“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.” – Oscar Wilde

With three World Series wins over the last decade, it would be a bit greedy for fans of the Giants to bemoan the team’s current state too strenuously. San Francisco fell out of their even-year championship pattern in 2016 and finished the last three seasons with losing records. With the key players of the dynasty either past their prime or gone completely, the club’s laudable goal of putting a quality team on the field every year has become a tricky one to fulfill.

The Setup

Unlike other formerly competitive teams such as the Tigers and Orioles, the Giants were in no mood to head full-bore into a rebuild in 2018. San Francisco rightly realized that the outfield was a major weakness, but the club struck out in their attempts to acquire Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, and Marcell Ozuna. Unable to be one of the teams pillaging the Marlins during that organization’s latest payroll temper tantrum, the Giants picked up Andrew McCutchen in a trade with the Pittsburgh Pirates in return for Bryan Reynolds, Kyle Crick, and international bonus money. That trade doesn’t look all that phenomenal in 2019 terms given the season Reynolds had, but it was a necessary one given San Francisco’s 2018 goals. Evan Longoria was also acquired in the hopes he could bounce back to being the star he had been for most of his 20s.

As we all know now, 2018 firmly demonstrated that 2017’s 64-98 record wasn’t some horrifying outlier. While the Giants were clearly had not given up on competing, the team’s attempts to stay under the luxury tax threshold made any October aspirations more difficult to achieve. There would be no Lorenzo Cain, no J.D. Martinez, and no Yu Darvish signed in free agency to reinforce the team’s declining core. In any event, none of those signings would have salvaged San Francisco’s 2018 campaign. McCutchen himself didn’t even finish the season with the Giants, as he was sent to the Yankees at the August trade deadline.

San Francisco entered last winter with competitive aspirations, and a combination of a $10 million bump in the luxury tax threshold and $25 million in expiring contracts to Hunter Pence and Matt Cain gave the team a bit of breathing room to add to the roster. One big addition, though not of the roster variety, was that of Farhan Zaidi, formerly the GM of the Dodgers, as head of baseball operations. Zaidi wasn’t brought in — at least at that point — to spearhead a full rebuild, and the Giants went after one of the offseason’s top prizes in free agent outfielder Bryce Harper. The Giants offered Harper 12 years and $310 million, but Harper instead took Philadelphia’s 13-year, $330 million offer. Read the rest of this entry »

On May 23, the Washington Nationals lost a matinee to the Mets in heartbreaking fashion, taking a lead 4-3 with a three-run eighth inning only to give up three runs of their own in the bottom of the frame. The loss dropped the Nationals to 19-31, a whopping 10 games back of the division-leading Phillies. They had been outscored by 40 runs on the season, and Dave Martinez’s seat was getting hot in only his second year as manager.

On Tuesday night, the Nationals will play in the World Series. It’s a change in fortune so extreme that it begs for explanation, and at first glance the explanation is easy. The Nationals have star power but lack depth, the exact kind of team “built for October.” Their starting lineup and top four starting pitchers are phenomenal; the less said about the backups and bullpen, the better. The kind of Nationals team losing 6-4 on a Tuesday afternoon in Queens is simply not the same team playing now.

That’s a convenient explanation, but it’s also wrong. Stephen Strasburg threw seven innings that day, and no regular had the day off. Wander Suero was the only reliever to pitch, and he wasn’t one of the relievers who weighed the Nationals down this year; he had a 4.54 ERA and 3.07 FIP over 71.1 innings, a solid season for a middle reliever.

No, the Nationals sent out their best, their co-ace starter backed by the A-squad, and they lost to a Mets team playing Adeiny Hechavarría, Carlos Gómez, and Juan Lagares all at once. That same team survived the Brewers, outlasted the Dodgers, and walked all over the Cardinals on their way to the first World Series appearance in franchise history. The convenient story isn’t always the right one. Washington simply started playing better.

After that bleak day in May, the Nations went 74-38 to finish the regular season. They outscored their opponents by 189 runs, scoring the most runs in the National League and allowing the third-least. The talent at the top of the roster shone through; the combined brilliance of Strasburg, Max Scherzer, Anthony Rendon, Juan Soto, and all the rest was so great that no amount of bullpen incompetence or lack of bench depth (36-year-old Howie Kendrick played the second-most innings at third base for them this year) could hold the team down.

Shockingly, that 74-38 record wasn’t the best in baseball. The Houston Astros, their World Series opponents, went 74-37 over the same stretch, a scant half-game ahead. They scored four fewer runs than the Nationals and allowed one more. The two hottest teams in baseball are facing off in the World Series, and if you don’t think about it too literally, you could even say they’re constructed from the same blueprint. Read the rest of this entry »

After what was otherwise a fairly quiet affair punctuated by the occasional home run, the Houston Astros won Game 6 of the American League Championship Series 6-4 on a walkoff home run from José Altuve. Houston takes the series four games to two, and avoids a high-stakes Game 7 that would have left Gerrit Cole unavailable in the World Series until the third game.

The evening got off to an inauspicious start for the Yankees as Houston’s first entrant in the bullpen battle, Brad Peacock, quickly dispatched DJ LeMahieu, Aaron Judge, and Gleyber Torres with seven pitches. Chad Green opened for New York and didn’t perform as well in his half of the inning as Peacock did in his. Green was perhaps fortunate to escape a rather pedestrian slider to Altuve with only a double, but he was less lucky with a high, very inside fastball to Yuli Gurriel, which the first baseman turned on for a home run to give the Astros an early 3-0 lead. That high, inside fastball isn’t usually that dangerous for a pitcher; there were only 13 home runs hit this year by right-handed hitters swinging at a four-seamer in Statcast’s inside and high-inside “chase” zones. Coincidentally enough, Gurriel had one of those home runs, comfortably turning on a sorta-fastball from Trevor Williams. This might have been one of the highest-leverage of those since Kit Keller’s.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the lowdown on Tyler Rogers: A 6-foot-5 right-hander from Littleton, Colorado, he’s the twin brother of a left-hander closer, he made his MLB debut this past August, and he’s a submariner. Moreover, he kills a lot of worms. The 1.02 ERA that Rogers put up in 17 games out of the San Francisco Giants bullpen was augmented with a 69.4% ground ball rate.

Unlike his traditional-arm-slot sibling, he’s not a power pitcher. Taylor Rogers — fittingly, a Minnesota Twin — features a 95-mph fastball and an 83-mph slider. Tyler features an 82-mph sinker and a 73-mph slider. The latter pitch, which the atypical hurler throws roughly a third of the time, is atypical in itself.

“I call it a slider, but it’s almost a curveball,” Rogers said in September. “I kind of curl it like people do when they throw a curveball overhand. It’s the same thing, I’m just bent over doing it. So yeah, basically it’s just a normal curveball grip that I throw from underneath.”

Rogers began dropping down his freshman year of junior college. He did so at the suggestion of a coach, and from there progressively got lower and lower. The transformation to an actual submarine-style delivery came after the Giants took him in the 10th round of the 2013 draft. Irony being what it is, the genesis of the more-extreme verticality was horizontal in nature. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — The Yankees may not win this year’s American League Championship Series. They may not become the 14th team to rally from a three-games-to-one deficit in a best-of seven, or the eighth to do so by finishing the job on the road — particularly against an Astros team with the majors’ best record and an historically powerful offense. But in the wake of a demoralizing Game 4 loss full of missed opportunities, sloppy defense, and the sudden end of CC Sabathia’s career, they met manager Aaron Boone’s immediate goal of sending the series back to Minute Maid Park with a 4-1 victory that featured strong work by starter James Paxton and a four-run first inning against Justin Verlander, featuring a pair of homers by DJ LeMahieu and Aaron Hicks.

“He’s got to go out and pitch well and set the tone for us,” Boone said of Paxton prior to the game, “because we’ve got to get on that plane and go back to Houston.”

The tone early on Friday evening was all too reminiscent of Thursday’s late-inning sloppiness. Second baseman Gleyber Torres, who made errors in each of the final two innings of Game 4, mishandled leadoff hitter George Springer‘s grounder, which had slipped under Paxton’s glove, though the ball was scored a single. Springer then took second on a passed ball by Gary Sánchez, advanced to third on Jose Altuve’s grounder, and scored on a wild pitch. It was an all-too-familiar story for Paxton, whose 29 first-inning runs allowed in 29 starts tied for the major league lead.

That was all the Astros would get from him, however. Both Alex Bregman and Yuli Gurriel scorched line drives to the outfield —  98.4 mph for the former to left, with Brett Gardner chasing it down, and 96.8 for the latter to center, but right at Hicks — and so Paxton escaped by allowing just one run. He’d failed to get ahead of any of the five batters he faced, gotten just one swinging strike on a total of 23 pitches, and his defense looked anything but sharp. With the Yankees desperately needing length given their plans for an all-bullpen Game 6, it was not an encouraging beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about their upcoming live event, review ALCS Game 4, the Yankees’ precarious position, and the career and last appearance of CC Sabathia, then discuss the significance of MLB both allowing investment funds to take minority stakes in multiple clubs and proposing to downsize and reorganize the minor leagues before wrapping up by answering listener emails about whether the Cardinals’ season was a success and whether it would make sense to change the playoff structure to make repeat appearances less common.

Audio intro: Uncle Tupelo, "Cold Shoulder"
Audio outro: Golden Earrings, "Cut ‘Em Down to Size"

Link to info on November 21 live event
Link to Ben on ALCS Game 4
Link to video of Girardi on Sabathia
Link to Ben on mid-plate-appearance pitching changes
Link to report about investment funds
Link to Ben Clemens on investment funds
Link to report about the downsizing of Minor League Baseball
Link to Travis on Minor League Baseball and player development
Link to story on Minor League Baseball attendance
Link to results of poll on home run reduction
Link to Jon Roegele thread on strike zone size
Link to order The MVP Machine

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As Justin Verlander takes the mound tonight, he’ll do so with 240.1 innings pitched this season between regular season and playoffs. In the last three seasons, Verlander’s 2019 campaign is just the second to go at least 240 innings; his 242.2 inning in 2017 is the other. Since 2011, there have been 26 seasons during which pitchers have thrown at least 240 innings. Verlander accounts for five of them. If he makes a decent start tonight and Houston advances to the World Series, he’ll likely be the first pitcher to go over 250 innings in a season since 2014, when James Shields, Madison Bumgarner, and David Price all eclipsed that mark. Verlander’s quality deservedly receives the bulk of the attention when analyzing the ace, but the quantity deserves accolades as well.

If we look a single player’s career and then compare his totals to his peers only during those seasons when he was active, it is bound to be misleading, as it cuts off the careers of others at the beginning and end where fuller comparisons are better made. For example, Justin Verlander’s 72 WAR is first among all pitchers since 2006 when he pitched his first full season. That Verlander was the best pitcher in baseball over that time is a defensible argument, but it should be noted that Clayton Kershaw is just seven wins behind Verlander and five years younger. If we looked at the leaders from 2006-2026, Verlander might not be first. Similarly, if we go back to 1996, we see Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez jump ahead of Verlander. If we go back to 1986, Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux are more than 40 wins ahead of him, with Mike Mussina, Curt Schilling, John Smoltz, and Kevin Brown also in possession of a higher WAR. This isn’t to take away anything from Verlander — the other pitchers discussed are all great. But it is a reminder that selectively choosing seasons can skew the results. Read the rest of this entry »

Yordan Alvarez is the favorite to win the AL Rookie of the Year Award. He completely demolished opposing pitching this year, first in Triple-A (170 wRC+), then in the majors (178 wRC+) after being called up in early June. Between the two levels, he launched 50 home runs while showing elite plate discipline. But this October, he’s been a non-factor for the Astros.

He showed some life against the Rays, going 6-for-19 with three doubles in that five game series. But against the Yankees, he’s been completely shut down. He collected his first hit of the Championship Series last night, a broken bat single off Chad Green. He’s reached base just three other times against Yankees pitching, drawing two walks and reaching on an error. Overall, he’s slashing just .206/.270/.294 in nine postseason games.

What’s even more concerning is his elevated strikeout rate. He struck out just over a quarter of the time he came to the plate during the regular season. That’s jumped up to 37.8% in the postseason. During the regular season, Alvarez never had a nine-game stretch as poor as this one.

There was a nine-game stretch ending on September 6 during which he posted a strikeout rate of 36.6%. But he also launched three home runs over that span, something he hasn’t been able to do during the postseason. Obviously small sample caveats apply here, but it appears as though both the Rays and the Yankees have found similar approaches to neutralizing the 22-year-old rookie. Read the rest of this entry »