2018 regular-season game chatter

how good can the last weekend of the season be?

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/team-entropy-2018-your-introduction-to-chaos/

Ozzie Albies' only enemy in baseball is his own helmet.

That is a very Todd Frazier play. He seems to have a knack for the weird one. I saw him hit a one armed home run off of Jamie Moyers.

https://www.freep.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2018/09/06/detroit-tigers-mario-impemba-rod-allen/1217312002/

Fox Sports Detroit continued searching for answers into a physical altercation between Detroit Tigers TV broadcasters Mario Impemba and Rod Allen on Thursday afternoon, conducting meetings with both men involved.

The pair was separated following Tuesday night’s game against the Chicago White Sox and sent home to Detroit after an incident described as “severe” by one person who was present.

i know which broadcast i'm going to listen to tonight during the STL/DET game!

They have the rest of the year off.

Michael Moore and Tom Selleck will be filling in.

as amazing as that sounds, i think i'm going to go see yojimbo instead

Rockies vs Dodgers series should be a good one.

The Rays are having an interesting year in that they traded or sold off almost all their "name" players, yet could easily/accidentally win 90 games and still miss the postseason by a mile.

gabe kapler is doing gabe kapler things with 39 players on his roster

pinch-running in the fourth!
pulling his starter with one out in the fifth, then using three relievers (so far) to get out of the inning!

well, his playoff odds are down to 14% (Fangraphs). Time to pull out all the stops.

i like this guy

The absolute unit that could. pic.twitter.com/r2a5uj9E7o

— MLB (@MLB) September 13, 2018

i don't know much about him, but his plate discipline is weird! for the last 5 years running he's struck out less than 5% of the time and walked less than 5% of the time.

Willians Astudillo

i don't follow the twins closely, but they currently have two of the top ten prospects, plus this guy. let's go twins!!

Astudillo is a folk hero in the EW circles

rightly so...

FG has the Red Sox WS odds at 16.4%, while the Astros are at 23.7%. How does that make sense? Aren't the Sox a better team?

definitely the better team. that's odd. also, just yesterday on the radio (just a little sports round-up segment on chicago NPR) they were saying that the Red Sox's odds to win the WS were > 25%? maybe half the red sox got injured this morning

yea 538 has it as 28% Sox, 25% Astros. that's uh...a pretty significant difference. I think FG's methodology is more sophisticated than 538s, which IIRC is based almost entirely on ELO.

could it be based on match-ups in the first round

like houston actually has it easier by playing cleveland, while boston has to play the a's or yankees?

that's how it works, right?

Boston has the better record, wouldn't they be playing Cleveland? or does the #1 seed play the wild-card winner every time? that seems a little unfair since the wild-card winner is likely to have a better record than the #3 division winner

plus the a’s/yankees will presumably have burnt their best starter before facing the sox

tbf i’m not sure the a’s even have any starters left

yeah idk how that factors into the playoff calculations. for example, if the Brewers get the wildcard, I'm assuming their starter is going 3 innings max. if they win whoever plays them in the divisional round is definitely gonna be at an advantage.

The Astros have a better run differential than the Red Sox, so the simulations probably see them as even despite the differences in team wins. And with both wild card teams being better than the Indians, the Astros should definitely be big favorites to reach the WS again.

The Astros are kind of underrated now because they won last year (winning the first time is a great story, winning the second time doesn't have any broad appeal so people don't talk about them as much) and don't have a clear MVP favourite.

Red Sox are also something like 20-X vs the Orioles where X is an interger >0 but <10 and Orioles /= a major league team

14-2

and in those games chris davis is 5-for-50 with 29 K

Boston is having a heck of a year and their lineup is really great but in a short series, I think Houston's starting pitching makes it a pick em.

Between Porcello, Price and Rodriquez, one of them will have to step up with Sale. Cole, Kuchel and Morton are a much stronger 2 through 4 in the rotation. Houston has more bullpen depth than last year. Playoff baseball takes a lot of pitchers and the back end of Boston's bullpen is probably their weak spot on the roster.

Preference wise, I'd kind of like Oakland to keep hot and make a run. I'd have no issue with Cleveland winning it all, but it would be a fluky run if they won it this year.

Yankees lineup can be diffused by a strikeout pitcher, it's really not unlike the later Torre teams. Teams will get 14 K's and a double play in a pitcher's dual and beat them 3-1 a couple of times.

I wouldn't say fluky -- all of Cleveland's core players are as good or better than they were last year. They'll win 90+ games and they're currently seven games off their expected W-L record, so talent wise they're a 100 win team or close to it.

i think cleveland also benefits from playing a bunch of games in the worst division in baseball, though. second place twins are 67-80

42-22 in division, 28-35 against the rest of the american league

Trevor Bauer is also hurt.

astros looked just a little more strapped in during the last series against the sox. felt like playoff baseball and it felt like the astros were the big boys.

Heard on the Jays broadcast that Justin Smoak is leading American League first basemen in OPS at .823.

Really? Talk about a position in decline. Some leading AL first baseman going back to the 2000 season:

Carlos Delgado - 41 HR/137 RBI/1.134 OPS
Jim Thome - 37/106/.929
Mike Sweeny - 29/144/.930
Jason Giambi - 43/137/1.123
Mo Vaughn - 36/117/.864
Rafael Palmeiro - 39/120/.954

I know those are unadjusted numbers, and I threw in RBI just because the numbers are big and shiny. There were another half-dozen good seasons at a lower level. This year, Justin Smoak's the benchmark.

adjusted
2018:
justin smoak - 24 HR/75 RBI/.823 OPS = 125 wRC+

2000:
Carlos Delgado - 41 HR/137 RBI/1.134 OPS = 179 wRC+
Jim Thome - 37/106/.929 = 131 wRC+
Mike Sweeney - 29/144/.930 = 129 wRC+
Jason Giambi - 43/137/1.123 = 183 wRC+
Mo Vaughn - 36/117/.864 = 114 wRC+
Rafael Palmeiro - 39/120/.954 = 130 wRC+

but yeah, it seems to be a bad year for AL first basemen. you have to go back to 2004 (Mark Teixeira, 129 wRC+) to find a similar level of meh for the league leader

I came back to post the adjusted numbers, but you beat me to it. I knew Vaughn was going to come in under Smoak's number; surprised Thome, Sweeny, and Palmeiro were so close. I chose 2000 at random; you could probably find a more impressive season for first basemen from around the same time.

key tiebreaker info as of right now

https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-playoff-picture-update/c-293413208

exactly zero of the teams involved in a close postseason chase in the NL are playing today

phillies are 5.5 back, but 7 of their remaining 11 games are against the braves -- they win the first couple and it could get intersting

also gabe kapler has a full complement of 40 players at his disposal

nevermind

"Phantom Big-Leaguers" are a loosely defined group of star-crossed minor-leaguers who, in one way or another, were promoted to the majors but never appeared in a big league game https://t.co/58VpIzAKav

— Post Sports (@PostSports) September 20, 2018

some of these stories are pretty brutal

relieved that this didn't happen to poncedeleon

can't believe Nats haven't actually been eliminated yet

You sound like:

What a disappointing year for the Nationals.

— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) September 20, 2018

Lol