Baseball IQ Weekly Recap (9/12 - 9/19)

By James LeDoux · Baseball IQ ·Sep 20, 2020 · 5 min read

Good morning! We’re in the final stretch of the season, with four teams having clenched playoff spots already. This was also a good week for career milestones, with Pujols passing Willie Mays on the all-time home run leaderboard and Alec Mills getting his first no-hitter.

News from Around The League

Pujols hit career home run no. 661, passing Willie Mays for fifth place on the all-time home run leaderboard (link: ESPN)
Alec Mills’ No-Hitter May Be the Last of its Kind (link: Beyond the Box Score)
A Hall of Fame Pitcher’s Most Outrageous Accomplishment was with His Bat (link: SB Nation)
Jacob DeGrom Just Keeps Throwing Faster (link: FiveThirtyEight)

Standings

We’ve only got about 8 games left in the season. Here’s how the league and division standings are looking as of today (I’m putting this together on Saturday morning, so it’ll be a day behind when this goes out on Sunday).

League Standings

The next two charts show how the AL and NL league rankings have changed throughout the season. You can find a team on the right-hand side in their current ranking position, and trace them back throughout the year to see how they’ve trended. You can also view their trend in isolation on the left-hand side of the figure.

The standings are noisy to the point of not being interpretable in the beginning of the season. I think that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s easy for a team to look better or worse than it it actually is during a small stretch of games. As the year moves forward, these small, random variations in team performance start to smooth over, and teams start to settle in a more stable region in the standings that’s more reflective of their true ability.

Division Standings

Here’s how the division races look as we head into the final stretch, now showing wins over time instead of rankings. While some teams have already clinched their spot (the Dodgers, White Sox, Rays, and A’s are all already in), many divisions and wildcard spots remain up for grabs. Note that while the charts below are my own, I’ve copied the division standings tables below them directly from Google’s standings page.