You know what? I know it's late, but let's do this!
My computer was in the shop for a while when the elimination season started, so I've missed the opening bell, but there's no reason we can't start this thing up again belatedly and see where it goes. I make no promises that I'll finish the thread this year, but I'm optimistic I'll get at least halfway there!
By my count we've got seven eliminated teams (Baltimore, Texas, KC, Minnesota, Arizona, Pittsburgh, and Washington) with the Marlins out in the WC but still with a game to give in the division (depending how the Braves do this afternoon). To start, let's take care of the three AL teams that were eliminated as of Thursday, and we'll get through the rest in the few days.
Anyway, enough prelude - let's get into it! As always, we start in Baltimore:
At the beginning of the year, the Orioles were shockingly adequate. Sure, they weren’t exactly world-beaters, and no one was mistaking them for the Rays or Astros, but they weren’t pushovers, either. They began the year with a decisive three-game sweep of the Red Sox, outscoring the crimson hose by a combined 18-5 tally in the three games. That series kicked of a stretch wherein the O's went 15-16; while that’s not amazing – or even good – it was good enough to warrant attention from fans and baseball types as a team that might actually win some baseball games.
The pinnacle of the season came on May 5, when ace John Means threw a no-hitter that was a close to a perfect game as one could imagine without it actually being a perfect game. Twenty-eight men went to the plate; twenty-seven were retired, and the twenty-eighth struck out but was granted a reprieve on catcher Pedro Severino’s dropped third strike. In the year of the no-hitter, this was perhaps the most impressive one of all, and for a team in need of an ace, it appeared that Means had finally arrived.
Unfortunately (and oddly), this near-perfecto marked the beginning of the Orioles’ collapse. Over the next twenty-three games, they went 2-21, putting the season out of reach for good. By the All-Star break, they were dead and buried, lying 6.5 games below even the second-worst team in the AL. The Orioles have had two runs of semi-competence this year: their 15-16 start and a 10-5 stretch at the end of July; apart from those two stretches, they're 22-81, good for a .214 winning percentage. In August, the O's embarked on a losing streak that rivaled their longest ever; at 19 games, the streak only barely managed to avoid the ignominy of “besting” the 1988 Orioles and their 21-game record. The most impressive part was not the 19-game streak itself – it was the fact that they also had a 16-game losing streak earlier in the season that will now be ignored because of the latter streak.
Just as they have for most of the last twenty-five years, the Orioles find themselves again stuck in rebuilding purgatory. For O’s fans, this is a familiar movie; the names change, but the roles remain the same. They have the uber-prospect (Adley Rutschman), a couple of good players who may end up traded before the Orioles see another winning season (Cedric Mullins, John Means, Trey Mancini), the drek (much of the rest of the roster), and, of course, the albatross (Chris Davis). Veteran O’s fans might remember when the uber-prospect was Matt Wieters or Adam Loewen or Matt Riley, or when the tradeable player was Erik Bedard or Miguel Tejada or Manny Machado, or when the albatross was Albert Belle or Scott Erickson or Ubaldo Jimenez; for those fans, there’s a disappointing (if calming) familiarity to the whole process. Orioles fans can only hope that some sort of a plan comes together and that the arrival looks more like the brief 2012-2016 run of competence and less like the rest of the futile quarter-century.
But whatever happens, one thing is certain about the Orioles' future: Chris Davis will still be drawing paychecks from the Orioles until 2037.
The O’s last made the playoffs in 2016. Their last championship was in 1983.
The deadline trade of Joey Gallo to the Yankees can mean only one thing: the first iteration of the rebuild has failed.
Five years ago, the Rangers were a shining example of the “right” way to build a franchise. They’d had back-to-back World Series appearances and three playoff appearances titles from 2010-12, then retooled for two years, then switched managers and made two more consecutive playoff appearances. It wasn’t an incredible run, but in the era of “three years of contending, seven years of rebuild,” making five playoffs in seven years was truly an accomplishment.
More impressively, however, they'd managed to put together the next core while the erstwhile core was still making the playoffs and getting into fights with the Blue Jays. The succession plan was in place; as greats like Adrian Beltre shuffled off into retirement, the next great Rangers team would be built around then-wunderkind Elvis Andrus and promising young prospects like Rougned Odor, Nomar Mazara, Jurickson Profar, and, of course, slugger Joey Gallo. Most prognosticators at the time were effusive with their praise of president Jon Daniels and his team construction, and for good reason – it’s no small feat to assemble a new core while you’re still enjoying the benefits of the previous one.
Unfortunately, that new core never materialized. Rougned Odor’s biggest highlight for the Rangers involved punching Jose Bautista; Rougy now plays for the Yankees. The Other Nomar never got over his astounding ability to swing at pitches and completely miss them; he was flipped to the White Sox in 2019 for an equally uninspiring prospect and has since been designated for assignment by two different teams. Andrus spent last year engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Mendoza line; he has since moved to Oakland, where he continues to get on base less than 30% of the time. Jurickson Profar could never get over the hump and was eventually shipped to Oakland after his career year as a 3-win player; in return, the Rangers received some international cap money and a catcher who hits like a pitcher. Now, with Gallo gone, that promising core....that young team whose arrival was so perfectly timed to coincide with the opening of the new Globe Life Park...has proven to be little more than a mirage.
At the beginning of the year, Texas management used the term “evaluation year” to describe the upcoming 2021 season. If this was the goal, it was accomplished; the Rangers – and the rest of baseball – correctly ‘evaluated’ the team as terrible. They were five games under .500 by the end of April, suffered a nine-game losing streak at the end of May that pushed them to the fringes of the standings, and were firmly entrenched in the cellar by an eleven-game losing streak in July. They're far and away the worst-hitting team (by OPS+) in the American League, and their pitching is third-worst in the AL (by ERA+). Their lineup is below average at every position except center field, and their only good starting pitcher in 2021 now plays for the Phillies. Given that they can neither pitch nor hit, the surprise of the season isn't so much that the Rangers are bad - it's that there's an AL team that's somehow worse.
The good news is that there’s at least some new blood in the front office, as the Rangers hired former pitcher and veteran tall person Chris Young to be the new general manager. As far as good news...that’s pretty much it. If baseball became a dunking contest between general managers, the Rangers and their 6’10 GM would probably win; apart from that, there’s little to like about the Rangers - little in the bigs, little in the farm, and little in the way of hope. The rebuild has crashed and burned, and the Rangers are now, for the first time in a while, stuck in an honest-to-goodness tanking rebuild. If Daniels and Young are to right the ship, it will have to be the way that every other team now does it – by drafting high and flipping veterans for kids. It’s an achievable path, but for a team that once prided itself on its ability to walk the roads of developing and contending at the same time, the current path just seems so….pedestrian.
The Rangers have never won a World Series. Their last playoff appearance was in 2016.
The Twins are the runaway winner of the 2021 Disappointment of the Year award. In the preseason, projections like PECOTA had the Twins winning the division, which makes sense; they’d won the division in 2020 and run away with it in 2019. The Twins were returning a solid middle of the lineup in Josh Donaldson, Byron Buxton, Eddie Rosario, Max Kepler, and Nelson Cruz, as well as perennial enigma Miguel Sano. They were returning a pitching staff that had come into its own, anchored by Kenta Maeta and Jose Berrios. Their incumbent manager (and native Rhode Islander) Rocco Baldelli was even a former manager of the year. To that core, they’d added dominant defender and sometimes hitter Andrelton Simmons to shore up the middle infield defense, and they’d added Alex Colome to strengthen the back of the bullpen. Sure, the White Sox and the Native American Traffic Watchers looked to be improved, but the Twins had every right to expect that when all was said and done, they’d walk away with the division crown.
What happened instead was...not that.
Instead, the Twins fell apart early. Starting in mid-April, the Twins embarked on a 2-13 stretch that pushed them to the edges of the playoff picture; a 3-12 stretch in early May pushed them even further out of contention, and by June 15 they were twelve games from the nearest playoff spot. Far from being contenders, the Twins were surprise sellers at the deadline; they sent Berrios and Cruz away to better teams, and they've spent the post-deadline months acting as a punching bag for playoff contenders.
What went wrong? The chief culprit was undoubtedly the pitching. In the rotation, only Jose Berrios gave a solid every-fifth-day effort; the rest were either injured, ineffective, or both. Kenta Maeda posted an ERA+ of 89 before heading to the IL with the dreaded “forearm tightness;” Michael Pineda battled all sorts of injuries (as he has for his entire career), including right elbow inflammation, an abscess in his thigh, and “side pain;” and J.A. Happ and Matt Shoemaker are cooked, as their 6 and 8 ERA’s might suggest. Meanwhile, Alex Colome was so bad as closer that he found himself ousted from the role in favor of Taylor Rodgers and Hansel Robles; the former suffered a finger injury, while the latter was uneven in his Twins appearances and was sent to the Red Sox to reprise his hot-and-cold routine for the Fenway faithful. All told, the Twins’ ERA+ is second-worst in the league, besting only the historically bad Orioles. The hitting was good, if un-clutch (.206 in late and close situations, but a 103 OPS+ overall), but the only way an offense can overcome a pitching staff giving up 5.2 runs a game is if that offense is playing in the steroid era or at Coors Field.
It’s been a weird, snakebitten year for the Twins. Spring training began in the worst way possible - they lost bench coach Mike Bell to cancer, casting a pall over the young season that never seems to have lifted. The Twins then suffered a Covid outbreak in April that forced them to postpone several games just as the season was kicking up. They’ve been ravaged by injuries – in addition to the pitching staff woes above, Byron Buxton’s hand fracture put a stop to an absolute monster season by the young slugger. For a team with so much promise, 2021 has been a long and miserable ride for the fans in the Twin Cities
The Twins are now faced with the thorny question of whether to rebuild or reload. They traded their only consistently good starter (Berrios) at the deadline, so they have to re-assemble the pitching staff from the ground up. On the other hand, their hitting - even without Cruz - can still be among the best in the league as long as the hitters stay healthy. With half the team good and half the team bad….what do they do? Your guess is as good as mine.
The Twins last won the World Series in 1991.
My computer was in the shop for a while when the elimination season started, so I've missed the opening bell, but there's no reason we can't start this thing up again belatedly and see where it goes. I make no promises that I'll finish the thread this year, but I'm optimistic I'll get at least halfway there!
By my count we've got seven eliminated teams (Baltimore, Texas, KC, Minnesota, Arizona, Pittsburgh, and Washington) with the Marlins out in the WC but still with a game to give in the division (depending how the Braves do this afternoon). To start, let's take care of the three AL teams that were eliminated as of Thursday, and we'll get through the rest in the few days.
Anyway, enough prelude - let's get into it! As always, we start in Baltimore:
At the beginning of the year, the Orioles were shockingly adequate. Sure, they weren’t exactly world-beaters, and no one was mistaking them for the Rays or Astros, but they weren’t pushovers, either. They began the year with a decisive three-game sweep of the Red Sox, outscoring the crimson hose by a combined 18-5 tally in the three games. That series kicked of a stretch wherein the O's went 15-16; while that’s not amazing – or even good – it was good enough to warrant attention from fans and baseball types as a team that might actually win some baseball games.
The pinnacle of the season came on May 5, when ace John Means threw a no-hitter that was a close to a perfect game as one could imagine without it actually being a perfect game. Twenty-eight men went to the plate; twenty-seven were retired, and the twenty-eighth struck out but was granted a reprieve on catcher Pedro Severino’s dropped third strike. In the year of the no-hitter, this was perhaps the most impressive one of all, and for a team in need of an ace, it appeared that Means had finally arrived.
Unfortunately (and oddly), this near-perfecto marked the beginning of the Orioles’ collapse. Over the next twenty-three games, they went 2-21, putting the season out of reach for good. By the All-Star break, they were dead and buried, lying 6.5 games below even the second-worst team in the AL. The Orioles have had two runs of semi-competence this year: their 15-16 start and a 10-5 stretch at the end of July; apart from those two stretches, they're 22-81, good for a .214 winning percentage. In August, the O's embarked on a losing streak that rivaled their longest ever; at 19 games, the streak only barely managed to avoid the ignominy of “besting” the 1988 Orioles and their 21-game record. The most impressive part was not the 19-game streak itself – it was the fact that they also had a 16-game losing streak earlier in the season that will now be ignored because of the latter streak.
Just as they have for most of the last twenty-five years, the Orioles find themselves again stuck in rebuilding purgatory. For O’s fans, this is a familiar movie; the names change, but the roles remain the same. They have the uber-prospect (Adley Rutschman), a couple of good players who may end up traded before the Orioles see another winning season (Cedric Mullins, John Means, Trey Mancini), the drek (much of the rest of the roster), and, of course, the albatross (Chris Davis). Veteran O’s fans might remember when the uber-prospect was Matt Wieters or Adam Loewen or Matt Riley, or when the tradeable player was Erik Bedard or Miguel Tejada or Manny Machado, or when the albatross was Albert Belle or Scott Erickson or Ubaldo Jimenez; for those fans, there’s a disappointing (if calming) familiarity to the whole process. Orioles fans can only hope that some sort of a plan comes together and that the arrival looks more like the brief 2012-2016 run of competence and less like the rest of the futile quarter-century.
But whatever happens, one thing is certain about the Orioles' future: Chris Davis will still be drawing paychecks from the Orioles until 2037.
The O’s last made the playoffs in 2016. Their last championship was in 1983.
The deadline trade of Joey Gallo to the Yankees can mean only one thing: the first iteration of the rebuild has failed.
Five years ago, the Rangers were a shining example of the “right” way to build a franchise. They’d had back-to-back World Series appearances and three playoff appearances titles from 2010-12, then retooled for two years, then switched managers and made two more consecutive playoff appearances. It wasn’t an incredible run, but in the era of “three years of contending, seven years of rebuild,” making five playoffs in seven years was truly an accomplishment.
More impressively, however, they'd managed to put together the next core while the erstwhile core was still making the playoffs and getting into fights with the Blue Jays. The succession plan was in place; as greats like Adrian Beltre shuffled off into retirement, the next great Rangers team would be built around then-wunderkind Elvis Andrus and promising young prospects like Rougned Odor, Nomar Mazara, Jurickson Profar, and, of course, slugger Joey Gallo. Most prognosticators at the time were effusive with their praise of president Jon Daniels and his team construction, and for good reason – it’s no small feat to assemble a new core while you’re still enjoying the benefits of the previous one.
Unfortunately, that new core never materialized. Rougned Odor’s biggest highlight for the Rangers involved punching Jose Bautista; Rougy now plays for the Yankees. The Other Nomar never got over his astounding ability to swing at pitches and completely miss them; he was flipped to the White Sox in 2019 for an equally uninspiring prospect and has since been designated for assignment by two different teams. Andrus spent last year engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Mendoza line; he has since moved to Oakland, where he continues to get on base less than 30% of the time. Jurickson Profar could never get over the hump and was eventually shipped to Oakland after his career year as a 3-win player; in return, the Rangers received some international cap money and a catcher who hits like a pitcher. Now, with Gallo gone, that promising core....that young team whose arrival was so perfectly timed to coincide with the opening of the new Globe Life Park...has proven to be little more than a mirage.
At the beginning of the year, Texas management used the term “evaluation year” to describe the upcoming 2021 season. If this was the goal, it was accomplished; the Rangers – and the rest of baseball – correctly ‘evaluated’ the team as terrible. They were five games under .500 by the end of April, suffered a nine-game losing streak at the end of May that pushed them to the fringes of the standings, and were firmly entrenched in the cellar by an eleven-game losing streak in July. They're far and away the worst-hitting team (by OPS+) in the American League, and their pitching is third-worst in the AL (by ERA+). Their lineup is below average at every position except center field, and their only good starting pitcher in 2021 now plays for the Phillies. Given that they can neither pitch nor hit, the surprise of the season isn't so much that the Rangers are bad - it's that there's an AL team that's somehow worse.
The good news is that there’s at least some new blood in the front office, as the Rangers hired former pitcher and veteran tall person Chris Young to be the new general manager. As far as good news...that’s pretty much it. If baseball became a dunking contest between general managers, the Rangers and their 6’10 GM would probably win; apart from that, there’s little to like about the Rangers - little in the bigs, little in the farm, and little in the way of hope. The rebuild has crashed and burned, and the Rangers are now, for the first time in a while, stuck in an honest-to-goodness tanking rebuild. If Daniels and Young are to right the ship, it will have to be the way that every other team now does it – by drafting high and flipping veterans for kids. It’s an achievable path, but for a team that once prided itself on its ability to walk the roads of developing and contending at the same time, the current path just seems so….pedestrian.
The Rangers have never won a World Series. Their last playoff appearance was in 2016.
The Twins are the runaway winner of the 2021 Disappointment of the Year award. In the preseason, projections like PECOTA had the Twins winning the division, which makes sense; they’d won the division in 2020 and run away with it in 2019. The Twins were returning a solid middle of the lineup in Josh Donaldson, Byron Buxton, Eddie Rosario, Max Kepler, and Nelson Cruz, as well as perennial enigma Miguel Sano. They were returning a pitching staff that had come into its own, anchored by Kenta Maeta and Jose Berrios. Their incumbent manager (and native Rhode Islander) Rocco Baldelli was even a former manager of the year. To that core, they’d added dominant defender and sometimes hitter Andrelton Simmons to shore up the middle infield defense, and they’d added Alex Colome to strengthen the back of the bullpen. Sure, the White Sox and the Native American Traffic Watchers looked to be improved, but the Twins had every right to expect that when all was said and done, they’d walk away with the division crown.
What happened instead was...not that.
Instead, the Twins fell apart early. Starting in mid-April, the Twins embarked on a 2-13 stretch that pushed them to the edges of the playoff picture; a 3-12 stretch in early May pushed them even further out of contention, and by June 15 they were twelve games from the nearest playoff spot. Far from being contenders, the Twins were surprise sellers at the deadline; they sent Berrios and Cruz away to better teams, and they've spent the post-deadline months acting as a punching bag for playoff contenders.
What went wrong? The chief culprit was undoubtedly the pitching. In the rotation, only Jose Berrios gave a solid every-fifth-day effort; the rest were either injured, ineffective, or both. Kenta Maeda posted an ERA+ of 89 before heading to the IL with the dreaded “forearm tightness;” Michael Pineda battled all sorts of injuries (as he has for his entire career), including right elbow inflammation, an abscess in his thigh, and “side pain;” and J.A. Happ and Matt Shoemaker are cooked, as their 6 and 8 ERA’s might suggest. Meanwhile, Alex Colome was so bad as closer that he found himself ousted from the role in favor of Taylor Rodgers and Hansel Robles; the former suffered a finger injury, while the latter was uneven in his Twins appearances and was sent to the Red Sox to reprise his hot-and-cold routine for the Fenway faithful. All told, the Twins’ ERA+ is second-worst in the league, besting only the historically bad Orioles. The hitting was good, if un-clutch (.206 in late and close situations, but a 103 OPS+ overall), but the only way an offense can overcome a pitching staff giving up 5.2 runs a game is if that offense is playing in the steroid era or at Coors Field.
It’s been a weird, snakebitten year for the Twins. Spring training began in the worst way possible - they lost bench coach Mike Bell to cancer, casting a pall over the young season that never seems to have lifted. The Twins then suffered a Covid outbreak in April that forced them to postpone several games just as the season was kicking up. They’ve been ravaged by injuries – in addition to the pitching staff woes above, Byron Buxton’s hand fracture put a stop to an absolute monster season by the young slugger. For a team with so much promise, 2021 has been a long and miserable ride for the fans in the Twin Cities
The Twins are now faced with the thorny question of whether to rebuild or reload. They traded their only consistently good starter (Berrios) at the deadline, so they have to re-assemble the pitching staff from the ground up. On the other hand, their hitting - even without Cruz - can still be among the best in the league as long as the hitters stay healthy. With half the team good and half the team bad….what do they do? Your guess is as good as mine.
The Twins last won the World Series in 1991.
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