MLB Notes August 26th

You know the 10 minutes a day when you’re not thinking about how awesome the Orioles are? Use ‘em now because it’s MLB Notes time again!

Are the Dodgers this good? 

Early on in June the Yankees looked unstoppable. They were the class of the league, the best team in decades, so the pundits said. Since then, the Yankees have been a sub-.500 team and the Dodgers, who were right there with New York during their good times, have done nothing but win.

And the Dodgers just keep winning. And winning and winning. They’ve posted winning percentages above .650, which is a 105 win pace, in four of the five months of the season. They have winning percentages over .800 – a 130 win pace! – in July AND August. They went 21-5 in July and 26 days into August have a shot at finishing this month with a better record. 

But maybe most impressive Dodgers stat of all is their run differential. The best run differential in baseball history is +458 by the St. Louis Maroons in 1884, but that game resembles nothing like the game played today. The best run diff in any modern sense is the 1939 New York Yankees, who finished their season at +411. They are the only team since 1900 to ever top +400. 

Wanna hear a stat that will upset Orioles and Red Sox fans alike? The top six post-1900 teams by run differential are all Yankees teams. Pretty barfy, huh? No non-Yankee team has ever finished with a run differential better than +300 since the 1906 Cubs finished at +323. 

If the Dodgers can add 26 runs to their run differential over their remaining 39 games, and they’re averaging a bit more than two runs per game they play which puts them on pace to achieve that, they’ll be the first non-Yankees team since those Cubs to break the +300 run differential barrier. 

So to answer the above bolded question, yes. Yes the Dodgers are this good. Of course that doesn’t mean they’ll win in the playoffs. Gives them a pretty strong shot though.

Can Pujols hit number 700?

Albert Pujols is one of the greatest hitters of all time. It’s easy to forget that given how he’s played since signing with the Anaheim Angels back in 2012, but the Pujols of 2001 through 2011 hit 459 homers and posted an OPS 70 percent above league average. 

Since then things have gone downhill for Albert, but now with retirement to come at the end of the season, he’s got one more race in him and he’s hitting the gas. Pujols was 50 games away from his regular season finale and sitting at 686 career homers. The Pujols of 2005 would’ve put that away easy and smashed past the 700th homer, but this Pujols isn’t that one. Fourteen homers seemed like a tall order and given the fact that he’s only a part time player, perhaps “tall order” is putting it nicely. 

But over the past 13 games Pujols has seven homers. Seven! And because he’s not playing full time, he’s actually hit those seven in just 42 plate appearances. But homer he did, and he now stands just seven homers away from 700. 

Thirteen games ago reaching 700 homers for his career was virtually impossible. Now, well, I wouldn’t call it likely, but it’s definitely possible. It’ll be an amazing month watching him try to reach the mark, one we thought out of reach just a few weeks ago. Of all the chases in this last month plus of baseball, this might be the most fun to watch.

But even if Pujols can’t reach 700, he can still do one notable thing. He can pass Alex Rodriguez and put himself fourth on the all time home run list behind Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth. That would be a fitting end to an amazing career.

Teams for Sale

The Angels have been a mess for the better part of the last decade. Mike Trout famously, despite being one of the best players of all time, has only played in three playoff games. That’s not meant as a knock against Trout but as a knock against the people who were in charge of putting a winning team around him. 

The good news, the only good news the Angels have received all season, seemingly, is the person who was in charge of putting the people in charge may finally be moving on. Angels owner Arte Moreno has publicly acknowledged he’s interested in selling the team. Not much is known about who would buy them, but the Angels strike me as a great fixer upper opportunity. Yes, the porch is falling down, there are cockroaches everywhere, and the yard is mostly weeds, but the lot is in an amazing location, and Mike Trout is standing in the living room. 

That Moreno might sell is fantastic news for fans of competent baseball. He’s consistently made the wrong decisions about who should make the right decisions for his franchise, and on occasion he’s even gone so far as to overrule his people and force them into making a worse decision than they might have already. Which is saying something. 

The sooner a new owner takes over the team, the sooner Mike Trout might get to play on a team with actual playoff aspirations, and that would be something to watch.

Elsewhere in baseball there’s another owner on the way out as the Washington Nationals have been put up for sale. In this sale we do have an idea of who might buy the franchise as current Washington Wizards, Washington Mystics, and Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis appears to be the frontrunner to acquire the team.

Judging by his decades owning pro sports teams in the DC market, the verdict on Leonsis is mostly good. He’s the kind of guy who knows what he doesn’t know, which is a rare trait in sports ownership. He knows he’s not a baseball expert and will hire people to are to do good work. Then he’ll sign the checks and otherwise stay out of the way. Nationals fans should be doing cartwheels about now.

While Leonsis been an exemplary owner of his NBA and NHL and WNBA franchises, the one thing he could improve on is avoiding staying with something too long after it stops working. He did that with the Capitals and with the Wizards, having left people in charge long past their sell-by date. That said, he’d be an upgrade on the Lerners who own the Nationals now as it would be hard to imagine the Capitals trading Alex Ovechkin. 

Obviously both these deals are exceedingly complicated, but a league without Arte Moreno and with Ted Leonsis is a better league on both fronts.