The Baseballsphere Blog

Obviously, a World Series Game 1 win would have been better for the Cubs. But when you think about the most likely scenarios in which the Cubs win the World Series, the two most likely both have the Cubs losing Game 1.

One scenario is the Cubs win all the games in which Corey Kluber doesn’t pitch, taking the Series in 6 games. But if you don’t have a midgame lead in Game 6, you’ll be facing a rested Andrew Miller in that game, not what you want.

The other scenario is the Cubs take one of the first two in Cleveland, and win all three home games. In this scenario, the most likely outcome is losing Game 1 (because Kluber is pitching) and winning Game 2.

So what sets you up best for winning Game 2? Making sure Andrew Miller throws a lot of pitches in Game 1. And hope that Game 2 isn’t rescheduled due to rain.

The Cubs definitely accomplished the first part of that. Miller threw 46 pitches in Game 1, more than he’s thrown all season. Plus, they mounted a real scoring threat against him. If they see him in Game 2, they won’t see much of him, and they won’t be intimidated by him. And he may not be as effective, either. The Cubs will be ready to succeed against Miller in Game 2, if they have to.

As for winning Game 4 against Kluber, it will help that they’re at home in Chicago. It will also help that they’d seen a lot of pitches from Kluber just four days before, so they have a better idea what to expect from him. There was some good contact against him in Game 1. They just need a little bit more good contact to start putting up runs.

For the Cubs’ sake, let’s just hope the rain doesn’t cancel Game 2.

In my latest post on OverTheMonster, I explain why I think the Red Sox had a crisis of belief this season, and how two words from David Ortiz helped to cure it.

Eduardo Rodriguez hasn’t earned a win in his last 9 starts, going back to mid-July. In that time, he’s had a good share of tough-luck losses and no decisions, none worse than September 4 against Oakland. Spinning a no-hitter through 7 and 2/3 innings, he finished having thrown 8 innings of shutout ball, the best start of his career. However, the Red Sox gave him exactly zero runs of support that day. This, the day after the Red Sox had scored 11 runs against the same team, and 16 the day before that. They would go on to lose 1-0.

And yet, it was not all for naught, because Rodriguez and the rest of the Red Sox starters strung together one excellent start after another to start September. By going deep into games, fewer innings were required of the relievers. By limiting runs allowed to at most 2 through the first seven games of September, the starters usually left the game with a big lead, allowing the Red Sox to pick and choose which relievers to use based on who was most rested, or who needed confidence-boosting. Some additional rest was already expected for the bullpen once rosters expanded September 1, but combined with the help from the starters, it was a perfect recipe for turning an overworked bullpen into a very well rested one.

The dividends from this rest were reaped Sunday night, as the bullpen was called on to take over at the start of the 4th inning of a close game against a potent offense and division rival in a tight pennant race. And they came through.

Let’s look at the numbers to see if they back all this up.

First, here are the performances of the Red Sox starters through the first 8 games of September:

Indeed, on the whole they went quite deep into games, and allowed very few runs.  This allowed the Red Sox to use the bullpen as a whole much less:

The bullpen as a whole threw about 1/3 fewer pitches per game through the first part of September versus their August average.  That’s a big reduction in workload.  Factor in the expanded rosters, allowing three additional relievers to be used in early September (Koji Uehara, Joe Kelly, and Robby Scott), and the usage per reliever went down.  Here are the number of appearances made per team game played in the month for each reliever.  Only pitchers making relief appearances in both months are included.

Except for Heath Hembree, who hadn’t been used much in August, the frequecy with which each reliever was called upon dropped by a third or more, for everybody.  Rest for the weary!

Better yet, thanks to improved performances by these relievers, they became more pitch-efficient.  With the exception of Brad Ziegler, the number of pitches thrown per game played by the team (not per game the pitcher participated in) dropped for each pitcher to between one sixth and one third of their previous August numbers.  That’s a lot of rest!

The performances got better, too.  Per batter faced, the frequency of undesirable results went down, and the frequency of desirable results went up:

Most importantly, the relievers’ overall earned run average went from poor to perfect:

Obviously, Sunday’s game threw off these low usage numbers. But that wasn’t such a bad thing, when you realize that none of these “previously overused” relievers had been called on more than twice over the previous 10 days.  They’ll need to pitch occasionally, and pitch in some pressure situations occasionally, to stay sharp.  With Uehara and Kelly back and throwing well, the Red Sox bullpen is suddenly looking like a strength.

The one thing remaining that the Red Sox have lacked is late-inning offense, especially in close games.  If they can turn that around, they’ll have all facets of their game working well.  That will make for an easy September, and an easy September will allow them to set themselves up to perform well in the playoffs.

Seems like the last 3 or 4 years there have been a lot of very excellent, very young baseball players in the major leagues.

Seems like, in that time, there has been a lot of talk about all the very excellent young baseball players in the majors, with Mike Trout and Bryce Harper leading the way. But our impressions are sometimes wrong, as analysis of the relevant data can reveal. So, to see if these impressions are right or wrong, I looked at the data.

The data agree, overwhelmingly.

Using Baseball-Reference.com, I looked at the highest-WAR seasons for players 22 and under from the last 40 years. Though rather than using WAR numbers outright, I scaled WAR to 150 games, to adjust for differences in playing time.  Because WAR behaves more like a cumulative statistic, like hits, than a rate statistic, like batting average, this effectively converts it to a rate statistic.  Because rate statistics are untrustworthy over small sample sizes, I only looked at seasons in which the player played in most of the games, so, at least 82 games.

Here are the top 40 such seasons from the last 40 years:

I then grouped these into 10 groups of 4 years. As it turns out, the period from 2012 to 2015 contains 5 of the top 10, 8 of the top 20, and 14 of the top 40 of these seasons, as shown by these charts. This, when the average group has 1 in the top 10, 2 in the top 20, and 4 in the top 40.

Of course, sometimes a single player produced more than one of these seasons. But these past four years also dominate in terms of the number of different young players on these lists. Here are all the players having top 40 seasons, listed under their 4-year groups, with their overall placements on the list next to their names. I’ve bolded those with top-20 seasons.

Again, these past 4 years dominate.

Now that we know for certain that we’re experiencing a very special surge of young talent, the next thing to ask is, why? Has the surge in the amount of free analysis available (on the web and in ESPN in-depth commentary) over the last decade or so allowed parents to self-coach their youngsters more effectively? And is this finally coming to fruition? Or is this just a fluke? Is it a Cuban invasion? Or something else?

I’m a little frustrated with this article. I don’t think it gets me any closer to knowing how much of a shot Xander Bogaerts has at 2015 American League batting title. It just says, “it will be difficult”.

So I did some projections, to see what the numbers say. Of course, things have changed a bit since this article was published – the gap is now just 12 points instead of 18. There are 11 games left on the Tigers’ schedule, and 12 games left on the Red Sox’. I did two sets of projections. One assumes each player plays in all his team’s remaining games. The other assumes each player sits out two games.

In each case, I used the numbers of at bats and hits of each player in his last 8, 9, 10, etc. games, up to his last 20 games, as the basis for projecting his number of at bats and hits to come in his remaining games. I scaled these samples to the number of remaining games, added them to the current season totals, and calculated batting averages. So that made for 13 separate projections in each case.  The results:

In both cases, because Bogaerts is hitting well right now and Cabrera is hitting poorly, the projections show that Bogaerts will probably surpass Cabrera and win the batting title. The charts pictured below show the lowest, highest, and median projections among the 13 projections produced for each case.

If both players hit at their current paces the rest of the way, Xander Bogaerts will surpass Miguel Cabrera for the 2015 AL batting title.

Over their last four games, the Boston Red Sox have posted scores of 15, 22, 8, and 2.  Had it not been for a late rally last night, they would have finished the last of these games with just one run instead of two, and this would have made for what must be an uncommon if not unprecedented oddity.  They’d have had four consecutive different scores, each one exactly 7 runs apart from the closest of the other scores.

What they did accomplish is probably also quite rare: four consecutive games in which no two scores are within 6 runs of each other. To see if any other team has ever accomplished this feat, I might look through Baseball-Reference.com’s play index for games with 18 runs scored or more and then look through game logs to see the scores of the adjacent games, but with over 300 results to look through, that’s more work than I can finish on my lunch break.  So I leave it to you, baseball community:  can you find any team that has done this before?

As the season opened I reported on Jon Lester’s potential to break the record for most hitless at bats to start a career this season, now that he’s batting regularly as a National League pitcher.  Later, I reported on his breaking that record.  Now, at last, there is closure.  On Monday Jon Lester got his first career hit, and it was off former teammate John Lackey (literally – it ricocheted off Lackey).  He tallied 30 AB and 30 plate appearances this season before getting that hit, adding to his prior career totals of 43 PA and 36 AB without a hit.

Here is the new top 10 list:

Congratulations, Jon. You’ve hit some balls pretty hard to this point in your career, and streak records like this one always involve some luck, either bad or good. Now forget about hitting, because you’ve got more important concerns.

Mookie Betts is closing in on a Red Sox team record.  Or at least he should be.  The record would be for consecutive multi hit games, and Mookie should now have 7 of these in a row, two shy of the team record of 9.  However on June 17 in Atlanta, Mookie was called out on a bunt hit in the second inning that replays clearly show was an unmistakably bad call.  The Red Sox had blown their challenge in the first inning, however, so the call stood, despite manager John Farrell’s pleadings to the umpire to review the call.  The play went as a sacrifice, so it didn’t cost him an at bat; Betts would finish the game with one official hit.  Officially, his multihit streak now stands at 4 instead of 7 because of this. Here are his official stats over these 7 games:

Where would he be on the Red Sox all time list had this call been corrected?  The chart below shows all Red Sox multiple-hit game streaks of 7 or more since 1914, courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com.  Betts’ numbers as they would have been are added in here.  (Though there are likely a few more from before 1914 that should be added to this list, we know none of those missing streaks exceed 9 games, thanks to this SABR article.)

Tied for 7th, and possibly still counting.

Especially interesting are his overall offensive totals during this run.  Only Jim Rice in 1978 (his best offensive year) and Fred Lynn in 1979 have higher OPS’s.  And this brings a note of consolation.  The best streaks on this list, going by OPS, came from players in the primes of their careers.  Mookie, on the other hand, is just starting his career.  In other words, he’s likely to get a few more shots at topping this list in the years to come.

His official streak of 4 is still going, and based on the above, Mookie Betts is about as hot a hitter right now as any Red Sox player has ever been.  I’ll be watching tonight.