It’s June 30th, the day by which San Diego State had to leave the Mountain West in order to avoid that $17M increase in the exit fee. San Diego State has…left the Mountain West?
My impression of where this all has landed is that Gloria Nevarez, Mountain West commissioner, took as hard a line on San Diego State as she believed she might be legally allowed to take. She took their hesitant notice that “San Diego State University (SDSU) intends to resign from the Mountain West Conference” as notice that San Diego State University (SDSU) intends to resign from the Mountain West Conference, and firmly rejected their requests to 1) get an extra month to make sure they wanted to leave and 2) get a discount on the exit fee because they made the Final Four and thereby helped everybody out financially. My impression is that SDSU is in conference purgatory effective today, set to play its final season in the Mountain West but unsure if the Pac-12 will actually invite them to join in 2024–25 as they hope.
That is only my impression, and it’s important to remember that everything which goes on with all of this goes on behind the scenes. We found out about the letters back and forth between SDSU and Nevarez a few days after they were sent. If letters are being sent right now, there’s no guarantee of when or if they’ll make their way to the media. This is all handled privately, and we may get news today but even if a newsworthy thing happens today, we might not know it’s happened until next week. It’s possible SDSU and Nevarez are still communicating, still negotiating, still hashing things out. But with no better fit for SDSU than the Mountain West among the Group of Five conferences, it makes all the sense in the world for Nevarez to maximize the Mountain West’s negotiating leverage by stating clearly and firmly that the Mountain West will wring every dollar out of SDSU that its bylaws allow.
There’s a corollary here which says that SDSU and the Pac-12 are probably also in communication, and that should also be true, but there are a lot of things which should be true involving the Pac-12, and the Pac-12 is teaching us that it’s full of surprises. The Pac-12 should, for example, have a media rights deal by now. It doesn’t. Is the Pac-12 sending SDSU assurances that it’s going to get the invite eventually? Maybe. Even if it is, though, there’s no guarantee those assurances are true. From what we know, the power in the Pac-12 lies with individual schools, individual schools which want to see the numbers behind this ghost of a deal and don’t want to tip their hand in the meantime. Pac-12 leadership might fully intend and expect to invite San Diego State, but they can only actually invite the Aztecs if the rest of the schools agree to it. It’s not just majority vote, either. As we’ve been discussing for nearly a year now, decisions in the Pac-12 probably have to be unanimous, because the Big 12 has made abundantly clear that it will accept any Pac-12 defectors, and every Pac-12 defector weakens the TV revenue pot enough that it’s reasonable to expect this to all go down as a chain reaction.
What happens to San Diego State, then? There are two main possibilities.
In the first possibility, this all works out for SDSU. The Pac-12 gets its media rights deal together, the schools approve it, the schools approve it including the invitation of SDSU (and probably SMU as well). The breakup with the MWC may have been ugly, but it was quick and clear and SDSU immediately finds a new place to live, and it’s the place it preferred, the place which led it to initiate the breakup in the first place, clumsy as that initiation may have been.
In the second possibility, this does not work out. Either the Pac-12 falls apart and cannot invite SDSU to join because the Pac-12 is no longer a conference, or the Pac-12 gets its media rights deal together but the Pac-12’s remaining member schools decide they prefer the option where they don’t invite anyone else to join, playing for a few years as a ten-team league. In this case, SDSU could look for another league—the Sun Belt and the American being the two best candidates—but the Mountain West is the best fit, and legal reentry would be the likely outcome (having not missed any games, because again, they’re already locked into the MWC for this coming season regardless of whether or not they ultimately do find a new home). In this scenario, would Nevarez and the MWC take it easy on SDSU? Probably not. Very current precedent suggests they would again try to wring every dollar out of SDSU they possibly can, and this is smart. Why wouldn’t they? Loyalty and good relations are helpful, but they aren’t worth millions and millions of dollars to a league that will be a mid-major entity for the foreseeable future, and therefore a league out of which every one of its athletic departments aspires to rise.
We’ve talked about this from as many angles as we can, and we’ve talked about it for a year, and it continues to just not happen. The Pac-12 continues to play chicken with itself. Eventually, something has to go down, because somebody has to broadcast the Pac-12’s 2024 football season. We no longer have any idea when that something might come, though, because the Pac-12 continues to flout all rules of normalcy as these things go, either out of supreme confidence in the deal it will eventually bring to its schools or due to no such deal existing at all. In the meantime, San Diego State is in a rough spot. It might work out, but the likeliest scenario seems to be a costly reentry to a league which just held its feet to the fire while those feet burned and burned and burned.
The Perfect Game
I wanted to get notes out yesterday, I did not get notes out yesterday, let’s talk about the perfect game today.
Perfect games are the most special mostly individual performances in sports. A blend of skill and luck, they are magical in part because of how clean they look in a scorebook, on a line score, on the unblemished uniforms of the opposition which has failed to spend a single moment on the basepaths. When I was a child, I had a book detailing every perfect game which had been pitched to date. I read that book obsessively. I think Catfish Hunter had a beer during the middle of his starts. If I had to guess, that obsession with perfection stemmed in part from the aesthetics of those box scores. In a no-hitter, looking at the line score on a scoreboard, you see one or two prominent zeroes. It just looks a little weird. With a perfect game, the whole scorebook is neat and tidy: 27 up, 27 down, zeroes everywhere that isn’t unvarnished white space.
One thing I like to do with no-hitters now that we’re into the Statcast era is calculate the luck involved. It’s not a complete calculation, of course—you can’t calculate little things like a batter making the wrong guess on a two-strike changeup or an umpire’s decision on a borderline check swing—but with expected batting averages on every play, we can at least calculate how dominant Domingo Germán was in terms of the contact he generated. Here’s what we find:
- The expected number of baserunners, given the quality of contact and the number of walks (zero), was only 2.53. For context: Reid Detmers’s no-hitter had 7.15 expected baserunners last spring.
- Only one ball in play had greater than a 50% chance of becoming a hit: Esteury Ruiz’s third-inning blooper caught by Anthony Volpe had an expected batting average of .670, meaning balls struck with that exit velocity and launch angle become hits 67% of the time. Volpe was positioned well on the play. It was nondescript at the time. The next-closest was the Seth Brown groundout in the 5th, hit 106.5 mph to Anthony Rizzo’s left. Rizzo made the diving play, one expected to be made, dive or not, 52% of the time.
- Overall, Germán had a 3.7% chance of throwing a perfect game given the quality of contact generated. This is very low, but it’s also very high. That’s a 1–in–27 probability. Detmers’s no-hitter last year had a 1–in–22,197 probability given the quality of contact generated. Germán shut down the Oakland Athletics.
Facing these Oakland Athletics is, of course, an advantage for any pitcher who gets the opportunity. But the A’s aren’t as bad as observing them from afar might lead you to believe, especially on the offensive side. They have a wRC+ better than three other teams, one of whom is the NL Central favorite Milwaukee Brewers. They strike out less than four other teams, including the AL Central favorite Minnesota Twins and the playoff-likely San Francisco Giants. They have the worst win percentage of any team through the first three months of the season that we’ve seen in at least a decade, but here’s the thing with that: A ton of it is pitching. They’re conventionally bad at scoring runs. They’re incredibly bad at preventing runs from being scored.
Domingo Germán is also not as unlikely to throw a perfect game as recent observation would suggest. Yes, he gave up 17 runs while recording only 16 outs over the two starts preceding this one, but his 5.31 FIP entering the day was at least within normal enough boundaries. It doesn’t jump off the page as completely terrible. Also? If Germán were to finish the season with that kind of FIP, it would far and away be the worst of his career. He’s reliably been a sub-5.00 guy. That isn’t good, but it makes him a normal MLB starter.
The efficiency was the big thing. Germán threw only 99 pitches. This number got a lot of attention, but it’s fairly normal for perfection. Nine of the 21 perfect games thrown in the pitch-counting era have featured fewer than 100 pitches, and no one has thrown more than 125 pitches in a perfect game (Matt Cain was the 125-pitch man). If you’re going to get 27 guys out, you need to be at reasonably full strength for the 27th guy. It helps to keep the pitch count down.
It was, all told, a masterful, masterful game. No asterisks here.
I would imagine some of you reading this think it’s important we mention Germán’s suspension in 2019 and 2020 for a domestic violence incident. We waffle on how to handle things like this, but we respect a lot of opinions on the matter, and that includes that one. Domestic violence is a really serious thing. I don’t think that there’s a perfect answer, and if there is one, I think it’s different in each unique case. We never want to ignore survivors and victims of things like domestic violence. But, we don’t want to try to be the judge and jury on the matter of the personal human worth of every single athlete whose name appears on this site. We aren’t wise enough for that, and we don’t know nearly enough on a personal level about the athletes involved. I have no idea how Domingo Germán has spent the last three and a half years during his time off the field. Hopefully, he’s made some big strides, and more importantly, hopefully the alleged victim is ok. But I don’t know. Here’s the link to his Wikipedia page if you want to read up on the incident yourself. I’m going to talk about the Cubs now.
Are the Cubs Jet-Lagged?
The Cubs got swept by the Phillies, and we were a little worried about this. The comedown from the trip to England looked like a tough one on paper, and it’s been a tough one on the field, with the offense going silent for two of three nights and managing barely two runs per game over the course of the series. Is this a collateral effect from the London Series? It’s impossible to say, teams go cold for three games in a row just plenty. But it would add up.
Baseball is a bad sport in which to be jet lagged. Not only is there less time for MLB players to recover after the London Series than there is for football players after games in Europe, but there’s less time to recover after the next game as well. Even if NFL teams don’t have a bye week after playing abroad, it’s possible to amp a guy up for three hours at the expense of needing extra recovery the next day. That’s not as easy with position players on the baseball field. Add in how much baseball revolves around differences in milliseconds of reaction time and overall mental clarity, rather than merely split seconds, and it gets worse. Add in how different the gametimes are in baseball, going from a 9 AM CDT start to a 7 PM CDT start as opposed to an 8 AM CDT start to a Noon CDT start, and it gets worse still. I hope the Cubs prepared for this as best they could. I wonder if they did.
Regardless, the Cubs are onto the Guardians today, and the matchups look solid on paper, with the Cubs favored today (Steele vs. Quantrill) and tomorrow (Stroman vs. Bibee) but an underdog on Sunday (Taillon vs. Civale). I would guess that Justin Steele is not a man who cares about jet lag. That’s part of what we love about Justin Steele. Also? The day game should help here.
There’s good news about Marcus Stroman, that news being that he came out of his bullpen fine and is still slated to start on Saturday. The blister, at least for the moment, must be ok? For my own research, I gave myself a little blister on Wednesday hitting golf balls and I can’t see it today but I can feel it a little bit. That’s my contribution to our collective knowledge of blisters.
Jared Young’s had a good little start to his MLB year, homering Wednesday and tripling last night. Still technically a prospect, with only 22 MLB plate appearances last year, Young is more a quadruple-A guy in effect. He’s 27, he’s only had an above-average wRC+ in the minor leagues in two of his five seasons, there isn’t much reason to believe he’s any better than Trey Mancini at hitting the ball (and he bats left-handed, so he doesn’t diversify the skillset from Cody Bellinger). Still, there’s much more uncertainty with Young than with Mancini. Mancini’s a known quantity, and while he’s underperforming that known status, that known status is still not great. It’s way too early to theorize about this being a breakout for Young, but it’s been a good two games, and he’s worth a roll of the dice until the Cubs either resign themselves to selling or grab a Carlos Santana type (or grab Santana and commit to selling him later, which would be an affordable and reasonable thing to do and is exactly how the Mariners made the playoffs last year).
Should be a fun weekend. Good atmosphere weekend. Still messed up MLB keeps making the Cubs play in Milwaukee on the Fourth of July. Tickets should not be available for ten dollars to see two teams in a division race on the Fourth of July.
