Pitching Grips

2:01 Jason Martinez : Welcome to the 1st post-trade deadline RosterResource chat! Still a lot of good topics on the table even if the popular “who will be sellers/buyers” one is off.   Here we go … 2:02 Salty : Do you think Justin Martinez will claim the closer’s role in AZ when he’s back in the bigs, or do you think there’s not enough time to do so with only roughly six weeks to go? 2:03 Jon Becker : I wouldn’t think his first appearance or two back from injury will be in the closer’s role; they’ll want him to get his feet back under him first. But I saw he averaged close to 102 on his fastball in his first rehab outing so the stuff is clearly all the way back. Very good odds he’s the closer by the end of the year, which allows Lovullo to deploy Morillo and Garcia earlier in the game and lengthens the whole bullpen. 2:03 BaseballBeerBrats : What do you think the playing time situation wil...

Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images With the trade deadline having come and gone, we’ve officially entered the homestretch of the 2026 season. And while teams surely want to avoid tempting the fury of the fates by assuming they’re postseason-bound, they’d be lying if they said they weren’t thinking about October baseball at least a little bit. And why shouldn’t they? Winning the World Series is the ultimate goal, and many of the league’s playoff-relevant teams made deadline moves for the express purpose of improving their postseason chances. Before you set out on a vacation, it’s natural, even prudent, to contemplate your trip, though it might mean making plans for a destination you never reach. If you’re heading to the beach, you’re likely going to think about the sun and the sand, even though there’s always a chance the alternator in your 1988 Ford Tempo dies on U.S. Route 50 near Easton, Maryland, forcing you to call your frie...

Even as teams have settled into their new normal following all the activity surrounding the trade deadline, the standings haven’t become any clearer with two months of the regular season left to play. There are still wide open division races and crowded Wild Card chases. For the teams already looking forward to next year, the stretch run is an opportunity to evaluate their rosters, and maybe play a little spoiler against those vying for the postseason. Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system . If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are ...

Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images On Friday, the Boston Globe ran a story by Red Sox beat writer Alex Speier on the concept of momentum. I can hear the collective groans of our Members now. Haven’t we gone over this enough? We’ve already established that there’s no such thing as momentum! Or, if there is, its effect is minimal. Our readers would be the first to point out that the month-and-a-half long surge up in Boston is mostly a matter of a talented, drastically underperforming Sox team experiencing some serious positive regression, bringing its overall record back up to about where we expected it to be all along. I get that, of course. We cannot conclusively prove the effect of momentum in baseball — and it’s not for lack of trying — and so therefore cannot definitively say that it exists. Yet when it comes to the Big Mo, a palpable feeling rather than a tangible metric, I tend to subscribe to what I call the Robert Graysmith Theory : Just because you can’t prove it, doesn...