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The last twenty comments in true blog fasion, with the links to their authors and the player commented upon.
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The elephant in the room in figuring out an answer to Eugene's question is the Rangers new park.
He had a .333/ .427/.727 slash line vs lefties in 75 AB which could be either a fluke or it could be the hitter version of the Clayton Kershaw Syndrome which is Kershaw doesn't have a large platoon split bc opposing managers only allow the best lefties to hit against him....so Gallo's large platoon split could also be due to only being allowed to face the weaker lefty pitchers.
Called up to facilitate comparisons with his teammate, the Brewers' center fielder.
Lorenzo's great, and as LynchMob points out, he was very unlucky this year.
But WAR doesn't know from luck... did Lorenzo really provide more wins above a replacement player in center field than Josh Hader did as a late-inning guy who invariably was summoned when the game was on the line, often in the 8th inning, tasked to finish it out?
I'm talking about Josh Hader, who we see in the list under Woodruff, gets a lower final WAR score from Baseball-Reference than Lorenzo Cain.
He was a goddamned monster in the second half. We can keep him at $20, but a massive career year from a 35-year-old?
The shocking thing is his BABIP jump while his K percent climbed even higher.
Poor guy can't stay healthy. He looked like hew as going to get close to a $30 season and instead earned just short of most of these bids. He also was crushing doubles. I can see him earning $30 one year, but we just don't know which one. Most years he will probably disappoint due to injuries.
He was well on his way to earning his career best when he was injured a second time. In half a season he earned $14 (likely $12) in 5x5. Can he keep his OBP/Avg up next year? Was this a new lease on life or merely a blip? I expect him to be a pick next year with bids closer to $25 than his normal $15-20.
He earned $14, probably $12 once the new formulae are calculated in 5x5 in about half a season. It was an odd series of injuries that held him back in the second half. It will be interesting to see if he can earn $20 next year in a full season. He's entering his prime and under long-term contract.
He almost won it for me this year -- with his fluke win on Saturday. The official scorer had half a dozen pitchers to choose from and chose him.
I picked him up in late June as a straight waiver claim. In 36 games (I had him on reserve for much of July), he had seven wins and seven saves, posting a 10.07 Ratio and 1.83 ERA.
As Branch Rickey said, luck is the residue of claiming a pitcher every chance you get.
An amazing factoid about the Brewers: not one pitcher qualified for the ERA crown.
NL Wild Card WAR Leaders
Washington Nationals
| Name | Age | WAR | Pos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stephen Strasburg | 30 | 6.5 | SP |
| Anthony Rendon | 29 | 6.3 | 3B |
| Max Scherzer | 34 | 5.8 | SP |
| Patrick Corbin | 29 | 5.4 | SP |
| Juan Soto | 20 | 4.7 | LF |
See 2019 Washington Nationals statistics at Baseball-Reference.com
Milwaukee Brewers
| Name | Age | WAR | Pos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christian Yelich | 27 | 7.1 | RF |
| Brandon Woodruff | 26 | 3.3 | SP |
| Mike Moustakas | 30 | 3.2 | 3B |
| Lorenzo Cain | 33 | 2.8 | CF |
| Josh Hader | 25 | 2.6 | RP |
See 2019 Milwaukee Brewers statistics at Baseball-Reference.com
He saved his best for last.
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Conspicuously absent from the list just posted under Yoan Moncada.
The Post-Hype Breakout Player of the Year for sure.
Runner-up: Josh Bell.
That said, I'm not such what B-R's criteria are to be ranked as a Top Performer each day. Is there a fomula similar to Game Scores?
Most Frequent Top Performers in 2019
Batters:
Christian Yelich* (MIL): 18x listed, .329 BA, 44 HR, 97 RBI, 30 SB
Ronald Acuna Jr.* (ATL): 16x, .280 BA, 41 HR, 101 RBI, 37 SB
Juan Soto* (WSN): 15x, .282 BA, 34 HR, 110 RBI, 12 SB
Charlie Blackmon (COL): 14x, .314 BA, 32 HR, 86 RBI, 2 SB
Mike Trout (LAA): 14x, .291 BA, 45 HR, 104 RBI, 11 SB
Eugenio Suarez (CIN): 14x, .271 BA, 49 HR, 103 RBI, 3 SB
Yoan Moncada (CHW): 13x, .315 BA, 25 HR, 79 RBI, 10 SB
Rafael Devers (BOS): 13x, .311 BA, 32 HR, 115 RBI, 8 SB
Yuli Gurriel (HOU): 13x, .298 BA, 31 HR, 104 RBI, 5 SB
Josh Bell (PIT): 13x, .277 BA, 37 HR, 116 RBI
That's great. Our league had a guy win by a half-point in the early 90s, in the "Heath Research weekly reports" days. That had to be amusing in the last days, but you're really guessing unless you're prepared to crunch everybody's numbers every day . . . and we weren't.
Not me. I'm still recovering from Sunday. So is Les Leopold of the Tooners. Here's his account.
The Tooners cruised into Monday with a four point lead. By Tuesday night it had vanished. All eight categories were in play. Moose had cut our 25 rbi lead to seven. The Peppers were on the Moose’s tail in HR. The Moose, Tooners, Bags, Jerry’s and Pals were virtually tied in BA, as were the Tooners, Nabobs and Pals in sbs. The Pals were about to catch the Moose in wins, while the Hackers were doing the same to us in saves. The Pals and Moose were playing footsie in era, and ratio was a mess: the Moose were in reach of the Peppers who were playing questionable starters to make their innings, and the Tooners, Bad K, Jerry’s and Bags were in a dead heat in ratio. (The Bags? Where did they come from?)
To compound the anxiety I screwed up on Monday’s waiver claims and was immediately punished by the baseball gods. We would bench all of our starters to protect ratio (and of course those starters then proceeded to pitch to good ratio and collect wins.) And we would try to pick up some sbs since we had such large leads in hr and rbi.
Larry then went off to play golf. As I was typing in six long lists I realized that we could only claim Alford if we dropped, rather than reserved Zimmer, whom I had a soft spot for. So I didn’t put in for Alford. Later that day we find out the Lourdes Gueriel, one of our best hitters, comes down with appendicitis, which means Alford might get some outfield time. That night he comes in during a 15 inning game, steals a base and hits a walk-off HR.
I was a low as I had ever been playing this game. I knew that one SB could determine the season. It was so bad that Larry had to console me for what seemed like hours on the phone. He kept saying that Newton was bound to join Alex’s rampaging team, bringing whatever goes up, down.
And sure enough, Newton arrived. The Mooser’s .500 ba slowed down as did his rbi outburst. Nevertheless, first place kept flipping, often several times in a night.
But the sixth inning of Sunday’s game we knew we would lose unless our hitters got some hits. Moose, the benefactor of a dubious scorer-given win to Hudson on Saturday night, would escape the Pals. The Nabobs had caught us yet again in steals. If the BA point flipped back to the Moose (and we virtually tied) we would lose by a half point. Mother F….
It is 5pm on Sunday and now Larry is sending me very spirited texts as if he were in the dugout of 10 teams urging our players to get hits…or else! Actually, he was watching four games on his computer plus the Rays on TV. He was so intent on his quest for hits that he didn’t want to hear from me anything about any other possible combinations. I too should be screaming for hits and more hits. I was thinking, now this really is crazy or maybe I’m so gone that it’s now normal to think that our cheering controls real baseball.
Well, the more Larry cried out for hits, the more the hits came. In the final hour our ba lead over Moose rose from .0001 to .0007. We were going to win and indeed I was now certifiably crazy.
ROI Year 1....almost 600,000 increase in attendance.
Anyone organizing a playoff league this year?
Capping a stellar season, Oracles had Miller and Hechavarria on the bench for yesterday's games.
With his team out of it, Clevinger was hoping to top his win total last year in the season finale against the Nationals. But he left in the sixth inning down 6-1.
"I went into it trying to have some fun," he said, "and it wasn't a whole lot of fun."
Final interleague scorecard: NL 166, NL 134 (1497 runs to 1338).
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His stats are hard to distinguish from JD Martinez, a reputed power hitter. I don't think strength of competition or ballpark factors into their comparison.