Baseball IQ Weekly Recap (9/12 - 9/19)
Good morning! We’re in the final stretch of the season, with four teams having clenched playoff spots already. This was also a good week for career milestones, with Pujols passing Willie Mays on the all-time home run leaderboard and Alec Mills getting his first no-hitter.
News from Around The League
Pujols hit career home run no. 661, passing Willie Mays for fifth place on the all-time home run leaderboard (link: ESPN)
Alec Mills’ No-Hitter May Be the Last of its Kind (link: Beyond the Box Score)
A Hall of Fame Pitcher’s Most Outrageous Accomplishment was with His Bat (link: SB Nation)
Jacob DeGrom Just Keeps Throwing Faster (link: FiveThirtyEight)
Standings
We’ve only got about 8 games left in the season. Here’s how the league and division standings are looking as of today (I’m putting this together on Saturday morning, so it’ll be a day behind when this goes out on Sunday).
League Standings
The next two charts show how the AL and NL league rankings have changed throughout the season. You can find a team on the right-hand side in their current ranking position, and trace them back throughout the year to see how they’ve trended. You can also view their trend in isolation on the left-hand side of the figure.
The standings are noisy to the point of not being interpretable in the beginning of the season. I think that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s easy for a team to look better or worse than it it actually is during a small stretch of games. As the year moves forward, these small, random variations in team performance start to smooth over, and teams start to settle in a more stable region in the standings that’s more reflective of their true ability.
Division Standings
Here’s how the division races look as we head into the final stretch, now showing wins over time instead of rankings. While some teams have already clinched their spot (the Dodgers, White Sox, Rays, and A’s are all already in), many divisions and wildcard spots remain up for grabs. Note that while the charts below are my own, I’ve copied the division standings tables below them directly from Google’s standings page.
AL East
AL West
AL Central
NL East
NL West
NL Central
League Leaders
Season-to-date, sorted by xwOBA. Don’t recognize some of these statistics? Check out this glossary.
Top 1% of Batters for Select Stats
Season-to-date Statcast metric leaders (top 1% of the league)
Longest Hits This Week (in Ft.)
George Springer, 455.0 (video)
Gavin Lux, 453.0 (video)
Javier Baez, 450.0 (video)
Jesse Winker, 447.0 (video)
Lourdes Gurriel, 447.0 (video)
Hardest Hits This Week (in MPH)
Gary Sanchez, 117.5 (video)
Nate Lowe, 114.8 (video)
Gary Sanchez, 114.8 (video)
Josh Bell, 114.2 (video)
Manny Machado, 114.0 (video)
Best Games This Week (By Total xwOBA)
Bryce Harper, PHI vs. NYN 2020-09-17 (box score)
Dominic Smith, PHI vs. NYN 2020-09-17 (box score)
José Abreu, CHA vs. DET 2020-09-12 (box score)
Kyle Higashioka, NYA vs. TOR 2020-09-16 (box score)
Miguel Cabrera, DET vs. KCA 2020-09-15 (box score)*
This chart uses xWOBA to account for good or bad luck based on fielding and other factors.
*Cabrera’s spraychart doesn’t look as great as the others on this list, but he was walked three times, so his total xwOBA points were a lot higher than the chart suggests.
Great Tweets
Book Club
I’ve been reading The Book to brush up on sabermetric fundamentals. But I’m on vacation this week and didn’t do my homework 😬. I’ll be back with more next week.
Pssst. This is a free newsletter. You can help support my work by buying a copy of The Book using my Amazon affiliate link.