first game of a doubleheader against the Twins on July 10, improving their record to 27-67. That date, almost a month ago, was the last time the White Sox won a game. The team’s 21 straight losses ties them with the 1988 Orioles for the second-most consecutive losses in modern baseball history (since 1901), just two losses behind the biggest loser, the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies. In some sense, the current one might be the most impressive losing streak, simply because the differences between the best and worst teams in baseball has shrunk over the years, making streaks like this more challenging to achieve.

And no, the White Sox haven’t been unlucky. Using a modified Pythagorean winning percentage (I use 1.83 for the exponent rather than two, as it’s been slightly more accurate historically), the White Sox have been the fourth-worst team since 1901.

If the season ended today, the White Sox would have the worst modified Pythagorean win percentage in more than 80 years, since the Philadelphia Phils in 1942. No, that’s not a typo; the Phillies officially shortened their team name for a season in 1942, apparently because they decided they didn’t want to have the same name as the line of cigars.

Problem is, the season doesn’t end today, so the Sox haven’t closed the deal yet. Regression toward the mean is a real thing, and one of the primary reasons why people overrate teams when things are going very well, and vice-versa. At the end of the day, a .235 winning percentage or the .272 in modified Pythag are likely – though not guaranteed – to go up over the remaining games. Projections represent a more stable description of a team’s ability, as well as one that’s generally more predictive of the future, and even with the diminished post-deadline roster, ZiPS sees the White Sox as “only” a .355 team, a 58-104 pace that represents merely a ho-hum level of awfulness.

But it’s also likely that given more games, these other terrible teams likely would have played better ball as well, for similar reasons. (Remember, Major League Baseball didn’t implement the current 162-game schedule until 1961.) While ZiPS projections date back to 2005, I have a quick little estimator for a team’s underlying ability that correlates fairly well with projections; it’s a mix of actual record, a team’s “wRC Pythagorean” — which uses wRC rather than runs score and allowed — and a model of regression toward .500. So I calculated the worst teams by this method and compared them to Chicago’s .356 estimate.

Whew, the White Sox once again fall to satisfyingly hurlicious levels as the worst team since the 1952 Pirates. And the thing is that for the Sox, a .355 record is lousy enough that they stand an excellent chance at losing 120 games anyway with the number of losses they already have banked. With 47 games to play, a .355 record would net them only 16.7 wins, leaving them at just under a 44-118 record, tantalizingly close to the 1962 Mets standard. And since we know that projections aren’t perfect, or at least maybe reality isn’t, that gives the White Sox ample room to continue to underperform and take the grand prize. Luckily, ZiPS can take care of that estimate.

Even with things projected not to go quite as badly, ZiPS gives the White Sox a slightly better than one-in-three chance (34%) to lose 120 games. And it could get even worse, with a 1% projected shot of finishing with a 35-127 record (or worse). That is championship brutality right there. The amusing thing is that this probability could’ve been even higher, but the White Sox didn’t trade Garrett Crochet or Luis Robert Jr. at the deadline, leaving the team encumbered with an additional 2-3 wins. If I remove Crochet and Robert Jr. in favor of their likely sub-replacement replacements, ZiPS projects the Pale Hose to have a 66% chance of losing at least 120 games!

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it a silver lining, but hope remains even for the most woeful teams in baseball. The last team to make a serious late run at 120 losses, the 2003 Tigers, improved quickly in the following seasons and made it to the World Series just three years later. Those 1952 Pirates were in the middle of a full rebuild helmed by legendary general manager Branch Rickey, hired in ’51, and though health problems forced him to step down in ’55, the organization assembled many of the key players who were on the World Series-winning team in ’60. And let’s not forget that seven years after losing 120 games, the Mets won the 1969 World Series. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf isn’t one to embrace change, but a disaster of epic proportions could, in theory, be the one thing that would prompt him to overhaul the organization. I wouldn’t say I’m terribly optimistic about this actually happening, but with an improved farm system – we now rank Chicago’s farm as the third best in baseball – and maybe a better front office assembled, the Sox could turn things around.

Whether the White Sox have a brighter future is something we’ll have to wait to find out. For now, enjoy these Sox as they reach new levels of ineptitude, because they may be the worst major league team you’ll ever see.

The smooth, lefty stroke has aged like fine wine through baseball history. Ben Rice is one of the latest examples of a left-handed hitter whose swing alone makes him fun to watch. Moving through the Yankees’ system as a bat-first catcher, Rice’s explosive minor league performance the last year forced his name into the big league conversation when first baseman Anthony Rizzo landed on the injured list with a fractured arm.

Even before Rizzo went down, Rice was mixing in more time at first base at Triple-A this season. That’s where the organizational need was, and his skills were not quite suited long-term at catcher anyway. As you’d expect, his defense at his new position has been a work in progress, and the same is true for the rest of his game. At the plate, Rice is experiencing the same ups and downs that most rookies do: Pitchers are figuring out how best to attack him, and he is learning how to make adjustments at the big league level.

With a 102 wRC+ over 142 plate appearances, Rice has been formidable thus far, but much of that is due to his hot streak that came along with his call-up. Across his first 19 games, he slashed .267/.348/.567 with five home runs, including the three against the Red Sox on July 6, and a 154 wRC+ over 69 plate appearances. During his 18 games (73 PA) since then, he’s batting .143/.247/.283 with two homers and a 53 wRC+. Despite that recent skid, ZiPS still believes in Rice, giving him a projected 110 wRC+ for the rest of the season. No projections come without uncertainty, of course, but there is a reason why ZiPS – and other projection systems – are confident the under-the-radar prospect can continue to be above average at the plate. Let’s get into it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Arizona Diamondbacks came through this weekend having won eight of their past 10 games, and after a bumpy start to the season, the Snakes are suddenly one of the most dangerous teams in the National League bracket. They hold a playoff spot even though their franchise player, Corbin Carroll, has hit like Eric Bruntlett this season, and despite having gotten nothing from the 2-3-4 slots in a rotation that was supposed to be a strength. Literally nothing in the case of Eduardo Rodriguez, who makes his season debut today.

So I was a little surprised when I went on Ketel Marte’s page and saw that we hadn’t written a standalone article about him on the main FanGraphs site this season. That’s our bad. Let me make up for it. Read the rest of this entry »