Baseball IQ Weekly Recap (9/26 - 10/03)
Say what you will about whether the expanded playoffs are good for the league in the long run*, but the sheer quantity of playoff baseball this past week has been a shock to my system in a very good way. It feels like a reward for the late start and all those months where sports should have been on TV, but weren’t.
*My personal take is that it’s too friendly toward below-average teams. There’s no reason a team like this year’s Brewers should be rewarded for a season where they never once played above .500.
News from Around The League
The Unbridled Joy of Being—and Watching—Fernando Tatis Jr. (Sports Illustrated)
Bob Gibson has died at 84. Read this profile for an explainer on just how good he was (spoiler alert: he was very good) (STL Today)
Interviewing mic’d up outfielders mid-game is one of the most underrated and fun things in sports broadcasting today. Ramon Laureano had some colorful language to share when the ball went his way mid-interview (SB Nation)
This isn’t exactly news, but the playoffs are happening. There are several places to keep up with the games you can’t catch live. (mlb.com/postseason, ESPN’s playoffs page, etc.)
League Leaders
Season-to-date, sorted by xwOBA. This table isn’t going to be very helpful for the remainder of the playoffs, since it won’t help to show stats from people whose teams didn’t make it, and a playoffs-only table would have small sample sizes. I’m sharing it this week to show the full end-of-season leaderboard, but will probably exclude it for the rest of the playoffs.
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.)
Luis Robert, 487 (video)*
Marcell Ozuna, 468 (video)
Pete Alonso, 456 (video)
Corey Seager, 447 (video)
Kris Bryant, 446 (video)
*This was the second longest playoff home run of the Statcast era!
Hardest Hits This Week (in MPH)
Rafael Devers, 116.7 (video)
Giancarlo Stanton, 116.1 (video)
José Abreu, 115.6 (video)
Nelson Cruz, 114.7 (video)
Pete Alonso, 114.3 (video)*
*This was also one of the longest hits of the week
Best Games This Week (By Total xwOBA)
Carlos Santana, CLE vs. PIT 2020-09-27 (box score)
Christian Yelich, SLN vs. MIL 2020-09-27 (box score)
Josh Naylor, CLE vs. NYA 2020-09-29 (box score)
Kole Calhoun, ARI vs. COL 2020-09-27 (box score)
Rougned Odor, TEX vs. HOU 2020-09-27 (box score)
This chart uses xwOBA to account for good or bad luck based on fielding and other factors.