Mathematical Eliminatory 2016

cannonball 1729

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It's that time again!

The way we did this thread last year kind of killed the thread, so I'd like to get back to just posting articles here and letting you guys comment - the (morbid) community of death-watchers that forms around this thread is always kind of fun. So let's get started!

With last night's Oriole victory, we lost.....



I guess the second Terry Ryan era didn’t work out quite as well as the first.


Five years ago, erstwhile GM Bill Smith was fired after turning a back-to-back division champion into a 99-game loser overnight. Terry Ryan, who served as the Twins’ GM from 1994 to 2007 and had been with the Twins in an oversight role since his retirement, decided to step back into the general managership, hoping to quickly reconstruct the tattered team and then perhaps pass it to someone better suited for the GM role than Smith.


For a while, everything seemed to be headed in the right direction. The minors were bursting with talent; before the 2015 season, the Twins had the second best farm system in baseball. Young, homegrown players like Eduardo Escobar, Tyler Duffy, Kyle Gibson, Eddie Rosario, Aaron Hicks, and (especially) Miguel Sano were arriving in the majors and having immediate impacts. Last year, the Twins even had a winning record for the first time since Ryan took over.


Then 2016 happened, and everything unraveled. Key young players either took a step backward (Escobar, Gibson, Rosario, Hicks, Duffy) or flopped upon promotion from the minors (Byron Buxton, Jose Berrios). Veterans like Ricky Nolasco, Phil Hughes, and Tommy Millone provided terrible innings and not enough of them. Wunderkind Miguel Sano proved to be human, as a falling line drive rate turned him into Mark Reynolds without the walks, while mental mistakes (the sort one might expect from a 23 year-old) put him on the receiving end of fans’ ire. The whole pitching staff collapsed; currently, Ervin Santana is the only pitcher this year who started more than one game for the Twins and has an ERA below 5. All told, the Twins are the worst team in baseball, and while the hitting has been respectable (especially Brian Dozier and his unbelievable 25 post-ASB home runs), the pitching is so awful that if the second-worst pitching team in the American League gave up 100 runs tomorrow, they would still have fewer runs allowed than the Twins.


How did everything go so wrong? Well, some of it was bad luck; young players are always a threat to regress, and many of them did. Part of it was a lack of veteran help; while Ryan got lucky with scrap-heap finds like Phil Hughes, Carl Pavano, and Sam Deduno in previous years, this year’s major acquisitions/scrap heap contenders were Korean slugger Byung Ho Park (.191 average, injured), Ryan Sweeney (released in spring training), and Carlos Quentin (also released in spring training). Part of it, too, was the fact that veterans appear to have reached the end of the rope – Tommy Millone, Ricky Nolasco, and Hughes previously had good years in Minnesota, but the Twins clearly didn’t expect all of them to go bad this year and certainly didn’t have a plan B for their whole pitching staff going south. In retrospect, it might be fair to point out that the Twins’ penchant for finding diamonds in the rough (like Hughes or Pavano) and then signing them to regrettable extensions instead of flipping them for prospects or letting them walk might have been part of the problem; the Twins seemed to have a tendency to believe that flash-in-the-pan seasons were real and replicable, rather than a great way to steal prospects from contending teams (like, say, Scott Feldman for Jake Arrieta).

Whatever the reason, this year’s disasterpiece cost GM Terry Ryan his job; he was replaced in June by Rob Anthony, with a full general manager search to happen this offseason.

Terry Ryan leaves behind an interesting legacy. Ryan’s instincts for how to build a farm system were exemplary; in both of his tenures as GM, Ryan took over a team with little talent in the minors and restocked the cupboard in just a couple of years. His ability to find key players via free agency and trades, on the other hand, were not nearly as successful; it is a testament to his ability to build a farm that he was able to put together winners in spite of this rather major handicap. In some ways, the Twins are the last truly “old-school” team, largely eschewing analytics (even more than the Royals), relying almost entirely on scouting, promoting almost entirely from within, and trusting themselves to simply scout better than everyone else. Whatever the sum total of Ryan’s tenure, he leaves the next GM in a favorable position, with a young core and a lot of help just a short ride away in Rochester. Of course, whoever takes over for Ryan will likely chart a very new direction for the Twins - there simply aren’t too many Terry Ryans left in baseball anymore….

The Twins last made the playoffs in 2010. Their last World Series championship was in 1991.
 

E5 Yaz

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It's like Christmas and Memorial Day rolled into one! Yay!
 

Phil Plantier

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I looked at the standings and saw the E and was so happy that this column would be appearing. Excellent summary as always.
 

cannonball 1729

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Thanks, guys! I decided to move from the .com back here so that I can get these up in timely fashion. It's important that we all celebrate the awful teams together!
 

Fratboy

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Huzzah! I love this thread. The Twins? Not so much. At this point I'm expecting Byron Buxton to be the next Stephen Strasburg.

Next up, sometime over the weekend, America's Team, and then in a few days, we will have 5 over the course of 2 days.
 

cannonball 1729

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Next up, sometime over the weekend, America's Team
Speaking of which....a 10-3 loss today did them in:



One of the truisms about baseball and life is that it’s hard to tell what the peak will look like when you’re in the middle of the valley. Thirteen years ago, the Tigers put together the worst season in American League history, losing 119 games and fielding a pitching staff that was just one loss away from having two twenty-game losers. Three years later, they were in the World Series. In 2009, the Nationals were a 100-loss laughingstock of a franchise who couldn’t even spell the names on their uniforms correctly; three years later, they were in the playoffs. In the major leagues, the valleys can be deep, but ascents can be quick.


Atlanta hopes, and perhaps even expects, to follow a similar trajectory. Frustrated with Frank Wren’s near-misses, the Braves decided to do a complete franchise reboot, cleaning out the front office, replacing Wren (eventually) with whiz-kid John Coppolella, and trading away nearly everyone of value. Not surprisingly, this made last year somewhat difficult to watch, as the 2015 Braves rolled out a young team full of talented players who might nevertheless have been better suited for a futures game. To their credit, the Braves of last season hung around better than management thought they would, but in short, little was expected last year, and little was given.


This year’s Atlanta team began even worse than the one before. The Braves stumbled out to a 5-18 start that left them ten games out of first before April had even concluded. Just thirty-seven games into the season, the Braves dismissed manager Fredi Gonzalez and decided to try something (anything!) else, sensibly deciding that a team with a .243 winning percentage couldn’t really get any worse. It’s probably not accurate to say that the Braves have been good since Gonzalez’s ouster, but certainly the Braves’ 46-60 record under replacement Brian Snitker is an improvement. If anything, the Braves have become more wildly inconsistent, as the Braves have run off a couple long win streaks (including two six-gamers), along with a couple of long losing ones (including a six- and seven-gamer). Most of the team is either young players or placeholders for young players that haven’t arrived in the bigs yet, and with the exception of Freddie Freeman, who has spent the second half of the season hitting like a less patient but more huggable version of Ted Williams (.315/.418/.626 since June 1!), those young players have had exactly the sort of up-and-down season that one would expect.

The next couple of years will be interesting for Atlanta. In addition to the opening of the new park, Braves fans will spend the next few years opening the gifts from the various trades that sent most of Frank Wren’s stars out of town. With the raw amount of talent in the Braves system, it seems unlikely that the franchise will head into a protracted tailspin like the Royals, Orioles, or Pirates did in the last decade; of course, “seems unlikely” isn’t exactly a guarantee, and there are a whole lot of possible landing spots between “protracted tailspin” and “world champion.” The more pressing matter for Braves fans is simply getting out of the valley in the first place; the future is bright, but there’s likely to be a bit of pain between now and then.

The Atlanta Braves’ only World Series title was in 1995, although the Braves did win a title in Milwaukee (1957) and in Boston (1914). Atlanta last made the playoffs in 2013.
 

cannonball 1729

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We finally have some more eliminants:



The Angels continue to be baseball’s most confounding team. Are they rebuilding? Contending? Talented? Bad? Good but injured? Buyers? Sellers? Owner Arte Moreno clearly wants them to be contenders, and last year’s team certainly made a bid for the playoffs, but the Halos are an old team with a lot of salary and few prospects, which makes any path forward difficult.

New GM Billy Eppler took over after previous GM Jerry Dipoto lost a power struggle with Mike Scioscia that, according to reports, was definitely not a power struggle at all. (As Jim Bowden put it, “I don’t think it’s a power struggle. I think it’s a philosophical struggle and Jerry Dipoto wanted more power as GM.” Oh. Well, glad we cleared that up.) Eppler faces the same difficulty as the last two GMs before him: how to make acquisitions that he thinks will help the ballclub while, at the same time, placating an old-school manager who has more power than he does and an owner who occasionally likes to make baseball signing decisions on his own. Billy doesn’t seem to be allowed to spend money yet, according to Arte Moreno’s announcement last offseason; of course, the Angels are still climbing out of salary hell and still owe $30 million to Josh Hamilton (who isn’t playing for them), $10 million to Huston Street (6.45 ERA, injured), and a whopping $140 million to Albert Pujols (109 OPS+ for an immobile 36 year-old first baseman), so it’s not a surprise that they’re not ready to throw money around like a drunken sailor again. Of course, the Angels farm system is dead last in baseball again (Keith Law actually called it “the worst he’s ever seen”), so if they’re going to put talent on the field, it’s probably going to have to come from outside of the organization.

Whatever the front office machinations may have been, this year’s on-field product was a disaster. Staff ace Garrett Richards was felled by injury in May, leaving the rotation to be spearheaded by Hector Santiago or Matt Shoemaker, one of whom, I suppose, had to be considered the staff ace by default. Pretty much everybody on the pitching end of the roster has either been hurt (Nick Tropeano, Cam Bedrosian), bad (Jered Weaver, Jhoulys Chacin, most everyone else), or both (Huston Street), and after Shoemaker went down with a horrific line drive to the head injury and Santiago was traded, the rotation has basically winnowed down to Weaver, Ricky Nolasco, and a grab bag of whoever happens to show up for work that day. So bad is the pitching that the Angels decided to wishcast on Timmy Lincecum this June, giving him nine starts to prove that he was completely, utterly cooked (2-6, 9.16 ERA). The lineup is the same as it always was – five good or great hitters (Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, Kole Calhoun, CJ Cron, and Yunel Escobar), one great fielder/mediocre hitter (Andrelton Simmons), and three automatic outs, which is good enough to go the playoffs if the pitching shows up….but the Angels’ pitching was so bad that it might well have torpedoed the ’27 Yankees offense.

Now, a team with good offense and terrible pitching is sunk if their offense ever goes into a slump; consequently, the Angels large chunks of the year mired in long losing stretches. In August, the Angels embarked on an 11-game stretch where they scored just 33 runs – unsurprisingly, they lost all 11 games. They muddled through completely forgettable June (8-19) where they scored 3 or fewer runs 13 times – notably, they won just one of those 13 low-scoring games. The Halos are currently limping to the finish line, struggling through a 1-8 stretch that has seen them fall below even the lowly Athletics in the race for AL West futility. They’ve lived or died by the offense all year, and for the most part, they’ve just died.

Next year is still a big question mark. Will Eppler be allowed to spend, or will Moreno tell him to wait for the stronger free agent class of 2018? Can Eppler fix the Angels’ broken farm system? Can Eppler and Scioscia get along? Can any general manager get along with a field manager who often inexplicably acts as the general manager’s boss? There are many questions with the Angels franchise right now, and there aren’t a lot of answers. Hopefully, they’ll figure it out soon; otherwise, Mike Trout might leave Los Angeles before he ever has a chance to make an impact on an Angels' postseason run.

The Angels last made the playoffs in 2014. Their last (and only) championship was in 2002.









For the last couple of years, Tampa Bay has become the new Moneyball-style laboratory of baseball. The Rays front office has excelled at finding little edges that no one else in baseball has noticed and then exploiting them until the rest of the league catches up. These edges ran through all aspects of baseball operations, from novel defensive positioning (the Joe Maddon signature) to help for young pitchers catching up to the speed of the game (Rays coaches would purposefully use mound visits to slow down the game, thereby keeping young pitchers from getting overwhelmed) to new usage patterns for starters (manager Kevin Cash began pulling pitchers after 18 batters instead of 100 pitches to avoid the “third time through the lineup penalty”) to more aggressive hitting approaches (Rays management decided that “work the count, get to the bullpen” doesn’t make sense in the era of dominant bullpens). Over the last decade, no team in baseball has been cleverer or more innovative on the diamond than the Rays.

The problem, though, is that ultimately, teams don’t win by finding and exploiting inefficiencies; they win by putting talented ballplayers on the field, and Tampa Bay isn’t really doing that right now. The Rays recent run of success from 2008-2011 was fueled by several fruitful drafts that yielded mainstays like David Price, Evan Longoria, Carl Crawford, either BJ or Melvin Upton, and James Shields. Now, that’s an impressive drafting record, but note that three of those five players were top-three picks in their respective drafts, and while it’s entirely possible to screw up a top pick (the pre-Neal Huntington Pirates did it annually for years), it’s certainly also easier to pick an impact player in those spots. Unfortunately, as the Rays got better, their spot in the drafting queue became later, and their draft yields have gotten smaller. They’re still reeling a bit from their disappointing 2011 draft, wherein the Rays managed to acquire a whopping ten first- and sandwich-round picks but managed to draft only one top prospect (Blake Snell), three players with varying levels of promise who can’t stay on the field (Taylor Guerrieri, Jake Hager, and Grayson Garvin), a backup outfielder (Mikie Mahtook), several washouts, and a murderer (Brandon Martin).

With less productive drafts, the Rays main avenue for talent acquisition has been trades. Much of the current firepower on their squad came over in trades for Carlos Zambrano, James Shields, Jesse Hahn, and David Price. Unlike the early 2000’s Rays, the current incarnation has been unafraid to trade prospects for young, established players; hopefully for the Rays, this will keep them out of the Waiting for Prospects to Mature Purgatory that they inhabited for almost a decade. Unfortunately, though, most of the tradeable vets are gone, and if the Rays are going to improve, they need to find a way to acquire more assets rather than simply trading current assets for different current assets.

This year, the Rays were essentially out of contention early. They played about .500 ball for the first month and a half, struggled at the end of May, surged at the beginning of June, and then collapsed with an awful 4-25 stretch that effectively ended the season. They suffered underperformances up and down the rotation (including regressions by Drew Smyly and ace Chris Archer), and while the infield was surprisingly good (due in large part to Evan Longoria’s bounce-back year and Brad Miller’s breakout), the outfield was a carousel of not-hitters. It’s likely that the Rays are a better team than their record indicates (they’re seven games under their Pythagorean), which gives hope for the future, but that hasn’t made it any easier to watch this year’s performance.

It’s hard to blame the Rays for their predicament. Winning without stars is difficult, but acquiring stars is tricky if your only options are the back of the draft, the trade market, and the free agent scrap heap. The fact that the Rays managed to defy gravity for as long as they did is testament to a talented front office, but as other teams have poached players, managers, and front office members from the Rays, it’s become harder and harder for them to find the next round of talented players. While the finances of baseball have largely become more egalitarian over the last ten years, the Rays and A’s still seem to be consigned to a financial underclass, stuck in relatively uninterested markets with stadiums in terribly inconvenient locations. The A’s have adapted to these circumstances with a binge-and-purge model of team construction (building, selling the assets before they leave, and then rebuilding again). The Rays are still new to the rebuilding cycle, as they’d never had much success before 2008; it remains to be seen how they decide to get out of their first post-success doldrums. One thing is certain, though: whatever path they choose will involve a whole lot of on-field experimentation.

The Rays last made the playoffs in 2013. They still await their first World Series.
 
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dynomite

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God that Angels write up is a work of art. Seriously, I want to keep these here but I feel like a wider baseball audience deserves to read these. This is baseball front office reviewing at its absolute best.

And more than anything else, I feel that the Rays are just the most boring team in baseball. Their uniforms are boring (except when they wear the baby blues), their stadium is horrible, their fans could care less, and their team lacks the terrible contracts or young superstars that make even bad teams compelling.

I will say, though, that with a little luck and a little improvement their rotation could be fearsome next year: Archer, Cobb, Snell, Smyly, Odorizzi is a pretty impressive group. Unfortunately for them, these starters are probably going to need to win a lot of 2-1 games for the 2017 Rays to just be mediocre.
 

montoursvillefan

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God THIS ENTIRE THREAD that Angels write up is a work of art. Seriously, I want to keep these here but I feel like a wider baseball audience deserves to read these. This is baseball front office reviewing at its absolute best.
Dynomite called it right, this thread should go mainstream, excellent analysis cb1729, great write ups!
 

TheYaz67

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The Halos could restock that awful farm system if they were willing to trade Trout, obviously.... but I think they would have to have another awful season/no progress on pitching to consider it, and they may have to consider it seriously if no high value pitching free agents want to sign with them for 2018 and they continue to suck (with a now 38/39 year old Pujols)....
 

Boggs26

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The Halos could restock that awful farm system if they were willing to trade Trout, obviously.... but I think they would have to have another awful season/no progress on pitching to consider it, and they may have to consider it seriously if no high value pitching free agents want to sign with them for 2018 and they continue to suck (with a now 38/39 year old Pujols)....
Could they actually restock the system by trading Trout? Since he's only one player they would only be able to restock from one system so maybe 2 or 3 top 100 guys. Is that really restocking?

I guess technically they could do something like Trout for (to use the system in familiar with) Moncada, Kopech, Devers, and Betts [note: I wouldn't want to do this trade at all] and then turn around and trade Betts for another team's top 3 or 4 prospects. If they ended up with 6 or 7 top 100 guys that would be a pretty powerful rebuild but I'm not sure any team would actually give up a very good MLer along with their top few ml-ers for Trout despite how good he is.
 

TheYaz67

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Cannonball must be deep in his bunker getting caught up on drafting all the summaries for the whole raft of teams who have met the bitter taste of the eliminator's sword in the last couple days...
 

cannonball 1729

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Cannonball must be deep in his bunker getting caught up on drafting all the summaries for the whole raft of teams who have met the bitter taste of the eliminator's sword in the last couple days...
You're not kidding. Let's see if we can get caught up from this weekend:



Give the Padres credit – they’re certainly not boring.


Last year, Padres' GM AJ Preller decided to drop the neutron bomb on the farm system in a quixotic quest to make the playoffs with mismatched parts. In the offseason, he traded away eleven of the Padres' top forty prospects, including six of their top ten and both of their top two, along with two outfielders, a starting catcher, and a frontline starter. In exchange, the Padres got a bunch of players who were All Stars in 2013, a roster that didn't fit together (usually, a team needs, say, a center fielder instead of three corner outfielders), and a whole lot of empty space on the “Top Prospects” list where prospects used to be. Naturally, Padres fans were ecstatic that the boring Josh Byrnes years were over and that the new GM was “bold” and a “risk-taker”; that enthusiasm would only be slightly tempered by the fact that the team that ended up taking the field last year was bad and old, and the players traded away were, in many cases, better than the ones received.

This year, the Padres decided to reverse course, trading away the players they acquired last year in an attempt to refill the prospect coffers with lesser players than the ones they traded away in the first place. Yonder Alonzo went to the A’s for Drew Pomeranz and some youth; Craig Kimbrel and (eventually) Drew Pomeranz were flipped to the Red Sox for three prospects and an announcer; James Shields would be flipped in June for Fernando Tatis’ son Fernando and a shortstop; and Andrew Cashner and Colin Rea (more on him in a moment) were sent to the Marlins in a large deal that sent Carter Capps, Jarred Cosart, Josh Naylor, and Luis Castillo west. These trades would help move the Padres’ farm system out of the bottom five and into the Top 25, which is technically an improvement, although that’s still about fifteen spots below where they were before Preller’s ill-advised shopping spree.

Unfortunately, it would later turn out that the Padres hadn’t exactly come by these new players entirely honestly. An MLB investigation revealed that the Padres kept two sets of medical records on each player: a real one for internal use, and a fake, Dr. Nick-style “everything’s great” set of records to send to inquiring teams during trade negotiations. After Colin Rea and Drew Pomeranz arrived on their respective teams, team doctors noticed that key information had been missing on their medical evaluations, especially after Rea’s arm blew out during his first Marlins’ start; eventually, Rea would be returned to the Padres and Preller would be (is) suspended for 30 days.


In lesser news, the Padres played baseball this year, and it was, as one might imagine from a roster that had sold off the best players from an 88-loss team, awful. The pitching was bad (91 ERA+); the hitting was worse (85 OPS+). There are certifiable black holes up and down the lineup (especially catcher, shortstop, and center field); apart from a breakout season by scrap-heap pickup Ryan Schimpf, the lineup basically managed to play down to meager expectations. The rotation is dreadful – the only player to spend all year in the rotation has been 23 year-old Luis Perdomo, a pitcher who managed to post a 5.68 ERA despite playing in a park that is big enough to host a supertanker convention. The Padres didn’t even score their first run of the season until the fourth inning of their fourth game, at which point their opponents had already combined to score 27 runs. San Diego hasn’t had a winning month all season, and they’ve only occasionally managed to stay out of last place in the division because of the equally dreadful Diamondbacks.


Now, most teams, when faced with a farm system that was decimated in just two years, a terrible team, and a front office so unethical that the GM isn’t allowed around the ballpark for the rest of the season, might consider the possibility of replacing the GM. (The kicker, of course, is that this isn’t even Preller’s first suspension – he was suspended from the Rangers in 2010 for illegal contact with an international signee.) The Padres, however, appear to think that Preller is the answer, so they’re seemingly willing to ignore trivialities like won-loss records, prospect lists, ethics, and reality. How long this will last is anyone’s guess; the Padres and their fans seem to be enamored by the idea that the Padres are actually exciting for once, but there’s only so long the excitement can last before reality sets in….

San Diego has never won a championship. Their last appearance in the postseason was in 2006, although they did lose a one-game playoff in 2007.



The rebuild continues. Last year, the Reds sported one of the youngest teams in baseball; so young were the Reds that at one point in the 2015 season, the Reds managed to set an MLB record by having 64 consecutive games started by rookie pitchers. This year, the team somehow got even younger, as they shipped out Aroldis Chapman and Todd Frazier before the season in an attempt to further augment their collection of young batters and pitchers; at the deadline, they sent Jay Bruce out as well. They’re now running out of people to trade; most of the key veterans are either untouchable (Joey Votto) or injured (Homer Bailey).


With a team as young and raw as the Reds, there’s been a good bit of testing and tweaking in Cincinnati to see who’s worth keeping and who isn’t. The good news is that this tweaking process actually appears to be working; the bad news was that at the beginning of the season, the testing and tweaking were entirely necessary, because the Reds were absolutely horrible. The Reds won just 9 games in April, and they followed that with an 8-win May. The bullpen was historically bad to start the season; their 6.76 ERA through the end of May put them on pace to be the third-worst bullpen in history and the worst in the specialized bullpen era. Similarly, the lineup couldn’t hit at all; they hit .238 in the first half of the season, caused as much by bad players getting too much playing time as by good players with slumps.


Starting around June, though, the Reds started to resemble a major league ballclub, and since the All Star break they’ve even gone so far as to have a winning record. The lineup still has some holes, but between second-half improvements for vets like Brandon Phillips and Zach Cozart and the promotion of good young hitters like Jose Peraza, the second-half lineup is much improved. Likewise, the rotation started the year in shambles, but after the Reds put Alfredo Simon on the DL and optioned John Lamb, young pitchers Dan Straily, Brandon Finnegan, and Tim Aldeman stepped in to deliver solid performances; in fact, the midseason return of staff ace Anthony DelSclafani now gives the Reds a rotation that goes four pitchers deep. The bullpen has been rescued from the brink of history by the arrival of rookies Raisel Iglesias and Michael Lorenzen, as well as the outrighting or release of underperforming players like JJ Hoover and Steve Delabar. The Reds have also managed to put a number of good defenders on the field (BP ranks them seventh in baseball in defense), which may also explain a good bit of the improvement in pitching. The moves still haven’t cleared out all of the deadwood yet, but it’s easy to understand why the Reds of the second half are far superior to the Reds of the first half. Throw in a farm system that seems to fall somewhere between 9th and 11th on any list, and you can see a future starting to form in Cincinnati.


It’ll still probably be a couple of years before the Reds make a run at the playoffs. However, if there’s one thing we know about Reds fans, it’s that they’re patient; the Reds haven’t won a postseason series in over 25 years, and they once suffered through a playoff series wherein it took the Reds two games to get a hit. At some point, the Reds may have to open the pocketbook for free agents, although no one seems to know what their finances will be, in large part because the Reds will have to renegotiate their TV deal this winter. For now, though, the Reds are young and improving, and for the first time since the teardown began, Reds fans can start to dream about what their team might become.

The Reds were last in the playoffs in 2014. Their last title was in 1990.


There’s an old saying that a house can take six months to build, but it only takes ten minutes to destroy.


This pretty effectively encapsulates where the A’s are right now. After the A’s ALCS appearance in 2006, the team was torn down, and players like Frank Thomas, Dan Haren, and Rich Harden were let go or traded off as the A’s retooled for the next run. Piece by piece, Billy Beane meticulously assembled the parts for the next run of success, suffering through a five-year stretch without a winning season from 2007 to 2011.


Then, after ALDS appearances in 2012-13 and a GFIN attempt in 2014, financial realities forced Beane to take a massive gamble and reshuffle the roster in 2015. The reshuffling dealt them little more than a dead man’s hand, and by the middle of the season, Beane had folded, traded away many of the most tradeable players, and moved onto the next contending team. Beane probably has the correct strategy, but for fans in the Bay, it’s surely a bit disappointing for the payoff of five years of bad baseball to be three years of good baseball, followed by more bad.


This is year 1.5 of the teardown. The A’s figured out that the ride was over about halfway through last year, at which point they sold off most of their veteran assets. This year, the restocking continued, as the A’s shipped off their entire starting outfield and ace Drew Pomeranz; they also managed to get enough dominant, healthy starts out of Rich Hill that they could trade him off as well. Now, they’re bad in all of the standard ways that a bad team is bad, stuck with the second-worst pitching and the fourth-worst offense in the American League. The A’s have gotten hot recently, happily playing spoiler for Kans as City’s playoff chances in the process, and they’ve watched Khris Davis turn into one of the most powerful hitters in baseball, but…..frankly, there’s been little to celebrate in Oakland this year. There’s a whole lot of youth on the roster, which is certainly a good sign, but while some of them have had success at the major league level (like Marcus Semien and Ryon Healy) many of those young players (like Kendall Graveman or Sean Manea) are still going through some growing pains.


The difficulty for Oakland is that unlike the early 2000’s, there’s not much hay to be made in exploiting statistical inefficiencies. Pretty much every team in baseball is aware of OBP and FIP, and now even a team like the Rays that relentlessly squeezes value out of inefficiencies can only churn out a few extra wins at the margin. The only way to put together a team with sustained success is to do things the other teams do except do them better, either by drafting or developing/coaching like the Cardinals (or the 90’s Braves) or spending like the Dodgers. For the other teams, there’s a very standard blueprint now for how to get good – trade the stars and vets for prospects, sign some fringy veterans every year, trade away the ones that play well for some more prospects, wait, get good, trade the stars and vets, repeat the cycle. That’s fine, and it’s a method that works eventually, but a team that resigns itself to this strategy is pretty much consigned to have more bad years than good. There are some A’s fans are comfortable with the idea that the good years are going to be surrounded by lots of bad, but there are certainly others who wish the A’s would try to actually have a sustained run of good teams for once instead of throwing in the towel after a couple of good years. Of course, if one of these good years would actually yield a championship, A’s fans might have a little more tolerance for all of the bad baseball.


The A’s last won a title in 1989. Their last postseason appearance was the one-game playoff in 2014.




The good news is that the Diamondbacks are no longer the unlikable franchise that they were under the hard-nosed tutelage of Kirk Gibson and Kevin Towers.


The bad news is that their new front office doesn’t really seem to know what it’s doing.


Now, when I say, “They don’t know what they’re doing,” I don’t mean it in the typical snarky, internety, dude-behind-the-keyboard, I-know-better-than-them-even-though-I’ve-never-been-in-a-major-league-stadium-without-paying-for-a-ticket manner that’s so pervasive on the worldwide web. I mean that if reports are to be believed, the Diamondbacks front office literally doesn’t seem to understand how the basic operations of a front office are performed. They bungled the finances of the 2015 draft, leaving money on the table instead of taking more players. They demonstrated a complete lack of understanding about the international bonus pool, signing Cuban defector Yoan Lopez for $8 million without realizing that a.) no other team would have offered him even $1 million, and b.) the signing would cost them a huge monetary penalty and preclude them from signing any major international free agents for two years. They don’t seem to know trade rules; Keith Law reported that after receiving one particular trade proposal from Arizona, a rival GM had to explain to the Diamondbacks that such a trade was impermissible by league rules. There are teams that don’t draft or acquire talent well, but the D-Backs seem to lack the ability to carry out basic front office tasks.


The problem with the Diamondbacks is obvious – the front office has too many baseball lifers and not enough guys with front-office experience. Certainly, there’s a place in the front office for a guy who’s been on the diamond his whole life, but usually that person is paired with somebody who understands the machinations of baseball rosters, the byzantine rules of the CBA, and the analytic revolution of the last 20 years. (This happens often – Nolan Ryan/Jon Daniels is a currently successful example). The Diamondbacks, though, decided to pair front office neophyte Tony LaRussa with front office neophyte Dave Stewart and somehow thought that their lack of front office experience would cause no problems. As comedian Mitch Hedberg might have said, that’s a bit like asking two people who are good cooks to go ahead and run a farm because, hey, food preparation is all the same.

The overarching problems have, in turn, led to more mundane ones like mis-evaluating talent. The Shelby Miller trade was a disaster; his 2016 ERA of 7.14 through August is apparently a homage to Babe Ruth and his 714 career home runs (also part of this homage is the fact that opposing hitters are hitting a Ruthian .312/.386/.523 off of him), and he’s spent a good portion of the season rediscovering his stuff in triple-A. Zack Grienke, who is in the first year of a $200 million deal that runs until 2021, is in the midst of his worst season since he was a 21 year-old kid battling anxiety issues; he also missed time this year with an oblique injury. Even some of the deals for prospects have been head-scratchers; rival GM’s were shocked when the Diamondbacks, after weeks of demanding the moon and stars for Brad Ziegler, pulled the trigger on a Ziegler-for-two-lesser-prospects deal. (One rival GM, when learning that the D-Backs had acquired Luis Alejandro Basabe, remarked, “I was just wondering if they know they got the wrong Basabe.”) Not all of the moves have been disasters; Yasmany Tomas and Jean Segura, for example, were smart acquisitions, and Didi Gregorius was flipped for two impressive young players. However, the misses have been big, expensive, and damaging.

Anyway, the result of all of these machinations is a team that absolutely can’t pitch. With an 84 ERA+, they’re currently the worst-pitching team in the National League, behind even the lowly Reds and Padres. The Diamondbacks are scoring runs at a fairly league-average clip, largely because Paul Goldschmidt is still a phenomenal player and Jake Lamb has learned to hit the ball really hard, but being outscored by an average of one run per game isn’t really a recipe for success, and, as a result, success is not a word that’s been often used to describe the D-Backs this season. The only thing that kept them out of the cellar of the NL West for most of the season was the equally woeful Padres, although now they’ve even started to catch the Friars in the race for futility.

The Diamondbacks have had a weird couple of years. Four years ago, the Snakes decided that they wanted to be the grittiest team in baseball, and by 2014, they were the baddest, beanballingest franchise on the planet, willing to fight anybody at the drop of a hat. (They were also “baddest” in the more traditional sense of “not able to play baseball well.”) Then, they decided that their emphasis on gritty culture wasn’t working, so they brought in two old-school iconoclasts who were all about playing the game the right way and made them for president and GM. It’s understandable that the Diamondbacks would care about their culture, but when that appears to be the primary interest of the ownership….it makes you start to wonder if they actually have a plan to acquire talented players rather than just accultured ones.

The good news is that most of the players on the team are still young – the only regular contributors this year whose ages begin with a “3” have been Zack Greinke and Michael Bourn’s corpse. Of the hitting core (Goldschmidt, Lamb, Segura, and Tomas), only Goldschmidt is above the age of 27, and most of the pitchers who had down years this year besides Greinke (Miller, Patrick Corbin, Robbie Ray, and Archie Bradley) are under 27 as well. As the team gets older and wiser, there’s certainly hope for the future, but before that happens, the front office might want to consider taking a look at the CBA and learning how those rules work….

Arizona last made the playoffs in 2011. They last won a World Series in 2001.
 
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cannonball 1729

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Next round:



Well, at least they had one good month. The Phillies startled everyone with a fast start to the season this year, going 15-10 out of the gate and convincing everyone that the Philadelphia youth revolution had begun in earnest. They followed up a hot April with a good first half of May, hanging around the top of the division and even drawing within half a game of first in mid-May before gravity kicked in and the descent began. June was where the wheels started to come off (but isn’t it always for the fast starting teams?), and by July, they were back to playing for pride and developing youth the way that they’ve been doing for the last couple of years. But the first fifty days were fun!


The Phillies have spent the 2015 and 2016 seasons largely undoing the damage done by the second half of the Ruben Amaro era. The first half of the Ruben Amaro era was marked by excellent teams, mostly identifiable as a good homegrown core supplemented by good on-the-fly replacements for players who went down or underperformed. Unfortunately, as the core reached free agency, Amaro decided to sign nearly all of them to long-term deals, putting his team on the hook for some sharp and expensive declines. You might remember that in 2013, the Phillies were the 3rd-worst team in the NL, plus they had the fourth-highest payroll in baseball and already had almost $90 million in contract commitments for 2015 even though 2014 still hadn’t happened yet. Moreover, as the team grew old and bad, Amaro decided that he needed to restock the system quickly and cheaply; as a result, Amaro refused to trade anyone away unless the trade partner basically agreed to give up their entire minor league system as part of the deal. (One of my favorite quotes of the era came from a rival GM, who described Amaro’s trade proposals as, “Could you drive your entire AA team to Reading and drop them off?”)


Fortunately, new GM Matt Klentak has decided to chart a different path. He’s not been shy about trading veterans for reasonable deals; Cole Hamels headed for Texas (again) and Chase Utley departed for Los Angeles last year, and young closer Ken Giles relocated to Houston in December, sending a smorgasbord of prospects to Philly in the process. Klentak has largely cleared the decks for salary; the Phillies’ only current financial commitments beyond 2016 are the $15 million owed to Matt Harrison (a contract that that the Phils took on in the Cole Hamels deal to better the prospect return) and either a $10 million buyout or a $23 million team option for Ryan Howard. (Guess which one they’re going to choose!) Now, the Phillies have a young team with an average age lower than every other team in baseball except Arizona, and they boast a minor league system whose teams combined for a .595 winning percentage (the best mark by an organization in eight years). There’s a lack of obvious impact prospects in the system, but the trades have stocked the system with an awful lot of intriguing players, especially in the lower levels. Of course, the big league team is still a bit of a work in progress, especially the league-worst hitting (and the fact that they gave over 300 at bats to a 36 year-old first baseman hitting .193), but reinforcements are on the way. The Phillies certainly aren’t as good as they were in April, but they’re a heck of a lot better than the last-place team that took the field last year.


Philly last made the playoffs in 2011. They won their last World Series in 2008.




The 2016 Brewers’ season will forever be marked as the season of the trades. You might remember that Doug Melvin, one of the last “gut feeling” and “old-school” GM’s, stepped down midseason last year after his all-in 2014 gamble went bust and his 2015 team played so badly that they fired the manager before Cinco de Mayo. New GM David Stearns, a much more “new school” or “analytics-friendly” general manager than the one before him, took over just after the trade deadline, assuming the helm of a disappointing team with a system that had largely been hollowed by the GFIN years of 2011 and 2014 (although Melvin did do some significant restocking at the 2015 deadline).

In the offseason, “Slingin’ Stearns” got to work, consummating nine offseason trades by the end of February that involved a total of 25 players. Now, not all of the trades were blockbusters (Garin Cecchini for cash, for example, likely won’t appear on any Year in Review retrospectives), but three of the trades were particularly noteworthy: Khris “Khrush” Davis was traded to Oakland for two prospects, second baseman Jean Segura was traded to Arizona in a six-player deal, and Francisco Rodriguez was traded for a prospect and a PTBNL.

The effect of these offseason trades has been….mixed. If we start with a surface level examination, many of the trades really don’t look good at all. Khris Davis, for instance, was traded for catcher Jacob Nottingham and pitcher Bubba Derby; while Davis is a 40-homer man, Nottingham is hitting .234 with little power and is striking out in almost one-third of his at bats in AA (albeit as a 21 year-old), while Derby has an ERA north of 5 and an acute case of gopheritis (1.2 HR/9 in high-A). Likewise, the Brewers sent Jean Segura to Arizona, exchanging a five-win player and the NL’s leader in hits for a league average innings eater (Chase Anderson), a toolsy kid with upside (Isan Diaz), and a player (Aaron Hill) who would later be flipped for two mid-tier prospects. In Detroit, Rodriguez continues to be one of the top closers in the league; meanwhile, the Brewers haul from the K-Rod deal was another prospect who’s struggling in AA (Javier Betancourt), plus a guy (Manny Pina) who’s generally been consigned to AAAA status (although he’s hit surprisingly well this year). That’s not a particularly impressive yield for a team depending upon trades to bring the next wave of talent.

What the trades did do, however, was open up space for other players, especially those who were acquired by Melvin in trades last year. Since Segura left, the Brewers have slotted Jonathan Villar into the shortstop hole, and Villar has responded with an absolute breakout of a year (112 OPS+ for a shortstop); he would later move to third to accommodate Orlando Arcia, the Future of the Franchise. Khris Davis’ departure opened up space for young players like Domingo Santana and Hernan Perez, who haven’t quite been Khris Davis but have made it easier for fans to take Davis’ departure; plus, offseason bargain-bin signing Chris Carter has managed to step into the “three-true-outcomes hitter” slot vacated by Davis, slugging 36 home runs to go with an NL-leading 192 strikeouts and a .223 batting average. Francisco Rodriguez’s departure allowed Jeremy Jeffress to step into the closer role and thrive (27 saves, 1 blown save, 2.22 ERA); while Jeffress was dealt to Texas in July, his replacement, Tyler Thornburg, still hasn’t allowed a run since Jeffress’ departure.

At the deadline, the Brewers traded even more players, sending reliever Will Smith to San Francisco, infielder Aaron Hill to boston, and Jeffress and catcher Jonathan Lucroy to Texas. Unlike the offseason trades, where the value seems to be largely tied to the space that the trades created, these trades were for impact prospects that most observers have at or near the top of their MiLB prospect lists. Now, after having a largely hollowed-out system by the end of 2014, the Brewers are considered to have one of the best systems in baseball, with eight prospects in the Top 100 rankings. That’s a pretty impressive turnaround for two years’ worth of work.

The most surprising thing, though, is not that the Brewers are young, or transitioning, or largely bereft of veterans – it’s that the remaining MLB team actually isn’t all that bad. Right now, the Brewers are right near league average in both hitting and pitching (just a tick below at bat and a tick above on the mound). They’re 15 games under .500, but most of that under-.500-ness stems from the fact that the Brewers went 10-20 right after the trade deadline; apart from that, they’ve had a surprisingly solid season. It’s likely that there will be more turnover in the immediate future (a Ryan Braun-for-Yasiel Puig and Brandon McCarthy trade was nearly consummated at the Aug. 31st deadline – promises were made to revisit the proposal in the offseason), but for a mid-budget franchise, the Brewers have recovered surprisingly quickly from a disastrous 2014 and a forgettable 2015.

The Brewers last made the playoffs in 2011. They’ve never won a World Series.
 
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nvalvo

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I'm optimistic about Philly. They have big-market spending potential, and can use 2017 to try to identify which positions they can fill from the farm before sinking a bazillion dollars into the loaded 2018 FA market. They will have a young core (so many young SP!) and zero money committed, and likely Harper, Price, Machado, Kershaw, Donaldson, Fernandez, etc. available in FA. We talk about the Yankees hitting that FA class hard, but they'll have competition: I'd expect Philly, along with Boston (assuming Price opts out), LAD, and Chicago to be right with them.

Meanwhile, Amaro's been doing great as a 1B coach.
 

santadevil

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As usual, great write ups.

I believe Arizona last made the playoffs in 2011. I was there with my Dad and Brother in Law.
 

TheYaz67

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Looks like the White Sox have now joined this "village of the damned", and it is oh so sweet to see the Yankees playoff chances now listed as "0.1%" after the loss to Tampa Bay today - meaning it is only a matter of time before their well deserved obit in this thread....
 

cannonball 1729

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Slowly getting caught up from the weekend....I'll post the Rockies tomorrow, but on Friday, we had



The White Sox may not have been good this year, but at least they were entertaining.

The fun began in spring training, when GM Kenny Williams plaintively suggested that perhaps “Take Your Kid to Work Day” shouldn’t happen every single day. Naturally, the club erupted at this unconscionable edict and Adam LaRoche (whose son Drake was in the clubhouse so often that he had his own locker) immediately retired. Chris Sale even went so far as to call Drake LaRoche “one of the leaders of the team,” a worrying and foreboding prospect for a ballclub ostensibly staffed by adults. Incredibly, members of the team even threatened to refuse to play a spring training game before manager Robin Ventura basically told them to shut up and play; eventually, the furor died down, order was restored, and Adam LaRoche went off to go fight crime in southeast Asian brothels.

Against this backdrop, the White Sox began to play out the season….and the season turned out to be just as exciting as spring training. The Pale Hose began the season as one of the hottest teams in baseball, going 23-10 out of the gate and jumping out to a six-game lead in the division. Then, on May 10th, with the Sox going for win #24 against the Rangers, the Sox had an 11-6 lead in the eighth when the bullpen absolutely collapsed, coughing up seven runs in an inning; the Sox would lose by a final of 13-11. That game would be the start of a disastrous 4-15 run; at the end of that run, the White Sox would endure a sweep by the Royals (all three losses in that series were the result of bullpen collapses) that would knock them out of the division lead for good.

Those first two stretches of White Sox baseball fairly well encapsulated the excitement and bipolarity of the season. When the White Sox have been on the field this year, no game has been over until it’s over – for both good and bad reasons. No AL team has blown more saves (29), sixth inning leads (20), or eighth inning leads (10) than the White Sox; conversely, only the Rangers have won more games where they were trailing after seven innings than have the Pale Hose. The curious thing about that blown save stat is that the White Sox bullpen has pitched well, but the White Sox have given their starters more rope than any other AL team (the White Sox had the most 100+ and 120+ pitch appearances in the AL); as a result, White Sox relievers have generally been called upon when there are already runners on base (White Sox relievers have the highest average leverage in the American League), which has made it oh-so-easy for White Sox relievers to blow leads. That’s the sort of thing that seems correctable, but….it doesn’t reflect particularly well on the in-game management.

GM Rick Hahn’s team-building strategy at this point is clear - build a veteran core and wait for the prospects to arrive in a year or two. The good news is that this is a perfectly sensible plan; the bad news is that the entire White Sox veteran core seems to be having major problems right now. Chris Sale apparently went insane in 2016; in addition to his bizarre leadership in the whole Drake LaRoche saga, Sale was suspended for five games after he decided to protest a set of ill-fitting throwback uniforms by taking a knife and tearing up every single throwback uniform in the clubhouse. Slugger Jose Abreu stopped hitting home runs for about a third of the season (specifically, June 23 to August 4), although it’s likely that family issues may have played a role in both the slump and its resolution; thanks to the normalizing of US/Cuban relations, Abreu was finally able to have his son visit him in the states in August for the first time since the his (Jose's) defection, and Abreu was recently granted a green card that would allow him to freely visit his family in Cuba. Midseason pickup James Shields was acquired in the midst of a historically bad four-start stretch in which he recorded just 34 outs and allowed 32 earned runs; since his return to the AL, Shields has posted an ERA of 7.11. Offseason trade acquisition Todd Frazier went through a brutal first half of the season, hitting .198 through June 28th; while he’s been better in the second half (especially his power numbers), he’s still only hitting .225 on the season, and most defensive metrics seem to think that his glovework has cratered. Even bullpen stalwart David Robertson has seen his ERA creeping closer to 4; that number was actually up over 4 for much of the season before a decent August brought it back down to earth.

So…is the veteran underperformance the fault of GM Hahn, Manager Robin Ventura, or someone/something else? Well, we should get some clarity on that question next year – Ventura’s contract is up at the end of the season, and given the lack of performance by the team and the fact that Ventura seems to have lost the clubhouse (after a recent series against the Royals, Jose Abreu opined that the White Sox don’t want to win as badly as the Royals do), it seems likely that there’ll be a new skipper for 2017. Of course, there are still many other unresolved questions, like “Can Chris Sale be kept under control?” “Is Jose Abreu’s second-half the Jose Abreu we should expect going forward?”, and, most importantly, “What do you do with a starter who can’t keep his ERA below 7 but still plans to charge you $10 million a year for his services?”, but since the White Sox now seem committed to keeping Sale and Abreu around, the questions are no longer about the plan for moving forward; now, everything will come down to the execution of that plan.

The White Sox won their most recent World Series in 2005. They last made the playoffs in 2008.
 

jon abbey

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I am looking forward to the Yankee one almost as much as you guys. I hope they still get to 82-80 to keep the streak of winning seasons (an amazing 24, going back to Showalter's first year in 1992), but moving up a few spots in the draft works too.
 

cannonball 1729

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Well, I suppose the bad (or good) news is that the Yankees can't be eliminated tonight, although the Royals have a good chance.

But first, let's finish getting caught up from the weekend. Saturday, the ax fell on..



This year was apparently the year where sportswriters got to remind us repeatedly that “Rockies” is only one letter away from “rookies,” because the Rockies' Rookies were the tale of the season.

The year began as the Trevor Story Show (the sportswriters loved that surname, too!), wherein the rookie shortstop hit 7 home runs and posted a .333/.357/1.111 line in his first week of professional baseball. Although Story soon cooled down from his 185 HR, 1.468 OPS pace, he continued to lead the league in homers and smash records, setting the NL rookie shortstop mark for home runs, winning the NL player of the week award twice, and coming up just three home runs short of Nomar’s shortstop rookie record before a clumsy slide into second base tore his UCL. Story ended his season in July with 27 home runs; he was on pace to break Frank Robinson’s record for most home runs by an NL rookie before the jammed thumb did him in.

Right around the time that Story’s season was coming to a close, rookie outfielder David Dahl reached the majors and immediately embarked on a 17-game hitting streak that tied the ML record for longest hit streak to start a career. He finally had his first 0-fer in mid-August (the 0-fer dropped his career batting average by 20 points!), and has since cooled off to “only” a .315 batting average. Apparently, it wasn’t enough this year for Rockie rookies to have a good start – they had to have historic ones.

Elsewhere around the diamond, rookies began to file into key positions, albeit without setting rookie records in the process. Rookie starting pitchers like Jon Gray and Tyler Anderson have turned in solid #1 or 2 starter performances, and while Gray seems to have hit the rookie wall, Anderson has gotten stronger as the season has gone on. Reliever Carlos Estevez slotted (albeit not entirely successfully) into the closer role after offseason acquisition Jason Motte flamed out and erstwhile closer Jake McGee blew out his knee; while the Wild Thing might need to push his walks down below 4/9 IP, he’s got electric stuff and is just 23 years old. Waiver-wire pickup (and 24 year-old rookie) Tony Wolters has been surprisingly average behind the plate, making up for lackluster hitting with exceptional pitch-framing and game-calling abilities. Add in breakout seasons for players like DJ LeMahieu (the league leader in batting average! Who saw that coming?), Nolan Arenado, and Charlie Blackmon, a post-injury re-emergence for pitcher Tyler Chatwood, and a Mark Reynolds who has improbably learned how to hit for average, you’ve got an exciting team that’s capable of beating anyone.

So….how does a team like that end up 10 games under .500? Well, part of it was probably luck – they’re .500 by Pythagorean record. Part of it was likely injuries – losing players like Story, Chatwood, McGee, Motte, Reynolds, and Gerardo Parra to the DL for significant time has certainly changed the face of the season. A big part of it was likely the back end of the bullpen; the Rockies were second-to-last in the NL in save percentage and tied for worst in baseball in inherited runners scoring. The biggest issue, though, is that the Rockies simply failed to take care of business against bad teams; Colorado had a 39-37 record against teams above .500 (fourth best in the NL), but they posted a league-worst 34-45 record against teams with losing records. Conventional wisdom says that veteran teams take care of business while rookie teams do not – clearly, that’s a veteran skill that Colorado’s youngsters still need to learn.

Going forward, the Rockies have most of the pieces in place for a successful run. Obviously, injuries are still a concern, but given that the Rockies biggest injury concern now plays in Toronto and took his massive contract with him, the Rockies are probably in decent shape. The biggest problem for the Rockies is the same as always – most free agent pitchers would rather sign with just about any other team in the world, including Bingo Long’s Travelling All-Stars or the Pyongyang Kim Jong Uns, than play for the Rockies. The history of Rockies free agent starting pitching begins and ends with the Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle disasters, and it will be a long time before a top pitcher takes an eight- or nine-figure deal to play in Denver if they have any other options available. Owner Dick Monfort has talked for a while about trying to make Mile-High Stadium a slightly less hitter-friendly park, but there’s only so much you can do with a stadium that’s built on top of a mountain. Without major free agents, the pitching staff will have to be built entirely from within, and while that's certainly doable (especially with the talent in the Rockies' system)...it doesn't leave much room for error if the development machine stalls out.

The Rockies last made the playoffs in 2009. They have never won a World Series.
 

E5 Yaz

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Folks, it's just as easy to send Cannonball a PM about a typo or mistake as it is to point it out in the thread
 

TheYaz67

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It would be sweet to not only clinch the AL East in New York, but also eliminate the Yanks on the same visit - do they need to win 2 or 3 to make that happen?
 

trekfan55

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It would be sweet to not only clinch the AL East in New York, but also eliminate the Yanks on the same visit - do they need to win 2 or 3 to make that happen?
Yes, but a Sox win AND an Orioles win will do that too.
 

cannonball 1729

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All right...we'll go out of order here. I still owe you all a writeup for the Pirates, Marlins, and Royals, but I have a feeling you all might want me to skip those for now and come back to them later, because tonight we had....




From 2000-2010, the Yankees’ “team-building” plan could basically have been described as an uncontrolled spending spree. The Yankees freely spent to acquire the best players, using either free agency or contract dumps to amass a collection of All Stars, MVPs, and free agents like Mark Teixeira, Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, CC Sabathia, Kevin Brown, Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Johnny Damon, AJ Burnett, Javier Vazquez, Roger Clemens, and the rest. Salary was no object – if a contract went bad (like, say, Carl Pavano or AJ Burnett), they simply papered it over with more money (like Roger Clemens or CC Sabathia). As far as strategies go, “spending all the money” is probably a bit like finding the cheat code in a Nintendo game, but it did work; the Yankees only won one championship during the century’s first decade, but that was merely the result of the unpredictability of the postseason - the Yankees had the best record in the AL in 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2009.

Unfortunately for the Yankees, the finances of the rest of the league began to catch up to the Yankees right around the turn of the new decade. As baseball teams figured out how to cash in on larger TV deals, those teams began to lock up their superstars before those stars ever hit free agency, massively weakening the free agent classes in the process. Now, the Yankees could no longer simply wait for the Felix Hernandez’s of the world to come to market and offer them the GDP of a small country. Having money is obviously still a major virtue, but it’s not the be-all that it was in the previous decade.

Right around the same time, George Steinbrenner passed away, and sons were not nearly as interested in spending the rest of the league into oblivion as was the father. The Yankees inexplicably went on a financial diet in 2012-2013 in an attempt to get under the soft salary cap of $189 million (despite the fact that they would lose starters at multiple positions and fail to upgrade other positions in the process); then, just as inexplicably, they reversed course in 2014, blowing up the cap to sign Masahiro Tanaka after signings of Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Carlos Beltran pushed them up to the mystical $189 million line. Obviously, having talent is better than not having talent, but cheaping out repeatedly and then going on a shopping spree for whatever talent is available is a bit like trying to fix a car’s transmission with chewing gum but then purchasing gold-plated tires because you were in a nice tire store.

Anyway, the last couple of years have been the reckoning for that strategy. Since a nightmarish 2012 ALCS that ended with a Tigers sweep and a Jeter injury, the Yankees have appeared in the postseason for exactly nine innings, during which they rapped exactly three hits and scored exactly as many runs as did the Easter Bunny. After 2013 and 2014 seasons that were notable only for the farewell tours of Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter, the Yankees had a good first half of 2015 before falling asleep sometime in early August; although they did manage to limp into the wildcard game last year, they were quickly dispatched by Houston in a game where they apparently forgot to show up. Over the last couple of years, the Yankees have been hamstrung by the large contracts, as they’ve been forced to pay dearly to watch the death throes of A-Rod, Teixeira, Jeter, Pettitte, Posada, and the rest of the over-35 crowd that’s populated their roster at great expense.

This offseason, the Yankees followed their eternal “don’t rebuild – reload” strategy; hence, they came into this season as lukewarm buyers, picking up closer Aroldis Chapman and second baseman Starlin Castro in hopes that the 2016 Yankees’ team would look more like the one that dominated the first half of 2015 and less like the one that sleepwalked through the last two months. Unfortunately for the Yankees, that didn’t work, and they’re currently watching the tail end of several bad contracts play out at a cost of $225 million. The lineup didn’t come close to the league lead in anything other than age; not a single hitter played in 100 games and put up a league average OPS. The farewell tours for Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira have been disasters; A-Rod barely managed to finish at (but not above) the Mendoza line before his involuntary retirement, and Tex has been just a few points Mr. Mendoza for much of the season. The rotation, other than a dominating Masahiro Tanaka and a surprisingly average Sabathia, was a mix of injury (Nathan Eovaldi) and ineffectiveness (Michael Pineda, Ivan Nova); and while the bullpen for much of the season was absolutely, absurdly, cartoonishly dominant, Misters Miller, Betances, and Chapman often found themselves waiting around for leads that never came.

The strange part came when the Yankees, faced with the reality described above, threw in the towel for the season and shipped many of their best players (specifically, Chapman, Miller, and Beltran) off to contending teams. Far from forcing the Yankees into an August to forget, though, the trades apparently spurred the Yankees to play better. Cashman plugged the newfound holes on the roster with prospects from the farm system, thereby letting the league in on a badly-kept secret: the Yankees’ farm system is really good. Most periodicals had the Yankees farm system among the top-three at the season’s midpoint, and in their first introduction to show, the kids played pretty darn well. Gary Sanchez has led the way, hitting a ridiculous .311/.387/.689 with 20 home runs in just 50 games (not including tonight) and almost single-handedly powering the Yankees’ lineup back into formidability. Aaron Judge hit .308/.379/.577 in his first week to announce his arrival; he’s massively cooled off since then (.121/.212/.241), although he’s still shown the occasional ability to hit a ball in such a way that the earth’s gravity only barely manages to bring it back down to the earth’s surface. Other youngsters like Aaron Hicks and Ronaldo Torreyes had their best months in August, apparently spurred on by the excitement of the Gary Sanchez Show. Veterans like Starlin Castro and Mark Teixeira began to catch the rookie fever and find their stroke in August; all of this, in addition to a solid second-half of the season by Didi Gregorius (who had overcome a slow start to have a good summer) and the elimination of deadweight like A-Rod, combined to make the Yankees a suddenly-good team.

After a 24-13 stretch of inspired ball, the Yankees went into Boston in mid-September on the outside of the playoff picture, needing a strong series to put them into wildcard position. Instead, Dellin Betances gave up a back-breaking walk-off home run to Hanley Ramirez, setting the tone for a skid that would see them lose 9 of their next 11 (as well as a skid where Betances would give up 8 earned runs in a span of just four appearances totaling 2.1 innings). Despite some inspired play in the last couple of games, that 2-9 stretch simply put the Yankees too far out of contention to overcome, and as soon as the Orioles re-awoke from their brief slumber, they were able to put the Yankees away for the season.

So….what do the Yankees do from here? Well, they’re still on the hook for $130 million next year, and while that probably means they can still spend another $100 million, there’s a lack of impact players on the 2016-17 free agent market. The Yanks are still going to hope that at least one of Luis Severino or Luis Cessa becomes a dependable starter, and they’re certainly hoping that hitting prospects like Aaron Judge, Tyler Austin, and Aaron Hicks can figure out how to hit in the pros at the same clip as they did in the minors (especially Judge and his 45% strikeout rate). Joe Girardi will continue to work his bullpen and Pythagorean magic as always, and the Yankees are going to stay far away from the cellar, but how much they do in the next couple of years depends on both how the youngsters adjust to the big leagues and how smartly the Yankees can use their ample funds. The good news is that they have a bunch of young talent on the way; the bad news is that the Yankees can’t simply spend their way out of this….it’s not 2001 anymore….

The Yankees last won a World Series in 2009.
 

cannonball 1729

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Slowly getting caught up....two nights ago, we lost:




Pirates GM Neal Huntington once noted that for a low-budget team, every offseason is critical because the margin for error is so low. Indeed, while most low-budget teams build from within through drafts and trades, the lifeblood of such a team is reclamation deals, make-good offers, and one-year gambles. Take a flyer on somebody good and you could end up with someone like Nelson Cruz or Carlos Pena anchoring the lineup or a rejuvenated Carl Pavano anchoring the rotation; choose poorly, and you’re giving three hundred at-bats to a Red Sox-era Tony Clark. Of course, the worst part of the whole setup is that the best case scenario would be that one of your gambles works out splendidly (like Cruz on the Orioles or Frank Thomas on the A’s), you get a year of amazing production….and then some other team with money signs that player to a long-term deal. Unfortunately, for a team that can’t afford big contracts…them’s the breaks.

Because of their fiscal realities, the Pirates have been playing the flyer lottery nearly every offseason. In previous years, the Pirates were able to spin yarn into gold with pitchers like AJ Burnett and Francisco Liriano, catchers like Russell Martin and Francisco Cervelli, and even Red Sox castoffs like Mark “The Shark” Melancon. As a result, they’ve been to the playoffs three years in a row, including last year where they won 98 games in the regular season. This year, the lottery became particularly necessary because of the number of key players who either retired or left as free agents (Pedro Alvarez, J.A. Happ, AJ Burnett, Vance Worley and Antonio Bastardo). Hoping fill the gaps with (as always) low-cost options, the Pirates gambled on the likes of John Jaso, Jon Niese, Ryan Vogelsong, Juan Nicasio, Neftali Feliz, David Freese, Sean Rodriguez, and Matt Joyce to fill the holes in the roster of last year’s 98-win team.

Now, all of these acquisitions were perfectly sensible gambles. Unfortunately, they didn’t work. The gambles on Jaso, Niese, Vogelsong, and Nicasio turned up snake-eyes. Freese was fine, Rodriguez and Joyce had good years in somewhat limited at-bats, and Feliz did a credible job as a reliever. Now, that’s not an awful haul from the free agent/trade market, but the Pirates were trying to replace the front end of their 2015 pitching staff plus their starting second and third basemen (plus five extra wins that Pythagoras didn’t feel they were entitled to), and that group simply wasn’t going to get it done.

Worse, several of the players who had been Pirates mainstays had down years. Francisco Liriano’s ERA ballooned by two runs; he’s since been dealt to Toronto, though he hasn’t pitched any better there. Ace Gerrit Cole has battled injuries all year, missing almost two months this season. Cervelli also missed time due to injury, as did third baseman Jung Ho Kang. The only pitcher who stayed in the rotation all year has been Jeff Locke, and he’s having his worst year in half a decade.

Perhaps the biggest problem for the Pirates this year, though, is that they couldn’t beat the Cubs. Against Chicago’s north siders, they went 4-14; against the rest of the league, they went 74-66. If they could have simply managed a .500 record against the Cubs (like the Cardinals have basically done), the Pirates would currently be a game ahead of St. Louis in the playoff race.

Even despite these problems, the Pirates were still in contention at the end of August. On August 29, the Pirates were at 67-62, just a game and a half out of the wildcard. That evening, however, the Pirates lost a marathon game to (who else?) the Cubs where Pirates took the lead in the top of the 13th, only to blow the game by letting up two in the bottom of that inning. That started a seven-game losing streak that pushed them permanently out of the playoff picture; they’ve struggled to reach .500 ever since.

So, how does Pittsburgh improve next year? The most obvious way is the farm; they invested over $50 million in the five years before draft salaries were finally capped in 2013. One option might be a petition to move the Cubs to the NL West, although that may be tricky. The biggest part, though, will undoubtedly be the free agent scrap heap – if they can pull talent out of the dumpster the way they have in the past, they should be right in the thick of things again next year.

Pittsburgh last won a World Series in 1979.
 

cannonball 1729

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All right - in anticipation of the big weekend, let's get caught up from the week:





If the season ended two weeks ago, this would have been one of the most fun Marlins seasons in a decade.


Recent Marlins seasons have involved all manner of awful, mostly self-inflicted crises, be they stupid things that the owner has done (like suing fans for failing to renew season tickets) to stupid things the owner has said (including nearly every comment he’s ever made about how great the new stadium is for Miami’s economy) to stupid things that managers have said (like when then-manager Ozzie Guillen noted that he “loves Fidel Castro”) to numerous transactions that made financial but definitely not baseball sense (nearly every recent offseason except the 2011 one had a major selloff of big contracts, and the ones signed in 2011 were sold off in 2012). The specific offenses have changed yearly, but the general disgust from the fanbase and the bad baseball have remained constant.


Last year was just as bad as usual, when a major Giancarlo Stanton contract extension was followed by candid Jeffrey Loria comments that Loria is counting on Stanton to opt out of his contract so that the Marlins only have to pay Giancarlo for the first couple of years. It also included a number of contract dumps that put the Marlins in a better fiscal position but a worse baseball one. At the beginning of May, the season would also include a strange managerial move where Loria fired the manager (for reasons unknown) and replace him with general manager Dan Jennings despite Jennings’ complete lack of coaching experience at any level; apparently, Loria had wanted Jennings in the manager role for quite a while, which made the timing of the move even stranger. (Jennings was not rehired and now works in the front office of the Nationals.)


This year, by contrast, the Marlins had a surprisingly good and drama-free year. Nearly every Marlins hitter in the lineup is above average and under 30. Ichiro had his asterisk-laden record breaking hit, passing Pete Rose’s total career number of hits (albeit on twice as many continents) and prompting Pete Rose to make some bizarre comments about being the “Hit Queen” that reminded us all how Pete Rose needs to talk less. Of course, nobody paid them much attention because it’s the Marlins and nobody cares about the Marlins…and suddenly, it was August 15th and Marlins were tied for the first wildcard. The Fish couldn’t keep up with the wildcard pace, though, and they began to falter around the end of August, going 1-10 over a span of 11 games at about the same time that the Mets pitching kicked into gear and the Giants righted themselves from their massive post-ASB freefall. All in all, though, the Marlins surprised most of the league, and for the first time, it felt that the Marlins had a season to build on.


Then, the unthinkable happened. Jose Fernandez, the face of the franchise and one of the most fun young players in baseball, was killed in a boat crash early in the morning on September 25. After canceling the game that afternoon, the Marlins played a game the next day that was tough to watch and - undoubtedly – extremely tough to play. That the Marlins have been able to play at all is a credit to the strength of the players; that they’ve been able to win a game feels beside the point.


It seems unlikely that the Fish are particularly worried about future seasons right now. For the Marlins, the pending tasks are much more basic: hold themselves together, make it through the season, and figure out how to deal with the hole in the both the organization and the lives of the players themselves in the offseason. There are certainly still unresolved baseball questions like whether Loria can stop intervening in dumb ways for a couple of years, or if the Marlins will ever be willing to spend money again after their 2012 disaster, or what the Marlins should do with their pitching staff now that their ace is gone, but those are undoubtedly questions for another day….

The Marlins have still never lost a postseason series. Their last World Series victory (and postseason appearance) was in 2003.




The Astros’ 2016 season was a heroic tale of a team repeatedly overcoming itself.


The Astros began the season with a postseason hangover, slumbering out to a 17-28 start that put them 10 games behind the Rangers. Then, they embarked on a 37-16 stretch that put them just a half game out of the wildcard by the close of business on July 24 (or, as it’s known in Boston, Varitek’s Glove in A-Rod’s Face Day). Not content to simply dig out of a huge hole once, the Astros decided to try it again, and they immediately descended into a 7-16 slide in an attempt to set up a big comeback. The good news is that they were able to pull themselves back into the playoff picture with yet another hot streak; the bad news is that they messed up the script and had a cold snap in the last week of the season when a hot streak may well have put them over the top. The Astros’ attempt to make the playoffs with a degree of difficulty is certainly laudable, but next year, they may want to shoot for a little more consistency.


The biggest problem for the Astros this year, and the biggest reason for their inability to repeat last year’s success, was the fact that most of their good starting pitchers regressed significantly. Doug Fister, Collin McHugh, Mike Fiers, and Dallas Keuchel all fell well below league-average; each of them saw their ERAs jump by anywhere from a half to two-and-a-half runs over last year’s total. Their seasons weren’t simply bad, though - they were wildly inconsistent, as all of those starters mixed good months with bad ones. (Losing Keuchel and Lance McCullers to injury in August didn’t really help with the consistency, either.) The bullpen, too, gives pause, especially Ken Giles, whose weak start (and, in truth, weak season) has caused many to question whether the Astros were smart in sending a platter of prospects for the 25 year-old closer. The hitting was also inconsistent, as great players (like MVP candidate and resident small person Jose Altuve) were mixed with complete black holes (especially Carlos Gomez and Colby Rasmus). Obviously, a team that wins 83 games has a number of things that it does well, but for a team this close to contention, there are a large number of things that could have gone right but simply didn’t.

The good news for the Astros is that the AL West is absolutely wide open right now; the Rangers’ Pythagorean record is only 81-78, and they're running away with the division only because of a ridiculous 36-11 record in one-run games. Moreover, there’s plenty of talent on the Astros' team - if the Astros can simply get their players to play up to what we've seen to be their capabilities, Houston could well be back in the playoffs next year. It might also be nice if the Astros started off next season by winning a few games; of course, the only time in Astros history that they made the World Series (2005), they began the season by going 15-30…so maybe that’s just the way the Astros do things.


The Astros have still never won a title.


Now, this is something Royals fans aren’t used to – for the first time in thirty years, the Royals are having a down year. Sure, the Royals have had far worse years recently, but in most of those cases, expectations were extremely low. This, by contrast, is the first disappointing season in quite a while.


The Royals, of course, are the defending champions; they’re also the two-time defending pennant-winners, marking the first time that a pennant winner has gone back-to-back since the 2010-2011 Rangers did so. The Process apparently worked; Dayton Moore managed to use smart scouting, veteran leadership, and gold-glove-caliber defenders to get the Royals to the point where they’re good; from there, timely hitting and a dominant bullpen got them to the Promised Land.


This year, though, the magic wore off. The hitting absolutely fell apart; the Royals’ 89 OPS+ is the worst in the American League, worse than even the A’s and Yankees. The rotation goes three deep – after Ian Kennedy, Danny Duffy, and Yordano Ventura, there were a lot of walks and not a lot of good pitching (by most metrics like quality starts and average game score, the Royals’ rotation was the 11th best in the AL). Most concerning, though, was the defense; after years of being one of the best defenses in baseball, the Royals (according to BP) were 24th in defensive efficiency this year. The bullpen, as always, was really good, but the rest of the team had holes. The surprise, then, wasn’t that they didn’t make the playoffs this year – it’s that they’re a near-playoff team with no hitting, no starting pitching, and no defense.


One can sensibly ask if the Royals can make it back to the series next year. In order to answer that, though, one would have to figure out how the Royals were good in the first place – and that’s still a mystery to the current author. Surely, defense played a role, and speed and a dominating bullpen helped, but the Royals have never been a particularly good-hitting team, and most of the good pitching for the Royals came after the bullpen door swung open in the middle innings. They always seem to be a team that’s better than the sum of its parts, either because they do the little things right, or because the clubhouse chemistry is strong, or because they have veteran leadership, or….really, I don’t know - I’m just listing off clichés here. Even in a year where everything has gone so wrong, the magic cliché beans have managed to push the Royals to a winning record; next year, if they can sell a few of their magic beans for some defense, they’ll probably be right back into contention.

The Royals seem to be the flipside of the analytic revolution; as teams have gotten smarter and more analytical, new inefficiencies seem to have opened up on the old-school side of things, and the Royals seem to have figured out that there’s hay to be made out of things like leadership and heart. Maybe in ten years we’ll figure out a Value over Replacement Heart or Leadership Runs Above Average metric and see the Royals as ahead of their time. Or maybe we’ll just figure out that some of us know less about this funny game than we think we do.
 
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cannonball 1729

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Down to the final day....here's the antepenultimate entry into the thread:




The story of the 2016 Mariners was basically the story of Felix Hernandez with some other people thrown in.

From the beginning of the season until the end of May, the Mariners had a dependable ace in King Felix. Through those first two months, Hernandez posted an ERA of 2.88 and allowed opposing hitters to hit just .217 off of him. Much has been made of King Felix’s declining velocity over the last couple of years; this year, Hernandez decided to compensate for the lower velocity by throwing more sinkers, thereby causing a spike in ground ball outs. For two months, that decision was paying off, and Felix looked like the Felix of old.

Then, on May 31, during a 16-4 win over the Padres, Hernandez pulled a calf muscle by – of all things – jumping off the bench to celebrate a teammate’s home run. Apparently, Felix had spent so much of his career on offensively-challenged teams that he’d never learned to celebrate properly when the offense did something good. The team initially planned to put Hernandez on the DL for a couple of starts; then, two weeks turned into almost two months, and by the time that Felix was able to return, the Mariners had dropped from a virtual tie for the division lead to a .500 record and a spot in the bottom half of the league.

Hernandez was able to return soon after the All-Star Break, but he wasn’t the same King Felix that we’ve all come to know. Since his return on July 20, Hernandez has posted a 4.33 ERA; since August 31, that number has been 5.79. Felix’s control appears to have deserted him, as he’s allowing more hard contact (and higher LD rates) than any other season of his career and finding the strike zone less often than ever before. Twice in the last two weeks, Felix took the mound in key games against the Astros; both times, he was shelled. If either one of those games had gone the other way, the Mariners would be playing today for a chance at a play-in game.

With Felix’s starts a question mark, the Mariners have been forced to ride the rollercoaster of five starters who are average on average (so to speak) but prone to bouts of being either great or awful; in the last 30 games, for instance, the Mariners have allowed three or fewer runs eighteen times and eight or more runs eight times. In previous years, Hisashi Iwakuma has been the shadow ace behind Felix, and Taijuan Walker has been the guy with the flashes of brilliance who hadn’t quite yet put it all together; this year, Walker is still the guy who hasn’t put it together and Iwakuma has been just as average as Felix. Somewhat unusually for the Mariners, they have offensive firepower (3rd best OPS+ in the AL), and they've been able to ride the bats of Robinson Cano, Nelson Cruz, and Kyle Seager to some long win streaks at times this season; however, if your pitchers are letting up 8-12 runs in a game, there’s only so much your offense can do. Last night’s elimination loss pretty well encapsulated the year’s problems, as the Mariners lost a 9-8 slugfest where the starter (Iwakuma) was knocked out in the fourth inning and the offense somehow made a contest of an otherwise unwinnable game.

It’ll be interesting to see how GM Jerry Dipoto moves forward in his first GM job where he doesn’t have to report to the manager. Unlike the Angels, where both the owner and the field manager get a say in personnel decisions, Seattle’s ownership has been very hands off, allowing the GM to largely shape the team in the manner he sees fit. Dipoto’s first offseason was notable for two major accomplishments: a complete revamp of the defense (now 7th in the league in defensive efficiency, up 12 spots from last year), and the creation of a bullpen that has more than two good pitchers (for the last couple of years, the bullpen has been the closer, the setup guy, and the arson squad). The biggest improvements from last year to this, though, were the breakout of Kyle Seager, the return of Robinson Cano, and the end of the bizarre and chaotic Jack Zduriencik reign as general manager. The Mariners certainly do not miss Zduriencik; he had a well-deserved reputation for berating his underlings, scapegoating whoever was nearby, and issuing crazy front-office directives (like a directive that Felix Hernandez needs to pitch batting practice, a demand that the manager summarily ignored). Notably, new managers would have good first years under Zduriencik; then, Jack Z and the manager would start fighting, the team would fall apart, the next manager would come in, and the cycle would continue. Of course, Dipoto's front office in Anaheim wasn't all hearts and flowers either, as he and his manager fought constantly, but that was probably the owner's fault as much as anything (since he picked a manager and a GM who didn't agree on anything). If Dipoto can avoid front office strife in Seattle, who knows - maybe the Mariners will actually have two decent years in a row for the first time in almost fifteen years.

The Mariners have still never won a World Series. They currently have the longest postseason drought in baseball; they haven’t made the playoffs since then-rookie Ichiro Suzuki led them to the postseason in 2001.
 

santadevil

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From 2000-2010, the Yankees’ “team-building” plan could basically have been described as an uncontrolled spending spree. The Yankees freely spent to acquire the best players, using either free agency or contract dumps to amass a collection of All Stars, MVPs, and free agents like Mark Teixeira, Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, CC Sabathia, Kevin Brown, Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Johnny Damon, AJ Burnett, Javier Vazquez, Roger Clemens, and the rest. Salary was no object – if a contract went bad (like, say, Carl Pavano or AJ Burnett), they simply papered it over with more money (like Roger Clemens or CC Sabathia). As far as strategies go, “spending all the money” is probably a bit like finding the cheat code in a Nintendo game, but it did work; the Yankees only won one championship during the century’s first decade, but that was merely the result of the unpredictability of the postseason - the Yankees had the best record in the AL in 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2009.

Unfortunately for the Yankees, the finances of the rest of the league began to catch up to the Yankees right around the turn of the new decade. As baseball teams figured out how to cash in on larger TV deals, those teams began to lock up their superstars before those stars ever hit free agency, massively weakening the free agent classes in the process. Now, the Yankees could no longer simply wait for the Felix Hernandez’s of the world to come to market and offer them the GDP of a small country. Having money is obviously still a major virtue, but it’s not the be-all that it was in the previous decade.

Right around the same time, George Steinbrenner passed away, and sons were not nearly as interested in spending the rest of the league into oblivion as was the father. The Yankees inexplicably went on a financial diet in 2012-2013 in an attempt to get under the soft salary cap of $189 million (despite the fact that they would lose starters at multiple positions and fail to upgrade other positions in the process); then, just as inexplicably, they reversed course in 2014, blowing up the cap to sign Masahiro Tanaka after signings of Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Carlos Beltran pushed them up to the mystical $189 million line. Obviously, having talent is better than not having talent, but cheaping out repeatedly and then going on a shopping spree for whatever talent is available is a bit like trying to fix a car’s transmission with chewing gum but then purchasing gold-plated tires because you were in a nice tire store.

Anyway, the last couple of years have been the reckoning for that strategy. Since a nightmarish 2012 ALCS that ended with a Tigers sweep and a Jeter injury, the Yankees have appeared in the postseason for exactly nine innings, during which they rapped exactly three hits and scored exactly as many runs as did the Easter Bunny. After 2013 and 2014 seasons that were notable only for the farewell tours of Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter, the Yankees had a good first half of 2015 before falling asleep sometime in early August; although they did manage to limp into the wildcard game last year, they were quickly dispatched by Houston in a game where they apparently forgot to show up. Over the last couple of years, the Yankees have been hamstrung by the large contracts, as they’ve been forced to pay dearly to watch the death throes of A-Rod, Teixeira, Jeter, Pettitte, Posada, and the rest of the over-35 crowd that’s populated their roster at great expense.

This offseason, the Yankees followed their eternal “don’t rebuild – reload” strategy; hence, they came into this season as lukewarm buyers, picking up closer Aroldis Chapman and second baseman Starlin Castro in hopes that the 2016 Yankees’ team would look more like the one that dominated the first half of 2015 and less like the one that sleepwalked through the last two months. Unfortunately for the Yankees, that didn’t work, and they’re currently watching the tail end of several bad contracts play out at a cost of $225 million. The lineup didn’t come close to the league lead in anything other than age; not a single hitter played in 100 games and put up a league average OPS. The farewell tours for Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira have been disasters; A-Rod barely managed to finish at (but not above) the Mendoza line before his involuntary retirement, and Tex has been just a few points Mr. Mendoza for much of the season. The rotation, other than a dominating Masahiro Tanaka and a surprisingly average Sabathia, was a mix of injury (Nathan Eovaldi) and ineffectiveness (Michael Pineda, Ivan Nova); and while the bullpen for much of the season was absolutely, absurdly, cartoonishly dominant, Misters Miller, Betances, and Chapman often found themselves waiting around for leads that never came.

The strange part came when the Yankees, faced with the reality described above, threw in the towel for the season and shipped many of their best players (specifically, Chapman, Miller, and Beltran) off to contending teams. Far from forcing the Yankees into an August to forget, though, the trades apparently spurred the Yankees to play better. Cashman plugged the newfound holes on the roster with prospects from the farm system, thereby letting the league in on a badly-kept secret: the Yankees’ farm system is really good. Most periodicals had the Yankees farm system among the top-three at the season’s midpoint, and in their first introduction to show, the kids played pretty darn well. Gary Sanchez has led the way, hitting a ridiculous .311/.387/.689 with 20 home runs in just 50 games (not including tonight) and almost single-handedly powering the Yankees’ lineup back into formidability. Aaron Judge hit .308/.379/.577 in his first week to announce his arrival; he’s massively cooled off since then (.121/.212/.241), although he’s still shown the occasional ability to hit a ball in such a way that the earth’s gravity only barely manages to bring it back down to the earth’s surface. Other youngsters like Aaron Hicks and Ronaldo Torreyes had their best months in August, apparently spurred on by the excitement of the Gary Sanchez Show. Veterans like Starlin Castro and Mark Teixeira began to catch the rookie fever and find their stroke in August; all of this, in addition to a solid second-half of the season by Didi Gregorius (who had overcome a slow start to have a good summer) and the elimination of deadweight like A-Rod, combined to make the Yankees a suddenly-good team.

After a 24-13 stretch of inspired ball, the Yankees went into Boston in mid-September on the outside of the playoff picture, needing a strong series to put them into wildcard position. Instead, Dellin Betances gave up a back-breaking walk-off home run to Hanley Ramirez, setting the tone for a skid that would see them lose 9 of their next 11 (as well as a skid where Betances would give up 8 earned runs in a span of just four appearances totaling 2.1 innings). Despite some inspired play in the last couple of games, that 2-9 stretch simply put the Yankees too far out of contention to overcome, and as soon as the Orioles re-awoke from their brief slumber, they were able to put the Yankees away for the season.

So….what do the Yankees do from here? Well, they’re still on the hook for $130 million next year, and while that probably means they can still spend another $100 million, there’s a lack of impact players on the 2016-17 free agent market. The Yanks are still going to hope that at least one of Luis Severino or Luis Cessa becomes a dependable starter, and they’re certainly hoping that hitting prospects like Aaron Judge, Tyler Austin, and Aaron Hicks can figure out how to hit in the pros at the same clip as they did in the minors (especially Judge and his 45% strikeout rate). Joe Girardi will continue to work his bullpen and Pythagorean magic as always, and the Yankees are going to stay far away from the cellar, but how much they do in the next couple of years depends on both how the youngsters adjust to the big leagues and how smartly the Yankees can use their ample funds. The good news is that they have a bunch of young talent on the way; the bad news is that the Yankees can’t simply spend their way out of this….it’s not 2001 anymore….

The Yankees last won a World Series in 2009.
I don't think we got a Happy YED thread this year. This post makes me happy though.
 

cannonball 1729

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 8, 2005
3,572
The Sticks
And finally:



For years, the Cardinals have been the poster team for the mantra that no one cares how you get into the postseason; the only thing that matters is if you get hot when you get there. For the last five years, and in six out of the last seven, the Cardinals have made the playoffs; in only two of those six years did they win more than 91 games. In 2011, the Cards managed to sneak into the wildcard spot only because of an Atlanta Braves’ collapse; they would go on to win the World Series that year. In 2012, they snuck into the playoffs only because of the new “second-wildcard” spot; they subsequently won the wildcard playoff game in Atlanta thanks to a dodgy infield fly call, then powered through the NLDS before losing a dramatic seven-game LCS to the eventual champion Giants. Perhaps no historical team better encapsulates this ethos than the 2006 Cardinals, who won just 83 games and then ran the table on three playoff opponents (including a Tigers’ team whose pitchers couldn’t stop throwing the ball all over the park) to win the title. For all the ink that has been spilled on what sort of team wins the playoffs, the clear answer is still going to be “whichever team gets hot at the right time;” after all, any 80+ win team that gets hot for two weeks is going to be hard to beat.

The irony of the 2016 Cardinals season, then, is that they failed to get hot at the right time. Halfway through September, the Cardinals were in a three-way tie for the wildcard. Sure, they hadn’t been great this season, and they’d been pretty lukewarm throughout August and September, but all they needed to do was outlast one of the other two candidates for fourth- and fifth-best team in the National League. Certainly, for a team with as much late-season and postseason experience with as the Cardinals, that should be doable, no?

Instead, the Cardinals simply stopped hitting in the clutch. Coming into yesterday’s game, the Cardinals had been hitting .243 with RISP since the three-way wildcard tie on September 20. In a September 28th game against the Reds that could have pushed the Cardinals into a tie with the Giants, the Cardinals trailed 2-1 going into the bottom of the ninth when Kolten Wong hit a leadoff triple; unfortunately, not one of the following three batters could muster even a sacrifice fly, and Wong remained on third as the game ended. Just a halfway decent stretch of baseball would have put the second wildcard away for the Redbirds, but the Cardinals 1-4 stretch last week pushed the Cards into a position where they no longer controlled their own destiny. Today, they were relegated to scoreboard watching and rooting against the Giants, and if there’s one cliché in baseball, it’s this: don’t ever be in a position where you have to root against the Giants in an even-numbered year.

This Cardinals crew was an odd one. The Redbirds had prodigious power; they led the NL in home runs, and there were twelve players on the team who had at least eight home runs this season. Of course, some of those players seemed to have trouble timing their home runs for when people were on base; for instance, team home run leader Jedd Gyorko hit 18 of his 30 home runs with the bases empty and managed to drive in just 58 runs on the season - in other words, more than half of his RBIs came from driving himself in. Regardless, between the home runs and a (perennially) strong bullpen, the Cardinals were never out of a game. On the other hand, a weakened starting rotation meant that the Cards were always having to play catch-up; the Cardinals were more often trailing than leading after the first inning, and if games had ended after six innings, St. Louis would have been 69-73.

The good news for the Cardinals is that the fix for the team is clear - somehow put more than one good starter into the rotation. The bad news is pretty much everything else involving the rotation. Michael Wacha took a big step back and battled shoulder soreness. $80 million man Mike Leake, the proposed answer to the rotation's woes, apparently broke a mirror on a black cat on top of an Indian burial ground this offseason, as the BABIP gods punished him with a .321 BABIP en route to a 4.69 ERA. Adam Wainwright had his worst year in a while, although the BABIP monster struck him as well to the tune of a .334 BABIP. (Maybe the Cardinals' 20th-ranked defense might have been the culprit here?) It seems likely that some of this can be fixed with a little more BABIP luck or better gloves in the field, although knowing the Cardinals, the most likely solution is that they grab some flamethrower out of their endlessly producing farm system (we'll call him, I don't know, Alex Reyes), throw him in the rotation, and wait for him to put up a 2.50 ERA.

Anyway, Cardinal fans are now faced with the unusual situation of having to find something else to do in October. Unfortunately, football doesn’t seem to be an option any more. Maybe they can take up golf? I’m sure that Cubs' fans would be happy to lend their clubs...

The Cardinals last won a World Series in 2011.






Rarely does one team have as much of an impact on the playoff hopes of another as did the Indians on the Tigers this year. Against the Indians, the Tigers went just 4-14 (which was 2-13 before the Indians took their foot off the gas in the final week); against everyone else, the Tigers went 82-60. If Detroit could merely have gone something close to .500 against Cleveland, the Tigers wouldn’t be in this mess. Adding insult to injury, the Indians weren’t exactly world-beaters against other good teams; they went 34-39 against non-Tigers teams with winning records, including 4-3 against first-wildcard winner Toronto and 1-5 against second-wildcard winner Baltimore.

Of course, the Indians weren’t the only team who had an outsized impact on the fate of the Tigers; the Braves certainly did, too. Usually, while the road through the playoffs goes through the best teams, the road to the playoffs is largely a result of taking care of business against bad teams. In that light, while the Tigers’ 1-2 weekend against one of the worst teams in the majors was undoubtedly crushing for Detroit faithful…it’s pretty much how baseball is supposed to work.

When GM Alex Avila took over the general managership from Dave Dombrowski last year, he had some major holes to fill in the rotation; the only pitchers on the Tigers who had decent 2015 seasons were Justin Verlander (who was good but injured) and David Price (who was traded partway through the season). It’s probably not correct to say that Avila rebuilt the rotation, but the rotation did look better thanks to some parting gifts that Dombrowski left. Rookie Mike Fulmer, acquired in the deadline deal that sent Yoenis Cespides away, was every bit as good as Verlander this year, giving the Tigers as potent a 1-2 punch as any in the league. Daniel Norris, who was acquired in the David Price trade, was a valuable addition to the rotation when healthy, though injuries limited him to just 69 innings this year.

Unfortunately, the starting pitchers that Avila brought in weren’t nearly as good. Mike Pelfrey, he of the two-year, $16 million deal, had a forgettable and injury-riddled season that ended with Pelfrey consigned to the bullpen. More calamitously, Jordan Zimmermann, who was the belle of the free agent ball before signing with the Tigers for 5 years/$110 million, battled a neck injury and put up disappointing numbers, making just 18 starts and posting an ERA of almost 5. Zimmermann was (and is) expected to be a key part of the Tigers rotation, but he’s currently costing them an awful lot of money for very little production.

On the other hand, the Tigers’ offense is one of the most fun units to watch in baseball. They’re not very fast, and steals only happen when conditions are just right (which, I suppose, is more than can be said for the Orioles, for whom steals happen almost never), but….man, can they hit. Leading the way, of course, is Miguel Cabrera, the perennial triple crown threat who could probably hit about .400 if he ever gave up on hitting for power. (It’s probably good that he doesn’t do this, however.) Behind him is Victor Martinez, who was a catcher once upon a time but has since migrated down the defensive spectrum to a position known as “hitter.” Past them are a whole bunch of other skilled batters; other than shortstop Jose Iglesias and catcher James McCann, who mostly stick around for their defense, the batsmen on the Tigers range from “above average” through “well above average” up to “Miguel Cabrera.”

The biggest questions going into the offseason are “What’s going on with Jordan Zimmermann?”, “How will the Tigers fortify the rotation (with or without Zimmermann)?”, and of course, “Can Detroit somehow steal away the Tiger voodoo doll that the Indians management apparently has in their locker room?” For the first one, the question is one of health, but it’s also one of pitch selection; Zimmermann seems to have abandoned his fastball this year, throwing it almost 10% less of the time this year than any other year in his career. (Perhaps it has something to do with lost velocity? Whatever the reason, it’s not working.) For the last one...I'm not really sure what they can do. I guess they could try to sneak in and take it, but that could be risky - we all learned from the movie Major League what happens when you mess with a voodoo doll in the Indians' locker room...

The Tigers last made the playoffs in 2014. Their last title came in 1984.
 
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LogansDad

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Nov 15, 2006
29,152
Alamogordo
Thanks for another great season cannonball.

I think the Cardinals write-up might actually make me happier than the Yankees one.