Baseball Bytes: We Couldn’t Have Done It Without You Guys
Baseball Bytes: We Couldn’t Have Done It Without You Guys
The overperformers who pushed their teams to the playoffs. Plus, one day determines the Mets' destiny.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Stand and (Over-)Deliver
The playoff field is all but set — more on that in a bit — which means that, at long last, we basically know the postseason bracket with the exceptions of seed Nos. 5-6 in the National League.
Over the past month or so, I’ve already classified the type of champion each playoff team would be if they went all the way, and I’ve gone through the weaknesses that might keep them from fulfilling that destiny. But one more thing I wanted to do as the regular season closes business is pay tribute to the players who leveled up this season — and helped carry their teams to the playoffs as a result.
So among potential playoff teams, let’s highlight the young players (age 25 or under), prime-age players (ages 26-30) and veterans (age 31 or older) who most exceeded the established level of their Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in 2024.
In terms of pure WAR over expected, young breakouts helped provide more power to playoff teams than any other category. Some of these were not necessarily unexpected — Witt Jr., Merrill, Henderson, Chourio and others were certainly hyped going into the year — but we also know that not every hyped young player delivers on those expectations, much less produces MVP-type seasons in the cases of Witt Jr. and Henderson.
Meanwhile, others like Colton Cowser and Mark Vientos were less heralded, but still managed to play crucial roles on teams bound for October (or potentially so). And it’s hilarious to see Juan Soto on this list, in a reminder that he is still ridiculously young for a player who has already accomplished so much in his career.
This is a fascinating mix of players who had been injured, inconsistent, underwhelming, or all of the above in recent years — but they managed to put everything together for great seasons in 2024. The injury factor can’t be overstated here; there’s a reason why most of the players in this category are pitchers, as their tendency toward boom-and-bust seasons can lead to big prime performances seemingly out of nowhere. (Flaherty was so good with the Tigers that he helped their postseason bid with his WAR, then went to the Dodgers and put up nearly another win of value there.) And then there are position players like Marte, who turns in an MVP-like season every few years for whatever reason.
The art of the veteran renaissance season is nearly as important an ingredient to a playoff run as the young breakout performance. There are a few different flavors of that here, from Chris Sale’s return to vintage dominance (after a four-year absence) with a probably playoff-bound Braves squad, to Seth Lugo having the season of his life at age 34, Marcell Ozuna bouncing back from a string of horrendous years, Jose Iglesias improbably sparking the Mets after years of irrelevance, and star players like Aaron Judge or Bryce Harper simply staying healthier than usual. Whatever the reason for the previous downturn, these revivals helped their teams get to the postseason (or at least knock on the door of it today).
Building a playoff team comes down to, first and foremost, getting the most talented players possible, who fit together and are guided by strong leadership. But sometimes it’s also about having the variance in player performance break your way with career years, veteran revivals and a bunch of young breakouts. Without those ingredients, it’s tough to find yourself playing meaningful games in October.
⚾ Double Your Pressure
As alluded to earlier, the only bit of unsettled business in the 2024 MLB regular season involves the final NL wild card spots — which will be determined via a doubleheader today, because multiple Braves-Mets games last week were postponed by Hurricane Helene.
Basically, a Braves sweep or a split gets Atlanta in, with the Diamondbacks also benefiting from the former situation, while a Mets sweep means New York and Arizona are headed to the playoffs.
This is not the first time a doubleheader has happened on the last day of the regular season — recently, it happened in both 2022 and 2015 — though neither of those cases were the only games of the day (technically a day past when the regular season should have ended), nor did they determine both teams’ playoff fates. So this is going to be an unusual situation even by the chaotic standards of a sport that used to give us one-game tiebreakers and dramatic days like the 2011 regular season finales.
But at the same time, maybe the Mets in particular should be used to the final day of the season determining their fate.
In both 2007 and 2008 — a pair of seasons in which New York had 90+ percent playoff odds at one point in September — the Mets were eliminated on the final day of the regular season by losing to the Florida Marlins, with the earlier of the two seeing future HOF pitcher Tom Glavine give up 7 runs in the top of the first inning to effectively end the team’s hopes that day before they began.
On the positive side of things, the 1999 Mets beat the Pittsburgh Pirates with a walk-off wild pitch on the final day of the regular season to force a tiebreaker playoff with the Cincinnati Reds:
They then beat the Reds 5-0, won the Division Series over the Diamondbacks (them again) with a walk-off 10th-inning home run from Todd Pratt, and used Robin Ventura’s “Grand Slam Single” to push the Braves to 6 games in the NLCS before ultimately losing.
Similarly, the 1973 Mets clinched the NL East with a win over the Chicago Cubs in Game 1 of what was supposed to be a makeup-game doubleheader day to end the regular season. But after Tom Seaver won the early matchup, the second game was called on account of rain and irrelevance; New York went on to outlast the powerhouse Cincinnati Reds in the NLCS and narrowly lost the World Series to the Swingin’ Oakland A’s.
So the final day of the regular season hasn’t always been cruel to the club from Queens — sometimes it has been the gateway to greater things.
But there’s one more last-day memory that haunts the Mets, from 1998, and it might be conjured up again today. Going into the final week (two series) of the regular season, New York held a 1-game wild-card lead over the Cubs. The Mets dropped both games at home against Montreal, while Chicago split 2 games with the Brewers, leaving the teams tied with 3 games left each. New York lost the first two to Atlanta; Chicago’s 1-1 split with Houston left the Cubs up by a game heading into the final day of the regular season.
The Mets needed a win and a Cubs loss to force a tiebreaker — which would also potentially involve the San Francisco Giants — but like Glavine a decade later, Armando Reynoso gave up a bunch of runs early and the Mets lost 7-2, eliminating them from the playoff picture. What they didn’t know was that, later in the afternoon, the Astros would come back to tie and then walk off the Cubs — so if only the Mets had taken a single game from the Braves, they would have been in the wild-card playoff. Instead, their season was over, and Chicago faced San Francisco the next day.
The same season-ending fate could befall the Mets today if they can’t take a single game from the Braves this time around, with the playoffs on the line on the last day of the regular season. But maybe things will work out better for Iglesias, Lindor and Tylor Megill than they did for Mike Piazza, John Olerud, Reynoso and company 26 years ago.
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Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.