In a sport with 2,430 games on the schedule every season, the commonplace has a tough battle to be retained in our memories. We remember strongly the greatest pitching performances we've ever seen, the most dominant hitters, the most undefeatable teams. There aren't as many sepia-toned memories for the most average pitcher from your childhood (for me, Mike Boddicker) or an 81-81 team.
That's also true on the downside. There's a Mendoza Line at .200, but nobody really cares who epitomizes a .240 hitter. The 1962 Mets are legendary for losing 120 games, the most in modern baseball, but nobody remembers the beloved bums on teams that merely lose 110 games.
Every season has potential for individual feats of historical excellence or incompetence. At the quarter mark, we have a better idea who has a chance to end up with a new, little footnote in history, as opposed to the usual observation that a player who hits two homers on Opening Day is on pace for a 324-homer season.
Toppling the single-season record for home runs
Major League Baseball set a record for the most home runs hit in a year in 2017, hitting 6,105 round-trippers, bettering the 2000 season by more than 400. But the individual team record of 264 homers in a season stuck, still held by the 1997 Mariners with Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., Jay Buhner and Edgar Martinez. Even Joey Cora hit 11 home runs (never more than six in another season).
This year, the thought was that the Yankees, by adding Giancarlo Stanton, would topple that record. It has not yet come to pass, with the team off the pace at 237. But this wasn't the product of people being too excited by preseason hype; the ZiPS projection system still has the Yankees, once you adjust for expected playing time, with 202 homers left for the season through Saturday's games. That would put them one homer over the Mariners' milestone. ZiPS puts that probability at 47 percent.
Nor is New York the only team with a shot. The Red Sox have 190 homers to hit remaining in the up-to-date projections, putting them at 255 on the year on average, with a 32 percent chance of getting to 265.
Once you add in all the teams with a shot at doing it this year, ZiPS gives a 79 percent chance of the record being beaten in 2018.
The death of the singles hitter
In a way, the retirement of Ichiro Suzuki, who seemingly could hit singles at will, fits in with the theme of the current re-explosion of offense in baseball. People think of the revival of the home run in baseball in 2016, after a hibernation of several years, as a return to the environment of the 1993-2009 period.
In fact, baseball is very different than it was during that era. Just as many homers were hit, but so were singles. Batting averages now are much lower than during the days of Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire chasing records. From 1993 to 2009, the leaguewide batting average never dipped below .260, peaking at .271 in 1999.
Now it's different, with the league not reaching .260 since 2009 and MLB in 2018 standing at .245. The singles rate is the lowest in baseball history, down 5 percent from 2017. Baseball has never finished below .250 in a season with designated hitters, and just three times in the past 100 years overall (1967, 1968 and 1972). Baseball isn't just different than what you might remember from 1985, it's different from 2005.
Tanks for the memories
OK, I hate the word "tanking" when it comes to rebuilding, but I can't resist a bad pun. Contrary to common belief, baseball's long-term trend is toward more parity rather than less, and the extremes in win totals have generally narrowed over the years. Only nine times in history have there been more than two 100-loss teams, and only once with the benefit of 30 teams in the league. That would be 2002, with four teams losing at least 100 games.
It takes a .383 winning percentage to lose 100 games, and as of Sunday morning, there were six teams on pace to lose 100 -- the Rangers, Marlins, Reds, Royals, Orioles and White Sox. The last five of those are on pace to lose at least 107 games, and the current basement-dweller White Sox are on a 116-loss pace.
Now, regression toward the mean tends to help the woeful as much as it topples the powerful, so it's likely some of the teams will fall off their pace for ineptitude. But in the end, ZiPS projects a 10 percent chance of four teams losing 100 games, a 2 percent chance of five teams losing 100, about a 1-in-460 shot at six teams managing it and about 1-in-1,000 for seven teams. Remember, that this is based on current rosters and playing-time assumptions, and teams at this level of loss accumulation are more likely to be sellers -- see the O's and Manny Machado. So the probabilities might actually be conservative.
Holding hitters hitless
If the 2018 season ended today, Josh Hader and Adam Ottavino would rank first and third in baseball history for fewest hits allowed per nine innings, at 2.30 and 2.52, respectively. The season doesn't end today, of course, but allowing 14 combined hits in 52⅓ innings is an impressive feat -- Ottavino even did it in Coors Field, and without the benefit of getting to face Ian Desmond.
At a minimum of 50 innings, only three pitchers have been below 4.0 in hits per nine for the season -- Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel and Carl Edwards Jr. While neither Hader or Ottavino are anywhere near odds-on favorites to best Chapman, there's a projected 1-in-5 chance that one of them will.
Mound history in the making in Houston?
Go back a calendar year and Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole were fighting to keep their ERAs under 5.00 for teams that were much closer to sell-offs than contention. This year with the Astros, in 19 combined starts they're 9-3 with a 1.38 ERA and 177 strikeouts in 130⅓ innings. Tim Keefe's record ERA of 0.86 and Bob Gibson's 1.12 in 1968 are likely out of reach, but the ERA+ crown might not be.
What is ERA+? Simply put, it's the expected league-average ERA in a specific home park and league divided by the pitcher's ERA. Then multiplied by 100 to get rid of that decimal point.
Keefe's 1880 season is the current record at 293; Pedro Martinez holds the modern era record by putting up a 291 in 2000 and in more than twice as many innings as Keefe, so it's even more impressive. Right now, Verlander's ERA+ stands at 376, and Cole is at 225. To stay above 300, Verlander needs to finish with an ERA of 1.32.
Assuming there are 150 innings remaining for Verlander to throw, he would need a 1.60 ERA or better over the rest of the year to keep his ERA below 1.32. That's unlikely, but not quite as far-fetched as it might seem; including the playoffs, Verlander has a 1.36 ERA in 21 starts for the Astros over 139⅓ innings. That's essentially two-thirds of a season in which he has pitched at that level.
ZiPS projects Verlander to finish with a 2.48 ERA, but with a 3 percent chance at setting the ERA+ record. Those are fairly slim odds, but we're talking about the best all time at a significant seasonal record! Verlander can still stay in the top 10 all time with just a 2.08 ERA over the rest of the season. That's a 189 ERA+, a little better than his previous season bests of 172 (2011) and 161 (2012), but that he needs to do it for only 70 percent of a season instead of 100 percent is actually a bit easier.
Epic reversals of fortune
In modern baseball history (going back to 1901), the largest one-season improvement in winning percentage was 251 percentage points, set by the 1903 New York Giants. The largest improvement that anyone alive has seen is that of the third-place team, the Diamondbacks, who went from 65 wins in their inaugural season in 1998 to 100 wins in 1999 to win the National League West before losing in the NLDS.
The Phillies would need to win 101 games this year to catch Arizona for this number. They're currently on pace for 98 wins, and they're likely not a "true" 98-win team based on talent, but that doesn't mean it's outside the realm of possibility. The 2001 Mariners needed some good fortune to win 116 games, but the fact is that in the end, they did win 116 games. It's better to be lucky than good, but like beer and tacos, why not both? ZiPS currently gives the Phillies a 7 percent chance to win 101 games.
On the flip side, the Dodgers, after winning 104 games in 2017, are going to be hard-pressed to drop off as much as the 1914-15 Philadelphia A's, who after a massive Connie Mack sell-off went from a .651 team to a .283 one, declining by 60 games over a 162-game season. Even passing the 1998 Marlins, the recent "champ" here with a 38-win decline, is unlikely; the Dodgers are still projected with a mean finish of 86 wins, a far cry from the 66 needed. Even becoming the 100-win team with the largest drop-off, beating out the 1932 Cardinals (and not counting the 1918 White Sox in their war-shortened season) would require a 74-win year, which ZiPS gives the Dodgers only a 2 percent chance of falling to.