I wanted to test that assumption. I pulled every 10-to-15-game window this season where a team cleared a real RBI threshold, split it into eight separate offensive categories (doubles, triples, homers, and singles-with-contact-volume on one end; sacrifice hits, sacrifice flies, stolen bases, and walks on the other), and asked one question for each division: does the team currently sitting in first place own the best version of that stretch anywhere in its own division? Every category also had to clear a .500-or-better record filter, so a losing stretch couldn’t sneak in and skew things.

They mostly don’t. And by the time I was done, one division leader wasn’t showing up anywhere at all, in any category, in any form. That felt like a mystery worth solving. It turned out the answer was sitting in a column nobody talks about.

Six divisions. Eight chances each. Forty-eight shots for a leader to show up.

Milwaukee looked like the answer key

The Brewers hit the top of their division in six of the eight categories. Doubles, homers, sac hits, sac flies, stolen bases, singles, all Milwaukee. Their early-April stretch (March 26 to April 6) alone produced the best stolen-base window in the National League Central and one of the best walk totals in the sport.

A couple of months later, as the calendar flipped to August, they backed it up again with a 117-single, 80-RBI, .733 stretch that’s one of the best contact-driven runs anybody posted all year.

When a team’s record actually matches its underlying offensive profile everywhere you look, that’s what it’s supposed to look like.

Houston and Tampa Bay showed up

The Astros and the Rays each capitalized on three or four categories. Houston’s opening week of the season (March 26-April 6) is the division’s best in doubles, stolen bases, and walks, practically the same ten days doing triple duty.

Tampa Bay owns the AL East in triples, stolen bases, and singles, including the single best contact-and-RBI stretch anywhere in baseball this year, 118 singles and 84 RBI over an 11-3 run in August.

There was one more piece I needed to see, and I wanted to verify what I was looking at. I went back and checked something that would temper what I found; were the season slugging stats inflated from hot streaks? If a team’s doubles or homerun streak sits close to their full-season SLG, that’s who they actually are. If it’s way above it, that’s a heater and nothing more.

The Hot Streak Test

Every single division-best power stretch in this dataset ran hot. Every one of them. The tightest gap belonged to the Cubs’ triples stretch in June, a .467 SLG against a .434 season mark, just 7.6% over their real level.

Tampa Bay’s triples stretch was right behind at 11.7% over. Everything else got uglier fast.

Houston’s division-leading doubles stretch ran 27.1% hot. Milwaukee’s doubles stretch, the one propping up that 6-of-8 case, ran 34.2% hot. Milwaukee’s homer stretch ran 40.5% hot, worse than Detroit’s and just behind the Athletics’ 45.6%. Miami’s triples binge in the NL East was the extreme case of the whole exercise, a .603 SLG against a .396 season number, more than 50% above their real level.

So the team winning this whole study on category count was still just getting hot at more opportune moments than everybody else. They were not playing some sustained, elevated version of itself. Two of Milwaukee’s six category wins, ironically the power ones, are exactly the kind of unsustainable heat this piece set out to identify in the first place. The four categories where they hold up (sac hits, sac flies, stolen bases, singles) don’t run on the same variance doubles and homers do. That’s the real Milwaukee. The power binges are just Milwaukee getting lucky at the right time, same as everyone else.

Then there’s Atlanta

The Braves have led the NL East from the jump. Since the first pitch of the 2026 season, no team has caught them all year. Across every one of the eight categories, in every window I tested, Atlanta does not own the best offensive stretch in its own division. Not in doubles. Not triples. Not home runs. Not sac hits, not sac flies, not stolen bases, not walks, not the contact-and-RBI combination in the singles data. Zero for eight. Atlanta simply never has had an offensive blow-out to point to.

That bugged me. A team doesn’t just run away with a division on nothing. Something is missing.

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The AL West is one of the strangest stories in the sport. The division Leader is one game above .500. The winner enters October as the least well-constructed playoff team in either league by the model. Five clubs, five completely different diagnoses, nobody deserving it.

Then there’s the upcoming playoff picture. The model ranks the six teams in each league. The order is not what anyone would give you. The team at the top will surprise you. The team at the bottom is leading a division.

Pete Crow-Armstrong can’t stop hitting homeruns. The NL MVP race isn’t a race. That’s the third most interesting thing in baseball.

That’s this week’s Division Line. Worth the extra few minutes.

SHOW NOTES

The Division Line — Season 1, Episode 23
A Division Leader Fired Its GM. The MVP Race Isn’t. The Strongest Team in the American League Is Not Who You Think.
August 31, 2026 · The Baseball Nerd

THIS EPISODE COVERS:

• Pete Crow-Armstrong: three home runs Saturday, six RBI, Wrigley chanting his initials. The NL MVP race isn’t a race. The numbers have been saying so for two months

• Dana Brown fired Monday morning while the Astros are tied for first with a 68-68 record. Owner reportedly overruled the deadline trade that would have fixed the rotation

• The AL West team by team: five clubs, five completely different diagnoses, nobody deserving it

• Houston: Josh Hader 20-for-20 in saves, ERA 0.76. The best bullpen in baseball covering for a rotation with an ERA-minus of 112, worst of any playoff team in either league

• Texas: best pitching process in the division by SIERA, Jacob Latz from losing the closer job in March to All-Star in July, an offense that cannot hit

• Seattle: elite pitching process, worst defense in the division, Cal Raleigh from 60 home runs to .156

• Anaheim: Mike Trout still great at 34, closer by committee for five months, analytics not reaching the pitchers until after the All-Star break

• The A’s: home wRC+ of 117, road wRC+ of 83, the park effects are real and documented

• AL playoff power rankings: the composite model ranks all six AL contenders — the order will surprise you

• NL playoff power rankings: Dodgers first despite going 1-and-4 this week, Cubs second with the worst rotation of any playoff team in either league, Atlanta fifth just swept the Dodgers

• The Cubs question: best bat, best defense, shakiest rotation in the field. Does it hold in October?

• Philadelphia’s rotation: xFIP-minus of 83.9, best of any team in either league’s playoff field

• Games that matter: Brewers at Cubs, Braves at Phillies, Rays at Rangers

  ---

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Nope. Not in this case.

I get why. Ohtani carries three straight years of default deference into every conversation. He’s the two-way unicorn, the guy who broke the sport’s math, four MVPs in five years. Calling him the best player in baseball has been the safe, obviously-correct statement for so long that saying it now barely registers as a claim anymore. It’s furniture.

But furniture rots. And this year, it has.

Since he stopped pitching, he hasn’t been the best hitter in his own dugout, let alone the league.

For anyone still writing “Ohtani, the best player alive” as a throwaway line in an MVP piece: it’s not a throwaway anymore. It’s the thing you actually have to defend, and the numbers don’t let you.

The last month is not competitive

Pull the last 26 games, the kind of sample that shows you who’s actually been good lately, and Crow-Armstrong isn’t just ahead of Ohtani. He’s been the best player in the sport. 2.28 WAR, a 182 wRC+, .685 slugging, 12 homers. Alex Bregman, Bryce Harper, Wilyer Abreu, they’re all in that stretch outproducing Ohtani too.

Ohtani, over the same window: 0.51 WAR. A 124 wRC+. A .495 slugging percentage that would’ve been a quiet season for him even in his DH-only years. He’s not been bad. He’s been solidly above average. That’s the entire case right now, and it’s not an MVP case.

Since the break: a two-win gap in six weeks

Zoom out to the All-Star break and it gets worse for the premise, not better. In 40 games since, Crow-Armstrong has 3.06 WAR, the best mark in baseball, with a 166 wRC+, 15 homers, 8 steals, and elite defensive value in center (+6.75 Def). Ohtani has 0.66 WAR in the same stretch. He ranks 19th among hitters over that span. Nineteenth. Behind Fernando Tatis Jr, Seiya Suzuki, Bregman, Steven Kwan, Jackson Merrill, Gabriel Moreno, Alex Kirk, Ty France, Pete Alonso, Bryson Stott, Geraldo Perdomo, Abreu, Elly De La Cruz, Ezequiel Duran, Yordan Alvarez, Jeremy Peña, Chandler Simpson, and Miguel Vargas.

Part of that gap is defense. PCA is playing plus center field on a bad hip angle every night. Ohtani, without a mound to occupy him since a knee and biceps issue shut down his pitching on July 3, has been a full-time DH, and his Def number since the break sits at -4.00. Two guys, same offensive attempt at the plate, wildly different value once you account for what happens when they’re not hitting.

The whole year, bat only, and it’s not close either

Take the entire 2026 season and strip out pitching completely, just bat-only value. Crow-Armstrong: 9.09 WAR, 36 homers, 32 steals, a 158 wRC+, and +21.6 defensive runs. Ohtani, as a hitter alone: 3.99 WAR, 30 homers, 10 steals, a 146 wRC+, and -13.5 Def as a DH.

That’s a five-win gap. As hitters, for the whole season, Pete Crow-Armstrong has been worth roughly two and a quarter Shohei Ohtanis.

The honest caveat is his arm was actually great

I’m not going to pretend the pitching doesn’t matter, because it does, and it’s the one place Ohtani’s case has real substance. Fourteen starts and a 1.79 ERA. That’s front-of-the-rotation, maybe Cy Young ballot production, and FanGraphs credits him 2.9 WAR for it. But it is only 85.2 innings. Add that to his batting WAR and you get a combined mark around 6.9, which is a real season by any normal standard.

It’s just not enough. Add pitching and hitting together and Ohtani still trails Crow-Armstrong’s bat-only total by roughly two wins. PCA’s number is climbing every week, powered by the best six weeks of baseball anyone’s played this year, capped by a five-homer, eight-RBI clinic this weekend that had Wrigley chanting his MVP dominance in the seventh inning. Ohtani’s number stopped growing on July 3.

So what’s actually stale here

The take that needed retiring wasn’t “Pete Crow-Armstrong could win NL MVP.” That one’s been correct since roughly the All-Star break, and the voters have caught up to it. MLB.com’s most recent poll gave PCA 29 of 37 first-place votes to Ohtani’s eight. The betting markets have him at -1100 to Ohtani’s +650.

The take that has to go is that Ohtani is still, self-evidently, the best player alive, and any other award has to be reconciled against that fact. He isn’t, not right now, not by the numbers, and hasn’t been for months. Once you drop that premise, there’s no paradox left to explain. There’s just a guy having a very good, injury-limited year, and another guy having a historic one.

Nobody wanted to be the one to say it. The kid didn't have a choice. He just kept playing, and the suit kept looking thinner every week until there was nothing left to compliment.

The Verdict

• Last 26 games: PCA the best player in baseball, Ohtani solidly average.

• Since the break: PCA’s 3.06 WAR leads MLB. Ohtani ranks 19th.

• Full season, bat only: PCA up five wins.

• Full season, everything included: PCA still up roughly two wins, and pulling away.

• The real stale take: “Ohtani is still the best player in baseball.”

  ---

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As August began in 1995, the struggling Seattle Mariners were 13 games behind the Angels in the AL West, missing their best player healing from a broken wrist, and losing a public vote that would decide whether the franchise had a future in the city at all. Two months later, a single swing of a bat in the eleventh inning of a playoff game changed the entire trajectory of baseball in the Pacific Northwest. Nobody needed a championship to make it happen. They just needed to show up.

A Franchise That Had Never Once Made the Playoffs

The Mariners began life as an expansion team in 1977 after the Pilots relocated to become the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970. The Mariners had played the game, year after year, without a single postseason appearance. They played in an aging, deteriorating dome that had seen ceiling tiles fall to the field the year before, forcing the team onto an extended road trip while repairs were made. By 1995, ownership was openly weighing a sale that could have relocated the team to Florida. A public referendum to fund a new ballpark looked like the team’s best chance to stay, and it was trending toward failure as the season wore down.

Griffey Crashes Into a Wall in May

In May, center fielder Ken Griffey Jr. crashed into the outfield wall making a catch and broke his left wrist, an injury that cost him roughly three months. The Mariners limped through the summer without their best player. As the calendar flipped to August, there was barely a third of the season left to play. At one point in that arduous summer, teammates razzed the injured Griffey outside the clubhouse, asking what exactly he was doing to help the team. He told them simply to get him to the playoffs, and they could all jump on his back.

Twenty-Five Wins in Thirty-Five Games

Griffey returned two weeks ahead of schedule in mid-August, and the Mariners started playing baseball nobody expected from them. They won 25 of their final 35 games down the stretch, while the Angels collapsed almost as dramatically in the opposite direction. “Refuse to Lose” fever took hold in the PNW, and Seattle not only caught California, they passed them and forced a one-game tiebreaker with the Angels for the division title. Randy Johnson took the mound and dominated, sending the Mariners to their first postseason appearance in franchise history.

Down Two Games, Then One Win From Elimination

The American League Division Series against the Yankees started about as badly as it could have. Seattle lost the first two games in New York, including a crushing 15-inning defeat in Game 2. Facing elimination, they won three straight to force a decisive Game 5 back home in the Kingdome. The Mariners trailed in that final game before rallying, and in the bottom of the eleventh inning, with the winning run on base, Edgar Martinez lined a double down the left field line. Griffey, running from first, never stopped, sliding across home plate with the series-winning run in one of the most replayed moments in postseason history. It’s remembered in Seattle simply as “The Double.”

The county vote failed, but the State came in

The Mariners lost in the next round and never reached a World Series that year. It didn’t matter nearly as much as what happened off the field. The public funding referendum for a new stadium had failed at the ballot box in mid-September, right in the middle of the comeback. County taxpayers were not comfortable subsidizing a new stadium. With the threat of the team moving, the state governor called a special session of the legislature. The excitement these Mariners had generated across the region gave local lawmakers the political cover to approve alternative funding for a new ballpark within weeks. That project that eventually became Safeco Field, now T-Mobile Park. A team that had never won anything, coming back from a deficit that should have buried its season, ended up saving its own home city’s claim to the sport entirely.

What Actually Got Saved

Griffey, Johnson, and Martinez all eventually reached the Hall of Fame, each with that 1995 season as a permanent chapter of how they’re remembered. None of the awards or plaques were really the point. A franchise that had spent 18 years proving nothing to anybody put together seven weeks of baseball good enough to convince an entire region it was worth keeping around, and it worked, not because they won it all, but because for one summer, coming close was somehow more than enough.

Sunday Stories · Timeless baseball stories, delivered weekly

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The ace is still climbing

Jacob Misiorowski’s CSR had slid for three…

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If the 2026 MLB season ended today, four Wild Card Series would be set: Astros host Guardians, Yankees host Red Sox, Braves host Padres, Cubs host Phillies. The conventional wisdom is that home field matters, and every fan take on these matchups starts with that philosophy.

Today, we examine pitching, both starters and relievers. Two things can be true in this exercise; a rotation can be excellent on paper and still be employing arms who get hammered at home. A bullpen can look shaky in the aggregate and still have a lockdown arm that’s been nearly unhittable in exactly this environment. The seeding is purely administrative. It tells you where the games are played, nothing about who has the better team.

So here’s every projected Wild Card starter and reliever, split the way the series will actually be played: home splits for the hosts, road splits for the visitors, since these are sweep-or-go-home three-gamers in one building.

Quick Answer: Who Wins Each 2026 MLB Wild Card Series With Pitching?

• Astros vs. Guardians: Cleveland

• Yankees vs. Red Sox: New York

• Braves vs. Padres: Atlanta

• Cubs vs. Phillies: Philadelphia

Full reasoning and the numbers behind each call below.

Who Wins Braves vs. Padres in the 2026 Wild Card Round?

Atlanta, the No. 3 NL seed, hosts San Diego, the No. 6 seed.

Chris Sale at home is putting up the kind of number relievers usually get to post in small doses, not starters carrying a real workload: 1.45 ERA, .247 wOBA against, 85 strikeouts, over 74.1 innings. Behind him, Atlanta’s home bullpen barely has a soft spot, Dylan Dodd at 1.13 ERA, Didier Fuentes at 1.41, Robert Suarez at 1.23.

San Diego’s counter has one real trump card. Mason Miller on the road is running a 0.40 ERA with a 47% strikeout rate, and Yuki Matsui isn’t far behind at 0.67. But that’s two arms. Behind them, Wandy Peralta and Jason Adam have both been hit hard away from Petco, and the road rotation outside Michael King leans on a struggling Walker Buehler.

The call: Atlanta, comfortably. Sale alone is close to series-deciding, and the Padres’ bullpen doesn’t have enough length beyond Miller and Matsui to survive a short series.

Who Wins Cubs vs. Phillies in the 2026 Wild Card Round?

Chicago, the No. 4 NL seed, hosts Philadelphia, the No. 5 seed.

Chicago’s home pitching is deeper than it first looks. Colin Rea has actually been the Cubs’ best arm at home (3.00 ERA), Shota Imanaga is right behind him (3.65 ERA), and Kevin Gausman, added at the deadline, gives them a credible third option (3.71 ERA, .323 wOBA against this season). Caleb Thielbar has been rough at Wrigley in relief, a 5.32 ERA and seven homers allowed, but the Cubs’ bullpen as a full unit (2.92 ERA) actually grades out ahead of Philadelphia’s road relief corps (3.89).

Philadelphia isn’t a one-man rotation either. Behind Jesús Luzardo, who’s been close to untouchable on the road (1.48 ERA, 110 strikeouts in 85.1 innings), Zack Wheeler (3.53 ERA, .299 wOBA against) and Cristopher Sánchez (3.66 ERA) are both legitimate arms in their own right. The bullpen behind them is thinner, Jhoan Duran and Jonathan Bowlan are excellent, but Alvarado, Mayza, Shugart and Keller have all been hit around away from home, which is why the full unit’s number lands worse than Chicago’s.

The call: Philadelphia, narrowly. Arm for arm at the two and three spots this is close to even, Wheeler and Sánchez roughly match up with Imanaga and Gausman. The series tilts to Philly because Luzardo is a clear step above anything Chicago can throw at the top, and that gap is usually enough on its own in a three-game set.

Who Do the Astros Play in the 2026 AL Wild Card Round?

Houston, as the No. 3 AL seed, would host the No. 6 seed Cleveland Guardians in a best-of-three Wild Card Series.

Houston’s rotation in front of this series is thin. Peter Lambert has logged the most innings at home (80) but sits at a pedestrian 3.71 ERA, and behind him Mike Burrows and Tatsuya Imai have both been getting hit hard at home, a .412 and .361 wOBA against, respectively. Hunter Brown’s home sample is light after missing time.

Cleveland counters with a road rotation that’s quietly been excellent away from Progressive Field. Parker Messick has thrown 80 innings on the road with a 2.25 ERA and a .256 wOBA against. Gavin Williams strikes out better than a batter an inning away from home.

Where Houston claws it back is two specific arms, not the whole unit. Steven Okert has a 0.76 home ERA and a .168 wOBA against, and Josh Hader, in a small home sample, is running a 40%+ strikeout rate. But zoom out and the full bullpen picture is basically a wash, Houston’s unit ERA at home (2.79) is nearly identical to Cleveland’s on the road (2.69). This series gets decided by the rotations, not the relief corps.

The call: Cleveland. The rotation gap is too wide for Houston’s bullpen to fully erase, and Messick gives the Guardians a Game 1 starter better than anything Houston can throw out.

Who Wins Yankees vs. Red Sox in the 2026 Wild Card Round?

New York, the No. 4 AL seed, hosts Boston, the No. 5 seed, in the other AL Wild Card Series.

New York’s home relief crew is tied with Boston’s for the best full-unit ERA in this entire round. Paul Blackburn and Brent Headrick are both running sub-1.00 ERAs at Yankee Stadium, and David Bednar is missing bats at a 39.5% clip. Gerrit Cole’s home numbers (3.35 ERA, .274 wOBA against) are the kind of thing that swings a short series by itself if he takes the ball.

Boston isn’t walking into this overmatched, which is exactly why the bullpens end up dead even. Brayan Bello has been dominant working in relief on the road (1.11 ERA), and Aroldis Chapman still touches elite swing-and-miss numbers away from Fenway (34.9% K rate). Sonny Gray and Ranger Suarez have both been sub-2.90 ERA pitchers on the road this year.

The call: New York, narrowly. The bullpens grade out virtually identical, so this one comes down to Cole’s ceiling at the top of the rotation.

The Series Most Likely to Flip on Home Field Alone

One series here, Astros-Guardians, is a pick against the home team, and it’s the rotation doing the damage, not the bullpen. Houston’s full home bullpen ERA (2.79) is basically even with Cleveland’s road pen (2.69), but the rotation gap alone is wide enough for Cleveland to be the play regardless of hosting. Cubs-Phillies is the closest call in the round: Chicago’s full roster is deeper than it looks, but Philadelphia’s ace at the top is the difference.

FAQ: 2026 MLB Wild Card Round

How does the wild card work in MLB? The three division winners in each league are seeded 1-3 by record, and the three Wild Card teams are seeded 4-6 by record. The No. 1 and No. 2 seeds get a first-round bye. The No. 3 seed hosts the No. 6 seed, and the No. 4 seed hosts the No. 5 seed, each in a best-of-three series.

How many wild card teams are in MLB? Three per league, six total. Each league sends its three division winners plus its three next-best records as Wild Card teams into a 12-team playoff field.

Which teams have a first-round bye in the 2026 MLB playoffs? Based on current standings, the top two division winners in each league get byes: the AL East and AL Central leaders in the American League, and the NL Central and NL West leaders in the National League.

Is home field a bigger advantage in a three-game Wild Card Series than in a longer series? Home field matters in every round, but a three-game series gives less time for a rotation or bullpen mismatch to even out. That’s part of why the pitching splits above matter more here than they might over a longer series.

Data: FanGraphs splits leaderboards, 2026 season, home and road performance for starters and relievers by handedness.

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We did this last week for the top 5 in each league. As we saw, just being in the top 5 does not mean you’re in the postseason conversation. It happens.

I was surprised to see a team in this field that traded away its best hitter for months and somehow still grades out with elite pitching to spare; there’s a team on the other side that traded its budding ace, and still didn’t fall out of contention. Neither of those is a fluke in the numbers. I checked.

Then there’s the team that might have the single best offense and the single best defense of any club in either league, paired with a rotation that grades out as genuinely the shakiest of anyone here. The numbers aren’t being unkind; it’s just what the numbers say, and it’s the kind of team that makes you nervous the moment a series goes short.

On the other end, there’s a team getting some of the best pitching in either league from a lineup that’s been missing its linchpin player since the end of May. Another team is riding a bullpen that might be the best in the sport to cover for a rotation that’s basically one starter deep. And one team, and I’ll be honest, I did not expect to write this sentence in March, has quietly built one of the best pitching staffs in the American League while its best player has spent almost the entire summer on the injured list.

I’m not walking through the actual order here. That’s what the two full pieces are for, one for each league, and the order in both surprised me more than once while I was building it.

Full AL breakdown, all six teams, ranked and explained, is up now. So is the full NL breakdown. Both go into the exact numbers behind every team and what they mean heading into October.

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No takes. No hot air. Just the numbers, backtested and published in the open so you can check the work.

New full episodes drop every Monday morning. Hit follow so you don’t miss one.

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Not one team. Five clubs, and the best record in the group belongs to a Houston Astros team that is currently 65-66. They are your American League West leaders, and on Monday morning they fired their general manager in the middle of the pennant race. A team with a losing record is running this show, and it might not be run by the same people from one week to the next, let alone the same players.

Since I wrote the article above, I have been scratching my head; it cannot just be Texas can it? So I have been obsessively staring at this division’s numbers for days now, cross-referencing Baseball Savant, Baseball Reference and FanGraphs leaderboards against MLB’s own game logs and about thirty different beat reports. Something this weird deserved more than a glance at the standings page.

What I found is a division where every team is broken in a completely different way. There’s no shared diagnosis here. Houston has a bullpen that might be historically good but wasted on a rotation that’s visually cratering in real time. Texas has arguably the best pitching staff in the division hiding behind an offense that cannot hit a baseball past the infield. Seattle has the best process numbers on the mound in the whole division and still can’t buy a clean inning because their defense is an abject failure. Anaheim has Mike Trout playing like Mike Trout and almost nobody else pulling their weight, on top of a bullpen situation that’s been utter chaos since March. And the Athletics are just getting hit. Hard. Over and over. Every night.

Let’s go team by team, because none of these stories are the same, and the numbers back up every bit of it.

Houston: A Great Bullpen Is Carrying a Rotation That’s Falling Apart

Houston’s in first place, and if you’ve watched them play the last two weeks, that sentence probably makes you laugh a little. They just got run out of their own building 18-3 by the Angels. They dropped a series to a Mariners team fighting for its own life. Crawfish Boxes, the SB Nation Astros site, ran a piece this morning literally asking whether fans should give up on the season, and that’s coming from people who write about this team every single day of the year.

The actual math on why it’s ugly: Houston’s rotation is running a team ERA close to a run and a half worse than league average, and the damage is spread across the whole staff rather than one or two bad arms. Cristian Javier’s still working his way back from Tommy John and the results haven’t come yet. Hunter Brown, who was a legitimate Cy Young name earlier this season, suddenly can’t locate his fastball, and the Astros beat writers have noticed the exact same thing I found buried in the plate discipline numbers. Mike Burrows has been up and down. Jeremy Peña took a 100 mph pitch off his hand last week and has missed time. Carlos Correa is still working his way back from ankle surgery and there’s real debate about whether the Astros should even rush him given his age and his contract. Yordan Alvarez, the one hitter in this lineup who has been an MVP-level presence all year at .321 with 36 homers, has cooled off in the last couple weeks right when Houston needed him most.

And yet, they’re still in first place.

The bullpen might be the best in baseball right now, not just the division. Josh Hader has converted every single save chance he’s gotten since coming back from injury in June, 18-for-18, with an ERA under 1.00 and just made his 500th career appearance, one of only a dozen active pitchers to reach that number. Behind him, A.J. Blubaugh is doing something nobody’s noticed nationally: he’s thrown more relief innings than any pitcher in Major League Baseball this year, and Houston hasn’t had a reliever lead MLB in innings pitched since Doug Jones did it back in 1992. The bullpen’s win-probability numbers back this up completely, Houston’s relief corps has been worth more added win probability and been more clutch in high-leverage spots than any other bullpen in this division, by a wide margin.

So Houston’s actual situation is this: a rotation that’s bleeding runs by the week, propped up by a bullpen that might be one of the best relief units baseball has seen in a while. That’s not a formula that usually wins a division outright.

There’s a scheduling wrinkle worth watching here. Houston and the Athletics have played nine games against each other already this season across three separate series, with Houston actually taking the worse end of it at 4-5, and they’ve got one series left, a four-game set in West Sacramento to close the regular season the final weekend of September. Four more games against the worst team in the division sounds like good news on paper, except a rotation that can’t get through five innings against anybody is still a problem, regardless of who’s standing in the other dugout. Manager Joe Espada has already had to lean on his top three relievers, Hader, Steven Okert, and Bryan Abreu, in games Houston was losing just to keep his bullpen sharp for the stretch run. Okert, by the way, deserves his own mention here. He’s quietly been every bit as good as Hader this year and almost nobody outside of Houston is talking about him.

Then on Monday morning, the biggest story of the week landed. The Astros and general manager Dana Brown mutually agreed to part ways, effective immediately, according to the team’s own release. Brown had run the front office since January 2023, delivered two division titles in his first two seasons, and was in the final year of his contract.

The timing tells you everything the press release won’t. This came one day after Houston blew two come-from-behind chances against the last-place Athletics over the weekend, part of a stretch where they’ve dropped six of their last eight and needed every ounce of that bullpen magic just to stay tied for first instead of sliding into second. And there’s a straight line from this firing to the exact problem sitting two paragraphs up. At the trade deadline, owner Jim Crane reportedly overruled a deal Brown had lined up with the Twins. That left the only move Houston actually made was sending a young, controllable starter, Spencer Arrighetti, to Toronto for outfielder Daulton Varsho, leaving the rotation hole that’s been bleeding runs all August completely unaddressed.

A division leader with a losing record just fired the man who built it, in the middle of a race it’s currently winning, over a rotation problem the box score has been screaming about for a while.

Texas: The Best Pitching Staff Nobody’s Talking About, Sitting Behind an Offense That Won’t Hit

Texas is tied with Houston at 65-66, and if you only looked at their ERA, you’d assume they’re roughly as broken as everybody else in this division. You’d be wrong, and the reason why is one of the best stories in baseball that almost nobody outside of Arlington has actually noticed.

Jacob Latz went to spring training this year trying to win the fifth starter’s job. He lost it to Kumar Rocker. Instead of sulking about it or getting buried in the minors, Latz took a bullpen role and opened the season by retiring 28 consecutive batters, a new Rangers franchise record, better than the start Yu Darvish had going for a perfect game against Houston back in 2013. By June he had 11 saves in a single month, tying a franchise record that had stood since John Wetteland and Joe Nathan. In July he was Texas’s singular All-Star representative in Philadelphia. Here was a guy, who by his own admission, was never expected to be a closer heading into the year, reaching the All Star game. He’s sitting on 25 saves with an ERA in the range of the best relievers in the American League, and he’s under club control through 2030. It means the Rangers may have solved a problem they didn’t even know they’d need solved for the rest of this decade.

The numbers underneath the rotation are just as surprising. By SIERA, the metric that strips out luck and defense and tries to isolate what a pitching staff is actually doing well, Texas grades out with the best starting rotation in the AL West. They are ahead of Houston, ahead of Seattle, ahead of everybody. Jacob deGrom, Nathan Eovaldi, and MacKenzie Gore are legitimately doing the job. The team ERA doesn’t fully reflect it because Texas isn’t converting that quality start into runs prevented at the rate you’d expect, but the underlying stuff is real.

So if the pitching is fine and actually good in spots, what’s dragging Texas down? The offense. The bats. The scoring of runs. Texas has scored fewer runs than every other team in this division except the Athletics, the lightest overall production in the AL West by the raw numbers. This is a team getting legitimately excellent value from an unexpected reliever and a genuinely strong rotation, and it still can’t separate from the pack because the lineup is not hitting the baseball.

Part of what makes Latz’s rise work is how he’s doing it. His fastball sits around 94 and a half miles per hour, not overpowering by modern closer standards, but he’s throwing it more than he ever has in his career. Opponents are hitting a buck-fourteen against it with a .200 slugging mark when he throws it. That’s a guy who figured out how to tunnel a below-average fastball off a slider and a changeup and made major league hitters look silly while guessing wrong all season. Manager Skip Schumaker has stuck with him even through the one hiccup of his season, a walk-off homer surrendered to Max Muncy in June that snapped his first hitless streak of the year, and Latz has barely blinked since.

Seattle: The Best Pitching in the Division, Undone by the Worst Gloves

Cal Raleigh’s 2025 season was one of the best offensive years any catcher has ever had in the history of the sport. Sixty home runs. A real MVP case that lost out only to Aaron Judge. A Home Run Derby win. Records for homers by a catcher, a switch hitter, and a Mariner, all at once.

This year he’s hitting somewhere around .156 with 13 home runs through 94 games. Nobody’s OPS has dropped more from one year to the next than Raleigh’s has, and he is currently on pace to see one of the largest single-season collapses by a full-time player that anybody’s tracked in recent memory. Whatever’s going on, whether it’s mechanical, physical, or something nobody outside the clubhouse fully understands yet, it’s real, and it’s been the story of Seattle’s season since May.

Another surprise sits behind this door: Seattle’s team offense, once you adjust for park and league context, is not the worst in the division. It’s basically average because Randy Arozarena, Julio Rodríguez, Josh Naylor, and Cole Young have picked up enough of the slack that the team-wide numbers haven’t completely collapsed the way Raleigh’s individual line has. That’s a real credit to the rest of that lineup, and it’s a nuance that gets lost when the story becomes “the reigning Derby champ can’t hit.”

The part of the game that falls apart is Seattle’s defense, which by the numbers is tied with the Athletics for the worst in the American League West. Logan Gilbert, Bryan Woo, Emerson Hancock, and George Kirby are running a rotation that grades out as one of the two best in this division by process, and the bullpen behind them, led by Andrés Muñoz, actually posts the best process-numbers of any bullpen in the AL West. But the actual results, the runs that cross the plate, keep coming in worse than the underlying stuff says they should. ERA is never fully on the pitchers’ shoulders, since it really is a team grade. With elite pitching and middling ERA scores, the glovework behind those pitchers is always part of the answer. Seattle’s defensive numbers prove the hypothesis.

This is a team that should be pretty good. The pitching says so. The math says they’re actually winning a few more games than their run differential predicts, which tells you the roster has more juice in it than the record shows. With an historic offensive collapse from their best player and a defense that’s giving away outs the pitching staff has already earned, the record hasn’t caught up to the talent.

Anaheim: Mike Trout Is Still Great, and Almost Nothing Else Is Working

The Angels beat Houston 18-3 last week behind Zach Neto going 5-for-6 with a homer and a career-high seven RBI, the most runs the Angels have scored in a game in three years. It was a great night. It was also, by the numbers, close to an outlier for this team.

Anaheim’s offense, adjusted for park and league, is the worst in the division. Every other AL West team is bunched up within roughly ten points of league average by wRC+. The Angels are sitting more than seven points below the next-worst team in the group. Mike Trout is still doing Mike Trout things at 34, carrying an OPS north of .800 in a lineup that badly needs more of it. Neto has power with over 20 homers, but he’s also striking out. A lot. He has one of the highest rates in the league. Beyond those two, this offense has had almost nobody consistently producing.

The pitching side has its own mess, and it traces back to a decision the front office made in the offseason. Kenley Jansen left in free agency as the Angels cut payroll. Jordan Romano got a shot to close and hadn’t gotten his laundry back when he was released with an ERA over 10. For most of this year, Anaheim has run a true closer-by-committee which is about as bad a place for a bullpen to live as there is in this sport. Ben Joyce has finally started to look like an answer over the last couple weeks, coming back from injury and stringing together scoreless outings. “Finally started to look like the answer in August” is not the same thing as having stability all season.

What should actually worry the Halo’s faithful more than the record is every other team in this division is winning more games than its run differential says it should. Mostly thanks in each case to a bullpen doing something right in various big moments. The Angels are the only team in the AL West losing more games than the math says they should. Reid Detmers moving from the bullpen into the rotation has worked, a sub-4.00 ERA with a lot of strikeouts, which is a real bright spot the front office should be encouraged by. Walbert Ureña has been just as good next to him, running an ERA under 3.00 in his own right. But a good one-two punch at the top of the rotation doesn’t fix a bullpen that spent five months without a real closer, and it doesn’t fix an offense that’s been the weakest link in a five-team race to the bottom.

The bullpen situation is worth sitting with for a second because of how it happened. At the actual trade deadline on August 3, interim general manager John Mozeliak made it official that 2026 was over, dealing Kirby Yates, Ryan Zeferjahn, and Brent Suter out of the bullpen, along with José Soriano, Jo Adell, Logan O’Hoppe, and Chase Silseth elsewhere on the roster, for packages that totaled nine prospects. This was a front office that decided months ago it didn’t have a closer, watched the season confirm it, and then sold off whatever bullpen pieces still had value once the verdict was official. Ben Joyce looking like the answer now, six consecutive scoreless outings and counting as of a few days ago, is the first real stability this group has had all year. It’s just arriving after the front office already decided the answer didn’t matter this season.

The Anaheim Turmoil continued on August 11, with the Angels sitting at 45-74 and dead last in the sport. Mozeliak fired pitching coach Mike Maddux along with bullpen coach Dom Chiti and assistant pitching coach Darryl Scott, all just seven months into their tenure. Maddux is the guy who helped Texas lead the majors in team ERA in 2025. His explanation for why the Angels’ pitching staff hadn’t taken a similar leap wasn’t about talent, it was that the technology and analytics the organization had available simply weren’t reaching the pitchers. Reid Detmers admitted afterward that he hadn’t even started using Trackman to break down his own bullpen sessions until after the All-Star break. Mozeliak handed the job to Tim Leveque, who’d spent the previous 20 seasons in the Cardinals’ pitching development pipeline overlapping with Mozeliak’s own run as St. Louis’s head of baseball operations, and who’d only joined the Angels organization this year as the pitching coach at Double-A. The bullpen job went to Michael Wuertz, an actual Angels lifer with 11 years in that farm system. One new voice with deep ties to the guy who just hired him, one internal promotion, both installed with seven weeks left in a season that was already over. I am becoming enthralled with Arte Moreno and John Mozeliak; it takes a certain level of “personality” to do this, in public.

The Athletics: Getting Hit, and Getting Hit Hard

There’s no complicated diagnosis here. The Athletics have the worst rotation ERA and the worst bullpen ERA in the division. Jeffrey Springs has given up 29 home runs in 113 innings. Jack Perkins is running an ERA north of 8 out of the bullpen. J.T. Ginn has been the one legitimately solid piece in that rotation, and he’s had to watch nearly everyone around him get hit around on a nightly basis.

Now, before we get too deep in this, one does have to ask how much of this is the staff itself, and how much of it is the building? Sutter Health Park is a minor league facility the A’s are using while their new digs in Las Vegas get built. It is a much smaller ballpark than a typical major league park, located in a part of California that runs hot and dry for most of the summer. Perfect weather for baseballs to fly a little higher and little further.

In fairness to the A’s and climatology, I checked instead of just floating the theory. With the Athletics’ home and road numbers, the gap is the largest in the division by a wide margin. A’s hitters are going deep at a rate 53% higher per game at home than on the road, their isolated power jumps by 60 points, and their team wRC+ swings from 117 at home to 83 on the road. That is more than double the size of any other AL West team’s home-road split. Park effects generally cut both ways, so a building that’s inflating the Athletics’ own power numbers this much is very likely doing the same thing to whatever their pitchers are giving up. So, yeah, the park is not helping matters.

I can also tell you is that the gap between the Athletics’ actual ERA and their expected ERA, based on the quality of contact they’re allowing, is one of the widest in the sport, both for the rotation and the bullpen. Some of what’s happening to this pitching staff is genuinely bad results relative to the underlying contact quality. Some of it is fully seated with the defense, which grades out as poorly as Seattle’s. Bad combination to have to work through.

The bottom line? This is the worst pitching staff in the division by a real margin, and it’s the reason a team with a roughly average offense still sits at the bottom of the standings with the worst run differential in the American League. Which free agent pitchers are lining up to throw for the green and gold? None? Not surprising.

The other piece of this puzzle is injuries. Brent Rooker, Shea Langeliers, Nick Kurtz, Tyler Soderstrom and Jacob Wilson have been out and will be out for the season. That list of names is the 2026 edition of Murderer’s Row that we did not get to see. It’s not completely fair to put the fall of the A’s on a pitching staff that has very little hope in recovering runs in the next half-inning.

We do have to give the Athletics some credit for one thing, because it would be unfair not to: they’re actually winning more games than their run differential says they should, same as Houston, Texas, and Seattle. A minus-187 run differential should be producing a historically bad win total, and it isn’t. What the team is doing in close games is working often enough to keep this from being a full-blown 100-loss disaster.

While the A’s season might be done for 2026, the outlook is not as bleak as some other teams in the division that simply do not have the roster this organization has.

So Who Actually Deserves This

Nobody, and that’s the entire point. Somebody is going to win the American League West in 2026, and as of right now that team is Houston, holding first place on a tiebreaker over an identical 65-66 Texas team. The Rangers are getting some of the best pitching in the sport from a guy who lost a rotation battle in March but still can’t buy enough offense to pull ahead. Seattle might be the most talented roster in the group and can’t get out of its own way defensively. Anaheim has Mike Trout wasting one of his last great seasons on a roster that spent half the year without a real closer. And the Athletics are getting hit like a team that’s still two years away from where they’re trying to be.

I hate excuses. When I got into this, I expected a fall off of offense, some questionable pitching and some shaky relivers throughout the division. I did not expect to find wholesale issues. Every single club has a legitimate, specific, documentable reason for being here. What makes it even worse is not one of them has fixed it yet. That’s rare. Bad divisions usually have a couple of clubs that are quietly fine. This year, so far, the AL West doesn’t have a quietly fine team hiding in it anywhere. There are roughly 31 more games to be played. One of these teams needs to figure out how to win a few games.

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Dylan Cease took a no-hitter into the seventh inning Saturday night. That’s the third most interesting thing happening in baseball right now. Because the model has had Cease as the second-best pitcher in the American League since May. The no-hit bid didn’t create anything. It confirmed what Contact Suppression Rate was already saying.

The more interesting question is what the composite rankings say about the teams still playing in October. The division leader ranked 23rd in baseball. The team ranked 14th is three games up in their division. Two teams bought rotation help at the deadline and both of those arms are running ERAs more than a run better than their underlying stuff says they deserve.

The standings give you volume. The model gives you quality. Right now they’re telling very different stories.

That’s this week’s Division Line. Worth the extra few minutes.

SHOW NOTES

The Division Line — Season 1, Episode 22
Everyone Is Wrong About Which Teams Are Actually Built for October. Here’s What the Model Says.
August 24, 2026 · The Baseball Nerd

Dylan Cease took a no-hitter into the seventh inning Saturday night against the Yankees. Every baseball conversation this weekend is about that at-bat in the seventh.

That’s the third most interesting thing happening in baseball right now.

This week Pete Dwyer runs the full CSR leaderboard and the composite power rankings for both leagues, and the gap between what the model says and what the standings show is the story of October before it’s even started.

THIS EPISODE COVERS:

• Dylan Cease, Toronto: CSR plus-1.488, second in baseball. ERA 2.42, expected ERA 2.65. The no-hit bid confirmed what the model has been saying since May

• Jacob Misiorowski, Milwaukee: CSR plus-2.583, the highest single-season mark ever recorded. The previous record was Chris Sale’s 2024 NL Cy Young season at plus-2.126. This isn’t close

• Chris Sale, Atlanta: CSR plus-1.435, third in baseball. ERA 2.16, expected ERA 3.07. That gap is the number to watch

• Parker Messick, Cleveland: CSR plus-0.938, second in the AL. Real arm, real season

• Drew Rasmussen, Tampa Bay: CSR plus-0.877. The story nobody is telling about the Rays

• The regression watch: Eduardo Rodriguez (ERA 2.71, xERA 4.71), Foster Griffin in Cleveland (ERA 3.18, xERA 4.19), Robbie Ray and Michael King in San Diego — two of the five widest ERA mirages in baseball, same rotation

• The composite model: park-adjusted hitting, run prevention with luck stripped out, defensive value — weighted and blended for all 30 teams

• The Dodgers are number 1 at plus-1.372. The Astros are number 23 at minus-0.262. They’re leading the AL West

• Atlanta ranks 14th in baseball at plus-0.046. They lead the NL East by three games

• The Yankees rank 4th in the AL model at plus-0.714 and aren’t leading anything. Judge comes back in September

• Philadelphia’s rotation grades out as the best by SIERA-minus of any team in either league’s top five. Nobody is saying this

• Cleveland’s deadline acquisition Foster Griffin has one of the five largest ERA mirages in baseball

• Games that matter: Dodgers at Braves, Cubs at Arizona, Red Sox at Yankees

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A Contract Signed on the Back of a Napkin

Cleveland scout Cy Slapnicka found Feller on a sandlot in Van Meter, Iowa, in 1935, after actually driving out to scout a different pitcher entirely and never bothering to watch him. He signed Feller instead, on the back of a napkin dated July 22, 1935, with his father’s signature required since Feller was only 16.

The agreement listed Cleveland’s farm club in Fargo-Moorhead, North Dakota, as the team of record, guaranteed Feller could visit home during the season, and even included a clause protecting his right to keep playing high school basketball, all in exchange for one dollar. The plan was for him to report to Fargo-Moorhead the following year. He never did.

His contract was quietly transferred to New Orleans instead, but that never resulted in an appearance either. Slapnicka brought him straight to Cleveland that summer, had him work out with the team, and got him into an exhibition game against the Cardinals that July, where Feller struck out eight batters in three innings, including Leo Durocher twice. The Indians called him up to the majors weeks later, skipping the minor leagues entirely.

A Manager Who Kept a Reliever Warming Up Just in Case

By the time Feller got his first real start on August 23, he’d already made several relief appearances. Manager Steve O’Neill wasn’t fully convinced a teenager was ready for it, and started him mainly at Slapnicka’s urging, keeping reliever Denny Galehouse loose in the bullpen in case things fell apart. They didn’t. Feller struck out 15 Browns and won, 4-1. O’Neill’s postgame assessment was blunt: the kid had been perfect.

An Investigation Already Underway

What the crowd at the ballpark that day didn’t know was that iron-fisted Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had opened a formal investigation into Feller’s signing just days earlier. Lee Keyser, owner of the Des Moines club in the Western League, had complained that Cleveland’s whole arrangement, signing a high schooler directly and routing him through farm teams he never actually played for, broke the rules governing how amateur players were supposed to be acquired.

Landis, adhering to his well-known reputation, made no secret of what he thought of the napkin contract, calling it a cover-up and fining Cleveland $7,500. Then he asked Feller directly whether he wanted to become a free agent, a status that reporters expected could have sparked a bidding war worth well over $100,000.

A Kid Who Said No

Feller told the commissioner he wanted to stay with Cleveland. His father wanted the same thing badly enough that he’d told Landis he was prepared to sue if the ruling went the other way. Landis let the fine stand and let Feller stay put.

Slapnicka wasn’t done bending the rules either. He’d used the same playbook that year on a first baseman named Tommy Henrich, offered by Landis the identical choice Feller had just faced. Henrich took free agency and signed with the Yankees instead.

Home for His Senior Year

Feller finished his rookie season with a 5-3 record and the best ERA on Cleveland’s staff, then went home to Van Meter to finish high school and graduate the following spring, before rejoining the Indians for good in 1937. Two years later he set a new single-game strikeout record that stood for decades. By 21, he’d become the first pitcher in history to win 24 games before turning that age.

None of it required the free agency Landis had offered him outright. The version of the story that gets remembered is a phenom striking out a stadium full of grown men on a random Sunday in August. The version underneath it is a 17-year-old who was handed the choice to walk away from the only team he wanted, and turned it down himself.

Sunday Stories · Timeless baseball stories, delivered weekly

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What our power rankings model measures

I wanted to get past the noise of the media of which team to watch for the postseason. I used a calculation to grade every team in baseball, measured on three things that tend to predict who keeps winning. The questions I wanted to see answers to were how well a lineup hits relative to the league, adjusted for park; how well a pitching staff prevents runs once you strip out the noise of balls falling in for hits or getting run down that shouldn’t have been; and how much value the defense adds on top of both, independent of who’s on the mound or at the plate.

I checked it for both leagues. The names at the top mostly aren’t surprises. What’s underneath them is.

NL power rankings: top 5 National League teams

In the National League, there’s a team riding one of the best defensive seasons I’ve ever put a number to, and using it to paper over a rotation that grades out as one of the shakiest of any contender in baseball. There’s a team that traded its actual ace over the winter and still runs the single best pitching staff in the league by the numbers. And there’s a team most people would reflexively pencil into a top five right now that doesn’t make the cut at all.

AL power rankings: top 5 American League teams

The American League told an even stranger story. We know the three teams from the same division that took three of the top spots outright. One team’s best hitter has been out since May 31 with a fractured rib and the club is still winning almost entirely on the strength of its rotation. And the team that made me want to write this in the first place traded away two of its top three starters, including a pitcher a lot of people would call the best in baseball, inside a single week at the deadline, and still didn’t fall out of the top five.

The full top five for the National League is up now, with the exact order, the numbers behind every team, and the case for each one. So is the American League. Both go into the model in full: the metrics I used, why I weighted things the way I did, and where a few teams surprised me enough that I had to double check my own math.

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This is not “the Rangers are bad at hitting with runners on,” kind of piece; you already know that. The piece is about the gap between what Rangers Manager Skip Schumaker says causes the losing and what he actually does about it, and how that gap has been sitting in plain sight in his own press conferences since April.

A team that was supposed to be different

Schumaker took over in October with a mandate. President of Baseball Operations Chris Young called him “driven, passionate and thorough.” Schumaker himself, at his introductory presser, said the Rangers needed to find their “real identity” as an offensive team and that his focus would be “situational hitting,” “winning on the margins,” doing “the little things.” Spring training reporters wrote about a manager who threw his own batting practice, who chased down relievers in the outfield between innings, who wanted a hand in everything. Brandon Nimmo called it “different, but I think it’s good.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The same failure, described the same way, over and over

Start with the phrase “big hit.” Ask most Ranger fans about it and you will get a guttural groan. It has a zombie-like quality that shows up in his postgame answers in April, twice in May, June, July, and August. Not similar phrasing. The words themselves.

April 5, after a sweep by the Reds: “We had a chance to win with traffic on bases… and just didn’t get that big hit.”

April 18, after stranding 16 runners against Seattle: “As long as we keep getting traffic, we’ll get the hit. I’m not concerned.”

May 5, after loading the bases with no outs against the Yankees and scoring once: “We had tons of guys on base, and again, just couldn’t get that big hit to add on.”

June 13, at Fenway: “wanting to be the guy, wanting to provide the big hit or the big RBI and… just couldn’t come through.”

July 22, in the same press conference, twice: “That was the difference in the game, and a little bit of an issue the whole year, quite honestly, in bases-loaded situations.” And then, more bluntly: “we just couldn’t get a big hit with runners in scoring position.”

August 15, after Jake Burger’s homer tied a game the Rangers still lost: “We were looking for the big hit, kind of a momentum-swinging play or change of emotion in the dugout, and Burger provided that.”

Six months, six variations on the same sentence. Shawn McFarland at the Dallas Morning News noticed it too, writing on August 1 that “the term ‘big hit,’ which has haunted the Rangers in various ways for a year-and-a-half now, was not used” that particular day, “the sentiment remained the same nevertheless.” A year and a half. That’s not a slump. That’s an identity, and not the one Schumaker promised to find back in October.

What prompted me to write this

On June 18, after the Rangers get swept by the Twins and are outscored 25-7 across the series, Schumaker stands in front of reporters and says this:

“I’ve said it before: ugly losses like this, when you don’t do well, really, in all facets of the game, it starts with me. We made some fundamental mistakes throughout the game that we have to clean up, but overall, just a tough, tough loss in all facets.”

He tells you himself this isn’t new. He says the thing that fans want to hear and it becomes part of the daily discussion among Rangers fans: Skip is going to take control.

Fast forward eight weeks. August 14. The Rangers just got swept out of Anaheim, going 1-for-16 with runners in scoring position over the final three games, and Schumaker is standing in front of reporters again:

“We’ve got to figure it out. It starts with me. I’ve got to start doing something different on the road. In-division especially, we have just not been good. We have to switch it up somehow, and I have to come up with different ideas for that to happen because that series right there cannot happen.”

This statement, given to reporters after losses, twice? Shouldn’t it have only had to be said once?

It’s the same phrase. It’s the same claimed ownership. The underlying problem of the road record, the multiple runners left on base, the first-inning shellacking, still sitting there completely unresolved. If it actually started with him in June, August should read differently.

It doesn’t.

The team’s bases-loaded OPS was the worst in baseball in early May at .379, still the worst in baseball at the start of August at .458, worse than any club had posted in that situation since the 2012 Astros, a team that lost 107 games. The number didn’t move. The sentence didn’t move. Only the calendar did.

It isn’t just the two months. On July 29 and July 30, back to back days in St. Petersburg, Schumaker used almost the identical sentence twice in a row. “But we just couldn’t get anything going offensively,” after a shutout loss on Wednesday. “The story is we didn’t get anything going offensively. It’s tough to win games that way,” after a 3-2 loss on Thursday. Two losses, twenty four hours apart, same diagnosis, same words, and nothing between them but another empty box score.

Here we go again

I was finishing this piece last night when the Rangers gave me one more example I did not go looking for. Washington’s Cade Cavalli struck out 10 of the first 13 Rangers he faced and finished with 13 K’s total. Texas managed four hits, all singles, drew one walk, and had a single baserunner across the final 21 plate appearances of a 6-0 loss. Schumaker’s answer in the press room after the game: “We just couldn’t get anything going, that’s just the bottom line.” Minutes later, same press conference: “We just couldn’t get anything going together today.”

That loss put a number on something else, too. The Rangers are 16-49, a .246 winning percentage, when their opponent scores first this season. Schumaker said as much himself: “if we don’t score first, for whatever reason, it feels that we just haven’t been able to come back.” And when it came time to name the fix, this is what he offered: “I wish I could give you the right answer of what we need to do.”

That’s the whole piece in one sentence. He doesn’t have the answer, and for once he said so plainly. But “I wish I could give you the right answer” and “it starts with me” cannot both be true at the same time. One of them is the truth. The other is what gets said into a microphone.

Naming a problem isn’t the same as fixing one

None of this is really about Schumaker being a bad manager. He has been given a pitching staff from a cost-conscious owner that is as good as it is going to get, aside from veteran workhorses Jacob deGrom and Nate Eovaldi. He is having to piece together a lineup from a roster that is mostly broken. The record isn’t an abject disaster for a team that was expected to be .500.

The issue at hand is the pattern in how he talks about the losing, because it tells you something about how the organization is actually processing its own failures. In each loss there is an excuse, and every excuse has a shape. This one’s shape is: praise the process, admit the result, promise a change, repeat the exact same promise two months later once the process has produced the exact same result again.

“It starts with me” sounds like accountability. Said once, with something done to correct the situation, it is. Said twice, eight weeks apart, describing the same failure, is a cop-out. It’s a script to get done with the interviews and seemingly back to the same old thing. And a script isn’t a fix.

I’ll be tracking the Rangers’ bases-loaded and RISP numbers through September. If they climb back toward league average while this language disappears from his pressers, that’s a real turnaround and I’ll say so plainly. If the number stays buried and the phrasing keeps showing up, that tells its own story, and by then it won’t need my help to make the point.

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I watched it, and I was not surprised. I had run the Contact Suppression Rate earlier in the week and his numbers were loud, in a bad way. I have always thought Merrill Kelly was a solid #2 or #3 pitcher and could hold his own. He had a long journey to the big leagues and his veteran presence was critical for the Diamondbacks. The numbers though. It was likely going to be a train wreck, and I had to see it.

Merrill Kelly got tagged at Fenway, and the board saw it coming

Kelly has shown the widest gap in baseball between the ERA a pitcher is posting and the ERA his skills have actually earned. His season ERA sat at 5.37 before Tuesday. It is closer to 5.6 now. That number is already bad enough to end most rotation jobs, and the expected version underneath it is far worse.

His expected ERA is 7.13. For most pitchers carrying an ugly number, the expected stats hand back a little hope, some slice of the damage written off as bad luck. Kelly gets none of that relief. The gap runs the wrong way, which means the 5.6 is closer to a ceiling than a floor. Tuesday was that gap starting to close, and it closed the way these always close, from the ERA side, in public, on a mound in front of everyone.

What happened to Merrill Kelly’s cutter?

He has all but abandoned it. The cutter was more than a quarter of everything Kelly threw as recently as 2024, when he used it 25 percent of the time. This season it is down to 13.5 percent. In its place he is throwing more four-seam fastballs and more changeups, and the changeup is now his most-used pitch.

When a veteran this deep into his career quietly retires a pitch that used to anchor his mix, the reason is rarely a good one. Either the pitch stopped working or the feel for it left. The barrels say whatever took its place is not fooling anybody.

Is Merrill Kelly hurt?

Probably not, at least not in any way the radar gun can see. His fastball still sits at 92.1, right where it has lived his entire career. A pitcher whose arm is failing almost always shows it in velocity first, and Kelly’s velocity has not moved.

So this is not the kind of decline that turns up on a gun reading, and arm health is the least likely of the explanations on the table. Whatever is happening is happening to his stuff and his command, not his arm speed. That is worse news in a way, because velocity tends to come back and feel for a pitch tends not to.

Why Merrill Kelly can’t miss bats

The whiffs are gone and the walks are up, at the same time, both at career worsts. Kelly’s strikeout-minus-walk rate is 4.8 percent against a league starter average north of 16, which puts him near the very floor of the pool. His strikeouts are down, under six per nine, a long-relief number wearing a starter’s uniform.

Contact with Kelly on the bump is loud. His barrel rate is 12 percent, nearly double the league mark. His hard-hit rate is 44 percent and his exit velocity sits a full click above the field. This means that he cannot end an at-bat and cannot survive the ball in play, which is a hard combination to pitch through for one start, let alone a season.

Merrill Kelly’s strike quality is at a career low

Every strike-earning number Kelly owns is parked at the bottom of his career. His called-plus-swinging-strike rate, the cleanest read on whether a pitch earns its own strike, is 23.3 percent, and he had never once finished a season under 26 before this one. His zone rate is a career low. His called-strike rate is a career low.

The chase numbers make it grimmer, not better. Hitters are actually swinging at more of his off-speed offerings than ever and making more contact when they do. So the pitches no longer steal strikes. He has backed off the plate to hunt whiffs that never come, and the walks pour out of the gap. He falls behind, he has to come back into the zone, and that makes for a long night.

Is Merrill Kelly a FADE for the rest of 2026?

Yes, and a specific kind. The mechanism from three angles proves it and it means that the effort we are watching is bigger than a slump. What Kelly has is the pitch mix, the swing-and-miss, and the strike quality all giving out together, which is what a real decline looks like when it is written on the page.

One more number closes the door on a rebound. His average on balls in play is .286, right at normal, so there is no unlucky bounce sitting in the ledger waiting to correct in his favor. His defense behind him is 9th in the league in Defensive Runs Saved. He is getting beaten by hitters.

Fenway was almost too fitting a place for it to land. A pitcher whose whole problem is that he cannot govern the quality of contact should fear that park more than nearly any other, because the big green wall in left turns a catchable mistake into a double and an ordinary hard fly into a souvenir. The profile said Kelly could not survive good contact, and Boston runs out a lineup and a ballpark built to manufacture exactly that. It did, six runs of it, in four innings.

The FADE board flagged him weeks ago as a fade with the floor still somewhere beneath him, and Tuesday the floor moved. His ERA is climbing to meet his skills, the way it almost always does in the end, and the skills are pointing at something north of seven. On a nice night for baseball next to the Charles River, the box score told the truth about a pitcher it has been protecting all summer, and the truth is not finished landing.

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Here is what the model has instead: Yahoo called Sean Manaea “the most upside of any starter under 30% rostered.” nSCORE has him rated SELL. Value gap of -161. Four consecutive updates.

Same player. Opposite calls.

One more thing before the update. CBS and Yahoo both recommended Abimelec Ortiz as a waiver wire add this week. He homered in his debut and they called it upside

I wrote about Ortiz in November. SPARK Score 80. The recommendation was explicit: trade Jake Burger, promote Ortiz for Opening Day 2026, expect 25-plus home runs. The Rangers went a different direction. The Nationals took him in the trade for MacKenzie Gore. Abi is hitting second against right-handed pitchers.

The mainstream found him when he homered in a game. We found him when he was still in Triple-A

Four Updates. The Gaps Are Growing.

These four names have been on the BUY board since July 21. Here is where the gaps stand today versus last week.

Alec Burleson (nSPARK, SCORE 79.8, GAP +86, ADP 92). Score ticked up this week. Gap unchanged. Still the highest-scored BUY in the database. Still not mentioned in a single mainstream waiver wire piece.

Miguel Vargas (nSPARK, SCORE 69.1, GAP +123, ADP 143). The gap grew. It was +120 on August 10. It is +123 today. The market is moving in the wrong direction on a 25-year-old with elite contact metrics.

Luis García Jr. (nSPARK, SCORE 71.7, GAP +116, ADP 134). Four updates as a top-14 hitter in the database. Market has him 134th. The gap has been over 100 spots for four straight weeks.

Nolan Schanuel (nSPARK, SCORE 49.4, GAP +105, ADP 164). Gap grew from +100 to +105. NBC Sports noticed him six weeks after the model did. Nobody else has followed

These gaps are supposed to close. That’s how the market works. Someone writes about a player, ADP adjusts, the opportunity shrinks. Four updates in, the market is moving further away from what the model says, not toward it.

The Names Trending Up This Week

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