We’re very quickly approaching the final month of the season and no team has really pulled away from the pack. Still, the playoff races are pretty settled, with just a handful of teams remaining on the fringes. The division races should provide all the drama down the stretch.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
While Shohei Ohtani hasn’t pitched this year after undergoing UCL reconstruction surgery last fall, he has found another area of the game in which he could excel while terrorizing opposing pitchers. The 30-year-old superstar blew past his previous career high in stolen bases in late July, and on Friday night against the Rays he swiped his 40th bag of the year. Five innings later, he collected his 40th home run to join the 40-40 club in spectacular style, when he clobbered a first-pitch, walk-off grand slam. Unfortunately, Ronald Acuña Jr.’s torn ACL deprived him of a chance to follow up last year’s unprecedented combination of 41 homers and 73 steals, but it’s not out of the question we could have another 40-40 player this season, namely José Ramírez, and at least a couple more 30-30 ones.
I’ll get to those, but first, it’s Sho time. Prior to this year, Ohtani had reached 40 homers twice (46 in 2021 and a league-leading 44 last year) but had stolen just 20 bases or more twice (26 in 2021 and 20 last year). Unburdened by the demands of pitching this year, and playing for a new team with much higher aspirations than the Angels, he’s been able to withstand more wear and tear on his legs, has had more time to study opposing pitchers, and has come to appreciate the extra dimension he can add to his new team.
“I think he has bought into stealing bases, understands the value of the stolen base, getting 90 feet,” manager Dave RobertstoldThe Athletic earlier this month. “He’s in a pennant race now. And I don’t think he’s been in a pennant race in his big-league career. So his enhanced focus is not a surprise to me.” Read the rest of this entry »
Previously on Dragon Ball Z, we discussed whether it’s better to run hot and cold like a reheated frozen burrito or show up at the plate with the comforting and consistent warmth of a hearty helping of mac and cheese. Specifically, when you’re a hitter trying to microwave some offense in the playoffs. The tl;dr of that article: When comparing streaky hitters to their more consistent colleagues, the streaky hitters came closer to replicating their regular season numbers in the postseason. Despite the fluky nature of playoff series and their bite-sized samples that leave no space for slumps, hitters prone to slumping still bring enough electricity when they do get hot to maintain a charge in their individual numbers.
But individuals don’t win the World Series, teams do. In the context of a team playing a sport where the superstars don’t necessarily factor into every plate appearance, individual performances don’t carry the same weight that they do in other sports. Not only do teams need contributions from multiple hitters in the lineup, but the sequence of those contributions matters too.
In my last article, I used wOBA, which is derived from the run values associated with specific events (i.e. walks, doubles, home runs), to measure individual output. In turn, run values are historical averages of the number of runs scored following the given event. Those historical averages assume that what follows a given plate appearance is a league-average hitter doing whatever is most statistically likely. But that’s not how it works irl. The player on deck might be better or worse than league average, might have distinct tendencies toward hitting the ball on the ground or in the air, might be 0-fer their last eleventy-billion, or might be hotter than soup in the summertime. Read the rest of this entry »
Shortly before Walter Pennington was acquired by the Texas Rangers from the Kansas City Royals at last month’s trade deadline, Eric Longenhagen wrote that the 26-year-old left-hander had “caught some helium of late after striking out 35% of the hitters he’s faced in Triple-A.” Our lead prospect analyst went on to note that Pennington had recently made his MLB debut, adding that he “has a middle relief profile with little margin for error due to his underwhelming velocity.” Longenhagen assigned the 2020 non-drafted free agent out of the Colorado School of Mines a not-overly-enthusiastic 35+ FV.
Through his first seven big-league appearances — one with the Royals and now six with the Rangers — Pennington has fanned 10 batters and allowed three earned runs while attacking hitters with an array of sinkers, sliders, and cutters (he’s also thrown a smattering of four-seamers) in eight-and-two-thirds innings of work. Down on the farm, he’d heavily featured his slider while fanning 82 batters and allowing 43 hits in 63-and-a-third frames.
His velocity is indeed underwhelming. And not only has Pennington been averaging just 91.7 mph with his heaters, his arsenal doesn’t include a breaking ball that sweeps or dips in eye-catching fashion. Your stereotypical power pitcher he’s not.
Entering Thursday, the Tampa Bay Rays had stolen 35 bases in their previous 15 games. Even in this new age of increased stolen base rates, that’s impressive. Only one other team has swiped at least 35 bags over 15 games since the implementation of the new rules: the Tampa Bay Rays in May 2023. Before that, only one other team had accomplished the feat in the 21st century: the Tampa Bay Rays in May 2009. The last time a team other than the Rays stole so many bases in so few games was before the Rays franchise even existed; in 1992, the Milwaukee Brewers enjoyed two distinct 15-game stretches with at least 35 stolen bags.
Perhaps 35 and 15 aren’t round enough numbers for you. In that case, you’ll be happy to hear that the 2024 Rays are the very first team in the pitch clock/disengagement limit/bigger bases era to steal 50 bases in any 25-game span; they pulled it off between July 21 and August 18 (and again from July 22 to August 19, and July 23 to August 20). The last team to achieve this particular feat was — you guessed it — the 2009 Rays, and before them, the 1992 Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »
Usually, with a baseball trade, you want to avoid rushing to judgment. Like, did the Rays get fleeced when they traded David Price to Detroit in 2014, considering that the third piece they got in that deal, Willy Adames, was a starter for three years in Tampa Bay, then got traded again, and is still under team control in Milwaukee? Always in motion, said the great philosopher, is the future.
Usually.
Sometimes you need about three weeks to find out if a trade worked out for your team. So say the Orioles, who on Thursday demoted their big deadline acquisition, left-hander Trevor Rogers, to the minor leagues. The 2021 NL Rookie of the Year runner-up made four starts for Baltimore, totaling 19 innings in which he allowed 16 runs, as well as an opponent batting line of .338/.404/.514. For a presumptive playoff starter, it’s not ideal. Read the rest of this entry »
Programming note: I’m taking a break from my Five Things column this week, as I’m traveling to Chicago for Saberseminar. Five Things will return next week with events from the last two weeks. In the meantime, please enjoy a ridiculous hypothetical.
This week, someone in my chat asked me an interesting hypothetical: How different would baseball be if the fences were the same distance from home plate all the way around? It would obviously be wildly different from how the sport currently works. Center field is the deepest part of the park by far, of course, and it’s hard to picture exactly what an equidistant fence would look like. You might think it’s a triangle, but that’s not right – it looks more or less like an arc, which is what an actual stadium looks like, only with a much sharper curvature.
That sounds so darn weird that I wanted to see what it would mean for offense. I don’t have any strong analytical reason for doing so. We aren’t plumbing the depths of smart baseball analysis here; we’re making up a dumb world and wondering what kinds of dumb things would happen in it.
First things first: There would be more home runs. I picked 370 feet as the distance because it feels reasonably close to the real world average of fence depths. I picked a 10-foot tall wall for similar reasons; if we’re getting weird in some ways, I’d prefer to standardize the others. There’s an easy math trick you can use here; baseballs tend to fall at roughly a 45 degree angle by the time they’re descending, their forward momentum getting slowly blunted by air resistance. That means that a ball that clears the wall by a millimeter would travel 10 more feet before hitting ground that was at field level – in an outfield bullpen, say. In other words, every ball that travels 380 or more feet in the air is going to be a home run now. 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.
Jordan Montgomery has been bad in his first season with the Diamondbacks. A 6.44 ERA is bad, a 5.23 xERA is bad, a 15.5% strikeout rate is bad, a .377 wOBA allowed is bad. We all know these things. (Dad, if you’re reading this, and I know you are: You now know these things. All those stats are bad.) So I’m not going to spend too much time belaboring that point. But Montgomery’s badness has cascading effects beyond just how long to stick with him in the rotation or if he’ll even be on the playoff roster the Diamondbacks almost certainly will be constructing.
Montgomery agreed to a deal with the Diamondbacks just before Opening Day for a contract paying him a guaranteed $25 million this year, and it crucially came with a vesting player option for Montgomery, as negotiated by his agent at the time, Scott Boras. (Montgomery has since left Boras for Joel Wolfe and Nick Chanock at Wasserman.) If Montgomery had made fewer than 10 starts this year, he simply would’ve become a free agent after the World Series; this was meant to limit Arizona’s risk if Montgomery sustained a long-term injury while ramping up after his late signing.
But what it didn’t protect the Diamondbacks from was ineffectiveness, and Montgomery’s 2025 is now in his hands. The option value began at $20 million, when Montgomery made his 10th start, and then went up to $22.5 million upon his 18th start. It will reach its maximum value of $25 million with four more starts. Since Montgomery is very much in the “he would probably have to take a one-year pillow contract” territory, I’d be absolutely shocked if he didn’t take the $25 million payday. The best he can hope for now is that next year, after getting a normal offseason and a full spring training, he pitches more like he did when he dominated during the 2023 postseason, so that his value rebounds when he becomes free agent again after the 2025 season.
The downstream effects on any team’s payroll would be notable — $25 million is a lot! — but especially so for the Diamondbacks. The Snakes currently have $171 million committed to this season, their highest payroll ever, and $63 million committed to next year. If Montgomery makes four more starts and elects to stay with the team, next year’s figure would jump to $88 million. On the surface, you’d think that would give Arizona a ton of room to build a team just as good as this one, but the payroll can increase very sharply, very quickly.
That $63 million number is only what’s actually committed to players as of this second, mainly the guaranteed money to Eduardo Rodriguez, Ketel Marte, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., and Corbin Carroll. Also included are the presumed buyouts of the mutual options (which are virtually never exercised) for Joc Pederson, Randal Grichuk, and Scott McGough. That $63 million also includes the combined $3 million in buyouts that the D-backs would need to pay if they don’t pick up their club options on Eugenio Suárez and Merrill Kelly. Suárez’s option could go either way, so for now we’ll just assume that it’s declined, but Kelly’s seems like a no-brainer to get picked up for just $7 million. Working off of that (adding the $7 million and subtracting the $1 million buyout they won’t have to pay him), we’re now at $69 million, or $94 million with Montgomery. That figure would be about 55% of this year’s franchise-record payroll for just six players.
Onto the arbitration-eligible players: Zac Gallen, A.J. Puk, Ryan Thompson, Kevin Ginkel, and Joe Mantiply have gone through arbitration before and should all stick around; they’re making about $14.3 million combined this year. If we conservatively assume that in the aggregate they get raises of 25%, that’s another $18 million or so added to next year’s payroll, for a total of $112 million. Throw in $3 million combined for the guys who’ll be in their first year of arbitration — Alek Thomas and Geraldo Perdomo — and we’re all the way up to two-thirds of this year’s payroll. Pre-arbitration players should account for, at absolute minimum, another $10 million or so, and boom, that brings the figure up to $125 million, 70% of where it’s at this season.
All of that would leave the D-backs plenty of room to build another really good team if they didn’t have any significant free agents to replace, but of course, they almost certainly will. Pederson has been quietly elite as a platoon DH; despite playing exactly zero games in the field and facing lefties only 30 times, he’s compiled 3.1 WAR because he’s just so darn good at mashing righties. Christian Walker, currently on the IL with an oblique strain, is set to hit free agency entering his age-34 season, so he’s not in line for a huge deal, but he’d still probably reject Arizona’s qualifying offer and look for a longer contract.
Perhaps 7th-ranked prospect Jordan Lawlar is able to factor into the infield, making Suárez’s possible departure easier to swallow, but there’s no heir apparent to Walker at first or Pederson at DH. The D-backs traded away their offense-first prospects Andrés Chaparro and Deyvison De Los Santos, and Tommy Troy — their other top-100 prospect — is struggling in High-A and years away from the majors. Perhaps Gurriel Jr. spends more time at DH next season to keep him fresh, with a speedy outfield of Carroll, Thomas, and Jake McCarthy, though without Pederson and Walker, that certainly makes for a worse offense. Signing at least one starting-caliber player would cost (again, conservatively) at least $12 million, which would bring them to 80% of this season’s payroll.
Again, all of these estimates are conservative, and I’m including only the bare minimum investment that the Diamondbacks would have to make to continue to have a competitive, complete roster. All of this to say: They may have to get creative. With Montgomery and Kelly both expected to be around next season, Arizona will have six starters (Montgomery, Kelly, Rodriguez, Gallen, Ryne Nelson, and Brandon Pfaadt) for five rotation spots. The D-backs could trade from that surplus to fill a position of need, just as they did a couple offseasons ago when they dealt Daulton Varsho for Gabriel Moreno and Gurriel Jr.
Teams would line up for Pfaadt, Nelson quietly has been worth a solid 2.0 WAR, and even if he hasn’t pitched like an ace for over a year now, Gallen still has notable trade value as he enters his final year before free agency. I’m not saying the Diamondbacks definitely will trade a starter, but it’s something they should consider. The Orioles, for example, are rich in young position players and have just three rotation spots (Grayson Rodriguez, Dean Kremer, and Trevor Rogers) locked in for next year.
Of course, if Montgomery bounces back next season, Arizona won’t regret paying him $25 million, but unless ownership decides to increase payroll, things are going to be tight. The primary focus for the Diamondbacks right now is on defending their National League title, but regardless of how long they last during their probable return to the postseason, tough decisions may be awaiting them on the other side of October.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners firing Scott Servais, the Angels not firing Perry Minasian, Joey Votto’s career and retirement, the continued collapse of Craig Kimbrel, NPB players pushing for a faster path to domestic and international free agency, and the NWSL abolishing its draft. Then (42:45) they’re joined by Patreon supporter Sam Horton to answer listener emails about active future Hall of Fame pitchers, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper, major and minor leaguers swapping parks, a desperate outfield tactic, penalizing catcher glove movement, and the ethics of returning milestone homers to hitters, followed (1:48:30) by a postscript Stat Blast about scoring at least 11 unanswered runs.
On Wednesday, Joey Vottoofficially announced his retirement from a major league career that spanned parts of 17 seasons, all with the Cincinnati Reds. He hit free agency for the first time last winter before signing a minor league contract with the Toronto Blue Jays, his hometown team. During his first spring training game with Toronto, he stepped on a bat and twisted his ankle, and it took him until June to get back into games. He eventually reached Triple-A at the start of this month but struggled there, hitting .143/.275/.214 with 22 strikeouts in 51 plate appearances with Buffalo.
“Toronto + Canada, I wanted to play in front of you,” Votto wrote on Instagram. “Sigh, I tried with all my heart to play for my people. I’m just not good anymore. Thank you for all the support during my attempt.”
“Anymore” is the key word there, because for the bulk of his career, Joey Votto banged. He retires with a .294/.409/.511 slash line, a 145 wRC+, 58.8 WAR, 356 home runs, and 2,135 hits. He made six All-Star teams, won the NL MVP award in 2010, and ranks 40th all-time in career MVP shares at 3.08.
I will be very surprised if Votto isn’t inducted into the Hall of Fame fairly quickly after he debuts on the ballot in four years. (He didn’t play in the majors this season, so for the purposes of eligibility, he retired after 2023.) Assuming he does, he’ll mainly get in on the basis of his tangible career accomplishments, with no controversy to counterbalance. My vote for him, so long as I haven’t prematurely shuffled off to eternity, will be based on his accomplishments as a player, but when it comes to Votto, his legacy is more than just his on-field performance.
As a baseball player, Votto was very much a 21st-century slugger, rather than the classic power hitter archetype. A phenomenally disciplined hitter, Votto swung at just 19% of pitches thrown to him outside the strike zone from 2012 to ’20 (using the Sports Info Solution data), second only to Alex Avila. It’s no coincidence that Votto was one of the most disciplined hitters around; you would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t think of Votto as one of the game’s most thoughtful people. Whether hanging out at chess clubs, learning Spanish just to communicate better with teammates, or using his Players’ Weekend nickname to pay tribute to Canadian soldiers who died in World War I — by way of Canadian poet John McCrae’s famous poem, “In Flanders Fields” — he was always interesting, in the best possible way. Votto was a constant tinkerer of his swing and his approach at the plate, and when his career was on the definite downslope, he took the bold step of becoming more aggressive at the plate, a pretty big change for a player in his late 30s, squeezing out one last great offensive season in 2021 (36 homers, 140 wRC+).
Votto also spoke out about his experiences with grief and anxiety, back in 2009, when it was taboo for an athlete to talk publicly about their mental health. As Julie Kliegman reported in her recent book, Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, players today are more open about their struggles with mental illness and more willing to seek the help that they need than they were 10-15 years ago; that’s because of stars like Votto and Zack Greinke, among others from across the sports landscape, who came forward at a time when mental-health conversations in sports were rare. This kind of thing has always resonated with me because my dad was severely psychologically affected by his experiences in Vietnam, and rather than being able to accept assistance — no matter how often and vigorously it was offered to him — he spent 25 years trying to drink away his memories, which he managed to do permanently in 1997. I’ll always have a very soft spot for someone who speaks up so that others can get help.
It’s bittersweet when a beloved player retires. It represents a sudden change in a player’s life, but also in ours. Suddenly, athletes have to accept that they will never again do the thing that they were best at doing for so long, and we realize we’ll never get to watch them do it again, either. As was the case with Buster Posey, Votto’s retirement hit me harder than I expected it would. There’s a real feeling of mortality when people you were writing about as young players are now old (in baseball terms) and out of baseball.
Okay, that’s enough sentimentality for this stathead; back to Votto’s career and Hall of Fame profile. Let’s look at his career numbers and see how they compare to other first basemen. Classifying players by position is never neat, but for the purposes of this piece, any player who appears on Jay Jaffe’s First Base JAWS leaders list will be considered a first baseman. However, I’ve removed any data from before 1901, simply because professional baseball in the 1800s was as much carnival sideshow as competitive sport. You could argue for a later – or even much later – starting point, but this deep into an article about Joey Votto isn’t the best place to have that fight.
By career WAR alone, Votto’s résumé isn’t that overwhelming, and it doesn’t help his case that he has just over 2,000 hits and fewer than 400 homers at an offense-first position, but one has to take peak performance and career length into consideration. I’m a big believer in looking at peak value — how good they are at their best over an extended period, divorced from the bulk counting stats at the start and end of their careers — so long as we’re talking about a peak that’s beyond just a couple of years. I think Aaron Judge is a Hall of Famer right now, and had I been a voter at the time, I would have cast my vote for Johan Santana. I’m also not positive that Félix Hernándezshouldn’t be a Hall of Famer. It isn’t a flaw in the data that Jack Morris has more career WAR than Sandy Koufax, but if you’re using WAR to make the case that Morris was just as good as or better than Koufax, the flaw is how you’re using the tool.
The Hall is about greatness, so I tend to prefer measures that include a peak run — such as WAR7 — and/or focus on wins above average rather than replacement. The table above is sorted by our version of WAR, but for the rest of this piece, I’m going to use Baseball Reference’s WAR, which ranks Votto slightly higher (64.5, 11th) than ours does, because that’s what Jay uses for JAWS. I am also using Baseball Reference’s wins above average to keep things consistent. Excluding anything that happened before 1901, Votto ranks seventh at the position in both WAA (37.7) and WAR7 (46.9) and ninth in JAWS (55.7). Except for those who were busted for performance enhancing drug use, all of the Hall of Fame-eligible players who rank in the top 15 by First Base JAWS have been inducted. Simply, Votto belongs in the Hall of Fame.
Votto’s fairly rapid decline kept him from gaudier WAR numbers. After a big drop-off in his power in 2018, his age 34 season, his resurgent 2021 campaign was a real outlier. But as Orson Welles once said, in one of my favorite quotes – and my desired epitaph – if you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop the story. Yes, many of us wanted another chapter, but Joey Votto’s career amounts to a banger of a story.
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