Season 51 Stats Center

Ray Goyenechea's club spent August taking the Bryce away from Bob Monaghan's, and that is the news at a hundred games: the Strokers are 69-31, the Bobcats who had led the division since April are 67-33, and the Yankees, who closed their August by taking the return leg from the Dragons, are 71-29 and ahead of both. Everybody else in the Speer League is at least a dozen games behind those three. The argument I promised you at the halfway mark has mostly been settled by the people who were supposed to settle it, and the interesting question in September is not who is good but who gets the two byes, and which of the six playoff clubs has to play its way through the other five.

Start with the Strokers, because August was theirs: 14-6, two 4-1 series against the Golden Bears, a 4-1 series at home against the Bobcats, and a 2-3 return leg that was the only thing they lost all month. The numbers are the same numbers, only bigger. Two hundred twenty-nine home runs. Five hundred fifty runs. An .874 team OPS. Cal Raleigh has fifty-three home runs and ninety-six runs batted in from behind the plate and is on a pace to hit eighty-four; Aaron Judge, in ninety games, has forty-nine homers, a hundred runs batted in, ninety-four runs scored, a .342 average and a 1.276 OPS that works out to a 235 OPS+ — he has been, by that measure, two and a third times as productive as a league-average hitter. Freddie Freeman is at .338 and a .987 OPS and is the third-best hitter in his own lineup. Kyle Schwarber has thirty-five home runs and bats somewhere behind all of them. And here is the part that should worry the rest of the league: the pitching has caught up. Max Fried is 14-3 with a 0.97 WHIP, Jesús Luzardo is 11-2 with 151 strikeouts, Zac Gallen has eleven wins, and Edwin Díaz has thirty-one saves. This was a slugging team with a staff. It is now a complete one.

The Bobcats went 10-10 in August, which is the first ordinary month Bob Monaghan's club has had all year, and it cost them the division. Nothing underneath has changed. The staff ERA is 3.45, the WHIP is 1.027, Aroldis Chapman has thirty-three saves, Tarik Skubal (11-5, 0.983 WHIP) and Cristopher Sánchez (0.966) are still the two best run-preventers on any one staff, and Logan Gilbert has twelve wins. Juan Soto has thirty-one home runs, eighty-two runs scored and a .965 OPS. They scored 502 runs and allowed 341. They are a 67-33 team that happens to be looking up at one, and if the two byes go to the Yankees and Strokers, the Bobcats will be the most dangerous wild card anybody has ever drawn.

Which brings us to the Yankees, whose August was 16-4 — 9-1 against the Jaybirds, then 4-1 and 3-2 in the home-and-home with the Dragons. Richard Chapman's club is 71-29 and playing .710 baseball, and the formula has not moved: a 3.26 staff ERA, a 1.065 WHIP, Carlos Rodón at 15-3, Luis Castillo 10-1 with a 3.00, Freddy Peralta with 168 strikeouts and four shutouts, David Bednar with thirty-two saves. Shohei Ohtani has a 1.015 OPS and a 169 OPS+, and the rest of the lineup still hits enough. They lead the Pendleton by sixteen games with fifty-eight to play, and the only race they are in is with the Strokers for the top seed.

The Coats has, at last, been claimed. The Panthers are 55-45 after an 11-9 August that Mark Gaudiano's club built almost entirely inside the division — 3-2 twice over the Rampage, a split with the Black Sox — and they lead the Polecats by nine. Whether that makes them a champion or merely a division winner we will find out in December, because the third division leader gets no bye, and right now the Panthers would be hosting the Speerits.

What August also gave us is the first player-level look at this club all year, and it explains a good deal. Junior Caminero hit eight home runs in twenty games. Corbin Carroll hit .300 with a 1.035 OPS. Bobby Witt Jr. hit .278. On the mound Zack Littell went 3-0 with a 3.12, and Garrett Crochet struck out thirty-seven in thirty-two innings. The full-season sheet, which arrived with it, says Crochet has 179 strikeouts, nine complete games and 159 innings — all three the most in the league — for a 9-8 record. That is a division champion's month, and a division champion's ace.

The Dragons and Speerits played each other ten times in August and split the two series exactly as home field said they should not: the Dragons won 4-1 in Carolina, the Speerits won 3-2 in Komodo. Then the Yankees took four of five and three of five from them, and Doug Triblehorn's club finished the month 9-11 and sits at 55-45. The story is still Byron Buxton — thirty-six home runs, seventy-eight runs batted in, a .938 OPS and fifteen game-winning hits, the most in the league by four. Elly De La Cruz has 115 hits and sixty-nine runs. The Dragons have scored 505 runs; they have also allowed 469, and a 4.49 staff ERA is what separates a club that is in from a club that is in comfortably.

Tom Speer's Speerits went 11-9 and are 52-48, holding the sixth and final seat by six games over the Polecats. They do it with arms: Ryne Nelson has a 2.81 earned run average and four shutouts, tied for the most in the league; Robbie Ray has three more; Jack Dreyer has twenty-two saves; the staff has struck out 850. Geraldo Perdomo has walked sixty-seven times, the most of anybody, gets on base at .378 and has stolen twenty. Trea Turner has 114 hits and twenty-two steals. It is a .705 OPS lineup, which is not enough to scare anyone, and it has been exactly enough to stay ahead of everyone.

Behind them: the Polecats at 46-54 after an 8-12 August, six back. Dan Spangler's club has scored 519 runs, second only to the Strokers, and Jeremy Peña (.293, twenty-two steals), Nico Hoerner (twenty-five) and Isaac Paredes (nineteen home runs) are as good as advertised. The pitching, at 4.31, is a run and change worse than the clubs they are chasing, and it has been all year.

The Black Sox, eight back, have now gone 11-9 in three of five months, and Darren Jones's club is 22-18 since the calendar turned to July. Shea Langeliers hit .353 with five home runs and seventeen runs batted in in August; Carlos Estévez has twenty-six saves and a 2.15. The staff still allowed a hundred and one runs in twenty games, and Bailey Falter's four August starts — eleven and a third innings, twenty-one earned runs — are the reason they are 44-56 rather than something better.

The Rampage are the club I keep coming back to, because they should not be 43-57. Brian Lyons has, by rate, the league's best pitcher in Yoshinobu Yamamoto — 169 strikeouts, second only to Crochet, and a 0.912 WHIP that is the best of any qualified starter — and the league's best earned run average in Hunter Brown at 2.68. The staff has struck out 922 hitters. And they have scored 362 runs, the fewest of any club with a full sheet, on a .222 team average, and Chandler Simpson's thirty-six stolen bases — eleven clear of anyone — have bought them another 10-10 month.

At the bottom, the Fightins went 10-10 and are 37-63, and now that Cleona has sent the numbers you can see why: a .221 team average, the lowest in the league, and a staff that has allowed 497 runs at a 4.87. José Ramírez — twenty-three home runs, sixty-four runs batted in, twenty steals, all hundred games — and Paul Skenes, with 141 strikeouts and six complete games for a 5-7 record, are being wasted. The Golden Bears went 6-14 and are 32-68; Tom Bryce's club leads the league with 962 strikeouts on the mound and has lost anyway. And the Jaybirds went 4-16 and are 29-71, with a staff that has allowed 633 runs and a 6.11 ERA. Will Warren has lost fifteen. Clay Holmes has thrown 150 and a third innings for a team that has made every one of them hurt. Nick Kurtz — twenty-six home runs, sixty-one walks — and Miguel Andújar, hitting .309, are the reasons to watch.

So here is the picture with fifty-eight to play, and it is simpler than the standings make it look. Two byes. One of them is the Yankees', and it has been since about June — they lead the Dragons by sixteen in the Pendleton, and a division that is not a race does not produce a race for the bye. The other bye belongs to whoever wins the Bryce, and that is the only thing left in this league that is genuinely undecided: the Strokers by two over the Bobcats, a 14-6 August against a 10-10 one, and both of them good enough that the loser of that argument will be, by a distance, the best wild card the format has ever produced. Twelve of the games each club has left — all of them in November, two six-game series — are against the other. It will be settled on the field, which is how you would want it.

Below the byes, the wild-card picture has stopped moving. The Bryce runner-up takes one seat with fifty-plus wins already banked. The Dragons, at 55-45, hold another, and after a month in which they went 9-11 and lost both series to the Yankees, they hold it on the strength of what came before — and on the second-best run differential in the Pendleton. The Speerits, at 52-48, hold the last one, and they hold it by six games over the Polecats with a pitching staff — Nelson, Ray, Dreyer, 850 strikeouts — that is built to keep a six-game lead a six-game lead. Nothing about either club looks fragile.

And in the Coats, the Panthers have started to do the thing division winners do in September, which is pull away. Nine clear of the Polecats after an 11-9 month in which the Polecats went 8-12, and Dan Spangler's club would need to make up nine games in fifty-eight against a team that has gone 24-16 since the start of July. The Black Sox at eight back and the Rampage at nine are playing better baseball than their records, and it is going to be too late for both of them.

The individual races have stopped being races. Raleigh leads in home runs. Judge leads in everything else — average, on-base, slugging, OPS, runs batted in, runs. Crochet has the strikeouts and the innings; Yamamoto the WHIP; Brown the ERA; Rodón the wins; Chapman the saves, by one over Bednar. The one thing worth watching is whether Judge, at his current rate, catches Raleigh — and whether either of them finishes the season without the other one's name on the same line.

Fifty-eight to go.