The retooling of the Toronto Blue Jays hasn’t gone quite as planned. While the team won’t say so in such explicit terms, I believe that the original plan was to keep the basic core of the team together just long enough that reinforcements would arrive and save the team from a more painful long-term rebuild. Toronto’s stable of All-Star relatives has started to arrive — possibly the most impressive such group in baseball history — but the MLB roster is in a worse state than I imagine the team had hoped.

The Setup

The 2017 Toronto Blue Jays could point to a run of bad luck as the possible culprit for dropping from 89 to 76 wins, but the 2018 Blue Jays probably ought to have let go of those hopes. The post-2018 offseason didn’t feature much that would change the trajectory of the team, and the transactions were consistent with a plan of trying to simply stay relevant before players like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, and Cavan Biggio started hitting the major leagues. Moves were made but generally featured the supporting cast. In a perfect world, a healthy Matt Shoemaker and the resurgent Clay Buchholz could fill out the rotation, making up for the losses of J.A. Happ by trade and Marco Estrada by decline and then free agency. The thin bullpen that finished 21st in ERA and 23rd in WAR in 2018 before losing its top two pitchers by WAR, Seunghwan Oh and Tyler Clippard, could hopefully be buttressed with veteran free agents Bud Norris, David Phelps, Daniel Hudson, and John Axford.

As the team attempted to keep a skeleton crew together, the need to simultaneously add minor-league talent was obvious. The Jays traded off some of the players that were perceived to be surplus talent in an attempt to add to the team’s depth. Russell Martin could be replaced by Danny Jansen, Aledmys Diaz didn’t bring much that Lourdes Gurriel Jr. or Richard Urena couldn’t, and Kendrys Morales’s 2018 production could be replicated by Rowdy Tellez.

With just enough luck, the winter pickups would be enough when combined with the existing core (Marcus Stroman, Justin Smoak, Aaron Sanchez, Ken Giles, Teoscar Hernandez, Randal Grichuk) to make the Blue Jays a .500 team, or even a skosh better. Then the fun would start. The Jays later made the public argument that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was not one of the best 25 players in the organization, but I don’t imagine that a single person that heard that either believed it or even thought that Toronto actually believed it. Vladito and Bichette would be the latest on baseball’s list of exciting phenoms starring quickly in the majors (with more on the way!) and help get the Blue Jays to at least the mid-80s in wins. And in a bifurcated American League, with a few great teams and several that looked like spring training B-squads, that might be enough to make a serious playoff run. Read the rest of this entry »

Far from the bright lights of the pennant chase, history was made last August when Oliver Drake came in to pitch the ninth inning of an 8-2 Twins victory. That appearance marked the fifth major league team Drake had appeared for in 2018 alone. He wasn’t done there; Drake changed teams a further three times in the offseason, with some of the transactions just seeming silly:

Drake was good-natured about the whole ordeal, appearing on Effectively Wild to talk about his odyssey. Still, he was clearly eager to put the past behind him and find a home on a single roster. No one gets into baseball in hopes of endlessly bouncing between teams, good enough to play in the majors but replaceable enough to frequently be a roster crunch casualty.

If you haven’t been following closely this year, you might not have heard anything about Drake. Did he slip off the edge of major league relevance, stuck in the purgatory of Triple-A Durham? Nope! Neither did he continue his travels across the major leagues. Instead he got better, and he now figures into the Rays’ bullpen plans for the rest of the regular season and beyond.

How did a reliever who had previously defined the word journeyman turn into a key cog in one of the best bullpens in baseball? For lack of a better way to say it, Drake essentially took every part of his game and made it better. In a world of nonstop player development and video-aided pitch design, no player is ever truly a finished product, and even marginal ones are seemingly a tweak away from being effective; Drake is the perfect example of that. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the diminishing roles (and salaries) of MLB managers, then answer listener emails about whether it’s better for teams to be balanced than unbalanced and how to decide whether to upgrade on offense or defense, how consistently good a player has to be to make the Hall of Fame without ever leading the league, and what they love most about baseball, plus a Stat Blast about steroids and the league-wide distribution of dingers in the 2000s and today.

Audio intro: Bright Eyes, "From a Balance Beam"
Audio outro: Dr. Dog, "Mystery to Me"

Link to Rosenthal article about managers
Link to FiveThirtyEight on balanced rosters
Link to Ben on runs scored vs. runs saved
Link to BP on runs scored vs. runs saved
Link to Ben on Baines
Link to Rob Arthur on steroids and the home run surge
Link to Ben on the steroid era
Link to Craig Edwards on the lack of 60-homer hitters
Link to Rich Hill highlights
Link to order The MVP Machine

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As a FanGraphs reader, Mets fan, baseball follower, or some combination of the three, you’re probably familiar with Seth Lugo. We at FanGraphs haven’t written a ton about Lugo in 2019, but he is one of baseball’s most fascinating pitchers, known for his high-spin curveball that consistently finds itself atop the Baseball Savant daily spin rate leaderboards, like this one from September 15:

Lugo’s curveball is cool, and its coolness has generated much discussion. For good measure, here’s another look:

Wil Myers had no chance. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Ned Yost announced that he would retire at the end of the season. While the news came as a surprise, the man himself has always kept a healthy perspective on the game. Based on Alec Lewis’s profile, he’ll leave the game feeling fulfilled and ready for the next chapter of his life. His departure, along with a juicy rumor that Royals special advisor and former Cardinals manager Mike Matheny will replace him, made for an eventful Monday morning in Kansas City.

As a skipper, Yost was never a visionary strategist. He’s not analytically inclined by nature, and he struggled in game states that require managers to play the percentages. Too often, his choices looked reflexive and dated: He liked having his fast shortstop lead off, OBP be damned. His good players bunted far too often. He didn’t always know when to deploy his closer. Managing the bullpen proved particularly challenging.

In one 2014 game, Yost summoned young Danny Duffy into a tied, extra-inning contest on the road, and then turned to Louis Coleman after the lefty loaded the bases. All that time, he had all-world closer Greg Holland ready to go, but he never got to pitch; Baltimore walked it off against Coleman. Later that year, Yost brought in a lefty specialist specifically to face (then) feeble-hitting Jackie Bradley Jr. with one on late in a one-run game; the Red Sox predictably inserted lefty-basher Jonny Gomes, who socked a two-run homer to give Boston a one-run win. After that episode, the manager memorably took responsibility, saying he’d “outsmarted himself.” Perhaps more than anyone over the last decade, Yost earned an almost anti-analytic reputation, becoming the face of what sabermetric seamheads spent so much time ranting about on Twitter.

But as Yost’s time in the dugout stretched on, the criticisms of his tactical acumen felt like an increasingly small slice of the story. For subscribers of the iceberg theory of managing, it’s clear that he compensated with other strengths. Yost always absorbed the blame whenever things went haywire, a point that both his bosses and charges acknowledged and appreciated. He also had a steady hand with young players. In Milwaukee and Kansas City, he helped turn perennially losing teams into playoff-caliber squads, happily shepherding young talents through the inevitable growing pains. Notably, a number of highly touted prospects who began their big league careers slowly — Eric Hosmer, Alex Gordon, Mike Moustakas, Jorge Soler, and Adalberto Mondesi among them — eventually blossomed. Might they have done so sooner under another manager? Perhaps, perhaps not. Regardless, most of the best prospects under Yost’s watch figured things out eventually. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the third installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but at 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.

You’ll be shocked to learn that when it comes to chaos, some teams just don’t want to cooperate. That’s the story of Team Entropy this year. Since I last checked in on September 13, our chances of seeing complex scenarios necessitating multiple tiebreakers have more or less gone in the direction of the Cubs’ season, which is to say sharply downward at cartoonish speed.

Chicago has not only lost 11 of its last 17 games since September 5, it’s lost six straight, including five in a row by one run and four in a row to the Cardinals, three of which featured the Cubs holding the lead or being tied in the ninth inning. Craig Edwards had the gory details on Monday. This isn’t all on the Cubs’ shoulders, however. With just six days of regular season baseball remaining, four of the six divisions have been clinched, and the Wild Card hopes of the Mets and Phillies are on life support; the Diamondbacks are done. Fortunately, the possibility of at least one tiebreaker in each league still looms. So let’s take a closer look at what’s left.

Contrary to the previous installments of this year’s series, the greater excitement is now in the American League. While the Indians (92-64) trail the Twins (96-60) by four games and have an elimination number of three in the AL Central race, Cleveland is just half a game behind Tampa Bay (93-64) for the second AL Wild Card spot, and two games behind Oakland (94-62) for the first. The chances of three teams winding up tied are just 2.0%, but that’s actually higher than they’ve been for most of the time since July 1. Sean Dolinar was kind enough to supply me with an archive of our tiebreakers page, and since July 1, there have only been four days that ended with greater odds of such a tie, all in the span from September 11-14. Woohoo! Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Dylan Cease, Tyler Duffey, and Buck Farmer— on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

——

Dylan Cease, Chicago White Sox

“I first learned a curveball when I was 12 or 13 years old. I think a coach probably taught me, but it’s tough to say that far back. I do know that I didn’t throw a whole lot of curveballs back in the day; it was mostly fastballs.

“When I got to pro ball, it took me… I really didn’t know anything about how to throw one. I had to figure out how to throw it like a fastball, how to get it to stay on a fastball plane, how to throw it with arm speed. At first I wanted to baby it. It kind of had a loop in it. I needed to work on things like the shape, and how it came out of my hand.

“It was a regular curveball until last year when I got to Double-A and changed to a knuckle curve. I was talking to Dane Dunning. I liked the shape of his curveball. I said, ‘I feel like mine is a little loopy; how do you do that?’ He showed me his knuckle curve grip, which I’m pretty sure he got from James Shields — indirectly from James Shields — and throwing it like that added a bunch of extra spin and drop. Read the rest of this entry »

Yu Darvish’s 2018 could hardly have gone any worse. Fresh off of signing a six-year, $126 million contract with the Cubs, he made just eight starts before triceps tendinitis and a stress reaction in his right elbow ended his season. The Cubs made the playoffs, but Darvish could only watch their maddening 13-inning loss to the Rockies and wonder what could have been.

When Darvish struggled to start 2019, the situation seemed to go from frustrating to dire. His first eight starts were horrendous, rife with walks and home runs. He had been one of the most exciting pitchers in all of baseball, all strikeouts and gadget pitches, a highlight waiting to happen. He’d been a thrilling rookie, a prized deadline acquisition, and a top-tier free agent. Was he now on the downswing of his career, adding expensive journeyman to his list of accomplishments?

As it turns out, he wasn’t. As Devan Fink chronicled, Darvish turned his walk problems around, going from the pitcher with the most walks in baseball to the pitcher with the least. Since a disastrous outing in early May where he walked six Marlins, he’s been the third-best pitcher in baseball by xFIP, fourth-best by strikeout rate, and in the top 15 in WAR. In the second half, he’s been even better than that, combining a 37.2% strikeout rate with a 2.2% walk rate. His ERA, FIP, and xFIP are all in the mid-twos.

This fully actualized version of Darvish is what his flashes of brilliance through the years had always hinted at. The bottomless arsenal of pitches — he picked up Craig Kimbrel’s knuckle curve in a week — made him a delight to watch, the strikeouts coming from every conceivable angle, fastball following cutter following curve. The Cubs were off to a hot start, 22-13 even after Darvish’s disastrous turn against the Marlins, and now they were adding one of the best pitchers in baseball.

But while Darvish returned to form, the Cubs backslid. The team has gone 60-61 since that date, falling from the top of the division to nearly eliminated from postseason play. Darvish has made 23 starts in that time, and the team has gone 9-14 in those games. Wins and losses are no measure of pitcher quality, but Darvish has gone 4-5 over that timeframe. Even in the second half of the season, when Darvish went full supernova, the team was only 6-6 in his starts heading into this past Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

With a four-game sweep that took Chicago’s playoff odds from likely to long-shot, the Cardinals put the Cubs’ season in the trash like an uneaten commemorative cake. Due to the Cubs’ recent run of success, and the painful way the club lost four, one-run games at home (while holding the lead or being tied in the ninth inning in three of those games), their fall is the most-attention grabbing aspect of the series (and we’ll get to that). But the sweep was massive for the Cardinals in its own right. Look at the Cardinals’ odds to win the division in the second half:

While the Cardinals still have some work to do, the division title is very likely theirs after failing to make the playoffs the last three seasons. At the beginning of the series, the team had some ground to cover, with a 58% chance at the division. Losing the first game of the series likely would have taken those odds below 50%. Despite the Brewers winning four straight, the Cardinals were able to push their chances upward due to their three-game lead over Milwaukee with just six games to go, while also eliminating their rival from division contention. The series might be viewed as microcosm of the season for St. Louis. The Cardinals offense was typically inconsistent, scoring nine runs in one game, and just nine total runs in the other three. Jack Flaherty pitched fantastically, continuing his run as the NL’s best pitcher in the second half. The bullpen was solid despite multiple short starts from the rotation, and the defense played its part, turning seven double plays.

A year ago, the Cardinals played the role of the Cubs. After going 39-23 in the second half after firing Mike Matheny just before the All-Star Break, the Cardinals got their playoff odds up to 79.5% with series against the Brewers and Cubs to close the season. But the Brewers swept the Cardinals in St. Louis, dropping the team’s playoff odds down to 19.6%. When they dropped the opener to the Cubs, those odds fell under 1% and their season was essentially over in four games. Speaking of a season essentially ending after four tough games:

Read the rest of this entry »