The latest update to my top 300 hitter rankings was posted earlier this week.
As we approach the halfway point of the 2024 season, tension is mounting between the rest of the season projections and the outliers (in both directions).
On our rosters, we are often wrestling with the differences between the actual production we have seen this season, the projection generated for the remainder of this season, and the prior expectations we had for a player (the initial season projection).
Of course, we know that in-season projection is supposed to weigh most of the factors we care about to inform our thinking and establish a likely and reasonable outcome going forward, but as we’ve discussed at Rates & Barrels over the years It’s easier to trust those numbers when a player hasn’t performed poorly on your roster.
Will Randy Arozarena continue on a similar path as the first three months of the season, pitching closer to his projection for the rest of the season, or will he completely return to his initial projection going forward?
As you may recall, Arozarena had a huge projection to start 2024 from The BAT .
Through 73 games, he has hit .186/.301/.348 with 10 HR, 33 R, 26 RBI and 10 SB (94 wRC+).
It’s disappointing, but placed in the context of a drop in run production across the league, and combined with a significant drop in barrel rate (12.3% last season to 7.3% in 2024), it’s easier to understand how so many things changed so quickly.
The BAT
In leagues where I can trade for upgrades, Arozarena is among the players I’m targeting now, because I don’t see any major loss of underlying abilities that would explain what’s happened up to this point.
On the other end of the player pool, has Jurickson Profar put together everything that once made him the No. 1 prospect in baseball, or is a return to the .245/.330/.375 projected line going forward inevitable? ?
Profar has been 63 percent better than league average this season, with a .321/.417/.483 line that should be enough to propel him to an All-Star appearance in the city where he began his career. in the Major Leagues as a 19-year-old player. -years in 2012.
If nothing else, it’s a great story, and one that’s even more impactful when you learn how much it would mean to Khairy, Profar’s six-year-old son.
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On our Friday livestream episode with Trevor May (weekly at 1pm ET: YouTube), we discuss…
- Takeaways from Thursday night’s Giants-Cardinals game at Rickwood Field.
- The quick return to a racing environment that resembles 2022.
- Deep divisions for pitchers
- Which pitchers most often recover after a 3-0 count?
- Who does the best job keeping legacy and legacy running backs from scoring?
The greatness of Willie Mays
Memories of former teammates and people who were lucky enough to see Willie Mays play have been flooding in since his passing Tuesday at the age of 93. It seems impossible that any other baseball player we will live to see could reach the height of Mays’ stardom and place in American history.
I agree with the opinion of Joe Posnaski of The Baseball 100. Mays is the greatest baseball player of all time.
As Grant Brisbee wrote (and said) earlier this week, Willie Mays was baseball and the world was better for it.
Is there a more surprising team on the pitching front in 2024 than the Nationals?
Coming into this season, the Nationals had a pitcher projected by The BAT to post a sub-4.00 ERA.
Joe La Sorsa.
(Don’t worry, I had to open his FanGraphs page to find out who he was too.)
La Sorsa logged 32.2 innings between Tampa Bay and Washington last season, but spent all of 2024 in Triple-A working as a reliever with a low strikeout rate (16.4%).
As the first half of the season comes to a close, the list of pleasant surprises on the pitching staff grows. Pitching coach Jim Hickey has been with the Nationals since the 2021 season, and the addition of Sean Doolittle as pitching strategist this offseason appears to be making things click on a different level.
From Barry Svrluga of the Washington Post in early March:
“We actually have a great data analytics team,” Doolittle said. “But the question has always been, ‘How can we give players the information with a workable solution or something that they can actually relate to and that’s digestible?'”
If nothing else, the changes in Washington over the first half of the season should push us to rethink our evaluations of their pitchers and keep a closer eye when someone like DJ Herz arrives on the scene with a 13-strikeout performance. , or when any new pitcher has the opportunity to join the Nationals’ rotation in the coming months. The improvement to this point is impressive.
- MacKenzie Gore
- Projected ERA of 4.53, WHIP of 1.34, 15.5% K-BB%
- 3.49 ERA, 1.39 WHIP, 21.0% K-BB%
- Jake Irvin
- Projected ERA of 5.27, WHIP of 1.42, 8.3% K-BB%
- 3.24 ERA, 1.12 WHIP, 15.0% K-BB%
- Trevor Williams (currently on IL with flexor strain)
- 5.49 projected ERA, 1.43 WHIP, 9.1% K-BB%
- 2.22 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 13.8% K-BB%
- michel parker
- Projected ERA of 4.90, WHIP of 1.46, 10.5% K-BB%
- 3.06 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 12.8% K-BB%
- Kyle Finnegan
- 4.74 projected ERA, 1.38 WHIP, 11.9 K-BB%
- 1.72 ERA, 0.83 WHIP, 19.3% K-BB%
- hunter harvey
- Projected ERA of 4.09, WHIP of 1.21, 18.4% K-BB%
- 2.68 ERA, 1.05 WHIP, 22.8% K-BB%
At parity in June
In our weekly episode with Britt Ghiroli, I asked Britt and Eno Sarris why some baseball writers and analysts seem to be upset about the current state of the standings, especially in the National League, where all but two teams were within two games of a playoff. berth at the time of our recording.
An important distinction to make in conversations about the league and rankings, beyond the fact that we are still in the first half of the season, is that rankings are not necessarily indicative of the quality of baseball being played. As Eno mentioned on Friday’s show with Trevor, Stuff+ is adjusted each year to achieve an “average” of 100, but if that adjustment wasn’t made, the numbers would increase each year due to improvements in tone design and development.
What do we think bad baseball is like? Despite a series of pitching injuries in recent years, being a major league hitter is harder than ever (at least in the Wild Card era).
Despite this, we are still seeing hitters do incredible things and with rule changes implemented ahead of 2023, stolen bases have returned in droves.
The fear is that having an expanded postseason field will constantly dilute the quality of teams during the regular season, and that many teams will settle for a win projection of 80, knowing they could turn a wild card berth into a World Series victory. . playing well in October. Concerns about that script are fresh after a Rangers-Diamondbacks World Series, but without knowing what the next few years will hold for those two franchises, we can’t evaluate their place in baseball history. If the downside to the expanded playoffs is that we get a relatively surprising World Series champion every half-decade, is that really a bad thing?
We took a very quick trip through the last 20 World Series winners, looking for other surprising winners relative to consistent success in the years surrounding the team’s World Series victory. Even if there are limitations to crowning a season’s best team with an end-of-season tournament, perhaps it works in the long run because consistently good teams make enough appearances to achieve a title or two within a multi-year window.
We came into the 2005 World Series as one that, as I said, was forgotten, in part because it was a four-game sweep for the White Sox, and because the White Sox weren’t as dominant in the years leading up to their victory as some of them. the others. World Series winners.
This was my offhand memory of a season from almost 20 years ago, so I had to look it up using Stathead.
Were the White Sox teams of the early and mid-2000s better than you remembered?
The White Sox won 430 regular-season games between 2003 and 2007, ranking ninth in the MLB during that span. The Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals, Braves, Angels, Athletics, Twins and Phillies won the most.
That was in line with my expectations, and I have no objection to a team in the top third of the league winning a World Series in a five-year span, but the multi-year rubric isn’t the only way to measure quality. of a World Series winner, or of a series itself.
As listener Bryan Campana kindly pointed out on Twitter, that White Sox team performed well in the postseason, had a starting pitcher we’ll probably never see again, and the weight of that World Series is significant given that it ended a drought of 88 years.
They also pitched four straight complete games in the playoffs, a feat that will likely never happen again. That team will go down in history as an all-time great team, and you can’t use the example that they were bad the next year, so it wasn’t special, they won 90 games the next year.
—Bryan Campana (@bc_campana) June 19, 2024
That the series was swept should not be considered a negative, because all four games were decided by a total of six runs. As Sam Miller noted in his October 2020 World Series rankings….
“Every game was tied or within one run in the eighth inning or later. Every White Sox starter worked at least seven innings. Compare that to the seven-game series between the Cubs and Cleveland in 2016, in which no starting pitcher reached seven. The White Sox’s 11-1 postseason record ended a World Series drought that was two years longer than the Red Sox.”
Just because it’s a sweep doesn’t mean it’s bad baseball.
In any case, I came away from this week’s shows with a much greater appreciation for the 2005 White Sox team, and I hope White Sox fans have the opportunity to celebrate that title again next year as part of the 20th anniversary celebration.
Thanks for reading: Rates & Barrels is back on Monday!
(Top photo by DJ Herz: Geoff Burke-KeynoteUSA Sports)
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