The Padres turn around, the Guardians’ bullpen comes through, and Yusei Kikuchi’s pitching mix after the transaction

The dog days of summer have arrived. Teams made their moves at the July 30 trade deadline and now the postseason races (and awards races) are heating up. Less than six weeks remain in the regular season. With that in mind, here now are three MLB trends worth knowing as we enter the stretch run.

Last year’s Padres were maybe the biggest disappointment in baseball. Expected to contend for a World Series title, they instead went 82-80, and needed a big September (20-7) to get to 82 wins. They were done in by their performance in close games: 9-23 in one-run games and 2-12 in extra innings. Coin flips games that could have gone either way with the right bounce.

This year’s Padres are solidly in wild-card position and within shouting distance of the Dodgers for the NL West title. They’ve won 22 of their last 27 games and outscored their opponents 159-90 in those 27 games. San Diego has been the best and most dominant team in baseball the last month or so. FanGraphs puts their postseason odds at a healthy 96.3%.

The 2024 Padres are the anti-2023 Padres when it comes to close games and clutch situations. They’re winning one run games, they’re coming out ahead in extra innings, and they’re performing better in high leverage spots. Here are the numbers:

Jurickson Profar, an under-the-radar MVP candidate, has a stellar 1.673 OPS in high leverage situations. That’s the best in baseball by more than 400 points — Rockies third baseman Ryan McMahon is second with a 1.168 OPS — among the 100 players with at least 40 high leverage plate appearances. Jackson Merrill, Profar’s teammate, is third. He has a 1.108 OPS in high leverage spots.

Merrill’s season really is incredible. He’s hitting .289/.320/.484 with 17 home runs and 13 steals in 15 attempts, and he’s doing it as a 21-year-old rookie who skipped over Triple-A and is playing an entirely new position. Merrill never played an inning in center field until this spring. Defensively, he’s currently 15th among all outfielders with plus-6 outs above average. What a player he’s become.

Already four times this season Merrill has hit a ninth-inning home run that either tied the game or gave the Padres the lead, and all four have come since July 30. Those clutch dingers have him in the top 25 among all hitters in win probability added. The rookie is a major reason the Padres have reversed their fortune in close games.

“It’s all a focus on winning the game,” Merrill told MLB.com recently. “Because if I’m trying to play for the homer or myself, then I roll that over or I strike out. Play for the game, try to hit a line drive or a single. If you play for the win, it’s going to happen.”

The National League wild-card race has begun to sort itself out — remember how crowded it was the first 3-4 months of the season? — and the Padres are in excellent position to return to the postseason. This team certainly isn’t short on talent. Last year they were done in by poor performance in close games and clutch situations. This year, they’re winning those battles.

Like pretty much every team near the top of the league standings, the Guardians have had themselves a rough few weeks. They started the season 51-26 but are 22-26 since, and an AL Central lead that was 6 1/2 games as recently as July 30 has been whittled down to 3 1/2. Cleveland will play seven of their next 15 games against the Royals. Those will be enormous series.

The Guardians got off to that 51-26 starts thanks to an offense that added power without sacrificing contact, and because their bullpen was out-of-this-world good. Emmanuel Clase returned to “best closer in the game” form after a subpar (for him) 2023, Cade Smith and Hunter Gaddis emerged as lockdown setup men, and others like Tim Herrin and Scott Barlow have been solid too.

Cleveland’s bullpen has been excellent and also heavily used. The Guardians lead baseball with 461 relief appearances, 18 more than any other team, and they’ve already had five relievers — Barlow, Clase, Gaddis, Herrin, Smith — appear in 58 games. Only 15 pitchers in baseball have made at least 58 appearances this year, and five are Guardians. This is a lot:

Last season, five teams (one of which was Cleveland) had five relievers make at least 55 appearances. It’s only Aug. 21 and the Guardians are there already. They have 37 games remaining. There’s a real chance the Guardians become the first team since the 2015 Pirates to have five relievers made at least 65 appearances.

Give Clase & Co. credit. They’ve answered the bell when called and been the best bullpen in baseball in terms of ERA, FIP, WHIP, win probability added, WAR, you name it. Baseball Reference has the bullpen at 9.9 WAR through 125 games. The single-season bullpen record is 11.2 WAR by the 2021 Yankees. The Guardians are on pace to beat that by near two full wins.

August has been a bit of a grind for Cleveland’s relief crew (3.66 ERA), though the underlying stats remain strong, and it’s really just a bad week early in the month skewing their numbers. If the bullpen slips these next few weeks, it’ll be fair to wonder whether the workload caught up to everyone. Until that happens, Cleveland’s bullpen will continue to be asked to carry the weight given the tight AL Central race. This is, truly, one of the best and most dependable bullpens ever.

It is a tale as old as time. Or, really, as old as the pitch-tracking era (since 2008). A talented pitcher joins a new team, makes a few adjustments to his pitch mix and/or pitch shapes, and finds a new level. The best example in recent history is Gerrit Cole, who went from very good with the Pirates to arguably the best pitcher in the game with the Astros following his trade in January 2018.

Prior to the trade deadline last month, the Astros picked up rental lefty Yusei Kikuchi from the Blue Jays in a trade that some thought was a huge overpay and some thought was just right. It depends how you value the three prospects Toronto received. We’re not here to litigate the trade though. We’re here to look at Kikuchi’s pitch mix, which Houston has tweaked:

The Astros have Yusei Kikuchi throwing more sliders and fewer curveballs. Brooks Baseball
Fewer curveballs and significantly more sliders. Kikuchi didn’t throw his curveball at all from 2020-22, then brought it back last year only to see it become his worst-performing pitch. The slider, meanwhile, has always been his money pitch. To put it another way, the Astros have Kikuchi throwing his worst breaking ball less and his best breaking ball more. Sometimes it really it is that simple.

Soon after the trade, our R.J. Anderson said such a tweak to Kikuchi’s pitch mix could be in the offing:

The Astros surely have their hunches — presumably as it pertains to pitch usage, location, or some combination thereof. One possible tweak to our eyes concerns Kikuchi’s curveball. It’s been his worst-performing pitch this season, surrendering arsenal-worst marks of a .291 average and a 91.1-mph exit velocity, yet he’s used it as his main secondary offering. Surely Kikuchi would benefit from reducing his curveball usage in favor of throwing more sliders and changeups.

This is the important part: it’s working. I’m not writing about pitch mix changes if there is no change in performance. Kikuchi had a 4.75 ERA with a 26.2% strikeout rate and a 40.9% ground ball rate in 22 starts with the Blue Jays before the trade. In four starts with the Astros, he has a 2.42 ERA with a top-of-the-line 34.1% strikeout rate and an improved 45.3% ground ball rate.

Why the Blue Jays had Kikuchi throw so many curveballs and so few sliders this year, I do not know. He threw 37.3% sliders and 7.6% curveballs in 2023, so the Blue Jays knew what they had, but for whatever reason they had him lean curveball in 2024. Maybe the Astros gave up too much to get him at the deadline, maybe they didn’t. Either way, Kikuchi has been excellent since the trade thanks to his new pitch mix.