Winning the offseason — signing the marquee free agent and/or making the headline-grabbing trade — does not correlate strongly with actual winning. The San Diego Padres “won” the 2014-15 offseason by adding Craig Kimbrel, James Shields and a host of other players, then went on to lose 88 games the following season. The previous winter, […]
gfoster (Geoff Foster, sports editor): Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s postseason MLB chat. We are done with the one-game wild-card playoffs. We are done with the one-game playoffs to figure out who would play in the one-game playoffs. And the Oakland Athletics and the Chicago Cubs are the first casualties of October. I think Oakland has to […]
Seated at his locker in the visitors’ clubhouse in Cleveland back in June, Christian Yelich looked more like someone you might find at a skatepark than an All-Star firmly in the National League MVP discussion. Yelich wore a straight-brimmed hat, jeans and a T-shirt that cloaked his lanky, 6-foot-3 frame, which sprawled out from a […]
On Aug. 3, shortly after being acquired by Milwaukee in a deadline deal from Baltimore, Jonathan Schoop found himself in an unusual position on the Miller Park infield. For just the third time in his six-year career, he was starting at shortstop. He wasn’t alone that day. His middle-infield teammate, Travis Shaw, was starting just […]
When the Kansas City Royals made back-to-back World Series in 2014 and 2015 — coming agonizingly close in the former and winning the latter — they launched a thousand think pieces about whether manager Ned Yost’s brand of small ball would spread throughout the game. But then it looked like it might never get the […]