It’s Election Day in the United States! If you haven’t yet voted, and if you still have the chance, I encourage you to go vote for whatever you’re going to vote for. If you’re already done, or if you’re standing in line waiting, or whatever — today’s a day that puts a lot of Americans in a voting mood. And as long as you’re in the mood to be voting, I’ve got more voting for you to do down below. Some voting with, shall we say, far lesser stakes.

We’re at the point where just about everyone is ready to turn the page and focus on the offseason ahead. The playoffs ended last week, and this is the week of the general-manager meetings in California. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some movement pretty soon. Some transactions of real consequence. I’ve been told to prepare for a crazy market, and it could all get underway at a moment’s notice. So before all that starts up, and while the 2018 season is still fresh in your collective minds, I want to continue what’s become an annual polling project. The convenient thing about this being an annual polling project is that I can just copy and paste the text below from last time!

This is a post with 30 polls, one for each team. Ideally I’d like you to only vote in the poll or polls corresponding to your favorite team(s). Some of you might be fans of baseball more than you’re fans of one team in particular, and in that case, either don’t vote at all, or vote for the team you think you care about the most. It’s up to you. It’s all up to you. For each team, I’ve asked a simple question. How was your experience being a fan of the given team this season? There’s no wrong answer, and your feeling is personal to you. But if you’d like to share it, please do so. This shouldn’t take much in the way of mental gymnastics. Were you happy? Were you disappointed? How disappointed were you? Do you love watching every game, no matter the score and no matter the standings? Just how much did you get out of your investment? To what extent were you invested in the first place?

It’s easy, and I appreciate your participation, in advance. I’ll review the results later this week. In the past, I’ve written summary blurbs for each team, but I realized those blurbs might bias the responses, so now I’ve quit. Also, I’m lazy (Editor’s note: still true in 2018). Anyhow, all the polls are below. Hopefully the anchor text works to send you to your team directly! Thank you again for making these poll posts possible.

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Jeff Albert brings a combination of common sense and analytic know-how to his new job as St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach. He also brings with him a degree of familiarity. Prior to joining the Astros organization in 2013, Albert spent five years tutoring up-and-coming hitters in the Cardinals’ farm system.

Last season was his first at the big-league level. After four years as Houston’s minor-league hitting coordinator, the 38-year-old spent the recently completed campaign as the Astros’ assistant hitting coach. His expertise is multi-faceted. Along with being a new-age hitting guru, Albert is a certified strength-and-conditioning specialist with a master’s degree in exercise science.

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Jeff Albert on hitting: “From a coaching perspective, I think you could make the argument that art and science are the same thing. The art is the way you apply the objective information — the scientific information — within the context of the human element and the environment. So, I don’t look at it as being one or the other. I look at it as having information that will help an individual player perform better.

“Ted Williams gets a lot of credit for his book [The Science of Hitting], and rightly so. Wade Boggs had one I really liked — The Techniques of Modern Hitting — and he’s talking about many of the same things. The two are considered different types of hitters, but both are talking about things like swing path, hitting line drives, and making solid contact to the outfield.

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At some point, I won’t continue to feel obligated to post this. That point isn’t now. The Mariners have the longest active playoff drought in the four major North American sports. Here are their playoff chances over the course of the 2018 regular season:

This is all well-established and relatively ancient history now, but it feels fresh and raw again with the benefit of some distance. Yes, the good Mariners were clearly overachieving. But in the middle of June, they stood at 46-25, 11 games ahead of the eventual wild-card A’s. The Mariners were going to snap the drought, because their lead in the race was virtually regression-proof. Then the Mariners regressed. The A’s, meanwhile, never lost again. The drought lives.

You wonder how things would be different today had the Mariners won a few extra ballgames. Had the A’s lost a few extra ballgames. Odds are, the Mariners still would’ve lost to the Yankees, but even getting that far would’ve meant something. Alas, a promising season turned out bad, and now the Mariners are in the news. They’re in the news because they might try to get worse.

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Howard Norsetter, the Minnesota Twins’ international scouting coordinator, was fired at the end of the 2017 season. The termination came as a shock, both because of Norsetter’s long tenure with the team – he was first hired by Minnesota in 1991 – and also because of his record whilst working for the Twins. Norsetter is most notable for being the scout who discovered and signed stars like Justin Morneau, but the sheer number of legitimate major league players he uncovered during his career is remarkable. Norsetter signed Grant Balfour, Liam Hendriks, Max Kepler, and Byung Ho Park, among more than 25 major leaguers. John Sickels posted an interview with Norsetter from 2010 in which he demonstrated a sharp baseball mind.

And even after Norsetter was let go, the Twins continued signing players he’d found and recommended, including Kai-Wei Teng. In other words, Norsetter, who lives in Australia, is undeniably good at his job. The Twins evidently agreed, saying his termination wasn’t performance related. Norsetter was later hired for a lesser position with the Philadelphia Phillies.

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Will the Hall of Fame find room for an all-time saves leader in 2019 — besides current leader and first-ballot lock Mariano Rivera, that is? (He’ll headline the BBWAA ballot, to be released on November 19.) I refer instead to Lee Smith, the record holder from April 13, 1993 (when he overtook Jeff Reardon) to September 24, 2006 (when 2018 Hall inductee Trevor Hoffman surpassed him). At first glance, he not only appears to be the most likely ex-player to be elected from among the six on the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, which also includes three managers and one owner, but the only one with a path to election. Released on Monday, the ballot, which centers on candidates who made their greatest impact upon Major League Baseball from 1988 onward, is as notable for its omissions as well as its inclusions.

The full slate of candidates alongside Smith includes former outfielders Harold Baines, Albert Belle, and Joe Carter; first baseman Will Clark; starter Orel Hershiser; managers Davey Johnson, Charlie Manuel, and Lou Piniella; and owner George Steinbrenner. Carter and Manuel are the ballot’s only newcomers besides Smith, which is curious because there wasn’t exactly a clamor to elect the rest, who served as bystanders when John Schuerholz and Bud Selig were elected two years ago. Six of the returnees received “fewer than five votes,” a shorthand the Hall typically uses so as not to embarrass any candidate. Piniella received seven votes, still far short of the 12 needed for election from among the panel of 16.

To these eyes, which have been studying the Hall of Fame voting since the 2002 election cycle, Smith isn’t necessarily the best candidate, but it’s not hard to see parallels with 2018 inductee Jack Morris, who was elected by the Modern Baseball Era Committee last December. Both candidates spent a full 15 years on the BBWAA ballot, Morris from 2000 to -14 and Smith from 2003 to -17; the latter was the last player to do so after a 2014 rule change that truncated candidates’ windows of BBWAA eligibility to 10 years. Both built up support slowly until they appeared to be trending towards election, with Morris crossing the all-important 50% threshold in his 11th year of eligibility and Smith in his 10th. The claims of both to a plaque in Cooperstown hinge(d) upon compiling big totals in a stat that’s since been devalued within stathead circles — 254 wins for Morris, 478 saves for Smith — but one that plays better in front of a panel where writers and historians generally constitute just a quarter of the electorate, with executives and Hall of Famers (both players and managers) making up the other three-quarters.

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Miguel Enrique Andújar was born in San Cristóbal, in the Dominican Republic, on March 2nd, 1995. That same day, 968 miles north and northwest of the newborn child, the space shuttle Endeavour launched itself into low-earth orbit, bearing five men and two women. It returned to eastern Florida 16 days later, flew 17 more missions over the next 16 years, and was finally decommissioned on the first day of June, 2011. Andújar, now 23 years old and a finalist for this year’s Rookie of the Year Award, remains in active service.

In 2018, Andújar took 606 plate appearances for the Yankees. In 239 of those appearances, he reached base by hit, walk, or hit-by-pitch. 15 of those hits came in a seven-game stretch in April during which Andújar recorded a 1.706 OPS and joined Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle as the only Yankees to record seven straight games with an extra-base hit before turning 25. Of his hits, 47 were doubles, which tied an American League rookie record set by Fred Lynn in 1975 and vaulted Andújar past DiMaggio, this time, into the Yankee record books. Andújar also hit 27 home runs in 2018, and his 128 wRC+ was third-best among AL hitters under 25, behind Francisco Lindor and Alex Bregman.

I don’t know if Andújar tipped his servers well in 2018, or brushed his teeth every night without fail, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He did a lot of things right in 2018. And he was part of a powerful Yankees infield that included Didi Gregorius and Gleyber Torres.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo‘s 2019 Steamer projections and turnover in the Astros front office and field staff, then (13:17) bring on Arnie Pollinger and Robin Perlow, husband and wife administrators of the 40-year-old SOMBILLA Strat-O-Matic league, to talk about the origins of the league, playing Strat on their first date, league rivalries, how they’ve kept the group together for so long, keeping track of past performance, how Strat has enhance their appreciation of baseball, pace of play, and the beginning of the league’s latest season. Then (41:16) they bring on EW listener and A’s fan Chris Rankin to ask him many probing questions about why he recently elected to get Khris Davis‘s .247 batting averages and Matt Chapman’s 2018 Defensive Runs Saved total tattooed on his wrists, and the possible ramifications of that decision. Lastly, Ben brings on Baseball Prospectus co-founder, Ringer colleague, and dermatologist Rany Jazayerli (1:04:29) to put a bow on both preceding segments by explaining whether Chris could conceivably remove his tattoos and how Strat taught him how to analyze baseball, followed by updates on Roger Angell and the minor-league free agent draft.

Audio intro: Clem Snide, "Weird"
Audio interstitial: The Rolling Stones, "Tumbling Dice"
Audio interstitial 2: Simon Love, "(Why’d You Get That) Tattoo Girl?"
Audio interstitial 3: Golden Earring, "Save Your Skin"
Audio outro: Dawes, "A Little Bit of Everything"

Link to 2019 Steamer projections
Link to SOMBILLA website
Link to photo of Chris’s tattoos
Link to Rany’s Strat-O-Matic article
Link to Roger Angell article
Link to .247 shirt

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Hello friends. You’ll notice this headline refers to the worst called strike of the second half. Late last week, I wrote about the worst called ball of the season. When I write about the worst called balls, I’m obligated to write about the worst called strikes. When was the worst called strike of the season? It turns out it happened pretty early on, and I already wrote about it in July. I figured there wasn’t any sense in writing about the same call a second time, since I’d have all the same stuff to say. So as a compromise, I’m following last week’s post with a more recent called-strike update. The worst called strike of the second half is still the worst called strike in a while.

Let me show you what was almost the worst called strike of the second half. This is determined, for the record, by distance from the nearest edge of the strike zone. The worst called strike of the second half was almost a pitch thrown to Jose Altuve. It was almost a pitch thrown by Jaime Barria. I don’t think I’ve ever actually written a sentence about Jaime Barria. This is as close as I’ve gotten. Barria got the benefit of the doubt in a 3-and-1 count.

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