Saturday afternoon, Corbin Burnes made several uncharacteristic missteps. He walked Max Muncy on five pitches, only the 34th walk he’d issued all year. The next batter, Justin Turner, deposited a 3-1 cutter into the left field stands for a three-run home run, only the seventh Burnes had allowed all season.

He pitched another inning without incident, then — back in the lead in the ERA race after briefly falling behind Max Scherzer — came out of the game for good, his regular season now complete. That ineffective outing might worry Brewers fans for the playoffs, but it also emphasized how spectacular the rest of his year has been. Surrendering a walk and a home run? It happens to everyone — batters hit 5,944 homers this season, third-most in history, and walked roughly 9% of the time they came to the plate. But it doesn’t happen to Burnes — and that’s why he deserves to win the NL Cy Young this year.

There’s no single criteria for the most outstanding pitcher in the National League, but in my eyes, Burnes has claims on several axes, and no real warts. More than that, his 2021 season is a towering achievement, one that we’ll hear about in 20 years when we talk about the best pitching seasons in history. Read the rest of this entry »

Every season, we brace ourselves for the inevitable decline of baseball’s stars of yesteryear. Unfortunately, we’re all getting older, and despite their rare talents and athleticism, major leaguers eventually lose production. But while each individual has their own rate of decline, generally speaking, we know a fair amount about how age affects hitters’ abilities: A typical player peaks around age 26 and gradually declines afterward in what we know as the age curve. For those fortunate enough to stick around into their late 30s. that decline becomes quite sharp.

The basis for the age curve is the difference between a player’s performance across two different seasons. The choice metric for hitters tends to be wRC+, because it’s adjusted for league average and should be less impacted by league-wide trends and fluctuations from one season to the next. The chart below shows an age curve for players using data from the last 10 seasons, preceding 2021:

The shape of the age curve makes intuitive sense, for two reasons. The obvious one is that the primary skills needed to succeed in baseball (eyesight, strength, agility, etc.) decline as the human body gets older. Another, however, is that players only remain at the big league level if they’re successful. Whether it be due to injury, a slump, or even a little bad luck, a decrease in a hitter’s performance is an inevitability before they decide to retire (or the decision is made for them). Read the rest of this entry »

After a wild Sunday afternoon that held plenty of drama for the final day of the regular season, the postseason field is set. Team Entropy ultimately found no joy, with the remaining playoff spots finally decided without the need for tiebreaker games. With the Wild Card round set to begin on Tuesday, here’s a look at the 10 teams in the playoffs and how they stack up against each other.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (50%/50% FIP- and RA9-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. Since regular season records don’t matter in the playoffs, I’ve ranked the teams simply by their overall team quality, removing the factors for win percentage and expected win percentage.

The Dodgers and Giants spent the entire season battling each other for the NL West crown. Los Angeles won 50 games after the All-Star break to post the best record in the second half and only gained a single game on San Francisco. The closest the Dodgers were to overtaking the Giants was entering their series in San Francisco on September 3. Even though the division wasn’t actually decided until the final weekend, that series gave the Giants the edge they needed to secure their first division title since 2012. It’s a shame they’re lined up to face each other in a Division Series instead of the NLCS — should the Dodgers advance out of the Wild Card game, that is. Read the rest of this entry »

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The playoffs feature the best teams, with the best hitters squaring off against the pitchers with the best stuff. The stakes and the quality of the competition force teams to respond to fluctuations in leverage more quickly than they would in the regular season. This response makes sense: every change in win probability has an outsized effect on championship probability, so major league clubs act accordingly.

In his dissection of Kevin Cash’s decision to pull Blake Snell in the sixth inning of Game Six of the 2020 World Series, Ben Lindbergh pointed out that starting pitchers leave playoff games earlier than regular season contests, with relief pitchers now throwing the majority of playoff innings. Lindbergh also noted that more playoff starters threw 3 1/3 innings or fewer in 2020 than went at least six, a product of teams’ acceptance of the third time through the order penalty. The third time through the order penalty is real, especially for starters who lack deep repertoires. Removing starters after they turn the lineup over once or twice in favor of a high-octane bullpen arm throwing 97 mph with a slider gives the pitching team a better chance of recording an out in situations where the outcome of the game hangs in the balance.

With starters aware that they are on a short leash and likely won’t see a hitter more than once or twice, I figured it was worth looking at how pitch usage changes in the postseason. I pulled every pitcher who threw at least 50 pitches in both the regular season and the playoffs from 2015-20. I calculated each pitcher’s pitch usage in the regular season and playoffs separately and took the differences in pitch usage for each pitch. My hypothesis was that hurlers who feature a bevy of different pitches would lean more on their more trusted offerings knowing they likely won’t be asked to go deep into the game and will be pulled at the first sign of any trouble. Similarly, I thought that pitchers who employ a limited arsenal would trust their favorite pitch with the increased pressure of getting their clubs back to the dugout without allowing runs. Read the rest of this entry »

Like the majority of the people reading this, I spent my weekend doing little other than watching baseball. The possibilities for real chaos were endless, and while none of the various bingo balls fell our way for a meaningful game on Monday, the season still ended with plenty of drama and interesting tidbits.

Clayton Kershaw Walks Off The Mound

In the midst of the exciting games with all sorts of playoff implications, it was a jarring moment when Kershaw came out of Friday night’s start against Milwaukee with what is being described as forearm discomfort. Based on both his and Dave Roberts’ post-game comments, whatever is going on with one of the best left arms in the history of the game is not good, and his 2021 season is likely over. As far as his Dodgers career, that’s still to be determined; his contract expires after the final out of the World Series.

The No. 7 pick in the 2006 draft out of a high school in the northern suburbs of Dallas, Kershaw came onto my radar that summer, when a veteran scout told me that he was the best pitcher at the complex level he’d ever seen over decades of experience. My first in-person look came the following spring during his full-season debut with Low-A Great Lakes. He reached Double-A that year as a teenager, and even though he walked nearly five batters per nine innings, much of that was the fault of minor league umpires who had no idea how to call a pure 12-to-6 curveball with more downward action than they had likely ever seen.

The first time I watched Kershaw for professional purposes came in March 2014 in a spring training game against the Padres. He was horrible, allowing nine base runners in his three innings of work; it was early, and he hadn’t ramped up. I still remember my report: “Fringy command of fringy weapons. Likely Cy Young candidate.” He’d go on to win his third in four years that season.

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This is the sixth 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.

As noted in the boilerplate introduction above, it is the primary goal of the Team Entropy project to root for extra baseball beyond the 162-game regular season. While the complicated scenarios involving more than a single isolated head-to-head tiebreaker game may be farfetched, appreciating the sense of possibility for greater things as events unfold is part of the package. This is as much about the journey as it is the destination, which so often remains abstract. There have been just three winner-take-all tiebreaker games played since I began this project in 2011.

The secondary goal of the Team Entropy project, and part of appreciating that sense of possibility, is to have at least some portion of the playoff picture at stake on the final day of the season. On that note, we have already achieved some level of success, as we enter the final day of the 2021 season with four teams still battling for the two AL Wild Card berths — one of which is attempting to make its first postseason in 20 years — and with the NL West title still in doubt as teams with 106 and 105 wins attempt to avoid a do-or-die Wild Card game. Read the rest of this entry »

Ralph Garza Jr.’s MLB debut was both forgettable and impossible to forget. The 27-year-old right-hander took the mound for the Houston Astros in a May 29 home game against the San Diego Padres, and the circumstances were anything but ordinary. Rookies rarely get their feet wet with games hanging in the balance, and Garza entered in the 12th inning with the score knotted at eight runs apiece. Moreover, the Friars — their eventual free fall still far in the future — had won 14 of their last 16 games. A hornet’s nest awaited.

“It wasn’t your stereotypical debut,” acknowledged Garza, who two months later was designated for assignment and claimed off waivers by the Minnesota Twins. “But it’s funny, because as a reliever you’re told to always prepare for the worst. And it was something, especially against that lineup at that time. They were hot. Basically, I was being thrown into the fire. It was extras, last guy available, ‘There you go.’”

When the bullpen phone rang, he knew that his debut was nigh. It was a moment where Garza needed to remind himself to “stay calm and remember what you do, and how to do it.” Easier said than done. As the Edinburg, Texas native aptly put it, keeping one’s emotions in check when climbing a big-league bump for the first time is “like trying to tell water not to be wet.”

Garza entered with a ghost runner on second and promptly issued an intentional walk to Fernando Tatis Jr. A harmless fly-ball out followed, but soon things went south. A few pitches later, Wil Myers launched a mis-located heater into the cheap seats, turning a coming-out party into a nightmare. Garza knew it right away. Read the rest of this entry »