Mathematical Eliminatory 2017

cannonball 1729

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Wait - is it really that time of year again? It looks like it's time to get this puppy cranked up. You all know the drill; one by one, we'll bid adieu to the each of the twenty teams who simply weren't playoff material, starting with the two that were mathematically eliminated last night:




Expectations were low for the Phillies this year, and the Phillies certainly delivered. Unlike last year, where the Phillies miraculously played well for fifty games to start the season, the 2017 Phils only took about a month to show their true colors, as a 12-12 start quickly gave way to 5-23 stretch that dispelled any illusions of mediocrity, and by the time the All-Star Game rolled around, the Phillies were the only team in the majors who still hadn’t recorded 30 wins. In fact, the only thing standing between the Phillies and a historically awful year may have been the Braves; take out their 12-4 record against the Braves, and the Phillies would be sitting at 41-84.

Of course, none of this was a surprise. Two years ago, after Ruben Amaro, Jr. became the first person ever to be demoted from GM to first base coach, new GM Matt Klentak sensibly decided that the Phillies’ way forward would be a complete tear-down, so he cleared out most of his veterans in trades and waited patiently while untradeables like Ryan Howard played out their contracts. Now, they have as close to a clean slate as one can have in baseball, with a paltry $5.8 million in contract obligations to their 2018 team and just one player (25 year-old Odubel Herrera) whose contract extends past December.

As is the case for most rebuilding teams, the Phillies' major league club served two purposes this year; it was 1.) a kindergarten where young players could figure out how the major leagues work, and 2.) a holding pen for fringy, rebounding, or rehabbing major leaguers who might get hot and then flipped to a contender at the deadline. The Phillies had pretty decent success with the second one, as fliers on Joaquin Benoit, Howie Kendrick (.329 BA!), Jeremy Hellickson, and Pat Neshek netted the Phillies a bevy of prospects at the deadline. (Fliers on Daniel Nava and Clay Buchholz were less successful - especially the latter, who only pitched 7.1 innings this season.) For the first one...the youth movement wasn’t quite the unequivocal success of last year when the farm teams won at a nearly .600 clip, but that’s to be expected; after all, transitioning to the majors is hard (unless you’re Rhys Hoskins, apparently). The important thing for the Phillies is that a core is beginning to emerge, as Hoskins, Herrera, Cesar Hernandez, Aaron Altherr, and Nick Williams have all demonstrated that they can satisfactorily hit major league pitching. The pitching is still a fiasco, as most of the starting pitchers not named Aaron Nola aren’t yet any good, but most of them are also under the age of 26 and would still be in Triple A on most teams.

One way or the other, the future is finally taking shape, and after years of watching Ruben Amaro drive the team into the ground, the denizens of Citizens’ Bank Park can start to dream about what the next good Philly team might look like. Of course, that team is still probably a few years off, and there are still a few remaining years of the kindergarten/holding pen Phillies between now and then, but hey - one doesn’t undo seven years of mismanagement overnight….

Philly last made the playoffs in 2011. Their last world championship was in 2008.





Ladies and gentlemen...your runaway winner for Most Disappointing Team of 2017!

The defending wildcard-game winners were already off to a rocky 6-10 start when Madison Bumgarner decided to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Jeff Kent’s infamous motorcycle/”car washing” injury with a bike injury of his own. Sadly, Bumgarner wasn’t doing anything quite as exciting as Kent’s ill-fated wheelies when he lost control of his dirtbike; even more sadly, the initial prognosis of 6-8 weeks was far too optimistic, and Maddy ended up being shelved until the All-Star Break.

Now, losing an ace for three months is certainly difficult for a team, and it obviously puts pressure on the rest of the staff to step up. Giants pitchers however, decided instead to play a game called, “Who can do the best impression of a #5 starter?”, a contest wherein Jeff Samardzija, Matt Moore, Johnny Cueto, and Matt Cain all put up ERA’s north of 4.30 (they were all over 4.50 until a recent "hot" streak) at a combined cost of $60 million for the season despite playing in a gigantic park where home runs are more of a theoretical concept than an actual thing that happens. Madison has been his usual self since his return, but even the Great Madison Bumgarner can only pitch once every five days (during the regular season, anyway), and there’s not a whole lot he can do when the other four starters (five if you include Bumgarner replacement Ty Blach and his 88 ERA+) are in the midst of an ongoing quest to put baseballs into McCovey Cove.

The good news, if it can be called that, is that the pitching staff wasn’t really squandering the work of the lineup because the lineup wasn’t really doing any work. It’s probably not enough to say that the hitters have been bad; their 82 OPS+ is easily the worst in the NL. Other than Buster Posey (who is doing his usual superhuman Posey thing), Brandon Belt (who was doing his usual Three True Outcomes thing until his concussion), and perhaps Joe Panik and Denard Span, the lineup has been abysmal, led by the massively inconsistent Hunter Pence (month-by-month BA: .266/.190/.310/.186/.290/.167), Gorkys Hernandez (who hit .175/.261/.223 for April and May before finding his stroke in June), and Brandon Crawford (.225/.266/.369 pre-ASB, .287/.350/.463 after). So bad has been the Giants offense this year that the Giants even decided to give Kung Fu Panda another try; the results from Pablo can’t really be described as good (his 0-39 streak made national baseball news), but he’s at least managed to keep his belt from exploding, which is progress.

Anyway, put bad starting pitching together with bad hitting, throw in some fielding woes (the Giants are 21st in baseball by UZR/150)....and you end up with a team that's 17.5 games out of the wildcard by the All-Star break and 30 games out of the NL West lead by July 24 (and 37.5 out of the division today). It's worth noting that the Giants have never finished more than 42 games behind the division or league leader; if the Giants have a rest-of-September that's more than five games worse than the Dodgers, they will break a franchise "games back" record that has stood since 1899.

So what do you do if you’re a team with the third-oldest opening day roster, no starting pitchers behind Madison Bumgarner (and $150 million still owed to Jeff Samardzija and Johnny Cueto), two hitters, and a bottom-ten farm? Well, step 1 is obviously to keep Maddy away from the dirt bikes. (That’s probably the easy part.) As far as step 2….that’s a good question. The Giants have enough money to paper over a whole lot of mistakes, and, as we’ve seen from the Angels this year, the gap between contender and disaster is a small one in baseball, especially when your team has a superstar or two. San Francisco’s best bet, though, is simply to wait until the calendar turns to 2018 - the Giants seem to have an awful lot more luck in even years…..

The Giants last World Series victory was 2014.
 
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cromulence

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These writeups are always really well-done. They read as if they were written by someone who's been following the team all season, which is pretty damn impressive considering you do it for twenty teams. Looking forward to more eliminations now.
 

Al Zarilla

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Cannonball, thanks for the Phils and Giants summaries. I had no idea Madbum's wipeout was at the same time of year as Jeff Kent's. Kent was also a "can do no wrong guy" around here, like Madbum. I always liked Brandon Crawford and happy to see he's hitting better lately. Maybe some of the Olde Town Team guys can get it going better again too. Thanks for the yearly saga!
 

jon abbey

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Wow, the Mets might be the 3rd team eliminated, how far the mighty have fallen.
 

StupendousMan

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Thanks, CB! These mini-histories of each team's season are a wonderful way for a casual fan like me to catch up on what happened.
 

cannonball 1729

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Thanks all for the kind words! It's always fun to see the community of elimination watchers come out for this thread.

Anyway, Colorado's hot streak claimed another victim last night (and sadly for Mr. Abbey, it wasn't the Mets)....




One of the open secrets about the Reds is that their method of team construction is basically Rockies-lite. Whether it’s because of the park or simply happenstance, the 21st century Reds have never had shutdown pitching; instead, their goal has always been for the pitchers to fend off opposing hitters just long enough for the Reds’ lineup to bludgeon the opposition into submission. During their run of success in the early 2010’s, this method basically worked (apart from that time they were no-hit in a playoff game), as their middling pitching staff would hold the line while Joey Votto, Jay Bruce, Brandon Phillips, Shin-Soo Choo and others unsheathed their bats and got to work.

Unfortunately, thanks to the teardown/rebuild, both the hitting and the pitching have slipped a little bit. Now, for the hitting, that isn't so bad, as the lineup this year is still pretty formidable; Joey Votto is still one of the best hitters in baseball, Zack Cozart and Eugenio Suarez broke out this year in a huge way, and scrap heap pickup Scooter Gennett finally remembered how to hit a changeup. Reds hitters may not be tearing up the world in contact hitting, but when they do hit the ball, it goes awfully far - their home runs and isolated power have spiked from bottom ten last year to top ten this year. They’re getting better-than-average production from most of their positions, which obviously translates to a better-than-average lineup.

But then….there’s the pitching. Good lord. It’s one thing to say that the Reds lead the NL in runs allowed by almost 50, or that they’ve given up almost 30 more homers than anyone else in the senior circuit, or that they have ten more walks than the second-place Marlins, or that their 84 ERA+ is worst in the league, or that the staff is putting up a collective 5.28 ERA in a non-steroid era, but….I’m not sure that all of this fully encapsulates just how harrowing it has been to watch Reds’ pitching over certain stretches this year. In June, the starters allowed a .954 OPS to opposing teams - as Joe Posnanski recently noted, Jeff Bagwell only OPS’ed .948 over his career, so every opposing hitter in June was basically a Hall of Famer. The rotation is a mess; of the seven starters who started ten or more games, three (Homer Bailey, Bronson Arroyo, and Amir Garrett) have ERA’s over 7, and the only person to spend the entire year healthy and in the rotation (Tim Aldeman) has posted a 5.41 ERA. The bullpen has been marginally better (i.e. there’s a good closer and a couple of decent though fungible arms), but they’ve also been prone to stretches of absolute awful; in the month of September, for instance, they’re allowing the opposition to OPS at a .924 rate, basically turning every opposing hitter into David Ortiz (.931). Reds pitchers have given up 6 or more runs in nearly half (72) of their games, and they’ve given up 10 or more runs 22 times this season, including one six game stretch just after the All-Star break where they hit double digits four times. Whatever synonyms you want to come up with for terrible...they all apply to the Reds hurlers.

Anyway, the Reds are yet another rebuilding team with all of the hallmarks that we've come to expect: lots of young players, a disinterested fanbase (14th in the NL in attendance), the crusty, profane manager (Bryan Price, the man who once launched into a media tirade that contained no fewer than 77 f-bombs), the real-life Willie Mays Hays (Billy Hamilton), the Wild Thing reliever (Michael Lorenzen, he of the 100 mph fastball and 11 wild pitches), and, of course, the guy who uses a religious ritual to help him hit a curveball (Scooter Gennett, who draws a Jesus fish in the dirt before every at-bat.). If you feel like you’ve seen this movie with an Ohio team before, well, it’s not going to end in a pennant this time. (At least not for another few years.) But in the meantime, the Reds at least have a new TV deal in place, a top ten farm, some offense, Joey Votto, and one guy who’s really, really fast.

The Reds last made the playoffs in 2013, when they lost the wilcard game to the Pirates. Their last World Series title was in 1990.
 
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jon abbey

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Oh, maybe they're not depending on how many games are left between CHC/STL/MIL, but from a pure add their losses to the division leader's wins standpoint, they're still at 161.
 

jon abbey

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Ah yeah, those three teams still have 14 games left between them, so indeed they are eliminated and I am wrong.
 

Lose Remerswaal

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I'm glad you concentrated on the Reds pitching. Back a few years ago when we had a SoSH bash in Cincy, I was asking locals who the best Reds pitcher of all time was. If I asked 10 people I think I got 10 answers and none of them were without a few "hmmm"s
 

Kliq

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I'm glad you concentrated on the Reds pitching. Back a few years ago when we had a SoSH bash in Cincy, I was asking locals who the best Reds pitcher of all time was. If I asked 10 people I think I got 10 answers and none of them were without a few "hmmm"s
A couple of years ago didn't you do a day by day vote for the best hitter/pitcher for each team? IIRC Eppa Rixey was the Cincinnati choice (I believe I voted for the immortal Will White). Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, for teams that date back to Reconstruction, have a pretty lousy history of pitching.
 

cannonball 1729

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Oh wow - I hadn't really thought how far back the pitching woes went. I limited my statement to "21st century" in the writeup because the 1990 team had the Nasty Boys bullpen and Jose Rijo, but that year was kind of an anomaly, wasn't it? Even the '75-76 teams only had decent pitching.
 

InstaFace

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But then….there’s the pitching. Good lord. It’s one thing to say that the Reds lead the NL in runs allowed by almost 50, or that they’ve given up almost 30 more homers than anyone else in the senior circuit, or that they have ten more walks than the second-place Marlins, or that their 84 ERA+ is worst in the league, or that the staff is putting up a collective 5.28 ERA in a non-steroid era, but….I’m not sure that all of this fully encapsulates just how harrowing it has been to watch Reds’ pitching over certain stretches this year.
Given the fraction of this site who watched, masochistically, throughout the 1997 Red Sox season, led by ace Aaron Sele (5.17 FIP) and closer Heathcliff Slocumb... oh, we know.
 

mt8thsw9th

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Rijo was definitely considered as one of the greatest Reds' pitchers of all time. Jose Rijo.
Is that a bad thing? Prior to his injury that cut him down in his prime, he was a top 5 pitcher in the NL. His 1990-1994 ERA+ (149) was 2 points off Greg Maddux' mark over the same stretch.
 

begranter

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But then….there’s the pitching. Good lord. It’s one thing to say that the Reds lead the NL in runs allowed by almost 50, or that they’ve given up almost 30 more homers than anyone else in the senior circuit, or that they have ten more walks than the second-place Marlins, or that their 84 ERA+ is worst in the league, or that the staff is putting up a collective 5.28 ERA in a non-steroid era, but….I’m not sure that all of this fully encapsulates just how harrowing it has been to watch Reds’ pitching over certain stretches this year. In June, the starters allowed a .954 OPS to opposing teams - as Joe Posnanski recently noted, Jeff Bagwell only OPS’ed .948 over his career, so every opposing hitter in June was basically a Hall of Famer. The rotation is a mess; of the seven starters who started ten or more games, three (Homer Bailey, Bronson Arroyo, and Amir Garrett) have ERA’s over 7, and the only person to spend the entire year healthy and in the rotation (Tim Aldeman) has posted a 5.41 ERA. The bullpen has been marginally better (i.e. there’s a good closer and a couple of decent though fungible arms), but they’ve also been prone to stretches of absolute awful; in the month of September, for instance, they’re allowing the opposition to OPS at a .924 rate, basically turning every opposing hitter into David Ortiz (.931). Reds pitchers have given up 6 or more runs in nearly half (72) of their games, and they’ve given up 10 or more runs 22 times this season, including one six game stretch just after the All-Star break where they hit double digits four times. Whatever synonyms you want to come up with for terrible...they all apply to the Reds hurlers.
This is all very true, but ignores the stint Luis Castillo had in the majors before being shut down due to innings limits. In his 15 major league starts, he averaged just under 6 innings/start with a 3.12 ERA, 1.075 WHIP, 9.8 k/9 and 3.06 K:BB. Sure he gave up a fair number of HR, but he also was promoted straight from AA and never looked back. His stuff is nasty and I wouldn't sleep on him being an impact pitcher next year/going forward.
Here's him facing Trea Turner earlier this year:
 

cannonball 1729

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Next team down:


For the last decade, the White Sox have been the Charlie Brown of the major leagues. Apart from the occasional home run acquisition, nearly everything they’ve done has backfired spectacularly, and every time it looks like they’ve done something good, Lucy pulls away the football (er, baseball). Open up the checkbook to sign Adam Dunn to a big contract? He’ll go and have the worst season by a position player in 50 years. Trade for James Shields? Watch him allow 21 runs in his first three starts. Hire a young promising international scouting director (David Wilder) right when all of the teams are exploiting the international scouting pipeline? Don’t worry - that scouting director will set up a system to skim bonuses in order to fund his nightclub in Arizona. High draft picks? Go ahead and plan your future around Gordon Beckham - if that doesn’t work, you could also grab Courtney Hawkins for the outfield. (I hear he can do a backflip!)

Such has been the plight of the White Sox. Ever since the White Sox were bounced by the Rays in the 2008 ALDS, they’ve been largely lost at sea, making a bunch of lateral moves or downgrades with the occasional stunner thrown in. In 2010, they swapped out a manager with a talent for saying stupid stuff and getting runners thrown out on bases (Ozzie Guillen) and replaced him with one (Robin Ventura) who didn’t really have any appreciable skills other than perhaps an uncanny ability to preside over veteran players having historically awful years. They watched the core of the 2005 team get old, and tried to supplement them with free agent disasters like Jeff Keppinger and Moneyball star Mark Teahan, as well as trade disasters like Mr. Shields. They whiffed on nearly every position player draft pick - as Baseball Prospectus gleefully loves to point out, the last 10 WAR position player the White Sox drafted was Aaron Rowand, who retired six years ago. And somewhere in there, they signed Jose Abreu to a bargain contract and drafted Chris Sale. It’s been a strange decade.

Anyway, the good news is that after years of indecision about whether they’re buyers or sellers, this year’s White Sox finally threw in the towel and commenced with the rebuild in earnest. Gone was ace Chris Sale, flipped to the Red Sox for a quartet of prospects. Gone, too, was Adam Eaton, sent to Washington for three youngsters. The old farm director was replaced by Royals’ player development assistant Chris Getz. Robin Ventura was fired at the end of the 2016 season, with former Cubs’ skipper Rick Renteria taking his place. At the deadline this year, the White Sox dealt half of the team, parting ways with Jose Quintana, Tommy Kahnle, David Robertson, Todd Frazier, Anthony Swarzak, Dan Jennings, and Melky Cabrera; in their places, the Sox acquired eleven youngsters and (for some reason) Tyler Clippard. In August, they added Miguel Gonzalez to the outgoing mail, and, as inexplicably as he arrived, Clippard was traded for a PTBNL or cash.

So what does your team look like after you’ve traded away nearly everyone over the age of 30 except for Jose Abreu and James Shields? Well, you can probably guess. The hitting was third from the bottom in runs scored, a product of just below average hitting (97 OPS+) and bad situational hitting (.238 close and late, .243 with two out and RISP). The lineup does have some pop in the middle; Jose Abreu kept doing his Jose Abreu thing, while Avisail Garcia shortened his swing so that he could catch up to fastballs and, as a result, finally had that breakout that everyone was waiting for. As for the rest of the lineup...well, the only position players past the age of 27 are Abreu and backup catcher Kevan Smith (who is 29), so their struggles aren't really a surprise.

As bad as the lineup was, though….the pitching was so much worse. Much like the Reds team that many of you read about yesterday, the White Sox led the AL in both HR allowed and walks allowed, showing a rare combination of both wildness and hittability. The starters had a special penchant for putting the Pale Hose behind early; starters on the White Sox combined for a 33-68 record, and the Sox trailed after five innings (78 times) far more often than they led (50 times). This is not to let the bullpen off the hook of course, because the bullpen was also bad, but the bullpen was entrusted with fewer save opportunities than any other team in the majors, and while the ‘pen’s save percentage was fourth-worst in the AL, White Sox relievers inherited more runners from starters than any other relief corps in the AL.

As is the case with every rebuilding team, there are still quite a few questions to answer. The pitching obviously needs work (and Carlos Rodon needs to stay healthy), and the lineup needs a couple more years of experience, but there are probably a whole lot of answers sitting in their top-3 farm system. GM Rick Hahn has had a few missteps in the first four years of his tenure, but his last year’s worth of moves (post-August 2016) have been pretty sensible, and he’s put the team in good position to come out of the rebuild with a contender. Of course, getting prospects is only the first part of building a contending team, and it will be interesting to see if Mr. Hahn has learned from his veteran acquisition mistakes when the White Sox reach the “supplement the core with veterans” part of the process. Maybe he can keep a picture of James Shields around the office to guard against complacency....

The White Sox last won a World Series in 2005.
 

Sad Sam Jones

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My favorite part of the White Sox season came a couple weeks ago, when Avisail Garcia tried to get Trevor Bauer to throw him fastballs by yelling at him and apparently questioning his manhood... I guess Garcia gets his rules from the same unwritten book that C.C. Sabathia does. Bauer struck him out on three breaking balls and barked back to Garcia that he could go sit down now.

If the White Sox show an ability to polish off their prospects, and the Twins manage to find some starting pitching to add to Jose Berrios, the AL Central might be interesting again by 2020.

*
 

cannonball 1729

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Ok...*now* we get to the long awaited....




Mets fans may not have been given a good team to root for, but at least they were given an interesting riddle to ponder: If Mr. Met has four fingers, which one is the middle one?

As much as sportswriters like to flog the joke about how Mr. Met’s ill-considered gesture might be emblematic of the Mets lost season, the better emblem for the season might be a one coming up (repeatedly) on a six-sided die. (Of course, the number one is indicated by a single finger, so perhaps Mr. Met was prophetic after all.) The Mets, as currently constructed, are forced to play a game of injury roulette every year; much like the Rockies of Tulo/CarGo vintage, the Mets’ franchise is built around a couple of extremely talented but extremely injury prone players. Noah Syndergaard, Matt Harvey, Steven Matz, and Jacob deGrom are the kind of rotation that every team dreams of having - young, cost-controlled, and capable of dominating both a season and a short series. Unfortunately, the Mets can only dream about such a rotation as well, because in real life, their rotation was derailed by injury, failed rehabs, and more injury. Syndergaard tore a lat just days after refusing an MRI and insisting he was fine. Harvey still hasn’t fully come back from Tommy John surgery - this year, he was just a tick under replacement level, meaning that he was more valuable to the team while on the DL than he was on the mound. Matz has been plagued by injuries throughout his professional career. Only deGrom, who hasn’t exactly been the paragon of perfect health in his career, was able to stay on the field and take the ball every fifth day.

Of course, there were other gambles that failed, too. The Mets gambled that Daniel Murphy wasn’t a middle of the order hitter and let him walk in free agency. They gambled in honoring Thor’s refusal to undergo an MRI. They gambled that they had enough pitching depth, shipping insurance policies Gabriel Ynoa and Logan Verrett to Baltimore in the offseason. They gambled that Asdrubal Cabrera’s already suspect fielding wouldn’t decay even further as he passed 30, that Jose Reyes’ dead-cat bounce last year was a real improvement, that David Wright might be able to stay healthy this year, that Matt Harvey wouldn’t bring sex toys into the locker room, and that ballboys would learn how to get out of the way of a flyball. Some of these gambles were ill-conceived, some of them were sensible, some of them made the team more interesting to follow, and some of them made the team harder to root for (who wants to root for a domestic abuser like Jose Reyes?)...but every single one of them turned up snake-eyes.

The result of all these failed gambles was a spectacular collapse, as last year’s wildcard-game runner-up and 2015’s World Series 2nd-place finisher was pushed out of the playoff picture by Memorial Day, the team’s aspirations falling victim to losing streaks of six and seven games before the end of May. The DL this season read like a novella, as time lost by Syndergaard, Matz, Harvey, Wright, Wilmer Flores, Michael Conforto, Yoenis Cespedes, Zack Wheeler, Travis d’Arnaud, Neil Walker, Lucas Duda, Seth Lugo, Josh Smoker, Jeurys Familia, Brandon Nimmo, Asdrubal Cabrera and several others made it difficult to tell whether the team at Citi Field was supposed to be the Mets or the Las Vegas 51s. Worse, nearly every prognosis by the Mets medical staff turned out to be overly optimistic by a factor of two, to the point where translating from Mets’ Medical Time to Actual Time became a running joke among Mets fans. Thanks to the loss of Ynoa and Verrett, the Mets were forced to roll out anyone who had an arm attached for pitching duty, scouring the system and the league for AAAA players like Rafael Montero (5.05 ERA in 15 starts), not-ready pitchers like Chris Flexen (7.68 in 8 starts), and ghosts of playoffs past like Tommy Milone (8.42 in 5 starts and 3 relief appearances). By midseason, they had thrown in the towel and traded most of their veterans for prospects, and by mid-August, they had pushed past Atlanta and begun to make a run at Philly’s place in the cellar.

The bad news is that the Mets, as a franchise, are kind of stuck. They have an extremely talented roster that absolutely can’t stay healthy, headlined by one of the most intimidating pitching staffs in the game. If the pitchers can do what everyone expects that they can do, the Mets have enough money that they can fill the rest of the roster with decent players, especially since they’ve offloaded so many veteran contracts this season. If not, well, there’s not a whole lot the Mets can do. The fate of the 2018 Mets may well be out of the hands of the front office; next year’s success or failure may just come down to whether the Injury Gods choose to smile upon the Mets….or give them the finger.

The Mets last won a World Series in 1986.





The Tigers are a mess - and an interesting perspective on what the future might hold for the Red Sox.

You might remember that Dave Dombrowski took over right at the bottom of the Tigers’ last down-cycle - in fact, the 2003 Tigers (his second year at the helm) were the losingest team in American League history. Somehow, though, Dave built that team into a pennant winner in just three short years. What’s interesting is that, unlike other MLB rebuilds we’ve seen recently, Dombrowski didn’t rebuild through the farm; very few of the key players on the 2006 World Series team were young (basically Verlander, Granderson, and Joel Zumaya...and Jeremy Bonderman if we’re using a generous definition of “key player”). Instead, most of the roster was made up of free agent signings and trade targets like Kenny Rogers, Magglio Ordonez, Pudge Rodriguez, and Carlos Guillen.

This team-building model was emblematic of what the Dombrowski era would look like in Tigertown - great veteran acquisitions, no farm. Dombrowski was decent at finding free agents to sign, but he absolutely excelled at finding other teams’ players to target. In fact, much of the Tigers’ success was based on this later attribute; players that came to Detroit at the behest of other GM’s during the Dombrowski era included Max Scherzer, David Price, Dmitri Young, Jhonny Peralta, Doug Fister, and, of course, Miguel Cabrera. The Tigers rode these acquisitions to an AL Central dynasty, reeling off four consecutive division titles from 2011-2014 and a forgettable World Series appearance in 2012.

The undoing of the DD era, and the problem with the current iteration of the team, was/is the abysmal farm system. As of now, the Tigers haven’t drafted a 10 WAR player since 2008 (although the immortal Drew Smyly might finally break that mark next year!), and Detroit's farm has been consistently ranked in the mid- to high-20’s for over a decade. Worse, Dombrowski hollowed out the system in an attempt to get one more pennant before the core got too old, strip-mining what little of a farm they had left for a 2015 rotation that never really materialized. With no remaining farm, Dombrowski was left shuffling veterans for other veterans, which is a far more risky proposition; when the tactic failed, Dombrowski was out of a job.

The problem now is that GM Alex Avila appears to have all of Dombrowski’s weaknesses but can’t match his strengths. Clearly, he still hasn’t fixed the farm system, as the Tigers’ farmhands still rank in the bottom five. However, Avila has whiffed on most of his free agent signings, giving $110 million to Jordan Zimmerman (5.64 ERA over two seasons), $16 million to Mike Pelfrey (5.07 ERA last year, DFA in March), and $11 million to Mark Lowe (7.11 ERA, DFA in March). Another signing, Justin Upton ($132 million), had a bounce-back, All-Star season this year after last year’s disappointment; of course, his lack of performance last year is one of the reasons the Tigers missed the playoffs. Moreover, Avila’s trades haven’t yet been anything to write home about; Avila traded for K-Rod and his $13 million, 2-year contract last year, then DFA’d him in July, and this offseason, Avila dealt starting center fielder Cameron Maybin (whom he acquired the year before in a surprisingly successful trade) for a Double-A prospect who has a live fastball but no command or secondary pitches.

Incidentally, if you happen to notice a seeming lack of big signings and big trades in the last paragraph...that brings us to Avila’s other failing: his penchant for inaction. Last offseason, after announcing that nearly every player on the roster was on the table, the Tigers largely stood pat; the biggest move they made (besides DFAing Pelfrey and Lowe) was trading Maybin and not replacing him with a center fielder. Now, if you’re wondering why an old team that has no farm system and missed the playoffs last year would stand pat, well, you’ve got a whole lot of company over at Blessyouboys.com. Rather than sell off or make a run for a title, Avila simply held a number of players past their expiration dates for no apparent gain, including Ian Kinsler (OPS dropped over 100 points this year), Victor Martinez (OPS dropped over 120 points this year), and Miguel Cabrera (OPS dropped 220 points this year). A season of losing seems to have finally spurred Avila into action, as he sold JD Martinez, Justin Wilson, Upton, Justin Verlander, and his own son at the various trade deadlines. However, 18 months of trade inaction have taken their toll, as several veterans are now largely untradeble, and one wonders what kind of a package the Tigers could have gotten if they'd traded Verlander in December, when he almost won the Cy Young, instead of in August, when he was just another decent pitcher with a big name and an ERA just south of 4.

The good news is that a rebuild can be done quickly if the team has resources and can spend them smartly on free agents and veteran pickups - for proof, look no further than the Tigers of last decade. The bad news is that a.) a quick turnaround like that is really hard to do, b.) the Tigers’ exec who is most capable of doing it doesn’t work there anymore, and c.) the current inhabitant of the GM position hasn’t yet shown any identifiable general managerial skills. So….good luck, Detroit!

Detroit last made the playoffs in 2014. Their last World Series championship was in 1984.
 
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cannonball 1729

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My favorite part of the White Sox season came a couple weeks ago, when Avisail Garcia tried to get Trevor Bauer to throw him fastballs by yelling at him and apparently questioning his manhood... I guess Garcia gets his rules from the same unwritten book that C.C. Sabathia does. Bauer struck him out on three breaking balls and barked back to Garcia that he could go sit down now.

If the White Sox show an ability to polish off their prospects, and the Twins manage to find some starting pitching to add to Jose Berrios, the AL Central might be interesting again by 2020.

*
The AL Central is so bizarre - just when one team looks ascendant, the dominant team collapses. The Tigers got good just when the Twins started losing 90+ games, then the Royals got good when the Tigers were falling apart, then the Indians got good when the Royals fell into mediocrity.
 

cannonball 1729

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Yesterday we added:



For most of the 2000’s, the Padres were one of the most nondescript franchises in sports. Their mascot was (and is) a person in a person costume, their star player was a closer with a sub-90’s fastball, their two managers were competent but seemingly interchangeable former players with BB initials, and their team president was fired so often that it may as well have been a rotating position. The Padres were, if you will, the McDonalds of the major leagues - thoroughly mediocre, not known to do anything particularly well….and yet sometimes, when things got late and the other teams had closed up shop, they were the only ones left. (The Padres still hold the record for worst playoff team ever - the 2005 NL West “winners” went 82-80.)

Then Josh Byrnes was fired, and things changed abruptly. New general manager AJ Preller decided to uproot the entire team, trading away much of the farm for proven veterans in a failed attempt to become contenders, then trading away the proven veterans to try to restock the now-depleted farm. He fired Bud Black or Bruce Bochy or Bob Brenly or whoever it was that was managing the team in 2015, frustrated at Bud or Bruce’s inability to get Preller’s misfits to play together. (Of course, whoever he fired is currently managing the Rockies to their best season in a decade.) Preller began to get more and more creative in his trades, even going so far as to compose fictitious medical reports and send them to trading partners to help consummate deals. (Incidentally, it turns out that those trade partners were not fans of Preller’s fiction work. Nor was the MLB office, who gave Preller a sabbatical so he could learn to write non-fiction instead.)

This offseason, the Padres excitement continued, as team president Mike Dee was fired for reasons that nobody surrounding the team was willing to divulge. Dee’s accomplishments included renaming the Padres’ Hall of Fame Plaza in honor of Padres’ legend Bud Selig, drafting Johnny Manziel in the 28th round of the 2014 draft, firing beloved PA announcer Frank Anthony and publicly searching for his replacement, and overseeing a series of PR disasters ranging from a badly run Filipino Heritage Night to an embarrassing national anthem snafu with the San Diego Gay Men’s Choir to an erosion of season ticket holder benefits that somehow resulted in a drop in season ticket holders during the 2016 season despite the fact that the Padres hosted the All-Star game that year. (That’s all in addition to the fact that he hired a guy who falsified medical reports.) In typical New Exciting Padres fashion, Dee departed the team, then took a position as the new CEO of Entercom - Entercom, of course, is the company that owns the Padres’ flagship radio station.

Anyway, if that front office excitement hasn’t yet translated into on-field excitement, well, it’s probably because the on-field team still isn’t any good. After the self-inflicted disaster of the 2015 season, the teardown of the MLB squad was neither unexpected nor unwelcome. Thanks to the trades in said teardown, the farm system appears to be pretty well-stocked, but other than recent farm graduates Manuel Margot and Hunter Renfroe, most of the youth is of the “low minors, high ceiling” type; of top ten prospects in the system, none were in AAA at the time of the draft and only Luis Urias had reached AA. The pitching crop is believed to be particularly strong (which is good, because the pitching at the major league level is awful), but it hasn’t developed yet, and since Urias isn’t a pitcher....the pitching cavalry is probably a *long* way off.

Whatever the reason, this year’s season was another awful one at Petco Park. After the excitement of the offseason turnover, the Padres decided to get fans pumped up for the season by unveiling a new jersey that was clearly designed by a ninety year-old who had just figured out how to use MS Paint. Clad in these new jerseys that correctly identified the team with as little color as possible, the young, bad Padres took the field for an opener that saw them lose 14-3, setting the tone for the rest of the season. The Padres have by far the worst run differential in the NL this year, probably because they’re an NL-worst 8-30 in blowouts. The lineup has two players who cracked league average in OPS+, and the rotation has one player who beat league average for OPS+ (two if you include the departed Trevor Cahill). The Padres underperformances ran all around the diamond, from closer Brandon Maurer and his 6 ERA (before the Pads dumped him on Kansas City) to last year's feel-good story Ryan Schempf (who was sent down this year after 53 games of .158 BA) to last year's feel-good pitching story Clayton Richard (now the league leader in losses). The Padres have had not one but two “message” demotions (i.e. demotions to Triple-A to “send a message” to the player) this season, as third baseman Cory Spangenberg was optioned down to the minors after spring training, while Hunter Renfroe was demoted in August after drawing just nine walks in over two months. (Of course, in Spangenberg’s case, the message may have been, “We want your free agency to be delayed by a year.”)

Fortunately for San Diego, the Padres have been blocked from the cellar by the atrocious Giants, and they’re likely to finish with their usual low-70’s win total that they’ve been putting up every year this decade. However, the Padres are still not any good, and they probably won’t be for a couple more years. In the meantime, they'll have to hope that they can keep the fans engaged with further episodes of Days of Our Lives: San Diego Edition.

The Pads last made the playoffs in 2006, though they lost a one-game playoff in 2007. They have never won a World Series.
 

cannonball 1729

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Finally getting caught up from the weekend:



What a difference a month makes. On August 11, the Pirates were just three games out of the division lead, the scrappy, low budget NL Central team fighting to upend the higher-budget Cardinals and Cubs. (Well, one of the two such NL Central teams, anyway.) Granted, they were only 58-58 at the time, but in the early-August fog of the mediocre NL Central, any signs of life were enough to be taken seriously.

The next day, the Pirates began a six-game losing streak during which the pitching staff give up 46 runs to the opposition. Over the next month, the Pirates would also suffer a four-game losing streak and a five-game losing streak, and they’re currently on yet another five-game losing streak. All told, since their August 11 glimpse at mediocrity, the Pirates have gone 10-23; in that time, the Cubs have gone 23-12 and the Brewers have gone 21-12. In a matter of five short weeks, the Pirates went from 3 games out to 14.5, and now the Pirates are just a game and a half away from the bottom of the NL Central.

If nothing else, at least the Pirates have provided their fans with a bevy of weird stories this season. The Pirates began the year by losing third baseman Jung Ho Kang to US Immigration; after Kang received a two-year deferred sentence for fleeing the scene of a DUI in South Korea, he and the Pirates discovered that the commission and admission of a crime is frowned upon by those in charge of processing US work visas, and the Pirates now don’t expect to see Kang until at least 2019. In April, star outfielder Starling Marte was lost for 80 games after he tested positive for a drug (nandrolone) that nobody ever uses because it’s easily detectable and stays in the body for a long time. In August, the Pirates tried to trade reliever Juan Nicasio at the waiver deadline, only to be blocked by an unnamed “direct NL competitor”; frustrated, they simply waived Nicasio instead, at which point he was picked up by the Phillies….and then traded to the Cardinals. It seemed only fitting that in this season of creative disappointment, one of the few memorable moments was an August 23rd walk-off, tenth-inning home run by Josh Harrington against the Dodgers….in a game where the Dodgers’ starter was perfect through nine.

Regardless, the Pirates are a relatively young (and improving) team that nevertheless continues to hang around contention. Most of the starting pitchers are under 27, and promising young players like Jameson Taillon, Josh Bell, and Tyler Glasnow are graduating to the majors and starting to make their presence felt. The stars on the Pirates are few and far between; other than Andrew McCutchen, there are no position players with an OPS+ over 110, and there are no starting pitchers with an ERA+ over that same number, either. The surprising part, then, isn’t that the Pirates had a disappointing season...it’s that they were playoff contenders in the first place, especially when their major veteran acquisitions over the last couple of years have been scrap-heap finds like Francisco Cervelli, Francisco Liriano, A.J. Burnett, and Mark “The Shark” Melancon. GM Neal Huntington has been phenomenal at building a team with veteran castoffs from other organizations, but even he can’t pull a diamond from the dumpster every year. Hopefully, with the rising young talent in Pittsburgh, he may no longer have to.

Pittsburgh last made the playoffs in 2015. Their last World Series title was in 1979.






The plan was to have the Braves be contenders right around the time their new stadium opened in 2017. After Frank Wren was fired in 2014 following yet another okay-but-not-good-enough season, new GM John Hart (but really his understudy and GM-in-waiting John Coppolella) began a complete tear-down of the team. Once the Braves traded away everyone not named Freddie Freeman, the Braves began to combine an aggressive building of the farm with an unusual (for a rebuilding team) willingness to take on veterans like Matt Kemp and Nick Markakis. The Braves’ goal was clearly to short-circuit the rebuilding process, shortening the wait for a contender from an Oakland-like five to seven years to a more fan-friendly two or three.

This year, Suntrust Park opened its doors to the fans of Cobb County, along with a fancy shopping district and a wholly inadequate amount of parking. As was the plan, the Braves began to put their low-budget contenders together; they spent the offseason bringing in veterans who might make the team vaguely credible, perhaps even improving the team to the point where the words “Braves” and “playoffs” might occur in the same sentence without giggling. The pitching staff would now be anchored by a pair of quadragenarian free agent signings in Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey, and the Braves traded three players to pull Jaime Garcia from the Cardinals. Atlanta signed Sean Rodriguez to a two-year deal; then, after Rodriguez was injured in a car accident, the Braves traded for Brandon Phillips. The Braves hoped that those acquisitions, along with improvement from the youngsters and a typical Freddie Freeman season from their first baseman, might vault them somewhere into the bottom of the playoff picture for the first time in a few years.

If that strategy didn’t succeed in bringing a contender to Atlanta, well, it didn’t really cost them anything, either. Most of those acquisitions were of the free agent variety, and those who weren’t (Phillips, Garcia) ended up being flipped for prospects, anyway. The Braves, having completed the “acquire youth” portion of their rebuild, are now in the “hopefully feisty, but not yet committed to anything” portion, where the team begins to bring in veterans - but only of the place-holding variety. Once the team starts bringing in high-priced free agents and trading for frontline starters, baseball pundits will begin to judge the team with a more critical eye; until then, they will simply point to the top-three farm system and acknowledge that a rebuild takes time.

Unfortunately, not everyone seems to agree with this “no harm, no foul” view of the 2017 season. In August, reports emerged of a power struggle between John Hart/John Coppolella and John Schuerholz; of course, all parties denied it, but the hiring of two new executives (Mets’ exec Adam Fisher and Blue Jays exec Perry Minasian) last week certainly raised a few eyebrows. Rumors this week have even indicated that manager Brian Snitker might soon be cast aside in favor of Bo Porter or Ron Washington and that the team is currently “assessing their managerial situation.” While there was no harm in this year’s failure, apparently it didn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence, either.

One way or the other, the future is still bright in Cobb County. It still remains to be seen whether the Braves can stop whiffing on veteran acquisitions, and it remains to be seen who will run the team, but the talent in the system means that whoever is in charge next year will have a whole lot of trade currency to play with. Of course, Atlanta fans can be forgiven if they’re still apprehensive - there’s a long way between promising and good, and besides, Atlanta fans are probably still a little shell-shocked from that football thing that happened back in February…..

Atlanta last made the playoffs in 2013. Their most recent championship was in 1995.
 
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cannonball 1729

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Last night finally added two more to the pile



Apparently, we’ve now moved on to the “collapse” portion of the thread. At the close of business on August 27, the Marlins were 66-63, five games out of the wildcard and winners of 9 of their last 11 games. Then, they went to Washington, and things fell apart. After losing three in a row to the Nationals, the Marlins went into a tailspin, dropping winnable games against mostly bad teams; they lost three of four to Philly, three straight to the Nationals again, three of four to Atlanta, and three straight to Philly. All told, the stretch from August 28 to September 15 saw them go 2-16, including a stretch of three straight games (and four out of five) where they lost games on walkoff hits.

While that stretch was undoubtedly disappointing to Marlins fans, it probably wasn’t a surprise, because the Marlins have been streaky all year. They put themselves in a hole earlier this year with a 4-19 stretch, then nearly dug themselves out of it with a 12-5 run, then managed to tread water until their 9-2 stretch put them into the playoff picture, and then undid it all with their disastrous September. The team has largely come and gone with the fortunes of the pitching - in months like April or August where the pitching has been respectable, Miami’s potent lineup makes the Marlins an unstoppable force. In months like September when the Marlins’ team ERA has started to approach 6...well, even the ‘27 Yankees couldn’t done much about that.

Most of those stories will likely be forgotten, however, because there were two much larger stories this season. The one that grabbed all of the headlines, of course, has been the Giancarlo Stanton Show. Ever since he shortened his swing in late May, he’s gone berzerk, hitting 44 home runs in his last 102 games (and OPSing almost 1.100 in that time), which is a pace that would translate to 70 home runs over a season. He’s cooled off a bit from his breakneck August pace, having hit just .164 since that fateful August 28th day that started the end for the Marlins. Still it’s been a whole lot of fun to watch.

The more important story, though, is the sale of the Marlins. Jeffrey Loria, after a fifteen-year tenure that could have served as a business school clinic for how not to interact with your customers or employees, finally accepted a bid to sell the team earlier this year. Loria has failed repeatedly to put a decent team on the field, owing to a combination of bad scouting, suffocating penury, and inept/malicious handling of players and staff that basically turned Miami into baseball’s Siberia. Where Loria really shined as a beacon of what not to do, however, was in his amazingly bad dealings with the fans. In addition to unloading all of his good players right after his World Championship and then doing it again after bilking the Miami taxpayers into giving him a new stadium, he’s done tons of things to remind fans just how much he doesn’t care about them, ranging from small things (like placing signs down the foul lines to make it harder for fans to see) to larger things (like removing perks from season ticket packages and then suing fans who try to cancel their plans). Needless to say, Loria could have sold the team to Al Qaeda and fans would still call it an improvement. It's not clear what Derek Jeter and friends bring to ownership, as Jeter has never held a rank higher than "captain" in a baseball organization; on the other hand, the Yankees have been oddly intertwined with the Marlins history, as the Yankees have provided the Marlins with everything from World Series opponents (2003) to embattled hitting coaches (Tino Martinez) to managers (Joe Girardi and now Don Mattingly) to retired numbers (the only number the Marlins ever retired - besides the universal 42 - was number 5 for Joe DiMaggio), so it only stands to reason that the new ownership group would be headlined by a Yankee legend.

Now, the Marlins still don’t seem to have direction, and they haven’t drafted well, and their farm is a wreck, and they certainly don’t have the horses to make the playoffs. Other than the Marlins six core players (Giancarlo Stanton, Justin Bour, Christian Yelich, J.T. Realmuto, Marcell Ozuna and Dan Straily), the roster has a whole lot of question marks, and the team has generally occupied a weird space between buyers and sellers for the last couple of years. Also, the new management has already done some strange things (like firing beloved Marlins like Jack McKeon and Jeff Conine), and they haven’t even taken over yet. But hope springs eternal with new ownership, and if there’s one new ownership group that has some leeway with the fanbase, it’s that of the Marlins; after all, it’s hard to alienate a fanbase when you don’t have any fans left.

The Marlins have still never lost a postseason series. Their last title (and postseason) was in 2003.






The wait for the new stadium continues. This offseason, the A’s had a bit of a front office shakeup, as managing partner Lew Wolff stepped down and sold his shares in the team. The new ownership management clearly wanted a new direction for the team, and so Michael Crowley was moved from president to “senior advisor” (I guess that sounded better than "liaison to the unemployment office") in favor of new president, Dave Kaval. Now, there’s only one reason you hire someone like Dave Kaval, given that Kaval’s previous job was to get a new stadium for the San Jose Earthquakes. True to form, Kaval announced that the A’s would have a timeline in place for a new stadium by the end of 2017; two weeks ago, Kaval made good on part of his promise, as he announced a tentative location for the new stadium near Laney College in Oakland.

Of course, it’s certainly understandable that A’s fans might be skeptical that a new stadium will ever be built. Kaval, however, seems to have a bit of momentum and a bit of good fortune on his side. With the Warriors and Raiders slated to move out of Oakland, the A's are the last team standing, and thus the city council may be a bit more amenable to the A’s demands. Also, since Kaval isn’t trying to move the team to places where the Giants are likely to veto (i.e. Fremont or San Jose), there’s at least one fewer immovable hurdle between the team and the new stadium.

In other, less exciting news, the A’s played baseball this year. The A’s are in their perpetual “three years of good, five years of bad” cycle thanks to Wolff’s unwillingness to spend money on anything, and they’re currently in year three of the five years of bad. They're still reeling from the failed all-in move of 2014, followed by the complete disaster of an attempt to keep the window open for another year in 2015. This year, the pitching has largely been the culprit, as entire rotation is 27 or under, and the only rotation members who have been average or better have been the oft-injured Kendall Graveman and a guy who now plays for the Yankees. Jesse Hahn, the young pitcher who was stolen from the Padres during the Friars’ failed “get-rich-quick” scheme in 2014, has been largely derailed by injuries and ineffectiveness; he went to the DL in late May, then came back and struggled to get major league hitters out, and he was eventually banished to AAA after giving up 16 runs in two starts. The bullpen has been awful - they have the second-worst bullpen ERA and the second-worst save percentage in the AL….and that’s before we even take park factors into account.

The hitting, on the other hand, seems to be coming into place, although it probably didn’t help that they traded Yonder Alonzo to Seattle. Matt Olson has been averaging a home run every other game; one suspect that he won’t keep a 1.024 OPS for an entire season, but to even do that for 57 games is a major accomplishment. The Other Boog Powell has hit .321 in his brief call-up; he actually made his A’s debut during a series in Baltimore (and hit a home run right over the Boog’s Barbecue stand), much to the delight and complete confusion of Orioles fans. Jed Lowrie continues to do his Lowrie thing, and Khris Davis continues to either hit the ball hard or not at all. The A’s even seem to be showing a little life at the end of the season, as they’ve won their last five and twelve of their last fifteen; of course, putting together wins against the other teams’ call-ups is no great shakes, but in a lost season like this one, you’ll take what you can get.

Anyway, the A’s future revolves around one simple question, and Mr. Kaval’s work over the next few months will likely determine whether Oakland fans have reason to be optimistic. In the meantime, the rebuild continues.

The A’s last made the playoffs in 2014. Their last championship was in 1989.
 
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Bosoxen

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Eagerly anticipating the Rangers entry, which was essentially sealed by - wait for it - getting swept by the A's over the weekend.
 

cannonball 1729

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Eagerly anticipating the Rangers entry, which was essentially sealed by - wait for it - getting swept by the A's over the weekend.
Yeah - they're right on the cusp....

In the meantime, getting caught up from this weekend....we'll go chronologically by elimination, which means I'll get to Sunday's eliminant (Seattle) later, but on Saturday, we had both of the participants in the 2016 AL wildcard game:




Speaking of collapses….


In a year that will be remembered for long streaks, the Indians and the Dodgers may have grabbed the headlines, but the Orioles might have been the streakiest of all. In early May, they vaulted into the division lead with a six-game winning streak; later in May, they fell out of the division lead as the result of a seven-game losing streak. A six-game losing streak in June and a five-gamer in July pushed them to out to the very fringes of the playoff picture, which is where they remained until a seven-game winning streak put them back into contention in late August (largely because no one was running away with the wildcard). Unfortunately, the Orioles completely ran out of gas in September, hitting a 3-14 skid that quickly pushed them into contention oblivion.

The problem all year was that the Orioles could not find a starting pitcher. Four years ago, the O’s gambled on Ubaldo Jimenez to be their low-budget ace; instead, he’s been at or below replacement level three of those four years (at a cost of $50 million). Without Jimenez doing what they want him to do, the Orioles have depended on their farm and whoever they could find on the scrap heap. In fact, for those who remember Dan Duquette’s last go-around….imagine the 1999 Red Sox if, instead of trading for Pedro, they signed, say, Armando Reynoso and kept Tony Armas, Jr. and Carl Pavano, and you have a pretty good sense of where the Orioles are now. They’ve had their obligatory Jeff Fassero- and Steve Avery-style retreads and reclamation projects (Wade Miley, Yovani Gallardo), and a whole lot of Pavano/Armas/Robinson Checo-style youth (Chris Tillman, Kevin Gaussman, Dylan Bundy….previously also Wei-Yin Chen). Andy MacPhail was an ardent follower of the development theory of “grow the arms, buy the bats,” so the Duke has had a lot of young arms to play with, but there’s been a decided lack of useful pitching reinforcements coming from outside of the organization. At the deadline, the Orioles actually traded human baseball players for Jeremy Hellickson, which was a shock to anyone who has ever watched Jeremy Hellickson pitch (anytime FIP indicates that someone’s ERA is a mirage of luck….and that ERA is 4.73….you should probably steer clear); unsurprisingly, Hellickson’s 6.97 ERA since joining the Orioles hasn’t been much help to the team. All told, the Orioles were the second-worst pitching team in the AL, and they were by far the worst-pitching team of all those that ever had a shot at the postseason; when add in the fact that the O’s bullpen had four pitchers with ERA+’s over 150 and were *still* the second-worst staff (by ERA+) in the AL...you get a pretty good sense of just how bad the starters were.

Baltimore is still an offensive force, though there were a few causes for concern around the diamond. Gold Glove winner Adam Jones has started to become a liability in centerfield; at age 31, that’s not a trend that’s likely to reverse, and while his bat would still play anywhere on the field, he doesn’t hit well enough to be a star in a corner position. Manny Machado spent the first half of the season grounding out to the shortstop on slider after slider until he finally figured out how to hit that pitch in June - his .316/.353/.551 line since June 20 looks an awful lot better than his .214/.286/.426 before it. (Of course, he’s only 24.) Chris Davis stopped doing two of his three true outcomes (25 HR, 59 BB, 189 K), as did Mark Trumbo (23 HR, 42 BB, 147 K); both of those hitters are 31, which is around the age where hitters with old-player skills usually fall off a cliff. There were pleasant surprises, of course; Welington Castillo bounced back nicely from a disappointing year in Arizona, Jonathan Schoop and Trey Mancini both had breakout seasons, and Tim Beckham had an offensive explosion when he reached Baltimore at midseason. All told, there’s more reason than not to be optimistic about the hitting, but they do have to figure out what their 1B/DH position is going to look like, and they have to figure out what’s going on with Mr. Jones.

Baltimore is in a strange place right now. Just one year removed from the playoffs and three years removed from a 96-win season, the O’s are now a streaky team with a formidable lineup, a dominant bullpen, and a very pedestrian rotation. The good news for Duke is that his mission is very clear - he needs to find an ace pitcher. With Jimenez coming off the books, there’s some money to play with, and if the Orioles are still as open to dealing some of their bullpen glut as they indicated at midseason, they have a good chance to add an impact arm or two. Now’s not the time to go cheap, though; if the O’s are serious about contention, they’re going to have to shoot a little higher than than the Wade Mileys or Frank Castillos of the world.

Baltimore last won a World Series in 1983.





It was eight years ago this month that a journeyman outfielder with a .164 batting average made a fateful decision that to start swinging his bat earlier - in fact, at the behest of teammate Vernon Wells, he decided that he would start his swing “so early [that] it would be ridiculous.” In his first at bat, that outfielder started his swing before pitcher Scott Baker had even thrown the ball; he smashed a double off the left field wall. Two innings later, he would start his swing just as early; the ball sailed off of his bat and over that same left field wall. Far from being “ridiculous,” that revamped swing would lead the outfielder to slug .629 for the rest of the season; the next year, that journeyman was suddenly a 50 home run-hitter, and over the next six years, he would average a .945 OPS, win three Silver Sluggers, and finish in the top-10 in MVP voting four times.


The transformation of Jose Bautista from a fourth outfielder who could be jammed with fastballs to a force of nature was one of the most important events in recent Blue Jays history. Joey Bats gave the Blue Jays lineup a ballast to build around; when fellow retread-turned-star Edwin Encarnacion started keeping his top hand on the bat, they had a real middle of the order, and when Billy Beane graciously donated Josh Donaldson to the Blue Jays for reasons unknown, they had one of the best 3-4-5’s - and consequently, one of the best lineups - in baseball. The Blue Jays last couple of years were fueled in large part by that dominating lineup; at the center of that lineup was Joey Bats, the surprise superstar who gave the Jays an identity, a bilingual presence, a swagger, a couple brawls, and some epic bat flips.

This year was the unfortunate coda to the Joey Bats saga. With his batspeed gone, Jose can’t catch up to fastballs anymore (as his .203/.311/.366 line would attest), and he now provides little other than veteran leadership and guaranteed outs; with Bautista’s impending free agency, it seems very likely that he’ll either play somewhere else next year or not at all. Jose’s compatriot, Mr. Encarnacion, has moved on, grabbing his $74 million payday from the Indians before Father Time sneaks up on him, too. Donaldson is still a monster, but other than Justin Smoak, most of Donaldson’s supporting cast either can’t hit (Steve Pearce, Kevin Pillar, Kendrys Morales), really can’t hit (Darwin Barney, Ryan Goins), or is injured and can’t hit (Troy Tulowitzki, Devon Travis).

It probably goes without saying, then, that the lineup was the culprit in this year’s collapse. The Jays are by far the worst-hitting team in the American League; their 88 OPS+ is four points clear of the next worst team. In April, when the Blue Jays went 8-17, the lineup as a whole hit .228/.295/.350 - let’s just say that when your whole lineup is hitting like 2017 Sandy Leon, you’re not going to win many baseball games. The pitching has been better than the hitting (by default, if nothing else), but the rotation only goes three deep; after Marcus Stroman, J.A. Happ, and Marco Estrada, the perpetually-injured Aaron Sanchez and the ineffective Francisco Liriano opened up the four and five slots to the AAAA contingent, with Joe Biagini (2-11, 5.75 ERA in 17 games as a starter) picking up much of the work. Throw in a team whose fielding ranked in the bottom-5 of MLB, and you can see how last year’s ALCS runners-up got so bad so quickly.

Now, it’s not all bad news in Toronto. The Blue Jays is that they do have several players to build around - Josh Donaldson and Justin Smoak (if Smoak’s breakout season is for real) can anchor a lineup, and the combo of Marcus Stroman, J.A. Happ, and (if he’s ever healthy again) Aaron Sanchez is one of the best 1-2-3’s in baseball. Past that, though, are a whole lot of question marks. This will be the first time that GM Ross Atkins will be tested - he stepped into the helm of a 93-win team after former GM Alex Anthopoulos got into a tiff with team president/CEO Mark Shapiro, so this will be the first time he’s ever had to build a team of his own. Of course, filling a roster is pretty much what GM’s get paid to do, so it’s no shock that he would have to start doing that eventually. Whatever happens, though, one thing is clear - the team will look very different next year without Mr. Bats in the middle of it.

The Blue Jays last won a title in 1993.
 

cannonball 1729

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All right, I haven't gotten to tonight's eliminations yet (including Bosoxen's favorite, the Rangers), but this one at least gets us caught up to the games going into tonight:



While a baseball team has 25 guys, the fortunes of a playoff team often boil down to a couple of key players. Take Mookie Betts or Chris Sale off the Red Sox, put Luis Severino or Aaron Judge on the DL for the Yankees, or consign Corey Kluber or Jose Ramirez to a season of mediocrity, and the playoff race looks a whole lot different.

For the last few years, the Mariners’ fortunes have revolved around Felix Hernandez and Robinson Cano. Sure, Nelson Cruz is always one of the best hitters in baseball, James Paxton provides ace-level pitching, and Kyle Seager provides stability at the hot corner. But the fortunes of the team seem to rise and fall with King Felix and Robbie Cano - if they’re good, the Mariners are playoff contenders, and if they’re bad, the Mariners are, too. Last year, the M's surprise run at the playoffs mirrored Cano's return to superstar form; meanwhile their collapse down the stretch coincided rather obviously with Hernandez's 5.12 September ERA.

This is what made it so hard for Seattle fans to watch Felix and Robbie this season. King Felix has had declining velocity and increasingly erratic location for years; he’s compensated by throwing more curveballs and flatter, more four-seamy fastballs, which can be a dangerous proposition when those fastballs are only going 90 mph. This year has been the reckoning of that strategy; apart from the bicep injuries that made Hernandez miss half the season, Felix’s reliance on four-seamers instead of sinkers has made him susceptible to the gopher ball, and,consequently, his home run rate has nearly doubled over last season. All told, Felix is 6-5 with a 4.36 ERA, which belies the 5.01 ERA that the FIP gods think he should have. It’s been an extremely worrying season for a player who is still owed almost $55 million over the next two years.

Cano is a more confounding case. Unlike Hernandez, whose career has followed clear trajectories, Cano’s career has progressed in fits and starts. In Cano's first year on the Seattle Seafarers, he put up a monster year; the second was a mild disappointment, and the third was another monster year. This year, he’s back in disappointment mode; while a 113 OPS+ isn’t poor by any standard (especially for a second baseman), it’s the worst offensive year he’s had since the New Yankee Stadium opened. There’s certainly no harm in having a 4-win player like Cano on your team, but he isn’t being paid $24 million per year to be a 4-win player; moreover, if Cano is already down to being a 4-win player at age 34, the Mariners probably don’t want to be paying him $24 million a year until he’s 40.

Anyway, there are certainly other stories to be told about the Mariners. The front office has made a concerted effort to make the team younger and more athletic; gone are the days of Raul Ibanez roaming the outfield and playing "defense" in name only. The administrative dysfunction of the Zduriencik era is gone; under GM Jerry Dipoto, Seattle is now a happy place to play and watch baseball, and manager Scott Servais has even channeled a little bit of Joe Maddon with annual dress-up days (this year’s “dress like twins” day featured pairs of Mariners dressed in matching outlandish costumes). On the field, James Paxton has become the ace Seattle needs, Nelson Cruz would be an MVP candidate if his team were better, Mike Zunino had his breakout season, and Kyle Seager had his regression to the mean. The lineup is good, the rotation is injured (the projected starting five only made 69 starts this year), the baserunning is atrocious (27th in Fangraphs' baserunning efficiency) and the farm is a mess. All of these are true. And yet….for the story of the season, it’s hard to look past the two faces of the franchise. Once upon a time, both of those players were 7-win players; if Seattle had gotten anything close to the 14 wins that they might have expected when the mega-contracts were signed instead of the 4.7 combined that they actually got this year, Seattle would be a playoff team.

Going forward, Jerry Dipoto has some work to do. The window for the core is closing, as most of the good players are on the wrong side of thirty. There’s no farm system to speak of, and there’s a whole lot of money committed to a couple of players whose best days are clearly behind them. Of course, getting a wildcard doesn’t require that many wins, and the Mariners do have enough horses that a few breaks would put them in the wildcard game (as it almost did last year). However, with as much dead money as the Mariners have, and with as little trade bait as the M’s farm can provide, the path Dipoto must tread is exceptionally narrow.

The Mariners last made the playoffs in 2001. They have never won a World Series.
 

cannonball 1729

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Here are the teams that were eliminated going into last night:




If there are two things you probably need to put together a playoff team, those things would be a bullpen and a middle-of-the-lineup. If there’s a third, it’s clutch hitting. And if none of those work out, you should at least try to put a defensively good team on the field.

This season, the Rangers had none of those four things. The Rangers’ bullpen was absolutely awful; their 14th-place finish among AL relief squads was bested (or rather, worsted) only by the woeful Detroit Tigers, and they had the fourth-lowest save percentage in baseball. The middle-of-the-order hitters weren’t good - Rangers’ 3-hole hitters combined to have a .773 OPS, which, while not terrible, is not a good number for the player who is ostensibly your best hitter; meanwhile, 5-hole hitters hit a .677 OPS, which *is* terrible. Texas hitters were abysmal in the clutch; they hit .223 with two outs and RISP, and they hit just .217/.294/.375 in close and late situations. Even the defense was lackluster; despite having a rock-solid left side of the infield, the rest of the team combined to only give the Rangers the 10th-best D in the American League. If any one of those had gone right, the Rangers might be in a much different place right now; as it is, all of them went wrong, and the Rangers will spend October at home.

The Rangers came into the season with a lot of talent and an equal number of question marks. Of the seven veterans in the lineup (i.e. players with at least two full seasons), all seven had an above-average season sometime in the last three years, and six had an above-average season sometime in the last two. Of course, many of those players had only had one such year in the last two, leaving unanswered the question of which year’s Elvis Andrus, Shin-Soo Choo, Robinson Chirinos, Carlos Gomez, or Mike Napoli would show up for 2017. The rotation was similarly full of question marks: Cole Hamels was going to be either dominant or old, Yu Darvish had a good 2016 and an injured 2015, and Andrew Cashner’s career has basically been one giant coaster ride. Among the players on the opening day roster, only Adrian Beltre was a guarantee….or at least as much of a guarantee as a 39 year-old can be.

In order for the season to go well for the Rangers, then, there were an awful lot of coinflips that needed to come up heads. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Rougned Odor and Mike Napoli, the main culprits for the 3- and 5-hole problems, have hit .204 and .193, respectively. Cole Hamels has had his worst season in years; although his 4.10 ERA was good by Globe Life Park standards, it wasn’t the Cole Hamels they needed. Shin-Soo Choo is a league average hitter, which is fine except that he’s the DH. Incumbent closer Sam Dyson blew up, allowing 20 earned runs in just 16.2 innings before being unloaded on the Giants; his replacement, Tony Barnette, was better but not better enough (4.79 ERA) before being demoted to set-up duty, and incumbent set-up guy Jeremy Jeffress was bad (5.39 ERA) before being shipped to the Brewers. Even Mr. Dependable, Adrian Beltre, was injured for a portion of the season; he’s been his usual, baseball pounding, head-touch avoiding self when healthy, but he already missed time with calf issues and is now largely unavailable thanks to hamstring issues. So significant were the Texas issues that the Rangers actually became mild sellers at the deadline, shipping Yu Darvish off to the Dodgers for prospect Willie Calhoun.

Now, it’s not been all bad. Some of the coinflips came up heads; Elvis Andrus is finally the player the Rangers always expected him to be, Joey Gallo mitigated some of the middle-of-the-order woes, Robinson Chirinos smashed the heck out of the baseball, and Andrew Cashner decided that this would be one of his good years. The Rangers do have a convincing youth movement on the major league team, with four of the starting nine under the age of 25 and closer Alex Claudio clocking in at a shade under 26. Of course, almost all of the youth in the Rangers’ system is currently on the team; apart from Jurickson Profar (who was sent down after a disappointing season) and new acquisition Willie Calhoun, there’s not much talent to be seen in minor league ball.

Next year, the Rangers will remain an interesting - if uncertain - team. There’s still a whole bunch of youth on the team, and not all of it has yet proven itself. Matt Bush could finally move into the rotation, although the fact that he’s even in the bigs after 39 months in jail is pretty astounding in its own right. The Rangers have a bit of money freed from the Darvish trade; they’re likely to go after another elite starter. There’s reason certainly hope in Arlington. However, this year proved that hope alone isn’t enough; your team needs to have at least a few sure things, and it would help if at least one of those “sure things” isn’t 39 years old.

The Rangers were in the playoffs last year. They’ve still never won a title, although they were awfully close in 2011.





Sometimes, you make all the right moves, and it just doesn’t work out.

At the trade deadline, with Kansas City sitting in second wildcard position, the Royals made a series of moves that should have ensured their ticket to the postseason. In the first trade, the Royals acquired starter Trevor Cahill and relievers Brandon Maurer and Ryan Buchter from the Padres. Cahill’s job was to replace Nathan Karns in the rotation; the bullpen arms, on the other hand, were simply on hand because of the old maxim that no team has too many bullpen arms. In the second trade, the Royals acquired Melky Cabrera from the White Sox. These trades, along with the fact that nearly every other AL Central team was selling off and getting worse (and the fact that the Royals had numerous games against the Tigers, White Sox, and a Twins team that was still sub-.500), the path to the postseason was clear.

Instead, the acquisitions faltered. Trevor Cahill’s ERA since joining the Royals has been north of 8. Melky Cabrera has lost 20 points of batting average and 30 points of slugging. Ryan Buchter was decent in his 26 appearances; Brandon Maurer was a tire fire in his 25 incendiary mound visits. Far from being the cures that the Royals needed, these acquisitions were harbingers of a collapse, and the Royals tumbled, going 10-18 in August and 12-13 in September. Kansas City’s wildcard lead vanished, the Twins and Angels slipped past the Royals, and by the middle of September in KC, it was all over but the fireworks and the barbecue.

The Royals are pretty much who they are at this point - a low budget, high variance team who could be just good enough to grab a playoff bid or just bad enough to miss the playoffs by ten games. The halcyon days of 2014-15 are gone; Alex Gordon has stopped hitting (9 HR, .294 OBP), Alcides Escobar stopped hitting three years ago, the bullpen has regressed, and the rotation is old and inconsistent. The defense is still solid, but for a team that’s been in the top-3 in defense in baseball every year since 2013, watching the gloves fall all the way to #11 is a bit troubling.

What’s truly disconcerting for Royals fans is that the window appears to be reaching its end. The farm is pretty much tapped out; they’re now a bottom-5 farm, with some periodicals (such as Bleacher Report) going so far as to call them the worst farm system in baseball. The big league team is decent but not good, and the roster is old and only getting older; half of the starting lineup is over 30, as are three of the five members of the rotation (with another hurler turning 30 next year). Of course, it bears noting that as lackluster as the current team may be, the Royals are still in the middle of their most successful run of baseball since the mid-1980’s; this is now the fifth consecutive year that the Royals have had a real shot at the playoffs, something that hasn’t happened in over thirty years. However, barring a miracle by the Royals front office, it’s very possible that Dayton Moore has reached the end of the line with this generation of Royals; after over a decade of telling the fans to trust The Process, it might finally be time to boot up The Process 2.0.

The Royals last made the playoffs and last won a World Series in 2015.






The hardest thing in sports may be hitting a baseball, but the hardest thing in general managerdom is deciding if you’re a buyer or a seller.

With apologies to Comedy Central, the Rays were the winner of the Indecision 2017 award. At the deadline, the Rays decided that they wanted to be buyers, but not if it meant they had to give up any youth. So they went and acquired Steve Cishek, a righthanded reliever who’s death against righties but very hittable against lefties (a ROOGY, if such a thing exists); for him, the Rays parted with serviceable (though disappointing) starter Erasmo Ramirez. Sergio Romo arrived on the east coast for the first time in his career after being DFA’d by the Dodgers and then purchased by the Rays. Perennial FIP mirage Dan Jennings flew in from Chicago, acquired for perennial prospect mirage Casey Gillaspie. Chaz Roe was acquired from the Braves for cash, although he was basically insurance in case the rest of the bullpen perished in an automotive accident of some form. Only Lucas Duda, acquired from the Mets, cost a real prospect, as the Rays gave up hard-throwing minor leaguer Drew Smith.

The hard part for the Rays, of course, is that they depend on their farm system, so it’s not a surprise that they wouldn’t want to go all-in on a “maybe” year. To the Rays’ credit, most of their deadline moves actually worked out rather well - Cishek dominated righties, Romo was rejuvenated by facing batters who’d never seen him, Jennings was fine but unspectacular, and Roe dominated the mop-up innings like nobody’s business. Ironically, Duda (the one who cost the most) was the lone disappointment; he’s hit .181 since heading to Florida.

The bigger problem here, though, is that the Rays are the paragons of efficiency in an era where efficiency alone isn’t a winning strategy. The Moneyball era of teams finding winning strategies using business school types and finding undervalued players who can power 90-win teams is gone; now, every team has business school types who can find players undervalued by traditional metrics. The Rays brain trust has found what little edges remain better than just about anyone; they’ve figured out when to pull pitchers to maximize performance (18 batters rather than 100 pitches), how to slow the game down for rookies, how to maximize outs from defensive shifts, how to construct rosters full of versatile players to take advantage of matchups, and all manner of other great methods for squeezing wins out of their underfunded team. Unfortunately, those methods don’t win many games; *talent* wins games, and that’s a hard thing to acquire if you don’t have money or high draft picks.

In reality, there’s only one tried-and-true method for a low-budget team to build a winner in today’s game; tear down, draft high, stock up prospects, wait for them to mature, acquire a few great players via trade or reclamation deal, make a run to the playoffs, repeat. The Rays have tried to defy gravity by attempting to set up a pipeline where one great player after another can join the team, but that requires a whole lot of luck and near-perfect drafting, and the Rays recently went through a stretch where neither of those happened. (Remember when the Rays had twelve first- and second-round picks in 2011 and only managed to get Blake Snell?) The Rays have been bad for long enough now that they’ve started to get some good picks again, and they’ve picked a bit better and traded enough that they’ve turned their farm system into one of the best in the game. Of course, the transition of those players to the majors is still going to be an adjustment, and it remains to be seen whether Kevin Cash can get as much out of his young tyros as Joe Maddon did.

The current roster is certainly decent - in an era where the wildcard is reachable to the middle classes, the Rays are as middle class as they come. But the Rays don’t currently have the horses to compete with whichever of the AL East rivals decides to play inspired ball for the year, and with free agency looming for Logan Morrison, Alex Cobb, Colby Rasmus, and a few others, the farm system is going to replace some players in a hurry. Now,it’s entirely possible that the Rays are in ascendancy, but if that’s the case, it’s not because the Rays office found some more inefficiencies.....it’s because the Rays finally have real, honest-to-goodness talent in the system.

The Rays last made the playoffs in 2013. They have never won a World Series.
 

Bosoxen

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Quick little note about the Rangers. They will finish the year with the worst road team batting average in the DH era:
And, when it was all done, the Rangers finished the year with a .224 road batting average.

It is the worst by an AL team since the DH came into existence in 1973.
Caveats about batting average notwithstanding, it helps to highlight how pathetic their offense was.

Also, and of note possibly only to me, even though Oakland and Seattle were officially eliminated before Texas, the Rangers - by virtue of their final four-game series against the A's - could actually finish in last place.
 

cannonball 1729

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And then there was one. (Well, there are eleven, but ten of them are going to the postseason).

Last night, we lost:




Give the Angels credit - they probably shouldn’t have been here. Mike Trout got injured early and looked human late. Albert Pujols is toast, all burnt and crispy. Relievers passed the closer title around like a hot potato. The pitching staff was seemingly made of glass, and the Angels’ pitching DL was as long as the active roster. The Angels couldn’t buy a hit with RISP and two outs (.228 BA) or against lefties (also .228 BA).

And yet...here they were. Defying all reason and common sense, the Angels were undoubtedly, improbably contenders this year. Part of it, of course, was that no one else was any good; the Twins were pretty much the only team that wanted the wildcard. Part of it, though, was that the Angels were simply resilient; they had 46 comeback wins, the largest number of any team in the AL. A big part was the emergence of Andrelton Simmons as a superstar; Simmons actually had a better year (according to WAR) than Mike Trout, and while that can largely be chalked up to Trout missing a couple weeks, Simmons may be the best fielder in baseball. The Angels’ deadline deal of Justin Upton for four players out of a barren system was a productive one, as Upton posted an OPS over .900 in Anaheim; meanwhile, their theft of 25 year-old Parker Bridwell from the Orioles (for the great “cash considerations”) brought stability to a rotation that couldn’t seem to keep anyone healthy.

That said….all those things in the first paragraph are still true. Trout is still Trout, .229 September batting average aside (of course, in Troutland, .229 BA translates to .387 OBP). But Pujols is done; other than the (very) occasional ability to crush a baseball, the only tool he seems to have kept from his St. Louis days is his uncanny ability to lead the league in GIDP. The Angels still owe four years and a whole lot of money on Pujols’ 10 year, $240 million deal, and they’re now paying that money to a first baseman who hits .244/.290/.391, couldn’t field any worse if he left his glove in the dugout, and can’t outrun a convenience store. The health of the pitching staff is a real problem - by the end of the season, the Angels were so banged up that they were relegated to giving key starts to non-entities like Troy Scribner and Andrew Heaney. There's also not much help on the way, as the farm, which was at the bottom of the league when Tony Reagins left, still hasn’t moved out of that position; BP ranked them worst in the league at the beginning of the year, and Bleacher Report gave them a similar rank at the deadline.

Unlike any other team in baseball, the Angels operate under a very loud, very visible clock that counts down to an as-of-yet indeterminate date in November 2020 - the date that Mike Trout becomes a free agent. In the three years between now and then, the Angels need to find a way to make themselves a contender, or there’s little-to-no chance that Trout sticks around. Of course, if Billy Eppler can filch productive players (or another star) from other clubs (as he did with Simmons), he can work around the fact that his farm system is nonexistent, but that will require some creativity. Eppler will have a little more payroll flexibility next year because he’ll no longer be paying $26 million to Josh Hamilton (remember him? The Angels’ payroll staff certainly does!), although the Angels have already promised a large chunk of that to the consistently inconsistent Justin Upton. If nothing else, the Angels’ front office at least no longer seems to be at war with itself; Mike Scioscia and Eppler speak glowingly of one another, which is a marked changed from the interminable Reagins/Scioscia feud.

There are two conflicting stories for the Angels right now. A year where the Angels can pick up an MVP candidate for almost nothing is a success. Conversely, a year where the Angels have Trout and don’t make the playoffs is a failure. The next three years will determine which story is the more important one in Angels lore: will the twenty-teens Angels be the team that pieced together a great team out of a generational player and spare parts…..or will they be the team that wasted the prime of the erstwhile greatest player in baseball? We’ll find out soon - the clock is ticking….

The Angels last made the playoffs in 2013. Their last Series championship was in 2002.
 

cannonball 1729

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Tonight, we also bid farewell to:



Not all non-playoff teams are eliminated; some just run out of time.

Such was the case for the Cardinals this year. The Cards were dismal in April and May, as the lineup underperformed, the bullpen blew leads, the baserunners ran stupidly and lazily, and offseason pickups like Dexter Fowler struggled to adjust to wearing red. Free agent losses like Matt Holliday, Brandon Moss, and Jeremy Hazelbaker had left a hole in the lineup, and the replacements from the Cardinals’ Triple A team in Memphis clearly hadn’t yet found their way. Through June 15, the Cardinals were 26th in MLB in runs scored, Fowler was hitting .240 (which was an improvement from the .222 of a week before), and the Cardinals were in fourth in their division - this despite the Central’s rampant mediocrity and the Cubs’ hangover.

Somewhere around mid-June, the light flicked on. Since June 15, the Cardinals have gone 52-41, good for fourth in the NL. They’ve scored more runs in that time than every other NL team other except the defending champs. Paul de Jong and Tommy Pham were moved into everyday roles and responded with huge seasons (especially Pham, who’s had a 6 WAR season despite only playing 125 games). Fowler rediscovered his stroke - he’s hit .306 since the middle of June. The bullpen stopped being a nightmare, the runners stopped running into outs, and the first-place AAA Memphis Redbirds finally started having an effect on the major league pennant race.

Unfortunately, like any good character from a hero’s tale, the Cardinals have a fatal flaw; they absolutely cannot beat the Cubs. Cubs’ fans, of course, have enjoyed this immensely, especially those who were on hand to celebrate the Cubs division-clinching win at Busch Stadium earlier this week. As good as the Redbirds have been this year, their 5-14 record against the Cubs is undoubtedly the difference between a wildcard contest against the Diamondbacks and an October full of tee times.

The biggest problem for the Cardinals this season, though, was simply that MLB decided to have a 162-game season instead of a 180-game one. While the Rockies have largely tread water since the All-Star Break (they’re at .500 since the two league squads faced off), the Cardinals have gone 39-31, and they’re 15-11 in September. If baseball had decided to give the Cardinals about twenty more games (especially against teams whose names don’t rhyme with “Mubs”), there’s a very strong possibility that the Cards could have overtaken the Rox. Cardinals fans hoping that MLB might grant such an extension are in for a disappointment, but there is good news for those fans - it appears that MLB has decided to schedule a whole new season starting next April….

The Cardinals last made the playoffs in 2015. Their last World Series win was in 2011.
 

John Marzano Olympic Hero

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Cannonball, love your stuff and want to see more. With that being said, will you continue to do the elimination posts for teams once they are booted from the playoffs? I know that you don't usually do it, but I've become addicted to these things and going cold turkey is one of the worst parts of October.
 

Fratboy

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And then there were two: Brewers and Rockies. I'm expecting the Rockies to pull it out, but let's face it: nobody expected them to be battling for the final playoff spot at the beginning of the season.
 

cannonball 1729

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Cannonball, love your stuff and want to see more. With that being said, will you continue to do the elimination posts for teams once they are booted from the playoffs? I know that you don't usually do it, but I've become addicted to these things and going cold turkey is one of the worst parts of October.
Oh man....there's no way I could pull that off. A couple of reasons:

1.) The practical: I'm traveling to China and Australia in October. Also, my writing efforts next month should probably be focused on the book I'm supposed to be writing.

2.) The other: Mathematical elimination somehow feels more impactful to me than playoff elimination. Mathematical elimination is a wholesale rejection of the strategies that the team decided to employ, and there are lots of interesting archetypes that such a team can follow: the rebuilding team that sucks, the rebuilding team in ascendancy, the collapse, the walking wounded, the failed new approach, the un-clutch squad, or the team on the downslope of the building cycle, just to name a few. Writing the postmortem for a playoff team, especially one that was eliminated because it ran into a buzzsaw pitching staff in a short series, just kind of feels like writing the postmortem for a Thanksgiving turkey: "It had a great life and one bad day." A writer's gotta stick to the story he knows how to tell.
 

John Marzano Olympic Hero

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I'll be satisfied when the AL team from NY gets bounced from the playoffs.
Oh man....there's no way I could pull that off. A couple of reasons:

1.) The practical: I'm traveling to China and Australia in October. Also, my writing efforts next month should probably be focused on the book I'm supposed to be writing.

2.) The other: Mathematical elimination somehow feels more impactful to me than playoff elimination. Mathematical elimination is a wholesale rejection of the strategies that the team decided to employ, and there are lots of interesting archetypes that such a team can follow: the rebuilding team that sucks, the rebuilding team in ascendancy, the collapse, the walking wounded, the failed new approach, the un-clutch squad, or the team on the downslope of the building cycle, just to name a few. Writing the postmortem for a playoff team, especially one that was eliminated because it ran into a buzzsaw pitching staff in a short series, just kind of feels like writing the postmortem for a Thanksgiving turkey: "It had a great life and one bad day." A writer's gotta stick to the story he knows how to tell.
All valid reasons, still bummed out. Enjoy China and Australia next month and let us know about your book when it comes out.
 

cannonball 1729

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The Sticks
Thanks! I really appreciate it. The fact that you guys are always so receptive and excited to read the write-ups is what makes this fun for me. In fact, after I took these write-ups over to sosh.com for a year, the main reason I came back (besides the fact that I have full editorial control here) was the fact that I'd rather write for 500 people who really enjoy reading what I write than 10,000 people to whom I'm just another dude on the internet with a keyboard and an opinion. The internet is an angry place, and when you comment bad about something that people like, they don't care how well you write or defend it.
 
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cannonball 1729

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 8, 2005
3,572
The Sticks
Finally:




New GMs generally take over rebuilding teams in one of two situations. One is the “disaster,” where ownership decides that the team is a wreck and hires a GM to come in, rip the foundations apart, and start over. (Think Theo Epstein on the Cubs or Matt Klentak on the Phillies). The other, rarer, situation is the “misstep,” where a rebuilding team builds a solid foundation, has a few years of steady improvement….and then they have a bad year and the ownership kicks everyone out. (This year’s Twins would fit that bill - everyone seems to forget that the Twins won 83 games in 2015.) There are certainly other situations where a GM can step into a team, but for a team that is explicitly rebuilding, GM’s usually have a fair bit of rope, so these are usually the only two instances where you’ll see a rebuilding team turn the front office over.

The 2015 Brewers were in the second camp. After a surprise contention in 2014 that lasted right up until the second of two late-summer collapses, GM Doug Melvin stuck to the rebuilding plan and continued to restock the farm, trading away Yovani Gallardo in the offseason and Mike Fiers, Carlos Gomez, Gerardo Parra, and Jonathan Broxton during the following regular season. If the 2015 season could be viewed as a step back (and it was - the manager was fired and the team was terrible), the moves that Melvin made and the players that he acquired could nevertheless be seen as steps in the right direction.

Then, in November of 2015, Melvin was shown the door. Clearly, there were other reasons besides an ownership freak-out - Melvin didn’t really believe in analytics while ownership did, and any time there’s a disagreement between management and ownership over something as big as “should we listen to the analytics department we paid a whole lot of money for?”, ownership usually wins. But Melvin may well have been the victim of increased expectations; had the 2014 team won only 72 games instead of 82, Doug may well still be the GM today.

Anyway, David Stearns walked into the general mangership in a pretty decent situation. There was no teardown to be done, no “For Sale” sign to erect on the front lawn of Miller Park. The Brewers already had about the 14th-best farm system, which is impressive considering that Melvin had basically emptied the farm for his all-in move in 2011. Hitting prospects like Orlando Arcia, Jonathan Villar, Domingo Santana, and Hernan Perez were already in the system, as were pitching prospects like Jacob Barnes, Zach Davies, Corey Knebel, Jimmy Nelson, and Brent Suter. Similarly, holdovers like Ryan Braun and Matt Garza were already inked to long-term deals. Obviously, that’s not the roster of a contending team, but there was an awful lot for Stearns to work with.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Stearns’ job was to sit idle and wait for prospects to arrive. Stearns began to trade actively, consummating so many trades that journalists began to refer to Stearns as Dealin’ Dave or Slingin’ Stearns. He had completed trades that involved 25 players before the 2016 season had even begun, and he only continued to deal players as the season wore on. This offseason, though, the turnover slowed down considerably, as the only major trade Stearns completed occurred when he sent closer Tyler Thornburg to the Red Sox; this, of course, turned out to be a lopsided trade that gave Stearns his best hitter of 2017 (Travis Shaw) and three minor leaguers in exchange for a pitcher who didn’t throw a single pitch in anger in 2017. Stearns also dumped Scooter Gennett on the Reds, which turned out to be a huge mistake; Gennett hit .296 with 27 home runs for a 126 OPS+ on the Reds (including his famous four-homer game), while Brewers’ starting second baseman Jonathan Villar hit .241/.293/.373 for a 73 OPS+.

Regardless, as the season opened, the story of the Brewers revolved around one of Stearns’ under-the-radar acquisitions: Eric Thames. Thames, after washing out as a Blue Jays farmhand, had put up Tuffy Rhodesian numbers in Korea, and while Korean leagues are worse than American ones (or even the Japanese ones where Tuffy made his name), a guy with a .381/.497/.790 slash line in South Korea is still probably worth a look. Sure enough, Thames hit 11 homers in his first 20 games while sporting a barely believable .371/.482/.929 (!!) slash line in that time. Oddly, as soon as Thames cooled down, the rest of the Brewers heated up, and from late April to mid-July, the Brewers were the team to beat in the NL Central. Granted, the non-Brewers teams of the NL Central looked awful for the first half of the season, so being “the team to beat in the NL Central” was damning with faint praise, but still - a team that’s 50-41 at the All-Star break would be a contender in any division. For the first half of the season, Milwaukee wasn’t fantastic at any one thing, but they were good at everything - they were fourth in the NL in runs scored, and they were seventh in runs allowed.


Unfortunately, one of the other characteristics that seems to have held over from Doug Melvin (or at least his 2011 and 2014 squads) is the propensity to start strong and then fade down the stretch. Obviously, Thames has cooled off since his hot start; of course, maintaining a SLG that would be 2001 Barry Bonds plus 60 points is a fairly tall order. However, the rest of the lineup has also gone quiet since the hot start; since the All-Star break, the Brewers have scored just 275 runs, good for dead last in the NL and 29th out of the 30 MLB teams. The pitching has been fine, but there’s only so much you can do when your offense never gives you a lead. Worse, the Brewers have absolutely failed to take advantage of cupcakes on their schedule in the second half - the list of second-half failures includes a six-game losing streak where all six games were against the inept Pennsylvania teams, as well as a three-game sweep at the hands of the Reds. Even despite all of this, the Brewers were able to hang around thanks to the Rockies’ equally mediocre second-half, but when the Rockies turned on the jets in the last week of the season, the Brewers were out of gas. The ultimate irony was that in the final (meaningful) game, the bullpen was the part that melted down; the offense, which has been horrible all second half, managed to put up six runs, while the bullpen, which had held opposing hitters below .200 in September, gave up seven to end the season for the Brewers.

The Brewers are, in all likelihood, a team in ascendancy. Granted, they probably need to find a pitcher to replace Matt Garza this offseason (Garza’s contract had a vesting option, which did not trigger due to insufficient appearances, and it also had a cheaper team option which could be nullified if Garza had a certain number of appearances,which he *did* hit. So….apparently he’s a free agent in the most complicated way possible.). It would also be nice if they could sort out their middle of the diamond - both Keon Broxton and Jonathan Villar had bad offensive years, and neither is particularly young anymore (27 and 26, respectively). In all honesty, though, the Brewers were a year early in contending - with a top four farm and a young team, everyone thought the contending would happen *next* year. If all goes reasonably well, it probably will.

The Brewers last made the playoffs in 2011. They have never won a World Series, although Milwaukee did win a title when the Braves played there in 1957.
 
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