2024 Postseason Trivia Column: The Last-Minute Return!

Thanks to the doubleheader today between the Mets and Braves to decide the last two Wild Card slots, I don’t have a lot of turn-around time between the end of the season and the start of the postseason, so apologies if parts of this get a little hasty or could have used some more editing. I tried to pre-write parts of it, but some bits still had to wait until I knew the results, plus I had some other things to get done on Monday, and it all made this a little more rushed than usual.

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Thankfully, I could pre-write this intro! So I’ll just take the time to say that their plan to move the two Braves games to the off-day between the regular season and the postseason was really dumb. I’m sure whichever team goes to the postseason (possibly both, if they split the series) will be thrilled with having to go all-out, losing an off-day, and traveling back-to-back-to-back like this. And if the Diamondbacks make it, even though they at least got to keep their off-day free, I’m sure they won’t be thrilled with having to wait so long and cut it so close to find out if they’re playing in October, let alone who their match-up will be against.

And this was such an obvious conflict. It was clear that the games would be disrupted due to weather, and rather than preemptively rescheduling them or moving them to a neutral site, my understanding is that Commissioner Manfred caved to the Braves management over concerns about missing out on ticket sales from the home games, letting them put off searching for alternatives until it was far too late to do anything.

Maybe it’s just my familiarity with the Astros, but I remember a time when the league would have stepped in and said “I’m sorry, but we need to move these to keep everything running smoothly”. In fact, I remember multiple times that happened! And neither of those scenarios were as pressing as these Mets-Braves games (both times came earlier in the season and had less bearing on postseason outcomes). And sure, I wasn’t happy about either of those at the moment, but I at least understood why they happened, and this present mess is offering a clear example of why the league needed to do something about the problem.

The big difference between then and now is, of course, the league’s commissioner. Bud Selig was greedy and rarely stood in the owners’ way, but he did seem interested in keeping the league functioning properly and improving the product on the field, even if that did occasionally lead to him overruling the owners. In contrast, Rob Manfred doesn’t seem to have that “but”; he’ll just let the owners keep pursuing whatever harebrained schemes they think will make them money now, even if it hurts them or the game in the long-run. Perhaps there are other scenarios where this pattern reappears.

Anyway, let’s move on to when future-me has the results of those last two games…



DROUGHTS

Rethinking What Makes a Hall of Fame Starting Pitcher, Part 4: How Could We Use Cy Young Shares?

Okay, after three whole articles to this series, it’s time to bring it all home. In Part 1, I broke down the problem with the Hall of Fame’s recent stances on electing pitchers and why it looked like it would be getting worse. In Part 2, I looked at the problem and its sources, and began kicking around some alternative things voters might consider looking at. In Part 3, I proposed Cy Young Shares as a solution, and went through their history and issues; they won’t be able to serve as a straight milestone number in the way that a stat like Wins or Strikeouts does. However! They are still useful at looking at pitchers in their context, and more importantly, they already seemed to have some relation to how voters are voting now.

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So there is clearly a point to looking into this more deeply, even if the hope of a single unified Award Shares milestone is gone. Having an easy-to-understand stat would be nice, for appealing to the bloc of Hall voters that skews more traditional (and besides, it’s not like Wins are going to escape being heavily affected by the context of the game, as career win totals continue to drop). And since the BBWAA seemed to consider Awards success before the crush of 300/3000 inductees, perhaps the induction of guys like Mike Mussina and Roy Halladay is evidence that they’ll start moving back in that direction. If so, it seems like the best way to look at pitchers through this lens is going to be within their respective eras.

So what do our Cy Young Shares leaderboards look like if we divide them into “1970 to 2009” and “2010 to Present”? This is just a simple division based on each pitcher’s career midpoint rather than a full era adjustments, because this is the third full article of what was originally supposed to be a single piece that I’ve been working on and completely re-writing for months and I just want to finally get it out the door, but it’s a good-enough starting point for now. (I can throw “in-depth look at fully era-adjusted Cy Young Shares” on the “potential future article” pile for the time being.)

Rethinking What Makes a Hall of Fame Starting Pitcher, Part 3: Can We Make a New Pitching Milestone?

The last two articles in this impromptu mini-series have been building to this question: since the Hall of Fame has been struggling to induct starting pitchers, is there a big, easy-to-understand metric that could serve as a new milestone for Hall of Fame voters and writers? I think that this is a particularly important thing in the context of Hall voting, given that such a large chunk of the electorate does rely on more “traditional” ways of thinking about their votes, and giving a big, round number to easily signal “this is a historic player!” could go a long way in helping those voters see what the rest of us are seeing. In fact, it’s something I’ve tried before in other areas, like when I tried to determine if there was a milestone for Walks to match 3000 Hits and 500 Homers, or when I repeatedly tried to emphasize how Scott Rolen was a top-ten all-time player at his position.

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But as part of answering this, I felt like I had to tackle the Hall’s recent history and their existing standards, and I found that the voters have largely just looked at pitcher wins, with a little bit of focus on strikeouts sometimes. And their recent logjam seems to be in part triggered by the Hall ballots in the 1990s that were heavy on milestones; six pitchers with big milestones under their belt came up for induction in short order, and rather than hurrying to get the obvious picks inducted, Hall voters instead seemed to respond to this by delaying the induction of “weaker” 300 win/3000 strikeout guys, and ignoring everyone else.

However, this was already kind of a big shift in voting behaviors, as before then, the voters would regularly induct players with less than 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts. So part of the answer to our overarching question is just “get voters to accept that not every starting pitcher needs to be a big milestone guy”.

Of course, that’s only one of the two sides of the issue, so having another milestone to point to could be useful, especially given the increasing rarity of 300-Wins pitchers. If some number of old-school voters want milestones, we might as well try to find another milestone for them, to help avoid this type of logjam in the future. And one thing that I noted last time was that, with the attention given to Jack Morris and subsequent candidates like Roy Halladay, it seemed like some of them might have been starting to move towards “most wins over a decade span”.