José Ramírez saw home run pitches again last night, drilling a fastball, a sinker, and a Corey Kluber curveball deep into the Massachusetts night. With his 7th, 8th, and 9th long balls of the year, the hot-corner-manning cornerstone of the Guardians franchise brought his fWAR total to 1.7 on the young year, putting him on pace for 4.4 of the stuff with 100 games left to play. With his 199th, 200th, and 201st long balls of his career, the undersized bopper carrying Cleveland brought his fWAR over the last decade (beginning at the start of 2013, his first year with any MLB at-bats) to 42.9 wins, a number which trails only eleven other players over that timespan.
Those 4.4 wins he’s on pace for this year?
Those would constitute José Ramírez’s second-worst season of the last eight years.
We wrote about Ramírez back in September, asking whether he’s the best player in the game right now. I don’t personally think he is—I’d vote for Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani using our definition from then of “who will do the most in any given month”—but as time goes on and the groundbreaking beginning to Mike Trout’s career gets further into the rearview mirror, Ramírez’s case as the best player of the last [insert number] years progressively improves. Trout hasn’t bested Ramírez in fWAR since 2019. Ramírez got him in 2017 as well.
If we act charitably and adjust the threshold for 2020 to 1.0 fWAR, here’s the list of players who’ve managed 3.0 or more fWAR every year from 2016 through last (again, excepting 2020, where the threshold is 1.0):
- Mookie Betts: 43.7 total fWAR
- Ramírez: 39.5
- Max Scherzer: 38.2
- Francisco Lindor: 38.0
- Freddie Freeman: 35.5
- Paul Goldschmidt: 33.1
- Xander Bogaerts: 29.3
- Carlos Correa: 27.9
- Clayton Kershaw: 27.4
It’s an arbitrary selection of years, it’s an arbitrary threshold of wins, it’s not Trout’s fault he was hurt for so much of 2021, it’s not Judge’s fault he didn’t enter the league ‘til 2017, it’s not Juan Soto’s fault he didn’t enter ‘til 2018. These, though, are the players whose company José Ramírez keeps, the players who’ve done what he does for as long as he’s done it. Two of the greatest pitchers of all time. Three phenomenal shortstops. Two of baseball’s best sluggers. The do-it-all Mookie Betts. These stars and José Ramírez, whom pitchers simply keep throwing home run pitches.
It’s not that Ramírez doesn’t get included in these lists enough. José Ramírez gets his due as one of the best players in the game. But depending how he navigates his aging curve, and depending what the Guardians do in their postseason chances these next few years, José Ramírez could conceivably go down as the greatest player of his era. Not necessarily the best—it’s going to be hard to best Trout numerically, or Judge or Ohtani for single-season excellence—but the greatest.
It’s an unlikely thing, but the guy’s got a chance, and hardly anyone gets to say that.
How Many Role Players?
One way of conceptualizing the Heat right now is that their team is Jimmy Butler, then Bam Adebayo, and then a collection of role players. This is a little oversimplistic, and Adebayo grades out so much better defensively than offensively that this next part is a little wonky, but if you’ll entertain us for a minute, we’re going to try to see what happens when the Heat get varying levels of scoring from players not named Jimmy and Bam.
Counting the two Play-In Tournament games, the Heat have played 23 times this postseason, posting a record of 14–9. In the fourteen victories, they’ve averaged 2.9 players besides Butler and Adebayo scoring 10 or more, 1.7 scoring 15 or more, and 0.6 scoring 20 or more. In the nine losses, they’ve averaged 2.8 “role players” scoring 10, 1.8 scoring 15, and 0.6 scoring 20.
This is small sample stuff, and this doesn’t account well for Tyler Herro (the team’s actual second-best offensive player) playing three of those games, and we’ve mentioned the Adebayo piece. But watching this team, there’s a temptation to say that the games’ outcomes depend on how many guys besides Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo step up, and it’s not at all borne out even by these small sample numbers.
What does determine if the Heat win? Plenty upon plenty of things, many of them centered upon the team’s defensive success and many centered on Jimmy Butler’s offense and many centered upon how well, collectively, the role players do their various things. But there’s no simple recipe of “Get 15 or more from three guys not named Butler” or anything like that. In terms of scoring contributions, it’s happened a variety of ways, and in a quantitative how-many-guys sense, the numbers aren’t actually that different between Heat wins and Heat losses.
The Panthers Didn’t Die
The Knights were two and a half minutes away from clearing shelf space for an impending Stanley Cup. Now, we’ve got a series.
It’s sad that these Stanley Cup Finals aren’t getting more attention nationally, because in terms of excitement value, they’re high, and while I know the Panthers and Knights aren’t main hockey characters as franchises, even accounting for my unintentionally Sens-skewed view (blogging next to a Burnley/Ottawa Senators/NIT/Joe Kelly fan changes you) it’s hard to think of more of a hockey guy than Matthew Tkachuk, who further built up his main hockey character status as a player last night. The guy scores, he fights, he talks, he’s well-known…I try to be very open about not knowing a ton about hockey, but watching him against the Knights’ size is fun. It’s physical. It gets you going.
In the numbers world, Gelo saw enough of the Panthers to slide them over to a narrow favorite in Game 4. It hardly doesn’t round down to 50%, but 50.6% is still favoritehood, putting Gelo in agreement with the market in one sense.
Super Regionals
Oklahoma won the Women’s College World Series, as expected, and Super Regionals on the men’s side are already underway today, with Duke taking Game 1 from Virginia on the road, TCU and Indiana State starting up as this is written, South Carolina about to begin at Florida, and series between Oregon & Oral Roberts, Wake Forest & Alabama, LSU & Kentucky, Southern Miss & Tennessee, and Stanford & Texas on their way in the next 24 hours or so. There aren’t any doubleheaders on the schedule, but I believe rain can change that.
College baseball is not as dominated as college softball, and every one of these series is reasonably close to a tossup. The most interesting? Bama @ Wake. Alabama’s still dealing with the fallout of the gambling scandal which axed its coach. Wake Forest is trying to become the first overall 1-seed to reach Omaha since Florida in 2018 and the first to win it all since Miami in 1999, a Miami team featuring absolutely no baseball players I remember because I was four years old when the games happened and none of those guys went on to make me know them in the major leagues.
The Cubs Head North
The Cubs’ West Coast trip moves up to San Francisco tonight, three games against the Giants concluding what will have been a ten-game swing. Marcus Stroman faces Anthony DeSclafani tonight, Kyle Hendricks goes tomorrow, Hayden Wesneski goes Sunday. The starters for San Francisco on Saturday and Sunday haven’t been listed, but projections have Jakob Junis and Sean Manaea taking the ball, possibly with John Brebbia serving as an opener, a role the Giants have seemed to like him in lately.
The Giants are a bit of a mess, especially if you heavily weight recency with DeSclafani, who was chased after three innings by the Orioles on Sunday. The Cubs manage to dodge Logan Webb and Alex Cobb, which is a godsend, but the Cubs are a mess as well, and the Giants are the better team on paper. This ‘on paper’ thing is big, and it’s something we’re going to continue to stress, because as we’ve been saying as loud as we can since January, the expectations placed on this team were silly. This was never a great roster, and it’s still not. Playing on the road, this is an on-paper series the Cubs should lose.
To pine for a hopeful case, acknowledging the weakness of the roster:
1. If Stroman pitches well again (believable) and either Wesneski or Hendricks shows up (also believable), winning this series is fairly doable, even as the worse team. The Giants don’t have a great bullpen. It’s fine, but it’s not great, and Brebbia’s one of its better pitchers, and Brebbia’s quite possibly earmarked for an opening role in one of these games. The teams are similar offensively as well, again On Paper. The Giants’ advantage is that it has aces and the Cubs kind of don’t, so with the Cubs not facing those aces, the door cracks open a bit.
2. After this series, the Cubs’ 24 remaining games before the All-Star Break come against…
- Pittsburgh (3 home, 3 away)
- Milwaukee (4 away)
- Philadelphia (3 home)
- Cleveland (3 home)
- Baltimore (3 home)
- New York AL (3 away)
- St. Louis (2 in London)
On Paper, none of those rosters is among the five best in baseball, and of the three in the upper half, only the Yankees have a winning record. The Brewers are a bottom-half team On Paper. The Orioles are a bottom-half team On Paper. The Phillies are scuffling, and the Cardinals are a mess (and those games in London will, if the last London series is a predictive example, be sheer chaos). Add in that ten of the 24 come against the NL Central’s two best teams to date, and there are not only attainable wins among these 24 games but attainable wins with accompanying consequences.
3. After the All-Star Break, there’s a ten-game homestand featuring the Red Sox (bottom-half On Paper, .500 in reality), the Nationals (very bad), and the aforementioned messy Cardinals. After that homestand, the Cubs play six games on the South Side and down in St. Louis. The Cubs are projected, when FanGraphs accounts for schedule and doesn’t account for deadline trades, to nearly play .500 ball from here. This is largely thanks to the Cubs having one of the three easiest schedules in baseball from here. The team hasn’t played as badly as it looks, and that’s not just a run differential thing (though they’ve been unlucky by that standard). It’s also thanks to the schedule. The schedule has been tough.
4. As the AL Central is handily demonstrating, we’ve got a decent chance of a sub-.500 division champion this year, as an even further downturn by Middle American ballclubs coincides with a more balanced schedule pulling their pants down for all to see. If it happens, it’ll be in one of the Centrals. This is a funny thing to write, but the Cubs might not need 80 wins to make the playoffs. They almost definitely do, but it’s at least possible that they don’t. The Centrals are so bad.
So…go Cubs this weekend. We’ve been consistent skeptics on this roster, we think what certain people say it *can* do is stupid and those people are deluding themselves by saying that, but we think what it *will* do actually exceeds their expectations. Maybe it starts tonight.
