MLB 2022 Season

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Is it weird that only four teams have winning records against teams above .500?

Interesting question. I'd guess it's not that odd historically. Teams tend to build good records by beating the teams that they're clearly better than and then just holding their own against the other good teams. That, and the fact that teams have so few games against > .500 teams that random variation can lead to some odd looking records.

I'm getting scared the Yankees are using all their luck too early.

Never heard an announcer just get totally broken before.

Here's phenom Roki Sasaki closing out the first inning of a game on 15 pitches - which is quick work considering he got four strikeouts

(The same kid threw a perfect game a few months back, the first in Japan leagues since the 90s. He's only 20, so you can imagine MLB has noticed.)

I'm always amazed/concerned about the workload Japan puts on such young arms. Broadly, it seems to be fine though? I don't think I've heard a ton of Tommy John stories from Japanese baseball.

I wonder what the difference is?

I don't know a lot about it, except that kids here throw a ton, and that there's occasionally debate over whether things should change.

But FWIW, if I recall correctly Roki was a known phenom out of high school that every team wanted, and the team that acquired him sat him his entire first season to let his arm develop. I don't know if that's a common thing or if it's unique to him.

I'm guessing the biggest difference is that we don't hear about the kids who never pitch after high school because they've blown out their arms. There's an inherent selection bias at work in any conversation about 'person X throws 150+ pitches per game, why can't everyone else?' It's even funnier when person X is a hall-of-famer. I can still remember my dad complaining about Felix Hernandez (completely lost his fastball by 30, couldn't transition to a different type of pitcher and out of the game by like 32) not being like Randy Johnson and throwing a bunch of 150+ pitch complete games.

By reputation at least, Japanese league pitchers also don't throw max effort like MLB pitchers generally do. That's why every time a position player comes over there's concern that they won't be able to handle the fastballs.

billt721 wrote:

By reputation at least, Japanese league pitchers also don't throw max effort like MLB pitchers generally do. That's why every time a position player comes over there's concern that they won't be able to handle the fastballs.

Actually, that squares with what I've heard about Ohtani. Dude can hit the high 90's or 100, but he only dials it up when he needs to, not on every single pitch.

Prederick wrote:
billt721 wrote:

By reputation at least, Japanese league pitchers also don't throw max effort like MLB pitchers generally do. That's why every time a position player comes over there's concern that they won't be able to handle the fastballs.

Actually, that squares with what I've heard about Ohtani. Dude can hit the high 90's or 100, but he only dials it up when he needs to, not on every single pitch.

The video shows Sasaki throwing 159km/h fastballs though, which is like 99mph.

'It's a dying breed. And it sucks': The decline of the starting pitcher -- and what it means for baseball's future

(ESPN+ Article.)

ALEK MANOAH IS a man of many opinions, and one of those is that with a gilded right arm and 6-foot-6 and 285 pounds of mass to buttress it, he should throw the baseball as much as he can. But during spring training in 2021, as the Toronto Blue Jays were mapping out Manoah's first full season in organized baseball, they approached him to discuss a different plan. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he hadn't seen game action for almost 18 months, and he had pitched sparingly in the minor leagues during his 2019 debut. They wanted to be cautious -- careful even. They wanted to set an innings limit, and they asked Manoah what he thought it should be.

"I don't think there should be a limit," Manoah said.

He wasn't trying to be contrarian. He just doesn't agree with the arbitrariness of prescribed restrictions that over the past four decades have taken the starting pitcher -- baseball's marquee attraction, the workhorse -- and, through a cocktail of fear and math, reduced it to show pony.

"I'm a big f---ing guy," Manoah, 24, says now. "I'm strong as a horse. I'm built for this stuff. ... I can take some hits, man. If you don't let a pitcher pitch, you're never building him up. You're never letting him struggle. I say this all the time: 'Let me get my ass kicked.' They understand that dog in me. I want to be out there."

For most starters in 2022, the dog within is more Pomeranian than pit bull. This season, pitch counts for starters have cratered to an average of 84.4, 10 fewer than the standard that held for decades. The typical start -- long, steady, around six innings -- has fallen to barely five. Complete games have almost vanished.

And yet efforts to keep pitchers healthier by limiting their workloads have been a failure. Arm injuries remain omnipresent, with upward of $100 million in salary this season lost to time on the injured list. Teams' purported prudence in lessening pitchers' workloads simply altered how those pitchers approach the game. They bide their finite time on the mound with maximum-effort throws, despite evidence that those high-effort pitches add stress and strain to the vulnerable joints in the arm. Less, it turns out, is not more.

"Everyone's here guessing," one National League farm director says. "Even the doctors don't know. Pitching is just a hard thing to do."

Manoah grew up during the last vestiges of the starting pitcher's heyday, when 200 innings in a season was expectation, not anomaly. He marveled at Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez and Mike Mussina -- at how Justin Verlander's fastball would gain velocity as a game lengthened. It's exactly the kind of career he desires, even if he knows he's swimming against the stream.

"I think it's a dying breed. And it sucks," Manoah says. "That's just the way baseball is going. It's more of an analytical game. ... If you told Pedro Martinez 15 years ago that they're gonna pull him because he might give up a run next time around? Good luck with that. You had to kill to get them off that mound. That was something I always wanted to be."

Perhaps in time. For now, Manoah celebrates the small victories. A few weeks after the initial conversation in 2021, Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins told Manoah he wouldn't have an innings limit. But, Atkins said, in the absence of one, they needed to be smart, proactive and safe. The Blue Jays' approach is noble and pragmatic but underscores that Manoah is the exception. And that's the paradox: In the current baseball universe, there is better training, better infrastructure, better knowledge -- a better foundation to support building up the starter. So why is baseball systematically eradicating him?

"Just like the guy with the stapler in 'Office Space,'" one longtime general manager says, "they've been optimized out."

"I think it's a dying breed. And it sucks," Manoah says. "That's just the way baseball is going. It's more of an analytical game. ... If you told Pedro Martinez 15 years ago that they're gonna pull him because he might give up a run next time around? Good luck with that. You had to kill to get them off that mound. That was something I always wanted to be."

This is what I was talking about above with people always picking out Hall of Famers for these comparisons. Like, motherf*cker, nobody would pull Pedro today because of the third-time-through-the-order penalty because even with that penalty, he would still be better than 95% of pitchers in the game. But a guy like (off the top of my head here) Sterling Hitchcock? Yeah, he might have had a longer and better career if his coaches knew to get him out of the game once hitters were seeing him for the third time.

Even today, guys who are able to handle seeing hitters 3 times per game are allowed to. With the Mariners, one of the more analytically-minded teams when it comes to pitching, both Robbie Ray and Logan Gilbert see hitters 3+ times per game unless they throw a ton of pitches early. The problem is less the disappearance of the pitcher and more the fact that teams have a better understanding of how rare an actual good starter is.

I love Manoah so much.

billt721 wrote:

This is what I was talking about above with people always picking out Hall of Famers for these comparisons. Like, motherf*cker, nobody would pull Pedro today because of the third-time-through-the-order penalty because even with that penalty, he would still be better than 95% of pitchers in the game. But a guy like (off the top of my head here) Sterling Hitchcock? Yeah, he might have had a longer and better career if his coaches knew to get him out of the game once hitters were seeing him for the third time.

This is discussed later in the article:

MANY OF MAJOR League Baseball's greatest ills -- the somnolent pace, the lack of action, the prevalence of an all-or-nothing approach at the plate -- can be traced directly to the evolution of the starter. He should be the game's touchstone -- and yet MLB teams operate as if they're often better off winning without him. And sometimes they are. A baseball franchise, with a mandate to position itself best to win games, strip mines numbers to uncover even the most minuscule advantage. Pitching has proven fertile ground.

The story of the disappearing starter is one in which analytics beat aesthetics. A confluence of factors -- small-market teams clawing for survival among their moneyed brethren, the broken youth baseball apparatus, the industry's general ignorance about arm health -- served as accelerants, but at the heart were numbers too compelling for teams to deny.

Efforts to keep pitchers healthy already had degraded the starter. In 1980, Oakland A's manager Billy Martin rolled out a rotation of five 20-somethings: Rick Langford, Mike Norris, Matt Keough, Steve McCatty and Brian Kingman. They threw complete games in 93 of 159 starts. All suffered career-altering arm injuries within four years. They were soon gone, cavalrymen before a technological boom, and the complete game exited with them. Forty-two years ago, starters finished 20.3% of games. This season, it's 0.5% -- 13 in 2,432 starts.

With finishing games no longer paramount, front offices began looking at pitchers differently. The sixth inning became the game's first real turning point, the eye test -- are hitters getting good swings on a guy? -- informing managers' decision-making. Then came an article Nov. 5, 2013, from Mitchel Lichtman, who expanded on a topic he had explored in his seminal baseball strategy treatise, "The Book." On Baseball Prospectus, Lichtman wrote about what he deemed the "times-through-the-order penalty." The premise was straightforward: The more times a batter sees a pitcher, the better he performs.

Over the previous 40 years, hitters gained an average of 27 on-base-plus-slugging points between their first and second plate appearances against a starter and 24 more between the second and third. Baseball people felt it -- the sixth inning and third time through the order regularly coincide -- but Lichtman's analysis spelled it out more clearly than ever before. For some teams, it was the impetus for change. Why concede such an obvious advantage at a time when a new breed of reliever -- the high-velocity, high-strikeout behemoth -- began roaming the land?

"It's math. It's real," says Theo Epstein, the World Series-winning executive who now works as a consultant for MLB. "If you're looking to just optimize for one game, of course you'd rather have a fresh reliever than a starter third time through. But when every team takes that approach there's a real cost to the industry. We lose the identity of the starting pitcher as a prominent character in the drama day in and day out."

Soon after Lichtman's piece, innings-per-start numbers tumbled, from 5.97 in 2014 to 5.81 to 5.65 to 5.51 to 5.36 to 5.18 in the last season before the COVID-19 pandemic. The figures ran inverse to average fastball velocity, which had continued its steady climb from under 89 mph at the turn of the 21st century to 93 mph by 2019. Teams were pivoting away from pitchers who could pitch deep into games and focusing on other skills: velocity, strength and pitch design. Ultimately, that philosophy birthed a cottage industry that inside pitch labs created a new strain of swing-and-miss pitches.

A generation of super relievers emerged, buoyed by a better understanding of how to throw a baseball more efficiently, more effectively. Even a back-of-the-bullpen reliever was better than a third-time-through starter. Youth baseball followed the lead, emphasizing velocity above all. Going deep in games? Pitching to contact? Old thinking. Velocity ruled.

"The data shows we're not keeping pitchers any healthier," Epstein says. "All we're doing is limiting how much they work."

In 2022, MLB starters average 5.15 innings per start. Only one pitcher, Miami's Sandy Alcantara, posts more than seven innings a start. Just 20 pitchers are above six. Alcantara and Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes are the lone two who log at least 100 pitches per game. Alcantara is at 101, Burnes at 100.

"Guys like [Manoah], like Alcantara, they're the outliers," says Kevin Gausman, Manoah's teammate and fellow frontline starter in Toronto. "Those guys: You put them in any generation and they're gonna be dudes. They're gonna go deep into games. They're just bulldogs. But you think about like the majority of other young starting pitchers -- I could speak for myself, too. You didn't really know what you were gonna get. I'm through five with 50 pitches, one hit and I'm cruising, but, you know, that third time through."

Starters laugh about the third time through, acquiescing because there is no choice. The numbers are the numbers. The game is the game. Comply or be replaced. It's a simple calculus, really: Pitchers crave strikeouts because front offices crave strikeouts. Hitters chase home runs because max-effort pitching is so difficult to hit that the idea of manufacturing runs is anachronistic. Defenses shift because outs, in the spin-to-win and elevate-and-celebrate era, are difficult to come by.

Across the game, there is belief that without rules changes to protect the sanctity of the starter, he will vanish. Arizona Diamondbacks pitching coach Brent Strom, among the first mainstream pitching coaches to apply analytics to his teaching, says: "Five to six innings will be considered premium." A veteran player-development executive concurs: "Every failure of a dumb team to develop a starting pitcher puts another nail in the coffin of the starting pitcher as analysts for smart teams cite these failures."

This is a seminal moment in baseball history. And though he's just one man, Manoah is doing his best to help his kind from going extinct.

Nice! Thanks for posting that. My ESPN+ subscription turned into The Athletic a few years ago.

Edit: I will say, though, that I've really enjoyed watching baseball again this season. I moved from Seattle to Hawaii in 2010 and every year since then I've watched less and less baseball -- for a variety of reasons (having young kids, the Mariners being a pathetic franchise not worth supporting, MLB's blackout f*ckery meaning I couldn't watch any west coast team live, etc) -- until in 2018 I paid for MLB.tv and literally only watched the opening day game. And to be clear, I would have been considered a diehard fan prior to moving, watching every game, attending ~40 per season even when the team was sh*t (especially when they were sh*t -- I liked it better when the stadium was empty).

Anyway, after that season I let my mlb.tv subscription lapse (just in time, as MLB then went back and changed Seattle to a blackout team for me again -- which was then changed to non-blackout as of 2021) and just didn't pay attention again until the Mariners were improbably in the race at the end of last year. That got me to pay for MLB.tv again this year and I've watched almost every game and it's honestly been great. I didn't realize that I'd missed watching baseball. Even with all the aesthetic changes to the game over the last decade, there's still something about it that I love.

I've come back to it recently myself, although not in the way I did when I was a kid. But, during the summer, if there's a free game on YouTube or wherever, it's wonderful background noise for summer evenings.

Frankly, if anything drove my resurgence of interest, it's stuff like OOTP and YouTubers like Foolish Baseball. And MLB has been pretty smart about their digital presence as well.

In other news:

Steinbrenner realizes may take record price to keep Judge

Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner realizes there is a chance the price may be going up to sign Aaron Judge to a long-term contract after the star slugger’s outstanding first half.

Judge turned down an eight-year contract worth $230.5 million to $234.5 million, cutting off talks ahead of the April 8 opener and saying he wouldn’t negotiate again until after the season. Judge’s representatives wanted a nine-year deal in excess of the average annual value of Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout’s contract, which comes to $319.6 million, a person familiar with the negotiations said then, speaking on condition of anonymity because Judge’s stance was not made public.

“Is it a possibility? Of course it’s a possibility,” Steinbrenner said Wednesday during his midseason media availability. “But cross that bridge when I come to it.”

Judge, eligible for free agency after the World Series, leads the major leagues with 29 homers. He is second in the AL with 60 RBIs and is batting .281, a big reason the Yankees began Wednesday with a major league-best 58-23 record and a 13-game lead in the AL East.

“Aaron is a great Yankee and he’s very valuable to this organization,” Steinbrenner said. “He’s a great leader. Obviously, he’s performed extremely well this year, which we’re all thrilled about. So, look, any great Yankee, yes, it’s something we’re going to be looking at and talking about seriously. It means a lot to the organization. Nobody’s going to deny that.”

Speaking as a Yankees fan, I simultaneously totally support Judge's position of negotiating strength here, and absolutely do not think the Yankees should hand him a bigger-than-Mike-Trout's contract for a dude that I just do not see keeping up this level of production for more than another 3 years, tops.

He's 30, right now. And he's going to ask for like a 10-year deal.

Just... no.

Yeah I'm still on Rays mailing list from when we used to live in Florida and get tickets so I got an email the other day saying they were free YouTube game this week.

Is there a long-term deal that's actually worked out? And not in an 'excess value in years 1-4 means you ignore the sunk cost in years 5-10' way. The only one I can think of was the original Alex Rodriguez contract with Texas, but he was 25 when he signed that, not ~30 like most of the guys who get those deals.

Also, holy sh*t at a .311/.359/.588 in AAA as an 18 year old! A paltry .360/.411/.654 in half a season the next year.

Edit: It's ... not great. Looking through the contracts here:

Tatis, and Franco are gonna be all about health.

I wouldn't bet on Betts, Harper, Lindor, Seager, Trout, Machado, or Stanton all being worth their deals by the end, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a couple of those guys maintain performance all the way through.

Cano somehow still has a year and a half left on his deal. Same with Votto. Both started out pretty strong but the last few years have been rough.

I'd argue that Pujols wasn't even worth it in the first year of the deal.

ARod's second 10-year deal started out ok but then he fell off a cliff at 36 and had the steriod issues. His first 10-year deal was good, though, and so was Jeter's.

Also mentioned in the article, but not making the list, was Mike Hampton's 8yr deal with the Rockies. He was bad in pre-humidor Coors, and only got marginally better when they traded him to Atlanta just 25% of the way through the deal.

billt721 wrote:

Is there a long-term deal that's actually worked out? And not in an 'excess value in years 1-4 means you ignore the sunk cost in years 5-10' way. The only one I can think of was the original Alex Rodriguez contract with Texas, but he was 25 when he signed that, not ~30 like most of the guys who get those deals.

Also, holy sh*t at a .311/.359/.588 in AAA as an 18 year old! A paltry .360/.411/.654 in half a season the next year.

Max Scherzer with the Nationals.

Vector wrote:
billt721 wrote:

Is there a long-term deal that's actually worked out? And not in an 'excess value in years 1-4 means you ignore the sunk cost in years 5-10' way. The only one I can think of was the original Alex Rodriguez contract with Texas, but he was 25 when he signed that, not ~30 like most of the guys who get those deals.

Also, holy sh*t at a .311/.359/.588 in AAA as an 18 year old! A paltry .360/.411/.654 in half a season the next year.

Max Scherzer with the Nationals.

Oh yeah, that's a good one. Kershaw's 7yr extension with the Dodger's worked out pretty well, too.

billt721 wrote:
Vector wrote:
billt721 wrote:

Is there a long-term deal that's actually worked out? And not in an 'excess value in years 1-4 means you ignore the sunk cost in years 5-10' way. The only one I can think of was the original Alex Rodriguez contract with Texas, but he was 25 when he signed that, not ~30 like most of the guys who get those deals.

Also, holy sh*t at a .311/.359/.588 in AAA as an 18 year old! A paltry .360/.411/.654 in half a season the next year.

Max Scherzer with the Nationals.

Oh yeah, that's a good one. Kershaw's 7yr extension with the Dodger's worked out pretty well, too.

Can't really say it's worked out yet I guess, but there's a roughly zero percent chance that Acuna and Albies' long term contracts don't work out for the Braves.

ukickmydog wrote:
billt721 wrote:
Vector wrote:
billt721 wrote:

Is there a long-term deal that's actually worked out? And not in an 'excess value in years 1-4 means you ignore the sunk cost in years 5-10' way. The only one I can think of was the original Alex Rodriguez contract with Texas, but he was 25 when he signed that, not ~30 like most of the guys who get those deals.

Also, holy sh*t at a .311/.359/.588 in AAA as an 18 year old! A paltry .360/.411/.654 in half a season the next year.

Max Scherzer with the Nationals.

Oh yeah, that's a good one. Kershaw's 7yr extension with the Dodger's worked out pretty well, too.

Can't really say it's worked out yet I guess, but there's a roughly zero percent chance that Acuna and Albies' long term contracts don't work out for the Braves.

Yeah, the long-term extensions for very young guys is pretty much about health. Those deals will end when they're at the age where Judge is signing his.

This also speaks to another reason why I will always have a love for baseball: numbers matter (and are fun) in baseball in a way they just aren't in most other sports.

Like, I like basketball more than baseball, and I still enjoy hockey, but if I wanna play a rousing game of "Remember Some Guys" from roughly 1991-2000, I'm always going baseball first.

(Also, Dmitri Young. Listed playing weight of 295 lbs!)

EDIT: Also, Shohei's 27 and is Arbitration Eligible in 2023 and possibly a FA in 2024. How much is he going to go for?

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXKVdWkUIAAgvXi?format=jpg&name=4096x4096)

How did that 1 base allowed get 1 run?

Inning 5

Well, according to Baseball Reference, it was the result of:

Walk
Single, runner to 2B
Passed ball, runner to 3B
Sac fly, runner scores.

And that's how you get 1 run on 1 TB! Kinda cool.

EDIT: LOL, Shohei also hit a 2-run HR to take the lead immediately afterward.

The Orioles and the Mariners both have 10 win streaks. I'm really enjoying this.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

The Orioles and the Mariners both have 10 win streaks. I'm really enjoying this.

13 for the M's!