This is the fifth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

The Mariners haven’t reached the postseason since 2001, and all season long, our Playoff Odds have strongly suggested that their drought — the majors’ longest active one — will continue. But as we head into the final weekend of the 2021 season, they’re on a 10-1 tear that has interjected them right into the thick of an American League Wild Card race with a decided East Coast bias. With the Yankees sweeping the Red Sox in Boston and then taking two out of three from the Blue Jays in Toronto while the Red Sox somehow dropped two out of three to the Orioles in Baltimore, we now have four teams separated by three games from top to bottom, with just three to play for each:

This is not a drill! I’ll get to the mechanics of how this will be sorted out soon enough, but first, I’m taking the opportunity to spotlight the Mariners’ unlikely run and the trends they’re up against. This isn’t a dive into individual performances; elsewhere on FanGraphs today, Jake Mailhot has a closer look at what’s fueled their September run. Here I’m looking at the bigger picture. But first, an illustration of the Mariners’ Playoff Odds over the course of the season:

It’s been awhile since the Mariners were anywhere close to this position. While they went 89-73 just three years ago before slipping below .500 in both 2019 (68-94) and ’20 (27-33), that ’18 squad fell eight games short in the AL Wild Card race and finished 14 games behind the Astros in the AL West race. They did finish three games back in the AL Wild Card race in 2016, going 86-76 while both the Orioles and Blue Jays went 89-73, but they were a distant nine games behind the Rangers in the AL West. Not since 2003, when they went 93-69 in Lou Piniella’s final year at the helm, have they come as close by both routes to the postseason; that year, they finished three games behind the A’s in the division race and two behind the Red Sox in the AL Wild Card. And not since that 2001 team set a modern record with 116 wins have they qualified for the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

The end of the season is rapidly approaching, so approach it in style with another episode ofChin Music. This week, I am joined by our very own Ben Clemens to chat for a couple of hours about baseball (and other things). We begin with a look at the wild Wild Card races, including tangents on Cody Bellinger’s future in Los Angeles, Devin Williams‘ wall punching incident and the Rays’ plans (or ruse) to spend their summers north of the border.

We’re then joined by special guest and life-long Mariners fan Meg Rowley of FanGraphs and Effectively Wild to discuss the team with September’s greatest fun differential. Then it’s your emails on Tyler O’Neill’s performance versus good and bad pitchers, the direction of baseball’s popularity, and The Beach Boys. We finish by catching up with Ben, and discussing board games and multiple personality disorder.

As always, we hope you enjoy, and thank you for listening.

Music by Bad Bad Hats.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

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Episode 942

This week on FanGraphs Audio, we talk to the author of one of our favorite baseball books before welcoming a big-league arm.

• At the top of the program, Jay Jaffe sits down with Fred C. Harris, co-author of The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading And Bubblegum Book, first published in 1973. Like many, Jay loved this book in his formative years, and he shares some of his favorite passages and cards. Meanwhile, Fred reflects on how the book came to be and the numerous versions that have been published over the years, many of which Jay has on his shelf. Finally, Jay shares his ode to Rocky Bridges, and we hear an anecdote about Jim Bouton’s reaction to being in the book. [2:35]
• After that, David Laurila is joined by Cole Sulser, right-hander for the Baltimore Orioles. Sulser talks about going from playing at Dartmouth with Kyle Hendricks to a pair of Tommy John surgeries to his unforgettable major league debut at age 29. David asks Sulser about playing in the Ivy League with players like Matt Bowman and Mike Ford and the Dominican Winter League with players like Fernando Tatis Jr. and Néstor Cortes Jr. Finally, we hear about Sulser’s favorite ballparks and his brother in the Pirates system. [34:10]

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The Brewers clinched the NL Central title on Sunday, becoming the third team to wrap up their division after the Rays and White Sox. The occasion was certainly cause for celebration, but one key player took things too far. Devin Williams, the team’s top setup man, fractured his right hand — his pitching hand, that is — punching a wall and will require surgery that could keep him out through at least the National League Championship Series and perhaps longer.

Renowned for his Airbender changeup, one of the game’s most effective and unhittable pitches, Williams won NL Rookie of the Year honors and Trevor Hoffman National League Reliever of the Year honors in 2020 while posting a 0.33 ERA and 0.86 FIP in 27 innings. A bout of right shoulder soreness, later diagnosed as a rotator cuff strain, kept him off the Brewers’ roster during last year’s Wild Card Series, during which the team was swept in two games by the Dodgers.

Though he did not require surgery, Williams was brought along slowly in the spring, and scuffled early in the season. He missed 10 days in July due to right elbow discomfort and was limited to five appearances in September due to a right calf injury but still posted a 2.50 ERA and 2.81 FIP in 54 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: The final Szymchat has arrived.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: of the REGULAR SEASON.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: The madness will continue.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: No doubt the last two months have been cruel. Like there’s a vengeful god who punishes the unsuccessful at the trade deadline.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Uh, header?

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Kris Bubic leans heavily on his changeup. The 24-year-old Kansas City Royals left-hander has gone to his signature pitch 30.9% of the time this year, the fourth highest percentage among hurlers with at least 120 innings. Low velocity and low spin are two of its attributes. Bubic — a Stanford product whom the Royals drafted 40th overall in 2018 — throws his change-of-pace 80 mph on average, with a 1,602 rpm spin rate.

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Kris Bubic: “At the end of Little League, around 13 [years old], I had a club coach — his name was Erick Raich — and I tried to throw a changeup. At that point you’re not really developed enough to throw a breaking ball, at least not in my opinion. Your hand speed isn’t there, and the ball is bigger than your hand, so it’s tough to hold it and whatnot. Even a changeup. But the changeup was the first off-speed pitch I learned, and he showed me a standard circle grip. I threw a four-seam fastball, and [the changeup] was just a four-seam circle. It was pretty simple.

“As I developed it, I would play catch with it constantly, at 90 feet, at 120 feet, just to get the feel for it. I’d feel myself releasing it out front to get that good extension. But I think the separator for me… there are two things, actually. One is the velocity difference I’m able to create off my fastball. Two is that it essentially spins the same. There is variability with changeups — some have sidespin, some guys have split grips and whatnot — but mine essentially spins the same as my fastball. The axis is a little tilted toward more sidespin, but not enough that you can really tell from the eye. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the time of year when folks doubt the playoff odds. With the St. Louis Cardinals going from 71-69 long-shots to postseason clinchers, and the rollercoaster that is the American League Wild Card race, you’ve probably heard the skeptics’ refrains. “You had the Jays at 5%, and now you have them at 50%. Why did you hate them so much?” Or, hey, this tongue-in-cheek interview response that mainly makes me happy Adam Wainwright reads our site:

Adam Wainwright: “FanGraphs had us at like a negative 400 percent chance to make the playoffs, and we just proved everyone wrong. We're going to try to and keep doing that.”

— Zach Silver (@zachsilver) September 29, 2021

In that generic statement’s defense, it really does feel that way. In your head, 5% rounds to impossible. When the odds say “impossible” and then the season progresses to a point where outcomes are far less certain, what other impression can you take away than “these odds were wrong”?

I feel the same way from time to time. Just this year, the Cardinals and Blue Jays have been written off and then exploded back into contention. St. Louis bottomed out at 1.3% odds to make the playoffs – in August! It’s not quite negative 400 percent, but it sure feels that way. Can it really be that those odds were accurate, and that we just witnessed a one-in-100 event?

To investigate this question, I did what I often do when I don’t know where to turn: I bothered Sean Dolinar. More specifically, I got a copy of our playoff odds on every day since 2014, the first year when we calculated them using our current method. I left out 2021, as we don’t have a full season of data to use yet, but that still left me with a robust (some would say too robust) amount of data. Read the rest of this entry »