Bertz

Kittredge has been a monster. I don't have a good way to sort for this but of relievers moved at the deadline it looks like really only Duran and Mason Miller have been better?

How many times?

The Cubs are 3rd in the league in steals and among teams in the top 10 have the second best success rate. They are a very good and high volume baserunning team.

I actually like this one. Sam Miller did an amazing article on this last year https://pebblehunting.substack.com/p/first-and-third-at-the-highest-level tl;dr is a lot of teams won't even throw through because they're worried about the steal of home. It's damn near an automatic base.

These are all pretty small potatoes, aren't they? Like even if they worked (I don't think they would, but we'll set that aside), they move the needle on like one or two games?

What specifically do you wish Craig would do differently?

Craig's really great. Fans are silly and and can't remember anything before yesterday and certainly don't think ahead. Craig does a good job of balancing long and short term interests. I'd like him to use the bench a little more, even knowing how bad it has been for much of the year, but that's about the only thing I'd quibble with. I am somewhat perversely enjoying the Craig hate to be honest. You could see this coming from a mile away. The stuff that fans really hated about Ross was very much *not* what Craig was going to do differently. Anyone paying attention could have told you that, but well here we are.

Luke Little's fastball velo is flat with his YTD mark while his slider is up about an MPH. So if the gun was hot for Wiggins it wasn't crazy hot

Holy horsefeathers. He was sitting 99 basically up until the end too Probably good to keep an eye on the other pitchers tonight to make sure it's not a calibration thing

I believe it goes by seeding until you get to the WS, and then it's whichever team had a better record. Not positive though.

If the Cubs limp into the playoffs, going 5-10 over these last 15, then: - The Padres must go 9-5 or the Mets 15-0 for the Cubs to not host the wildcard round - The Giants must go 14-2 or the Reds 15-0 for the Cubs to miss the playoffs entirely

I missed us signing Joe Ross, interesting Also I'm really intrigued by Austin Gomber and would love to keep him over the winter. He's going to be a minor league free agent I believe, so it won't take much to hold onto him. Probably not even a 40 man spot?

Wow Mets are down 6 in the bottom of the 1st, and deGrom is going for the Rangers. Odds are at least one of the Giants/Reds win tonight and Mets only have a half game lead on a playoff spot

Boyd's getting a lot less chase over the last month or so than he was getting prior. Pretty much everything else such as velo, contact rate, in-zone rate, first strike rate, etc. is flat. Hell even his pitch type usage is more or less the same. My guess is it's a gameplanning thing. We're now a little over a year into Matt Boyd 2.0, he's probably just gotten a little predictable and needs to change things up.

Nice game. "Chris Morel gets a big hit and the Cubs still win somewhat comfortably" is bordering on best case scenario.

SUPER encouraging on Palencia

Shane Baz is not as bad as that ERA would tell you. He's got some Ben Brown to him where when an outing goes sideways it goes *really* sideways. But it looks like in 11 of his 28 starts he's given up 2 runs or less.

Yeah I suspect Assad will go to Iowa to stay stretched out. We're at a month since Brown has gone more than 3 innings. Soroka is obviously not stretched out. Ditto Wicks. Someone has to be ready in case god forbid a SP goes down late here.

Over/Under 3.5 "We have to get rid of him and replace him with someone worse who hits more dongs" articles this winter?

There's unfortunately not a lot of concrete info to go off of because teams have incentive to keep these things close to the vest. But generally some things to keep in mind - Historically the rule of thumb for increasing a young pitcher's innings limit was "your old career high in innings plus 30" - It was shown this was bunk like a decade ago, but around the league teams continued to mostly follow it. My thought was the that teams had pushed back on the specifics not the general idea - The Cubs among other teams have said over the last few years that they use technology to monitor for fatigue instead of simply counting innings. I believe them to an extent, though in practice "career high +30" has been stayed a pretty solid rule of thumb - The Cubs this past winter added pitching guru Tyler Zombro to their front office and also hired a Japanese consulting firm that specializes in pitcher health - Over the last few years, a bunch of veteran relievers have converted back to starting. For these veterans, they have generally ended up around 150 IP their first year back in the rotation. Regardless of how long they'd been relieving, their previous career high, etc. - Last year Garrett Crochet coming off of TJ and having never exceeded 70 innings in a year in his life, made 32 starts and threw a shade under 150 innings. The White Sox pulled this off not by messing with Crochet's schedule but by shortening his outings, particularly in the second half. For the year he ended up throwing just under 75 pitches per start. This year Crochet is leading MLB in innings So take it all together, and my guess is that the current wisdom is that whether young or old more or less any pitcher (at least of MLB age) can be asked to throw at least 150 innings, and the question is just how do you want to finagle things to end up at that target. Shorter outings like Crochet, a fake trip to the IL, shifting to relief, etc. The big question is the playoffs, because between Crochet and all those converted relievers, I can't find any who pitched in October. This year Jacob Misiorowski (about 15 innings behind Cade) and Clay Holmes (about 15 innings ahead) both will. But the Seth Lugos of the recent past did not and so aren't helpful historical examples on this part. I would suspect that Horton will be allowed to pitch once per series. That would give him plenty of rest between each start. So it would add as much as 20 more innings, but doing so over the course of an extra month probably isn't especially problematic?

via The Athletic this AM It would be really fortunate if Hodge basically reverted to being the guy right as Palencia went down.

Yeah I kind of got into it above responding to Squally, but more or less there are two components 1. Playoff Path: How likely are you to make the playoffs, and if you do make the playoffs how likely are you to get a bye? Cubs are more or less locked into that #4 seed. So very simplistically a team that locks up the four seed has odds that are 100% of making the playoffs times 50% of surviving the WC round times 50% for the LDS, ditto the NLCS and WS. So 1*.5*.5*.5*5 = 6.25% 2. Team quality: This is where things can get messy, and where the Mets/Cubs split is likely coming from. Fangraphs has a live depth chart for every team, here is the Cubs: https://www.fangraphs.com/depthcharts.aspx?position=ALL&teamid=17 These depth charts take projected WAR for each player prorated towards playing time that is manually adjusted by a dude who works at FG (Jon Becker). This projected WAR goes into a math blender along with strength of schedule to get a projected winning percentage. And that win % goes then into a different blender to adjust those playoff round %s from being 50/50 by default to like 60/40 or whatever. A team that's 50/50 in each playoff round is 6.25% to win it all like I had above. A team that's only 40% in each round would have 2.6% world series odds. The Cubs' current ROS winning % is only .512 (83 win pace) while the Mets is .588 (95 win pace). A big part of this is SOS, .504 for the Cubs and .488 for the Mets. Another part of that is projected WAR. This doesn't have one culprit but look at that depth chart, a lot of choices on that page are extremely reasonable for the regular season but become ludicrous for the postseason, such as Colin Rea's prominent playing time or Kyle Tucker's lack of playing time. The FG continually fiddles with these depth charts, at this late stage those changes can have huge impacts on the World Series odds because of the chaining effect of the playoffs (the 50/50 vs. 60/40 deal). They'll do a big pass at the end of the regular season and you'll see the numbers look a lot more reasonable (i.e. flatter across the league) from that point onward.

The majority of the variation in WS odds is basically the odds of making the playoffs chained with the odds of getting a bye, since that removes a more or less 50/50 round. But yeah the Padres and Mets show it's not all that. The rest is driven by that ROS Win %. For most of the year that's a totally acceptable proxy for team quality. However down the stretch here there's SSS wonkiness because of strength of schedule and playing time quirks (e.g Kyle Tucker only playing 45% of the time in RF). tl;dr is that the things FG is doing to make playoff odds as accurate as possible do silly things to the WS odds.

I'm not going to do your trolling work for you. This stuff is very well documented, go read. You shouldn't be using numbers if you don't understand their inputs anyway.