Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley lament and discuss Shohei Ohtani’s UCL injury and its ramifications for the rest of his season, his two-way future, his free agency, the Angels, and the continued happiness of baseball fans and podcast co-hosts, followed by conversations about Stephen Strasburg’s retirement (59:17), Wander Franco’s placement on administrative leave (1:11:30), and whether players are required to wear pants (1:21:06), plus a Future Blast from 2050 (1:31:37).

Audio intro: Ted O., “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ben’s Ohtani article
Link to Evan Drellich on Ohtani
Link to Jay Jaffe on the Angels
Link to Sam on the Angels
Link to FA class
Link to Ohtani and Elly
Link to TJS study
Link to Stat Blast on max-effort pitching
Link to Ben on pitcher roster limits
Link to WaPo report on Strasburg
Link to Drellich on Franco
Link to Jeff Passan on Franco
Link to Jay Cuda pants tweet
Link to CBA
Link to high-socks study
Link to Rick Wilber’s website
Link to Future Blast wiki

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You’re going to hear a lot about the Braves over the next couple months. They’re the best team in baseball, and that’s how it goes. Some of you are Braves fans, so getting to see more of your favorite team in October will just be one more drop of good news in a season filled up to the brim with happy headlines. But for those of you who are indifferent or ambivalent toward the Braves, for those of you who loathe them in your very core, I have a little treat. That’s all this article is: a treat to bring a bit more fun to the wall-to-wall coverage awaiting us all.

On Tuesday night, Daniel Vogelbach homered to straightaway center field and Michael Harris II attempted to rob it. Harris tried very hard, and I went back and watched the replay to see exactly how close he came to making the play. However, after watching a few times, my attention shifted. I kept rewinding because I noticed that something was sticking out of Harris’ glove and flapping like the tongue of a golden retriever:

That’s the little positioning card that tells Harris where to stand for each batter. Those cheat sheets are a small part of the revolution in outfield positioning that has hammered BABIP league-wide over the last several years. Your local sports outlet probably wrote about the phenomenon when these cards started appearing back in 2018, but at this point they’re old hat (especially for the Yankees, who literally kept the cards in their hats). Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox are going to miss the playoffs in the AL Central, which is the baseball equivalent of failing driver’s ed. It’s disappointing but not particularly surprising; since winning the World Series in 2005, the Sox have made the postseason just three times and won a grand total of three games across all of those trips.

Shockingly, the White Sox have enjoyed remarkable front office continuity over that time. For most of the 21st century, the duo of Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn, in some combination of titles, was running the show. I say “was” because, as you well know, Williams and Hahn were fired on Tuesday.

There’s no structural reason the White Sox can’t be successful. They have history and branding half the league would kill for. They play in the third-largest media market in the U.S., and though they share it with a richer and more popular neighbor, if Houston and Philadelphia and Toronto can spend enough to put out a winning team, so can the White Sox. Most important, they play in the easiest division in baseball, where the last-place club in the AL East would have a decent shot at winning the division.

They’re also lucky enough to have an owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, who cares whether the team wins. Not every team can say the same. Unfortunately, Reinsdorf seems to care how the White Sox win. Read the rest of this entry »

Another week, another jam-packed baseball schedule. The biggest story of the week, no doubt, is Shohei Ohtani’s torn UCL, the most profound baseball-related bummer of the year in my opinion. Ohtani is such a globe-spanning superstar that news of this magnitude will naturally overshadow the rest of what’s going on in the sport. But I’m not here to mope. Like Zach Lowe and his seminal Ten Things basketball column, we’re here to celebrate some little oddities. So let’s get down to business. This week’s column is filled with delightful weirdness, and delightfully odd teams, to offset the Ohtani sadness. Do you like bunts? Do you like the Marlins doing weird stuff? Do you like baserunning adventures and underdogs taking on bullies? Then read on, because this column has all of that and more. Read the rest of this entry »

The news last night out of Anaheim landed like a punch to the gut of every reasonable baseball fan: Shohei Ohtani has a torn ulnar collateral ligament and at the very least is done pitching for the season, thus ending perhaps the greatest campaign we’ve ever seen. And in a double whammy that shouldn’t be dismissed, the team announced that Mike Trout is heading back to the injured list after playing just one game following a seven-week absence due to a fractured left hamate that required surgery.

Set aside the money for a moment; obviously this carries ramifications for Ohtani’s upcoming payday, which I’ll get to below. And forget the playoffs. The Angels went all-in in advance of the August 1 trade deadline but have gone an unfathomable 5-16 this month, plummeting out of the AL Wild Card race like an anvil without a parachute. Their Playoff Odds were already down to 0.3% before they were swept by the Reds in a bleak doubleheader on Wednesday. Even if Ohtani and Trout had both played at their peaks over the season’s final 34 games, the team’s fate was sealed. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, the Rangers and Diamondbacks played a classic at Chase Field. It started as a pitcher’s duel between Jordan Montgomery, who pitched beautifully over eight scoreless frames, and a cadre of Diamondbacks pitchers led by bulk man Slade Cecconi, who allowed the only run of the first eight innings on a solo shot off the bat of Adolis García. Then, things got chaotic. From the ninth inning on, the game swung from an 88.4% chance of a Texas win to an 81.3% likelihood for Arizona, then back to 95.1% odds in favor of the Rangers before a final swing back to the D-backs on a Tommy Pham walk-off double. Not to be confused for the heart rates of each team’s fans Monday evening, the win probability chart came out looking like this:

Last week, Ben Clemens wrote about how neat Win Probability Added is, and its merits as a part of the MVP discussion. While Ben’s piece made the great point that WPA is not “just a storytelling statistic,” lobbying for its use in measuring value over a season, its storytelling powers are indeed pretty remarkable. So much of the drama within Monday’s game was made quantifiable by measuring the shifts in win probability. Ketel Marte’s game-tying homer in the ninth was worth .467 WPA, or 46.7 percentage points of win probability; Nathaniel Lowe’s go-ahead double was worth .454; Tommy Pham’s walk-off was worth .754, the 11th-highest WPA value for any single play this year. That’s three hits that turned the game on its head, and then back on its feet, and then back on its head again. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tigers’ season hasn’t been much to write home about, particularly on the offensive side, but one encouraging sign has been the play of Spencer Torkelson. The top pick of the 2020 draft was utterly overwhelmed by major league pitching as a rookie last year, to the point that he was demoted to Triple-A for a spell. He started this season slowly as well, but has shown significant signs of progress and has been red-hot this month.

Even while going hitless in his last two games — can’t win ’em all when it comes to timing these articles — the 23-year-old Torkelson entered Wednesday hitting .237/.320/.449 with 23 homers and a 112 wRC+. Those numbers may not jump off the page, but that represents significant advancement over last year’s dismal line (.203/.285/.319, 76 wRC+), not to mention a strong effort to overcome this year’s early-season struggles. After hitting just .206/.266/.309 (55 wRC+) through April, he’s at .243/.331/.480 (124 wRC+) since, including .267/.375/.653 with eight home runs and a 179 wRC+ in August, with a pair of four-hit games and a quartet of two-hit games. And he’s done this month’s damage against the Pirates, Rays, Twins, Red Sox, Guardians, and Cubs — mostly contending teams, if not necessarily powerhouses.

A hot month or six weeks may just be that, and while it’s too early to suggest that Torkelson is a finished product, there’s a lot to like about the evolution of his performance. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020, the Washington Nationals succumbed to one of the worst championship hangovers of all time. They’re on course to finish in last place in the NL East for the fourth year running (though by God, the Mets are going to make them earn it this year!), and while signs of rejuvenation are on the horizon, they are only signs at this point. Since that pandemic-shortened season, Patrick Corbin has existed mostly as a study in contrast, a reminder that the ruins of now used to be the enviable bastion of then. In 2019, Corbin was one of three bona fide front-of-the-rotation starters in Washington, along with Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg. Now, Strasburg is on the IL indefinitely as he recovers from thoracic outlet syndrome. Scherzer is gone. So are Juan Soto, Trea Turner, Anthony Rendon, Ryan Zimmerman, Daniel Hudson, and Sean Doolittle. Victor Robles has been limited to just 36 games this season due to injury. For all intents and purposes, Corbin is the only championship National left.

Last year, Corbin pitched as an act of self-abnegation, posting a 6.31 ERA and leading all of baseball in losses, hits, and earned runs allowed. His name was a metonym for futility.

But right now? Things aren’t that bad. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And we are LIVE

12:01

Dan Szymborski: No, they’re supposed to be presents for people who know what the trade deadline is.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: You don’t expect me to give *all* the secrets away do ya?

Read the rest of this entry »

Look, I know that isn’t the line. It’s a chicken in every pot. But I came up with a good lobster pun last week, and I’m writing more about the ins and outs of teams driving home runners from third base, so I decided to go back to the well. You’ll just have to live with it; I’m the one driving the boat here, and as it turns out, it’s a lobster boat.

With the puns are now settled, let’s get down to business. Last week, I chopped up the 2023 season into halves to see how well various statistical indicators correlated with a team’s future ability to cash in their runners. As a recap, strikeout rate had a fairly strong correlation, and not much else did. Quite frankly, though, I wasn’t particularly convinced by that. There just wasn’t enough data. With only 30 observations, it’s too easy for one team to skew things, or at least that’s how it feels in my head.

There’s an easy solution: more data. So I used the same split-half methodology from last week and started chopping past seasons in two. More specifically, I picked the years from 2012-22, excluding the shortened 2020 season. In each case, I followed the same procedure: I split the season in two and noted each team’s offensive statistics in the first half. Then I looked at how efficient each team was at scoring when a runner reached third with less than two outs. I got a much bigger sample this time; 300 observations, which makes it a lot harder for a single outlier to mess things up. Read the rest of this entry »