The Giants won a franchise-record 107 games last year, then reloaded after being knocked out of the Division Series by the Dodgers. But since posting a 14-7 record through the end of April, things haven’t gone their way. Though they snapped a six-game losing streak with a late-inning comeback against the Diamondbacks on Wednesday night, they’ve dropped 12 of their last 16 games, largely against sub-.500 teams. As the season’s midway point approaches, they’re barely above .500 at 41-39, and what’s more, they just lost their hottest hitter, Evan Longoria, to an oblique strain.
It’s not clear at this writing how Longoria was injured, but losing him is a blow nonetheless. The 36-year-old third baseman is hitting .242/.331/.462 with eight home runs; his 123 wRC+ is fourth among Giants regulars. In the two weeks prior to his injury, as the team has struggled, he hit for a team-high 166 wRC+ (.316/.413/.553) with three of those eight homers.
Longoria already missed the first 30 games of the season due to surgery to repair a torn ligament in his right index finger, making this the fifth straight season in which he has landed on the injured list. Last year, he was limited to 81 games due to a dislocated sternoclavicular joint in his left shoulder as well as a right hand contusion. In 2020, he missed the first seven games of the season due to an oblique strain; reportedly, he tweaked the muscle on his right side while swinging on July 14 of that year and was back in the lineup on July 30. In terming his current strain mild, manager Gabe Kapler offered similar optimism that this won’t be a long-term absence, though Longoria is out through at least the All-Star break. Read the rest of this entry »
The New York Mets acquired Edwin Díaz in a trade with the Seattle Mariners before the 2019 season. At the time, the deal was controversial, to put it charitably. Díaz was coming off a breakout 2018 season, one that established him as the best young reliever in baseball. He struck out 44.3% of his opponents en route to a 1.96 ERA (1.61 FIP, 1.78 xFIP) and had four years of team control remaining.
That combination of skill and value doesn’t come around often, and the Mets paid dearly for it. They took Robinson Canó and his contract along with Díaz, and sent multiple prospects back in the bargain, headlined by Jarred Kelenic, their previous year’s first round draft pick and a consensus future star. Things went quite poorly for New York out of the gate; Kelenic flew through the minors, Díaz posted a 5.59 ERA in his first season with the Mets, and Canó had his worst season since 2008.
You probably already knew all of that. It wasn’t exactly a small story at the time, and when Kelenic debuted at the start of the 2021 season while Canó was serving a suspension for violating the league’s performance-enhancing drug policy, the “Mets snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” headlines reached a fever pitch. But with the benefit of 15 more months of games, and also as someone who isn’t particularly good at hot takes, allow me to add this to the discourse: Edwin Díaz is really good. Read the rest of this entry »
The Mets aren’t the only team awaiting an ace’s return from injury. Chris Sale is scheduled to start for the Red Sox’s Triple-A Worcester affiliate on Wednesday, and if all goes well, the 33-year-old lefty could join the big club after that, in time to help a team whose rotation is looking rather threadbare as it heads into a crucial stretch of the season. While Sale pitches for Worcester, fast-rising prospect Brayan Bello — whose rotation slot Sale is filling — will debut in Boston against the Rays.
After winning 92 games and falling just two wins short of a trip to the World Series in 2021, the Red Sox stumbled to a 14-22 start, and were just 23-27 at the end of May. Though they went 20-6 in June, they actually lost ground to the Yankees, who went 22-6. After splitting their first four games of July, they’re 45-36, 13 games out of first place, and while they now occupy the top AL Wild Card spot, they’re about to face a major test. The three-game series they began on Monday kicked off a brutal 27-game stretch against teams .500 or better, with seven apiece against the Rays (44-37) and Yankees (58-23, a 116-win pace) followed by three against the Blue Jays (44-38), four against the Guardians (40-39), three against the Brewers (47-36) and three against the Astros (53-27).
That’s a weighted opponents’ winning percentage of .595 for that span, a 96-win pace over the course of 162 games, with all but Cleveland currently occupying a playoff spot. The good news for the Red Sox is that 17 of the 27 games are at home, but the bad news is that their rotation currently has three starters (Nathan Eovaldi, Rich Hill, and Garrett Whitlock) on the injured list and a fourth (Michael Wacha) whose status is in question after being scratched on Sunday, forcing manager Alex Cora and chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom to piece things together on a day-by-day basis. Hence the higher stakes when it comes to the progress of Sale and the debut of Bello. Read the rest of this entry »
As we reach the mathematical halfway point of the season and approach the trade deadline, this is an opportune moment to run an update of the ZiPS projected standings. The standings are based on projections from the most robust version of ZiPS rather than the simpler one, which is more practical to run daily during the regular season, implementing things like the Statcast-aided zStats and up-to-date minor league translations.
The process that ZiPS uses is the typical one, but I’ll run it down quickly for those who may be new to how these projections work. ZiPS starts with a modified version of our depth chart and applies a generalized probabilistic model of available playing time for the players listed. So instead of a team’s roster strength being a simple sum of everyone’s projected WAR pro-rated to a fixed expected number of plate appearances, we end up with a whole distribution of possible roster strength. As an example: While Jacob deGrom still has a median of 55 innings in the roster sims I run for each team, sometimes he’ll be at 65 or 70 innings, sometimes he’ll be at 30 or 45 innings, and occasionally, it’ll be much worse than that. ZiPS will then “fill in” playing time based on the next players available on the depth chart and their probabilistic measure of availability. Just to stay with the Mets: When the outfield is healthy, the depth chart is mostly Mark Canha, Brandon Nimmo, and Starling Marte. But on the particularly bad rolls, the team’s estimated roster strength will have a lot more Ender Inciarte, Nick Plummer, Mark Vientos, and even players like Daniel Palka and Terrance Gore.
After ZiPS gets a distribution of each team’s roster strength, it “draws” one each year and sims out the rest of the season, team versus team, a million times and sees what happens. Is this a perfect methodology? Absolutely not! But I think we get closer to our goal of trying to evaluate team uncertainty and team depth, something which is harder to do using a less time-consuming scheme.
Jason Foley has emerged as one of the most reliable members of the Detroit Tigers bullpen, and learning that his four-seam fastball profiled poorly is a big reason why. The 26-year-old right-hander switched to a sinker, and the results speak for themselves. Since debuting with Detroit last June, Foley has a 2.79 ERA and a 3.54 FIP over 36 relief appearances comprising 38-and-two-thirds innings. Throwing his worm-killer 53.9% of the time, he’s logged a 55.3% groundball rate.
Foley, whom the Tigers signed out of Sacred Heart University in 2016, discussed his career-changing repertoire tweak at Fenway Park in late June.
———
David Laurila: You’ve gone from a non-drafted free agent out of a low-profile college program to a pitcher performing at a high level in the big leagues. How did that happen?
Jason Foley: “I get asked that quite a bit, like — ‘You weren’t good enough to get drafted, so how are you now here?’ — and I think a lot of people are looking for one magic answer, or maybe one magic change that I’ve made. But neither of those are true. It really just stems from hard work and consistency, and from all of the little things that help you get 1% better every day.” Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a question that gets asked all the time on baseball social media. The variations are endless, but essentially, it boils down to this: Would you rather have an ultra-consistent hitter in Player X, who you can count on for a daily hit, or an uneven hitter in Player Y, who oscillates between prime Barry Bonds and a benchwarmer?
Given specific numbers, you could work out whether Player X or Y is more valuable. But what if we assume they’re players of equal caliber? That’s where it gets tricky. Maybe I’m only seeing certain answers, but in such cases, it seems like people prefer the clockwork Player X. It makes sense: The prospect of guaranteed production is reassuring, as befits our risk-averse tendencies. I have a hunch that we generally overvalue consistency in baseball, but I’m not here to prove that. Instead, I wanted to find out which hitters have been steady at the plate this season, and which hitters have been mercurial.
Over on our Splits Leaderboards, you can break down hitters’ seasons into weekly chunks. They range from Isaac Paredes’ destruction of the league in mid-June (488 wRC+) to Travis Demeritte’s hit-less and walk-less stretch a month prior (-100 wRC+). From there, measuring the variance between those weeks is a fairly simple endeavor. I grouped the weeks by each player, then calculated the standard deviation in wRC+, which represents how spread apart a player’s weeks are from his overall production. The higher the standard deviation, the more variable he is; the lower the standard deviation, the more consistent. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the possible end of the Taylor Ward/Tyler Wade broadcaster confusion, Ward getting caught unawares at first base, and the Twins turning the first-ever 8-5 triple play, then Stat Blast (11:06) about Cam Vieaux and the most pitches thrown in various types of innings, share a Past Blast (23:33) from 1871, and discuss the Empire State Greys, a traveling Frontier League team that started the season 0-35 and now, at 2-42, is in danger of posting the lowest winning percentage in pro baseball history. Then (43:23) Ben brings on brothers Eddie Gonzalez and Jerry Gonzalez, the co-owners and co-hitting coaches of the Greys, to talk about their work with the Empire Professional Baseball League, the challenges of operating in indy ball, the Greys’ origins and roster composition, being a perpetual road team, the mood on the team during its historically long losing streak, how the streak was snapped, the close calls they had before their first win, facing Kumar Rocker, their hopes for the rest of the season, the Greys’ growing fan base, and more, followed (1:23:54) by a few postscripts.
I like to think that I’ve asked a lot of questions about baseball in my life. It comes with the territory: my job is to write about those exact baseball questions, which gives me plenty of incentive to come up with them. But crowdsourcing is a powerful thing, and on a recent episode of Effectively Wild, I heard a question I’d never pondered before.
The major league record for home runs in a single game by a single team is 10. It was set on September 14, 1987, by the Toronto Blue Jays. That’s not an historically powerful team, nor was it an historically powerful era. Those Jays finished the season with 215 home runs, a mark 10 teams surpassed in 2021. But it stands alone as the most prolific single-game home run outburst, and it’s part of a broad trend that doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think about it.
Home runs have exploded since the ball became livelier in 2015. Despite that, only four teams have set new single-game home run records in that time. It doesn’t add up; home runs are flying out of ballparks like never before, and yet teams are mostly looking up at records set in earlier eras.
On the podcast, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley mentioned a few hard-to-measure ideas. Maybe players are easing off the gas pedal more in blowouts, or managers are taking their best players out for rest more often. Maybe the deeper bullpens on modern teams mean fewer chances to pile on a reliever who just doesn’t have it that day.
Maybe, they also mentioned, it’s just math. After all, there might be a lot of home runs now, but there were a lot of games then. Any individual game might be less likely to result in an offensive outburst, but play enough of them, and the math starts to change. Ten games in a low-homer environment are less likely to produce a home run record than 10 games today, but what about 100 games, or 1,000 games? Read the rest of this entry »
For the Mets, help is on the way at long last in the form of a pair of multiple Cy Young award winners. On Sunday, Jacob deGrom dominated in his first rehab start for the team’s Single-A affiliate, his first competitive start in nearly a year, and on Tuesday, Max Scherzer is scheduled to start for the big club for the first time in nearly seven weeks. The two aces should provide a boost for a team whose lead in the NL East has dwindled since reaching double digits at the end of May.
The 34-year-old deGrom, who had been sidelined since March 27 due to a stress reaction in his right scapula, struck out five of the six hitters he faced for the St. Lucie Mets, reaching 100 mph with his four-seam fastball against the first three of those hitters. Wearing a garish camouflage-and-stars-and-stripes jersey, he threw 24 pitches, 18 for strikes; the only blemish on his performance was hitting the Jupiter Hammerheads’ Ian Lewis in the foot with a cutter.
That was deGrom’s first competitive appearance since last July 7, interrupting what had the look of a season for the ages. Through 15 starts and 92 innings, he had pitched to a 1.08 ERA and 1.24 FIP, striking out 45.1% of all hitters, walking just 3.4%, and averaging 99.2 mph with his fastball. His elbow couldn’t handle the stress, though not until September was his “inflammation” revealed to be a low-grade sprain of his ulnar collateral ligament. The two-time Cy Young winner, who underwent Tommy John surgery back in October 2010, shortly after completing his first professional season, thankfully did not need surgery to heal this time around. “I have been told my UCL is perfectly fine,” he said in mid-March, before his shoulder injury.
By his own description at least, his shoulder is fine as well. “I felt like I had control of everything — the main thing was trying to locate the fastball and pitch off that. Everything felt good,” he said after Sunday’s start. “[My shoulder] feels 100 percent. Because it was bone… you can’t really push it. I had to wait until the bone was healed and move forward from there.”
DeGrom said he expects to make at least one more start for St. Lucie. He’ll probably need a couple of additional turns at higher levels to build his pitch count to the point of a late-July return to the Mets. Expecting him to pick up where he left off a year ago is probably a recipe for disappointment given how far off the charts that performance was, but the bar for him to improve the team’s outlook isn’t nearly that high.
As for Scherzer, he pitched to a 2.54 ERA and 2.96 FIP and struck out 30.6% of hitters through his first eight starts as a Met before straining an oblique muscle in his May 17 start. His 47-day stay on the injured list is the longest of his major league career, capped by a pair of starts for the Double-A Binghamtom Rumble Ponies late last month, with pitch counts of 65 and 80. The 37-year-old three-time Cy Young winner additionally made quite an impression by treating his teammates to a feast of bone-in ribeye, filet mignon and lobster that reportedly cost upwards of $7,000; he also purchased a pair of AirPods headphones for each teammate. In Tuesday’s return against the Reds, he’s expected to throw about 90 pitches over six innings.
When Scherzer landed on the IL, the Mets were 26–14, seven games ahead of the pack in the NL East. By the end of the month, they were 34–17, their third-best mark through 51 games, behind only their celebrated 1986 and ’88 teams. Additionally, their 10.5-game lead through the end of May was the third-largest of any team since division play began in 1969, trailing only those of the 2001 Mariners and ’17 Astros. The Mets couldn’t maintain that pace in June, however, going just 13–12 against a difficult schedule that included the Dodgers, Padres, Brewers, and Astros, against whom they went a combined 5–9. Though they’ve perked up via a 3–1 start in July, the surges of the Braves (24–6 since the end of May) and Phillies (21–9 in that span) have narrowed their cushion to four games.
Through the end of May, the Mets had outscored opponents by nearly a run and a half per game, but since then, they’ve been outscored by about four-tenths of a run per game:
The Mets’ June Swoon
Period
W
L
Win%
RS
RA
PythW-L%
April/May
34
17
.667
5.22
3.80
.641
June/July
16
13
.552
4.07
4.48
.456
SOURCE: Baseball-Reference
During both segments of the season, they’ve outplayed their Pythagorean winning percentage, with a trio of particularly lopsided June losses (13–2 to the Padres on June 8, 10–2 to the Brewers on June 15, 9–1 to the Astros on June 28) distorting their run differential. Take those away and they have a 4.35 to 3.77 advantage in per-game scoring since the start of June, as well as a .565 Pythagorean percentage. Alas, those games did happen, they did count, and the pitching staff is showing some wear and tear:
Mets Pitching by Months
Starters
ERA
FIP
K%
BB%
HR/9
April/May
3.83
3.76
22.4%
6.7%
1.02
June/July
4.53
3.95
26.9%
6.9%
1.45
Relievers
ERA
FIP
K%
BB%
HR/9
April/May
3.50
3.52
27.7%
9.3%
0.99
June/July
3.79
4.34
25.8%
9.5%
1.44
Most of the deterioration in the team’s pitching owes to the long ball, though to be fair, there’s a lot of that going around, as the major league home run rate has risen from 1.02 per nine innings in April and May to 1.21 per nine since. The problem has been particularly acute for Carlos Carrasco (2.04 per nine in June and July), Tylor Megill (2.70) and Trevor Williams (4.26) — the last two in particularly small samples, admittedly — and has driven the overall downturn in their performances.
The 35-year-old Carrasco is the only Met to make a full complement of starts (16) thus far, that after making just 12 starts last year due to a right hamstring injury. He pitched to a 3.98 ERA and 2.79 FIP through the end of May thanks to improved results on his slider and changeup, both of which got whacked around last year. While he began June with strong starts against the Nationals and Padres, he was bombarded for seven homers and 19 runs in 17.2 innings over a four-start stretch against the Angels, Marlins, and Astros (twice), allowing more runs than innings pitched in all but the Miami start. He did pitch well against the Rangers on Sunday (5.2 innings, one run, eight strikeouts), lowering his ERA to 4.64 and his FIP to a more respectable 3.68, but batters have slugged .439 or better against all four of his main offerings (four-seam, sinker, slider, and changeup) in June and July, a trend that could be hazardous if it continues.
The 26-year-old Megill turned in some impressive outings early in the season, highlighted by his throwing the first five innings of the team’s combined no-hitter against the Phillies on April 29, but after being torched for eight runs in 1.1 innings on May 11, he landed on the injured list with biceps inflammation. Upon returning a month later, he yielded six runs in 6.2 innings over two starts, suffered a shoulder strain and was shut down; he’s now on the 60-day IL, meaning that the earliest he could return would be mid-August. As for the 30-year-old Williams, he’s been very useful out of the bullpen (2.00 ERA, 2.62 FIP in 18 innings), but his performance in the rotation (5.86 ERA, 6.27 FIP in 27.2 innings) has been erratic at best.
Fortunately, Taijuan Walker has done good work (2.72 ERA, 3.09 FIP) in making 14 starts, and Chris Bassitt has been solid (4.01 ERA, 3.92 FIP), though the latter just landed on the IL in Friday with what is reportedly a bout of COVID-19. David Peterson has done the bulk of the fill-in work in the absence of Scherzer and other injured pitchers and has been the unit’s unsung hero, posting a 3.24 ERA and 3.78 FIP in 58.1 innings.
For as fluffed-up as the Mets bullpen’s ERA has been since June, there’s been some very good news, in that Edwin Díaz has been absolutely lights out. Since blowing a save against the Giants on May 24, he’s allowed just one run in 13.2 innings, pitching to a 0.66 ERA and -0.25 FIP (yes, negative) and striking out 54.7% of batters faced. Overall, he owns a 1.93 ERA and 1.63 FIP and has allowed just one barreled ball all season. Meanwhile, Adam Ottavino is showing signs of returning from his wilderness years with the Yankees and Red Sox; since the start of June, he’s posted a 0.71 ERA, and overall for the season he’s carrying a 2.67 ERA and 3.28 FIP. On the down side, the struggles of lefties Chasen Shreve and Joely Rodríguez stand out, with the pair combining to allow 15 runs in 17 innings since the start of June. As a group, Mets lefty relievers (mainly that pair plus a couple of spot appearances) allowed a .283 wOBA through the end of May, but that’s up to .363 since, giving general manager Billy Eppler something to add to his trade deadline shopping list.
The Mets’ offense isn’t blameless when it comes to the team’s recent struggles, dipping from a 116 wRC+ through the end of May to 99 since. Unlike the rotation, there’s no cavalry on the immediate horizon, but given the 45 wRC+ they’ve received from catchers Tomás Nido, James McCann, and Patrick Mazeika, the possibility of recalling top prospect Francisco Álvarez offers some appeal. The 20-year-old backstop, who placed seventh on our preseason Top 100 Prospects list, was just promoted to Triple-A Syracuse, however, and the Mets aren’t likely to rush him to the majors.
In the grand scheme, a Mets team that has gotten a combined eight starts from its two aces through the first half of the season has played .625 ball nonetheless. The team already owns a 97.9% chance at a playoff spot and a 51.7% chance at a first-round bye, and the returns of Scherzer and deGrom will soon overshadow their June swoon.
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