I–a Cubs fan no less–was gonna comment when this was initially posted, as the White Sox were not far behind (I think 3 gb, IIRC, someone check the stats), and still in the dogfight, but now they’re just a game behind the Guardians, and a game and a half up on Minnesota. It’s gonna be a dogfight between the three of them in this shitty, shitty division. Sox are now at around 37% to win the division.
Point taken.
I looked back at my post from just 10 days ago, and there are certainly changes. Braves are tied with the Mets. Yankees are still holding on over the Rays. Orioles slipping out of the WC race. Astros and Dodgers are locks for their divisions and the Cards still looking tough to win theirs. 3 teams fighting for the 3 WC spots in the AL, while Phillies and Padres are tied for the last 2 NL WC spots. Brewers slipping away as well.
Albert Pujols hits homer #696 to tie A-Rod for fourth all-time.
It’s a convoluted and awkward thing now, but it probably made a lot more sense when it was put into the rule book and revised into it’s current form. Building off rules and how a game was played 160 or so years ago doesn’t make for a very logical or consistently organized set of rules.
Most people who care about stats have long dismissed pitcher wins as meaningful, imo. As your example shows, it’s not so much about a pitchers performance as the teams.And fortunately contracts have seemed to move away from wins as a metric for pitchers.
Even in the 1940s, more than half of all games didn’t see the starter finish the game.
I am not entirely sure why having relief pitchers is bad. It definitely means you’re getting higher quality pitching; there is very little argument to the contrary. Starting pitcher effectiveness falls off very rapidly once they face batters for the third time. Relief pitcher has given us a lot of unforgettable stars, too - Mariano Rivera, Goose Gossage, Dan Quisenberry, Tug McGraw, Tom Henke, Trevor Hoffman. How can one watch the Edwin Diaz entrance and not think that’s the coolest goddamn thing ever?
Having a huge, huge number of relief pitchers might be bad though, and I do like the fact MLB now limits how many pitchers you can have at one time. In a few years I think they should reduce it again by one.
Yanks bought themselves a little breathing room winning the series over the Twins and then especially the Rays. A good time to go 5-2.
Maybe the offense is awake again with the returning players.
Pujols hits #697 and incidentally keeps the Cardinals from losing two out of three to Pittsburgh.
The Dodgers today became the first team to clinch a playoff berth. The magic number to clinch the division over the Padres is 2.
So pretty much the series is theirs to lose …
I mean they’ll be favorites, but let’s not crown them yet. The mariners know all about that, as do the dodgers and giants from last season.
Yeah, turns out the Dodgers haven’t even clinched a postseason appearance yet.
I suppose this is warranted:
This article is a few years out of date, but it notes that since 1969, the holder of the best record has only won the WS 12 times (it’s now 13, though that 2020 COVID shortened season really deserves an asterisk).
This is generally true of any playoff format. Any playoff discounts the regular season to some degree (some much more than others).
And the Dodgers have been, by and large, either the best or nearly the best team in the regular season almost every year over the last several but only won it all once in that span (again, that weird 2020 season). They’ve come close a few times but haven’t managed to win that final game but the once. There’s more than a little luck involved in doing so, even for the best teams.
If you think the batting averages are too low, then it is bad. If you don’t, then of course it is fine. When I started watching, a lot of players batted over .300. Around 1930, I think the major league average was around .300. I think it makes for more interesting baseball. YMMV.
As the hardest postseason in baseball history? No home field advantage, an expanded playoff field, unpredictably fluctuating rosters, and living their postseason life in a bubble. I am no Dodgers fan and actively rooted against them. But that World Series victory is legitimate.
Well, in the NL in 1930 it was, but that was a weird outlier.
I think what has happened is, in the last 20-30 years (and especially in the last 10 years), bullpens have taken on greater prominence, and starting pitchers don’t often pitch deep into games.
As noted upthread by @RickJay, a big part of it is that advanced stats have demonstrated that, by and large, pitchers are decreasingly effective against batters each time they go through the batting order.
Most managers now choose strategies according to those stats, and that typically means pulling the starter (even if he’s still relatively effective) after 5 innings or so, because the numbers indicate that it’s increasingly likely that the other team’s hitters will start teeing off on him the third or fourth time that they face that pitcher.
Part of it is also that managers now pay attention to pitch counts – particularly for younger pitchers, there’s a pretty strong correlation between number of pitches thrown (per appearance, and per season), and developing arm injuries, particularly rotator cuff and UCL (Tommy John) injuries. It may frustrate fans to see pitchers pulled when they’re pitching well, but it likely does reduce the risk of injuries.
For both of those reasons, complete games are now a rare thing; there have only been 27 complete games thrown so far in 2022, or less than one per team. Thirty years ago (1992), there were 419 thrown, and that was with four fewer teams in MLB.
Conceptually, relief pitchers are fine, but it has (or had) swung too far to that extreme (and, FWIW, I do think that batting averages are too low). MLB has taken some small steps to reinstitute a little balance: they’ve instituted rules around minimum numbers of batters a pitcher must face (largely eliminating the role of the “LOOGY” reliever), and now limit teams to carrying 13 pitchers on the active roster.
Up to 28 earlier tonight. Framber Valdez threw a complete game shut out for the Astros tonight in Detroit.
But, yes, still a rarity these days.
It’ll be interesting to see if any of this helps. Or if it helps enough.
Offense levels do come and go, after all, and things might change even without direct intervention. The insane offensive levels of the late 20s and early 30s came and went without rules changes. They just happened.