The Wild Card races in both leagues continue to be filled with drama as none of the teams vying for those playoff spots have created any daylight in the standings.

A quick aside before we get into the rankings themselves: there has been some discussion about the efficacy and value of these rankings, particularly the team quality metric I’m calculating. I won’t argue that it’s a perfect encapsulation of any given team’s relative strength or the right way to rank teams on a weekly basis, but I did want to share some historical data from last season. In 2022, team quality had a 97% correlation to a team’s final win percentage. In addition, team quality at the All-Star break had a 95% correlation to a team’s final record. The relationship hasn’t been as strong this season with team quality at the All-Star break having a 82% correlation to a team’s current record. It’s possible teams like the Orioles and Padres who are historically over- or under-performing their underlying stats are skewing the relationship and that’s a possible area of research this offseason. Anyway, I’m comfortable with the established relationship between team quality and actual wins to continue using it as a way to compare team strengths.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

With the NL East and a first-round bye into the playoffs locked up, the Braves are simply hoping to get to October with a healthy roster that hasn’t lost its edge. That’s why it’s important to not get too worked up about any extreme swings in results over these last few weeks of the season. Case in point: Atlanta took three of four from the Phillies in a potential NLDS preview early last week before allowing 36 runs across three games in a sweep by the Marlins over the weekend.

The Rays had an opportunity to take over the AL East lead after taking the first two games of their big weekend series against the Orioles. The two best teams in the AL ended up splitting that four game-series and head into this week locked into the same position, with Tampa Bay sitting two games behind Baltimore. One of the biggest reasons why the Rays have been able to keep pace in the division is a much improved bullpen locking down games behind a suddenly stable starting rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves are the best team in baseball right now. They were the first team to clinch their division, and their title odds are nearly double that of any other squad. Their leadoff man, Ronald Acuña Jr., is gunning for a 40-70 season, and their cleanup hitter, Matt Olson, just hit his 52nd homer of the year, surpassing the franchise’s single-season record. Oh, and they have six other All-Stars besides that pair, including one of the favorites to win the FIP Cy Young in Spencer Strider.

If the Braves have shown any weakness this season, it’s been their relative lack of starting pitching depth. They’ve had a trio of 29-game starters in Strider, Bryce Elder, and Charlie Morton, and while all of them have showcased their warts down the stretch, the main problems for the rotation were the absences of last year’s ace — Max Fried — and breakout starter — Kyle Wright. Though he’s made just 13 starts on the season (the fourth most on the team), Fried is back now, and he’s looking pretty darn good, rounding out what should be an excellent four-man playoff rotation, so the Braves’ issues with depth (and Wright’s struggles) likely won’t matter as much in October. Yet, they left me scratching my head at times this season when they passed over top prospect AJ Smith-Shawver for starts in Fried and Wright’s absence. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Beforetimes, mid-September brought my annual check-in on the potential for end-of-season chaos in the playoff races via the Team Entropy series. With last year’s introduction of an expanded and restructured postseason, however, Major League Baseball did away with the potential for scheduling mayhem in favor of a larger inventory of playoff games. Along with the expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12 and of the Wild Card round from a pair of winner-take-all games to a quartet of three-game series, MLB also eliminated all winner-take-all regular-season tiebreaker games. In the name of efficiency, we have no more Games 163 and no more potential Bucky Dents. Instead, ties, even for spots where the winner would receive a postseason berth and the loser would go home, are decided by mathematics. It’s enough to make a fan want to shout, “Hey, Manfred, pull your head out of a spreadsheet and watch an elimination game!”

The untangling of the often-chaotic scenarios by which those one-game tiebreakers could come about was Team Entropy’s raison d’etre. But particularly with so many close races, there’s still enough untangling to do in potentially complex tie scenarios that I’ve chosen to continue a version of this exercise, pouring out a cold one for what might have been. If what we’re left with isn’t exactly chaotic, you can thumb your nose at the commissioner as you take a seat on the Team Un-Tropy bandwagon. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, I wrote about the imminent demise of the 3,000 Hit Club after Miguel Cabrera became a member. Simply put, it was a question of math. The worse the environment is for hitting for batting average, the fewer players there will be who will put up lofty career hit totals. While it would be easy to think there are simply more lousy hitters these days, as league batting average has dropped in recent decades, the spread in individual batting averages has not increased; great players see lower batting averages when league batting averages decline. But while 2023’s new rules didn’t herald a reversal of the trend, one late entrant in the race for 3,000 hits has continued to excel: Freddie Freeman.

What makes the nadir of the 3,000 Hit Club so jarring to a baseball fan is the newness of this phenomenon. The explosion of offense in the 1990s wasn’t just homers, but batting average as well. Even going back 10 years, there were always a lot of players with career hit totals somewhere north of 2,000.

In 2023, that number is seven, and that’s only because there were four new members this year: Freeman, Jose Altuve, Elvis Andrus, and Andrew McCutchen. (I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Evan Longoria won’t get 72 hits over the next two weeks.) Contrast that with 2004, which featured 27 active players with 2,000 career hits. Read the rest of this entry »

Gavin Williams came as advertised when I saw him pitch earlier this month. The 24-year-old rookie right-hander’s fastball topped out at 99.3 mph, while his slider sat in the mid-80s and occasionally topped 90. Allowing one hit and a lone run over five rain-delayed innings against the Minnesota Twins, Williams was all about power.

He also came as advertised when I spoke to him on the day preceding his outing. I was told that the 6-foot-6, 255-pound Cleveland Guardians hurler is a man of few words, and that was pretty much the case. While accommodating, Williams was anything but verbose. No matter. I largely got what I was looking for: a self-appraisal of what he brings to the table.

“Most people know me for my fastball, really,” the righty replied when I asked for a self scouting report. “That’s the main thing people know me as, and it’s what I know myself as.”

The Fayetteville, North Carolina native first hit triple digits during his freshman year at East Carolina University, and as meaningful as that milestone was to his identity on the mound, he recognizes that retiring big-league hitters takes more than pure velocity.

“I don’t think 96 to 100 is that big of a difference,” Williams said. “If it’s down the middle it can get hit. Putting it where you want to is a bigger thing. It also matters how it moves.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Patreon supporter Max Harris banter about Ben’s problems remembering Orioles rookie Heston Kjerstad’s name, Baltimore’s lookalike offensive core, and Max’s history with the podcast and baseball, then (18:22) answer listener emails about seat fillers at MLB games, hypothetical players “Mr. Repeat” and “Mr. First Time,” centralizing MLB R&D, systemic vs. individual explanations for changes in the game, instituting minimum and maximum pitch counts, Kyle Schwarber vs. Nick Ahmed, the good-but-disappointing Blue Jays, the Mariners’ streak of not losing by a lot, and Theo Epstein pedantry, plus a Future Blast (1:27:39) from 2059 and a follow-up (1:30:31) about a tiered Hall of Fame.

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to first tweet about Orioles
Link to second tweet about Orioles
Link to Swanson/Culberson story
Link to The Athletic on tech spending
Link to Scouting Bureau story
Link to Ben on Scout School
Link to Swanson interview episode
Link to Ben on Dunn and Pierre
Link to Ben on defense vs. offense
Link to offense vs. defense spending
Link to Ben on pitcher limits
Link to no-blowouts streaks
Link to Sam Kennedy quote
Link to listener emails database
Link to Rick Wilber’s website
Link to Future Blast wiki
Link to Kjerstad homer
Link to Bill James proposal
Link to Hall of Stats
Link to career tiers sheet

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The National League playoff race has been a frenzy in the second half. The Cubs have surged from being virtually out of the picture to probable October qualifiers. The Giants have streaked their way from a likely playoff team to one on the outside looking in a couple of times over – they’re working on their latest push now. The Phillies have risen – albeit more gradually than the Cubs – from no-man’s land to a comfortable Wild Card lead with a few weeks to go. Meanwhile, the Diamondbacks, Reds, and Marlins each have a negative run differential but are still well in the mix for the final Wild Card.

Amid all the chaos, the Brewers have rather quietly risen up the NL ranks. They’ve handled their business in the Central – most crucially going 10-3 in their season series against those Reds – and on September 15, find themselves with the third-best record in the NL at 82-64, trailing only the NL East champion Braves and the Dodgers. With a 4.5-game lead in the division and a better record than any of the senior circuit’s Wild Card teams, our playoff odds give the Brewers a 94.0% chance of winning the division, with their odds of making the playoffs rounding up to 100.0%. In a year where NL teams have struggled to distinguish themselves from a busy middle of the pack, the Brewers have faced relatively little adversity in doing so:

Read the rest of this entry »

Language barriers typically involve speakers of two different languages, but barriers can also exist between people who speak the same language. The evolution and expansion of language over many centuries and cultures provides a googolplex of options for communicating a given message. That’s why I’ll never understand how we settled on referring to an effective pitcher as having “good stuff.”

With oodles of options for depicting our day-to-day experiences, it makes sense that our diction be dictated by the shared jargon of our peers. Gamers have their n00bs and POGs, literary types their dichotomies and postmodernism, coders BSODs and buffer overflows. But beneath the glittery phrasing is almost always a nugget of substance anyone can relate to. Programmers teach computers to solve problems in terms of zeros and ones, while authors use binaries as metaphors to explore opposing forces in their characters lives, and gamers wage the battle between good and evil in their ever more challenging boss fights. We use different words, but we share the same notions. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine trading Mookie Betts. Chaim Bloom must have done that, must have considered all of the angles and potential outcomes of such a move, including the possibility that he would be saddled with it as his legacy — then sold principal owner John Henry on a vision of the Red Sox without the superstar right fielder in order to be hired as the team’s chief baseball officer in October 2019. That trade has not worked out well for the Red Sox, who have made the playoffs just once since winning the 2018 World Series, behaving more like a mid-market franchise than the league’s third-most valuable one. And while Bloom had put something of a stamp on the post-Betts roster, the rest of his vision will not be realized. On Thursday, the Red Sox fired him, kicking off a search for new leadership of their baseball operations department for the fourth time since Theo Epstein departed for the Cubs in October 2011.

Unlike predecessors Ben Cherington (2011–15) and Dave Dombrowski (2015–19), Bloom didn’t win a championship during his run to offset the team’s disappointing seasons. On his watch, the Red Sox went just 267–262 from the start of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to the point of his dismissal, becoming more notable for their belt-tightening than for their on-field success. They made the playoffs only in 2021, when they went 92–70, finishing second in the AL East, then beating the Yankees in the Wild Card Game and the Rays in the Division Series before losing to the Astros in the ALCS. They finished last in the division in both 2020 (24–36) and ’22 (78–84) and fired Bloom while tied for fourth with the Yankees at 73–72, with just a 0.3% chance of making the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »