There are myriad reasons why the Houston Astros have spent 2020 hovering around the .500 mark, a distinct decline from last season’s 107-win record. One of those reasons is a down season from second baseman Jose Altuve, who has been a key part of the team’s core over the last decade. With .216/.281/.307 line, Altuve is having his worst season as a major leaguer and at age-30, this kind of performance decline is more concerning than it would be if it were just a mid-20s blip. Further complicating matters, at least from a storyline perspective, is the fact that Altuve was a member of the Astros squad that played fast and loose with the league’s policies on electronic sign-stealing. Any Astro from that era who later underperforms relative to expectations is going to be put under the microscope, and with Altuve the big underachiever, his performance is likely to bear a fair amount of scrutiny.

So, what’s going on? There are a few aspects of Altuve’s season that could rightly be passed off as chance-related, but others might serve as signals of decline in the second baseman’s skills. When trying to explain poor performance, one obvious place to look is to see whether pitchers are taking a new, more effective approach to a batter. Pitchers have been throwing Altuve more sliders than ever before, a 28% rate that’s nearly double what it was four or five years ago. He’s struggled facing the pitch this year, hitting .226 with no extra-base hits; with a .283/.312/.387 line against sliders over the course of his career, it’s the pitch he’s had the most trouble with. But those numbers are not disastrous in themselves. Before now, Altuve’s been really good at hitting just about everything.

Last month, my colleague Alex Chamberlain discussed Altuve’s launch angle tightness and how he’d been increasingly inconsistent in 2019, an inconsistency that persisted into the first few weeks of the 2020 season. Altuve’s standard deviation of launch angle of 32.7 degrees in 2020 would have ranked him dead-last in baseball last year. Inconsistency from a struggling player, one who used to be among the more consistent in baseball, isn’t what you want to see. And this is important because a large part of Altuve’s missing performance is BABIP-related and a tightly clustered launch angle has a relationship with that number. Altuve had a career .340 BABIP entering 2019, put up a .303 last year, and is standing at .254 this year. Read the rest of this entry »

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When the Padres added Mike Clevinger to their starting rotation, they were bolstering what was already a team strength. San Diego’s rotation had cumulatively put up the fourth-best FIP in baseball through the end of August, and that mark has improved from 3.92 to 3.64 in just a few weeks’ time. Their rotation is now the second-best in baseball by FIP and fourth-best by ERA. Dinelson Lamet has led the way with his 2.12 ERA and 2.70 FIP, but their second-best starter might not be who you expect. It’s not last year’s phenom Chris Paddack (4.74 ERA/4.66 FIP) nor is it the finally healthy Garrett Richards (4.27/4.28). It is Zach Davies and his 2.69 ERA and 3.68 FIP.

Acquired from the Brewers in November in the same trade that netted them Trent Grisham, a budding superstar in his own right, Davies has been a surprising source of quality innings for the Padres. A command artist armed with a diving changeup and an 88-mph sinker, he put together a solid-if-unspectacular career in Milwaukee over 600 innings. Despite well-below-average fastball velocity, he’s managed to succeed with a pitch-to-contact mentality by avoiding hard contact.

In late March, Davies discussed his pitch mix in an interview with David Laurila, titled, “Zach Davies Plans to Rely Less on Changeups.” Here’s how he explained it:

“I was getting guys out in any way possible. Going into last year, I was coming off injuries [rotator cuff inflammation and lower back tightness] and wasn’t guaranteed a starting spot. I wasn’t able to go into spring training and work on pitches, and the best way for me to get outs was fastball-changeup. That’s why the numbers were skewed. This year there will be a lot more of a mix.”

Davies threw his changeup 31.3% of the time last year, more than twice as often as he had in 2018 and good for the highest rate of his career. After struggling with his health the year before, he lost the feel for his curveball last year and leaned on his fastball-changeup combo to great effect. He posted the lowest ERA of his career, even though it was a little more than a full run lower than his FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Gregory Polanco had Greg Holland in a bind. Leading off the ninth inning in a one-run game, he worked the count to 3-1. Holland isn’t exactly a control artist, and none of his first four pitches had been in the zone — Polanco could sit dead red and only engage with a pitch he could pummel. He got it — middle-middle no less — and took a mighty cut:

Whoops! That wasn’t what Polanco was aiming for, and Holland got away with one. He finished Polanco off with a 3-2 slider below the zone, and the Pirates went down in order.

Everyone misses a cookie once in a while. Polanco, however, is making a habit of it this year. Here he is against Carlos Carrasco (see what I did there?) in August:

All told, Polanco has taken a swing at 26 pitches in the white hot center of the strike zone this year. He’s come up empty on 12 of them. That’s the worst rate in the majors this year — unsurprisingly — and the second-worst whiff rate on middle-middle pitches since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008. Among batters who took at least 25 cuts at down-the-middle pitches, only Kyle Parker (in 2015) did worse. You haven’t heard of Kyle Parker, because, well, he swung and missed at too many pitches.

While you might be surprised by that particular Polanco fact, it’s no secret that he’s having a down year. He’s batting .135/.190/.294 and striking out in more than 40% of his at-bats. Have a synonym for futile? It probably applies to Polanco’s 2020. It would almost be a surprise if he weren’t having a tough time with easy pitches, though maybe not to this extent. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Clint Frazier is no longer the future of the Yankees outfield — or, as it has sometimes seemed over the past few years, of somebody else’s — he’s the present. The 26-year-old righty-swinging redhead, who began the season toiling at the Yankees’ alternate training site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, homered for the second straight night on Wednesday, helping the Yankees overtake the Blue Jays for second place in the AL East. During a season in which Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have played a combined total of 35 games due to injuries, in which age has finally caught up to Brett Gardner, and in which the 2019 magic has worn off of Mike Tauchman, Frazier has shown that both his lightning-quick bat and much-maligned glove are ready for prime time.

On Tuesday and Wednesday night in the Bronx while facing the Blue Jays — who came to town half a game ahead of the Yankees in the AL East standings — the Yankees erupted for 33 runs, winning by lopsided scores of 20-6 and 13-2 while hitting at least six homers in back-to-back games for the first time in franchise history; they added another 10 runs and six homers on Thursday night. While Stanton and Judge went hitless in their respective returns from injuries, and AL wRC+ leader (!) DJ LeMahieu and major-league home run leader (!) Luke Voit produced their share of fireworks on both nights, Frazier was right in the middle of the action, collecting two hits, two walks, and a homer in each game. Using MLB.com’s fantastic new Film Room feature, we can play the hits from those two nights in one clip:

Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of New Yorker writer and editor and Baseball Hall of Famer Roger Angell’s 100th birthday, Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley discuss what they admire about Angell’s life and work, how he’s influenced their writing, and a few of their favorite Angell works. Then (26:22) they cue up a collection of original, recorded tributes to Angell from a distinguished group of baseball writers.

Audio intro: The Swinghoppers & Wolfgang Lohr, "Party Like it’s 1920"
Audio interstitial: Matthew Grimson, "Prize for Writing"
Audio outro: The Moody Blues, "I Never Thought I’d Live to Be a Hundred"

Link to tribute episode transcript
Link to WSJ interview with Angell
Link to Gammons on Angell
Link to Mark Singer on Angell
Link to David Remnick on Angell
Link to Verducci on Angell
Link to Roger Angell Day video
Link to Bonomo EW episode about Angell
Link to Angell’s “In the Fire”
Link to Ben on catchers
Link to Angell’s “Agincourt and After”
Link to Angell’s “Distance”
Link to Angell’s “Four Taverns in the Town”
Link to Angell’s “The ‘Go!’ Shouters”
Link to Angell’s “If Only”
Link to Angell on Tiant
Link to Angell on Blass

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After a deal with Steve Cohen to purchase the New York Mets was nixed last year due to issues of continued team control, the Wilpons looked for other suitors only to end up back with the hedge fund billionaire. According to Sportico, the deal values the Mets at $2.42 billion. Cohen will assume 95% ownership of the team, increasing his stake from 8%; the Wilpon family will retain control of the remaining 5%. The transaction will not include the Mets’ regional sports network SNY, a cash cow currently controlled by the Wilpons’ Sterling Equity with a 65% share.

The sale is the largest in MLB history, and given the franchise’s $391 million value at the time of the Wilpons’ purchase in 2002, it’s also the most profitable in terms of total dollar amount. Here are MLB franchise purchase price valuations since 1988 in chronological order:

And here’s profitability compared to the previous valuation:

In terms of annual profits based on the valuation of the franchise when it was bought and sold, the Mets’ deal is a little closer to the middle at around 9%. There’s an argument that being only a little bit above average isn’t great, though being above-average on a debt-laden team in the middle of a pandemic looks to be a pretty positive outcome. Here’s where the Mets’ sale stacks up in terms of its annual increase in value after inflation:

Before we get to Cohen, let’s take a look back at the Wilpons and how we got here.

From Initial Investment to Full Control

Fred Wilpon reportedly originally bought 5% of the Mets in 1980 when Doubleday & Co. purchased the team for $21.1 million. Six years later, Nelson Doubleday and Wilpon joined forces to purchase the club at a value of around $80 million. It wasn’t until 16 years after that that Wilpon and his family gained full control of the club, though the purchase was not without controversy. The sale price valuing the club at $391 million was set by an appraiser and initially contested by Doubleday. He argued against the price due to a number of factors ranging from:

Wilpon being “in cahoots” with baseball to force him to accept less-than-market value for his 50 percent of the Mets to baseball “manufacturing phantom operating losses” as part of its labor strategy.

Doubleday relented on his claims after the Wilpons agreed to quadruple the money owed at the time of sale from $28 million to $100 million. In the end, the Wilpons paid just $135 million to purchase the other half of the club from Doubleday due to team debt that was subtracted from the purchase. For about $1 million in 1980, $40 million in 1986, and $135 million in 2002, the Wilpon family gained full control of the Mets. Read the rest of this entry »

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Like nearly every team outside of Pittsburgh during this odd season, there were a couple of weeks in which it appeared the Detroit Tigers might actually be able to make a surprise run at the playoffs. After being given just 3.1% postseason odds by our projections even with the year shortened to 60 games and the field expanded from 10 teams to 16, the Tigers shot out to a 9-5 start, raising their playoff chances to a season-high 39.2% on August 10. Some struggles followed, but then another decent run got them back to 17-16 on September 1, with 31.1% odds at a playoff spot. Since then, there has been another rough patch that the team won’t have a chance to recover from. Detroit has lost 11 of its last 15, giving it a record of 21-27 that places their playoff chances at worse than a 1-in-50 shot. We can say with near-certainty that the Tigers’ surprise pursuit of the playoffs is behind them. One of the major engineers of that pursuit, however, is still worth paying attention to over the campaign’s final two weeks.

The 2019 season wasn’t an easy one for Jeimer Candelario. The Tigers demoted him not once, but three times to Triple-A Toledo amid struggles at the big league level, and he also missed time due to shoulder inflammation. He quickly hit well enough in the minors to get his job back in the majors, posting a .320/.416/.588 line over 39 Triple-A games. He could never make that stick when he got called up though, finishing with a .203/.306/.337 line in 94 games, good for a 72 wRC+. Once an impressive offensive prospect, those numbers didn’t match Candelario’s pedigree, and neither did the .225/.317/.393 line the season before.

This year it appears he has finally begun to put it all together. Candelario is hitting .333/.391/.572 with seven home runs in 174 plate appearances through Tuesday. His 158 wRC+ and 1.7 WAR both lead his team and rank him 18th and 26th in baseball, respectively. Those numbers have only gotten better as the season has gone on — after entering August 19 with a .242/.286/.424 line, he has hit .398/.462/.677 over his past 26 games, with a 207 wRC+ that ranks fourth-best in baseball over that time. After showing all peaks and valleys over his first few seasons, he’s only improved with each game in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — On Wednesday night, DJ LeMahieu got it started for the Yankees, as he has so often done since arriving from Colorado in January 2019. Blue Jays starter Tanner Roark, having missed the strike zone with his first pitch of the night, left a 90.5 mph four-seam fastball in the upper outside corner of the zone — an area where the right-handed LeMahieu rarely swings — and this time the 32-year-old second baseman reached out and poked it onto the short porch in Yankee Stadium’s right field for a solo home run. The Yankees, who had dropped 20 runs on the Blue Jays on Tuesday night while retaking second place in the AL East, added another 13 more on Wednesday via a season-high season seven homers, including three by backup catcher Kyle Higashioka and another by LeMahieu. They did all of this despite Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge going hitless in their respective returns from injury.

“DJ just continued to set the tone for us,” said manager Aaron Boone, a night after LeMahieu had gone 4-for-6 with a homer and five RBI. Here’s the first-inning shot:

LeMonster pic.twitter.com/yq2OZDz2vY

— New York Yankees (@Yankees) September 16, 2020

The home run was LeMahieu’s fifth to lead off his team’s half of a game, moving him into the major league lead:

It was the 11th time LeMahieu has hit a leadoff homer in his two seasons as a Yankee; in that time, only Springer (15) has more, though until Wednesday, Acuña and Joc Pederson had as many in the same span. Read the rest of this entry »