We'll look at baseball's 2021 run scoring patterns in a post later in the month, but for now let's wrap up several of the "minutiae" that we've presented intermittently over the season.
The M's win! (the Pythagorean lottery only...so sorry!) Hell, a team whose Pythagorean won-loss record works out 76-86 has no real chance of lighting up the post-season, so the Mariners' shot at entering the playoffs would've been a fluke anyway. As it turned out, the 2021 M's are officially the luckiest team ever, having won 14 more games than Daddy Pythag says should be the case.
This year's luckiest playoff team? After a long stretch with the Red Sox in the lead, it turns out to be the Yankees (+6.46, for those of you who crave extra precision). Next: the Cardinals (+5.27), then the Giants (+4.13) before we get to the Red Sox (+3.55).
More interesting, perhaps, are the playoff teams (or near-and-yet-so-far teams) at the other end of the luck spectrum. The White Sox (-4.36), the Astros (-5.68) and the Braves (-6.02) all played a good bit under their Pythagorean projections. The biggest underachievers, however, were the Blue Jays (-7.82), who projected to win 99 games but came up one win short of a post-season tumble.
Austin Adams quietly hits...the road. After setting a record (of sorts) with by completing a "double Dunkin" run of 24 HBPs, the burly Padres reliever found himself collecting splinters down the stretch as San Diego collapsed in September (7-21). Do not be surprised if Adams is elsewhere in 2022...
The fate of those "fat pitchers"... We will spend more downtime in the off-season refining our search for all the "chunky chukkers" in MLB, since there is clearly a "coverage gap" in this all-important area. (We need to keep tabs on all the guys with "gut hang"...)
Of the two showcased at the end of July, lefty Nestor Cortes Jr. had the more successful run, becoming a steady member of the Yankees rotation down the stretch. In 12 starts from July 28 to the end of the year, Cortes fashioned a 3.31 ERA, with the Yanks going 8-4 in those games. He struggled a bit with the HR ball, but who didn't in 2021?
His righty counterpart Paolo Espino was not so successful for the depleted Nationals, but they gamely kept him in the rotation despite a poor August (7.36 ERA) and he perked up a bit in September. It's another story of dogged perseverance for Paolo--the only man named Paolo to play in the big leagues--he finally stuck for a full season in the majors at the age of 34. Never overpowering even when young, Paolo will probably remain in the majors for a couple more years because he demonstrated versatility (pitching better in relief before being thrust into the rotation), but he probably won't get another such stretch as a starting pitcher (snif!).
The "smallfry" renaissance fizzles a bit: So the short folk did not, in fact, create an oasis of tiny excellence as we'd hoped might be the case previously. Cedric Mullins' slump in September dropped his OPS+ down to 135, pushing him off our list of tiny 140+ achievers. The man who managed to make it for the smallfry is Jose Ramirez of the Indians (probably the last time we'll use that embattled nickname in the semi-present tense...) who had a fine year (36 HRs, .536 SLG) and posted a 141 OPS+.
Other well-known smallfry final OPS+ numbers are as follows: Mookie Betts 128 (injury-prone season), Jose Altuve 127 (31 HRs), and--in ~440 PA, a surprising, unsung season from the A's Tony Kemp (5'6", 160 lbs.) at 126, easily the best year of his career. All in all, it was a solid showing from the little big men, but it fell short of what we'd been hoping for back in July.
The 50+-HR-a-month club grows a bit more: That total moved upward again in '21, as five teams clustered up over that line in September (we'll cover the "hot" month a bit later when we return to MLB run scoring levels/patterns...), bringing the all-time total of 50+ HRs-in-a-month incidences to 90. The 60+-HR-a-month club moved up to three all-time when the Blue Jays slammed 66 in September, placing them second all time behind that insane Yankees performance in August 2019 (74).
