After sweeping the San Diego Padres over the weekend, the Los Angeles Dodgers are on pace to win 103 games this season — the fourth time in the past five seasons that they have produced at least 100 wins per 162 games. If that trend holds steady over the next few weeks, L.A. would become […]
After MLB’s lukewarm interest in free agency the past few seasons, this winter could bring an even less active marketplace. COVID-19 slashed baseball revenues in 2020, and teams are expected to cut payroll next season, which could hurt the middle class of free agents particularly hard. But even during this recent trend away from high-dollar […]
Travis Sawchik is a FiveThirtyEight staff writer. His new book “The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players,” co-authored with The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh, is available this week. In it, they examine how outsiders (and a few forward-thinking insiders) are employing unconventional ideas along with new data from new […]
Major League Baseball seems to be on an unstoppable pathway to more and more strikeouts. After a record share of plate appearances ended in a strikeout last season (22.3 percent), this season is winding up to set another record: If the to-date strikeout rate of 23 percent holds or increases over the season, it would […]
When baseball welcomed the new Statcast technology to every major league stadium in 2015, the system’s Doppler radar began tracking an underlying pitching skill: spin rate. Teams and players were suddenly armed with new data to study and optimize. They were able to quantify long-held beliefs about pitch characteristics, like “late life” and “rise,” and […]