Episode 891

While the playoff field continues to narrow, the FanGraphs crew invites a number of guests to join the show. This week they honor a Hall of Famer, talk to a major league pitcher, discuss what is going on with fall instructional league this year, and evaluate an encouraging rebuild.

• At the top of the show, Jay Jaffe remembers the late Bob Gibson. The Cardinals legend passed away earlier this month, prompting Jay to take a close look at his illustrious legacy. [1:45]
• Next, David Laurila is joined by Cardinals left-hander Andrew Miller. The pair discuss what this unique season was like for players, the three true outcomes, and Miller’s own eventful career. [8:00]
• After that, Eric Longenhagen chats with Baseball America’s Bill Mitchell about fall instructs in Arizona. Bill is an experienced baseball photographer, and while the pair knows their way around backfields in the Phoenix area, the pandemic is likely to make seeing prospects a difficult proposition this fall. [30:19]
• Finally, Dan Szymborski is joined by Josh Nelson and Jim Margalus of SoxMachine.com to look back on an exciting Chicago White Sox season. While Chicago’s playoff run did not go how they had hoped, the team looks ready going forward. [54:25]

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The Dodgers are a machine. They’re star-studded, of course — Mookie Betts, Corey Seager, Cody Bellinger, Walker Buehler, Clayton Kershaw. I almost don’t know where to stop naming Dodgers. They’re deep, too — their role players could start for most teams, and their development pipeline keeps churning out relievers and shockingly good catchers, more than any team has a right to.

This is an article about Game 3 of the Dodgers-Padres NLDS, during which Los Angeles eliminated San Diego to advance to the NLCS. Don’t worry, there will be a tick-tock of who swung at what, who caught what, and when the damage was done. But I couldn’t stop thinking of a very old poem when I was watching the Dodgers, and honestly, that poem has more drama in it than this game did.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is, in theory, about hubris. Heck, it’s about hubris in practice, too. As every high school English teacher in the world can tell you, the imagery of an old, decrepit statue proclaiming its greatness even as it slowly crumbles into nothingness is a lesson in humility — you might think you’re great, but time wounds all heels. Soon enough, it will all be in the past.

Someday, that will be true of the Dodgers. Bellinger and Betts will get old and retire. Kershaw will be an old-timer who shows up at the stadium once a year for a celebration of his career. Julio Urías or Dustin May might leave the team; the Chris Taylors and Max Muncys will stop panning out quite so well.

As of yet, however, the Dodgers haven’t declined. They’re at the peak of their powers, Ozymandias in his own time. They towered over the Padres, made them look small. Baseball isn’t the kind of sport where you can dominate your opponent; on any given night, the margin separating victory and defeat is small and largely made of random chance, whether a ball eludes a glove or a bat misses the sweet spot by a fraction of an inch. And yet, the Dodgers just seemed better, like San Diego was accomplishing something merely by keeping even. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about which team with a new opening at the top of its baseball operations department would be the most attractive to baseball executives: the Reds, the Phillies, or the Angels. Then (15:07) they bring on James Buffi, the biomechanics expert, former Driveline Baseball biomechanics consultant and Dodgers senior analyst, and current CEO of motion analysis company Reboot Motion, to discuss the path he took from public research to working for a team, the biomechanical arms race, how progressive teams are using motion-tracking tech to improve players, how the Dodgers develop pitchers, how predictable and preventable injuries are, how the pandemic-shortened season and the postseason schedule affect pitchers, whether deception can be quantified, and how to avoid snake oil salesmen.

Audio intro: Neil Young, "Motion Pictures"
Audio interstitial: Pavement, "Motion Suggests Itself"
Audio outro: Rex White, "Who’s Hiring?"

Link to Dick Williams story
Link to Matt Klentak story
Link to Phillies hiring process story
Link to Angels hiring process story
Link to James Buffi’s LinkedIn page
Link to Reboot Motion website
Link to Driveline story on biomechanics and motion capture
Link to story on baseball’s biomechanical revolution
Link to excerpt from The Arm about Buffi
Link to story about Buffi leaving the Dodgers
Link to Driveline study on Dodgers player development
Link to story about KinaTrax
Link to Hawk-Eye introduction
Link to FanGraphs playoff coverage

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Beyond Giancarlo Stanton going electric and Gerrit Cole proving that investing $315 million in him was one of Brian Cashman’s better decisions, not a whole lot else has gone right for the Yankees against the Rays. Going into Game 4 needing a win to stay alive, they’d found no answer to the Ruth and Gehrig cosplay of Randy Arozarena and Ji-Man Choi. They’d struggled to do much of anything when faced with Tampa Bay’s best relievers. Most of the lineup aside from Stanton, Aaron Hicks, DJ LeMahieu and (unexpectedly enough) backup catcher turned starter Kyle Higashioka hadn’t shown up. New York had come by its series deficit and a potential trip home fairly.

But the biggest problem for the Yankees in this series is the one that was the biggest problem in the 2019 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2018 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2017 playoffs: a pitching staff that hasn’t performed consistently. Granted, that’s a small sample, with only six starts so far and two of those belonging to Cole. But Masahiro Tanaka, normally the postseason stalwart, has been bludgeoned in his two turns, including Game 3. Aaron Boone’s attempt at a Rays-style opener gambit in Game 2 quickly went pear-shaped. Game 4 rested on Jordan Montgomery, who hadn’t pitched in over two weeks and could at best provide three or four innings in what would be his postseason debut. If he went south early, making it to Game 5 was highly unlikely.

Yet for the first time this month, Boone got a capable start from a non-Cole pitcher, and his bullpen was able to hold it together for a 5–1 win. Even better, Game 5 will be in the hands of Cole, who held the Rays in check in Game 1, bulldozed the Indians in the Wild Card round, and would be a popular pick league-wide for “man you most want on the mound in an elimination game.” Read the rest of this entry »

For a little while there, everything was going the way the A’s drew it up. Thanks to — you guessed it — a homer, they had a 3-0 lead entering the bottom of the fourth. Zack Greinke, though generally effective, had allowed consecutive singles to Matt Olson and Mark Canha in the top of third; he hung a 3-2 slider to Ramón Laureano, and the A’s jumped out ahead. Meanwhile, Frankie Montas had managed to face the minimum through his three frames, outside of Yuli Gurriel reaching base on an Olson error. After the Laureano homer, the A’s win expectancy jumped to 76.4%. It wasn’t just that they had a chance to win, to stay alive and push this ALDS to a winner-take-all fifth game; they had a good chance.

It was all the more astonishing, then, how quickly the wheels fell off for Oakland, how quickly the Astros swung the game in their favor, taking it to a point of no return. Though the A’s offense did their best to rally, the scale of the thumping the Astros lineup put on Montas and a desperate, ineffective succession of A’s relievers was, in the end, too much for them to overcome. With a final score of 11-6, the Astros make their way into their fourth consecutive ALCS, while the A’s make their way home after yet another postseason heartbreak.

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The Atlanta Braves finished sweeping the Miami Marlins on Thursday afternoon, issuing a 7-0 shellacking to knock the Fish out of the postseason. After holding Cincinnati’s bats firmly in check in two Wild Card games, the Braves’ bats exploded in Games 1 and 3, with a generally ineffective Miami lineup struggling to keep up.
Coming into the 2020 season, one of the big question marks surrounding the Marlins was just how effective they’d actually be at scoring runs. In 2019, the team finished last in the National League in runs scored, nearly half a run per game behind the 14th-place San Diego Padres. The Marlins added some veteran depth to the lineup in the form of Jesús Aguilar, Jonathan Villar, Corey Dickerson, and Matt Joyce last offseason — which feels like it was about five years ago at this point — and the hope was that with the team’s impressive stable of young pitching improving, they’d score just enough runs to become relevant. With an assist from a 16-team playoff format, that’s exactly what happened; the offense managed to support a generally solid rotation, and the weak bullpen (5.65 FIP) didn’t sink the team enough to drop it below .500.

That blueprint worked against the Cubs and their 10th-ranked offense and thanks to Sandy Alcantara and Sixto Sánchez, seven runs in two games still left Miami with significant room to spare. But shutting out the Braves is a trickier proposition and when Atlanta’s run-scoring machine ramped up, the Marlins failed to match it, leading them to be the first team eliminated from the round of eight. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Yankees lost to the Rays for the second night in a row on Wednesday night to fall behind in the Division Series, two games to one, but Giancarlo Stanton continued his rampage. The 30-year-old slugger, who was limited to just 23 games this year due to a Grade 1 left hamstring strain, has now homered in all five of the Yankees’ postseason games, with a consecutive games steak that’s one short of the record.

Stanton’s latest blast, his sixth of the postseason, came in the eighth inning off Shane McClanahan, a 23-year-old lefty who in Game 1 became the first pitcher in major league history to debut in the postseason without having pitched in a regular season game. He got out of that one unscathed, but not so on Wednesday:

The homer, Stanton’s second hit of the night, came with a man on base and trimmed the Rays’ lead to 8-4, but the Yankees could draw no closer. To date, they’ve scored 18 runs in the Division Series, 10 of which have been driven in by Stanton with his four homers. He broke open Game 1 with a ninth-inning grand slam off John Curtiss, extending a 5-3 lead to 9-3:

Stanton followed that up with a pair of homers off Tyler Glasnow in Game 2, first with a game-tying opposite field liner in the second inning, and then a three-run blast — and I do mean blast — in the fourth, which cut a 5-1 lead to 5-4, though the Rays eventually pulled away for a 7-5 win:

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There’s a moment in almost every Clayton Kershaw postseason start where the entire enterprise threatens to swing completely off its axis — where the boulder, finally nearing the top of the hill, begins its inexorable roll back down, leaving the three-time Cy Young winner flattened underneath it. It never happened in the Wild Card round, when Kershaw sliced and diced a punchless Brewers lineup over eight scoreless innings, but it arrived in Game 2 of the NLDS against the Padres in the sixth inning, when two pitches and two swings seemed like they would undo all of the veteran lefty’s hard work.

Clayton Kershaw is not Clayton Kershaw™ any more. At the same time, he is neither bad nor finished, and his 2020 was a resurgence previously hard to imagine for a 32-year-old man with 2,300-plus innings on his arm and a wobbly back that shifts and grinds like tectonic plates. He made 10 starts and threw 58.1 innings and struck out 62 batters and posted a 2.16 ERA, a hair off his 2.13 mark in 2016, the last year when he was really, truly the best pitcher in baseball. Since then he’s been more passable imitation of himself than the genuine thing, but this season was proof that he could adjust and thrive despite a fastball that’s past its peak.

The trick to Kershaw’s success, as Ben Lindbergh noted over at The Ringer, is that he starts off with that fastball — which, after dipping to an average of 90.5 mph, a career low, in 2019, rose back up 91.6 this year and got up to 93–94 — and then goes to his slider. It’s a winning strategy for several reasons: Hitters tend to let the first pitch go, allowing Kershaw to pump in strikes and get ahead; and his slider is a monster of a pitch. None of that likely works without that four-seamer getting a little more life on it, but Kershaw also has smarts and savvy and spin on his side, and he can reach back and find his old self albeit without the heat.

So it was against Milwaukee and so it looked against San Diego. For the first five innings, Kershaw stuck to his plan: 19 first-pitch fastballs out of 24 offerings, 45 fastballs total averaging 91.7 mph and peaking at 93.6, lots of two-strike sliders. And for five innings it worked, aside from a Wil Myers RBI double in the second on a slider that caught too much of the plate; otherwise, weak contact and strikeouts abounded. Read the rest of this entry »