He's something I think you and W2W would enjoy about Bartolo Colon and the Mets. It's written by Joe Sheehan and I pay a subscription rate for his writing about Baseball all year around. It's really inexpensive and I really shouldn't be copying and pasting but I know what type of Met fans you are and thought you guys would like this.
The Mets are back in the postseason, locking up a spot hosting the NL Wild Card Game with a 5-3 win over the Phillies yesterday. Bartolo Colon threw five innings and allowed two runs, striking out six and walking no one. It was the tenth time this year Colon had gone at least five innings without issuing a free pass.*
This is an amazing thing to say, but the Mets don't make their way back to the postseason without Colon. In a season in which all five of their young-stud starters battled some kind of health problem, in which four of them are done for the year, in which the five combined for just 93 starts, Colon became the rotation anchor. He led the Mets in starts and innings and was third among the team's pitchers in bWAR; in fact, he was third among all Mets in bWAR. If the Mets play in the Division Series, Colon will be their Game One starter.*
Players who operate at the extremes are fascinating. Colon, for three years in Queens, has been operating at the outer edges of repertoire. Nine out of every ten pitches Colon threw this year were fastballs; three of every five were two-seamers. (Colon showed James Wagner of The New York Times his pitch grips in this excellent baseball-focused profile of the righty.) No MLB starter with at least 100 innings pitched came close to Colon's extreme usage of a fastball, while at the same time, just a handful of pitchers throw their "heater" at a lower average velocity. It's a fascinating profile.
Colon has succeeded in this stage of his career by all but eliminating walks. Helped, as many have been, by the larger de facto strike at the low end, Colon has poured in strikes -- nearly half of his pitches are strikes, virtually tied with Danny Duffy for first among qualified starters. For the three years combined, he's second only to Phil Hughes in throwing strikes and last among all pitchers in getting swinging strikes.* In that time, though, just two pitchers have a lower walk rate than Colon, who has issued free passes to just 3.5% of the batters he's faced. It's a model we saw Curt Schilling explore at the end of his career, and Chien-Ming Wang succeed with before injuries derailed him: Throw fastballs for strikes and what happens, happens. In Colon's case, it's made him a credible #3 or #4 starter who has been as valuable for his durability as his run prevention.
(All data courtesy Fangraphs.)
If anything, Colon's numbers might have been better had he been playing for another team; the Mets have ranged from average to bad at turning balls in play into outs in Colon's three years with them. Colon's velocity and use of the fastball are comparable to that of Kyle Hendricks, who is going to win the ERA title and possibly the NL Cy Young Award thanks to the Cubs' defense.*
I know you really don't want to, but you kind of have to write a piece on Bartolo Colon. He's having a historic season.*
--R.B.
That showed up in my inbox about two weeks ago. R.B. isn't wrong and I'm glad to have had the hook, with the Mets clinching behind Colon, to finally run this. The note did make me think about why I haven't written about Colon, though.*
Colon's pitch mix and control, coupled with his advanced age and importance to the once pitching-rich Mets, are the story. Out there in the world, though, Colon is more meme than man, more GIF than whiff. I don't know exactly when or how it started, but Colon surpassed Yasiel Puig as baseball social media's most popular player about two years ago, and he retains that title.
That's never set right with me. The attention paid to Colon in his dotage has always had, for me, this undercurrent of "look at the fat kid run!" I make no claim that is what it was, but the barrage of images of Colon swinging a bat haplessly, the overwrought reactions to his rare hits, the awe when he would make a play in the field, has always made me uncomfortable. It has seemed to me like the cool kids mocking, but doing so in a way that allowed for plausible deniability. Again, I reiterate: I may well be wrong, or maybe even projecting (less about size than the cool kids), but it's one reason why I've shied away from Colon as topic.
The other is that Colon is one critical point in the ongoing discussion of how we address players who have been ensnared in sports drugs. To wit:
"This player was on his way out of the league, having thrown just 421 1/3 innings over six seasons at the age of 38, with a 95 ERA+ in that time. He'd played for four teams in five years, missing a complete season in there as well. At 39, though, he posted his best numbers since 32 while being suspended for 50 games under the Joint Drug Agreement. Since that suspension, he has taken every start asked of him and provided a 106 ERA+ in 779 innings."
We ruin so many players' reputations over this stuff. We foster suspicion and disdain and outright hatred of baseball players, many of whom have never tested positive, much less been suspended. We build narratives that collapse under the slightest of examinations -- but the stain remains.
Yet a player whose career inarguably has the shape of a player who saved himself through chemistry is a cuddly, mascot-like figure whose transgression is almost never mentioned.
I'm not a parishioner in the Church of Steroids. Colon's career path doesn't bother me in some moral sense. What bothers me is that the congregation in that church picks and chooses who to damn and who to beatify, and they do it in a way that violates all standards of evidence and fairness. So when I think about Bartolo Colon, it's hard for me to not think about Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro and Roger Clemens and the arguments and the assertions and the 25-year battle to figure out what this all means. We got it wrong, and every time Colon walks off the mound to raucous cheers, I think that we're never going to get it right.
--
The Mets' win over the Phillies reduced the NL wild-card race to two teams for one spot. Both those teams, the Giants and Cardinals, won, so the NL wild-card race is simple: the Giants win, and they're in. If the Giants lose, the Cardinals can force a tie and a Monday playoff with a win. Whichever team advances will play the Mets at Citi Field on Wednesday night. A quick-and-dirty look at the Vegas odds puts the chance of a playoff at about 31%. That might be high; the Dodgers are starting Kenta Maeda against the Giants, but I doubt we'll see them at maximum strength for all nine innings.
Here's a little something else
That game at AT&T Park will be Vin Scully's final game. I've enjoyed listening to Scully for a long time, and years spent living in Los Angeles gave me an appreciation for his voice, his approach, his unique style. It will be a long time before we see a broadcaster call games by himself the way Scully has, and longer still before anyone does it as well. In the MLB.tv era, Scully has been brought to a younger and wider audience in his final years in the booth, a treat for fans who've never seen games done the way he does them.*
I enjoyed my final dose of Clayton Kershaw called by Vin Scully yesterday, and I'm sure I'll be tuned in this afternoon no matter how the game goes. For more on Scully, you should read Jay Jaffe's SI.com remembrance, Jayson Stark's epic tribute, and Cee Angi's 2014 profile.*
Very briefly on Kershaw: he had one of the greatest seasons any pitcher has ever had with 11 critical starts chopped out of it. He was the best pitcher in baseball this year and remains the best pitcher alive. My question is this: If Zach Britton can be the AL Cy Young with fewer than 70 innings pitched, because they were just that good, why can't Kershaw be the NL Cy Young with 149 innings pitched?
Speaking of Britton, he didn't pitch yesterday. The Orioles blew an early three-run lead and allowed four runs to break and eighth-inning tie in Game 161 when a win would have locked up a playoff berth and they didn't use the pitcher many people will call the best in the American League this year. If the argument for Britton is that his low number of innings are more meaningful because of when he pitches, yesterday showed just how empty that argument is. You can have all the three-run, clean-inning saves against the bottom of the Twins' lineup; if you can't use the best pitcher in the league in a tied game in the eighth inning when you can clinch a playoff spot with a win, then he's not the best pitcher in the league.
All I know is Andrew Miller would have been in there.
Contrast this with John Gibbons, who went to closer Roberto Osuna for a six-out save against the Red Sox last night. The save part didn't work out, but the Jays manufactured a run off of Craig Kimbrel in the ninth inning to position themselves for no worse than a 163rd.
Gibbons' decision to bring Osuna in with two on and nobody out in the eighth was commendable, but on Twitter, Alex Cora raised a good point: if Gibbons was willing to use Osuna when he did, why not just have him start the eighth? As I told him, I agree in the big picture; we'll see this mistake made time and again over the next month, managers passing up a clean inning for their always-throws-clean-innings reliever, then bringing the guy in with second and third and one out. It goes back to the point I make over and over again -- it's about putting your players in position to succeed.
However, I was sympathetic to Gibbons here, because I think his calling on Osuna was something of a last resort. Osuna isn't right; his velocity looks fine, but entering last night, he'd struck out just one of the last 19 men he'd faced (it's one of 24 after a whiff-free two frames). His strikeout rate in September is under 20% and, going back to the start of August, he has a 4.21 ERA. Moreover, Gibbons had to consider the possibility that the Jays would be playing elimination games on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday -- using Osuna for two innings would almost certainly make him unavailable for at least one of those days.
I think Gibbons made the right decision to call on Osuna when he did, and a defensible decision, given Osuna's recent work and the possibility he'd be needed extensively on future days, to not start the eighth with him. Alex Cora's main point, though, is absolutely correct: if there's a chance you're going to use your best reliever to get out of an inning, you should just put him on the mound to start the inning. For more on this, re-watch the 2015 World Series.
The Orioles' loss opened the door to all kinds of chaos in the American League, which for about three hours had a chance at a four-way tie. Alas, neither the Tigers nor the Mariners could beat teams playing out the string -- more evidence that motivation is a useless predictor of baseball games. The Mariners were eliminated with their loss, while the Tigers lost control of their fate by losing to the Diamondb er, the Braves, 5-3.
This makes today in the NL about as simple as it is in the AL. The Orioles and Blue Jays will lock up the wild cards and eliminate the Tigers with wins. If either loses, the Tigers can extend their season with a win over the Braves, which would then require them to play a makeup game Monday in Cleveland that they would have win to get to 88-74 and a tie for a wild-card berth. Based, again, on the posted odds and my vague memory of a long-ago prob class, I get a 44.8% chance the Tigers will survive today.
Comments
w2w
w2w
Oops wrong thread. I thought this was your "Army Football" thread. LOL
w2w
w2w
w2w
God damn, that's a bitch to spell both those names...
Regardless, gonna be a great one Wednesday night.
LGM
Not really, Bum vs Thor, see that wasn't so hard
The Mets are back in the postseason, locking up a spot hosting the NL Wild Card Game with a 5-3 win over the Phillies yesterday. Bartolo Colon threw five innings and allowed two runs, striking out six and walking no one. It was the tenth time this year Colon had gone at least five innings without issuing a free pass.*
This is an amazing thing to say, but the Mets don't make their way back to the postseason without Colon. In a season in which all five of their young-stud starters battled some kind of health problem, in which four of them are done for the year, in which the five combined for just 93 starts, Colon became the rotation anchor. He led the Mets in starts and innings and was third among the team's pitchers in bWAR; in fact, he was third among all Mets in bWAR. If the Mets play in the Division Series, Colon will be their Game One starter.*
Players who operate at the extremes are fascinating. Colon, for three years in Queens, has been operating at the outer edges of repertoire. Nine out of every ten pitches Colon threw this year were fastballs; three of every five were two-seamers. (Colon showed James Wagner of The New York Times his pitch grips in this excellent baseball-focused profile of the righty.) No MLB starter with at least 100 innings pitched came close to Colon's extreme usage of a fastball, while at the same time, just a handful of pitchers throw their "heater" at a lower average velocity. It's a fascinating profile.
Colon has succeeded in this stage of his career by all but eliminating walks. Helped, as many have been, by the larger de facto strike at the low end, Colon has poured in strikes -- nearly half of his pitches are strikes, virtually tied with Danny Duffy for first among qualified starters. For the three years combined, he's second only to Phil Hughes in throwing strikes and last among all pitchers in getting swinging strikes.* In that time, though, just two pitchers have a lower walk rate than Colon, who has issued free passes to just 3.5% of the batters he's faced. It's a model we saw Curt Schilling explore at the end of his career, and Chien-Ming Wang succeed with before injuries derailed him: Throw fastballs for strikes and what happens, happens. In Colon's case, it's made him a credible #3 or #4 starter who has been as valuable for his durability as his run prevention.
(All data courtesy Fangraphs.)
If anything, Colon's numbers might have been better had he been playing for another team; the Mets have ranged from average to bad at turning balls in play into outs in Colon's three years with them. Colon's velocity and use of the fastball are comparable to that of Kyle Hendricks, who is going to win the ERA title and possibly the NL Cy Young Award thanks to the Cubs' defense.*
I know you really don't want to, but you kind of have to write a piece on Bartolo Colon. He's having a historic season.*
--R.B.
That showed up in my inbox about two weeks ago. R.B. isn't wrong and I'm glad to have had the hook, with the Mets clinching behind Colon, to finally run this. The note did make me think about why I haven't written about Colon, though.*
Colon's pitch mix and control, coupled with his advanced age and importance to the once pitching-rich Mets, are the story. Out there in the world, though, Colon is more meme than man, more GIF than whiff. I don't know exactly when or how it started, but Colon surpassed Yasiel Puig as baseball social media's most popular player about two years ago, and he retains that title.
That's never set right with me. The attention paid to Colon in his dotage has always had, for me, this undercurrent of "look at the fat kid run!" I make no claim that is what it was, but the barrage of images of Colon swinging a bat haplessly, the overwrought reactions to his rare hits, the awe when he would make a play in the field, has always made me uncomfortable. It has seemed to me like the cool kids mocking, but doing so in a way that allowed for plausible deniability. Again, I reiterate: I may well be wrong, or maybe even projecting (less about size than the cool kids), but it's one reason why I've shied away from Colon as topic.
The other is that Colon is one critical point in the ongoing discussion of how we address players who have been ensnared in sports drugs. To wit:
"This player was on his way out of the league, having thrown just 421 1/3 innings over six seasons at the age of 38, with a 95 ERA+ in that time. He'd played for four teams in five years, missing a complete season in there as well. At 39, though, he posted his best numbers since 32 while being suspended for 50 games under the Joint Drug Agreement. Since that suspension, he has taken every start asked of him and provided a 106 ERA+ in 779 innings."
We ruin so many players' reputations over this stuff. We foster suspicion and disdain and outright hatred of baseball players, many of whom have never tested positive, much less been suspended. We build narratives that collapse under the slightest of examinations -- but the stain remains.
Yet a player whose career inarguably has the shape of a player who saved himself through chemistry is a cuddly, mascot-like figure whose transgression is almost never mentioned.
I'm not a parishioner in the Church of Steroids. Colon's career path doesn't bother me in some moral sense. What bothers me is that the congregation in that church picks and chooses who to damn and who to beatify, and they do it in a way that violates all standards of evidence and fairness. So when I think about Bartolo Colon, it's hard for me to not think about Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro and Roger Clemens and the arguments and the assertions and the 25-year battle to figure out what this all means. We got it wrong, and every time Colon walks off the mound to raucous cheers, I think that we're never going to get it right.
--
The Mets' win over the Phillies reduced the NL wild-card race to two teams for one spot. Both those teams, the Giants and Cardinals, won, so the NL wild-card race is simple: the Giants win, and they're in. If the Giants lose, the Cardinals can force a tie and a Monday playoff with a win. Whichever team advances will play the Mets at Citi Field on Wednesday night. A quick-and-dirty look at the Vegas odds puts the chance of a playoff at about 31%. That might be high; the Dodgers are starting Kenta Maeda against the Giants, but I doubt we'll see them at maximum strength for all nine innings.
Here's a little something else
That game at AT&T Park will be Vin Scully's final game. I've enjoyed listening to Scully for a long time, and years spent living in Los Angeles gave me an appreciation for his voice, his approach, his unique style. It will be a long time before we see a broadcaster call games by himself the way Scully has, and longer still before anyone does it as well. In the MLB.tv era, Scully has been brought to a younger and wider audience in his final years in the booth, a treat for fans who've never seen games done the way he does them.*
I enjoyed my final dose of Clayton Kershaw called by Vin Scully yesterday, and I'm sure I'll be tuned in this afternoon no matter how the game goes. For more on Scully, you should read Jay Jaffe's SI.com remembrance, Jayson Stark's epic tribute, and Cee Angi's 2014 profile.*
Very briefly on Kershaw: he had one of the greatest seasons any pitcher has ever had with 11 critical starts chopped out of it. He was the best pitcher in baseball this year and remains the best pitcher alive. My question is this: If Zach Britton can be the AL Cy Young with fewer than 70 innings pitched, because they were just that good, why can't Kershaw be the NL Cy Young with 149 innings pitched?
Speaking of Britton, he didn't pitch yesterday. The Orioles blew an early three-run lead and allowed four runs to break and eighth-inning tie in Game 161 when a win would have locked up a playoff berth and they didn't use the pitcher many people will call the best in the American League this year. If the argument for Britton is that his low number of innings are more meaningful because of when he pitches, yesterday showed just how empty that argument is. You can have all the three-run, clean-inning saves against the bottom of the Twins' lineup; if you can't use the best pitcher in the league in a tied game in the eighth inning when you can clinch a playoff spot with a win, then he's not the best pitcher in the league.
All I know is Andrew Miller would have been in there.
Contrast this with John Gibbons, who went to closer Roberto Osuna for a six-out save against the Red Sox last night. The save part didn't work out, but the Jays manufactured a run off of Craig Kimbrel in the ninth inning to position themselves for no worse than a 163rd.
Gibbons' decision to bring Osuna in with two on and nobody out in the eighth was commendable, but on Twitter, Alex Cora raised a good point: if Gibbons was willing to use Osuna when he did, why not just have him start the eighth? As I told him, I agree in the big picture; we'll see this mistake made time and again over the next month, managers passing up a clean inning for their always-throws-clean-innings reliever, then bringing the guy in with second and third and one out. It goes back to the point I make over and over again -- it's about putting your players in position to succeed.
However, I was sympathetic to Gibbons here, because I think his calling on Osuna was something of a last resort. Osuna isn't right; his velocity looks fine, but entering last night, he'd struck out just one of the last 19 men he'd faced (it's one of 24 after a whiff-free two frames). His strikeout rate in September is under 20% and, going back to the start of August, he has a 4.21 ERA. Moreover, Gibbons had to consider the possibility that the Jays would be playing elimination games on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday -- using Osuna for two innings would almost certainly make him unavailable for at least one of those days.
I think Gibbons made the right decision to call on Osuna when he did, and a defensible decision, given Osuna's recent work and the possibility he'd be needed extensively on future days, to not start the eighth with him. Alex Cora's main point, though, is absolutely correct: if there's a chance you're going to use your best reliever to get out of an inning, you should just put him on the mound to start the inning. For more on this, re-watch the 2015 World Series.
The Orioles' loss opened the door to all kinds of chaos in the American League, which for about three hours had a chance at a four-way tie. Alas, neither the Tigers nor the Mariners could beat teams playing out the string -- more evidence that motivation is a useless predictor of baseball games. The Mariners were eliminated with their loss, while the Tigers lost control of their fate by losing to the Diamondb er, the Braves, 5-3.
This makes today in the NL about as simple as it is in the AL. The Orioles and Blue Jays will lock up the wild cards and eliminate the Tigers with wins. If either loses, the Tigers can extend their season with a win over the Braves, which would then require them to play a makeup game Monday in Cleveland that they would have win to get to 88-74 and a tie for a wild-card berth. Based, again, on the posted odds and my vague memory of a long-ago prob class, I get a 44.8% chance the Tigers will survive today.
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