PicoBlog

Yordan Álvarez and Kyle Tucker are teammates on the Houston Astros. Both are stars. A question I’ve been asking people lately is: Which is more likely to make the Hall of Fame?

For the question to be fun, you have to appreciate how similar their (still-young) careers have been so far. Each just finished his age-26 season. One has 18.2 career WAR, one has 18.3. Both have one top-5 MVP finish and neither has won the award. Tucker has a Gold Glove award, Álvarez won Rookie of the Year, both won the Silver Slugger once. Both have made two All-Star teams, both/both coming in the past two years. It’s obviously early in their careers, but as far as pursuing career milestones, they’re similarly positioned: Only 27 homers separate them, only 22 hits, only 15 runs scored, only 12 RBIs. Despite differences in positions played and standout tools, both are close comps to Willie McCovey at the same age, according to Baseball Reference’s similarity scores.

It’s, obviously, way too early to consider either of these players’ HOF merits. But I’ve been asking it as a way of considering another question: Is it still enough to write a paragraph of a player’s accomplishments that only includes the regular season?

Here’s what Álvarez and Tucker have done in the postseason to date:

• Álvarez, postseason: .295/.393/.556 in 244 plate appearances

• Tucker, postseason:  .237/.315/.389 in 239 plate appearances

There’s a stat called Championship Win Probability Added that measures how much a player’s offensive results changed his team’s chances of winning the World Series. In cWPA, a strikeout or a home run is worth more or less depending on factors like how close the game is, how much the team in question is in a pennant race, and whether it’s a regular-season or postseason game. In the regular season, Tucker and Álvarez’ career cWPAs are very close, as you’d expect from the similarity of their other career stats:

• Álvarez, regular-season cWPA: 9 percent

• Tucker, regular-season cWPA: 7 percent

(For perspective: Joey Votto, 23 percent; Justin Verlander 27 percent; Albert Pujols, 48 percent.)

But in the postseason, their cWPAs are not close at all: 

• Álvarez, postseason cWPA: 32 percent

• Tucker: postseason cWPA: negative 28 percent

Historically, I don’t think this would matter much to Hall of Fame voters. But in the future—perhaps by the time Álvarez and Tucker are up for election—I have a hard time seeing how it can’t. I think a major reevaluation of Hall of Fame standards might be looming.

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Major League Baseball comprises a scaffold of competitive situations (pitch → plate appearance → inning → game → series → final standings → three separate playoff rounds) all building up to the ultimate goal, the World Series. A championship isn’t the only way to define success, but it’s the one that imbues everything else with significance. Those other things, in the league’s value system, serve the biggest thing. The Dodgers recently made this point explicit, when President Andrew Friedman declared their 2022 and 2023 seasons “organizational failures.” They’d won more regular season games in a three-year period than any team in a half-century, but it was all failure—up and down the organization!—because they hadn’t won a championship in that time. As he explained further, success in the regular season is important to the degree it puts the team in a stronger position to win the World Series, but the goal, the point, what matters, “each and every year, is to win a championship.”

As it stands now, 40 percent of teams make the playoffs and, for that achievement, they are still four rounds away from winning a championship. As it stood in Nap Lajoie’s day, 12 percent of teams made the playoffs and needed to win only one round to win a championship. Statistically, the change in the regular season’s significance to parade-having is staggering.

Consider plays that swing a team’s championship chances by 1 percent or more. That’s a HUGE play. The biggest regular-season play (by cWPA) last year was 1.5 percent, a come-from-behind, walk-off, bases-loaded double that J.P. Crawford hit to pull the Mariners to within one game of a playoff spot on Sept. 29. “And the Mariners season continues!” is how the Seattle broadcaster put it, as the club poured onto the field to mob Crawford. It was one of three regular-season plays with a cWPA over 1 percent last year.

There used to be almost 500 in some seasons.

In 2022, the first year under the current playoff structure, there were none.

• 1951-1968 (Two playoff teams): 234 per year

• 1969-1993 (Four playoff teams): 48 per year

• 1995-2011 (Eight playoff teams): 10 per year

• 2012-2021 (10 playoff teams): 3 per year

• 2022-2023 (12 playoff teams): 1.5 per year

In 1951, when Bobby Thomson homered in the ninth inning to win the National League’s regular season, that single swing—a regular-season swing—was worth about 31 percent in cWPA. It sent the Giants straight to the World Series. In the modern equivalent, it would be a home run that clinched a playoff spot and the Wild Card Series and the Division Series and the League Championship Series all at once. A regular-season swing like that no longer exists.

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The implications for players’ contributions follow. Consider a player who has a season that’s worth somewhere between 6 and 7 WAR, MVP territory. Last year five hitters fell in that range: Freddie Freeman, Corey Seager, Shohei Ohtani (as a hitter), Gunnar Henderson and Francisco Lindor.

In the 12 years since 2012—when MLB introduced the Wild Card round, increasing the number of playoff teams to 10 (and later 12) and the number of postseason rounds to four—81 hitters have had seasons between 6 and 7 WAR. On average, their regular season cWPA in those years has been 1.8 percent. Having a player produce a near-MVP season makes a team about 1.8 percent more likely to win the World Series. If a player has 10 of those in the peak of his career he’s made a 65-WAR career, he’ll probably make the Hall of Fame, and he’s made 18 percent of a championship with his regular season play.

But go back 1957-1968—the 12 years before MLB first expanded the playoffs. Back then, winning the regular season was a straight-to-the-World-Series ticket, so the regular season was worth a lot more. In that period of time, 62 players had a WAR between 6 and 7, and their regular-season cWPA was, on average, 6.0 percent. A near-MVP regular season back then was about 3.5 times more “valuable,” as far as championship implications go. If championships are the point, then great players’ regular seasons used to be a lot more pointful:

Or:

• Mike Trout: 23.9 percent cWPA, career

• Willie Mays: 23.6 percent cWPA, 1959

• Willie Mays: 23.4 percent cWPA, 1966

The kicker is that Mays’ team didn’t even make the playoffs those two seasons. He was able to contribute that much to his team’s championship hopes in the regular season alone, for a non-playoff team. The regular season used to be so important! In a year Mays was actually on a playoff team—in 1962—his regular season cWPA was 45 percent.

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Meanwhile, the postseason is far more of a player’s career than it used to be. Some players (Trout, sigh) barely appear in it, of course. But others will end up with an entire extra season of playing time, or even more. Tucker and Álvarez, at age 26, both already have more postseason playing time than Joe DiMaggio—a nine-time World Series champion—did in his career. One’s postseason performance is no longer some small sliver of his statistical record, even though it doesn’t appear at all in his career stats. It can be 10 percent or it.

That has been true for almost 30 years, when MLB added a third round to the postseason, but it’s even truer now, with a fourth round and more teams. Corey Seager is still in his 20s and he’s got more postseason homers than David Ortiz. Carlos Correa is still in his 20s and he’s got as many postseason RBIs as DiMaggio and Babe Ruth combined. Alex Bregman is still in his 20s and he’s already eighth all-time in postseason plate appearances.

The postseason isn’t ever going to get shorter. If anything, it could get longer. And if anything, the regular season could get shorter. MLB wanted to include 14 teams, not 12, in the latest playoff reformatting, so we know their position is October-expansive. The players union, meanwhile, has made proposals for shortening the season, and the Athletic noted last month that one realistic way to make that happen without sacrificing revenue would be to expand the playoffs further. And, on top of all that, MLB will consider a break in the regular season in Olympics years, which would presumably require cutting a few games from those regular seasons.

All to say: Players’ regular season stats are less important than ever. Their postseason stats are more voluminous than ever. Both trends are more likely to accelerate than reverse. Judging players exclusively by their regular season WAR doesn’t seem like it’ll make as much as sense forever, if it even does now.    

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