2022 Semi-Punctual Mathematical Eliminatory

cannonball 1729

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As has become tradition, I'm starting this about a week and a half late (it seems like there's usually some deadline for something in early/mid September that I need to take care of), but now that that's over...let's get this puppy fired up! I'll be posting stuff as it gets done (with the goal of getting caught up to real-time eliminations at some point soon!) but in the meantime let's at least get on the board here with the two worst teams:


washington nats.png


It’s always a bittersweet moment when a team decides to sell off its impending free agents. Sure, the sale is borne of a belief that the future can be better, and the writing has usually been on the wall for weeks or months...but there’s a dreadful finality to the fact that a team has intentionally decided to hamstring itself for the remainder of the season in hopes that future years will be better.

That moment takes on whole new level of despondency, however, when the traded player won’t be a free agent until next year – a tacit admission that the team won’t be worth watching next year, either. And that admission becomes particularly plaintive when that departing player won’t be a free agent for two and a half more years.

Ever since he arrived in Washington as a 19-year-old in 2018, Juan Soto has been an offensive force. He’s never finished outside the top-5 in the NL in OBP, never finished outside the top-7 in OPS, and never finished outside the top 9 in the MVP voting except during his rookie year (when he finished 2nd in the ROY voting instead). His 2022 season has been a down year only in comparison to his otherworldly 2020 and 2021; this year he’s “only” OPSed 147, a step down from last year's 177 but still an MVP-caliber number. Oh, and he's still just 23. By all accounts, he’s the sort of player you build a franchise around....the sort of player whom you lock up with a huge, back-the-Brinks-truck-up offer that makes him the centerpiece of the rebuild. And this season, that’s exactly what Washington tried to do, offering him a 15-year deal worth $445 million dollars.

But Soto had every reason to be skeptical of the offer. For one thing, the Nationals are soon to be sold, and Soto worried about committing a decade and a half to a “ghost” owner, as his agent called it. More importantly, though, while $445 million is a lot of money...it might not even be fair market value for Soto; that deal works out to less than $30 million per year, and it’s fairly likely that Soto will command far more than that on the free agent market after the 2024 season. (Plus, if there’s one constant with Boras clients, it’s that they looove testing the free agent market). Soto already makes $17 million after just a single, Super-2 year of arbitration – he stands a good chance of earning more than $50 million in his last two pre-arb years alone.

And so, in one of the most pathetic admissions of futility in baseball history, Washington all-but-announced that they were giving up on the next three years of baseball and traded the young star to the Padres. That the Nationals then traded Soto away is understandable – ever since they committed to a full-on teardown last July, the Nats have made little pretense that they would be a watchable team in 2022, 2023, or even 2024. Nevertheless, for Nats fans who happen to like watching competitive baseball, it was a sad reminder of just how deep the rebuilding trough will go.

Having traded away their last remaining star, the Nationals are now left with a bad, bad, bad baseball team. They’ve either set or are on pace to set all kinds of franchise and league records; their recent stretch of 43 games without a win by a starter was an all-time mark, and they're currently in the lead for the "worst three-year stretch after a World Series victory" crown, surging "ahead" of legendary teams like the 1914-16 A's and the 1998-2000 Marlins. Many words have been written about Patrick Corbin this year (none of them good), particularly in terms of his chase for 20 losses, his pursuit of the all-time worst ERA+ in history (his 64 ERA+ is now probably a bit too "good" to catch the all-time record, but he’s still vaguely in the running againt Jose Lima’s liveball-era record of 62), and his contract (six years, $140 million, running through 2024), but what’s been overlooked is his efficiency – had Corbin lost 20 games this year, he would likely have smashed the record for fewest innings pitched by a 20-game loser. Fortunately for Patrick, his FIP is about a run and a half better than his ERA, so he could see some significant improvement just by the team defense being a bit less clank-tacular, but...his FIP is still around 5, which isn’t exactly worth a $20 million-a-year contract.

All told, the current Nationals’ ERA+ is at 78, which puts them just a few points off of the worst pitching staff in the post-deadball era. The hitting has been surprisingly league-average (even after the Soto/Josh Bell trade), and Bell-replacement Joey Meneses has been a revelation in his short big-league tenure, but when the starters are posting a combined ERA of around 5.80, well, you’re not going to win a whole lot of ball games.

It’s going to be a long road for the Nats. They stand a good chance of finishing dead last in the bigs this year (although they picked the wrong year to do so, now that the top of the draft is determined by a lottery); their farm system is still middle-of-the-pack (even after the Soto trade!); and Patrick Corbin will continue to be a $20+ million dollar anchor for the pitching staff (in several senses of the word “anchor”). Hopefully the fanbase’s memories of 2019 are still fresh, because those are going to have to sustain the Washington faithful through several years of abject futility. In short, the new owners are going to have a lot of work to do.

The Nationals last made the playoffs in 2019.

oakland as.png

One of the time-honored maxims in sports is, “If you want a new stadium, make sure the fans have a miserable experience in the current one.”

This year, Oakland clearly took that maxim to heart. After the 2021 season, the A’s did everything they could to make the team less watchable on the field while also making the fan experience more miserable off of it. On the field, nearly every player who might actually be recognized by fans was sent to a team that is better at baseball: Matt Olson headed for the Braves, Matt Chapman went to the Blue Jays, Chris Bassitt and Starling Marte became Mets, Sean Manaea was shipped to the Padres, and essentially the entire bullpen was scattered to the four winds. Even manager Bob Melvin, under contract through 2022, was allowed to leave for San Diego.

Worse, though, the A's decided that now was a good time to make the fan experience as bad as possible. Parking prices went up by 75%, tickets around the park took hefty hikes, season-ticket-holder benefits were cut, innovative services like the subscription-for-standing-room memberships were discontinued, and the sales offices basically gave up on trying to get fans to come to the ballpark. A's fans have dealt with a teardown before, but the middle finger from the fan experience crew added a special new twist to the proceedings.

In fact, nothing could have better encapsulated the A’s open disdain for their own fans than a late-September 2021 season ticket “deal” wherein the A’s hiked their ticket prices, then emailed season ticket holders and asked them to re-up within the next week in exchange for one game in a complimentary suite and....wait for it...a free Matt Olson jersey. Because nothing says "fan relations" like offering a jersey that will be obsolete before it even arrives at the fan's house.

Now, it's not particularly unusual for a team trying to move to a new location to make life as bad as possible for the fans in the current location. In fact, the playbook that the A's are following was essentially written by the Expos in the early 2000’s, when the Montrealers played home games in San Juan and completely removed the Expos from local TV. On some level, it makes sense - if your fans don’t show up, you can claim that you’re just looking for a place where they will, and then you relocate to wherever you want to go.

What is weird about the current A’s situation is that they’re making life miserable for their fans in an attempt to move…to a different part of the same city. Sure, there have been flirtations with Las Vegas, including some entirely cringe-worthy photos of businesslike Dave Kaval surrounded by the tackiest Vegas décor imaginable. But Oakland is still plan 1a, 1b, and 1c. The A’s have zeroed in on the Howard Terminal project, a new downtown endeavor that is slated to house the A’s, revitalize the downtown, and cause mayhem in one of the largest shipping ports in the US. And yet...Oakland is also the city whose fans they're currently at war with. Usually, when a team is trying to move to a new ballpark, the team's actions have an undertone of, "We love our fans, but gosh this ballpark experience is terrible!" The A's, however, seem to have gone straight into "EVERYTHING WILL BE HORRIBLE FOR EVERYONE!" mode. Will those fans forget the madess of the 2022 season when the new park opens? Will the new location attract enough new fans that the antagonzation won't matter long-term? It's not clear what step 2 is for the A's if the new park opens in Oakland in 2025 or 2026.

Oh, and of course 2025 is still three years away, so the A's will have at least two more years of battling with fans and the local Coliseum Authority - the latter of which have basically given up, leading to reports of a stadium with backed-up sewers, colonies of feral cats, mold, a moth infestation, and concession stands so understaffed that the team has resorted to bringing in food trucks.

Unsurprisngly, fans this year have stayed away in droves. The average attendance has been below 10,000 a game, which (if it holds until the end of the season) would be the first time a team has averaged less than 10,000 in a non-covid year since Montreal still had a franchise. In fact, there have been four games so far this year where the announced attendance has been less than 3,000..which means that the A's are sometimes being outdrawn not just by other major and minor league teams but also by many megachurches, symphony orchestras, high school graduations, and perhaps even large college classes.

If I haven’t written much about baseball here, well, there’s not much to write. Fresh off of a bullpen collapse in 2021, the A’s turned over the roster and decided to start over. With Frankie Montas being shipped out at the deadline, the 2022 A's are basically down to a skeleton crew, and they've given a whole lot of playing time to older players whose time has passed (like Steven Vogt, Jed Lowrie, Tony Kemp, and Elvis Andrus - although the latter is having a dead-cat bounce in Chicago), former mega-prospects who have lost their luster (Ramon Laureano, AJ Puk), a whole lot of AAAA filler, and a couple of ringers to help other clubs remember that this is still, in fact, a major league team (like Sean Murphy or Cole Irwin). The farm system, which was weak going into last year and further depleted by the Starling Marte for Jesus Luzardo-and-others trade, is still a ways from supporting the next contender; the offseason trades have since derricked the system up to mediocrity, but there's clearly little major league-ready help on the way. Moreover, owner John Fisher has said (through team officials) that the payroll will not expand until there are "shovels in the ground" - because apparently team performance is just another bargaining chip to use in a real estate battle with the city - which means that there will also be little help arriving from the free agent market.

So...now, we wait. The Howard Terminal project seems to be moving forward, and 2025 or 2026 will come soon enough...but for the near future, it looks like the A's will be a horribly overmatched team in a close-to-condemned stadium with few fans to witness the spectacle.

The A's last made the playoffs in 2020. Their last World Series came in 1989.
 

DeadlySplitter

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Thanks for the annual thread as usual.

The <3000 A's games were mostly against Florida teams, also highlighting how unpopular baseball is there.
 

jon abbey

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Yay this thread yay!

The fascinating thing to me about the current A's is that they have very little overall talent but they have an absolutely loaded catcher pipeline. Sean Murphy is under control through 2025, and was just ranked 4th highest of catchers on the Fangraphs trade value list, behind Rutschman, Will Smith and Kirk. Then their best two prospects are also catchers, both top 50 overall MLB prospects, Shea Langeliers and Tyler Soderstrom. And if that wasn't enough, their first round pick this year (#19 overall) was Daniel Susac, the second highest catcher drafted.

I don't see how they don't trade Murphy this winter, that will be a bidding war.
 

loshjott

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Hate that the Nats are the first ones on here, but always absolutely love this thread!
Yeah, my season ticket group that's been in existence since almost the beginning is disbanding next year. Partly it's because our kids have largely moved away to college but we'd have continued if the team had any pretense of contending.
 

dynomite

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Praise be. God these summaries are good.

It’s always a bittersweet moment when a team decides to sell off its impending free agents. Sure, the sale is borne of a belief that the future can be better, and the writing has usually been on the wall for weeks or months...but there’s a dreadful finality to the fact that a team has intentionally decided to hamstring itself for the remainder of the season in hopes that future years will be better. That moment takes on whole new level of despondency, however, when the traded player won’t be a free agent until next year – a tacit admission that the team won’t be worth watching next year, either. And that admission becomes particularly plaintive when that departing player won’t be a free agent for two and a half more years.
Usually, when a team is trying to move to a new ballpark, the team's actions have an undertone of, "We love our fans, but gosh this ballpark experience is terrible!" The A's, however, seem to have gone straight into "EVERYTHING WILL BE HORRIBLE FOR EVERYONE!" mode. ... So...now, we wait. The Howard Terminal project seems to be moving forward, and 2025 or 2026 will come soon enough...but for the near future, it looks like the A's will be a horribly overmatched team in a close-to-condemned stadium with few fans to witness the spectacle.
 

E5 Yaz

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Folks, this thread is a gift from the baseball gods. Think twice if you feel compelled to nitpick, and just send Cannonball a PM instead.
 

cannonball 1729

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Thanks for the kind words, all! More coming later this evening...

Love that this thread is back. But why no mention of the Nats' World Series title in their postmortem?
My usual convention is that the tag at the end ("They were last in the playoffs in X, the last WS was in Y") only includes information that wasn't in the rest of the post. So if there's a mention of their last WS championsihp, I omit it from the tag, or if there's a mention that the team was in the playoffs last year, I leave off the "they were last in the playoffs in X" part (because it's obviously also their most recent playoff appearance).

I'm not entirely sure why I came upon that convention, but since it's now been 15 years since I started doing it, I think it's part of the brand at this point.
 

Mueller's Twin Grannies

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Thanks for the kind words, all! More coming later this evening...


My usual convention is that the tag at the end ("They were last in the playoffs in X, the last WS was in Y") only includes information that wasn't in the rest of the post. So if there's a mention of their last WS championsihp, I omit it from the tag, or if there's a mention that the team was in the playoffs last year, I leave off the "they were last in the playoffs in X" part (because it's obviously also their most recent playoff appearance).

I'm not entirely sure why I came upon that convention, but since it's now been 15 years since I started doing it, I think it's part of the brand at this point.
Ah, I blinked and missed the reference. Cheerfully withdrawn!
 

cannonball 1729

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All right! On we go. I'm not entirely going in order here, but I'll try to stay at least somewhat close:

55756

The 2021 Detroit Tigers’ season was a showcase for everything that erstwhile GM Al Avila did well: using the draft to fill the minors with exciting players, being patient, and hiring a manager who worked well with Avila’s newly-rebuilt analytics department.

The 2022 Tigers’ season, by contrast, was a showcase for all of Avila’s faults: bad evaluation of trade targets, a propensity to throw money at the wrong free agents, an inability to identify when a player is at his peak (and sell accordingly), and a lack of creativity.

You may remember that seven years ago, Al Avila took over the Tigers after Dave Dombrowski’s tenure ended in typical DD fashion: a run of success that was ended by bad contracts and a strip-mined farm system. Avila’s first order of business upon taking the reins was to determine whether he should try to extend the contention window or rebuild. He sensibly decided to try to extend the window...and then promptly whiffed on player acquisition, signing Jordan Zimmerman and BJ Upton to huge deals and receiving negative WAR, and then trading for K-Rod and also receiving negative WAR.

After a year and a half of failing to contend, Avila decided that it was time to tear down and trade veterans for prospects….and promptly whiffed on that as well. The Tigers’ two major trade pieces going into the rebuild were Justin Verlander and JD Martinez, and Avila managed to turn those perennial stars into Daz Cameron, Jake Rogers, Franklin Perez, Dawel Lugo, Sergio Alcantara, and, of course, the immortal Jose King. Later, Avila would have another major trade piece – Nick Castellanos – whom he would turn into middle relievers Paul Richan and Alex Lange. Worse, the Tigers had two young pitchers – Michael Fulmer and Mathew Boyd – who would have been great trade fodder because they absolutely didn’t fit with the Tigers’ contention timeline, but Avila instead decided to hold onto both pitchers until they were felled by injuries and thus untradeable.

One thing that Avila did not whiff on was the myriad high draft picks in his tenure. You see, Avila began his front-office career for the Marlins as a scout in Latin America and later the director of Latin American operations, and it was under his tenure that players like Miguel Cabrera and Livan Hernandez were signed to professional contracts. Clearly, amateur evaluation was in Avila's wheelhouse, and he drafted accordingly. With the Tigers posting a half-decade of futile results, Avila had many opportunities to pick at the top of the draft and/or trade veterans for prospects, and eventually the farm system began to bustle with talented young players.

2021 was the year that this pipeline began to reach the majors, and the results were indeed promising. After a horrible start, the Tigers played the last 130ish games at an above-.500 clip, including an impressive September where they held their own with playoff teams around the American League. 2022, then, was to be the year of the leap; Avila supplemented the young core by spending $220 million on Javy Baez and Eduardo Rodriguez and traded for both Austin Meadows and Tucker Barnhart. With a weak division and an expanded wildcard, the Tigers rightfully felt that this year would be a good one to take a shot.

Unfortunately, none of those acquisitions worked out for the Tigers. Rodriguez and Meadows have both taken time off this year to address personal issues – Rodriguez left the team to deal with his marriage and Meadows has had mental health issues, an Achilles injury, AND vertigo. Javy Baez hasn’t been the defensive wizard of years past (due in part to right knee soreness), which is a problem since he was always a “very good hitter for a second baseman” rather than being a very good hitter; this year, though, his hitting also atrophied to the point where he found himself doing battle with the Mendoza line through the middle June. Barnhart didn’t hit, which is not surprising, but the level of not hitting was new even for him; in 88 games, Barnhart has posted a slugging percentage of .260, largely because he has exactly nine more total bases than he does hits.

All of that would have been survivable, except….nothing else worked for the Tigers either. For one thing, the pitching rotation was decimated with injuries, headlined by surgeries for staff leaders Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal (Tommy John for Mize, flexor tendon surgery for Skubal). In fact, of the ten pitchers who made eight or more starts for the club, five of them are currently either on the 60-day IL or the restricted list - and that doesn’t even include Mize, who made two starts. With most of the rotation shelved, the Tigers found themselves turning to players who were over the hill (like Michael Pineda), not yet ready (like Elvin Rodriguez) or just plain AAAA fodder (like Tyler Alexander or Drew Hutchinson) with predictably bad results.

And the pitching was the good part of the team. The hitting was absolutely, unabashedly, historically awful. There are exactly two players currently on the Tigers’ roster who have an OPS+ above 100, and only one of them – catcher Eric Hasse – has played in more than 28 games. The team leader in walks has 38 and the team leader in home runs has 14; meanwhile, there are seven Tigers who have struck out at least 90 times this year. It’s not just the new or the fringy players who are causing the problems, either; key 2021 contributors like Akil Baddoo (.188/.270/.263, ended up spending time in AAA), Jeimer Candelario (.207/.264/.357), Jonathan Schoop (.199/.233/.318 – worst OBP among AL qualifiers!), and team grandpa Miguel Cabrera (.256/.305/.316) have seen massive offensive declines this year. In fact, the Tigers are actually on pace to finish with a lower OBP (.284) than any other AL team from 1973-2021, and the only reason that stat isn’t getting more press...is because the 2022 A’s (.281) are even worse.

It’s hard for a GM to survive such a disappointing season, and indeed Avila did not. A trade deadline where Avila inexplicably did nothing appears to have been the final straw; less than two weeks after that empty deadline, the Tigers’ ownership fired Avila and hired Giants exec Scott Harris to be president of baseball operations. The good news for Harris is that his new team appears to have a strong core on which to build; the bad news is that that core apparently forgot how to pitch, hit, or stay healthy this year. Harris has been evasive about how much of a rebuild is required for this Tiger team; after five years of rebuilding already, Detroit fans can only hope that they’re closer to the end than the beginning. There’s still probably reason for optimism in Tigertown, but for fans giddy from a 2021 that exceeded all expectations, this 2022 experience was an unwelcome dose of reality.

Detroit last made the playoffs in 2014. Their last title was in 1984.


55755

Charles Dickens once wrote:

Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher, who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he got his on horse down to a straw a day and would most unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died , just four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait of air.

For some reason, the Reds have decided to adopt this as their team-building model.

Going into the 2021 season, the Reds did very little to augment their team. In fact, their only offseason transaction of note was sending Raisel Iglesias to the Angels for a bucket of balls. Nevertheless, the team surprised the league with a winning record, largely on the backs of surprise or rebound performances from Nick Castellanos, Joey Votto, and (especially) Wade Miley.

This year, the Reds decided to double-down on this Dickensian model of team construction. Not content to simply trade away role players like Iglesias, the Reds decided this year to jettison key players as well. Castellanos walked to free agency, with Reds’ GM Nick Krall indicating that the Reds had not even bothered to engage the outfielder in contract discussions (apart from a qualifying offer). Fan favorite (though not necessarily good player) Tucker Barnhart was sent to the Tigers for a prospect, due largely to the fact that his club option would have cost the Reds $7.5 million dollars. Wade Miley, who was a Cy Young contender in 2021, was placed on waivers and claimed by one of the first teams with the option to claim him, the Chicago Cubs. In mid-March (i.e. just after the lockout), the Reds really went into firesale mode, dealing Sonny Gray, Jesse Winker and Eugenio Suarez around the league over the span of a week for still more prospects.

True to legend, the horse died. The Reds stumbled out of the gate, posting a stunning 3-22 through the first 25 games. The rest of the season has been only marginally better – much as any cellar-dweller does, they’ve had stretches of competence and stretches of, uh, less competence. Unfortunately, the veteran players who should have provided ballast have caught the bad baseball contagion; Joey Votto looks cooked at 38 (despite an age-37 season that garnered MVP votes), Tommy Pham developed an allergy to hitting that seemed to last up until his trade to Boston, Tyler Mahle battled injuries before (and after!) also being traded, Mike Moustakas is two years past his expiration date, and “closer” Hunter Strickland has an ERA north of 5.

Now, as much as it's easy to criticize the Reds for sending away all of their best players....it’s not entirely fair to pillory the Reds for walking away from the players that they did. Miley has been injured for much of the season for the Cubs. Castellanos has been terrible with the Phillies and is owed $100 million. Suarez has had a great 2022, but his 2021 proved that it is possible to post a replacement-level season while hitting 30+ home runs. Jesse Winker, always an injury risk, has lost almost 100 points of batting average from last year to this one. Barnhart’s hitting has degraded from “tolerable for a good defensive catcher” to “tolerable for a pitcher,” which is a problem unless he learns to throw a fastball. Individually, each of these decisions is perfectly defensible.

That said, the goal of a baseball team isn’t to correctly evaluate veterans and free agents; it’s to win baseball games, and the Reds do not do that. It’s certainly reasonable to say that team that’s rebuilding has little use for veterans, and it makes little sense for such a team to commit long-term to an expensive free agent whose best years may not align with the team’s window. On the other hand, the Reds are now in year nine of the rebuild, and fans certainly had every reason to think that this year would be a step forward and not a massive step back; after two straight years with records north of .500, the Reds looked to be on the cusp of competitiveness, and yet the Reds decided that now was the time to retrench instead of reinforcing.

So the question remains: are the Reds a team with a plan, or are they just a team that’s cheap? The fans who clamored for a boycott in March and have followed through with their threats from April until now certainly feel that the answer is the latter, and the Reds have so far have done little to assuage those concerns. Most teams will at least try to get maximum mileage out of young, cost-controlled players before free agency arrives; the Reds, however, have proven that even arb-eligible players (e.g. Raisel Iglesias) can sometimes be too expensive for them. There’s a running joke (and now a t-shirt!) in Cincinnati that claims that “REDS” actually stands for “Rebuilding Every Damn Season,” and as we approach the second decade of the rebuild, that maxim seems to become less of a joke and more of a statement of fact. Sure, we could talk about Reds' bright spots like reigning ROY Jonathan India or Guy Who Throws Really Hard Hunter Greene, but there’s little reason to discuss those topics until we figure out whether owner Bob Castellini is actually serious about fielding a winning team or simply content to cash revenue-sharing checks.

In the meantime….our thoughts and prayers to the horse.

The Reds last made the playoffs in the NCAA-style Covid tournament of 2020. Their last World Series title was in 1990.
 
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dynomite

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On the other hand, the Reds are now in year nine of the rebuild, and fans certainly had every reason to think that this year would be a step forward and not a massive step back; after two straight years with records north of .500, the Reds looked to be on the cusp of competitiveness, and yet the Reds decided that now was the time to retrench instead of reinforcing.
You had me at quoting Dickens at the beginning of this writeup.

I feel especially bad for Reds fans given the "What might have been?" of their 2020 season. They had a rotation of Trevor Bauer (Cy Young winner), Luis Castillo, Sonny Gray, and Tyler Mahle with Raisel Iglesias closing games out. The core of their lineup was old but decent Votto, Eugenio, Moustakas, Winker, and Castellanos. That's a good team.

Then COVID hit, they came back and had a weird partial season, grabbed a Wild Card spot and got bounced in the playoffs in 2 games. Who knows? Maybe over a full season their outstanding rotation wins them the NL Central?
 

cannonball 1729

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Moving right along:

55857

For small-market teams who have become enamored with the A’s model of teardown and rebuild, the 21st century Pirates serve as a cautionary tale of what can go wrong during such a process.

Nine years ago, the Pirates finally – finally – made the playoffs after twenty years in the wilderness. The young core and draft picks came together, GM Neal Huntington hit on some cheap free agent pitchers, and the Bucks went storming into the playoffs. The Pirates even managed to win a play-in game and two NLDS games before being bounced from the postseason by the Cardinals. The next two years, they repeated as wildcard-earners, though in both of those years they lost the wildcard game by running into a buzzsaw pitcher (Bumgarner in 2014, Arrieta in 2015).

Then the window began to close. For the next three years, then-GM Neal Huntington scrambled to assemble a rotation to back Gerritt Cole using only chewing gum and bailing wire, eventually culminating in the horrid Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows, and Shane Baz for Chris Archer trade that has since become a punchline around baseball. And thus the window slammed shut.

Notably, at no point during that entire run did the Pirates’ payroll ever go higher than 20th, and at no point did the Pirates' payroll ever break $100 million.

Look, winning a World Series is hard, so it’s not entirely fair to judge a team-building philosophy by World Series wins. But ever since Billy Beane began to spread the gospel of the teardown/rebuild/teardown/rebuild cycle in the early-to-mid aughts, low-budget teams have flocked to that orthodoxy as a way to enjoy occasional shots at a World Series title while avoiding spending money, and it's just...really, really, really hard to execute. The teardown/rebuild cycle for low-budget teams is a difficult enough proposition as it is; for every 2014-15 Royals, there are a whole bunch of 2010-13 Reds (whose postseason exploits are mostly memorable for the time the Reds were no-hit in the 2010 NLDS), 2013-15 Pirates (see above), or 2012-16 Orioles (who won one postseason series and one wildcard game over three playoff appearances). Spending seven years in a Process to win a title like the Royals is vindicatory; spending seven years in a Process for the honor of three postseason wins spread out over three years like the Pirates is just torture.

But all of those other teams besides the Pirates were at least willing to spend some money when the team became good. For instance, the Royals' payroll went up to 17th (or 15th, depending whose numbers you use) during their run; the Orioles and Reds, meanwhile, even broke into the top half of the league in payroll to support their brief title aspirations. The last team to win a World Series with a payroll ranked 20th or lower? That would be the 2003 Florida Marlins, who only managed to do so because they happened to have a young Josh Beckett and a young Miguel Cabrera in their employ.

So it seems reasonable to ask: for the Pirates…what is even the plan here? They’re not tinkering with new baseball philosophies like the Rays or A's, and they don’t even seem to have a specific team-building philosophy like the mid-teens “defense and bullpen first” Royals; if the past is any guide, they’re just acquiring young players in hopes that they’ll get good without spending a lot. And that's a bit like trying to land a rover on Mars if mission control only had Commodore 64 computers - sure, it could work, but it's a lot more likely that it doesn't. Collecting young players is great, but if the GM is still going to have to dumpster dive for a new pitching rotation every year during the team’s brief window of opportunity, well, that’s a strategy with a pretty low probability of success...and it's a strategy where one bad move (e.g. Archer) can really torpedo the franchise.

Ben Cherington has had about four years of rebuild, and it’s starting to become clear who the centerpieces of the next run are supposed to be: Ke’Bryan Hayes, Oneil Cruz, Quinn Priester, Henry Davis, Nick Gonzales, and Roansy Contreras are some of the obvious candidates. There are still some concerns with most of those players – Hayes has taken a step back from his exciting 2020 season, Cruz puts up prodigious numbers in the "exit velo "and "being really tall" categories but still doesn’t make consistent contact, Conteras had a forearm injury last year (and has had all sorts of fun service time shenanigans inflicted on him this year!), and Priester/Davis/Gonzales are still too far down in the minors to make real projections. That said, everyone on that list is 25 or under, so the upside on all of them is still pretty high.

But...then what? What happens if those guys become good? Cherington is a known quantity at this point; he’s great at drafting and development, hit-or-miss at free agent acquisition, and highly unlikely to be the sort of person who is going to find the 2020’s version of Moneyball. So what will the Pirates find that every other team in the league misses? How are they going to put together a World Series contender with no budget?

While we wait for the answers to those lofty questions...we are left to watch a 2022 Pirates team that is just not any good. They don’t hit (worst OPS+ in the NL), don’t pitch (second worst ERA+ in the NL), don’t field (second-worst defensive numbers in the NL per FanGraphs), and definitely don’t clutch (.196 BA with RISP and 2 out). Attendance is, as always, miserable (14th in the NL), and there’s little prospect of things getting much better in the next year or two. Perhaps the most excitement in Pittsburgh came in August when Dennis Eckersley called the Pirates’ roster “ridiculous” and a “hodgepodge of nothingness,” which made the Bucks players angry and even prompted one player to call the comments “crappy and bush league.” (Notably, however, the player did not call those comments “incorrect.”)

So now the Pirates are four years into a rebuild with little success and an unclear goal. Maybe, just maybe, they can “Royal” their way into a championship in 2025 or so, but for now, long-suffering Pittsburgh fans - who have seen just four winning seasons over the last 30 years - can be forgiven if they’re a little burned out by the whole “baseball” thing.

The Pirates last won a World Series in 1979.


55858


Give the Royals front office some credit – in an era where everyone is trying to copy the Dodgers, Rays, or A’s, the Royals decided to copy the Guardians.

(But don’t give them too much credit, because it hasn’t yet worked. And it appears to have led to the firing of team president Dayton Moore.)

Dayton Moore is in many ways the opposite of Al Avila, the other recently-departed front office executive from the AL Central whom I wrote about last week. Avila was (and probably still is) a good identifier of talent, but he wasn’t the most creative front office exec – his plan was basically to get good young players and hold them until they became good older players, then supplement them with good free agents. Moore, by contrast, is more of a gut-feel/go-against-the-grain-and-look-for-the next-big-thing type. Some of his more famous analytics-defying moves – e.g. signing Jeff Francouer to provide veteran leadership for a last-place team in 2010 – are the sorts of moves that come from an exec trying something different from the pack, and his ultimate success in 2014-15 came from his realization that in an era where starters were becoming less important, doubling down on defense and bullpen was a better (and cheaper) way to success.

In hindsight, it’s probably unsurprising that Moore and new owner John Sherman didn’t work well together. Sherman, a former minority owner in Cleveland, is much more analytics-focused than was the previous Glass ownership, and he clearly wanted to bring some of what was working in Cleveland down to Kansas City. In particular, the new owner wanted to replicate Cleveland’s “pitching lab,” wherein the organization sets up a unified, top-to-bottom developmental approach based around video analysis and spin rate maximization. The Guardians have used this to churn out good starter after good starter; Sherman saw no reason this couldn’t also work for the Royals.

Coincidentally, Moore had spent the 2018 draft picking all of the arms he could because he decided that college arms were the best talent available; since the Royals had several free agents leave after 2017, this gave the Royals a sizeable haul of promising arms. So the pitching stockpile that Sherman coveted had already begun to materialize.

And...that’s about where the synergy seems to have ended.

The implementation of the lab appears to have been rocky, with not all of the minor league coaches on board with the system and/or understanding what was required of them. (An early 2019 hiccup where new draftees were not allowed into the video room without a coach present appears to have been one of many issues that cropped up during the implementation.) Many of the coaches that Moore had brought into the organization were baseball lifers who knew their specialty inside and out, but they weren’t versed in the new data, didn’t know what it meant, and certainly didn’t know how to communicate it to the players.

Much of the implementation, then, appears to have been spearheaded not by Moore but instead his second-in-command, general manager J.J. Picollo. Picollo has spent the last couple of years hiring more analytics-friendly coaches (including and especially current Royals hitting coach Drew Saylor), and it’s been under his tutelage that the pitching lab has really come into full force.

Unfortunately, the new system hasn’t yet worked. The pitching staff at the MLB level is still bad, with both starters and relievers posting staffwide ERA's in the 4.70's. That 2018 draft class was an important one, with five starters from that class all reaching the bigs, and yet only one (Brady Singer) has really rounded into form - the rest of them (Brad Keller, Kris Bubic, Daniel Lynch, and Jonathan Heasley) have ERA's approaching or above 5. On the relief side, Scott Barlow and Dylan Coleman have put together a lockdown back of the bullpen, but there are a lot of question marks coming out of the 'pen in innings before the 8th.

So what’s gone wrong with the lab? Implementation obviously was an issue, and the canceled 2020 MiLB season certainly didn’t help. More pressingly, though, the pitchers that Moore picked in 2018 may have been bad fits for this new system. College-level pitchers are certainly safer bets to make the majors, but they tend to be lower ceiling; in this case, however, many of them also seem to have had low spin rates, which doesn’t really fit with the new approach. Can a team be successful in the 2020’s with a staff of low-spin rate pitchers? Perhaps...but not if the organization focuses all of its efforts on spin rate maximization.

With the lab producing only question marks, the divide between Sherman and Moore became ever more pronounced. It's not clear that there was ever an out-and-out power struggle in the Royals front office, but it's become evident that Moore and Picollo/Sherman had two fairly divergent team-building philosophies, and it also appears that there have recently been an increasing number of instances where Picollo's ideas won out. Moore had hoped (and even expected) that 2022 would be a breakout year; when that breakout failed to materialize, Sherman decided that it was time to let Moore go, handing the keys instead to Mr. Picollo.

While the off-field drama unfolded in new and exciting ways, the 2022 Royals's season has played out largely as the 2021 version did, with the pitching being uneven and the offense being largely the Salvador Perez and Friends Show (with special guest Bobby Witt, Jr! And Andrew Benintendi before his trade!). As the catcher continues to launch baseballs into orbit and Witt continues to find his big league footing, the rest of the lineup basically rides on the coattails of the veteran catcher and the rookie shorstop. To Moore’s credit, it’s easier to be a Royals fan than, say, a Pirates fan; Salvy is a fun player, some of the young callups have had good and exciting second-halfs (like Edward Olivares and the comically-mustachioed Vinny Pasquatino), and the lingering effect of Moore’s perpetual emphasis on defense is that while the team may not be very good, they’re still entertaining to watch in the field. But that’s still a long way from saying that the team is actually competitive, which is ostensibly the goal.

Will the Cleveland South system work? Well, Sherman finally appears to have the right guy running the show, so if ever this system is to succeed, now is the time. The one complicating factor, of course, is that the Guardians happen to have one of the best managers in the game, which is a luxury that not every team (Royals or otherwise) possesses. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting experiment that the Royals are running, and if it works, we may start hearing about another blueprint for rebuilding teams to follow.

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

cannonball 1729

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You had me at quoting Dickens at the beginning of this writeup.

I feel especially bad for Reds fans given the "What might have been?" of their 2020 season. They had a rotation of Trevor Bauer (Cy Young winner), Luis Castillo, Sonny Gray, and Tyler Mahle with Raisel Iglesias closing games out. The core of their lineup was old but decent Votto, Eugenio, Moustakas, Winker, and Castellanos. That's a good team.

Then COVID hit, they came back and had a weird partial season, grabbed a Wild Card spot and got bounced in the playoffs in 2 games. Who knows? Maybe over a full season their outstanding rotation wins them the NL Central?
HA! I kept hearing "stumbled out of the gate" for the Reds and thinking about that horse story and how the Reds had basically gone Oliver Twist on the roster.

I do also wonder if they might have been a tad more willing to spend had 2020-21 not been such a significant financial loss. Obviously, they're still the Reds, but it would have been easier to justify they expense of a good team if they'd sold 2 million tickets a year instead of zero the first year and less than a million the second.
 

santadevil

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I really enjoyed the Royals breakdown. I haven't been following them at all, so I wasn't aware of the internal struggles with the new owner and Moore
Nice to have some insights
 

cannonball 1729

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Onward!

55985
The goal of a development director is fall in love with their players – or at least to figure out how to mold those players into something they can fall in love with.

The goal of a general manager is not to fall in love with their players so that they can judge their players dispassionately.

The sooner general manager Bill Schmidt learns that distinction, the better the chance he has of keeping his job.

_________________________

Other franchises are worse at baseball, but few are as dysfunctional as the Rockies. It has now been twenty-three years since the last time the Rockies looked outside of the franchise to hire a general manager; ever since Dan O’Dowd was hired to be the GM in 1999, the Rockies have filled consistently filled openings by promoting from within, and in the two instances since then where the general manager left the organization, the Rockies filled the seat with another Rockie executive. Now, if your team is doing well, promoting from within is a perfectly sensible idea.....but the Rockies have only made the playoffs four times in those twenty-three years, and they’ve won exactly two playoff games in the last fourteen years.

In April of 2021, general manager Jeff Briditch parted ways with the organization, a perfectly reasonable outcome for an executive who spent a third of a billion dollars on free agents who combined to post negative WAR. Since the resignation occurred mid-season, it made sense that Colorado would promote someone from within the organization to serve as temporary GM until the Rockies could find the next man or woman for the job. Sure enough, the Rockies moved Bill Schmidt from his role as Vice President of Scouting over to the general manager chair; this was a role for which Schmidt did not seem particularly suited, and he responded by doing very little...as one might expect of a caretaker GM.

So the baseball world was a little bit shocked when, in October, the Rockies decided to remove the interim tag, making Schmidt the full-fledged general manager. No league-wide search, no thought of anyone else...the Rox just went ahead and turned the keys to their multi-billion-dollar franchise over to the next guy in line.

Why do the Rockies insist on hiring from within when that hasn’t worked in two decades? The primary reason seems to be that owner Dick Monfort fashions himself as a latter-day Theo Epstein, and the Rockies’ general manager role is as much about placating the owner as it is about actually building a good team. The Monfort-era Rockies apparently operate under three core tenets:

1.) Rebuilding is never an option,
2.) Bringing in high-priced free agents keeps the fans engaged, and
3.) Risk is bad.

Why bring someone into the organization who may have a different philosophy? Heck, where would you even find someone outside of the organization with that philosophy?

And now the Rockies have a general manager who can charitably be described as, I guess, “overly attached.” I mentioned earlier the distinction between a GM and a development director; at present, that distinction seems to be lost on Schmidt. Last year at the trade deadline, Schmidt traded only one player; this year at the deadline, he outdid himself by trading no one at all. In fact, the only major leaguers that Schmidt has traded during his year-and-a-half long tenure are reliever Mychal Givens and thoroughly mediocre outfielder Raimel Tapia – this despite presiding over two years' worth of absolutely terrible teams. Meanwhile, Schmidt has given extensions to catcher Elias Diaz (three years, $14.5 million), starting pitchers Antonio Senzatela (five years, $50.5 million) and Kyle Freeland (five years, $64.5 million), infielder Ryan McMahon (six years, $70 million), and reliever/35-year-old reclamation project Daniel Bard (two years, $19 million), leading the Denver Post to run an article titled, “Find someone who loves you like Bill Schmidt loves his Rockies.”

The problem with Schmidt’s love of his Rockies, of course, is that his Rockies aren’t good. For one thing, the cavalry of young pitchers all took huge steps back this year. In previous years, the foursome of German Marquez, Kyle Freeland, Austin Gomber, and Antonio Senzatela comprised a sneakily-good rotation whose effectiveness was hidden from the average fan by Coors-inflated ERA’s; this year, those ERA’s are inflated not just by Coors but also by the fact that they’ve pitched badly. Meanwhile, the starting lineup has been fraught with injuries and ineffectiveness; in particular, franchise cornerstone Brendan Rodgers appeared to lose his power stroke before taking his annual trip to the IL, while 180-million-dollar man Kris Bryant played in just 42 games before being felled with several different ailments (a bone bruise, plantar fasciitis, and a lower back strain). The Coors effect has always been an issue with Colorado teams, but this year the difference between home and road was large even by the Rockies’ standards; while the Rockies actually have a winning record at home (41-40), they are an NL-worst 24-49 on the road, largely because they’ve hit .227/.287/.333 when playing at a non-Coors park.

The good news for Colorado fans is that the Rockies are highly unlikely to go into a full-on rebuild; as long as Dick Monfort is involved, that is completely off the table. The better news is that there’s still a good amount of talent on the team, and with Schmidt in charge, it’s unlikely that talent will go anywhere else for a while. If the pitching can figure out whatever went wrong this year, and if the Rockies’ top-10 system can plug some holes in the majors, it’s possible (albeit remotely) that the 2023 Rockies could be competitive. Notably, injuries do seem to be a concern; in interviews, Bryant mentioned how much harder it is to recover from an injury at altitude, and given the multitude of injuries on the Rockies this year, it’s likely that Bryant is not the only one to have noticed this phenomenon. The biggest question, though, is simply whether Schmidt figures out what the GM role is all about; if he continues to fall in love with the wrong players, Monfort may eventually have to find another yes-man to act as an enabler for his free agent addiction.

The Rockies last made the playoffs in 2020. They have never won a World Series.

55986

Although it wasn’t official until the middle of 2021, the Cubs’ newest teardown actually appears to have begun in December of 2020 when the Cubs traded Yu Darvish (and Victor Caratini) to the Padres for prospects and Zach Davies. At the time, GM Jed Hoyer blamed the pandemic’s effects on finances (which seems like a strange thing to complain about if you’re as rich as the Cubs), but it was certainly a curious move – a team in the middle of a contention window doesn’t usually trade its ace for prospects.

After another half-season of futility, this unofficial teardown was made official in July of 2021 when Kris Bryant, Javy Baez, and nearly anyone else who fans might have recognized was shipped out at the deadline. For the remainder of 2021, the Cubs essentially fielded a minor league team, and this has largely spilled over into 2022.

And now that the Cubs are in the throes of their second full-on, burn-it-all-down-and-start-over-again rebuild, I think it’s fair to ask….why is this happening? When the Cubs embarked on a rebuild after the 2011 season, there were least good reasons – the 2011 team was terrible and the farm was fallow, and there was no point in spending oodles of money to supplement a nonexistent core...plus Cubs fans at that point were more than happy to sacrifice a couple of seasons and perhaps even a first-born if they could see a title in their lifetime. But two years ago the Cubs had a team that could compete with the rest of the NL Central, and yet they traded their ace, their first baseman, their third baseman, their left fielder, their bullpen, their shortstop – basically everyone except their catcher. Hoyer has mentioned finances as a potential motivator, but...those claims of penury fall flat when you’re talking about the fourth-most valuable franchise in MLB, especially in light of the fact that the Cubs just created a new TV network and successfully managed to shove it down local carriers’ throats.

So why is this happening? Well, in most franchises, “rebuild” is a get-out-of-jail-free card that a general manager can play once during their tenure – if you’ve badly mismanaged the big league club, just shout “Rebuild!”, trade away everyone on the team, and you’ve bought yourself three or four years without any expectations. Perhaps Hoyer had reached that point? Or perhaps owner Tom Ricketts just decided it was time to cash in on his investment, banking on the fact that Cubs fans will come to games regardless of how bad the team is? None of the potential explanations are particularly flattering, but when a wealthy team goes from “contender” to “dregs” in two years, the reason isn’t usually going to be a flattering one.

Either way, 2022 was the first full year of the rebuild, and it went about as badly as one would expect. The Cubs ended last year with a glorified AAA team; to that team, Hoyer added Japanese outfielder Seiya Suzuki, workhorse Marcus Stroman, and 2021 mirage Wade Miley. If “a Triple-A team plus an outfielder, a pitcher, and a mirage” doesn’t sound like the recipe for a contender to you, well, watching the 2022 Cubs would have done nothing to change your mind. The team was 12 games out of the division by Memorial Day – and then embarked on a ten-game losing streak. Going into the season, there was little expectation that the Cubs would be competitive, but even compared to those meager expectations, the Cubs’ season has been a disappointment.

Now, there are some causes for optimism. For one thing, the Cubs have played better in the second half than the first, and in September they’ve even looked (dare I say) good. For another, the Cubs are the least-clutch team in baseball (according to FanGraphs clutch stat) – they’re batting under .200 in close and late situations, which means that they’d be a much better-hitting team if they just had some normal clutch luck. Cubs fans will also be heartened by the fact that after this season is over, Jayson Heyward will finally - finally! - be released.

Really, though, the main cause for optimism is that there’s no reason for the Cubs to be where they are. The Cubs only have about $100 million in contract commitments next year; given the market they play in and the TV deal they’ve signed, they could easily support a payroll of at least twice that size. If Hoyer and Ricketts open up the coffers to sign free agents this offseason, the Cubbies could have a competitive team in short order; if they don’t, it’s fair for Cubs fans to ask where all of that stadium and cable money is going. The current ownership group obviously built up a significant reservoir of goodwill in their 2016 march to the World Series; it remains to be seen how much of it they can use before the fans start to become restless.

The Cubs last made the playoffs in 2020.
 

cannonball 1729

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A little slower going this week, but since I have this one done...
56124

The Marlins’ story is actually two very divergent stories: there’s a happy one about the pitching, and there’s a less-than-happy one about the hitting.

On the pitching side, the Marlins have cracked the changeup code - they've apparently figured out some way to grip/throw/develop an effective changeup, and they now teach this secret to all of their prospects. The result of this Operation Changeup is a team that throws changeups more frequently than anyone else in the league (19% of the time, three percent clear of the second-most changeup-throwing MLB team) and with a whole lot of effectiveness (they’re second in baseball in Fangraph’s clumsily-named “runs saved by per 100 pitches on changeups” category, trailing only the Braves). Even this probably understates how important a pitch this is to the young squad. Of the twenty-five NL pitchers whose changeups saved the most runs over the season, five of those pitchers are on the Marlins, including the runaway-winner in the category: Sandy Alcantara. Pitchers seem to be coming out of the Miami system with a changeup grip that allows them to throw a changeup with both a huge vertical break and a horizontal run that looks like a fastball, and even pitchers who went into the system with no changeup to speak of (like Alcantara or Pablo Lopez or Trevor Rogers ) are now flummoxing hitters with their two-seam change at the major league level.

On the hitting side, by contrast, the Marlins have done little right. When the rebuild began, the Marlins targeted five-tool players with low floors and high ceilings. As a result, they ended up with Jazz Chisholm and a bunch of people who do five things equally badly. (What’s that old line? “He’s got five tools but they’re all still in the shed?” That’s the Marlins’ young hitting right now.) In 2021, the Marlins’ young hitters were among the worst in baseball; in 2022, none of those players (apart from Chisholm) have gotten appreciably better.

This year, then, the Marlins decided to change gears and look outside the organization for hitters. They also decided to change their philosophy on what they were looking for; since five-tool free agents are expensive (or at least good ones are), they decided to focus on one tool, namely power and isolated slugging. For the first time since the teardown began, the Marlins began to expand the payroll, signing Avisail Garcia, Jacob Stallings, Jorge Soler, and Joey Wendle in an attempt to add some punch to the previously lifeless offense.

Unfortunately, those signings also went badly. Maybe it was bad luck, or maybe it was injuries (in Soler’s case, anyway), or maybe it was the fact that the Marlins inexplicably signed a bunch of right-handed power-hitters to hit in a home stadium that suppresses extra-base hits to left field. Who knows? Whatever the reason, the Marlins’ 2022 season was as punchless as their previous ones (especially as Chisholm was sidelined with a stress fracture in his back), with the Marlins battling the Reds and Pirates for worst OPS+ in the National League. The pitching staff has been excellent across the board, but good hurlers can only take you so far when the lineup hits .229 for the season.

In fact, it was another bad decision on a hitter that led to the most exciting drama of the Marlins’ season. Last winter, with the Marlins’ checkbook finally starting to creak open, erstwhile team president Derek Jeter though it would be a good time to go out and get a franchise cornerstone, and so he decided to target major free agent outfielder Nick Castellanos. Details of the episode are a bit fuzzy, but it appears that Jeter offered a five-year deal to Castellanos before the lockout, only to have owner Bruce Sherman rescind the offer after the lockout ended. Unsurprisingly, Jeter left the organization shortly thereafter, citing a “difference in vision” (i.e. ownership's unwillingness to spend money). Ironically, Castellanos has been terrible this year, so the Marlins may have dodged a bullet by avoiding his contract, but the long-term question of whether the new Marlins’ onwership is willing to invest in their team is still unresolved.

At the close of 2022, Miami finds itself in a place that’s very similar to where it was at the close of 2021 and 2020: they're a team with a lot of great pitching and a lot of terrible hitting. The first order of business will be to find a new manager, as Don Mattingly has announced that he, like his former teammate, is leaving the organization. The Marlins have announced that they will be pursuing a new strategy for assembling a lineup; due to the upcoming shift ban and the larger bases, Miami will now be focusing on hitters who are fast and can make consistent contact. (Of course, every other team will also be focusing on those things....). Obviously, with a young team in year six of a rebuild, the goal is to finish with more wins than the previous year, and yet the Marlins will finish 2022 with at most three more wins than last year. Can GM Kim Ng figure out how to put together an offense? Will Bruce Sherman finally agree to spend money despite being in a small market? And how did we come to accept that Miami is a “small market,” anyway? It’s Miami, for Pete’s sake – the ninth-largest metro area in the country, and a city with huge immigrant populations from all sorts of baseball-loving countries.

Regardless, we’ve now reached the turning point of the rebuild. The pieces are there, and it will be up to Sherman to spend money and Ng to spend it wisely. If they can assemble a lineup, the Marlins can be a playoff team in very short order. If not, the Fish may be consigned to the wilderness for another half-decade while the pitchers age out towards free agency and/or other teams figure out the Marlins’ changeup secret. It’s been a long time since the Marlins were any good, so the next couple of years will likely tell us a lot about whether the new ownership is an improvement over the Loria era or just more of the same.

The Marlins last made the playoffs in 2020. Their last title was in 2003.
 

cannonball 1729

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I'ma hit a couple of AL teams next. Rangers are today - I'll try to get the Angels and then Red Sox done over the weekend:

56196


Last July, the Rangers announced - in word and deed - that they were deep in the throes of a full rebuild. Just before the July 31 deadline, the Rangers shipped Joey Gallo, their last remaining homegrown star, off to New York for a batch of prospects. “When it comes to rebuilding, that can’t be at half-measures,” said team president Jon Daniels.

Something must have changed between July and December, because apparently the full-measured rebuild lasted a whole five months; in the offseason that followed, Jon Daniels suddenly decided that it was time to half-measure the rebuild again. Rebuilding teams don’t usually scour the free agent market for top talent; they rarely sign two of the top free agents on the market; and they definitely don’t spend over half a billion dollars in contracts.

Nevertheless, this was the path that Daniels chose. Whether that was a reasonable conclusion for a team that had won just 60 games the year before was unclear, but with the rebuild dragging on for half a decade, Daniels may well have felt like he had to take a shot to save his own job. Whatever the reason, Daniels convinced Rangers' ownership that the 2021 offseason was a good time buttress the roster with large numbers of US dollars. 325 million of those dollars went to shortstop Corey Seagar, 175 million more went to shortstop Marcus Semien, and just for fun, another 56 million were promised to Jon Gray.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a losing team aspirationally locking up major free agents to long-term deals. Notably, the players themselves haven’t exactly wowed in the first years of their long contracts - Seager and Semien are down about 20 points from last year’s OPS+es - but they’re still 4-5-WAR players at premium defensive positions. But the bigger problem is that taking a 60-win team and adding three 4-WAR players gives you (by my math) a 72-win team - except that this 72-win team now has a half-billion dollars in contract commitments to three players. Unless there's some reason to expect the rest of the team to improve, well, winning 72 games in a season only earns plaudits if you're playing in the NBA.

Unsurprisingly, ownership does not appear pleased that it was saddled with $500 million of new contracts while still watching a 70-win Rangers club. It’s hard to pin down whether the problem was manager Chris Woodward or the players he was given by Daniels...so ownership decided that the easiest thing was to fire both. On August 15, manager Chris Woodward was shown the door, leading to speculation that Woodward was being fired to save Daniels’ job; that speculation ended two days later when Daniels was also let go.

So how bad are the Rangers? It’s hard to say. By Pythagorean, they’ve been extremely unlucky; based on runs scored and allowed, they should be ten wins better than they are. Their record in one-run games is an abysmal 15-35, mostly because their starters have gone fewer innings than any other team in the AL except the opener-laden Rays and the injured Twins, leading to an overtaxed bullpen that ended up second in the AL in blown saves. The hitting is fine, if spotty; Nathaniel Lowe has been an absolute revelation and the free agent bats have been decent (if overpriced), which has helped cover some significant holes in the outfield and at DH. They're the sort of team where they could be competitive if the GM shoots the lights out on player acquisition this offseason this offseason, though they could also be terrible if he doesn't.

So now, with the team president gone and the manager also gone...incumbent (and not fired!) general manager Chris Young is tasked with the interesting task of moving on without his boss. Young was brought to the team at the end of 2020, so while he missed much of the failed rebuild, he's been around for at least a little bit of the "unsuccessful free agent" era wherein the farm system was fortified and the free agent money was thrown around like lawn chairs in a hurricane. Young has some work ahead of him - with such large contracts on the books, ownership probably doesn’t have much appetite for another half-decade of rebuild, but with a bit of a patchwork team, Young is going to have to hope that the newly-revitalized minor league system bears fruit sooner rather than later. Either way, this is a stunning fall for a team that looked so promising a half-decade ago; in 2016, the Rangers had a playoff team AND a young core of players ready to take over...and now they have neither.

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

cannonball 1729

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All right - now that YED has been observed, it's time to get back to observing some other eliminations. (Hopefully, my new laptop will hold up a little better than the old one did....)


56890

There’s nothing in sports that inspires pathos quite like the saga of a great player on a terrible team. All of the stories we tell ourselves about superstars in sports – that a single athlete can will their team to victory, that one player can change the culture of an entire organization, that the true measure of a great player is “RINGZ, BABY!!!” – it’s hard to square those notions with the sight of a great player toiling on a last place team. Sure, in some sports, a great player can make a difference; when there are only five players on the court at a given time, or when the ball is snapped to the same player on every play, that one player can lift a bad team to mediocrity or beyond. But in baseball, even the best hitter only gets to hit once every nine times, and even the best starting pitcher still sits in the dugout four days out of five.

By that measure, few teams have been as effective at inspiring pathos as the 2010’s-and-20’s Angels. For over a decade, the Angels have had at least one player on the team who can be reasonably argued to be the best player in baseball. Last year, the Angels even managed to one-up themselves by having TWO players who could compete for an MVP award. And yet…the Angels have continued to lose. The roster has been a graveyard of big-ticket failures; Albert Pujols, Anthony Rendon, Josh Hamilton, C.J. Wilson, Justin Upton, Vernon Wells, and numerous others have cashed prodigious Angels' paychecks for little production in the Trout era. The farm system has hovered in the bottom ten for a decade. And two of the greatest players in the sport continue to do amazing things for an absolutely futile team. It's like the baseball equivalent of Pavoratti singing the second tenor part in a local church choir, or of F.L. Olmstead designing courtyards in remote Siberia.

This year, though, there was a new twist, as the Angels transitioned from “futile” to “disappointing, and then futile.” Much to everyone’s surprise, the Angels came out of the starting gate like they’d been shot from a cannon, going 27-17 through their first 44 games. At the close of business on May 24, Los Angeles was just one game out of first place in the AL West - and just 3.5 away from having the best record in baseball. The Halos’ success wasn’t just a series of fluky one-run wins, either; the Angels had, to that point, scored more runs than any other team in the AL, and their Pythagorean win percentage to that point (.629) was even a tick higher than their actual winning percentage (.614).

Beginning with a 7-2 loss to the Rangers on May 25, the Angels went through a 14-game stretch where absolutely nothing worked. The lineup stopped hitting; they scored one run or fewer in six of those games, and they hit just one home run in a stretch of over 300 plate appearances. The bullpen exploded, blowing the lead in six of those fourteen contests. Mike Trout was sidelined with a groin injury. Even Shohei Ohtani looked mortal, hitting .192 and ERA’ing 9.00 over the stretch (and getting picked off of first base once, to boot).

The Angels tried everything they could think of to reverse the slide. Team meeting after team meeting was held – to no avail. The Halos changed every batter’s walk-up music to Nickelback – they still lost. Joe Maddon got a mohawk that he planned to unveil once the Angels finally won a game – he was fired before ever revealing his surprise. The nightmare dragged on and on, and when it finally – mercifully - came to a stop two weeks later, the Angels’ season was all but over.

From there, the Angels’ season became indistinguishable from every season before it. Mike Trout continued to play some of the best baseball in history. Shohei Ohtani continued to do things that no living person has ever seen on a major league ballfield before. And the Angels continued to lose baseball games. They trotted out a lineup that went four or five deep, in part because Jared Walsh and Anthony Rendon were injured and Jo Adell and Max Stassi forgot how to hit. The seventh inning was a perpetual nightmare for the relief corps, as their 4.61 ERA (and 5.17 RA) in that inning led to numerous blown leads. (Fun fact: the Angels were tied going into the seventh inning exactly sixteen times...and went 3-13 in those sixteen games.) And – for the seventh year in a row – the Angels finished with a sub-.500 record and missed the playoffs handily.

The offseason excitement will likely revolve around owner Arte Moreno and the question of whether he will sell the team. Moreno, who took over just after the 2002 World Series championship, has had a very up-and-down (in that order) tenure with the Halos. In his first seven years at the helm, the Angels won the AL West five times, and in 2008 the Halos even managed to win triple-digit games for the first time in franchise history. Since that time, though, they’ve had one postseason appearance and zero postseason wins. Meanwhile, in 2011, Moreno managed to cash out on the Angels’ recent success and their, ahem, “move” to Los Angeles to sign a huge, three billion-dollar TV deal in 2011; he’s since used the proceeds from that revenue to create some of the largest contract albatrosses in the sport’s history. This year, Moreno’s biggest accomplishment seems to have been getting rid of the mayor of Anaheim, which Arte managed to do by signing a shady real-estate deal with the city under questionable circumstances; the city later voided the transaction after the FBI opened an investigation into the deal. (The investigation is still pending…as are the lawsuits. But the mayor has resigned.) Unlike their green-clad neighbors in Oakland, the Angels can't really play the “we’re moving” card in their real estate battles (thanks to that massive TV deal that's unlikely to be replicated elsewhere), so for now the Angels and Anaheim will have to be awkward neighbors until the new ownership (potentially) arrives. In the meantime….at least there are two mega-stars to watch!

The Angels last made the playoffs in 2014.
 
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cannonball 1729

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Continuing with the Eliminatory reboot - I'ma hold off one more day on posting the Red Sox so that @Mueller's Twin Grannies can pretend the season isn't over, so let's skip ahead and post:

56914

Blaming injuries for lack of success always feels like a cop-out. Nearly every team has injuries, and overcoming injuries is another part of the game, like avoiding slumps or hitting in the clutch.

For the Twins, though, injuries were the story of the season. The Twins put 32 players in the IL, losing an AL-worst (or best?) 2,363 days of service to the list. Every starting pitcher of importance for the rotation spent some time on the IL; in total, ten starting pitchers spent a combined 967 days on the list. The bats were similarly decimated, as all of the players that the Twins expected (or hoped) would provide ballast to the lineup – Miguel Sano, Max Kepler, Byron Buxton, Jorge Polanco, even newly-purchased Carlos Correa – spent some time on the IL. (Although in Buxton’s case, an IL stint is just part of the Buxton package now.) At the deadline, the Twins traded for Tyler Mahle to shore up the beleaguered rotation...then he got injured and spent almost 50 days on the IL. At the beginning of September, there was a tweet pointing out that the Twins now had an entire contending team on the IL; indeed, the Injured Twins had five starting pitchers and every field position covered except third base. Perhaps this is what happens when you take a perpetually injured player and make him the manager of your club? It seems somehow fitting that Rocco Baldelli, the player who was always battling injuries and never seemed to meet recovery timelines, is now presiding over a whole team of such players.

The surprise, then, is that despite all of the things in the previous paragraph, the Twins were still in first place in the AL Central at the end of July. Sure, 53-48 wouldn’t put you in first place in most divisions, but with the White Sox inexplicably faltering and the Guardians not yet having found their stride (and with perennial injury risk Luis Arraez somehow staying healthy enough to lead the AL in batting) the Twins stood alone as the mediocre team in a sea of haplessness. With the playoffs in their sights, the Twins made deadline trades for Mahle and Jorge Lopez – neither of whom helped the team – and then somehow continued to hang around the top of the division until September. On September 4, the Twins were just 68-64...and yet they were tied with the Guardians for the division lead.

And...that's when everything fell apart.

From September 5 onward, Minnesota posted a record of 10-20, making them the worst team in the American League over that stretch. Worse, the Twins played the Guardians eight times in that stretch and managed to win just one of those eight games. Even for the terrible AL Central, a .333 winning percentage – and a .125 mark against the division leaders - is a death knell for any attempts at contention, and the Twins quickly went from division-aided contender to also-ran overnight. By the time the season ended, the Twins had dipped six games below .500, marking the second time in as many seasons that the Twins ended with fewer than 80 wins.

It’s hard to know what to make of the Twins. The Twins don’t have (or at least won’t spend) the funds to be a major market team, which means that they generally have to sign stars off of the “irregular” rack...and usually, that “irregularity” is an injury history. That makes the Minnesota a bit of a high-variance team; when healthy, they’re great, but when the injury bug pops up, things can turn bad in a hurry. The Twins aren't in a terribly strong division – the White Sox are running through Jerry Reinsdorf’s “Hey, I Remember That Guy!” Management Tour, the Guardians were .500 before a September hot streak, and the Tigers and Royals are terrible - so there's always an opening for Minnesota to make the postseason if they can keep enough starters on the field. And...sometimes they do; in 2019, for instance, the Twins won 101 games, and even in this lost year the Twins managed to stay in contention until the last month. Fortunately, Kenta Maeda should be back from Tommy John surgery last year, and the team should have plenty of firepower on paper for 2023...but until Minnesota starts signing or developing people who can stay healthy, the Twins are going to have to continue playing Russian roulette with Arraez's hamstrings, Maeda's ligaments, Buxton's knees, Max Kepler/Caleb Thielbar/Emilio Pagán/Trevor Megill's unvaccinatedness, and whatever other injuries and afflictions befall the budget franchise.

The Twins last made the playoffs in 2020. Their last World Series championship was in 1991.
 
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cannonball 1729

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All right, now that YED is over and the anniversary of the '04 championship has passed, I suppose it's time to put the Sox season to bed:

56976

One of the strangest aspects of 21st century sports is the widespread proliferation of “The Process.” Perhaps it only seems normal because we have so internalized it, but the idea that a team must go through some sort of wandering in the desert before entering the playoffs – as though winning a World Series were some sort of Biblical proposition - is a truly odd artifact of the American sports landscape. Certainly, no one expects Kansas basketball or Manchester United or even the 1940’s Yankees to take five years and retool; in fact, such a drought would cause the management to be emphatically fired (or worse!). But in baseball (and a few other sports), a Tankathon is actually welcomed by the fanbase and viewed as an indication that things will DEFINITELY get better in the future.

The most unfortunate thing to a fanbase in the throes of a Process isn’t just the losing itself; it’s that fans have to abide a complete loss of hope for the present. There’s no level of imagination or wishcasting where fans can say, “Well, maybe this is the year where everything comes together!” There’s not even a sense of how the team might be good; you can’t look at the roster and say, “Well, X will give us 15 wins and Y will hit 30 homers – now we just fill in the rest.” It’s just a wasteland - a mishmash of players (or a "hodgepodge of nothingness," as Dennis Eckersley might say) with no indication of where the cornerstone for the next contender might be.

For various reasons, the 2000’s Red Sox have been one of the few teams to be immune to this Process, which means that fans have always been able to imagine what the next good Sox team might look like. Sure, there have been bad years – years where they missed the playoffs, years where they were downright terrible – but none of those down years were a sign of a longer rebuild, and in each of those years it was easy to see which players the Sox would build around and how the team could be better. Even in the darkest days of the Bobby Valentine era, for instance, the Sox still had David Ortiz and Dustin Pedroia in their employ, and the pitching staff still had a recently-good Jon Lester; the team itself was bad, but with a few good personnel decisions and a new manager, the Sox could (and did!) launch themselves right back into contention.

Now, it’s unlikely that the Sox will be sent careening into a Process; neither the ownership nor the fans have the patience for it, and the Sox payroll can cover a lot of issues. But what’s different now (and a bit more Process-like) is that for the first time in this century, it’s not entirely clear what the next good Sox team is going to look like. There’s no Lester or Pedro or Beckett to pencil into the rotation for the foreseeable future, no Papelbon or Foulke to lock down the back of the bullpen for the next few years, no Manny or Papi or Youk or Pedroia or Mookie to carry the hitting while ownership fills in the blanks in the lineup. Sure, there are stars (or potential stars), but they all have question marks attached. Will Xander walk away? Will Devers? Eovaldi? Can Sale stay healthy? Can Story? And what about JD – is he going to be here next year, and will he be healthy? Can Marcelo Mayer turn into a star? What about Bello? Yorke? Casas? It’s not that the team is bad - it’s that the team is a complete cipher; it's a Rorsarch Test where one can see whatever they want to see in the future of the Red Sox. The Sox have plenty of parts, and they have plenty of prospects, but right now, the shape of the future club is simply a blur - or an ink blot, if you will.

Making things murkier, it’s hard to know what the Sox have in GM Chaim Bloom because everything about his tenure seems like it can be read as a positive or a negative. Should his 2021 season be seen as the year where they stomped the Yankees in the wildcard game, stunned the Rays in the ALDS and got within two games of the World Series...or the year where they barely snuck into the playoffs by squeaking past an awful Nats team on the last day of the season? Should the 2022 season be seen as the year where everyone got injured...or the year where Chaim proved that he didn’t know how to build a bullpen? Was 2020 an organizational failure or a mirage season that never really happened? Chaim’s only big-ticket signing – Trevor Story - was felled by a wild pitch, so it’s still too early to say if he’s any good at major free agent signings; meanwhile, his smaller deals have ranged from great (e.g. picking up Garrett Whitlock or Hunter Renfroe) to awful (e.g. trading Hunter Renfroe for JBJ) with all manner of stops in between.

What will likely change about Mr. Bloom is that, from public comments (and actions), he’s begun to sense that the contention window needs to come sooner rather than later. Up to this point, nearly every deal or signing Bloom has made has been with an eye toward the future; while Chaim has attempted to win, he’s also been on a quest to clear up the payroll logjam left by his predecessor. Now, though, with Eovaldi and JD coming off the books, and with the farm system restocked, Bloom is going to have to take some shots. Maybe it’s re-upping X or extending Devers, maybe it’s signing a major free agent starter or closer, maybe it's throwing an avalanche of dollars at Aaron Judge…whatever the plan, we’re now reaching the point in the Chaim Bloom experience where real money needs to be spent. Is Bloom the right man for the job? Your guess is as good as mine.

In the meantime, this 2022 team…it just wasn’t any good. Or rather, they had one good month – June – and five months that ranged from mediocre to awful. Their hitting was patchy; they were an average offense, but it was “average” in the very literal sense where some great players averaged out some terrible ones. The offense was also pretty unlucky; the Sox were first in the AL in runners left on base, which is what one might expect to happen when great players get on base and then terrible players are unable to drive them in. The pitching, meanwhile, was shorthanded, as the Red Sox awful bullpen meant that starters were worked past their effectiveness, relievers were used until they burned out (see: John Schreiber), and the last few innings of a game were a white-knuckle rollercoaster ride. No AL team gave up more runs in the last two innings than did the Red Sox; no team allowed a higher percentage of inherited runners to score; and only one team (the Rangers) blew more leads than did the Red Sox.

So what will 2023 look like? Who will play shortstop? Who’s the DH? Who will close? Who’s the cleanup hitter? Who’s the ace? Will the Sox spend money, or will they continue to hoard payroll space in hopes of a better tomorrow? If there’s one thing we know for certain about the Sox in the Chaim Bloom era…I have no idea what it is.

The Sox last won the World Series in 2018.
 
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John Marzano Olympic Hero

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If there’s one thing we know for certain about the Sox in the Chaim Bloom era…I have no idea what it is.
Nailed it. Thank you for crystalizing the Red Sox experience since 2020 and it's what I've been trying to figure out throughout the entire Bloom era. It's been three years and I still have no idea what type of front office guy he is. And that's what's been most frustrating about these past three years.
 

cannonball 1729

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It's been three years and I still have no idea what type of front office guy he is. And that's what's been most frustrating about these past three years.
Exactly. I was trying to think of the last time that we had a Sox team where I couldn't name a star who would be on the club in a year, and...I can't. Even in the 90's, Clemens' departure came after Vaughn was well-established, and Vaughn's departure came two years after Nomar's debut and one year after the Pedro trade. I just don't know how to evaluate a guy who hasn't yet made any major acquisitions, or how to evaluate a team where I have no idea what it will look like in a year.

(I should note that the first Sox team I remember was 1988, so I can't speak to the pre-1986 era.)
 
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cannonball 1729

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Also, speaking of teams that are hard to evaluate:

57007

One of the nice things about a surprise bad season is that if there’s no obvious reason for the team to be bad, there’s no obvious reason that the team has to be bad again.

Last year, the Diamondbacks were on the precipice of a youth breakthrough – or so they thought. Their 2019 season ended with 85 wins and a great deal of promise; with young hitters like Ketel Marte and Nick Ahmed beginning to break out and a Robbie Ray-led pitching staff rounding into form (and the offseason addition of Madison Bumgarner), there was ample reason to believe the future was bright for the D-backs. 2020 was a washout (and Robbie Ray was traded at the deadline), but whatever...Covidball never happened anyway, right?

Calling 2021 a “disappointment,” then, is a significant understatement, akin to calling the Grand Canyon a “hole in the ground” or World War II a “disagreement.” The Diamondbacks’ 2021 season was an utter catastrophe, a historically bad season wherein the D-backs chased all manner of awful records and only barely managed to escape setting the franchise record for most losses in a season. In the end, Arizona lost 110 games last year; in the roughly sixty seasons since MLB started playing 162 games, there have only been eight teams to lose more games in a single year than did the 2021 Diamondbacks.

The strange part, though, is that the D-backs’ amazingly horrible season just...didn’t make sense. They weren’t tanking, and the players didn’t seem like they should be bad; they just somehow were. The D-backs even started out the season fairly well, going 15-13 up through May 2nd before descending into what could only be described as the baseball version of a walking nightmare. It’s unusual enough for a team to lose 110 baseball games in a season, but in most of the previous cases the futility wasn’t really a surprise; certainly no one thought that, say, the 1962 Mets or the 2018 Orioles or the 2003 Tigers were going to be playoff contenders when those seasons began. The 2021 Diamondbacks, though, were different; they had a full roster of players who could conceivably win baseball games, and they simply failed to do so.

(If you’re wondering whether a non-expansion or tanking team ever lost 110 games in the 162-game era, it’s happened exactly once, and it was (coincidentally) the same franchise: the 2004 Diamondbacks. That was the team that traded Curt Schilling for a bunch of parts that they then turned into Richie Sexson…who promptly blew out his shoulder and was done for the season.)

Anyway, with no good explanation for 2021, it was hard to make good predictions for 2022. What happened, then, was a bit of a pleasant surprise; the team was actually watchable again, and they even managed to hang around the outside of the playoff picture for a while before finally fading at the end of the season. The offense, which had inexplicably lost the ability to hit home runs in 2021, managed to swat a few more into the seats in 2022, jumping from 14th in the NL in homers up to 7th in that category. The starters’ ERA was 4.05 this year, which isn’t amazing...but is light-years better than the horrific 5.20 they posted last year. Sure, the bullpen still isn’t any good, and the veterans they brought in to shore it up (namely Mark “The Shark” Melancon and Ian Kennedy) were awful, but the Snakes had some surprisingly good performances from retreads and out-of-nowheres like Joe Mantiply and Kevin Ginkel. If the end result doesn’t sound like a pack of world beaters, that’s probably because it wasn’t; however, for a fanbase who spent the previous year watching a team chase history for the wrong reasons, a forgettable, 74-win season was good enough.

Speaking of history...the big story of the Diamondbacks’ season, of course, was the emergence of Zac Gallen. As much as Aaron Judge dominates our collective memory for his race to 62, there was a time in the middle of the season when we were all transfixed Gallen’s quest for 60 – that is, 60 consecutive shutout innings. The whole episode was a bit of a surprise; Gallen was a promising young pitcher, but he’d also just finished a 10-game stretch where he’d posted a 5.30 ERA...when suddenly he just stopped letting the opposition score. Over six magical games, Gallen was simply untouchable, allowing just 16 hits in 41 innings while striking out 46 and walking 8 – and, of course, giving up no runs. I suppose it’s no surprise that the scoreless streak came to an end in Colorado, where pitching records go to die – but what is surprising is that Gallen had already pitched there once during that stretch and had still managed to maintain his streak. Regardless, a streak of 44 1/3 scoreless innings is an incredible accomplishment, and for a team that’s been looking for an ace ever since Madison Bumgarner turned into a pumpkin, Gallen's breakthrough is a huge development. With a strong farm system, some hitting, and now an ace who is capable of running off long stretches of utter dominance, the Diamondbacks could now finally be in a position to make a run at the postseason in 2023.

Or they could lose 110 games again. Who knows with this team?

The Diamondbacks last made the playoffs in 2017. Their only title was in 2001.
 

cannonball 1729

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The big White Sox managerial announcement today means that it's time to post:

57125

It’s astounding to say this, but as crazy as we all thought the Tony La Russa hiring was at the time…the reality of it was even crazier than expected.

It’s hard to pick a "most Tony La Russa" moment of the last two years. There was the time that Tony chastised one of his rookie players - publicly, in the press! - for hitting a home run because it broke the "unwritten rules." There was the time that he voiced support for the Twins throwing at that same player. There was the time he forgot the ghost runner rule and sent a pitcher out to run instead of Jose Abreu. There were the two (!) times this season he intentionally walked a hitter on a 1-2 count, including the one time where the next batter up immediately homered. Heck, one might even say most Tony La Russa moment of all was when the announcement of his hiring was followed almost immediately by the announcement of his second DUI.

Whatever your favorite moment, the second La Russa era in Chicago was definitely a memorable one. Two years ago, the White Sox felt that their rebuild was finally beginning to crest, and they wanted a manager who would be less of a developmental type and more of a win-now type. Gone was Rick Renteria, a man who coached the White Sox to a .583 win percentage during the Covid year and lost Game 3 of the 2020 ALWCS mostly because his primary reliever and cleanup hitter both left the game due to injuries. In his stead came good ol’ Tony, a man who last managed in 2011 and was thought to be easing his way into retirement with cushy “advisor” jobs.

Now, anytime an older manager fails, the reflexive response is always to say that the “game has passed him by.” With La Russa, though, that’s probably not entirely accurate. Sure, the game has changed a lot since Tony first entered baseball in 1963, but a lot of that is due to La Russa himself; in fact, many of the ideas that we now take as orthodoxy (the closer, the opener, the LOOGY, the whole idea of tracking splits for hitters and pitchers, treating the number 9 hitter as the second leadoff instead of just dumping the pitcher there) had La Russa as one of the early adopters. If anything, Tony may have tinkered too much; certainly, it seems unlikely that we’ll see an onslaught of intentional walks on 1-2 counts any time soon.

What does appear to have passed La Russa by is the culture surrounding the game. Gone are the days where players will tolerate endless beanbrawls,
where teams will go back and forth with “who threw at whom” as though baseball teams were the Hatfields and McCoys. (In the era of the universal DH, hitters don’t generally want to wear a baseball-shaped bruise just because their pitcher was an idiot.) Gone are many of the unwritten rules, as hitters have embraced batflips and have replaced the mantra of “Don’t swing on 3-0 in a blowout” with “Hey, if you don’t want me to hit a home run, maybe you should pitch better.” Most importantly, gone are the days where “You’re not a politician – just play the game!” is a universally-accepted truism; in the post 2016-era, publicly-available political opinions are now another thing that managers have to handle.

For one glorious year, La Russa and the White Sox managed to put all of those cultural differences aside and win baseball games. Sure, there were growing pains, but for the most part everything worked; the pitching staff dominated, the middle of the order tore the cover off the ball, and the White Sox were the AL Central champions (and the first MLB team in the 21st century to win a game in a cornfield). The postseason wasn’t a smashing success, but when the opposing offense is red-hot and averages nine runs a game for the series, well, there’s not a whole lot you can do.

Unfortunately, whatever motivational techniques and ideas that La Russa found in 2021...none of those worked in 2022. For one thing, the hitters stopped hitting. Yasmani Grandal lost almost 400 points off of his OPS, largely because his power absolutely vanished. The up-and-down career of Yoan Moncada added another “down” after an oblique injury apparently messed up his swing. Leury Garcia’s lack of patience reached an all-time high, as his seven walks in 97 games led him to post an OPS+ of 42. Jose Abreu and Tim Anderson and Eloy Jimenez and Luis Robert still did their usual raking (when healthy), but when a third of the lineup goes missing, there’s only so much that those four can do.

The bigger problem, though, is that the fielding absolutely collapsed. The current iteration of the White Sox has never been a particularly good-fielding team, but when your pitching staff leads the league in strikeouts (like they did in 2021), you can get away with a few clanky gloves in the field. Unfortunately, in 2022 the Sox defense went from “bad” to “abysmal;” by most metrics, the White Sox were the worst-fielding team in the Amercan League, and there aren’t too many pitching staffs who can win when their defense is simply incapable of making outs.

The biggest problem of all was that the White Sox would randomly slip into stretches where they would play sloppy, disinterested ball. In April, the Pale Hose suffered a seven-game losing streak where they were outscored 45-15 and committed 16 errors (including 7 errors in the first two games of the stretch). Another seven-game stretch at the end of May saw them go 1-6 and be outscored 52-27; meanwhile, a 12-game stretch at the end of August saw them go 2-10 and be outscored 76-42. Unsurprisingly, “Fire Tony” chants became common refrains at White Sox games by midsummer, and the foundering team – with their bad fielding, lack of hustle, anemic hitting, and bizarre lineups - did little to quell the fans’ protestations.

Unfortunately, the end of the Tony La Russa era in Chicago came not for baseball reasons but for health ones. Tony was forced to step away from the team at the end of August due to a pacemaker issue; while he had hoped to return before the end of the season, he never did, and at the beginning of October La Russa announced the end of his tenure with the White Sox.

Following La Russa’s departure, Miguel Cairo took over the team, and for a time, the Sox actually played like the team they were capable of being. In Cairo’s first three weeks as manager, the White Sox went 13-8, convincing fans and broadcasters that the manager was indeed the issue and that the team was good enough to contend. Then they had the misfortune of playing the white-hot Guardians, who promptly swept the White Sox and sent the Pale Hose into a tailspin that ended the season; an eight-game losing streak at the end of September sealed the deal for the South Siders.

It’s often been said that teams who fire a manager often hire the opposite; in the case of the White Sox, “the opposite” appears to have meant “chosen by the whole management structure and not just the owner,” as well as “first-time manager as opposed to Hall of Famer coming out of retirement.” Regardless, Pedro Grifol assumes the helm of a team that has the potential to be good but also has a lot of questions attached. I guess the big question, though, is…what did Rick Renteria do to anger the gods of baseball karma so much? So far, he’s led two teams through the end of a rebuild (Cubs and White Sox) only to be replaced with a legendary manager as soon as the team became good (first Joe Maddon, and now Tony La Russa). I suppose it’s safe to assume that Renteria’s probably not coming back to the White Sox, but one wonders what he has to do to get a fair shake...

The White Sox last won a World Series in 2005.
 

Sad Sam Jones

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This will always be my favorite LaRussa moment. Roberto should have given him the Pedro/Zimmer treatment.

 

cannonball 1729

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This will always be my favorite LaRussa moment. Roberto should have given him the Pedro/Zimmer treatment.

YES! That's exactly what I'm talking about. The idea that a HBP means everyone goes to battle stations is, uh, not necessarily how the game works anymore.

The best part of that whole thing is that TLR said after the game that he didn't think the beanball was intentional, but he felt like the catcher shouldn't call for a ball up and in (but in the strike zone) if the pitcher is wild. Which is a pretty good way to get your pitcher shelled.
 

cannonball 1729

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Next up:

57188

Few teams have ever embraced “average” quite like the 2022 Giants. They finished seventh in the National League in runs scored. They were seventh in ERA. Heck, they even moved in the fences to make their park an average offensive environment...and that park, incidentally, had the eighth-highest attendance in the National League this year. At the end of the season, the Giants finished right in the middle of the NL – seven teams better and seven teams worse – and third out of five teams in the NL West. Their 2022 season record? You guessed it: 81-81.

Yet the Giants arrived at their averageness in profoundly unaverage ways. The Giants’ pitching staff was the best in the National League at fielding-independent pitching; their FIP was 3.43, two points better than the second-place Dodgers and nearly a half-run better than their actual ERA. In fact, every pitcher in the starting rotation had an FIP below 4, and two of them had an FIP below 3 (plus a third one, Logan Webb, who just missed at 3.04). The fielding, on the other hand, was easily the worst in the NL by UZR, by Defensive Runs Saved, or by pretty much any other measure that could properly document the glove-inflicted carnage. San Francisco’s roster had a glut of corner infielders/outfielders/DH’s (Joc Pederson, Wilmer Flores, Brandon Belt, Austin Slater, Darin Ruf, Tommy La Stella, Evan Longoria, Thairo Estrada, Luis Gonzalez, David Villar) and only five places to play them; the logjam at the corners meant that a lot of innings were logged at second base and center field by players who no business inhabiting those locations, with predictably disastrous results. As a result, no team in baseball had a wider gulf between ERA and RA per game than did the Giants. Mix the excellent pitching and execrable fielding together....and you get team that finished just 0.02 runs away from being exactly at the major league average in the "runs allowed per game" category.

The hitting, meanwhile, featured a fairly disappointing lineup mitigated by significant luck in the clutch. Most of the four corners logjam didn’t hit well enough to justify sacrificing defense, with many of them (Belt, Longoria, La Stella, Flores, Ruf, Villar) posting batting averages in the .210-.245 range. Mike Yastrzemski and Brandon Crawford are still defensive assets (a rarity in San Francisco), but they no longer appear to be good hitters, and at ages 31 and 36 (respectively) it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a rebound will occur for either player. Nevertheless, the Giants made up for their offensive difficulties with some good old-fashioned luck; their team OPS went up 60 points with runners in scoring position, mostly because of a .309 BABIP in those situations. The end result didn’t quite win the award for “most average team in the NL runs scored” (that distinction goes to the Diamondbacks), but they were awfully close, notching a mark that was just 0.08 runs per game away from the league average.

If you’re starting to get the idea that “great and awful averaging out to mediocre” was the dominant motif of the 2022 Giants' season, you’ll be unsurprised to know that the Giants were incredibly streaky. San Francisco started out the season on a 14-7 run, essentially picking up where they left off with last year’s division-winning team. Then they lost five in a row, and then they won six in a row. And so on. Up through the end of June, the Giants still managed to win more than they lost, keeping themselves in the hunt for the wildcard (if not the division), but then a 4-14 stretch brought them down to the .500 mark, and a 7-game losing streak at the end of July put them into a hole from which they never fully recovered. A 10-1 stretch at the end of September made things interesting, but the end result of all of those alternating stretches of inspired ball and insipid ball was, that’s right, a perfectly average record.

Without question, the Giants are one of the hardest franchises to predict. Last year, the Giants were absolute world-beaters, winning 107 games and pushing past the Dodgers in the crowded NL West. This year, the entire lineup apparently all got old at once; out of the eleven Giants’ hitters with the most plate appearances, seven of them are over 30, and four of them are over 34. The pitching, though, is fairly young, so San Francisco will have some arms to build around if they can get the lineup (and especially the defense!) straightened out. The Giants are definitely a team that can compete in short order (they do have a history of taking alternate years off) and they certainly showed flashes of being the team that demolished the NL last year, but...they’re going to need a few more decidedly above-average players in the lineup if they want to compete in 2023.

The Giants last won a World Series in 2014.
 

cannonball 1729

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 8, 2005
3,572
The Sticks
I promised myself I'd get back to this eventually, so....

57407


One of the oldest cliches about baseball is that, yes, it’s a team sport, but it’s a team sport of individuals. Sure, a team wins and loses, but it wins or loses on the backs of individual achievements – strikes thrown, strikes taken, balls hit, walks earned, bases stolen, home runs allowed.

Which is probably why we’ve never really figured out how to collectively think about fielding.

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At first glance, the success of the 2022 Orioles seems like a mystery. Their hitting was palatable but not particularly good, with a decent-enough starting lineup being “supplemented” (read: punctured) by awful bench players. Their pitching staff was mostly a collection of people you’d never heard of. Their best pitcher, John Means, was out for most of the season with a torn UCL, and their long-tenured middle-of-the-order bat, Trey Mancini, was shipped to Houston at the deadline. Oh, and in the previous three non-shortened seasons, the O’s had lost 110, 108, and 115 games. Little about the team indicated that there was any reason to watch, let alone any reason to expect that they would contend.

But unbeknownst to baseball intelligentsia, the Orioles had sneakily acquired the parts to become a good defensive team. This defensive foundation was laid seven years ago when the Orioles drafted Cedric Mullins in the 15th round of the draft; over the last half-decade, Mullins has developed into a plus defender in center field. Two more plus defenders came from the waiver wire in 2020 and 2021 when the O’s picked up Ramon Urias and Jorge Mateo to man third base and shortstop, respectively. This year, the O’s brought up the piece de resistance, Adley Rutschman, a young backstop who catches and hits and frames pitches well and generally makes the Orioles a much better team. For those keeping score at home, that’s now three good defenders in the middle of the field and another one at the hot corner – that alone is enough to vault a team into the upper echelons of the fielding ranks.

So how does one “see” this improvement mathematically? Well, there’s an alphabet soup of defensive statistics (UZR, DRS, dWAR, Rtz, BMI, AARP, NAACP, etc.) that say the O’s defense was somewhere around third-best in the AL. But if you really want to see how helpful the defense was, just look at the names on the pitching staff. Dean Kremer, whose own immediately family may not have been aware that he was a major league pitcher before this year, somehow posted a 3.23 ERA over 21 starts. Austin Voth had a 10.13 ERA with the Nationals this year before being selected off waivers by the O’s, whereupon he started 17 games and posted a 3.04 ERA. Jorge Lopez, who had never gone a full season with an ERA below 5, was inexplicably given the closer role and responded by throwing the half-season of his life, pitching in 44 games with a 1.68 ERA before being traded to the Twins and turning back into a pumpkin. Some of the ERA’s were likely FIP mirages (Voth’s FIP was almost a run higher than his ERA, and Lopez’s was almost a run and a half higher) but...much of it just seems to be that if the defense behind a pitcher is good, the pitcher will pitch better.

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It’s hard to properly encapsulate just how bad the Orioles had been for the previous four years, but let’s try. You might remember that the Orioles started off the season in pretty rough shape, going 7-14 for the month of April. For most franchises that would be a terrible month. For the Orioles, though, that .333 win percentage put them on pace to finish with more wins than they did in 2021 or 2018 and equal to their 2019 mark. In May, the O’s improved to 14-16 for the month, which was still not .500...but was still their best full month since July of 2019.

So the baseball world was understandably EXTREMELY surprised when the O's turned into a contender for the rest of the 2022 season. The Orioles had a solid June (14-12), then became red-hot the rest of the summer, posting a 33-19 record for the following two months. The bullpen locked in for June and July, posting an ERA below 3 for that stretch; then the starting pitching took over, posting a 3.27 ERA in August. Even the controversial deadline selling of Misters Mancini and Lopez (not a terribly popular decision in a year where the O’s were finally contending!) did little to cool off surging Birds. At the beginning of September, the Orioles were – incredibly! improbably! - just a game and a half out of the last wildcard spot, a stunning turnaround for a team that's been so bad for so long.

If the rest of September didn’t play out quite as hoped, well, there's no shame in having a mediocre month. The pitching, which had been so surprisingly good for so long, finally faltered, as several of the O’s surprising hurlers started to move closer to career norms. A doubleheader sweep at the hands of the Blue Jays at in early September marked the beginning of the end; a 17-4 loss to the Red Sox a few days later put a nice exclamation mark on the pitchers’ newfound woes. While the O’s didn’t go into a full-on tailspin, they spent the rest of September on the outside of the playoff picture; and even despite the Rays’ best efforts to give away their playoff spot, the O’s couldn’t string together enough wins to make things interesting. The O's went 15-18 for September and October, which was disappointing for the 2022 squad...but would have been amazing for the 2018-2021 versions.

So how competitive can a defense-first team be? The best model for such a roster would probably be the 2013-2015 Royals, a team that didn’t do much hitting but had a penchant for fetching batted balls and a catcher who seemed able to coax the most out of his pitchers. It’s not a high-upside team model – even in the Royals’ best year, their Pythagorean win total only reached 90 – but in an era where 86-win teams make the playoffs with regularity, a dominating defense alone may well be enough to gain admission into the postseason tournament. The arrival of Rutschman seems to have made a big difference for the Orioles; his call-up at the end of May coincided with the bullpen’s emergence, and the O’s were 63-50 in games where the young catcher played. It still remains to be seen whether the improvement in the Orioles’ no-name pitching staff is real, but for the first time in several years, things have started to get very interesting in the Inner Harbor.

The O’s last made the playoffs in 2016. Their last title was in 1983.
 
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