Mathematical Eliminatory 2019 - the (hopefully) triumphant return!

cannonball 1729

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All right....time for another year of lamenting the fallen! For the second year in a row, I'm releasing an album right during the height of elimination season, so I make no promises as to the punctuality of these writeups, but nevertheless...here we go....

25741

On August 9, the Orioles lost to the Astros by a score of 3-2 in a close and exciting game. After the game, manager Brandon Hyde was complimentary of his squad, noting that the O’s had “played a good baseball game [against a] tough team.” Indeed, Hyde's positivity was well-placed; there’s no shame in losing a squeaker to a juggernaut.

The next night, the Orioles lost to the Astros by a score of 23-2. Similar comments were not made by the manager after that game.

Such is life on a team deep in the throes of a rebuild. This season, the Orioles have flitted between looking sort of like a major league team and looking like an expansion team. Certainly, there have been rare bouts of competence, like their .500 July, or when the middle of the order (Mancini and Villar) is rolling, or any time John Means or pre-trade Andrew Cashner have taken the mound. Most of the rest of the year, though, has been a disaster; the Orioles have four months where they haven’t cracked ten wins, they’ve had three losing streaks of seven games or more (7, 8, and 10 games), and they’ve won one or fewer games against 10 of the 18 teams they’ve faced this year. They’ve lost by five or more runs 39 times, and they’re getting outscored by over two runs a game on average. The Orioles didn’t quite match the record that they set last year for earliest division elimination in history, but they’re only about a week behind that pace.

The biggest problem for the Orioles has undoubtedly been the pitching. The launch angle revolution has baseballs flying out of the park at unprecedented rates, and no team has borne the brunt of that change more than the O’s. So far, the Orioles have given up 261 home runs this season; in doing so, they’ve already set the record for most home runs in a season….and it’s only August. The O’s are currently on pace to give up almost 330 home runs, smashing the previous record by 70 home runs; their 61 home runs allowed to the Yankees also smashes the old “HR allowed to one team” record by 13, and also happens to be a big reason for the Yanks’ 16-game winning streak against the O’s. The Orioles’ current team ERA+ is 78, which is on par with some of the worst-pitching teams in history like the 1908 Highlanders, the 1962 Mets, and the 1939-40 St. Louis Browns; it’s no stretch to say that this year’s pitching staff is the worst in the history of the Baltimore Orioles.

And then, of course, there’s still the silly saga of Chris Davis. I suppose it doesn’t hurt a rebuilding team to pay a big salary for no production (it’s not like that salary is preventing them from signing someone, because no one will sign with them anyway), but….it’s still painful for O’s fans to watch the big first baseman who forgot how to hit. Last year, Davis cratered, hitting .168 with minimal power (28 extra-base hits) while cashing a check for $23 million from the Orioles. This year, he picked up where he left off….. literally; he began a hitless streak in September and continued it through the middle of April, eventually setting the record for longest hitless streak in MLB history. So far this year, Davis has “improved” to .177, although he’s down to 17 extra-base hits. For the first time, Davis even began to show some visible signs of frustration, leading to a verbal altercation in the dugout between Davis and the rookie manager in August. Not to worry, though – only three more years and $69 million left on that contract!

New GM Mike Elias has promised to bring in a new Orioles way with lots of statistics and video scouting, and after a gradual start, he’s ramped up the organizational turnover/purge as the season has gone on. VP of Baseball Operations Brady Anderson was slowly edged out over the course of the season, and in August, Elias fired a dozen top scouts (which has drawn a bit of concern as he hasn’t replaced them yet). He inherited a farm system that’s good but young; the top players are all at least three levels away from the bigs, and the top prospect of the system is recent-draftee and still-in-short-season-ball Adley Rutschman. There’s some reason for long-term optimism in Charm City, but between the eternal MASN fight with the Nationals, the fact that they’ve had four winning seasons out of the last 22, and a lingering city-wide pall from the whole Freddie Gray fiasco, Baltimoreans aren’t the most optimistic lot right now. For now, O’s fans may just have to amuse themselves with the barrage of souvenirs coming off of the bats of opposing hitters.

The O's last made the playoffs in 2016. Their last World Series was in 1983.

25742


Unlike other sports, MLB rebuilds are usually an attempt to turn over the roster without tanking it. Sure, refusing to tank may lead to a worse draft pick, but one player doesn’t make a team, and there are real financial costs to completely bottoming out – not to mention that establishing a losing culture isn’t exactly how you want your young core to develop.

It goes without saying, then, that when a team is on pace to win fewer than fifty games, something has gone a little bit wrong with the rebuild.

Entering the second year of the rebuild, GM Alex Avila decided that it was time to bring in some veteran presence to help the youngsters and give the Tigers a bit of respectability (also, veterans can be traded at the deadline). He signed middle infielders Jordy Mercer and Josh Harrison from the Pirates to anchor the middle of the diamond, and starting pitchers Matt Moore and Tyson Ross were also added to bolster the otherwise young rotation. Certainly, these moves weren’t exactly a cue to start printing Tigers’ playoff tickets, but they would at least lend the Tigers some respectability as they spent the year trying to figure out which youngsters to keep and which to get rid of.

Unfortunately for the Tigers, all of those signings failed spectacularly, and all four have spent most of the season on the IL. Matt Moore looked dominant (posting a 0 ERA!) in his brief Tigers’ tenure; of course, that tenure lasted just ten innings before he was felled with a torn meniscus. The other three, however, have been both injured and bad, which is the worst of all worlds: Jordy Mercer has played 53 games and amassed a -0.1 WAR; Harrison posted a .176/.219/.265 line in 36 hapless games; and Ross went 1-5 with a 6.11 ERA before blowing out his right elbow.

Adding insult (and more injury) to literal injury, former Rookie of the Year Michael Fullmer was shut down in spring training to focus on his lower body mechanics, which apparently turned out to be a really odd euphemism for Tommy John surgery. Throw in Jordan Zimmerman’s complete collapse, and the Tigers were already down four starters by the end of April…which means that the Tigers have spent the season giving starts to pretty much anyone with a functioning arm, from overmatched AAA/AAAA players like Gregory Soto and Ryan Carpenter to over-the-hill castoffs like Edwin Jackson. As of now, Tigers starters have only won 19 games this year, which is just four more than ex-Tiger Justin Verlander has won all by himself for the Astros this season; in fact, from June 5 to July 3, Tigers' starters didn't win a single game. The surprise, then, isn’t that the Tigers’ pitching hasn’t been good – the surprise is that they haven’t been worse. Their surprisingly not-awful 94 ERA+ is a result of good seasons from the Matthew Boyd/Daniel Norris/Spencer Turnbull trio in the rotation, as well as (pre-trade) closer Shane Greene’s unwillingness to give up runs in the ninth inning.

The hitting, however, has had no such saving grace. The Tigers’ 77 OPS+ is 12 points clear of the next-worst AL team and is, in fact, much closer to awful historical comps like the 1955 Orioles and the 1979 A’s than any team playing in the American League today. This season, the Tigers’ lineup has featured exactly one player with a 100 OPS+ (Nicholas Castellanos)…and that player was sent to the Cubs at the deadline. Castellanos and Niko Goodrum are the only position players worth at least one win above replacement; in fact, Matt Moore, who pitched exactly ten innings this year, has a higher WAR than all but three of the 2019 Tigers’ position players. Tigers’ catchers have been particularly bad; they’ve actually been less valuable at the plate (.160/.216/.297) than Mets’ pitchers (.189/.224/.289) this season. There are any multitude of stats that one could use to explain just how bad the Tigers hitters are this year - they’re getting a .294 OPS from the leadoff spot and a .205 batting average from the #5 spot, they’ve scored more than four runs in just 28% of their games this year, they’re the only AL team to average less than one home run per game in the year of the juiced ball - but the bottom line is that the Tigers’ offense has been absolutely, unbelievably, historically bad.

And much like the Orioles, the Tigers also have an aging slugger who has turned into an albatross for the team. Miguel Cabrera, the greatest Tigers’ hitter in history, whom the Tigers acquired for Cameron Maybin/the terrible-starting-pitcher version of Andrew Miller/four guys you’ve never heard of, the guy who’s definitely going into the Hall of Fame with a Tigers’ hat on his plaque, the first triple crown winner in forty years….is currently a shell of his former self. He’s been battling leg issues all season that have sapped his power, which is a problem because he doesn’t exactly do anything else besides hit; a .280 batting average with nine home runs and 19 doubles isn’t going to provide a whole lot of value from a full-time DH. Five-and-a-half years ago, Cabrera was signed to an inexplicable $248 million contract extension through 2023 despite the fact that he still had two years left on his then-current deal; now, Cabrera has a persistent knee “soreness” that may never go away, which means that the Tigers are on the hook for $30+ million per year for a player who can’t hit for power or field any position. Cabrera had a nice dead-cat bounce last year, and he's beloved in Detroit, but now there’s not much he offers the Tigers except memories.

Detroit last won the World Series in 1984. They were last in the playoffs in 2014.
 
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JMDurron

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Jul 15, 2005
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These are always enjoyable, thanks for posting whenever you can. There was one thing that confused me about the Orioles, though.

There’s some reason for long-term optimism in Charm City, but between the eternal MASN fight with the Nationals, the fact that they’ve had four winning seasons out of the last 23, and a lingering city-wide pall from the whole Freddie Gray fiasco, Baltimoreans aren’t the most optimistic lot right now.
If I count from 1997-2019, I see 6 winning seasons (1997, then 2012-2016), not 4, unless you mean something other than "above .500" when you say "winning seasons."
 

cannonball 1729

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These are always enjoyable, thanks for posting whenever you can. There was one thing that confused me about the Orioles, though.



If I count from 1997-2019, I see 6 winning seasons (1997, then 2012-2016), not 4, unless you mean something other than "above .500" when you say "winning seasons."
Should be 22. In 2015, they went 81-81.
 

donutogre

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Yay, this is always a good time.

Also, I cannot believe that Cabrera has four seasons left on that contract. FOUR. He's had a hell of a career, no disrespect for having hit the downside.... but yeesh. You'd think GMs would have learned about signing guys into their late 30s and and beyond, and yet... Bryce Harper. Anyhow. Looking forward to this bloodbath of a thread, Sox inevitable demise aside!
 

cannonball 1729

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Continuing onward

25761

One of the pieces of wisdom that every novelist or composer discovers is that the writing the beginning is much easier than writing the middle. Starting a work is (relatively) easy – you string together a few meaningful words or notes, or you introduce a few interesting characters, and you’re off to the races. The middle, on the other hand, is much more difficult – creating something new without uprooting what you’ve already done or falling into clichés is a narrow path to tread. The old saying in Hollywood is that "everyone has an idea for a movie"..…but that’s just the beginning; the good writers get paid for their ability to write an end.

In many ways, the same thing can be said about being a GM. In today’s baseball, turning a cellar-dweller into a contender doesn’t appear to be a ridiculously tall order, given that the Orioles, Royals, Astros, Pirates, Reds, Braves, Indians, Twins, Rockies, Athletics, Blue Jays, Cubs, Nationals, Mets, and Brewers (and probably others that I’m forgetting) have pulled themselves out of a tank and into the playoffs in this decade alone. Sure, there are teams that get lost in the desert like the Padres or Mariners or Marlins, but for the average GM, wiping the slate clean and building a contender is an achievable task. Keeping that team in contention, however, is another matter entirely; cheap players become expensive, and teams are forced to either expand payroll, find scrap-heap pickups, or somehow keep a pipeline of young players open (despite low draft picks and farm-sapping deadline deals).

The Royals are a great example of this maxim. Given a completely blank slate and years of high draft picks, Dayton Moore slowly built the Royals into a contender, eventually winning the 2014 AL pennant and the 2015 World Series crown. Then, tasked with the challenge of extending the window, the Royals completely whiffed, handing out ill-advised contracts to Alex Gordon, Ian Kennedy, and Danny Duffy, and Salvador Perez , failing to find decent free agents, and letting the farm system go completely fallow. 2016 and 2017 saw the Royals descend into mediocrity (81-81 and 80-82, respectively), and 2018 saw Moore throw in the towel as the Royals descended back into the murk of triple-digit losses.

2019 has been a continued reckoning for the Royals’ recent missteps. The Royals are still paying $63 million a year for Gordon, Kennedy, Duffy, and Perez; for that money, Kennedy has been turned into a very expensive closer, Duffy has an ERA around 5 (and is injured), Gordon lost his power stroke, and Perez had Tommy John surgery. Having hamstrung themselves with such budgetary misfires, the Royals have had to go cheap with the rest of the roster, which is understandable..but it's not a formula for winning many baseball games. The good news is that Kansas City finally had the breakout performances by Hunter Dozier and Jorge Soler that they’ve been waiting for (and a less-expected one from pitcher Brad Keller); also Whit Merrifeld continues to hit, and the Royals have derricked their minor league system out from the depths of the league to somewhere around average. The bad news is pretty much everything else. Their lineup doesn’t hit for power (14th in the AL in home runs) or for anything else (14th in the AL in OPS+), their pitching staff can’t throw strikes (2nd in the AL in walks allowed, 1st in HBP), and their starters aren’t particularly good (tied for 4th in game score average) but are repeatedly hung out to dry by the offense (3rd in quality starts lost), the manager (3rd in bequeathed runners), and the bullpen (2nd in bequeathed runners scored, 2nd in relief losses, 11th in save percentage). Oh, and they’re not so good at fielding, either (10th in the AL in defensive efficiency). The Royals free agent signings, ostensibly signed to be flipped in July, were mostly washouts; Jake Diekman was the only major piece traded at the deadline, largely because offseason signings Billy Hamilton, Lucas Duda, and Chris Owings were released or waived.

The next few years will likely see a good bit of turnover, including a new ownership regime. Yet again, the Royals will go through some sort of Process, picking at the top of the draft, attempting to flip veterans for prospects, and generally waiting for the talent on the team to mature. Although a happy end to the Process 2.0 is far from guaranteed, the fact that Dayton Moore eventually found his way to the playoffs once gives hope that he can do it again. But is that what the new owners are even looking for? Would they be happy with two years of playoffs every decade, followed by a disastrous attempt to extend the window? Or will they look for someone who can write the beginning of the success story….and a middle?
 

cannonball 1729

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Shockingly, I think this one's actually punctual, since the Jays were eliminated tonight:

25798

Baseball rebuilds are like political revolutions: they’re far easier to start than they are to control. Three years ago, President Mark Shapiro and GM Ross Atkins decided that it was time to blow things up a little bit - but not completely; they would rebuild, sure, but they would still keep enough major pieces to roll out a team that Jays fans would come to watch. After all, the mini-run of playoff teams in 2015-16 had minted a whole lot of new Jays fans, and management didn’t want to chase those new fans off with a full-fledged tanking effort.

The problem is that it’s tough for a team to sort-of-tank because there’s so little room for error. If you’re trying to build a 100-win team and things go wrong, you still probably have an 80-90 win team; if you’re trying to build an 80-win team and things don’t work out, you’re in the cellar. Moreover, once things start to go wrong with a team whose best-case scenario was “feisty but not contending,” the white flag goes up in a hurry and players play accordingly. Sure, the Jays still had a top closer in Ken Giles; they had a rotation fronted by Marcus Strohman and Aaron Sanchez; and they had a lineup with a little bit of veteran thump (including Randall Grichuk, Justin Smoak, and Eric Sogard) and a cavalcade of young batsmen. But the Jays tumbled through a disastrous May, and once a team with limited firepower is pushed out of contention, there’s no coming back. In June, Sanchez noted, “It’s definitely different from being on teams where you’re expected to show up and win every night and do your part and then being on a team where, I don’t want to say it’s not expected, but it doesn’t matter if you do or don’t.” Sanchez may have been a walking example of the toll that losing takes; after two years of increasingly terrible pitching in Toronto (including a 6.07 ERA this year), Sanchez was traded at the deadline and immediately threw a no-hitter for the Astros with the help of former Jay Joe Biagini. (Of course, learning to throw a four-seamer up in the zone in Houston may have helped Sanchez, too.)

Whether because of the losing or some other reason, the Blue Jays have suffered underperformances all over the diamond. Young hitters like Teoscar Hernandez, Rowdy Tellez, and Danny Jansen all took huge steps backwards after breakout campaigns last year; Tellez was so lost (and so flummoxed by sliders up and in) that the Blue Jays sent him to AAA to sort things out. Justin Smoak has regressed back to a three-true-outcomes player, with his batting average going from .270 to .242 to .215 over the last three years. Randall Grichuk’s slugging has collapsed, and his fielding has gotten increasingly erratic, with this year’s fielding performance “highlighted” by his misplay of an Avisail Garcia pop-up into an inside-the-park home run. (Grichuk also just signed a five-year extension for $52 million. And he revealed himself to be very anti-batflip this year, which seems like a very un-Blue Jay position to hold.) The rotation has been a patchwork all season; Jays starters have thrown fewer than 80 pitches more often than any other AL team besides the Rays (who use starters a little differently), and they have the fourth-worst average game score in the AL.

All that being said…there are few teams with as many exciting young players as does Toronto. While the Jays’ season started in March, the buzz around the Jays’ season started in late-April when Vlad Guerrero, Jr. arrived in the big leagues and immediately started smashing the ball all over the park. He was joined in the Parade of Sons of Former Big Leaguers by Bo Bichette, who arrived in mid-July and has hit at an ungodly .328/.361/.613 pace ever since (even though he was the last out of a no-hitter two days ago). The list of highly touted under-26 Jays is lengthy, including Guerrero, Bichette, Telez, Jansen, Cavan Biggio, and Lourdes Gurriel, Jr., in addition to 26-year-old Hernandez and 27-year-old Grichuk. (Not to mention mega-pitching prospect Nate Pearson rocketing up through the system.) What’s more, the Jays still have a few pieces to be traded; for instance, Ken Giles is a good bet to be dealt in the offseason (he would have been traded already if not for elbow inflammation in late July). If the Jays had announced three years ago that they were simply tanking for prospects, we would consider their roster turnover a success to this point, and between the young talented team and a #4 farm system, there’s no doubt that the Blue Jays future is bright. The whole “stay in contention while retooling” thing hasn’t quite worked out, but hey – if the young core can spark the next round of contention, all will be forgiven.

The Blue Jays last made the playoffs in 2016. Their last title was in 1993.
 
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cannonball 1729

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On Tuesday we added:

25836

It’s funny how some franchises always seem to have issues with their owners. The Marlins were founded under Wayne Huizenga, who would build the Marlins from expansion in 1993 to a title in 1997 and then, frustrated that South Florida hadn’t taken to the Marlins after exactly one winning season, immediately disband the team. The next ownership group was led by John Henry, but they quickly sold to Jeff Loria; Loria would build the team that would win a title in 2003 but would subsequently hold the club for a decade and a half and manage to anger nearly every interested party while acquiring a stadium and sending the bill to the city of Miami. After Loria sold the Marlins, the bar for the next ownership was very low, and if the new post-Loria owners were only marginally affable or vaguely committed to fielding a winner, they could have easily won over the Marlins’ few diehard fans…or at least reached a détente with them.

Instead, the Marlins got the Bruce Sherman/Derek Jeter team. Jeter/Sherman began their tenure by firing anything that was Marliny about the Marlins, getting rid of team ambassadors Jeff Conine, Andre Dawson, Jack McKeon, Tony Perez, and Billy the Marlin, as well as the home run statue in center field. Next, they traded away Giancarlo Stanton, JT Realmuto, Christian Yellich, and Marcell Ozuna, turning the Marlins into a Triple A team in a major league stadium. Of course, tearing down is always the easy option; it’s easy, it’s cheap, and it buys time for the front office since no one expects a teardown to bear fruit for 5-7 years. That the Marlins were bad last year was a foregone conclusion; that the fans would respond by staying away in droves was the obvious corollary; that the Marlins will get better is still an open question.

As of now, though, opinions of the Marlins’ firesale haul have been mixed. MiLB.com currently has their farm ranked fourth; Bleacher Report has them at 23rd. The bad news is that most of their trade chips are now cashed; this year their only available chips at the deadline were a decent middle reliever (Sergio Romo) and a negative-WAR second baseman (Starlin Castro). The Marlins’ system seems high on toolsy players, which means that the ceiling for future Marlins is very high but the floor is very low.

More concerningly, Jeter’s right-hand man, Gary Denbo, has chased a number of scouts out of the organization with his mercurial nature, his unwillingness to tolerate disagreement, and (oddly) his fat-shaming of scouts. Denbo has always been known as a good judge of talent, but his reputation for not playing well with others is long-standing and well-earned. Thanks to Gary, the Marlins even lost their affiliation with the single-A Greensboro Grasshoppers; according to Ken Rosenthal, Denbo demanded that Greensboro get rid of its bat-dogs (Greensboro uses dogs to fetch bats and carry buckets of balls to the umpires), leading the Grasshoppers to end their affiliation with the Marlins and prompting Grasshoppers GM to opine, “There must be only one guy in all of minor-league baseball who doesn’t like dogs.” Jeter has decided to take a more active role in curating a relationship with the minor league franchises, which is great, but there’s only so much he can do if Denbo is actively chasing franchisees off.

Long story short, the Marlins are currently terrible with an uncertain future. Through their first 41 games, the Marlins had the third-fewest runs scored of any team in the live-ball era ….and the two teams worse than the Marlins played in 1968, when run-scoring was so depressed that the mound was lowered at the end of the season. Their current OPS+ is 76, which puts them below such legendary teams as the 1962 Mets (82 OPS+) and the 119-loss 2003 Tigers (83 OPS+) and on par with the 2004 Diamondbacks team (77 OPS+) that somehow lost 111 games with both Randy Johnson and Brandon Webb in the rotation. The Marlins have scored two or fewer runs in 63 of their games; not surprisingly, the Fish have gone 3-60 in those games. The pitching looks competent only in comparison to the hitting, as their 91 ERA+ puts them at 14th in the NL. For the second straight year, the Marlins are flirting with the 10,000 fan per game attendance mark; they’re currently just above that number, but they’re in danger of becoming the first team with a four-digit attendance average since the 2004 Expos played out the string on their way to Washington. We’re still only two years into the rebuild, so there’s no reason to assume that all will end badly, but for a fanbase that hasn’t seen the playoffs since 2003, optimism is a tall order.

The Marlins last won the World Series in their most recent playoff appearance, which took place in 2003.
 

Mueller's Twin Grannies

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Dec 19, 2009
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I know you're hard at work on other, more important stuff, but I think we lost more than just the Jays and Marlins recently... can't wait to read the writeups.

Great work, thank you!
 

E5 Yaz

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I know you're hard at work on other, more important stuff, but I think we lost more than just the Jays and Marlins recently... can't wait to read the writeups.

Great work, thank you!
Only you could make this post after the two preceding it ... from yesterday
 

cannonball 1729

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With this one, I should be all caught up - on Wednesday, the bulb went out for:

25858

Some of you might recall that the story of the 2018 Mariners was that of a mirage followed by a reckoning. The Mariners stormed out of the gate, buoyed by a wholly unsustainable record in one- and two-run-games; in the second half, that record normalized and the Mariners were overtaken by the A’s and Rays.

This year, the mirage only lasted fifteen games. From their early start in Tokyo all the way up to April 11, the Mariners were unstoppable, going 13-2 and outscoring their opponents 117-75. They set an MLB record by homering in each of the first fifteen games, and they set AL records by hitting 36 home runs and scoring 117 runs in that span. Since the start of the division era, there had been eight teams besides the ’19 Mariners who had won 13 or more of their first 15 games; of those eight teams, seven made the playoffs, and the eighth still managed to win 91 games.

Since the completion of that stretch, however, the Mariners have been on track for other types of history. At the end of April, the Mariners’ lost four games by scores of 15-1, 14-1, 6-5, and 11-0; the last time that a team had lost by double-digits in three out of four games was when the A’s did it back in ’90 - that would be 1890, when the A’s were the old Philadelphia A’s of the American Association. In July, the Mariners would be on the receiving end of a combined no-hitter by the Angels; less than a month later, the Mariners would be no-hit again by the Astros, becoming the first team in history to be on the receiving end of two combined no-hitters in a season. The Mariners’ defense is truly awful; through May 1, they were on pace to record the most errors in 40 years, and through May 30, they were on pace for the second-worst UZR since the stat began being tracked in 2003. Their 7-21 May and 45-81 post-hot-start won-loss marks aren’t record-breaking on their own, but the Mariners are still well on their way to becoming the worst 13-2-starting team in the division era.

The undoing for the Mariners this year has been the pitching – or perhaps the aforementioned fielding. The number of starters who started more than two games for the Mariners and posted an ERA+ above 100 is currently at one: Mike Leake, who now pitches for the Diamondbacks after a midseason relocation. Free agent signing Yusei Kikuchi, he of the 5.36 ERA, has been a disappointment, and Felix Hernandez’s greater-than-6 ERA indicates that he’s likely toast. So desperate was the Seattle rotation in June that the Mariners turned to the Rays’ famous “opener” model, and while the Mariners have indeed allowed fewer runs since that experiment began, June was also the point where the Mariners re-arranged their outfield and improved the defense from “historically bad” to “regular bad.” (Unfortunately, July happened to be the month where the Mariners stopped hitting.) Whatever the reason, the M’s have handed the ball to 17 different starting pitchers this year, and a team ERA+ of 87 indicates that whoever was given the ball had no idea what to do with it.

While the futility of 2019 may be disappointing for M’s fans, it’s not all that surprising, as it reflects a well-chronicled change in tactics by GM Jerry Dipoto. When he was hired, Dipoto made it clear that he didn’t think the Mariners needed to rebuild; he claimed that the Mariners were close enough to contention that just a few tweaks and smart pickups could build depth and push the M’s to the promised land. After three years of unsuccessfully attempting to do just that, Dipoto finally gave in and decided that, in fact, the dreaded rebuild was the best option. This offseason, Dipoto dealt ace James Paxton to the Yankees, closer Edwin Diaz and second base contract albatross Robinson Cano to the Mets, and shortstop Jean Segura to the Phillies. Later, they would add Jay Bruce and Edwin Encarnacion to the outgoing mail, and Mike Leake, Roenis Elias, and Hunter Strickland would also leave town at the trade deadline. Dipoto has now cleared the team of large salaries; next year, the only remaining players with 10+ million salaries will be Dee Gordon, Kyle Seager, and Yusei Kikuchi….and Gordon stands a good chance of being traded as well if the Mariners can find a taker for a light-hitting second baseman.

One of the problems Dipoto encountered in original plan to remake the team (which remains a problem for the current rebuild) is that he’s had to overcome the Mariners’ long history of draft ineptitude. Since Pat Gillick left the team in 2003, the Mariners have drafted exactly two players who have contributed at least 10 WAR to the club: Kyle Seager in 2009 and James Paxton in 2010. Their first round has been particularly abysmal; the last M’s first-rounder to record 10 WAR for any team was Brandon Morrow, who was picked in 2006…two picks before Clayton Kershaw, five before Tim Lincecum, and six before Max Scherzer. (The last first rounder to record 10 WAR for the Mariners was A-Rod, who was drafted when Kurt Cobain was still on tour.) It’s awfully hard to compete when the pipeline of cheap help and trade bait is cut off; it’s also tough to rebuild when the farm system isn’t giving the team much to rebuild around.

Whatever their previous drafting ills, the Mariners under Dipoto have done a creditable job restocking the farm; Bleacher Report, who had their system ranked 29th after last year’s deadline, now has them ranked 5th, which has to be one of the biggest one-season jumps in history. The rebuild is well on its way, with appropriately woeful major league results to show for it. In a few years, perhaps the Mariners may make a different kind of history; for now, Mariners fans, who haven’t seen their team in the playoffs since Ichiro was a rookie, will have to hold on to those first fifteen games of 2019. Maybe the M’s will sell “Fifteen Games to Glory” DVD’s?

The Mariners have never won a World Series. Their last playoff appearance was in 2001.
 

edoug

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...and I love the occasional retro logo too.

The best baseball thread of the year.
Last year it was. Unfortunately, it's about to go downhill soon. And not because of cannonball 1729's excellent work.
 

cannonball 1729

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 8, 2005
3,572
The Sticks
Well, before the inevitable Red Sox appearance, let's start getting rid of some of the backlog. As of Thursday, we had three more teams out:


25965

Sometimes, a franchise moves forward with trades, acquisitions, and drafts; other times, the move forward is simply a matter of better instruction. We tend to notice the former more than the latter, but often, the biggest move a franchise can make is simply a manager telling a young David Ortiz to stop trying to hit situationally and just swing away, or telling a Randy Johnson to intentionally hit the batter the next time he has a 3-0 count so he’ll stop being afraid of throwing inside, or a teammate telling Jose Bautista to try swinging earlier.

Last year, Lucas Giolito was the worst pitcher in baseball, posting the highest ERA in baseball amongst qualified starters. This year, he arrived at camp with a more compact delivery that simplified his release point and hid the ball better; he also learned to stop throwing his sinker, relying instead on his four-seamer and a newly-developed change-up. Suddenly, Giolito was one of the best pitchers in the game; after five rough starts at the beginning of the season, the lefty found his stride, and he’s had a 3.12 ERA since then. Giolito currently stands at sixth in the AL in (lowest) ERA, which is one of the most impressive year-to-year turnarounds by a pitcher in baseball history.

Last year, Yoan Moncada struck out over two hundred times; moreover, 85 of those were strikeouts looking, which was not just the highest total in the league but the highest total ever recorded. Pitchers pounded the zone against Moncada with fastballs, and Moncada’s unwillingness to swing put him consistently behind in counts. You might guess what a manager would tell Moncada upon seeing these stats, but “swing earlier and more often” is easier said than done. Nevertheless, Moncada did exactly that, and with a current slash line of .305/.362/.536, Moncada has blossomed into the hitter that the White Sox thought they had acquired from the Red Sox three years ago.

The most surprising story of all, though, might be Tim Anderson. Last year, Tim hit .240; in the offseason, most of the discussion about Tim Anderson revolved around the hope that the White Sox might sign Manny Machado and push Tim Anderson to, well, wherever it is that failed prospects go. At some point this winter, Anderson decided that he should try to focus more on hitting the ball into the middle of the field and stop changing his batting stance; somehow, that change added nearly 100 points to his batting average, and now Anderson is in the running for the AL batting crown. As an added bonus, Anderson has brought some swagger to the club, flipping his bat and flexing on home runs, occasionally getting in trouble for yelling bad words at opposing pitchers, and making the game a little more interesting for a team that has had a short supply of “interesting” over the last couple of years.

Now, three young players do not a franchise make (or four if you count the emerging but still-not-quite-where-they-want-him-to-be Eloy Jimenez)…but for a team that has struggled to develop young talent as much as the White Sox, this is an enormous breakthrough. In 2018, the Sox rebuilding project appeared to have stalled out; Giolito looked lost and broken, Moncada was a whiff machine with a clanktastic glove, and Anderson was a defense-only shortstop. White Sox development has lagged behind the rest of the league for years now, a deficiency that traces back to a kickback scandal ten years ago and continued through much of this decade with the White Sox unwillingness to modernize their scouting and development processes. GM Rick Hahn’s (and scouting director Chris Getz’s) biggest challenge was always going to be getting the White Sox development apparatuses up to the level of other teams; if these three or four players are any indication, it seems that they may finally be reaching that point.

If the White Sox are still several players short of contention (and they are), the White Sox have at least given the fans some individual performances to watch. There’s a good chance that Jose Abreu could win the RBI crown, and Tim Anderson could walk away with the batting title; basically, they’re a home run hitter away from winning (as a team) the Triple Crown, which is an interesting distinction for a team as far down in the standings as are the White Sox. Sure, the Pale Hose still have a whole lot more mountain to climb – they’re four starters short of a rotation, and some prospects have taken steps back (like Daniel Palka and his barely believable .019 batting average), and they may need someone to step up and compensate next year if Tim Anderson’s .390 BABIP turns out to be unsustainable - but this is the first time in years that the future has looked somewhat bright. Of course, a decade ago, the White Sox had young stars named Chris Sale, Adam Eaton, and Carlos Quentin and then ended up trading those stars when nothing else developed…..so future success is far from guaranteed.

The White Sox last made the playoffs in 2008. Their last World Series victory was in 2005.

25966

July of 2019 was one of the most momentous months in recent Angels’ memory. Entering July, the Angels were in the midst of one of their standard “win some, lose some” campaigns that they’ve so often endured over this decade. Their complacency would be shattered on July 1, however, when pitcher Tyler Skaggs passed away as the result of a drug overdose. After a dozen days of postponements, road games, an All-Star break, and Skaggs tributes throughout baseball, the Angels finally returned home; on July 13 (Skaggs’ 28th birthday), with the entire team clad in “Skaggs 45” jerseys and Skaggs’ mother throwing out the first pitch, the Angels held a pregame remembrance for Skaggs and then immediately – incredibly – threw a combined no-hitter against the Mariners.

Buoyed by the seemingly Hollywood-style script for the remembrance of their fallen friend, the Angels began to roll. They took five out of six across two series against the Mariners, split a series in Houston, and even swept a two-game series against the Dodgers in Chavez Ravine. When they returned to Anaheim at the end of the month, the Halos were clearly in position to make a run; just four games out of the wildcard race, the Angels had reached the easy part of the schedule with four upcoming games against the Orioles and three against the Tigers.

What followed in the opener against the Orioles was one of the wildest games of the 2019 season. The Angels would take the lead in the first, fall behind in the fifth, take the lead back in the seventh (on a misplay by center fielder Stevie Wilkerson), lose the lead in the eighth, and fall behind in the ninth before defensive replacement Brian Goodwin hit a solo home run to send the game into extra innings. After both teams went scoreless through the first five extra frames, the Angels put in starter Griffin Canning to start the 15th, and the Orioles struck for three runs in an inning that included two steals, a failed bunt, and an E1 on a pickoff. Not to worry, though – in the bottom of the inning, the Angels would strike back with three of their own, and they would just miss a fourth as David Fletcher was gunned down at the plate. Coming back out for the 16th, Canning allowed two more runs on a home run, and going into the bottom of the 16th, the Angels would have to make up a two-run deficit against….center fielder Stevie Wilkerson, whom the Orioles had brought on to pitch. Inexplicably, Wilkerson set down the Angels’ Brian Goodwin, Kole Calhoun, and Albert Pujols in order, never throwing a pitch faster than 56 mph in the process, thereby closing out a 10-8 Orioles' victory. Tanner Scott became first pitcher in decades to record a win after allowing three runs in the 15th or later. And Stevie Wilkerson became the first position player ever to record a save.

For whatever reason, this loss at the hands of a center fielder-turned-pitcher was the start of an Angels collapse. They would win just one of their four games against the Orioles and one of three against the Tigers. A seven-game losing streak against the Tigers, Indians, Reds, and Red Sox would follow, and by the time that losing streak had ended, the Angels were 11 games out of the wildcard and essentially done for the season. Since the start of that wild Orioles’ affair, the Angels are just 15-33.

Stepping back a bit, if one looks at the Angels season from 30,000 feet (and ignores the vicissitudes of the long season), they’ll notice that LAAoA have the same problem that they always have: a complete and total aversion to competent role players. Nearly every player on the Angels seems to be either a star player or a player who wouldn’t look out of place in Triple A. In the lineup, the Angels never have a problem filling four of the nine positions with big bats, but they also currently have five positions (C, 1B, 3B, SS, LF) where their hitting is well below that of a league average player at that position. The 2019 Angels have had a number of fairly competent starts by (when healthy) (or alive) Griffin Canning, Andrew Heaney, Tyler Skaggs, and Cam Bedrosian; on the other hand, they’ve had no fewer than fifty-nine starts made by a starter whose ERA is currently above 6 (Jose Suarez, Jaime Barra, Matt Harvey, Trevor Cahill, Taylor Cole, Chris Stratton, and Nick Tropeano).

How one team can have the same problem over and over despite different general managers is a mystery, but “stars and scrubs” has consistently been the story of the Angels throughout the current decade. The good news is that a mediocre team with stars and scrubs is cheaper to upgrade than a mediocre team with no stars (since signing complementary players is more expensive than signing stars). The better news is that the stars are largely locked up, especially as Mike Trout won’t be going anywhere until 2030. The bad news is that the Angels haven’t shown themselves capable of fixing said problem, and their last major free agent foray/attempt-to-vault-themselves-into-the-Promised-Land netted them a dead albatross tied to the first base bag. The worse news is that the Angels play in a division with two playoff contenders and a possibly ascendant Rangers team. With the current assemblage of talent, the Angels fortunes will never be completely hopeless, but unless they can find a #4 starter or a #6 hitter, they’ll continue to mope around in the murk of mediocrity for the foreseeable future.

The Angels last made the playoffs in 2014. Their only championship came in 2002.

25970


“Coors Field, in a vacuum, is an offensive place to play,” Blackmon said. “The problem of playing there is it tears your body up. It’s pretty tough physically to play there.” As he summed things up a few minutes later, he shrugged. “It’s bad for your body.”

- Charlie Blackmon in The Athletic


The problem with the 2019 Rockies is the same problem that has always plagued the Rockies. Ever since their inception, the Rockies have searched for ways to combat the effects of high altitude. They’ve put baseballs in humidors; they’ve gone to six-man rotations; they’ve tried thirteen-man pitching staffs; they’ve constructed a hitting-first roster; they’ve constructed a pitching-first roster. It’s not that the Rockies have never had success; it’s that their success always seems transient and temporary, as though their solutions are merely plugs in a dam that always finds new places to spring leaks.

No player has been more emblematic of the home/road divide this year than Charlie Blackmon, the Rockies’ longtime leadoff hitter. At home, he’s hitting an incredible .391/.443/.753; on the road, he’s hitting an incredible (for different reasons) .256/.291/.420. That split between road OPS and total OPS is the largest since Chuck Klein took aim at the 280-foot right-field line at the Baker Bowl all the way back in 1933.

Complicating matters significantly, the pitching completely fell apart….but they did it in the opposite way from the hitting. At home, they had a 6.33 ERA; on the road, their ERA was a more respectable 4.89. A large part of the regression from last year to this came from Kyle Freeland’s collapse; he fell from fringe Cy Young contender to 7 ERA. Defrocked closer Wade Davis suffered a similar fate, watching his ERA balloon to 7.87, although his road ERA is just 3.50 (as opposed to 11.10 (!) at home). The biggest problem, though, is the collapse of the middle of the rotation; other than German Marquez (currently injured) and Jon Gray (also currently injured), no player has started more than five games for the Rockies and posted an ERA+ of more than 81.

All of that said, the Rockies were cruising along with their typical Rockies-esque high-offense season into late June, when they would have a fateful meeting with the Padres for one of the most Coors series (92 runs in four games) ever witnessed. After a win in game 1, the Rockies held an 11-4 lead going into the eighth inning of game 2 before the Padres scored one in the eighth, six in the ninth, and five in the twelfth to win the game 16-12. The Rockies would win game 3, but then the two teams staged a game 2 reprise in game 4, when a 13-8 Rockies lead going into the seventh set the stage for a huge Padre comeback, capped by a four-run ninth that gave the Padres a 14-13 victory. Although the Rockies split the series, Rockies fans and personalities began to see that as the series that got away, and many began to point to that as a turning point in the season. The Rockies would tread water for the next couple of series, but a collapse began in earnest on July 1 when the Rox embarked on a 6-19 July that marked the worst month in Rockies’ history. The Rockies’ July dropped them from contenders to last-place residents, and their 13-26 August and September have only been marginally better.

And once again, the Rockies are faced with the age-old Rockie question: how do you sustain success in high altitude? The Rox recent idea of filling the roster with young players (who can bounce back more easily in altitude) led them to the playoffs in each of the last two years, but young players also tend to be inconsistent, which appears to be what ailed the Rox this year. Of course, given that the Rockies have never had back-to-back postseason appearances before 2017-18, the mantra of "build around youth" seems to be working better than all of their previous team-building-mantras. That said, we still don't know if it's possible to have sustained success in Colorado; the altitude continues to tear people up (to borrow the phrasing of Mr. Blackmon), which makes constant roster turnover an unfortunate necessity. It's strange that MLB has a franchise whose location essentially ties one hand behind its back, but such is life in the bizarre baseball outpost of Colorado.

The Rockies have never won a World Series.
 

cannonball 1729

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 8, 2005
3,572
The Sticks
I'm going to go out of order and post the one we all care most about - I owe you all a couple NL teams and the Rangers, but let's get to the one we've all been waiting for/dreading:
26021
If the 20th century Sox were a search for a title and the 2000’s Sox were a resolution of that search, the 2010’s have been a demonstration of how fleeting those title teams can be.

Coming into the season, the big questions for the defending champions centered on the pitching staff. What would they do when the back end of their rotation became free agents? How would they handle their ace, a lights-out starter who had repeatedly run into health issues? Whom would the Sox extend and whom would they let play out the contract? The offense has largely featured the same players since Ortiz retired (with the key addition of Martinez), so it would be the Sox pitching decisions that would determine the Sox fortunes for 2019.

Puzzlingly, the first decision that the Sox made was to stand pat on the bullpen. Craig Kimbrel would be allowed to walk (slowly, given that he signed with the Cubs at midseason), and Joe Kelly went all the way across the country to Los Angeles, and in their stead, the Sox would sign….nobody. Everybody in the Sox pen simply moved up a role, as though Kimbrel and Kelly were the graduating seniors on a high school baseball team. In fairness to the Sox, neither Kimbrel nor Kelly has been all that good in their new roles, so the Sox were correct in letting those players leave, but the problem was that their 2018 production was going to have to be replaced by someone. Besides, it’s not like the bullpen was a position of strength last year; Sox fans might recall that the Sox playoff run was buoyed by relief appearances from Nathan Eovaldi, David Price, and Chris Sale, none of whom were slated to be doing much relieving during the 2019 season. Nevertheless, the Sox went into battle hoping that Ryan Braiser’s breakout was real and permanent and that Barnes/Hembree/ Workman et al were prepared for bigger roles in the bullpen.

Not surprisingly, the bullpen has been a mess. The Red Sox have converted 54% of save opportunities, just a percent off of being worst in the American League. Last year’s feel-good story Ryan Brasier went from “sometimes-closer” in May to “Pawtucket resident” in July. Matt Barnes started out great but went into a tailspin in June; since June 2, his ERA has been 5.26. (Barnes has also turned into the rare three-true-outcomes pitcher – he’s struck out 15 per 9 IP but allowed 5 walks and 1.2 home runs per 9 IP.) Heath Hembree, Marcus Walden, and other bullpenners have similarly gone through hot stretches and cold stretches, which has turned the call to the pen into a game of Russian roulette. Clearly, the Sox decided that there was no point in spending a lot of money on a bad bullpen when you can spend no money on a bad bullpen, and while the logic of that proposition is sound, it doesn't help the Sox win baseball games.

Most of the money that the Sox did decide to spend instead went to the starting rotation….which is why it has been so concerning that the starters have also been so pedestrian. (It’s also one of the reasons that the bullpen has been so bad – the starters' waning ability to go deep into games has exposed the weak underbelly of the pen.) Much has been made of the Sox decision to hold the starters back during spring training, and it’s hard to say whether that was the cause of the slow start or not…but whatever the reason, Sox pitchers were awful at the start of the season and have only been somewhat better since. Chris Sale, he of the newly-minted five-year extension, has had the worst ERA of his career by a full run with a sparkling 6-11 W-L record to show for it; Sale was last seen heading to the IL for the season in August. Nathan Eovaldi, whose checkered injury history somehow didn’t scare the Sox out of offering him a four-year deal, has made 10 starts this year, and his ERA currently hovers above 6. Rick Porcello has completely collapsed, and David Price fell apart in mid-July and ended up on the DL in early August. Midseason reinforcement Andrew Cashner flamed out in the Sox rotation and was quickly moved to the bullpen – he currently occupies the vaunted “10th inning guy” role in the bullpen. The best starter this year has been Eduardo Rodriguez, and while Rodriugez's breakout season has been impressive....he shouldn't be your ace if you have Chris Sale and David Price on staff.

As one would expect with a talented yet underperforming staff, Sox pitchers have shown flashes of brilliance at times and flashes of ineptitude at others. To wit: by WPA (the stat that measures clutchness), the Sox are almost exactly league average….but they’re fourth in the AL in positive WPA events (good clutch performances) and fifth in the AL in negative WPA events (bad clutch performances). Most notable for this phenomenon has been Chris Sale, whose season will be mostly remembered for his frequent press conferences blaming himself for his pitching woes; Sale nevertheless has had 10 double-digit-strikeout, two-or-fewer-earned run games this year, including one where he set a record by striking out 17 batters through seven innings. (Naturally, the bullpen would lose his 17K game in extra innings.)

Pairing an uneven pitching staff with a top-notch offense has led to a season that can be charitably described as “consistently inconsistent.” The whole season has been two steps forward, two steps back, and every time the Sox have been on the cusp of getting back into the pennant race, they’ve faltered and fallen back out of the picture. The Sox began the season with a disastrous road trip; eventually, they would manage to crawl back into the picture in May only to stumble at the beginning of June. In mid-June, the Sox won eight out of nine, putting themselves just two and a half games behind the Rays…only to lose five of the next seven. In late July, the Sox won five out of six against the Rays and Yankees…and then lost their next eight games straight. Such has been the season, and whether it’s been their inability to put their foot on the gas against bad teams (like their 11-8 record against the Blue Jays), their inability to take care of business at home (37-41 at Fenway), or their ability to follow a good effort with another one (the Sox are 9-9 on the day after they score double-digit runs and 4-4 after throwing a shutout), the Sox have spent the whole season making gains and immediately losing them. They’ve been particularly adept at being a slumpbuster, whether it was helping the Angels break their seven-game losing streak in August or helping Chris Davis end his legendary hitless streak in April.

Next year, Boston has some big salary decisions to make, and given how poorly the last offseason went, the Sox decided that they’d be better served with a new executive making those decisions. The good news is that Sox will have a bit of money coming off of the books in the offseason (especially Porcello’s $21 million), which should give them some money to paper over the previous round of transactional misfires. Moreover, Boston still has another year before Mookie Betts tests the free agent waters (although he hasn’t been the MOOKIE of 2018 this year), and while JD Martinez may opt out, the Sox will still employ the services of most of their starting lineup for a while…so the lineup looks pretty set for the time being. The pitching will be a little more complicated, given that Sale, Eovaldi, and Price have all dealt with injuries this season and all three are under contract through at least 2022. Complicating matters, the previous president appears to have exhausted the farm via trades, promotions, and lack of development (Bleacher Report ranks the Sox farm to be dead last), so the next executive will have limited options for how to improve the ballclub..

The most pressing issue for the Sox, though, is simply the hiring of a new front office. For a team as analytics-driven as the Sox, the hiring of Dombrowski was a surprise, but he did what he does best; he pushed all of the team’s chips into the center of the table and gave the Sox a good chance at a World Series title. With Dombrowski gone, it’s now time for the team to rebuild the analytics department, restock the farm, and try to figure out how to keep the pitching staff healthy. In the meantime, we all know the old saying: flags fly forever...
 

santadevil

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Aug 1, 2006
6,472
Saskatchestan
CB, as always, thanks for doing these.
Sad to see the Sox one, but it just wasn't the year

I'm also excited about Pablo's money coming off the books too, other than his buyout.
I was one of the few that was happy he was signed. I figured he'd be fine here...glad I was wrong, because the Sox appear to have the 3rd baseman of the future and he got a lot better this year

Future is still bright for the 2020 World Series champs!
 

cannonball 1729

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 8, 2005
3,572
The Sticks
Let's start getting caught up in anticipation of the final weekend. Here are three of the eliminated six:

26045

Apparently, someone needs to sit down with the Pirates and explain that “Pirates” is just a team name and not a lifestyle suggestion.

After years of being mediocre and bland, the Pirates chose 2019 as the year to try to become the baddest team in the baseball, both in the sense of “bad behavior” and “bad at baseball.” The year has been marked by brawls, fights, and other general mayhem; already, one pitcher (Kyle Crick) has been lost for the season due to a fistfight (his second of the year) and players have fought with coaches on two occasions….and those are just fights between members of the Pirates. There were also two memorable brawls with the Reds, including the all-out battle at the end of July that was sparked by Keone Kela openly throwing at the Reds. Off the field, the Pirates were even worse, particularly in light of a shocking (and rather disgusting) incident where closer Felipe Vazquez was arrested for soliciting a 13-year-old. (Vazquez was also the opposing fighter in the Kyle Crick season-ending bout, which makes him a shoe-in for whatever is the opposite of the Roberto Clemente award. Maybe the Ty Cobb award?)

Compared to the awful off-field exploits, the Pirates' on-field product has been somewhat better - which is to say, still terrible. For the first half of the season, the Pirates did their usual win-some, lose-some routine; unfortunately, the wheels would come flying off in July. After posting a 44-45 record before the All-Star Game, the Pirates won just two of their first seventeen games after the break en route to a 21-46 second-half collapse. The Pirates current 10-game losing streak is the longest such streak this season, but they’ve also suffered through a 9-game losing streak and an 8-game losing streak. The pitching has been particularly bad; they’ve given up more than 6.2 runs a game since the break, and they’ve allowed double-digit runs seven times in this month alone. By the end of July, the Pirates had fallen from 2.5 out of the division to 10.5 games out (despite the weakness of the NL Central), and the following two months would watch them add another 13.5 games onto that deficit.

It’s no mystery what the problem with the Pirates is: they don’t have any starters. In the Pirates’ plans, 2018 deadline acquisition Chris Archer would regain his All-Star form and Jameson Taillon would build on his breakout season of 2018. Instead, Archer’s ERA has continued to climb (as it has every year since his All-Star year of 2015), and he would eventually be felled by an elbow inflammation (although he did have one special moment this season where he was caught underneath a pile of brawling players in July). Moreover, Taillon was limited to just seven starts before needing flexor tendon repair surgery; while undergoing said surgery, doctors discovered that Taillon also had a torn UCL, and thus he was sent off to get Tommy John surgery as well. (Taillon might be the unluckiest man in baseball – he’s had two Tommy John surgeries and one bout of testicular cancer in the last five years.) With the horses down, the fillies were forced to pick up the slack, and they were completely unable to do so; the Pirates had just 38 games this year started by a player with an ERA below 5. The Pirates’ ERA+ is 82 – not only is that bad, it’s a full eight points worse than the second-worst team in the NL. Oddly, the bullpen hasn’t been awful, but with former closer Vazquez now likely in jail for a decade or more and setup map Crick recovering from a self-induced injury, the bullpen has the potential to be every bit as bad as the rotation.

Allegedly, the Pirates' plan is the same as it always was. Ever since their last run of competence in 2013-15, the Pirates have been restocking while trying to compete with castoffs. GM Neal Huntington has been good at finding bargain-basement players (until this year, anyway), which has allowed the small-market Pirates to maintain an air of respectability. The hitting is pretty much ready (Josh Bell anchors a potent young offense) and the middle-of-the pack farm system gives hope that there will be more promotions. Unfortunately, the Bucs have bet the house on their pitching front line of Archer and Taillon, so the Pirates are going to have to hope some surprise development on the part of those two (or some other) pitchers if they want to be competitive next year. In the meantime, the Pirates could use an attitudinal overhaul, and since manager Clint Hurdle is a good bet to be fired, there will probably be a new manager tasked with the challenge of doing exactly that in 2020.

The Pirates last made the playoffs in 2015. Their last World Series win was in 1979.


26048

One of the revelations of the Moneyball revolution is that a strikeout isn’t as bad as it may seem. Sure, it’s less productive than a sacrifice, and it makes errors and other fortuitous events less likely, but strikeout on its own is just like any other out.

The Rangers, though, appear to have taken this reasoning to its illogical extreme, having assembled a team for which strikeouts seem to be the primary goal. For the third year in a row, the Rangers are in the top two in the AL in strikeouts; this year, they trail only the Tigers in strikeouts, though the Tigers’ K’s are borne of overmatchedness rather than organizational approach. Six players are currently north of 100 strikeouts, with another two standing a good chance of joining them (one with 96 and one with 93). These aren’t three true outcomes players, either; the team leader in home runs has just 27 (despite 2019 being the year of the home run), and the only players have more than fifty walks are Shin-Soo Choo (71) and Joey Gallo (52).

If there has been a surprise this year, it’s that the pitching, has, for once, been pretty good. In the offseason, the Rangers signed catcher Jeff Mathis, whose defense grades out as one of the best in the game (and it had better, given how bad he is at hitting: his current OPS+ is 10). With Mathis’ pitch-calling in the fold, Lance Lynn and Mike Minor have turned into a bonafide 1-2 punch. Granted the rest of the rotation is in shambles, largely because the Rangers don’t have much depth in their pitching ranks, and also because their veteran stopgap starters (Drew Smyly, Shelby Miller, Edinson Volquez) have been atrocious. Even despite those shortcomings, however, the mere presence of Lynn and Minor has propelled the Rangers to an above-average ERA+, which is no small feat considering that three of the best pitchers on last year’s team now play for the Cubs, Tigers, and Pirates.

But the hitting…good lord, the hitting. Rougned Odor is barely ahead of Mario Mendoza’s vaunted line for the second time in three years. Elvis Andrus breakout year of 2016 was followed by his break-back-in year of 2018, wherein his batting average collapsed; over the last two seasons, Andrus’ OPS is .690. Ronald Guzman, Isaiah Kinder-Falefa, Nomar Mazara, and Delino Deshields (and Rougie) all failed to have their long-awaited breakout seasons; in Deshields’ case, he may have reached the age where such a season is likely to never happen. The Rangers’ OPS+ of 89 is in line with recent years’ data, but, given that the Rangers are a young team hoping to improve, the complete lack of movement in batting statistics from 2018 to 2019 is a worrying sign. The Rangers did have two good hitters at one point this year (Joey Gallo appears to have turned into the player they wanted, and Hunter Pence had a nice dead-cat bounce); unfortunately, both players were injured at midseason….which happened to correspond with the 8-game post-ASB losing streak that pushed them squarely out of contention.

More worrying, the Rangers have a farm system that is largely bereft of depth – after the first three or four prospects, the dropoff is significant. Most of the previous prospects have already graduated to become bad hitters/whiff machines or inconsistent starters, and there's very little left in the system. Last year, management began an experiment with a new, don’t-throw-any-pitches-for-a-year-after-drafting program for some of their younger draftees; however, given that two of the members of their inaugural class have already fallen to Tommy John surgery, it’s not clear whether the program is helping. There’s a real concern that the centerpieces of this round of rebuilding won’t pan out, which may mean that the Rangers may be in for the dreaded back-to-back rebuilding cycle(s). The Rangers already used the “fire the manager” bullet last year; with no one else to fire, it’s likely that the front office is next. If Rangers’ GM Jon Daniels is to avoid this fate….he probably needs to tell his hitters to stop swinging at everything.

The Rangers last made the playoffs in 2016. They have never won a World Series.



26046

Regardless of the results, we can at least say that the Padres were more exciting this year. For over a decade, the Padres had turned in 70-win performance after 70-win performance, never contending, never quite bottoming out, and never convincing anyone that they had a chance. Youth movements, go-for-it-now movements, team-building movements…no matter; the end result was still a listless, 70-win season.

This year, however, things have been different. San Diego began by signing Manny Machado, the top free agent on the market and the biggest free agent signing for the Padres since, well, ever. Padres free agent hauls have historically been name players on the back nines of their careers (like Steve Garvey, Bruce Hurst, or Chuck Finley), or exciting players who would cost more than they were worth (like Matt Kemp). For them to pull in Manny Machado, the top name on the market and a free agent at the height of his earning powers, was so incredibly un-Padre that absolutely no one saw it coming. Throwing in an Eric Hosmer signing afterwards was like icing on a cake for a fanbase that had never seen cake before.

Then came Fernando Tatis, Jr. Tatis, who is part of the cavalcade of sons of former players currently graduating to the bigs (and one of the few not employed by the Blue Jays), arrived on the scene in March with a bang. To describe his hitting line and statistics (.317/.379/.590) gives short shrift to his somewhat less quantifiable abilities like his athleticism and fearlessness, including his willingness to score from first on a single or tag up and score on popups to the infield (twice). Had he played a full season, Tatis would likely have been a shoe-in for the Rookie of the Year; as it was, Fernando provided more than four wins of production in just over half a season of work.

Of course, the Padres still don’t have the firepower to compete, especially after Tatis went on the injured list with back issues. Just like every other year, the Padres would finish well out of contention; in fact, just like every other year, the Padres are likely to finish with a win total that begins with “7.” As the season wore on, reports even began to emerge that manager Andy Green wasn’t getting through to his veteran players (whatever that may mean); that disconnect would lead to Green’s ouster last week.

Yet for once, there’s hope in Padre land. No more are the Padres merely discount shoppers with turbulent ownership and forgettable seasons; they’ve now purchased a franchise cornerstone and surrounded him with young talent, be it Tatis, the front of the rotation, or the ten (!) top-100 prospects in their farm system. For one the most non-descript franchises in sports, the future suddenly looks….descript.

The Padres have never won a championship. Their last playoff appearance was in 2006, although they lost a one-game playoff in 2007.
 
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cannonball 1729

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Since the season has ended, I'll just post these in random order as my schedule allows. Today, let's recount the tales of the fired managers:

26171
The hiring of Joe Maddon away from the Tampa Bay Rays was a pivotal hiring by the Cubs. In 2014, Joe Maddon was the hot managerial name – he could have written a ticket to nearly any job in baseball. His willingness to use statistics to countervail baseball orthodoxy made him a perfect fit for a Theo-led team, and the fact that he’d chosen the Cubs was a sign that the Cubs were – finally - truly serious about trying to win a title.

The immediate dividends were enormous. The Cubs vaulted from a last-place team in 2014 to an NLCS participant in 2015, submitting a 24-win improvement and winning a playoff series for the first time since Steve Bartman became a household name in 2003. The next year, the Cubs would reach an even higher peak, as they would win their first World Series since the days of the Ottoman Empire. Of course, several of Maddon’s moves backfired in game 7 of that series (like using Jon Lester in a fireman role or calling on the overworked Aroldis Chapman), but no matter; when you land the ultimate prize, no one really asks how. Whatever else happened in the Joe Maddon era for the Cubs, 2016 would ensure that the manager’s tenure would be branded a success – and it would also ensure that Theo will someday go into the baseball Hall of Fame.

The next three season weren’t exactly disappointments, but nor were they the kind of seasons that you’d expect to follow a 103-win 2016 season…especially for a team returning essentially all of its stars. In 2017, the Cubs stumbled out to a losing record in the first half before being bailed out by the futility of the rest of their division; in total, they won 92 games that season, a wholly unimpressive total for a reigning mega-team. The 2018 season was better in the sense that the Cubs won more games, but worse in the sense that they blew a five-game lead in the division over the last month, eventually losing a one-game playoff by the Brewers and then losing a wildcard matchup in extra innings.

2019, then, would be a pivotal year for the Maddon era. The Cubs offseason was surprisingly “budget-friendly” and bereft of major signings, but the holdover from the 2018 team would surely have enough firepower to bring the Cubs back to the postseason. Besides, Maddon had spent several years in central Florida, where he'd been required to do a whole lot more with a whole lot less.

Somehow, though, the 2019 season just never seemed to get going. The Cubs started 1-5, righted the ship, went on a 9-1 tear to take the division lead, leveled off, sputtered through 2-8 stretch to fall back to the pack, and then spent much of the rest of the season in three steps forward, two steps back mode. Just after the All-Star Break, the Cubs played 15 straight games in which they took the lead at some point…and yet somehow they went 9-6 over that stretch. The hitting was top five in runs scored, the pitching was third-best in runs allowed, everything seemed to be going fine – except they just weren’t breaking out of the pack of NL Central teams.

On September 17, however, the bottom fell out. Heading into that day, the Cubs were in second-wildcard position, riding a five-game win streak buoyed by a sweep of the moribund Pirates. Mysteriously, though, the Cubs then decided to stop hitting; they would lose their next nine games straight, scoring two or fewer runs in six of those games and averaging just 3.1 runs per game over that stretch. Midway through that nine-game stretch, the Cubs were officially eliminated from postseason contention, and by the end of it, they were closer to .500 than they were to the playoffs. Obviously, few managers can survive a year-end collapse of that nature, and Maddon was no exception; the day after the season ended, the Joe Maddon era ended in a bizarrely chummy press conference with the fired employee and his former boss talking about how much they enjoyed each other’s company.

Now, four playoff appearances in five years, along with three LCS appearances and one title is a successful run by any fair metric. But for the dream pairing of the Wunderkid GM and Baseball’s Innovating-est Manager, expectations were quite a bit higher. It’s hard to pin down what makes a talented team underperform, but Epstein was pretty explicit in his press conference that he blamed lack of accountability and motivation. In other words, Maddon may have excelled at coaching kids in their first big-league go-arounds (as he did in Tampa and at the beginning of the Cubs tenure), but he struggled with keeping a veteran clubhouse engaged. The moral of the story, I suppose, is that managing is hard…and even those who appear to have the game figured out still have a lot to learn.


26172

The Mets were done. Dead. Buried. If the season had ended in mid-July, the story of the 2019 Mets would have had them buried at the bottom of the heap, victim of a cavalcade of typical Metsiness. The Mets began the offseason by hiring new GM Brodie Van Wagenen, an agent who had represented half of the team, creating major conflicts of interest in his personnel decisions. Their offseason was the usual “build around the pitching staff that may or may not stay healthy” with an added dash of “but win now.” As the season began, Jacob de Grom quickly went on the IL with a sore elbow immediately after signing his $137.5 million contract extension. Manager Mickey Callaway and pitcher Jason Vargas got into a verbal altercation with a reporter (apparently because the reporter told Callaway “I’ll see you tomorrow,”), leading to a rare instance where the manager had to issue two apologies after the first one fell flat. The bullpen had an eye-popping 21 blown saves and .834 OPS in the first half alone (even despite the acquisition of closer Edwin Diaz), inspiring the occasional entertaining Mike Francesa rant but causing general consternation to the Mets fandom. The GM was accused of armchair managing, apparently sending managerial instructions to the dugout while sitting at home in front of his TV. At the All-Star break, the Mets were 40-50, owners of the second-worst record in the NL, and while all of their non-Marlin NL East brethren were hanging around the playoff picture, the Mets were lamenting another lost season.

Then, suddenly, improbably, miraculously, the Mets started winning. Starting on July 25, the Mets went 15-1, a streak that culminated in a four-run rally for a walk-off against the Nationals on August 9 and two-run eighth-inning rally to beat the Nationals again on the 10th. The pitching (especially deGrom) had finally locked into place; the Mets allowed three runs or less in eleven of those sixteen games, including four shutouts. Seth Lugo had emerged as a relief ace, at one point even retiring 26 consecutive batters. The Mets were now very much alive; at the close of business on August 10, they were just a half-game behind the Brewers for the last playoff spot.

Then, as quickly as it began, the Mets’ streak of excellence ended. Although they weren’t close to replicating their execrable first-half performance, the Mets were just 25-20 following their hot streak, which is pretty good for a Mets team but not good enough to make the playoffs. A couple of crushing losses, including a 14-inning loss to the Braves on Aug. 23 and a Sept. 3 affair in which the Mets became the first team this season to blow a six-run lead in the ninth, put punctuation marks on the Mets’ unsatisfying end to the season. All told, the Mets ended the season three games out of the playoffs, easily the best finish since their World Series appearance in 2015 but still not good enough for a team whose plan was to win now.

Of course, any time a team wants to win now but doesn’t, someone gets fired, and in this case it was manager Mickey Callaway who got the axe. This means that first order of business will be to find a new manager for this misfit Mets ballclub. Granted, there are some great pieces on this club, particularly the pitching and youngsters Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil. On the other hand, the new manager is going to have to deal with some GM interference, a typically rabid New York press corps who can apparently drive a manager into a tirade with a simple “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and – most concerningly – an organization that doesn’t really seem to be on the upswing or downswing. With most organizations, it’s easy to tell whether they’re going up or down, but with the Mets, no one has the slightest idea; the core players are talented but injured, the GM is either good with the players or too close to them, and the team vacillates between being good and bad with alarming regularity. In other words, it’s another typical season in Flushing.

The Mets last made the playoffs in 2015. Their last World Series victory came in 1986.
 

cannonball 1729

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Has anyone heard from cannonball in awhile? Getting worried over here.
Not to worry! (Though I appreciate your concern for me!) At the end of September, I put out another album and have been snowed under with trying to get it played on radio stations in addition to doing my regular jobs. Life should slow down for me a bit next week, so I should hopefully be able to start finishing up the writeups then. I suppose that, due to the lack of punctuality, they'll be retrospectives instead of elimination celebrations, but....still better late than never!
 

Mueller's Twin Grannies

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Dec 19, 2009
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Not to worry! (Though I appreciate your concern for me!) At the end of September, I put out another album and have been snowed under with trying to get it played on radio stations in addition to doing my regular jobs. Life should slow down for me a bit next week, so I should hopefully be able to start finishing up the writeups then. I suppose that, due to the lack of punctuality, they'll be retrospectives instead of elimination celebrations, but....still better late than never!
Bumping to see if we could get the end to this thread since there seemingly won't be baseball for awhile longer and all the teams who were eliminated from contention last year are still eliminated.

Or have you been 'rona'd? ;)
 

cannonball 1729

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Bumping to see if we could get the end to this thread since there seemingly won't be baseball for awhile longer and all the teams who were eliminated from contention last year are still eliminated.

Or have you been 'rona'd? ;)
Sure, why not? I'll pull the drafts of the last couple of teams out of storage and start the thread up again shortly.
 

cannonball 1729

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All right, since we all have nothing else to do, let's restart this thread! I'll post these on no particular set schedule and in somewhat random order. To begin again, it looks like all of the AL eliminants except one are in this thread, so let's add the last one:

29538

No team does smoke and mirrors quite like the Indians. Every year, an objective look at the Indians’ roster would lead to conclude one that the Indians are hopelessly outgunned; nevertheless, every year, the Indians are in contention. You might recall that the 2016 Indians made it to game 7 of the World Series with about three or four pitchers that they actually trusted in key situations; while not every season has been as successful as that one, that blueprint of "ride the stars, hide the flaws, and somehow overachieve" is the model that has led the Indians to seven straight winning seasons (and four playoff appearances) since Terry Francona took over in 2013.

This year, we were treated to yet another season where the Indians’ on-paper chances should have been zero. The Indians had exactly one pitcher start more than 25 games: 24-year-old Shawn Bieber, who’d started just nineteen games in his brief career before the season began. One of their rotation aces, Corey Kluber, lasted just seven games before being felled by oblique issues. The other ace, Trevor Bauer, was sent to the Reds at the trade deadline. Their ace-in-waiting, Mike Clevinger, missed two months with a back sprain. By all accounts, this is a team that should have been dead in the water; few teams can lose their top three starters and maintain any semblance of competitiveness, let alone win.

Instead, the rest of the pitching staff stepped up admirably. Bieber, who had just 19 starts before this season, became the ace of the staff, posting a 144 ERA+ in 214 innings. Clevinger, when he was healthy, was even better, with a 2.71 ERA yielding a 174 ERA+. Meanwhile, the Indians dug into their farm system to fill in on the other starts, eventually coming up with 24-year-olds Zach Plesac and Aaron Civale (who would post ERA’s of 3.81 and 2.34 in limited action). All in all, the beleaguered Indians pitching staff somehow managed to post a 125 ERA+, good for second in the league.

As for the hitting....well, it took a while for the Indians to figure out how to paper over their flaws. Through April and May, the Indians' offense was basically the Carlos Santana Homecoming Tour, with the newly reacquired Santana hitting the cover off the ball and everyone else struggling. In the summer months, Frankie Lindor and Jose Ramirez found their batting strokes, and the Indians dug Jordan Luplow out of the minors and pried Yasiel Puig out of a heap in Cincinnati (literally - the trade was announced while he was in the midst of a brawl with the Pirates). As the season moved from spring to summer to fall, the hitting got progressively better and better, but even still, a team who posts a 95 OPS+ for the season isn't exactly going to be mistaken for the '27 Yankees.

Nevertheless, with none of their expected starters available and many of the hitters disappearing for significant chunks of time, the Indians somehow smoked and mirrored their way through the season. As is typical with the Indians, they racked up victories against teams they were supposed to beat; their 68-30 record against sub-.500 teams was third in the AL, better than three of the five playoff teams (NY, TB, Oak). Terry Francona perennially does everything he can to exploit platoon advantages; this year, the Indians’ 2182 plate appearances against same-handed pitchers were well below that of any other contending AL team (and second-lowest in the AL behind only the Orioles). Most importantly, to make up for a depleted staff, the Indians rode their starters harder than any team in baseball; their 94 pitches per game started were tops in the AL, and their 80 starts with 100+ pitches led all of Major League Baseball.

Unfortunately, with just five games left in the season, the Indians ran out of gas. (Or perhaps smoke.) The pitching staff, who had been ridden so hard and for so long, simply collapsed from overuse and injury. On September 25 and 26, the Indians blew two must-win games against the cellar-dwelling White Sox, losing 8-0 and 8-3; then, the Tribe traveled to Washington and proceeded to throw batting practice to a streaking Nationals team, letting up 26 runs in the final three games. For an Indians team that hadn’t missed the playoffs since 2015, the ending was undoubtedly disappointing; for a team that had somehow fought back from a losing record in June to playoff contention in September (and done so with the entire pitching staff injured), it was doubly so.

The good news about this years’ Indians season was that it answered the question, “Can the Tribe survive Trevor Bauer’s and Corey Kluber’s upcoming free agencies in 2020 and 2021?” in the affirmative. In fact, so affirmative was the answer to this question that the Tribe ended up shipping Kluber to Texas in the offseason for a pitching prospect and the newest Delino Deshields. With Kluber and Bauer now both gone, the Indians will enter the 2020 (or whenever) season making as little sense on paper as ever, but as long as Francona can keep rolling out the smoke and mirrors, Cleveland may keep finding their way into the playoff race.

The Indians still have the longest World Series drought in baseball. Their last championship came in 1948.
 

cannonball 1729

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Next up in my "no particular order" elimination thread:

29596

This was supposed to be the year. All of the rebuilding, the drafting, the acquiring of mismatched parts and too many corner infielder/outfielders, the learning curve of the manager, the demotion of Ruben Amaro, the revamping of the analytics department….this was the year that all of those were supposed to crest together and send the Phillies to the playoffs. The division was wide open (the reigning champions had essentially won the 2018 division by default), and the Phillies had already shown they could contend for long stretches last year; coming into the season, then, the only question was whether the Phillies could take that which was theirs for the taking.

What’ s more, the Phillies offseason would add an increased sense of urgency when the Phils acquired free agent Bryce Harper; in doing so, the Phillies ratcheted expectations from “This might be the year!” to “This had better be the year!” Of course, the signing of a high-profile free agent is the ultimate high-risk, high-reward proposition in baseball, but it went doubly so for Bryce Harper. At his best, Harper can be one of the best players in the sport and could single-handedly carry a team to a title. At his worst, Harper is a mediocre hitter and a clubhouse malcontent. Obviously, Harper was going to command top dollar, but whoever signed Harper was also going to have to prepare themselves for the Harper Rollercoaster, a ride from which Nationals fans have been only too happy to extricate themselves. No matter, though – the Philles wanted to get their man, and for the princely sum of $330 million, they were able to do exactly that.

Now, Harper’s aforementioned inconsistency makes him an unusual bet for a long-term deal. An optimist might look at his 2015 and 2017 seasons and proclaim that he’s already had two 1.000 OPS seasons (including a 9-win season in 2015) and isn’t yet 27. A pessimist might note that he’s also had several seasons that look more “old-player” than “All-Star,” including his final season in DC where he hit just .249 despite 34 home runs and 130 walks (which counterbalanced his 169 strikeouts). The odd, part, though, is that when an up-and-down player nets a huge deal...he’s usually coming off one of his "up" years, which was not the case in 2018. Whatever the specifics, the Phillies clearly took a huge gamble by committing a third of a billion dollars to the Bryce Harper experience. Harper as a star would be a bargain and a franchise cornerstone; Harper as a four-win player is market rate for WAR; Harper as a young old-player could turn into a contract millstone and a 2020’s version of version of Ryan Howard.

To that end, 2019 Harper didn’t exactly assuage the concerns of the Philly faithful. While his batting average improved from 2018, it did so by a meager 11 points, while his strikeouts increased by nine and his walks decreased by 31. The good news is that he’s still only 26 and the vaunted age-27 season where everyone seems to break out is still ahead of him; the bad news is that he’s yet another year removed from superstardom, and the Phils are still on the hook for another twelve years.

That said, if a team doesn’t make the playoffs, it’s usually not because their left fielder “only” had a 125 OPS+. Sure, Harper hasn’t been the superstar they wanted, but a guy who walks 100 times and hits 30 home runs is still going to win you more games than he loses. Instead, the problem was that Harper only gets to bat once per time through the order...and the other eight hitters weren’t very good. In 2018, Philly’s offense was a one-dimensional, homer-or-bust outfit; this year, other teams essentially caught up to the Phils' longball output, which made the Phillies more of a zero-dimensional offense. Philadelphia employed a surprising number of ineffective former All-Stars: Odubel Herrerra hit .222 in limited action before being suspended for domestic abuse, Andrew McCutchen walked a lot but hasn't seen his power stroke since 2015, Jay Bruce somehow managed to OPS just .235 after a midseason trade from Seattle, and Jean Segura’s 90 OPS+ is a bit less than the Phillies were expecting when they signed him to a 4-year, $60 million deal in the offseason. Most concerningly, slugger-of-the-future Rhys Hoskins hit fewer home runs this year than last, which is a concern given that a.) 2019 was the season of the home run, and b.) walking and hitting home runs are the only two things he does well as a ballplayer,. All told, the Phillies’ team OPS+ was 91; bearing in mind that Harper’s OPS+ was 125, you get a sense of just how bad the rest of the Phillies’ hitters were.

All of that being said, the Phillies pitching staff may well have been good enough to bail out the offense...except every pitcher other than Aaron Nola either battled injuries or inconsistency. 25-year-old starter Zac Elfin was the closest to being a consistent starter, but he still had a month (July) where his ERA spiked to 11. Jake Arrietta has turned into an oft-injured mediocrity who costs the Phillies copious amounts of money. Closer Hector Neris had a sparkling 2.93 ERA, but that’s mostly because of his 2.12 mark in non-save situations; in save situations, Neris’ ERA rose to 3.55, causing Philly fans to christen the closer “Nervous Neris.” Much of the bullpen has been lost to injuries, including David Robertson, PatNeshek, Tommy Hunter, Seranthony Dominguez Adam Morgan, Victor Arano, and Edubray Ramos. To their credit, the pitching staff was good enough to keep the team around .500, but their inconsistency prevented them from doing any more.

Obviously, any season that registers this level of disappointment demands a fall guy, and thus manager Gabe Kapler got the axe. Kapler is a man who sounds impressive in interviews; nevertheless, he has yet to prove that he has any ability to manage in the major leagues. As the old saying goes, teams who fire a manager try to replace him with his opposite; in this case, Kapler’sreplacement will be Joe Girardi, a man who sounds adversarial in interviews yet has proven his ability to manage a big league ballclub. Girardi is probably a good hire for the Phils, as he’s certainly dealt with an unkind east-coast media and a battered pitching staff before. The main question, though, is how the strong personalities of Girardi and Harper will coexist in the dugout; the Nationals chewed through several managers in Harper’s DC tenure, and if Harper and Girardi start to butt heads, there’s little question as to which one of the two will be sent packing. One way or another, Phillies’ fans are encouraged to buckle up, as the Bryce Harper era is just beginning, and these next twelve years may be a bit of a bumpy ride…

The Phillies last made the playoffs in 2011. Their last title was in 2008.
 

cannonball 1729

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Continuing the "no particular order" theme of this thread:

29695

In December of 2018, the Diamondbacks confirmed every Arizona fans fears and traded Paul Goldschmidt for a bevy of prospects. Goldy was entering the final year of his contract; the D-Backs decided that they’d be unable to match whatever offers he would entertain, and so they sold him off for three players – the oldest of whom was just 25 – and a draft pick. As you might imagine, Diamondbacks fandom was unhappy with the trade; sure, fans understood, but they were still tremendously disappointed. Curses were uttered, jerseys rent, allegiances sworn off, season tickets not renewed…it was an unhappy time to be an Arizona fan.

Baseball, though, has a funny way of upsetting our upsettedness. Goldy arrived in Saint Louis with the requisite amount of pomp and circumstance, but his hitting failed to join him. For the first half of the season, Paul looked downright pedestrian; through the first three months of the season, the first baseman was hitting just .246 with a .741 OPS. His April wasn’t too bad, but his May and June were awful; from May 1 to June 30, Goldy had just nine extra base hits and hit a punchless 238/.329/.337. Goldschmidt finally burst out of his shell in July…only to slip right back into it in August.

Meanwhile, the pieces that the Snakes had acquired started playing well. Carson Kelly turned into a starting catcher, Luke Weaver turned in an excellent half-season (with a 2.94 ERA) before being felled by a knee injury, and the minor league prospects earned promotions in their respective leagues. It was no shock that Goldschmidt outhit Carson Kelly…but it was a huge shock that the first baseman only managed to out-OPS+ the catcher by just one point; in fact, for much of the season, Kelly led Goldy in the race for most productive hitter.

If anything, this overperformance by youngsters/unexpecteds and underperformance by established players was the theme of D-Backs season. The lineup featured solid and/or surprising performances by overlooked veterans/journeymen like Eduardo Escobar and Christian Walker, as well as a monster breakout year by Ketel Marte; meanwhile, formerly serviceable veterans like Adam Jones and Jake Lamb took up roster space to no apparent benefit. The pitching rotation featured Zack Greinke and a couple of breakout-ish performances by kids like Alex Young, Luke Weaver, and Zac Gallen…which meant that when Greinke was traded at the deadline, the rotation was mostly just the surprise performances and some very okay veterans. With their two biggest stars (Greinke and Goldy) now gone, the D-Backs were more “Little Engine that Could” than any kind of contending powerhouse, but they were winning just the same.

Unfortunately, the Diamondbacks waited just a tad too long before making their move. On August 17th, the Snakes were just 61-63, which – shockingly – put them just 4.5 games out of the wildcard. From then on, the D-Backs would get hot and post a 24-14 record; unfortunately, during that same stretch, the Brewers and Nationals got even hotter, posting 27-13 and 25-14 records, respectively. Had the Diamondbacks played in a year where there were fewer hot September teams, they may have even snuck into the playoffs; as it is, the Diamondbacks still somehow ended up winning 85 games in an ostensibly “lost” season.

For a team whose future was held hostage by Goldy’s impending free agency, the front office’s decision to rip off the band-aid appears to have been well-considered and well-executed; after all, this is the first time in a long time where the Diamondbacks don’t seem to be racing against the clock and trying to contend before the key parts scatter to the four winds. Currently, most of the key players are under 26, and the Snakes’ farm system is bursting with extremely young, high-ceiling prospects (their farm system is top-10, and the average age of their top five prospects is 20). Who knows – with a young team and a now-flexible payroll due to the Goldy/Greinke departures, the Diamondbacks might finally have the space and time to build an enduring contender….

The Diamondbacks last made the playoffs in 2017. Their last (and only) title came in 2001.
 

Dim13

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It’s a coronavirus miracle! Seriously, thanks so much for picking this thread back up. I look forward to it year after year.
 

cannonball 1729

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Well, with baseball on hiatus for a couple more months, the odds are still pretty good that I'll finish them. :)

Honestly, Zoom classes got a little too cumbersome to do while also posting these. Hopefully since college summer is almost here, I can knock out the last couple shortly.