In what may have been the most surprising trade ahead of the August 2 deadline, the Brewers and Padres swapped closers on August 1 as part of a five-player deal, with four-time All-Star Josh Hader heading to San Diego and 2021 All-Star Taylor Rogers and three other players going to Milwaukee. But a trade that was supposed to improve both contenders while making some additional sense in terms of rosters and payrolls has thus far failed to pan out for either team, and at this point both clubs find themselves scrambling for the National League’s last playoff spot.

The full deal sent the 28-year-old Hader to the Padres in exchange for the 31-year-old Rogers as well as 30-year-old righty Dinelson Lamet and a pair of 23-year-old prospects, lefty Robert Gasser and outfielder Esteury Ruiz. Lamet didn’t even suit up for the Brewers, who designated him for assignment on August 5; he was claimed by the Rockies and at this writing has made eight appearances for them. Meanwhile, the Brewers sent Ruiz, who had been on the Padres’ major league roster, back to Triple-A and promoted Gasser from High-A to Double-A.

While the trade appeared puzzling on the surface, the Brewers seemed motivated to make the move because they perceived that they had a deep enough bullpen to withstand the loss of the increasingly expensive Hader, who’s making $11 million this year and could make around $15 million in his final year of arbitration. Even if Rogers didn’t wind up working the ninth inning, they believed that the extra goodies they were receiving from the Padres would help them in the long run. The Padres made the trade because they felt they needed an elite closer for a playoff push that they hoped would include a revamped roster, not only with Fernando Tatis Jr. after he rehabbed from a wrist injury but also other significant fortifications that were in the works; they landed Juan Soto and Josh Bell from the Nationals but might have turned to Willson Contreras had that massive blockbuster not materialized. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a thing that you could say about José Berríos: he’s been a lousy pitcher this year. I don’t even think he would argue with you on that one; after signing a seven-year, $131 million deal with the Blue Jays, he’s having comfortably his worst season in the majors. His 5.28 ERA is more than a run higher than his career mark coming into the year despite the declining offensive environment. He’s striking fewer batters out and giving up home runs at an alarming rate. Whether you’re talking about advanced or standard metrics, new school or old school, it’s been a disaster of a year.

Here’s another thing you could say about Berríos: he’s a solid pitcher who’s sticking with the approach that got him here in the first place. If you thought he was good last year — and you probably did, given that he put up a mid-3s ERA in both Minnesota and Toronto with the peripherals to match — you’d expect him to be good again this year. He’s not losing velocity. He didn’t change his pitch mix. He didn’t suddenly lose command of the zone. What the heck is happening here?

Before we go any further in this investigation, I’m going to spoil the conclusion a little bit: I don’t know the answer. I don’t think there’s an obvious answer at all, in fact. If there were, I’m fairly certain the Jays would have figured it out by now. Whatever’s ailing Berríos, it’s somewhere on the margins. Read the rest of this entry »

Mitch White brought a new-ish slider to Toronto when the Blue Jays acquired him at this year’s trade deadline. He also brought a nerdy approach to pitching. That should come as no surprise. The 27-year-old right-hander had pitched in the Los Angeles Dodgers system since being selected in the second round of the 2016 draft out of Santa Clara University.

White also had a big-league resume when he changed organizations. Having debuted with the Dodgers in August of 2020’s COVID-truncated campaign, he had 105-and-two-thirds innings under his belt when the four-player swap occurred. Since coming to Toronto, White has a 5.89 ERA over four starts.

White discussed his new and old sliders, and the blister issues that have dogged his career, when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park last week.

———

On his path to the big leagues and dealing with blisters:
“A lot of it was staying healthy. I’ve had a few things go on every year, whether it was blisters or some back stuff. I had a broken toe at one point. Right now, I have this little guy [blister]. The slider really puts a lot of pressure there because I’m trying to get to the side of the ball and spin it, and for whatever reason, I guess my skin is soft. I’ve had to learn how to manage that stuff in between outings. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’m an obnoxiously determined Devil’s advocate, one of my favorite uses of data is tackling conventional wisdom. For example, one such bit of wisdom that always bugs me is when pundits insist that the best teams are the ones that win close games. In fact, the opposite is true. The most predictive run differential comes in blowouts — the good teams are the ones that are more likely to humiliate their opponents, not squeeze out a close one. This time of year, you start to see a lot of analysis asserting that X team is definitely blessed or doomed come playoff time because of some randomly chosen factor Y. We could do a column a day on these and still have dozens of unwritten pieces by the time the actual playoffs roll around, but let’s focus on a few specific ones, concentrating on who good teams beat rather than how many games they win.

First off, do regular season head-to-head records matter in the playoffs? Since the start of divisional play in 1969, teams that face each other in the playoffs have frequently met in the regular season. Interleague play added eventual World Series matchups to the regular season, and starting in 2023, every playoff matchup will have already occurred during the regular season. Given the sample size of playoff series, if we construct a simple model of series winning percentage that only consists of a team’s regular season winning percentage and its winning percentage in head-to-head matchups, the model horribly inaccurate, with an r-squared of 0.0886 and a mean absolute error of 275 points of winning percentage.

But including head-to-head winning percentage doesn’t really even have a marginal influence on the coin flip; without the head-to-head matchups, the model’s MAE increases to 276 points of winning percentage. Now, a head-to-head record may imply something about a team’s overall strength that isn’t captured in its overall record, but rather than pick up a small sample implication, we can use strength of schedule directly, which does help the model a tiny bit (playoff series are always going to be very uncertain unless we move to best-of-75 series or something wacky). Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

While Francisco Lindor is having an MVP-caliber season — that is, one that would not be out of place given historical precedents and that belongs in the discussion of this year’s potential honorees — he’s not the leading candidate for National League hardware. Particularly after what he’s done in August as the Cardinals have pulled away with the NL Central lead, Paul Goldschmidt must be considered the favorite, as he not only leads the NL in all three slash stats (and wRC+), but he has a shot at winning the league’s Triple Crown.

The 34-year-old Goldschmidt finished the weekend hitting .338/.421/.639 with 33 home runs, 105 RBI, a 194 wRC+, and 6.9 WAR. All of those figures lead the Senior Circuit except for his homers, and he’s tied for the RBI lead. Here’s how those numbers stack up versus other NL players:

Read the rest of this entry »

With the playoff pictures in both leagues nearly settled with a month left to play, big matchups between the best teams lose a little meaning without the high stakes of a close pennant race hanging in the balance. Still, there are a few competitive divisions, and the Wild Card race in both leagues should be exciting down to the end of the season.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. 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.

Despite nine wins over their last 13 games, the Dodgers have slowed down just a touch, though they’re still on pace for 113 wins this year, or a .698 winning percentage. History awaits if they can crest the .700 mark: Only the 1998 Yankees and 2001 Mariners have finished a full 162-game season with a winning percentage that high or better. After wrapping up their series with the Marlins on Monday, they have a tough stretch of games ahead of them: three in New York against the Mets and then six games against the Padres split up by a three-game set against the Giants. If they can get through this part of their schedule at their current pace, they’ll have a good shot of becoming the third team ever to finish with 114 wins or more.

Even though they just dropped two of three to the Orioles over the weekend, the Astros have elevated themselves over all the other teams in the American League. Houston has played extremely well all season long and has a soft schedule on the docket, with six straight series against teams with records below .500. Of some concern: the Astros scored just four runs total against Baltimore. Justin Verlander, the favorite to win the AL Cy Young award, was also forced to exit his start on Sunday with a calf injury. The offensive woes should sort themselves out, but losing Verlander for an extended period of time would be a serious blow. Read the rest of this entry »

In the top of the fourth inning of Saturday’s Braves-Cardinals tilt, Atlanta struck for four runs, breaking a scoreless tie and setting the team up in an enviable position. Leading off the bottom of the inning, St. Louis’ Tyler O’Neill walked on four straight pitches against Charlie Morton. That walk cost the Braves; two batters later, Andrew Knizner popped a two-run homer that brought the Cardinals within two runs.

On the broadcast, John Smoltz was livid even before the home run. “The last thing you want to do is walk the leadoff hitter after the team gave you four runs…. You don’t care if he hits a 3–1 pitch for a homer. Just don’t walk him.” He said that even before O’Neill walked, and emphasized the point throughout the inning.

Aaron Goldsmith, handling play-by-play, asked Smoltz to elaborate. “You’re not being facetious, you actually mean that? You’d rather have a run on the board than a runner at first base?” Smoltz stuck to his guns, said he preferred the homer to the walk, and that was that.

Here’s a bit of an upset: I understood what Smoltz was talking about. In fact, I think that if you give him a little leeway, he might have a point. Sure, it’s fun to point at a statement like that and laugh. It’s absurd on its face. The worst-case outcome of a walk is a run scoring. The only outcome of a solo home run is a run scoring. There’s just no way a rational observer could come to any other conclusion.

That said: I don’t think that’s what Smoltz meant. Consider this: no major league pitcher has ever thrown a pitch that they knew with certainty would turn into a home run when it left their hand. That’s just not how baseball works. Position players lob plenty of objectively terrible pitchers that don’t leave the yard every time they handle mop-up duty. The meatiest meatball Morton could throw is far from a certain home run. If we think a little more about process, and a little less about outcomes, this silly debate takes on new light. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday’s interview with Michael Harris II focused on his career path, the 21-year-old Atlanta Braves rookie having excelled as a multiple-sport athlete while growing up in Stockbridge, Georgia. Moreover, he’d been a two-way player whom many scouts preferred as a pitcher. While baseball and outfielder-only are proving to be prudent choices, he had options along the way.

Jordan Romano’s path shares some similarities with Harris’s. Not only was the Toronto Blue Jays closer a multi-sport athlete in his formative years, he originally excelled as a position player. That he became a pitcher was circumstantial. Choosing baseball was a matter of passion.

“Being Canadian, I played a lot of hockey in high school,”said Romano, who grew up a Toronto Maple Leafs fan in Markham, Ontario. “I also played a little basketball and was pretty decent at volleyball. But with baseball, you kind of had to drag me off the field, even in practice. My parents wanted me to play a bunch of different sports, and while I really enjoyed hockey — I still do — I didn’t have the passion for it that I did for baseball.”

Romano never considered himself NHL material, but he does feel he had the potential to play collegiately, or in juniors, had he stuck with it. The decision to forgo that possibility came at age 17, and while it shaped his future, it didn’t end his time on the ice. Romano kept lacing up the skates for another year. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Julio Rodríguez‘s complex, long-term extension with the Mariners, which wild card contenders Meg is most worried about as a Mariners fan, George Kirby’s game-starting strike streak and the nature of a strike, the new CBA’s impact on midseason callups, and Bryce Harper’s return, follow up on MLB players playing KBO players, “defended” vs. “defensed,” Munetaka Murakami’s homers, and Yankee Stadium’s design, share a Past Blast (43:17) from 1895, and reflect on the 20th anniversary of the first MLB game stream. Then (54:40) they talk to listener and broadcast designer/director Chris Hanel about his research into the pitch-speed flames and score bugs on baseball broadcasts, the biggest score bug mistakes and disputes, how score bugs have evolved, the best and worst score bugs, the future of score bugs, and more.

Audio intro: The Apples in Stereo, “Stream Running Over”
Audio interstitial: Bobbie Gentry, “Bugs”
Audio outro: Popsicle, “Join My Stream”

Link to Passan’s extension article
Link to Passan’s Twitter thread
Link to MLBTR on the extension
Link to Dan S. on the extension
Link to Stathead on 20/20 players
Link to Kirby strike-record data
Link to Stowers walk-off video
Link to Elias fact tweet
Link to CBA incentive details
Link to BP on the Cavalli callup
Link to tweet about Henderson
Link to info on the “Korea Series”
Link to Mark Simon on Walker
Link to Zach Buchanan on Walker
Link to Murakami tweet
Link to defended/defensed discussion
Link to story about streaming anniversary
Link to 2002 streaming screenshot
Link to Richard Hershberger’s Strike Four
Link to 1895 story source
Link to Sam on the flames
Link to Chris’s flames grid
Link to Chris’s graphics sheet
Link to NPB graphics screenshot
Link to NPB graphics screenshot 2
Link to story on ESPN NFL graphics change
Link to MLB survey screenshot thread
Link to Chris’s score bug account
Link to Chris’s thread with more info
Link to Chris’s baseball account
Link to Chris’s company

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