The latest update to my Top 300 hitter rankings dropped earlier this week.
As we approach the mid-way point of the 2024 season, the tension between rest-of-season projections and outliers (in both directions) increases.
Across our rosters, we are often wrestling with the differences between the actual production that we’ve seen this season, the projection generated for the rest of this season, and the previous expectations we had for a player (the initial season projection).
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Of course, we know the in-season projection is supposed to weigh most of the factors we care about to ground our thinking and set a likely and reasonable outcome for us to follow, but as we have discussed on Rates & Barrels over the years, it’s easier to trust those numbers when a player hasn’t been underperforming on your roster already.
Is Randy Arozarena going to continue on a path similar to the first three months of the season, hue closer to his rest-of-season projection, or go all the way back to the initial projection from here on out?
You may recall, Arozarena had a massive projection to begin 2024 from The BAT X — .255/.342/.449, 25 HR, 91 R, 75 RBI, 31 SB (123 wRC+) — and I wasn’t quibbling with it.
Through 73 games, he’s 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 league-wide downturn in run production, and paired with a significant dip in barrel rate (12.3% last season to 7.3% in 2024), it’s easier to understand how so much changed this quickly.
The ROS projection from The BAT X is still encouraging: .248, 14 HR, 48 R, 42 RBI, 16 SB (127 wRC+).
In leagues where I can trade for upgrades, Arozarena is among the players I am targeting now, because I don’t see any major underlying skills loss to explain what has happened to this point.
At the other end of the player pool, did Jurickson Profar put everything together that once made him the No. 1 prospect in baseball, or is a tumble back to the projected .245/.330/.375 line from here on out inevitable?
Profar has been 63 percent better than league average this season, boasting a .321/.417/.483 line that should be enough to propel him to an All-Star game appearance in the city where his big-league career started as a 19-year-old in 2012.
If nothing else, it’s a great story, and one that hits even more when you learn how much it would mean to Profar’s six-year-old son, Khairy.
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On our Friday livestream episode with Trevor May (weekly at 1p ET: YouTube), we discussed…
- Takeaways from Thursday night’s Giants-Cardinals game at Rickwood Field.
- The swift return to a run environment that resembles to 2022.
- Deep splits for pitchers
- Which pitchers work back most often from a 3-0 count?
- Who does the best job preventing inherited and bequeathed runners from scoring?
Willie Mays’ greatness
The memories from former teammates and people who were lucky enough to watch Willie Mays play have been flooding in since his passing on Tuesday at the age of 93. It seems impossible that any other baseball player we will live to see could ever reach the height of Mays’ stardom and place in American history.
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I agree with Joe Posnaski’s take from 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 because of it.
Is there a more surprising team on the pitching front in 2024 than the Nationals?
Entering this season, the Nationals had one pitcher projected by The BAT to deliver a sub-4.00 ERA.
(Don’t worry, I had to open his FanGraphs page to learn who he was too.)
La Sorsa racked up 32.2 innings between Tampa Bay and Washington last season, but has spent all of 2024 at Triple-A working as a reliever with a low-strikeout rate (16.4%).
As the first half of the season winds down, the list of pleasant surprises on the pitching staff is growing. Pitching coach Jim Hickey has been in place with the Nats since the 2021 season, and the addition of Sean Doolittle as a pitching strategist this offseason seems 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 in place,” Doolittle said. “But the question has always been, ‘How do we get the players the information with an actionable solution or something that they can really put their finger on that’s digestible?’“
If nothing else, the changes in Washington through the first half of the season should push us to re-think our evaluations of their pitchers, and keep a more interested eye open when someone like DJ Herz arrives on the scene with a 13-strikeout performance, or when any new pitcher gets an opportunity to join the Nats’ rotation in the coming months. The improvement to this point is impressive.
- MacKenzie Gore
- Projected 4.53 ERA, 1.34 WHIP, 15.5% K-BB%
- Actual 3.49 ERA, 1.39 WHIP, 21.0% K-BB%
- Jake Irvin
- Projected 5.27 ERA, 1.42 WHIP, 8.3% K-BB%
- Actual 3.24 ERA, 1.12 WHIP, 15.0% K-BB%
- Trevor Williams (currently on IL with flexor strain)
- Projected 5.49 ERA, 1.43 WHIP, 9.1% K-BB%
- Actual 2.22 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 13.8% K-BB%
- Mitchell Parker
- Projected 4.90 ERA, 1.46 WHIP, 10.5% K-BB%
- Actual 3.06 ERA, 1.08 WHIP, 12.8% K-BB%
- Kyle Finnegan
- Projected 4.74 ERA, 1.38 WHIP, 11.9 K-BB%
- Actual 1.72 ERA, 0.83 WHIP, 19.3% K-BB%
- Hunter Harvey
- Projected 4.09 ERA, 1.21 WHIP, 18.4% K-BB%
- Actual 2.68 ERA, 1.05 WHIP, 22.8% K-BB%
On 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 by 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.
One important distinction to make in conversations about the league and the standings beyond the fact that we’re still in the first half of the season is that the standings are not necessarily indicative of the quality of baseball being played. As Eno mentioned on the Friday show with Trevor, Stuff+ is adjusted every year to make 100 “average,” but if that adjustment wasn’t being made, the numbers would be going up every year because of improvements in pitch design and development.
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What do we think bad baseball looks like? Despite a rash of pitching injuries in recent years, it’s as difficult as ever (at least in the Wild Card era) to be a big-league hitter.
Despite this, we’re still seeing hitters do amazing things, and with the rule changes implemented before 2023, stolen bases have come back in a massive way.
The fear is that having an expanded postseason field will consistently water down the quality of teams during the regular season, and that many teams will settle for a high-80s win projection knowing that they could parlay a wild card berth into a World Series win by playing well in October. The concerns for that script are fresh coming off of a Rangers-Diamondbacks World Series, but without knowing what the next few years holds for those two franchises, we can’t evaluate their place in baseball history. If the downside of 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 back through the past 20 World Series winners, looking for other surprising winners relative to consistent success in the years surrounding the team’s World Series win. Even if there are limitations to crowning a season’s best team with an end-of-season tournament, maybe it works out in the long run because consistently good teams make enough appearances to crank out a title or two within a multi-year window.
We landed on the 2005 World Series as one that I said was forgotten, in part because it was a four-game sweep for the White Sox, and because the White Sox were not as dominant in the years around their win as some of the other World Series winners.
This was my off-the-cuff recollection from a season nearly 20 years behind us, so I had to look it up using Stathead.
Were the White Sox’s teams of the early and mid-2000s better than I remembered?
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The White Sox won 430 regular-season games from 2003-2007, ranking ninth in MLB during that span. The Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals, Braves, Angels, A’s, Twins and Phillies won more.
That was in line with my expectations and I have zero objection to a team in the top-third of the league over a five-year span winning a World Series, but the multi-year rubric isn’t the only way to measure the quality of a World Series winner, or a series itself.
As listener Bryan Campana kindly pointed out on Twitter, that White Sox team cruised in the postseason, had starting pitching that we’ll likely never see again, and the weight of that World Series is significant given that it ended an 88-year drought.
They also pitched four straight complete games in the playoffs, a feat that will probably never happen again. That team will go down as an all time great team, and you can’t use the example they were bad the following year so it wasn’t special , they won 90 games the next year.
— Bryan Campana (@bc_campana) June 19, 2024
The series being a sweep shouldn’t be considered a negative, because the four games were decided by a total of six runs. As Sam Miller pointed out in his World Series rankings from October of 2020….
“Every game was either tied or within one run in the eighth inning or later. Every White Sox starter went at least seven innings. Compare that to the seven-game series between the Cubs and Cleveland in 2016, in which no starting pitcher went seven. The White Sox’s 11-1 postseason record ended a World Series drought that was two years longer than the Red Sox’s had been.”
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 that 2005 White Sox squad, and I hope White Sox fans have a chance to celebrate that title again next year as part of a 20th anniversary celebration.
Thanks for reading — Rates & Barrels is back on Monday!
(Top photo of DJ Herz: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports)
