Who needs October? The best moment for each out-of-it MLB team

5:02 am | September 20, 2018 | Go to Source | Author:

9:00 AM ET

The end of the baseball season began March 31, when the Miami Marlins‘ record dropped to 1-2, and their playoff odds dropped to 0 percent. Not even plain old 0, rounded down from 0.4, but 0.0.

One by one, other teams have followed them: The White Sox on April 10, the Reds and Tigers on April 15, dot dot dot, until the most recent “eliminations,” the Giants and Pirates on Sept. 3, the 14th and 15th teams to hit zeroes. None of these teams was technically eliminated on that date, but about as many teams come back from 0.0 as you’d expect. Indeed, of the first 15 teams to hit 0.0 this year, none has clawed back to even 1 percent at any point in the subsequent months or weeks.

The first 15 have collectively played about 1,200 games, more than a quarter of a major league season, under the threat of nothing. But they play those games out of something more than obligation; they play them because there remains some potential to add to the pool of happiness in the sport.

So for each dead team, we picked a day — or a play, or a moment — this season when the neurons fired and the brain was faintly alive.

In reverse order of elimination:

Sept. 3: San Francisco Giants
Record since: 4-9
Post-zero high point: Chris Stratton‘s Sept. 14 shutout

It helps if you were listening to the Giants game on Aug. 3, when Stratton — having lost his spot in the rotation, then having been demoted to Triple-A — got a spot start against Arizona. It was brutal: three innings, 14 baserunners and six runs before he left with the bases loaded and nobody out in the fourth. Stratton went right back to Triple-A, his ERA at 5.52. He looked like the fringe major leaguer we feared he was.

But after he was recalled in late August, the former first-round pick made four strong starts with a 2.84 ERA, walking only three batters. Then came Sept. 14, when he threw a two-hit, complete-game shutout, snapping the Giants’ record 11-game losing streak. It was, by Game Score, the 14th-best start in the major leagues this year. After that start, Stratton had lowered his ERA by almost a full run, had bumped his record up over .500, and — because he’s tied for the major league lead in shutouts — might very well end this season with black ink on his player page. Not a bad year!

Also Sept. 3: Pittsburgh Pirates

Record since: 10-3
Post-zero high point: Jacob Stallings‘ walk-off hit Monday

Let’s briefly talk about Jacob Stallings, a 28-year-old catcher whom I’d never heard of (or, probably, had but forgot about). Specifically, let’s talk about two things in his splits page:

1. Fifty-five percent of all the major league games he has played in have come in September, a percentage that will go up with every game he plays this month. Now, that’s only 12 out of 22 games, but that’s the point: He spends day after day in Triple-A, and then September comes, and he gets to come up to the majors — three years in a row of that. He exists in this weird backhanded compliment: He is acknowledged to be good enough to sit in a major league dugout and play major league games, but roughly 750 other living human beings are considered to be that good and slightly better, so Stallings is prevented from playing. Put another way: If baseball had added two expansion teams sometime in the past 20 years, Stallings would quite possibly be a regular major leaguer, a backup catcher to be sure but still a regular major leaguer. He’d be making $800,000 a year, he’d fluke into a .285 batting average one season, he’d retire with $10 million or so, and he’d end up managing for 18 years after he retired. (His dad coached high level college basketball for 35 years.) Instead, well, the math doesn’t quite work out for him. This scarce resource is just slightly too scarce for Stallings to get it, except when rosters expand in September. So he plays in September, when he rakes. He has hit .424 in those 12 games.

2. His slash line in what are classified as “high-leverage” situations: .636/.583/.636. He had this walk-off hit against Kansas City on Monday, just as, two years ago, he had a walk-off hit against the Nationals. He has the sixth-highest OPS in high-leverage situations in history. The games barely count, his team playing as it is with 0.0 percent playoff odds, but still: He’s the hero of September!

Which is all to say, henceforth we shall all vow to remember small-sample legend Jacob Stallings, as well as call him by his new nickname: Mr. September.

Aug. 12: Minnesota Twins
Record since: 17-18
Post-zero high point: Willians Astudillo‘s Sept. 9 walk-off homer

The following tweet is not from that game but is a fair approximation of the feeling you get anytime you remember Astudillo exists:

In a sport with Shohei Ohtani and Pat Venditte, Astudillo flies under the radar, but he’s almost equally joyously, joyfully unique. He’s a catcher (and a good-framing catcher) who, because he has limited power and a Bartolo-at-40-esque body, has had to fight his way up the minor league ladder. But unlike every other modern hitter, he almost never strikes out, which has led to some gaudy batting averages (.361 in the Venezuelan Summer League one year; .333 in Single-A; .348 in High-A; .342 in Triple-A). Ben Lindbergh has been on the Astudillo beat for a while and puts it thusly:

Astudillo has produced some of the most strikeout-averse single seasons on record. The Baseball Prospectus database includes minor league records from MLB Advanced Media dating back to 2005 and incorporating almost 42,000 individual player-seasons of at least 100 plate appearances (counting 100-PA stints at multiple levels in the same season as discrete entities). Ranked by the lowest strikeout rates relative to the league, five of the top 11 entries and eight of the top 30 belong to Astudillo alone.

There’s plenty more to love about him — the top Google News headline for him right now is “Willians Astudillo is taking grounders at shortstop” — but there has always been a tension about whether he’s legit or a meme, whether his skills would translate as he moved up levels. The Twins have given him a pretty good look, and he’s hitting .317. It’s only 65 plate appearances, but he’s hitting .317, he’s slugging .508, and he’s struck out only twice.

Anyway, here’s him hitting the walk-off homer: