Ha🧔ppy Friday to you all. I just hope you have a 💮good day. Sincerely.
Seiya can really send ’em:
With that homer as part of a great game last night, Suzuki ticked over his 2023 homer and WAR total, to set a new career high at 21 and 3.3, respectively. He’s hitting .280/.361/.484/136 wRC+ on the season, and he has essentially gotten better and better as his time in MLB has gone on. Eventually, age will become a factor in pushing things back in the other direction, but seeing as he only just turned 30, it’s wholly conceivable that Suzuki could be even better offensively next year.
So, I read this story a couple times over the past day, and, contrary to the obvious takeaways (in sum: Jerry Reinsdorf is overly involved, cheap, and ineffective) it’s pretty wild to think about how close the White Sox came to winning big IN SPITE OF everything:
I mean, the White Sox were quite good from 2020-22, and could’ve made a real run in 2021 with a different bounce here or there. Knowing what we know now about how inefficiently those teams were constructed – and how much they could’ve been improved if the organization had been treated more seriously – it reminds me just how much about a team’s season is not entirely controllable. We usually think about it in the other direction (when flukey things go wrong), but sometimes flukey stuff coalesces in a positive way to help a team have a really good season when maybe they didn’t “deserve” it when you evaluate the org as a whole.
Speaking of that concept, a general point I’ve tried to make a few times over the years that was sparked by a lot of comments about the Cubs’ last two seasons, but which is not explicitly about these two seasons (copied and pasted ):
“As baseball fans, we instinctively understand that a two at bat sample doesn’t really tell you a lot, because sometimes unlikely things happen two at bats in a row. A guy hit back-to-back grand slams? That’s freaking awesome. But it’s also probably not at all predictive of at bat number three, or even necessarily entirely descriptive of that player’s inherent talent. Sometimes, two weird at bats happen back-to-back.
What if it’s two games? Or two months? Or two seasons for a whole team?
Some folks just can’t fathom that weird things can also happen two of THOSE in a row, just as they could happen in two at bats.
Is there more signal in a team’s season than in a single player’s at bat? Of course! It’s all a sliding scale.
But whacky, randomly-driven outcomes SOMETIMES happen at a season-long level for teams. And unlike with at bats, where we quickly get to see 500+ more of them to even out a lot of the noise, we don’t get that for seasons. A 100-season sample takes 100 years. We don’t really, uh, have the time to do that. And the teams completely change year-to-year anyway.”
I don’t know that I think this season for the Cubs has been all that flukey to the downside. I know what the metrics say (four or five losses ), but a lot of it has felt earned. Maybe an extra loss or two, in total, driven by pure bad luck? I don’t think it was more than that. (Last season, however, pretty easily could’ve flipped three or four games in the other direction, and then it’s a playoff team, and people talk about it completely differently, even though the underlying performance was exactly the same.)
Wait for Shōta:
Something nice to enjoy about baseball here at the close – did we witness literally the best game in baseball history last night from Shohei Ohtani? When you consider just the results, it’s right up there, and then you layer in the fact that it was the same night he became the only member ever of the 50-50 club, it sure feels like it. More:
