Worldwide Sports News

Officials with Fifth Third Bank and the Detroit Tigers held a press conference on Monday afternoon to announce a new name for Comerica Park. Back on February 2, Fifth Third Bancorp completed its merger with Comerica Incorporated. The latter’s absorption into Fifth Third immediately prompted the question about future naming rights for the Detroit Tigers’ ballpark. That question was answered today, as starting in 2027, Comerica Park will be re-named Fifth Third Park.

In a sense, this keeps things in the family. The Triple-A Toledo Mud Hens play at Fifth Third Field. From 2000-2021, the Tigers’ High-A affiliate, the West Michigan Whitecaps, played at Fifth Third Ballpark in Comstock Park, Michigan, until it was re-named LMCU Ballpark.

We could’ve hoped for something like Tigers Stadium at Fifth Third Park, or Mike Ilitch Field at Fifth Third Park, but instead it’s the most basic name possible. We’ll get used to it, but “Fifth Third” just doesn’t roll off the tongue. It sounds more like an exercise for people trying to cure a lisp, but here we are. Fans tend to find their own way to a nickname, but we’ll see if anyone comes up with a slightly more workable option.

In other news, first baseman and former prospect Jace Jung reportedly has a locker in the Tigers clubhouse as of today. It looks like he’ll get to join the team for the final week of the season, earning a bit of a thank you check after being stuck in Triple-A all year. He’s on the 40-man roster anyway, so perhaps he’ll just take Troy Melton’s active roster spot for the final week after Melton left Sunday night’s game in Chicago with tightness in his right forearm.

Comerica Park has 25 years of memories in it through Tigers baseball and various concerts people have attended over the year, as well as via the buildup of the surrounding entertainment district. This is a new chapter, but as some Olde English guy once wrote, “what’s in a name?” Ultimately, all that matters is how the Detroit Tigers play in Fifth Third Park.

In the 2019 MLB Draft, CJ Abrams was one of the most highly touted prospects. MLB Pipeline ranked him as the 4th overall prospect in that draft. However, he was not seen as being a monster power hitter. Pipeline actually expected him to be a 10 to 15 home run hitter whose speed and contact skills carried his profile.

After being taken 6th overall by the Padres and being traded to the Nationals in the Juan Soto trade, Abrams is now a much more powerful hitter. That slim, wiry kid who was projected to have 40 grade power is now a grown man with a 30 home run season under his belt.

Even now when you see Abrams, he does not look like your typical 30 home run bat. He has filled out, but he is not an overly physical player. Abrams is still quite lean and his exit velocities do not jump off the page. However, he has still found a way to hit 31 home runs even while slumping down the stretch.

A big reason why Abrams is able to hit so many home runs is his pull heavy approach. This season he is pulling the ball in the air at a 24.7% clip, which is a career high and well above league average. His swing is geared to do damage to the pull side, which leads to him out slugging his exit velocities.

It is always fun to see a player succeed in a way that scouts did not expect. People throughout the industry knew that CJ Abrams would be a good player from a young age. However, he is doing it in a slightly different way. 

As Abrams got closer to the big leagues, scouts became more bullish on his power upside. Baseball America said that Abrams could develop into a 20 home run bat and Pipeline stated that he had at least average power. Those projections seemed right on the money until this season. Abrams hit 18, 20 and 19 homers from 2023 to 2025.

However, he has reached a different level this season. With 31 homers, no shortstop has hit more long balls than Abrams. He has become a power bat that is a force to be reckoned with. If he can find a way to finish seasons more effectively, Abrams can become a 35 to 40 home run bat in the future.

He has been around a long time now, so it is easy to forget that CJ Abrams is still just 25 years old. Even though he has faded late in seasons, Abrams has been on an upward trajectory and this was his best year yet.

The question now is what comes next for Abrams. He just had a career year, but is getting closer to free agency. Abrams only has two more years of team control left. Do the Nationals trade him, extend him or do they want to build around him and let these next two years play out? We will get the answer to this question in the offseason.

All I know is that 30/30 players do not grow on trees. In fact, Abrams is only the second National to ever accomplish that. Alfonso Soriano is the only other, and that happened 20 years ago now. Abrams is a special player, and it will take a special haul to get him out of DC.

With the recent extension of Cade Cavalli, there could be at least some chance of extending Abrams. He is not a Boras client, which makes things easier. However, it has been reported that there has not been a lot of movement on that front yet. It will be fascinating to see what happens this offseason.

Regardless of that, it is cool to see players morph into something we did not see coming. CJ Abrams was expected to be a great player, but not a big time power hitter. He has flipped the script and has become one of the best power hitting middle infielders in the game. Seeing that growth and development is one of my favorite parts of being a baseball fan. You can think you know it all, but the game will always throw surprises your way.

The bad news in the world of the Cincinnati Reds this weekend was that TJ Friedl was mercifully designated for assignment. That’s good news if you focus solely on the ghastly production he put forward during the 2026 season, but it’s bad news in the sense that Friedl both provided years of yeomen’s work in CF and atop the order and that the Reds, seemingly, weren’t prepared for him to fall right off a cliff like that.

He was still their regular leadoff hitter up until May 12th, after all. The Reds chose to pay him nearly $4 million for this season for a reason.

While Friedl’s eventual departure will take a chunk of past-production out of Cincinnati’s outfield quiver, it’s worth pointing out just how bad Cincinnati’s outfield has been even with Friedl’s good years. Just last year, for instance, collective RF production by the Reds graded out to just a 56 wRC+, far and away the worst among all RF groups in the sport (with Detroit’s 69 second worst). The 79 wRC+ put up by the entirety of the outfield (Friedl included) was similarly dead last among all 30 teams.

The Reds are not devoid of semi-talented options out there as we look towards 2027, however. JJ Bleday has brought a reasonably solid bit of lefty power to LF, something that should dovetail nicely with Spencer Steer when the latter is healthy again next spring. In center, Dane Myers has brought a decent-ish floor to the position with solid defense and an ability to hit left-handed pitching reasonably well, but leaning on him against righties still seems an outlandish ask. There have even been flashes of true brilliance from the young Hector Rodriguez, though his splits suggest that he, too, should likely only be used on one side of a platoon.

Sprinkle in the return of Blake Dunn and the potential that Carlos Jorge can take a step forward after his first cup of coffee and there are bodies to take breaths out on the grass next year. On any given day you wouldn’t be shocked to see any of them actually get a hit off big league pitching, swipe a bag, or make a catch that prompted you innately to stand up and applaud. Deserving big leaguers most all of them, with only the talented prospects yet to show enough to be considered ‘actual major leaguers’ in terms of their quality.

What the Reds don’t seemingly have, though, is a single one of those guys who looks the part of both an everyday player and a player on whom you can give a middle-of-the-order role to right now. Only Steer – who should really just be an infielder and who is coming off a season-ending wrist injury – fits the bill of ‘everyday regular’ by even Cincinnati’s standards, and he’s been worth a grand total of 0.9 bWAR in 952 PA since the start of the 2025 season. Hell, Steer will turn 30 in 2027 and will be making something akin to ~$6 million via his second trip through arbitration this winter, and if anything he fits the Friedl profile of ‘a guy the Reds should have traded before he hits 30 and his production craters.’

So, like in most other corners of the baseball world that exist, the Cincinnati Reds find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Frugal to their core, they have to figure out a way to revamp an entire outfield while also knowing full well they have an existing stock of outfielders in-house who’d probably warrant a collective C- grade, at best, if judged by their front office peers.

What’s sad, though, is despite being this deep into a second consecutive botched rebuild, Cincinnati’s ownership and front office seem to have zero urgency in making a thorough revamp happen. They are going to sit on their hands and let this group have another year to show that maybe, just maybe, one of the group will stick as a found-money success story, since actually putting in the time, money, and effort to bring in proven players is simply too much to ask from these guys.

Moving on from Friedl should just be the start. Instead, they’re going to turn him into the fall guy by their inactivity beyond that.

Before the 2026 season started, the Braves were projected to be good. Per FanGraphs, their central estimate Steamer-plus-ZiPS blend projection saw them in a virtual tie for the NL East crown with the Mets at 90 wins, with division odds of 36 percent, top-two-in-NL record odds of 29 percent, and overall playoff odds of 79 percent. The projected record was top three; the playoff odds were top four.

As I start writing this on September 21, the day after the Braves clinched the NL East with a sweep of the Astros, it’s hard to say that things didn’t work out as expected. The Braves have 92 wins, good for fourth in MLB — whatever extra wins they collect this week are gravy, as the Braves have little chance of overtaking the Dodgers for a top-two NL record and corresponding bye, and they probably won’t try in favor of getting guys rest and lining up their rotation for the first round of the postseason. In at least this way, things went according to plan: the Braves were projected to be good, they were good, and they ended up basically where they were expected to. Hooray, the system works, at least this time. (Not in 2025, but the less we can say about that cursed season, the better… perhaps 2025 was the debt repaid for 2018.)

This turn of events should be satisfying. Or, failing that, at least mollifying. For all the hand-wringing from 2024-on: the core is aging and no longer good; the team can’t supplement its roster with quality players, especially in the rotation; the team can’t manage player health well enough to complete; and so on and so forth ad nauseam like a giant Battery Power Atlanta Braves Game Thread and Discussion made manifest into a marquee crawl blazoning from the inside of fans’ eyelids… yes, for all that hand-wringing, here came the 2026 Braves, clinching with a week to go, while the Mets went full Mets (again, and earlier this time) and the Phillies look like a much more apt target for the same sort of hand-wringing.

Are you satisfied? If so, this post isn’t for you. This post is for me, someone who spent a huge chunk of the offseason thinking about how this roster shaped up, and then pulled an update together every two weeks that told a… different… story. A weird story. Not weird like 2018, where a young roster led by a budding superstar played well enough on both sides of the ball to roll through five of the season’s six months en route to a 90-win season. Weird a different way.

I considered burying the lede, but I won’t, and chances are, you’ve seen this written before. The Braves have the fourth-most wins through the point where win collection was relevant for them. Yet, they rank 21st in position player fWAR and ninth in pitching fWAR. Are they getting horrendously unlucky with offensive outputs? Not really — they rank 14th in xwOBA (and that’s not park-adjusted; they play in a favorable-ish home park for offense). There’s a bunch of stuff going on, but it all makes the the story of the 2026 Braves complicated. And weird. I’m emphasizing weird, because that’s the vaguest, most-broad way of talking about it.

Baseball is great because it’s weird. It’s an affair that lends itself to identifying, collecting, and analyzing insanely minute data slices. You’d think with that level of granularity, we’d have come up with a Unifying Theory of Baseball, and in some ways, we have. The thing is, that theory only works in general, and not in every single case. That tension between “we know how this works at this point” and “oh crap it didn’t work right here” is, at least for me, the most delectable part of the whole affair. Experiencing baseball is standing chest-deep in a river of both expectations and occurrences as they unceasingly rush past you. It’s amazing. I won’t forget the 2026 Braves, who are like a bizarrely-shaped log in that same river, cartwheeling end-on-end and occasionally smacking everyone in the face.

Let’s talk briefly about WAR. fWAR, the FanGraphs WAR formulation, to be specific. (This is not the place for a castigation of bWAR, the Baseball-Reference flavor, but we can make a space for that elsewhere.) Here’s a not-secret that you may not be aware of if you made it this far, but don’t know how (f)WAR works.

WAR has no idea whether a run scored (or didn’t), and therefore has no care for whether anyone scored more (or fewer) runs than anyone else at any time ever.

WAR has a tough job, and I won’t get into everything it does pretty well here, but the idea is that in order to meet all of its functions and responsibilities, WAR has little use for context. A bloop single can be a walkoff that wins a game. A bloop single can be a garbage time nothingburger. A bloop single could be a key part of a rally that is rendered irrelevant by a bullpen meltdown later. To WAR, they’re all just bloop singles.

So then, you may not find it noteworthy, but I find it mind-spinningly remarkable, that this is true: from 2021-2026, somewhere between 80-90 percent of the difference in team record (and generally closer to 90 percent) can be explained by difference in team (f)WAR. If you made a chart, it would look like this:

(Hey, what’s with the stuff in the bottom left corner? That’s 2020. WAR even worked this well in 2020.)

See the coefficient on that best-fit line formula? It’s basically one, i.e., one more WAR-win means one more actual win. This is also remarkably consistent — if doing individual years, that slope coefficient is somewhere outside of 0.9 to 1.1 in just five of the 25 years assessed (excluding the pandemic season), and just one since 2010 (2025). (And it’s not like it’s far off of 0.9 or 1.1 where it does happen.)

Another thing remarkable about this diagonal corndog of a graph? fWAR was, maybe at some point, focused entirely on the nuts and bolts of outs and non-outs, but it has deviated. One huge thing that stands out in my mind has to do with fielding: by switching from UZR to Statcast/OAA for defense, positioning is no longer accounted for in fWAR. A team with elite defenders in the wrong place gets more WAR even if they don’t get more outs; a team with lollygagging glovemen that has pristine-ish positioning would probably have awful defensive metrics but a very low BABIP-against (that wouldn’t factor into WAR). Yet, fWAR perseveres. (It wasn’t that big a change, but I do think it’s one that needs to be acknowledged — it makes WAR better at comparing players but worse at being summed and giving you a team-level understanding.)

So, the system works. Does it work for the Braves?

Pretty much, yes. There were three outlier-ish seasons where the Braves did something akin to what they are doing in 2026, but most of the rest are right on the line. In 2002, the Braves had 88 WAR-wins but romped to a 101-win season. In 2019, it was 86 WAR-wins and a 97-win season. 2026? Even without the full year in the books, it’s 79 WAR-wins and 92 wins.

The 2026 Braves have a real chance of having sub-.500 WAR-wins, while winning the division and winning 92-plus games. Since I’ve been watching them (2001-onward, hence the time horizon here), the Braves have had eight seasons with sub-.500 WAR-wins (excluding 2020); the only season, other than what might transpire in 2026, was that doomed 2011 campaign where the team finished with 80 WAR-wins but 89 go-nowhere wins. That season sucked at the end, but maybe it was… the universe setting things to rights in a compressed period?

Anyway, enough examples, here’s a table.

I could stop here, but let’s go deeper.

In addition to team WAR, which is the sum of WAR accrued by all players playing for that team, FanGraphs also computes and maintains BaseRuns. The idea behind BaseRuns is that linear weights (the things that assign value to a double versus a homer versus an out) don’t cover enough edge cases when adding a bunch of players performing on the same team together, so it exists as a team-oriented measure of run scoring and run prevention, done mostly by just taking all the individual events that a team is involved in and converting them into runs-per-PA on both the hitting and pitching-plus-defense side. It’s basically like run differential, except if you decomposed run differential to be “the stuff that leads to runs” instead of “actual runs scored that we are just going to tally.” For more, see here — ten years old, but still useful, I think.

The 2026 Braves are not suuuuper weird when it comes to BaseRuns. This season, they have the tenth-best BaseRuns-based offense, the seventh-best BaseRuns-based run prevention, and the ninth-best BaseRuns proxy record overall. (A funny thing about BaseRuns in 2026: the Pirates are fifth in MLB, the Tigers are seventh, and the Braves are barely ahead of the Marlins.) The Braves’ current BaseRuns record is 85-71, seven wins behind their actual pace. The Reds, Phillies, and Rays are all at +9 over BaseRuns; there are three teams (Angels, Tigers, Giants) at -11 or worse relative to BaseRuns. It’s been kind of a wild year for BaseRuns, to be honest.

Both BaseRuns and WAR are sort of based on the same premises. There are key differences, of course — adjustments for the non-linear weights-ness of it all offensively, and the run prevention side really just uses “what did your team allow in terms of outcomes” rather than joining together position player defensive value for balls in play and walks/plunkings/strikeouts/homers (i.e., FIP) on the pitching end. Not surprisingly, there is very little difference between BaseRuns and WAR-wins — probably because BaseRuns is largely only meant to differentiate in edge cases.

Where things get weird is that the Braves are pretty good by BaseRuns, and very mediocre by team fWAR. This is the franchise’s second-largest fWAR-versus-BaseRuns gap, after 2010 (86 by WAR-wins, 93 by BaseRuns, and 91 actual wins).

Worth noting that the Tigers (78 WAR-wins, 86 BaseRuns wins, 73 wins) and the Giants (69 WAR-wins, 77 BaseRuns wins, 64 wins) are also in Weird City. Especially the Tigers, who… I don’t even know what’s going on there. Woof, man. Honorable mention to the Rangers in the opposite direction: 82 WAR-wins, 75 BaseRuns wins, 78 actual wins.

Among the time periods examined (2001-2026 for WAR-wins versus actual wins, 2001-2025 for WAR-wins versus BaseRuns wins), the Braves are:

• Seventh in magnitude of outperforming their WAR-wins in terms of actual wins, literally a 99th percentile happenstance; and
• 20th in terms of WAR-wins lower than BaseRuns, a 97th percentile outcome (or, 54th in overall magnitude of disparity between the two, a 93rd percentile outcome).

Having seven more wins than your BaseRuns record isn’t weird. But having six fewer WAR-wins than your BaseRuns record? Yeah, that doesn’t happen all that often. Add it to the weird pile.

Of course, what this all comes down to is the players. The players play, accumulate WAR, and thereby also inform BaseRuns (mostly doing the same thing in both cases). Whether the team wins or loses a given game isn’t super-related to WAR or BaseRuns because sequencing and the like comes into account.

Wait a minute… sequencing. Maybe this is all about sequencing. We’re on to something, a bit. The Braves do have the league’s fourth-highest clutch score offensively, suggesting that they hit a lot better in higher leverage than lower leverage. They have the exact same ranking on the pitching end, too. The actual splits aren’t very exciting, though. For hitting, they rank:

• 21st in batting outputs and 11th in batting outputs in low leverage;
• 19th and 18th, respectively, in medium leverage; and
• Tenth and ninth, respectively, in high leverage.

They’re unlucky in low leverage and pretty good (and not unlucky in the same way) in high leverage.

For pitching, they rank:

• 18th in FIP and 13th in xFIP in low leverage;
• 11th and 10th, respectively, in medium leverage; and
• Eighth and 17th, respectively, in high leverage.

The secret to the Braves’ success? It’s apparently not giving up homers in high leverage. That’ll do it. Why are the Braves weird like they are? Because their HR/FB in high leverage is 7.3 percent, while their HR/FB in medium leverage is 11.9 percent. That’s not the whole story, but imagine how this team looks if they give up eight more homers (I counted, that’s the difference in the HR/FB in high leverage) in high leverage. Sure, maybe they don’t then lose all of those games, or maybe they did lose some where they avoided a homer in high leverage but… eight falls right into that BaseRuns/WAR-wins/actual wins differential range. It’s not everything, but it’s something.

Three cheers for not giving up as many homers in high leverage en route to a division title!

By the way, here’s a list of Braves with 20 innings pitched and an FIP- of ten or more points lower than their xFIP-: Chris Sale, Didier Fuentes, Dylan Lee, Robert Suarez, Victor Mederos. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Okay, I was going to talk about players but got derailed. Here’s my final bit of “this team is weird” pelting. I’m going to give you three things in the table below:

1. Each position player projected to get 200-plus PAs in 2026, each starter projected to throw at least 67 innings, and each reliever projected to throw at least 22 innings;
2. Their projected playing time and WAR; and,
3. Their actual playing time and fWAR.

How do you think this is going to look like before you scroll down?

Honestly, good lord, what is even happening here. The Braves basically lost a full season of playing time among these projected guys (Ha-Seong Kim, Sean Murphy, and Ronald Acuña Jr.) — but moreso than that, this group of 11 was supposed to contribute above-average, 2.9 WAR-per-600 PAs play. Instead, they contributed… 1.9 WAR-per-600 PAs play.

Austin Riley is/was a nightmare basically all season, minus a few brief glimmers of something that wasn’t awful. Acuña has been awesome lately, but let’s not forget that even if you leave some xwOBA underperformance aside, his current .368 mark is tied for his second-lowest ever, and the run environment is better this year than in the other two years where he didn’t perform up to his lefty standards. Kim’s season was one of the biggest disasters we’ve seen from this franchise, closer to B.J. Upton than anything else — even if he too managed to kinda-sorta salvage it with some huge hits down the stretch. Murphy is either not fully healthy or not fully jiving with trying not to swing out of his shoes. Dominic Smith was supposed to be terrible and somehow ended up even worse in nearly 100 more PAs than anticipated.

Were there any big wins? Mauricio Dubon. That’s really it.

Did anyone else save the position players? Nope. These guys account for 16 of the team’s 16.8 position player fWAR, and 88 percent of their PAs. No player not projected to play a big role actually stepped in and “won” a big role. The best bench performance the Braves got was Eli White’s 0.6 fWAR in 144 PAs as a result of massive xwOBA overperformance, and they traded him to make roster room at the Trade Deadline anyway.

Pitchers, this almost feels like a typed-out version of a Lewis Black routine. (Do people even get this reference anymore?)

Yeah, Chris Sale is awesome. But… Spencer Strider? Terrible and barely pitched. Reynaldo Lopez? Not good, and barely pitched. Oh, Bryce Elder pitched a lot… and due to homers, somehow produced less on a rate basis than modest expectations. Spencer Schwellenbach? Let’s not even go there.

The good news for the pitching is that Sale was so freakin’ good that these guys didn’t really miss a beat, other than availability. They were projected to pitch at a rate of around 3.2 WAR per 200 innings, and they ended up at 3.0 WAR… except that they ended up pitching about two-thirds of the innings they were supposed to, collectively. Who filled the gap? Well, Martin Perez came in and played savior, with a funny 74/105/111 (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) line. Thanks, guy! We all know about Tyler Mahle, and he’s been huge. Still, that leaves about 50 innings unaccounted for, and, well, the guys the Braves tried in those innings pretty much got obliterated.

Aaand, that leads us to this, where we applaud Dylan Lee and Didier Fuentes for A) being awesome, but also B) not allowing homers, which basically gave extra weight to their already-fantastic pitching.

Yes, the Braves fell short of about 100 innings in terms of projected “bullpen regulars,” but not having Joel Payamps around was addition by subtraction. Throw in Robert Suarez being great before getting hurt along with the Iglesias and Lee show, a nice showing from the other Dylan (Dodd), and the fact that Victor Mederos is apparently the key emblem of this team (87/71/110, you can hahaha that all the way to the bank), and I guess the point is that wherever things went terribly, it wasn’t in the bullpen.

Wanna add these together?

Consider that the team’s actual WAR from all sources, not just these prognosticated-to-be-key-contributors names is 32.6, so we’re not missing much (Tyler Mahle, Martin Perez, and mostly negative fWAR otherwise). Nearly every position player was worse! Chris Sale (and Tyler Mahle’s two months), awesome! Bullpen, awesome! The team still fell well short of what it was expected to do… but also, absolutely didn’t.

We’ve come full circle. This team is weird. Will the weirdness continue? I have no idea. Either way, I don’t think I’ll ever forget these guys. But, I will request that in 2027, they be a little less weird… and just win the normal way: by crushing the other team on both sides of the ball.

(Oh, and we haven’t even gotten into the whole Antoan Richardson mess, the challenging passivity, the way that almost no good team has had a month as bad as the Braves had in June… and it keeps going. But I was over 3,000 words. We can cover those later, when things calm down.)

Astros fans, your team is running on empty.

The problem is the pedal is already to the floor, the finish line is approaching, and there may not be anything left in the tank.

Once again, the Astros dug themselves a massive early-season hole. Once again, they somehow fought their way out of it and made September baseball matter.

But that comeback came at a price. Now we’re seeing it. The pitching staff looks exhausted.

The rotation spent much of the season battling injuries, inconsistency and an inability to consistently pitch deep into games. That forced the bullpen to carry an enormous workload just to keep the Astros’ season alive.

For months, those relievers answered the call. They covered innings. They protected leads. They compensated for short starts and helped drag this team back into contention.

But eventually, the bill comes due. It’s coming due now.

Ángel De Los Santos, AJ Blubaugh and Bryan King are among the pitchers who provided important innings and stretches of excellent baseball for this team. But at some point, arms get tired. Guys hit a wall. And when that happens in September, there’s no offseason reset button you can push to get them back to where they were in May, June or July.

The Astros needed their bullpen to survive the first five months. Now they desperately need that same bullpen to save their season. There may simply not be enough left in the tank.

How Did the Astros Get Here?

If you’re looking for where to place blame, start with roster construction. The Astros entered the season with an obvious imbalance. They had a surplus of infielders and a shortage of legitimate major league outfielders. It wasn’t a hidden problem.

It wasn’t something that suddenly appeared because of injuries. Everyone could see it. Yet somehow, an entire season has nearly passed and the problem was never adequately solved.

Waiver claims weren’t going to fix it. Reclamation projects weren’t going to fix it. The desperation moves at the trade deadline weren’t guaranteed to fix something that should have been addressed months earlier.

That brings us back to former general manager Dana Brown. Brown deserves criticism because he was the general manager and roster construction was part of his responsibility. But there’s an important question we may never be able to completely answer:

How much authority did Dana Brown actually have?

How many decisions were his, and how many were influenced or directed by owner Jim Crane and others within the organization? Brown is gone now, but the organizational structure remains. That’s why simply blaming the former general manager doesn’t solve everything.

Joe Espada Isn’t the Biggest Problem

I’ve criticized Joe Espada when I thought criticism was warranted. He has shortcomings. Every manager does. But considering the roster he’s been handed and the obstacles this team has faced, I believe Espada has done a better-than-average job getting the Astros back to the brink of another postseason appearance.

Think about everything he’s navigated. An early-season hole. An inconsistent rotation. A bullpen that was forced to absorb a massive workload. Injuries throughout the roster. An outfield that has been a problem virtually all season.

And yet the Astros continued winning enough games to matter in September.

If this team ultimately falls short of the postseason, Espada will inevitably receive some of the blame. That’s part of being the manager. But he shouldn’t be at the front of the line.

The bigger questions should be directed toward the people who constructed the roster and the system that produced it. That means Brown, and it also means Crane.

What Happens Next?

This is where the Astros could be approaching a fascinating—and potentially uncomfortable—offseason. The organization needs a new general manager. If Crane also decides to move on from Espada, it could need a new manager.

But here’s the question: How attractive are those jobs?

The Astros have been one of baseball’s premier organizations for nearly a decade. They’ve won championships, reached World Series, dominated their division and established a winning culture that most franchises would love to replicate.

That should make Houston an extremely desirable destination.

But prospective candidates are also going to want to understand exactly how the organization operates. How much authority will the next general manager actually have?

Who makes the final call on personnel decisions?

How much influence does ownership have on roster construction?

How much control does the manager have over his lineup and in-game decisions compared with the front office and analytics department?

Those aren’t insignificant questions.

Dusty Baker publicly expressed frustration at times with aspects of modern organizational decision-making during his tenure. More recently, there have been questions and reports surrounding how much influence the front office and analytics staff have over lineup construction.

Whether every rumor is accurate or not, perception matters when you’re trying to attract the best baseball people available. If candidates believe they’re going to be held accountable for decisions they don’t completely control, that’s something Crane will have to address.

The Players Deserved Better

This might be the most frustrating part of all. I feel for the players in that clubhouse. They’ve battled through injuries. They’ve overcome a terrible start. They’ve watched teammates go down and roles change. They’ve dealt with a revolving door in the outfield and a pitching staff that has been asked to absorb far too much. And they still found a way to matter.

They kept fighting. They kept winning. They kept themselves alive deep into September.

If I’m a veteran leader in that clubhouse—whether it’s Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa or another established voice—I’d want answers from ownership after the season.

Not excuses. Answers.

What is the plan?

Who’s making the baseball decisions?

How is this roster going to be constructed differently?

What is ownership prepared to do to give this clubhouse the support it needs to compete for another championship?

Because these players have spent an entire season fighting to overcome deficiencies that shouldn’t have existed for this long.

This Offseason Has to Be About More Than Changing Names

Maybe the Astros still find a way. Maybe there’s one more run left in them. Maybe this battered pitching staff finds another gear, the offense gets hot and Houston somehow reaches October again. Considering everything we’ve watched from this franchise over the years, I wouldn’t completely count them out until they’re officially eliminated.

But regardless of how this season ends, Crane has some difficult questions to answer. Replacing Dana Brown alone won’t fix the Astros. Replacing Joe Espada won’t automatically fix them either.

If Houston truly wants to remain one of baseball’s elite organizations, the Astros need to examine the entire structure of their baseball operation—from roster construction to analytics to the relationship between the manager, general manager and ownership.

Because right now, the Astros aren’t just fighting their opponents. They’re fighting exhaustion. They’re fighting roster deficiencies. They’re fighting the consequences of problems that were visible months ago and never adequately addressed. This team has spent the entire season digging itself out of another hole.

The question isn’t only whether the Astros have enough left to reach the playoffs. It’s whether the organization understands why they were forced to dig out of that hole in the first place.

And until that question is answered, changing the names on the office doors may not change much at all.

Spencer Jones is finally gaining some momentum at the plate and earning his spot on the postseason roster after making some needed adjustments. Who does he have to thank, you might ask?

Aaron Judge’s hitting coach, perhaps.

Jones, whose height and build are very similar to the Yankees captain, first met with Judge’s hitting coach, Richard Schenk, during the offseason to make adjustments to his stance. Although he may still struggle with frequent strikeouts, Jones is making a lot of positive progress that has helped him earn his place on this team.

The 25-year-old outfielder is hitting a .279 average with a .343 on-base percentage and .475 slugging percentage in September. Among Yankees, his .819 OPS and 130 wRC+ for the month are topped only by Ben Rice and Cody Bellinger, helping boost a Bombers lineup that sagged in August. After dealing with a sore left foot that kept him sidelined on Saturday, Jones returned to the lineup prepared to make some noise and launched a 448-foot homer off Corbin Burnes during the series finale against the Diamondbacks.

With Grisham still recovering from a right hamstring strain, Jones will be a valuable asset in the outfield—be it in center or right—who adds some depth to the lineup as well. It’s also worth noting that Aaron Judge, who joined the IL on Friday with a right calf strain, will likely be sidelined for the beginning of the playoff run. As long as Jones can focus on developing his swing through these critical postseason at-bats, he has the potential to help the Yankees go far.

Beginning tomorrow afternoon, the Yankees will face the Rays in a critical four-game series that will ultimately determine the division and could even serve as a playoff preview. If he can stay consistent with his offensive production, Jones might just be the secret the Pinstripes need to seize the American League.

LOS ANGELES — Emmet Sheehan continued his late-season hot streak with another strong outing on Sunday against the San Francisco Giants, with nine strikeouts in 5 1/3 innings, allowing only a single and a walk.

“I’ve loved the version of Emmet we’ve seen the last three outings,” manager Dave Roberts said Sunday. “He’s been fantastic.”

Sheehan in three starts over the last two weeks since rejoining the Dodgers has allowed only one run in 17 innings, with 24 strikeouts against only three walks. It came after spending most of August in Triple-A.

“I don’t know if I proved anything to myself,” Sheehan said. “It was more just getting a couple of things right, and I’m in a much better spot now.”

Sheehan was in the Dodgers rotation from opening day through August 2, when he allowed three home runs and five runs in a loss to the Boston Red Sox. Twenty starts into the season, Sheehan wasn’t getting results (5.29 ERA, belying his 4.00 xERA), and was having issues holding his velocity throughout his starts. He was optioned to Oklahoma City the next day.

That time in the minors was productive for Sheehan. After a planned shortened outing in which he allowed two runs in 2/3 of an inning, Sheehan struck out 24 over three starts with one run allowed in 17 1/3 innings. That earned him a Pacific Coast League pitcher of the week award and pitcher of the month honors for August.

“My confidence stayed the same the whole time. I knew the coaches down there were going to help me, and I was going to get right,” Sheehan said. “I took that approach going into it. I wasn’t helping the team here, so I needed that a little bit. I feel like in a good spot.”

“We’ve seen confidence. When you’re essentially fighting for your life, to create an opportunity for yourself, that’s what I see. There’s urgency,” Roberts said. “I like the way he’s trusting his stuff, he’s in a good spot physically, and the performance has been fantastic.”

One tweak Sheehan made was throwing his curveball more. In his last three outings with the Dodgers, he threw the curve 21.9 percent of the time, up from his 12.3 percent over the course of the season.

“It’s something, Connor [McGuiness, assistant pitching coach], Mark [Prior, pitching coach], and I and the coaches down at Triple-A have been working on a lot is expanding the front-to-back game with the fastball and the curveball,” Sheehan said. “Some guys ended up throughout the season sitting more mid-speed, slider, changeup on me. I think having that change of speeds has been really important.

On Sunday against San Francisco, Sheehan induced 15 of his 18 swinging strikes on his fastball and curveball and finished off five of his nine strikeouts with those two pitches.

Sheehan’s first 26 outings this year were starts, but on Sunday he followed an opener, at the very least getting him oriented about his possible relief role in the postseason. After three solid months in the rotation last season, Sheehan pitched in relief in October, with mixed results (8.59 ERA, 13 hits and five walks in 7 1/3 innings). He allowed runs in each of his four appearances, though rebounded with 2 2/3 scoreless innings in extras in the marathon Game 3, when got three outs with two strikeouts in a scoreless outing in the seventh and eighth innings of Game 7.

“The routine of everything can be a little hard to adjust to, so having that experience helps a lot. Getting back into that, I know what I need to do to be ready to go in the game,” Sheehan said. “Execution was off in the first couple, but then I felt better as it went on.”

Sheehan returned Sunday when Tarik Skubal went on the bereavement list, and the plan is for Sheehan to be optioned back to Triple-A, perhaps as early as Tuesday when Roki Sasaki is likely activated from the injured list straight into a high-leverage relief role.

Roberts on Sunday said the plan is for Sheehan to start on Saturday in the Triple-A championship game, provided Oklahoma City beats Las Vegas in the best-of-3 PCL championship starting Tuesday. But after that, Sheehan will almost certainly be on the playoff roster. Most likely he’ll be in a relief role, but that might depend on how Blake Snell progresses over the next two weeks from his left groin tightness.

“After [Sheehan] makes that last start, we’ll evaluate where we are as a staff,” Roberts said.

“Whatever role they want me to do going forward, I’m ready to do it,” Sheehan said. “It was nice to get that experience coming out of the pen.”