Just in case Max Scherzer’s season-ending injury wasn’t enough pitcher-specific tragedy for the week, baseball’s deities have handed down a tale of woe to another of the game’s top pitchers. Sandy Alcantara, last year’s NL Cy Young award winner, may miss the remainder of the season as well. While you could argue that teammate Jesús Luzardo has surpassed Alcantara as a top-of-the-rotation weapon, Alcantara’s history as one of the NL’s top workhorses makes his absence extremely ill-timed for the Marlins, who are currently fighting for their playoff lives against the Diamondbacks, Reds, and Giants.

Alcantara first landed on the IL about a week ago after experiencing discomfort in his forearm. Baseball people take forearm pain as seriously as the denizens of Middle-earth regard inscribed poems on mysterious rings, so Alcantara was shut down for further diagnosis. While he felt healthy enough to play catch on Wednesday, an MRI revealed that his forearm strain stems from a sprained UCL. While the worst-case scenario — namely, a Tommy John surgery that would cost him the rest of this season and likely all of 2024 — does not appear to be the immediate course of action, his 2023 status remains uncertain. When asked specifically about Alcantara’s return, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker avoided being too bullish on the prospects of getting him back this year, saying, “I don’t know. I can’t say yes. I can’t say no. I’ve just gotta be positive. I just gotta keep telling myself day by day and try to take advantage of the opportunity.”

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize Alcantara as having a rough season — I think something like Alek Manoah’s disastrous 2023 better fits that bill — but I can’t deny that it’s been a bit disappointing compared to his 2022. This year, Alcantara has posted his highest ERA as a Marlin, as well as his highest home run allowed rate and lowest strikeout rate. He’s been hit harder than usual, so none of these numbers are pure flukes. But while Statcast’s xERA isn’t happy about his season, ZiPS sees him as have a 3.60 zFIP, reflecting that the declines in his strikeout rate don’t quite match the smaller declines seen in his plate discipline data. It would be hard to say he’s been an ace this year, but the fact that Alcantara is able to eat so many innings has kept his value strong, and he was likely headed for his third-straight season of 200 innings and at least 3 WAR. The Marlins have a young rotation and many of their pitchers have significant injury histories. That makes it extra nice to have one of baseball’s dwindling number of pitchers who can casually go seven innings most nights.

In losing Scherzer, ZiPS estimated that the Rangers lost two percentage points in the playoff race and 0.4 percentage points in World Series probability. ZiPS likes Alcantara slightly better as a pitcher and feels more confident about the replacement options in Texas, so the impact on Miami’s fate is a skosh larger. First, I ran ZiPS assuming that Alcantara would miss the rest of the season:

If we ignore the Padres, who are on the verge of rounding to zero, the Marlins have the toughest road of any of the Wild Card contenders without Alcantara. Now, let’s assume the Marlins get one of those aforementioned Tolkienian rings, use its little-known power to heal elbow and forearm problems, and get Alcantara back into the rotation when he’s eligible on Tuesday:

In a very tight race, getting Alcantara back for a couple starts is still enough to snag the Marlins nearly four percentage points of playoff probability, about twice what a healthy Scherzer would have done for the Rangers. And as importantly, having him for the playoffs would change the top of the rotation enough to give Miami a much better chance of making a deep postseason run.

Naturally, the worst-case scenario would have a significant effect on Alcantara’s long-term outlook:

While the odds still favor Alcantara returning, if worst came to worst, there would be a lot of concerns. Would Alcantara’s changeup still be as devastating if he came back with a 95 mph fastball instead of a 98 mph one? Would the loss of an entire year reduce the chances of him finally finding the strikeout upside of his solid stuff, as Nathan Eovaldi eventually did? What are the chances he could return and still be one of the few pitchers who’s a good bet to throw 200 innings?

Thankfully, we’re not yet at the point where we have to answer those questions. Mason Miller suffered an UCL sprain in May, but has been able to come back with conservative treatment thanks to the A’s showing an abundance of caution in terms of hurrying him back. But if Alcantara’s 2023 is indeed over, the Marlins face a tougher path to the playoffs, certainly a tougher one than when both ZiPS and the FanGraphs playoff odds had them with an over 70% chance of making the playoffs back in July.

With the season the Atlanta Braves are having, there isn’t that much spotlight to go around. Ronald Acuña Jr. is rewriting the record book, Matt Olson has an outside shot at 60 home runs, and beyond that Atlanta literally has an above-average starter at every position on the field:

And because these guys never seem to get hurt or take a day off, there hasn’t been a story about an unsung hero picking up the slack when a star goes down. So Michael Harris II, a 22-year-old center fielder with a plus-plus glove and a 115 wRC+, goes under the radar a little. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dan Szymborski: Greetings, fair FanGraphs reader, it is a time for chats and chidings.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Also, since it was being stubborn about getting on the front page, my queue is almost nothing, so this is YOUR best time for random nonsense.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: While it’s too early to say exactly *what* will happen, I’m not particularly optimistic.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: The players complaints heading into the last CBA are going to be basically unchanged except for minimums salaries.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: The luxury tax threshold still grows slower than inflation and WAY slower than MLB revenue growth

Read the rest of this entry »

All season, the Rangers have been fighting gravity. They stormed out to a lead in the AL West, but they lost Jacob deGrom in the interim. The Astros lurked not far off the pace. But the Rangers persevered and held their lead until the trade deadline. Reinforcements were on the way! Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Aroldis Chapman — they made more improvements than any other team in the league.

They needed it, too, because Nathan Eovaldi hit the IL the next day. Josh Jung followed not long after. As they slogged through August, the Mariners charged into the AL West race, making it a three-way fracas. No sooner did Eovaldi return than Adolis García succumbed to injury. And now, with the playoffs hanging in the balance and every win at a premium, this:

Right-hander Max Scherzer is expected to miss the remainder of the regular season with a strained teres major — a muscle that connects the scapula to the humerus. Scherzer is, Texas GM Chris Young told reporters, "unlikely" to pitch in the playoffs.

Brutal news for the Rangers.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 13, 2023

What rotten luck. For those of you who aren’t anatomists, the teres major is a muscle in the rear shoulder that gets stressed by pitching. It’s been in the news quite a bit this year, in fact. Justin Verlander missed the first month of the season with a low-grade teres major strain. Triston McKenzie missed the first two months of the season with a strained teres major. John Means’ return from Tommy John surgery was delayed by a teres major injury. None of these injuries have seemed to linger, and none required surgery, but the timeline is unfortunately immutable: there’s no chance of Scherzer making it back for the regular season, and little shot of him pitching in the playoffs either. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Jay Jaffe wrote about the NL Cy Young race and its lack of a clear frontrunner. What struck me about the NL crop of pitchers is that each top candidate has excelled in a specific category that could cater to a certain class of voters. Do you heavily weigh peripheral stats like FIP and strikeouts? If so, you’d probably vote for Spencer Strider, who leads the NL in K/9, K%, K-BB%, FIP, xFIP, SIERA, swinging-strike rate, and CSW%. If you value run prevention over all else, then Justin Steele and Blake Snell, the only big league pitchers with ERAs below 2.50, are your guys. Voters who value both excellence and volume may choose to select Logan Webb or Zac Gallen, who lead the way in innings pitched with solid ERA and FIP numbers. While they (along with NL WAR leader Zack Wheeler) are all close in pitching prowess, odds are I could guess who would come first on your ballot if you gave me a pie chart of your perceived importance of ERA, peripherals, and volume.

The AL race is a bit different. There are deserving candidates who are strong in individual areas of the game, but none stand out as elite compared to top pitchers in previous seasons. Consider Gerrit Cole, whose 187 innings and 2.79 ERA (66 ERA-) pace the AL. He’s on pace to reach the 200-inning threshold for the sixth time in his career, but just last year, 19 qualified hurlers averaged at least as many innings per start as Cole, including several guys who came nowhere near award contention. And while his 66 ERA- is impressive, it’s the worst AL-leading ERA- since 2016, when Rick Porcello led with a mark of 71 as one of the more underwhelming Cy Young winners in recent memory. Before that, you have to go back to 2007 to find a worse top of the class in the junior circuit.

Even though Cole doesn’t compare to premier seasons of yesteryear (including many of his own), he’s still locked in as a top candidate this year and the likely frontrunner. He hasn’t had a better single-season ERA since his legendary 2019 campaign, when he struck out 326 batters and lost a narrow Cy Young race to Justin Verlander. But he’s kept runs off the board despite fewer strikeouts than is custom for him. For the first time since discovering the power of his elevated fastball, Cole has struck out fewer than 30% of batters faced. And while no ERA estimator has him below 3.30, the batted ball data suggests that may not be a fluke. His barrel rate, which has sat between the 15th and 25th percentile over the past three years, has been almost exactly average in 2023, along with his hard-hit rate allowed. Because of this, he’s kept a greater share of fly balls in the yard of any season since his days in Pittsburgh. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde stood in the visiting dugout at Chase Field and cast a furtive glance toward the warning track where his players began to warm. “I haven’t seen a baseball thrown today and it’s already 3:15,” he said. Even here, three time zones away from the comfortable climes of Camden Yards, the duties of a big league manager had pulled him in every direction. So many people had popped into his office – front office members, coaches, reporters, players – he’d barely found time to shed his street clothes and don his uniform.

At the helm of the team with the best record in the American League, Hyde is a clear frontrunner to be named AL Manager of the Year, an award for which he was the runner-up last season. His candidacy, then and now, bears many hallmarks of a winner. As the leader of a long-dormant team now in the postseason hunt, he makes for a good narrative. That the Orioles lead baseball’s toughest division, despite a young and inexperienced roster and a mediocre pitching staff, would seem to attest to Hyde’s managerial skill. If he wins, it will be hard to say he doesn’t deserve it.

It will also be almost impossible to say, definitively and concretely, that he does. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have much in the way of groundbreaking analysis for you today. I’m here to write about something that’s pretty obvious: Brandon Woodruff is still awfully good. You probably knew that already without fancy stats or gory math. The Milwaukee right-hander owns a career 3.08 ERA and 3.18 FIP. He has been good at just about every point since his rookie year in 2017. Still, I’d like to address a few of the reasons that his continued success is a big deal. So until I get to the part where I can dazzle you with numbers, I will at least try to drop in some fun facts here and there.

Woodruff originally hit the IL with shoulder inflammation back in April, after making just two starts that were — stop me if you’ve heard this before — very good. His shoulder inflammation turned out to be a Grade 2 subscapular strain. The subscapularis is the largest muscle in your rotator cuff, and doctors can diagnose a subscapular tear using three tests with excellent names: the lift-off test, the bear hug test, and the belly press test. Sadly, none of these tests is quite as fun as it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

In the moment, the home run was huge. With the Mariners trailing 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning against the Angels on Monday night, needing a win to stay half a game ahead of the Rangers in the race for the third AL Wild Card spot, Julio Rodríguez chased a low sinker from José Marte and swatted it over the center field wall into the No Fly Zone, the personal cheering section of T-Mobile Park where the J-Rod Squad sits. The 402-foot blast was Rodríguez’s 30th of the year, meaning that it not only tied the game, it made the 22-year-old center fielder the third-youngest player to join the 30-homer, 30-steal club.

Counting to the point where the players joined the club by reaching the second milestone, only Mike Trout (21 years, 54 days in 2012) and Ronald Acuña Jr. (21 years, 248 days in 2019) reached 30 homers and 30 stolen bases in the same season at a younger age. Alex Rodriguez, like Julio Rodríguez, reached the mark in his age-22 season — and is the only other Mariner to accomplish the feat, but he was 23 years and three days old when he notched his 30th steal in 1998. Read the rest of this entry »

If I were an image-conscious billionaire with a disappointing baseball team on my books and unlimited financial resources, David Stearns is one of the first people I’d call to run it. The Mets won 101 games in 2022, and while 2023 represents a monumental step back for the franchise, this team still has tons of talent both in the majors and high minors. It’s also better-funded than any other team in the league.

So with Stearns due to join the Mets as president of baseball operations, we get a talented, rich team being run by one of the top executives in the sport. I don’t know if it will work, because nothing with the Mets is straightforward, but I see no obvious better idea. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you at the start of this: I never quite bought into what Luis Arraez was doing. When he won the batting title last year, I was skeptical. When he was traded from Minnesota to Miami before the season, I loved the Twins’ side of the deal. When he was flirting with a .400 batting average at the All-Star break, I relegated him to Honorable Mention status on our top 50 trade value list. He just perpetually flummoxed me, slapping singles while I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly keep it up.

Arraez has been downright putrid of late. He’s been below replacement level since the start of August. He’s batting .262 with a .282 OBP in that span, which is hard to fathom for a guy who is still only striking out 6.7% of the time. This isn’t a victory lap article, though. It won’t last. It can’t last. I don’t believe in this version of Arraez any more than I believed in the .400 hitter from June.

In trying to solve this mystery, I let other people guide me. Honestly, I’m not the person to figure out what Arraez is doing wrong, because I never quite understood what he was doing right. So instead, I read a bunch of articles about the good times. Then I looked to see whether Arraez had stopped doing the things that had so recently made him special. Read the rest of this entry »