“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” – H.L. Mencken

The Marlins are a franchise with exactly two modes: brief moments of contention, and long stretches that punish anyone who would want to root for them. Miami is currently in the latter mode. Parity’s alive and well in the National League, with 14 of the league’s 15 teams spending significant time in 2019 playing the role of legitimate wild card contenders. The 15th team was these Marlins, the Star Trek redshirt of the Senior Circuit.

The Setup

The troubling truth for Marlins fans is that most winters’ offseason activity involves guessing who the team will get in return for its best players who are approaching free agency; if the 2018-2019 winter offered less consternation for fans, it’s only because the team had already traded away their entire outfield the year before. Without the ability to replace their lost stars with effective minor league talent — the formula that has kept the Rays frequent contenders despite their part-feigned penury — there was little chance the Marlins would be competitive enough to justify hanging on to J.T. Realmuto. In fairness, a lot of the blame for this is due to the previous regime, which made moves like trading away Chris Paddack and Luis Castillo for Fernando Rodney and Dan Straily.

Two years away from free agency, and with the Marlins unlikely to be competitive during that stretch, it was all but assured that Realmuto, an All-Star for the first time in 2018, would start the season in another city. A week before spring training started, he departed for the Phillies in exchange for Sixto Sanchez, Jorge Alfaro, Will Stewart, and, in a surprising move for a Marlins team to make, the right to spend more money in the form of international bonus space. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the costs of Christian Yelich’s broken kneecap and other injuries disrupting pennant races and the Mets-centric personal-catcher controversy involving Noah Syndergaard, Wilson Ramos, and Tomás Nido. Then they answer listener emails about the mystery of Edwin Díaz (and the more minor mystery of Justin Verlander) and whether we’re heading for a post-pitch-type sport, plus a Stat Blast about batter results on 3-0 counts and further discussion about out-of-nowhere closers and viral fun facts about Bruce Bochy and the Mariners.

Audio intro: Green Day, "Christian’s Inferno"
Audio outro: The Pigeon Detectives, "Making Up Numbers"

Link to Ben on the Yelich injury
Link to first Syndergaard-Ramos report
Link to Syndergaard-Ramos follow-up
Link to Díaz story
Link to Craig on Verlander dingers
Link to story on Verlander’s strand rate
Link to Sam on surprise closers
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Episode 870

FanGraphs senior writer Jay Jaffe joins the program to discuss the current potential for ties, and thus chaos, in the postseason field, Jay’s preference that the playoffs feature match ups of the game’s best rosters, and his predictions for which teams make it to October, and the World Series. We also discuss his impressions of the current major league home run leaderboard and all these damn home runs, as well as Mookie Betts’ future in Boston. Jay also swears in Yiddish. It’s fine.

You can read Jay’s primer on Team Entropy, and the possible playoff scenarios it might inspire, from last week here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @megrowler on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 49 min play time.)

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Despite being a near lock to make the playoffs, the Twins are facing plenty of challenges on their way to October. Over the weekend, Michael Pineda was hit with a 60-game suspension for violating the MLB’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. That seriously hurts the Twins starting rotation considering he’s been their best starter since June. But that’s not the only problem the Twins are facing now. Yesterday, news broke that center fielder Byron Buxton had labrum surgery, knocking him out for the rest of the season.

Buxton had been on the injured list since early August, but before that, he was putting together the best season of his career. In addition to his elite defense in center field, his bat had finally risen to meet the high expectations his prospect pedigree placed on him. He had cut his strikeout rate to 23.1% and pushed his isolated power up to .251, helping him post a 111 wRC+ in just under 300 plate appearances. If given a full year on the field, he was on pace to post a five-win season.

Buxton had been making progress rehabbing his shoulder with the hope of a late-September activation with an eye towards helping the team in the postseason. His return was never guaranteed, but now that he’s entirely out of the picture, it pushes the Twins outfield depth to its limit. Three other outfielders on the Twins roster have battled nagging injuries recently, leaving them critically short-handed despite the expanded rosters in September. Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Doolittle threw 10 pitches to Billy Hamilton on Saturday. Every one of them was a fastball, and all but one of them were in the upper third of the strike zone or higher. That’s what Doolittle does. No one in baseball throws a higher rate of fastballs than Doolittle’s 89.2%, and no one throws a higher rate of them in the upper third of the zone or higher than his 54.2%. He wears hitters out there, and that’s what he did to Hamilton. After a lengthy battle, the Braves’ new speedster didn’t have enough in the tank to get a piece of this last pitch.

That was a good outing for Doolittle. He retired all three hitters he faced, two of them on strikeouts. Even though Washington failed to rally in the top of the ninth, losing 5-4 to Atlanta, that kind of inning might have left a few Nationals fans feeling a bit more encouraged about their team’s overall outlook than they did before the game. That’s because recently, a dominant inning of work from Doolittle has no longer been the near-guarantee it used to be.

From 2017-18, Doolittle was incomprehensibly great. He threw 96.1 innings between Oakland and Washington and held a 2.24 ERA with a 2.27 FIP. He struck out 122 batters while walking 16. In terms of the game’s elite relievers, Doolittle was practically without equal. But this season, he hasn’t packed nearly the same punch. His ERA is 4.09, and his FIP is 4.23. His xFIP, which was a jaw-dropping 2.68 just last year, is now 5.05. He’s striking out two fewer batters per nine innings and issuing walks at his highest rate since 2015. After allowing just eight homers over the previous two seasons combined, he’s surrendered 10 this season. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers didn’t win the World Series in 2018, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a successful year. After several frustrating seasons of rebuilding, a division title (in a one game playoff against the hated Cubs, no less!) and a trip to the NLCS felt like huge strides in the right direction. It seemed as though the team had arrived a year early in a manner reminiscent of the 2015 Cubs, with better-than-expected seasons from young players and star turns from big offseason additions. In 2019, their young pitching staff would have another year of experience, and by adding Yasmani Grandal, the front office kept the talent pipeline primed.

144 games later, things haven’t gone as planned. The Brewers are out of playoff position, though they have lately gained ground, with only a 25% chance of reaching the postseason. Christian Yelich’s season-ending fracture adds injury to insult — a second straight MVP season would be a fun September storyline, and without Yelich’s bat, the team’s chances seem even more remote. Before his injury, however, Yelich was absolutely carrying the Brewers, improving on his MVP 2018 nearly across the board. Grandal has been magnificent as well, walking and slugging his way to a 123 wRC+ in addition to his usual excellent framing.

If those two have done so well, why aren’t the Brewers having a better season? Injuries have taken their toll. The pitching staff hasn’t developed as hoped, but that’s hardly shocking given how volatile pitching can be. More surprisingly, Lorenzo Cain has gone from down-ballot MVP contender to merely another guy, and on a team without much outfield depth, the decline has been particularly tough to deal with. While he’s been slowed by a knee injury since early August, his season was hardly better before then — his wRC+ has actually increased since sustaining that injury. What’s wrong with Cain?

One look at that oldest of statistics, batting average, will tell you something’s not right. From 2014 to 2018, Cain hit .300 or better four times and had an overall .301 average to pair with a .361 OBP. His .253 and .321 marks in 2019 are near career lows. The last time he was hitting like this, he wasn’t Lorenzo Cain, star outfielder. He was simply Lorenzo Cain, Royals prospect with a good glove. The gap between this Cain (0.9 WAR) and star-turn Cain (5.7 WAR in 2018) is so wide that it’s hardly believable.

Batting average isn’t the most valuable statistic, but the three components that make it up are all trending in the wrong direction for Cain. First, there’s strikeout rate. Strikeouts count against average without giving you a chance for a hit, so limiting strikeouts is a key component to hitting for a high average. It’s a part of the game that Cain has often excelled at — he hasn’t struck out more than the league average since 2014, and he actually got better at it as the league has gotten worse, posting a career-low 15.2% rate last year. This part of Cain’s game is worse, but that’s hardly surprising given the high bar he set last year, and his 16.9% strikeout rate is still tremendous.

If it’s not the strikeouts, is it the home runs? Home runs are hits that don’t give fielders any play on the ball, an automatic outcome not subject to the vagaries of defense and luck. If Cain lost a lot of home run power, we’d see it in batting average, and it would also sap his overall value tremendously. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

A man in black stands in the bullpen. He looks different than the last time we saw him here, almost six months ago now. The strange uniform hangs off him so loosely; his hair is clipped shorter; his beard is longer. It is the early evening, and the sky is loosely clouded, the light and shadow falling in that way that is so familiar now, the way it only does in this specific place, this close to the ocean in the west.

The energy, though, is not familiar for this building: the loud blue everywhere, the excitement of thousands who are experiencing something they can only have once a year, or once every few years, or even once in a lifetime. They are not here for the man in black; he might as well be one of the shadows.

In the corner, though, above the bullpen, the faithful form their block of yellow. They hold up their signs, and the kids wear their little foam crowns. And if it wasn’t for the fact that the words they hold up mirror the ones sewn to the back of his uniform, you might not know that the person they were so excited to see is the same subdued presence now taking the man.

It is the 209th time that Félix Hernández has started a game in this ballpark. Read the rest of this entry »

Christian Yelich won NL MVP honors while leading the Brewers to a division title and within one win of a trip to the World Series last year, but hopes for repeating that magic took a severe blow on Tuesday night. In the first inning of the Brewers’ game against the Marlins in Miami, the 27-year-old right fielder fouled a pitch off his right kneecap and was forced from the game. In the aftermath of the team’s 4-3 victory, general manager David Stearns told reporters that Yelich had fractured the kneecap and will be out for the remainder of the season, a crushing blow to a team that has overcome a slew of injuries to win five straight games and climb to within one game of the second NL Wild Card spot.

Ouch. Ugh. F***. A player with a reasonable claim as the NL’s best is down for the count as far as 2019 goes, and while thankfully it’s not an injury with career-altering ramifications, right now there’s no joy in Mudville or Milwaukee. This completely sucks.

Facing righty Elieser Hernandez, Yelich fouled a 1-1 slider squarely off his right knee, crumpled to the ground, and remained there for several minutes while being tended to by Brewers athletic trainer Rafael Freitas. He could not complete the plate appearance (pinch-hitter Trent Grisham completed the strikeout, which was charged to Yelich) and limped off the field under his own power (you can see the video here).

Stearns said that Yelich would be flown back to Milwaukee to meet with team doctors and determine whether surgery would be necessary and what the prognosis would be going forward. He praised his star slugger, saying, “Look, I think first and foremost, we feel awful for Christian. This is a guy who has carried us in a number of ways over the last two years. He could have been two and a half weeks away from a repeat Most Valuable Player Award. That’s where our thoughts go first.” Read the rest of this entry »

I confess that I haven’t watched many Marlins games this year. The team is projected to have the third worst record in baseball, potentially losing 100 or more games for just the third time in organization history. They average fewer than 10,000 fans per home game, the lowest in the league in 2019, which would be an all-time low, surpassing the 2018 season. It’s been a bumpy ride for Don Mattingly’s rebuilding Miami club.

But the Marlins do have some interesting players who are capable of doing interesting things not many other players are capable of doing. After Caleb Smith’s solid outing this past weekend, I spent some time perusing Statcast and discovered that, among left-handed pitchers who have thrown a minimum of 50 four-seam fastballs in 2019, Smith’s has the third most horizontal movement in the game. Right behind him is his teammate, Adam Conley. One spot ahead of him is Chris Sale. And one spot ahead of Sale, leading all 113 lefties in this sample in horizontal movement, is Smith and Conley’s teammate Jarlin Garcia.

Three of the top four left-handed big leaguers in four-seam horizontal movement all pitch for the Marlins.

That piqued my interest. In 2018, Garcia was one of the worst pitchers in baseball, carrying a -1.3 WAR and 6.37 FIP in 66 innings pitched. His xwOBA-against and xSLG-against were both in the first percentile in the league. In 2019, Garcia’s strikeout rate is up, his walk rate is down, and as of this writing, he has contributed 0.4 WAR and has a 3.79 FIP. What seems to be the likeliest cause of this improvement? His fastball’s horizontal movement was still 98% better than league-average last year, but its value was -1.57 wFB/C. This year it is 110% better than league average and its value has been 0.86 wFB/C. What changed more than his fastball movement, however, was his slider movement and usage:

Read the rest of this entry »