Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

From now on, maybe we should ignore the numbers until Juan Soto is leading the league in walks. Soto has had the highest walk rate in baseball in each of the last four seasons. And he’s close this season! He’s got 21 walks (tied for first) and a 17.4% walk rate (tied for third). But first place belongs to Riley Greene, and that’s a surprise. Greene is not the person you’d expect to top this list. Excepting a two-game stint in Single-A in 2022, he hasn’t run a walk rate above 12% at any stop of his career, but this season, he’s at 19.6%. Since 1903, the largest single-season jump in walk rate by a qualified player in AL/NL history was 10.7 percentage points, by Barry Bonds in 2004. Right now, Greene is sitting on a jump of 11.2 percentage points. He’s also sitting on a 157 wRC+, thanks to a .244 ISO that ranks 22nd in baseball, just behind Soto. Aside from the fact that it’s still April, what exactly is going on?

For the second year in a row, Greene has cut his chase rate, and this year the drop is more than five percentage points. Want to walk more? Not swinging at balls is a great start! But take a look at his swing rate on pitches inside the zone.

It’s down by nearly 10 points! Among all qualified players, Greene has the 12th-lowest overall swing rate, by virtue of being 27th lowest outside the zone and 24th lowest inside it. It’s not just that he’s chasing less, it’s that he’s being much less aggressive overall. With such a big drop on pitches inside the zone, I wondered whether Greene had become too passive. After all, his exit velocity numbers are down a bit, and his 63.2% swing rate on meatballs (pitches right down the middle that you should definitely be swinging at) is 15th lowest among qualified players. However, according to Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric, not only is Greene making better swing decisions than he did in 2023, he ranks 17th in all of baseball (minimum 70 plate appearances). Greene has cut his swing rate in the heart zone by 15 percentage points, but apparently cutting nine percentage points off his swing rate in the chase zone was a worthy tradeoff.

Despite being so much choosier, Greene has improved his contact rate by less than a percentage point, which is somewhat odd. We can see what’s happening when we break things down by pitch type. He has cut his in-zone swing rate by roughly the same amount against all three categories of pitches, but look at the breakdown of his chase rates.

Offspeed pitches are still his biggest problem, but he’s halved his chase rate against fastballs, and cut his chase rate against breaking pitches by a quarter. No one who has seen at least 100 fastballs outside the zone has chased fewer of them than Greene. This helps explain things: He’s making a hair more contact on pitches inside the zone, but his contact rate on pitches outside the zone has fallen by nearly five percentage points. That’s what happens when the pitches you’re chasing are harder to hit. In 2023, fastballs (which run lower whiff rates) made up 37.6% of the pitches Greene chased. So far this year, they’re just 19.2%.

It’s important to keep in mind that a player’s contact rate on pitches outside the zone isn’t necessarily that important. Chasing and whiffing isn’t great, but chasing and making weak contact is usually worse. That’s part of the reason Greene is getting into deeper counts and working so many walks. Even though he’s swinging at way fewer strikes, more of the balls that Greene actually puts into play are coming on pitches in the zone: 83.1%, up from 80.7% in 2023.

Before we end, I would like to take you on a brief detour. I mentioned before that Greene’s in-zone swing rate has dropped more or less indiscriminately. He’s down roughly eight points against offspeed pitches and 10 points against fastballs and breaking balls.

Understandably, opponents have reacted to this by throwing Greene a lot more offspeed pitches. In a somewhat odd side note, Greene is under the impression that he has, in fact, stopped chasing changeups. “Heater in, changeup away,” he told reporters. “It’s almost automatic now. Until I can prove that I can lay off the changeup away, they’re going to keep throwing it. And I feel like I’ve been doing a good job recently of laying off the changeup away.” To be clear, he is swinging at significantly fewer changeups, but only inside the zone (where he’s swinging at less of everything). That is in itself a victory, as offspeed pitches give Greene a ton of trouble, but he’s still chasing them at a nearly identical rate. In 2023, 14.6% of his swings came against offspeed pitches. In 2023, that number is 28.6%. It’s nearly double! His 2023 swing rate is on the left, and 2024 is on the right.

Greene has done a great job of laying off elevated fastballs this season, and he’s also done a better job of laying off low breaking balls. But because so many of his swings are coming against changeups, his swing zone is focused down and away. When he swings at offspeed pitches, he’s worse than ever. He’s running a .158 wOBA and a 50% whiff rate against them, and his 83.5 mph exit velocity against them is dragging his overall EV numbers down. However, because he’s picking better fastballs and breaking balls to swing at, he’s barreling up nearly twice as many balls as he did in 2023.

These are all knock-on effects of the big news. The big news is simple: Riley Greene has slashed his chase rate against breaking pitches and decided to stop chasing fastballs entirely. That’s why he’s walking more, and that’s huge. Even if he never figures out how to stop chasing changeups, this is an improvement. However, we’ve still got a few more days left in April, so I am legally obligated to end by throwing some cold water on everything I just told you. Take a look at the 15-game rolling average of Greene’s walk and chase rates.

In both 2022 and 2023, Greene started out passive, and then got more aggressive over the next couple weeks. Presumably he’ll start swinging more at some point, and presumably Soto will ease back into pole position. But even if Greene’s aggression goes all the way back to his career norms, it’s definitely encouraging that he’s displaying better pitch recognition and a better understanding of the strike zone. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for Greene to get some of his old aggression back, especially if he can keep any of the gains he’s displayed in the past month.

Justin Slaten is well on his way to becoming a Rule 5 success story. Selected by the Mets out of the Rangers organization this past December and subsequently swapped to the Red Sox on the same day, the 26-year-old right-hander has come out of the Boston bullpen eight times and relinquished a single run in 14 1/3 innings. Moreover, he’s been stingy with baserunners, allowing just six hits and a pair of free passes. Four weeks into the season, he’s been the team’s top reliever.

His lone low moment to date came in his major league debut. Pitching in Seattle in the third game of the season, Slaten surrendered a 10th-inning walk-off single to Julio Rodríguez on his fifth big league pitch. Since that time, he’s been borderline flawless — opposing hitters have gone a paltry 5-for-45 against his power arsenal, with a Mike Trout triple accounting for the only extra-base knock. He’s punched out 14 batters.

Slaten’s mix — 38.5% cutters, 35.2% sweepers, 24.0% four-seamers, 2.2% curveballs — has been more varied than he expected it to be when he broke camp. Other than that, he’s mostly the same hurler who attracted Rule 5 interest by overpowering hitters while pitching with the Rangers’ Double-A and Triple-A affiliates last year.

“My only approach coming in was to throw everything in the zone, trying to get the best results,” Slaten told me before a recent game. “The only thing that has changed a little bit is the pitches that have been called. I’m probably throwing a higher percentage of breaking balls than I have in my entire life. But nothing has changed about the way I throw them, or try to execute.” Read the rest of this entry »

Pat Murphy is nominally in his first season as a full-time MLB manager, having previously helmed the Padres for a 96-game interim stint in 2015. But it’s not like he just fell off the turnip truck; he started coaching so long ago I’m not sure they even had trucks or turnips back then. Murphy had been Craig Counsell’s bench coach for eight seasons when he got promoted this past winter. When he took that job, he’d already been working in baseball for 33 seasons, all but one of them as either a minor league manager or college head coach.

Murphy’s seen some stuff.

About halfway through spring training, when Murphy named Brice Turang his starting second baseman, he accompanied the announcement with some glowing praise: “I think this kid’s gonna make a quantum leap… His swing decisions will be better, his contact will be better, and his damage will come.”

At the time, it seemed like puffery, an attempt to build confidence in a former first-round pick who’d been sub-replacement level in his first major league season. Now, it looks like Murphy, endowed with the wisdom of four decades’ experience, can predict the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things, my weekly column that highlights strange and often delightful happenings from the last week of baseball. My own baseball watching was a bit stilted this week, for the best possible reason. I went to three Giants games, an exciting event made possible by cheap ticket deals, a friend’s birthday, and some last minute cancellations of non-baseball weekend plans. Two of those games were pretty awful; Blake Snell got shelled Friday night, and then Blake Snell’s replacements got shelled Wednesday afternoon.

The good news is, there’s still *so much* good baseball going on all the time that I had plenty in the tank to write about. You don’t have to look too far to find things to like about baseball these days. We’ve got new holidays, old AL Central rivals, stadium gimmicks, and pure unadulterated velocity. As always, this column is inspired by Zach Lowe’s basketball column, Ten Things (Zach inspired Will Leitch to start his own Five Things column over at MLB.com, in fact). Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

Blake Snell’s Giants tenure couldn’t be going much worse. In three starts spanning just 11.2 innings, he’s allowed 15 runs — nearly a third of last year’s total in only 6.5% of the innings — with a hard-hit rate that’s up nearly six percentage points from last year. Some of his woes can be attributed to small samples and bad luck — his 11.57 ERA is much higher than his 4.05 xERA — but this clearly isn’t how he and San Francisco drew it up. And that was before news broke Wednesday that the Giants were placing Snell on the 15-day injured list with an adductor muscle strain in his groin area. He has dealt with this injury twice before in his career, though he doesn’t seem worried that it’ll a long-term issue:

Snell had the same injury in 21 and 22, says he caught it early and is hopeful he misses minimal time. Maybe just slightly more than the 15 day minimum.

— Susan Slusser (@susanslusser) April 24, 2024

After his disappointing free agency, Snell could at least look forward to the possibility that he’d earn $32 million this year and pitch well enough to opt out and seek a more lucrative deal after the season. But now that he is going to miss at least three starts, following his three clunkers, it appears unlikely that he’ll be in a position to risk the $30 million he’s set to make next year if he stays.

The more immediate concern for the Giants, though, is how they’ll fill Snell’s spot in the rotation. Logan Webb is on a roll (29 innings in his last four starts, with just three runs allowed), and Jordan Hicks is pitching quite nicely, with a 1.61 ERA in five starts. Keaton Winn (3.54 ERA) is also chipping in on the back end, and while top prospect Kyle Harrison has struggled to a 5.00 ERA so far, there’s certainly room for him to get better. The fifth spot, however, looks like something of a mess.

The Giants had hoped Alex Cobb would be in the rotation by now after he recovered from hip surgery more quickly than expected, but he strained his elbow as he ramped up and was transferred to the 60-day IL instead. That leaves the Giants with two options: go with bullpen games, as they did in a pinch on Wednesday when Snell was scratched, or bring up someone from Triple-A. The latter feels far more likely, especially with Mason Black (1.53 ERA in four starts) pitching very well with Sacramento. Black hasn’t thrown more than five innings or 70 pitches in a start this year, so he won’t exactly take the load off San Francisco relievers, who have the second-highest bullpen ERA in the majors. Still, promoting Black appears to be the best way through this unfortunate situation.

…

On the opposite coast, the Red Sox placed Opening Day starter Brayan Bello on the IL with lat tightness, joining fellow starters Lucas Giolito, Nick Pivetta, and Garrett Whitlock. As with Snell’s injury, Bello seems to have avoided serious injury, but in the best division in baseball, Boston can hardly afford to miss its no. 1 starter for even the minimum 15 days.

Rather amazingly, despite all those injuries, the Red Sox have the lowest ERA and FIP in the majors, with Kutter Crawford leading the way with a 0.66 ERA (two earned runs in 27.1 innings) that’s backed up by an also excellent 2.28 FIP. Tanner Houck (1.65 ERA/2.24 FIP) has become indispensable as well.

But things get dicey after that. The rest of the rotation now consists of Cooper Criswell, Josh Winckowski, and Chase Anderson, and because the latter two opened the season as relievers and aren’t stretched out to start just yet, their outings have turned into bullpen games.

This creates an awfully precarious position for the Red Sox bullpen, which has performed well thus far but doesn’t have the depth to cover an extended workload. Boston has already tapped into its pitching pipeline by calling up Criswell, and none of its other Triple-A pitchers are performing well enough to warrant a promotion to the majors. Moving Winckowski and Anderson to the rotation, then, has the compounding effect of weakening the bullpen, especially since Winckowski had pitched in high leverage situations.

Checking in on Wyatt Langford

Things certainly haven’t been rosy for Rangers rookie Wyatt Langford, who is batting .253/.337/.308 (89 wRC+) with no home runs across 104 plate appearances.

The 22-year-old has excellent raw power but just hasn’t tapped into it in the majors yet. His average exit velocity and hard-hit rate are both well below league average, with his barrel and sweet spot rates just barely above it.

It’s not all bad for Langford; he has elite speed that’s allowed him to beat out some infield hits, and his swing decisions are generally good, with chase and contact rates both well better than major league averages. But having great plate discipline can sometimes handcuff batters when they’re scuffling, and that seems to be the case with Langford. He’s talking too many pitches over the heart of the plate.

Pitch selectivity is a skill that depends just as much on swinging at the right pitches as it does laying off the wrong ones. A hitter may not get his ideal pitch during an entire game, let alone a single plate appearance, and taking too many hittable pitches leads to a lot of pitcher’s counts. It appears Langford would be much better off swinging more and using his quick hands and raw talent to make the most out of the pitches he gets over the plate rather than waiting around for the best possible one.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about how much dirt MLB players ingest in a season, the second-most-encouraging stat about Mike Trout’s season, Shohei Ohtani, Earl Webb, and the single-season doubles record, Cody Bellinger and whether the Cubs should pad the walls at Wrigley Field, whether replay review should privilege the call on the field, Matt Waldron’s knuckleball, the disparate seasons of Elly De La Cruz and Oneil Cruz, Francisco Lindor’s superstar status, José Ruiz’s pursuit of Ryan Webb’s record for games finished without a save, and Tigers broadcaster Jason Benetti’s request for a baseball plus/minus stat (and whether baseball would be better with more player-interaction effects).

Audio intro: Harold Walker, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to dirt-consumption info
Link to FG post on Trout’s running
Link to BP on Trout’s swings
Link to Trout’s pitch-type performance
Link to Trout’s plate-discipline stats
Link to Trout’s sprint speeds
Link to Posnanski on Ohtani
Link to Webb SABR bio
Link to Maris Jr. article 1
Link to Maris Jr. article 2
Link to Bellinger play
Link to Bellinger quote
Link to Bellinger IL news
Link to MLBTR on Bellinger
Link to 1991 Wrigley padding article
Link to info on the ivy
Link to info on Veeck’s role
Link to article on Reiser
Link to second Reiser article
Link to ballpark homogenization info
Link to Adell play
Link to Sheehan on replay
Link to replay review rules
Link to Waldron article
Link to BP on Waldron’s latest
Link to Waldron game highlights
Link to Thrice band wiki
Link to Ben on knuckleballs
Link to Jannis EW appearance
Link to Lindor’s big game
Link to post-2020 hitter WAR
Link to Webb/Albers wiki
Link to Webb/Ruiz leaderboard
Link to plus/minus wiki
Link to MLB defense plus/minus
Link to hockey plus/minus problems
Link to NBA plus/minus problems
Link to Russell on lineups
Link to Ben on batter vs. pitcher stats
Link to catcher ERA article
Link to more on catcher impact
Link to article on Jeter studies
Link to all-22 film info
Link to Jeff on time of possession
Link to Trial By Content pod
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

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Tuesday, April 2 was a good day for the Chicago White Sox. A solid seven-inning start from Garrett Crochet gave the team a lead into the late innings and the bullpen managed to preserve the win. This win, the first of the season, moved to Sox to a 1-4 record, a .200 winning percentage. That’s not an impressive start to the season by any means, but that 1-4 record represents the high-water mark of the month-old 2024 season for the Pale Hose. At no point in the last three weeks have the White Sox had a seasonal winning percentage better than .200, and the four-game losing streak to begin the year is their shortest losing streak so far. Whenever a team that’s projected to be terrible starts the season even worse than expected, we instinctually invoke the 1962 Mets, who set the record for the most losses in a season, at 120. We’re at that point with these White Sox.

What’s striking about Chicago’s start is that in some ways, it’s not even particularly unlucky. Yes, Yoán Moncada and Luis Robert Jr. are out for significant stretches of time, but the projected WAR for their missed playing time so far is a bit under one win. The team’s had only two other IL stints since the start of the season and both injured players, reliever John Brebbia and slugger Eloy Jiménez, returned quickly. Other than Moncada and Robert, the Sox are fielding largely the lineup, rotation, and bullpen that they intended to when the season began. They’re only about a single win worse than their Pythagorean record, and in their three wins, they outscored their opponents by a total of four runs, meaning they were just a few bad breaks from being in the 1988 Orioles territory of dreadful starts.

Chicago’s pitching, at least, hasn’t been completely hopeless. Don’t get me wrong, the White Sox staff ranks at or near the bottom of the league in ERA, FIP, and the various spins on these numbers, but the bullpen has been sort of average, and there have been at least flashes of competence from some of the starters. Crochet’s ERA is ugly, but his peripheral stats are much better and the reasons he’s struggled (homer rate, BABIP) are two of the most volatile stats in existence. Erick Fedde has looked a lot better than he did before his stint in Korea and was terrific on Tuesday, striking out 11 Twins in a 6-5 walk-off loss for the Sox. No, it’s not the pitching that’s the primary offender right now; it’s the offense.

The White Sox have been cosplaying as a Deadball era team, hitting .189/.263/.292 and scoring barely over two runs per game. To put that into context, they have a 62 wRC+ as a team, a mark that has never been maintained for a full season by any big league club; the worst hitting team over a full season was the 1920 Philadelphia A’s, with a 68 wRC+. Even if we look at just the first 24 games of a season, the White Sox lineup is among the most inept since 1901.

Teams were shut out an average of 10.3 times last year; these White Sox have been shut out eight times, meaning they’ve already been shut out half as many times as the offense that led the majors in shutouts last season, the Oakland A’s. Chicago is more than a third of the way toward matching the 2019 Marlins and 2022 Tigers for the highest single-season total of shutouts in the wild-card era, with 22. Let’s catch up quickly on the current AL Central projections in ZiPS.

The White Sox are hopelessly out of the race in a division where “showing up for the season” is basically all it takes to contend. Their current 80th percentile projection to finish the season is about 10 wins worse than the 20th percentile projection for any other team. That 20th percentile projection of 47.2 wins would amount to 115 losses, tantalizingly close to 120. Let’s get the exact distribution of the South Siders’ results.

ZiPS currently gives the White Sox an 8.1% chance of winning 42 or fewer games. When I projected the A’s last year, they came out with only a 5.2% shot at finishing that poorly. Congratulations?

The 2024 White Sox are fairly likely to set franchise records for futility. The current projections give them a 43% chance to have the worst winning percentage in franchise history, a mark currently held by the 1932 club, at .325.

It’s also hard to see where the White Sox would get surges of improvement outside of a regression toward the mean. At the earliest, Moncada is still a few months away from returning. ZiPS is already assuming that Robert’s IL stint will be much shorter and he’ll come back and play as he was expected to coming into the season. There are no hotshot prospects expected to make an impact this year, and the big league roster looks an awful lot like a Triple-A team at the moment, full of fringy veterans.

And don’t forget: The White Sox could get even worse than this come trade season. Moncada’s likely going to return too late to be tradeable at the deadline, but everyone else should be available. I’m including Robert; next season is his last under his base contract before the team option years, and I can’t envision this franchise turning things around before he hits free agency. If 2023 wasn’t sufficient notice that the team’s competitive window has been slammed shut and locked, it’s clear now that the whole thing has been bricked over.

It’s tragic – in a baseball sense – that the fans endured a seven-year rebuild only to have the win-now phase amount to only two seasons, one of them severely shortened by the pandemic. And unlike teams that can claim to have suffered an extraordinary series of unfortunate events, this tale is largely one the White Sox wrote for themselves. Coming off a 93-win season in 2021 in which they lapped the division, finishing in first by 13 games, the White Sox suddenly stopped acting like contenders. Rather than addressing their weaknesses, they simply added a couple of relievers (Kendall Graveman and Joe Kelly) and called it an offseason. Despite getting no offensive contributions from second base, the outfielder corners, and designated hitter in 2021, the team’s big position player move was bringing back Leury García on a three-year contract.

Demosthenes, an Athenian politician of the fourth century BC, once wrote that “the easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self; for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true.” This comes from one his speeches (the Olynthiacs) in which he urged military support of Olynthus, attacked by Philip II of Macedon in 349 BC. And it’s a fitting quote for the White Sox, a team that has largely been run with decisions based on things they want to be true, rather than things that are actually so.

The White Sox wanted to address the second base hole, a problem for years, by just going with whatever utility guys they had on hand. They wanted Andrew Vaughn to hit in the majors in 2021, despite his struggles at High-A ball in 2019 and the cancellation of the minor leagues in 2020. They wanted Tony La Russa to manage the team to glory, and Jiménez to turn into prime José Bautista, and Moncada to stay healthy. The wish list goes on and on.

The end result is that the Sox squandered a position in which they had many advantages. They were a team at the top of the division with a payroll that was tens of millions of dollars from the luxury tax threshold. They had much of their young core a long way from free agency and the financial potential of playing in one of the country’s largest media markets. They played in the weakest division in baseball. Now they’re the worst team in that division.

The White Sox are too far gone, with problems that run too deep to be papered over by a few personnel changes and a handful of hires to their notoriously tiny analytics department. At this point, it feels like the only way for the franchise to turn things around is to clean house. That includes Jerry Reinsdorf, the team’s owner, who by all indications is a large part of the current dysfunction, but who by all indications has no intention of selling the team. So, can the White Sox lose 120 games? Sure. But maybe the better question is this: What would it matter if they did?

Ribs have been in the headlines this week, but sadly, not as part of a review of exciting new ballpark barbecue offerings. On Monday, Triston Casas was diagnosed with a fractured rib on his left side, an injury that will result in a prolonged absence and comes at a time when the Red Sox infield has already been depleted. On Wednesday, the Cubs’ Cody Bellinger was diagnosed with fractured ribs on his right side, interrupting his rebound from a slow start.

The 24-year-old Casas left Saturday’s game against the Pirates after injuring himself while fouling off a Mitch Keller pitch. He was initially diagnosed with a strain in his left rib cage and was placed on the injured list on Sunday. An MRI taken on Monday revealed a fracture as well, and the presumption is that his absence will be a long one given that the damage involves muscle and cartilage as well as bone. “Timetable, there’s none. It has to heal on its own. We’ve just got to be patient,” said manager Alex Cora. That sounds like a trip to the 60-day IL could be in order. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday night, the Orioles beat the Angels to vault into a tie for first place in the AL East at 16-8. That tie was short-lived; the Yankees beat the A’s a few hours later to reclaim first for themselves. Meanwhile, the Red Sox beat the Guardians to move to 14-11, the last-place Rays beat the Tigers to get back to .500, and the Blue Jays lost a squeaker to the Royals. It was a good day for the AL East, but what else is new?

Through 93 games of non-divisional play, the AL East teams have accumulated a 57-36 record, a .613 winning percentage. That would be a 99-win pace across a 162-game schedule. They’re tearing the league to shreds. That led me to wonder: Just how good is this start, and what happened to the previous divisions to start this hot?

To solve this problem, I decided to look back through history for inter-divisional records from across the league, because by definition intra-divisional records work out to .500. I started in 1998, the first year with 30 teams, and went from there. But that’s not sufficient, of course. If the East keeps this record up throughout the year, it will end up with the best winning percentage of the 30-team era. But its teams probably won’t keep the pace up. It’s a lot easier to post a .600 winning percentage over 93 games than over the 550 they’ll rack up by season’s end. The best full-season non-divisional winning percentage over that time was .595 by the AL West in 2001, and the Mariners tying the single-season wins record had a lot to do with that.

To account for that, you have to stop your count earlier in the season. Through the same date last year, for example, the AL East had played 81 non-divisional games. Outrageously, its teams had won 57 of those as well, a .704 winning percentage that’s the best, through games of April 24, of any division over this time frame.

Using the exact day isn’t perfect either, though. Through April 24 of 2004, AL East teams had played 18 non-divisional games thanks to a late start to the season. In 1998, they’d already played 95. Still, that provides us an interesting initial benchmark. The .613 clip that the division is currently playing at is a 93rd-percentile outcome, 11th-best over the last 26 years (I’ve excluded 2020 from this analysis for obvious reasons).
Read the rest of this entry »