The problem with the Padres this year is largely...luck.

They are 69-78, but their Pyth projection is 80-67. They have outscored opponents 674-614, and 29-20 in blowouts. They are only 6-22 (!) in one-run games, though. They are 0-11 in extra-inning games. With average lucky in one-run games, they'd be 77-70 and in the playoffs.

The conventional wisdom is that much of 1-run games is luck, with a strong bullpen being one of the few non-luck factors. The Padres set up guys have been pretty disappointing this year. Many of their stars have been OK, but not what the team probably expected: Bogaerts, Tatis, and Machado have all been...fine. Only Soto among the superstars has been elite-level good.

Regardless, I suspect this is less about culture, and more about bad luck on the field.

Luck. I'd love to have a comprehensive definition of luck( or random variation) Because it's the fallback when analytics can't readily provide an answer. The issue I have with luck is that 162 game seasons should even out luck to a large extent and that people only look at the "bad" luck issues and ignore the "good" luck issues

The conventional wisdom of all the analytics guys who follow the Cardinals is that luck/random variation is the culprit. Yet when you look at injuries (especially pre-deadline) , they had enormous good luck. I looked at Dans zips projections by player, adjusted them for playing time and compared them to bWAR and, lo and behold, there was a 20bWAR gap that easily highlights why the Redbirds are a 90 loss team.

I suspect a review of the Padres would show an easily identifiable set of reasons for their fall as well. Although I suspect chemistry, which is also hard to measure, could be an issue there as the article suggests. I've always thought machado was a problem child - kind of a mini A-Rod.

Seems like the article takes great pains to say that Machado isn't a problem child, but that everyone looks up to him and he fails to seize the leadership role.

A's fan so I naturally hate Manny Machado. I've never heard a bad word said about Bob Melvin but it looks like he is having a hard time motivating a team of superstars.

Easy to scapegoat the Padres’ best players when they share the same talents, qualities, personalities.

Maybe not enough good players, leader types of the hard working, gritty variety who can be a red ass at times.

Jake Cronenworth ain’t going to do bupkis hitting .229.

These culture discussions are always so amorphous and seem to almost always use some ethnic undertones.

Machado, Soto, Tatis, Boegaerts - three Latin-American players and an Aruban leading the team. No one taking voluntary groundballs. Underperforming. No chemistry. That's the story.

2022 Toronto Blue Jays - Vlad, Teoscar, Gurriel Jr actively living it up every game - chemistry galore. But "don't seem to be taaking the game seriously enough" and underperforming . . .

2023 - . . . so the Jays bring in some more corporate/redass/serious types - Brandon Belt, Kiermaier, Varsho. Underperforming. Narrative now is that they look flat, disengaged. "Don't seem to want it enough".

"25 guys . . . 25 cabs" - an obvious sign that the team was not going to be able to win.

etc etc

Yet we have examples of winning teams where teammates detest each other, are motivated by individual glory or prefer to keep to themselves. Other great stories for the press.

I forget which pundits have offered this wisdom but the only thing that determines a winning culture is the winning. Then the narrative gets shaped to explain why that culture -- be it one of closeness, hostility, indifference or whatever -- was the recipe for success.

Luck. I'd love to have a comprehensive definition of luck( or random variation) Because it's the fallback when analytics can't readily provide an answer. The issue I have with luck is that 162 game seasons should even out luck to a large extent and that people only look at the "bad" luck issues and ignore the "good" luck issues

Around here, people typically use "luck" to describe an outsized performance in something that isn't repeatable from year-to-year. It's been pretty conclusively shown that over- or underperforming one's Pythagorean winning percentage isn't repeatable from one year to the next, at least not at the level that the Padres are doing it (underperforming by 11 wins). These things tend to even out over 162 game seasons but pretty much by definition you will have occasional outliers in any given year.

I disagree that people only talk about "bad" luck here. I remember the 2018 Mariners won 89 games with a 77-85 Pythagorean record, and a number of people predicted, correctly, that they were due for a downward correction the following year.

Well the Cronenworth situation was spectacularly stupid. Cronenworth was a good defensive middle infielder who was a good hitter by the standards of middle infield. Nothing wrong with signing Bogaerts, but simply moving Cronenworth to first meant that he had predictably less value. A sOPS+ of 69 for Padre 1B is a heavy price for a bad decision.

And the funny thing about the one run game situation is that Josh Hader has been lights out. And the rest of the bullpen, well they've been serviceable. Their pitching line in late/close is .226/.316/.392 and that's not terrible (sOPS+ of 105 so not great but not something directly leading to those terrible results)

Their hitting in late/close now. sOPS+ of 79. .195/.304/.312 Probably won't repeat in 2024, but it does help explain their terrible pythag.

I looked at Dans zips projections by player, adjusted them for playing time and compared them to bWAR and, lo and behold, there was a 20bWAR gap that easily highlights why the Redbirds are a 90 loss team.

Best show your adjustments and the math that got you from fWAR ZIPS to bWAR.

As I understand it zips is not fWAR it's zips. Dan writes for fangraphs but I don't believe he uses their math in his zips model. I thought it was proprietary.

Please correct me if I am wrong but 99% sure he answered that question in a chat a few years ago

The problem with the Padres this year is largely...luck.

They are 69-78, but their Pyth projection is 80-67. They have outscored opponents 674-614, and 29-20 in blowouts. They are only 6-22 (!) in one-run games, though. They are 0-11 in extra-inning games. With average lucky in one-run games, they'd be 77-70 and in the playoffs.

The conventional wisdom is that much of 1-run games is luck, with a strong bullpen being one of the few non-luck factors. The Padres set up guys have been pretty disappointing this year. Many of their stars have been OK, but not what the team probably expected: Bogaerts, Tatis, and Machado have all been...fine. Only Soto among the superstars has been elite-level good.

Regardless, I suspect this is less about culture, and more about bad luck on the field.

Fan and media expectation for the Padres was a ~98 win team. Preseason Zips had the Padres as a 91 team. Even if the Padres hit their Pythag on the nose, and ended up with ~88 wins, this article still gets written. “Luck” is why this team is a massive underachiever, but they were always going to struggle to meet expectations. Why? Because this is a poorly constructed roster: middle infielders playing out of position, no competent 1B/DH, and thin on starting pitching.

I remember the 2018 Mariners won 89 games with a 77-85 Pythagorean record, and a number of people predicted, correctly, that they were due for a downward correction the following year.

Deviation to the mean is, as James Brown would say, the FM backwards.

As I understand it zips is not fWAR it's zips. Dan writes for fangraphs but I don't believe he uses their math in his zips model. I thought it was proprietary.

ZIPS is Dan's projection system and it includes an fWAR projection based on his projections. You can see/find everyone's projection for 2023 on this page. With that information it doesn't make any sense to then attempt switching over to bWAR. For example, ZIPS predicted a 5.6-fWAR season for Arenado, and he's at 2.8 here in the home stretch. What's then the gain from seeing bWAR has him at 2.6?

So I don't use that data. He publishes team by team estimates and I compared Arenado from your link to the team article and the WAR data is different. The underlying stats are the same but different WAR. Not sure what to make of that. I also read his intro to the team charts and at no point does he say he is creating an fWAR prediction. In fact he talks about various non fWAR data sets being used to generate his WAR projections.

I will dig further

an and media expectation for the Padres was a ~98 win team. Preseason Zips had the Padres as a 91 team. Even if the Padres hit their Pythag on the nose, and ended up with ~88 wins, this article still gets written.

I doubt that. 88 wins puts them comfortably in a wild card spot. Maybe there's some question as to why they didn't do better, but no one is talking about them spiraling or what their "problem" is.

Luck. I'd love to have a comprehensive definition of luck( or random variation) Because it's the fallback when analytics can't readily provide an answer.

That's usually what luck means though.

"Pure luck" -- batter hits a flyball of a given velocity and launch angle at Wrigley Field. If the wind is blowing out, it's 10 rows deep; if the wind is blowing in, it's a flyout; if it's a calm day, it lands in the basket. The batter had no control over wind speed and direction, neither did the pitcher, neither did the defense. About the closest you can come to some sort of predictable, repeatable "explanation" is that pitchers should be more careful with their location when the wind is blowing out but not worry about it so much when the wind is blowing in.

"Sure, it's physics but it's luck, part 1" -- batter hits a flyball of a given velocity and laungh angle at Wrigley Field on a calm day. If they hit it to straightaway LCF, it finds the basket. If it's 5 feet further towards the corner, it's a couple of rows deep. If it's 5 feet further towards CF, it's either a double or caught at the wall. Now obviously the planar(?) angle of the ball is the result of pitch velocity and movement, bat speed, etc. but we all know batters can't control the placement of the ball so precisely. So whether that ball was hit in just the right spot or not was luck -- same pitch, same batter, same conditions later in the game and it doesn't get hit to the same spot.

"This is not what anybody means by luck" -- physics doesn't change. In 1996, Brady Anderson hit 50 HR. Everybody knows those 50 HR happened, there's no dispute. We didn't have statcast then but nobody is claiming that Anderson didn't hit a lot more balls with the right EV and LA combination to produce 50 HRs. Nobody is claiming that 30 of those HRs "should" have been doubles (in fact he hit the 2nd most doubles of his career that year). So "explaining" Brady Anderson's 50 HRs is not hard at all, not mysterious at all. Same thing with the Padres record in extras -- they gave up more runs than they scored, a measured failure of their pitching/hitting/fielding in the highest leverage situations. "Luck" is not the same thing as "didn't actually happen."

"This we often call 'luck' or 'random' for convenience" -- From 1993-1995, Brady Anderson hit 41 HR total; from 1997-1999, he hit 60 HR total. My that 50-HR season looks a lot less explainable now. If it was a "real" change, why did Anderson change back? Again, nobody's saying those 50 HR didn't happen, nobody's claiming the EV/LA didn't change in 1996. It's a "fluke" because it was a one-year thing that came out of nowhere. Now buried in there is some "real" change in that from 93-95 he hit a HR in 2.2% of his PAs and from 97-99 it was up to 3.1% and an extra 5-6 HR a year matters. But that jump to 7.3% then back to 2.6% is neither predictable nor explainable nor (it turned out) was it sustainable. Moreover, treating 1996 Anderson as a "new" Anderson (i.e. ignoring or severly downplaying his previous HR perfromance) would lead to much worse prediction for 1997 than treating 1996 as a fluke (and possibly downplaying it).

"Who knows what Duke is talking about kind of luck" -- Near as I can tell, Duke is claimig the Cards were projected to produce something like 40 WAR. They are currently measured at 25 WAR. He thinks the "luck" explanation only holds if they are credited with 40 WAR but win only 25 games above replacement. While I suppose 15 games below pythag is theoretically possible -- the Padres are credited with 9 WAA and "should" have 83 wins but have just 70. That's reflecting in their +65 run differential too.

The Cardinals are the other kind of "bad luck" -- projections are uncertain, we can even estimate the uncertainty. What we usually see is that some players fall short of their projection, some exceed their projection but, over a large eough sample of players and games, these things even out. And the vast majority of those under/over-performances will fall within the exitmated range of uncertainty. The Cards had "bad luck" in that many players fell well short of their projections and few, if any, exceeded them. Player after player on the Cards flipped tails this year -- it happens. Some of them will bounce back next year, some will not. Some of those changes are real, the projection system won't be particularly good at sorting out the real from the fluke in next year's projections.

None of that means there aren't "explanations" for what happened to the 2023 Cards. Maybe some player under-perfored because he's going through a messy divorce. Another one might have had nagging injuries all year. Another one might have a hole in his swing that pitchers have recently discovered (or maybe recently emerged due to aging). And sure, maybe the bad start was a fluke but then the clubhouse soured in reaction and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The problem with those "explanations" is that nobody knows if they happened, nobody knows how to measure them, they don't seem to have sustainable effcts and, even if a review of the Cards season turned some issues up, unless you undertake the same sort of review on other teams, you don't know which issues are predictive of poor perfromance.

Bill James's old adage about "just because you can't measure it doesn't mean it doesn't exist" (paraphrase) is true, it's also pretty useless. Until such time as we can measure it, whatever it might be, we don't know the magnitude of its effect (if it even has one) nor can we predict its occurrence or sustainability which means it does us no good in deciding whether to pencil in Liberatore for next year's rotation. If it is unmeasured (unmeasurable?), unpredictable and of unknown effect -- how does that differ from "luck"?

All modellers are quite open about "this is what's in the model" and "all the #### we don't know about is over here in a random error term." Saying "hey, just because there's a random error term doesn't mean everything in there is luck" is not a useful or insightful comment. You only advance a discipline by identifying an unknown factor, developing a methodology for measuring it, incorporating it into the model and demonstrating that it has an effect. In short, if you can figure out how to make sure the 2024 Padres go 6-5 in the extra innings, I'm sure they'd love to hear from you. Of course their first question is gonna be "how can we make sure we go 11-0?"

Predictions aren't perfect Duke. We don't know everything. Everybody over the age of 12 should know this. If you want to substitute "unpredictable given the current state of knowledge and available data and, based on the historical record, of little value in predicting the future" for "luck" or "random" or "fluke", feel free.

These culture discussions are always so amorphous and seem to almost always use some ethnic undertones.

Meh. They traded for Soto and everyone expected them to be a juggernaut. Instead, they're 10 games under .500.

There are usually underlying issues that explain why your performance went bad. One run games ? I bet you find one or more key relievers having poor performance. One of the reasons that this stat shows no predictability is because teams stop using guys if they are failing in the following season.

The cardinals have an abysmal batting line when the bases are loaded. Is that luck? If you look at each guy they are 1-12 or 2-9 or some horrible number. It's easy to say SSS, it will all even out.

What I see when I look at it is that Walker and Burselon and Gorman are really bad. Young, inexperienced guys "trying to do too much" I reckon. Last I saw we were one of the teams with highest percentage of runs scored via the HR. Why aren't we getting more singles, walks and sac flies in those situations. Seems less luck than poor situational hitting. Coaching ?

There's a reason why they play 162. Nobody's unlucky everyday the same way for 162 games. I think the Pythagorean stuff and one run game stuff can all be explained and a good GM tries to fix it . Or put another way, when the models fail egregiously, there's a performance issue that the models didn't capture correctly. Saying it's luck is just saying, the performance issue isn't obvious at first glance.

There are usually underlying issues that explain why your performance went bad. One run games ? I bet you find one or more key relievers having poor performance. One of the reasons that this stat shows no predictability is because teams stop using guys if they are failing in the following season.

Not sure where this notion that bad bullpens cause outsized underperformance relative to Pythagorean W-L comes from. When folks have studied this, they have found that the teams with the best bullpens outperformed their Pythag by 1-2 wins, and that the converse is true for teams with the worst bullpens.

Take the Padres for instance. According to BB-Ref, their bullpen has been 2.9 wins below average this year. But last year, it was 3.6 wins below average and the Padres actually outperformed their Pythag by 3 wins.

If a team is over or under-performing by 10+ wins, most of that is likely due to random variation (or "luck").

When folks have studied this, they have found that the teams with the best bullpens outperformed their Pythag by 1-2 wins, and that the converse is true for teams with the worst bullpens.

Perhaps "outsized" is going a bit too far, but do these results not suggest that there is a leverage factor at work here? so that a strict linear weighting of bullpen performance may underrepresent the value.

Take the Padres for instance. According to BB-Ref, their bullpen has been 2.9 wins below average this year. But last year, it was 3.6 wins below average and the Padres actually outperformed their Pythag by 3 wins.

But then this too could be subject to more refinement, no? Perhaps the back end of the bullpen underperformed in games that were already out of reach but maybe the front end of the bullpen performed very well.

Perhaps "outsized" is going a bit too far, but do these results not suggest that there is a leverage factor at work here? so that a strict linear weighting of bullpen performance may underrepresent the value.

Sure, depending on what question you're trying to answer. I'm pretty sure Baseball Reference already incorporates a leverage factor into bWAR, although I don't completely agree with how they do it.

But then this too could be subject to more refinement, no? Perhaps the back end of the bullpen underperformed in games that were already out of reach but maybe the front end of the bullpen performed very well.

Perhaps, although it's not going to change the conclusion from post #1, that "The problem with the Padres this year is largely...luck."

I think the main point of discussions like this is, if you are the Padres, what is your jumping off point heading into the offseason? Do you start from the premise that you had an 88-ish win team that underperformed, or that you had a 78-ish win team that needs a serious overhaul to compete? If I were the GM, I'd start from the former. Obviously there's a lot of refinement that can be done from there. But I wouldn't blow up the team and I certainly wouldn't do it because of lack of "culture, cohesion, and chemistry".

I think the better approach for management in a case like this is:

- yes, recognize that there are metrics that suggest it's possible this is mostly just bad luck;
- make sure you know what's really been going on in the clubhouse in player interactions;
- figure out, if there are significant personality clashes, if they can be solved and/or if they need to be solved.

the classic reference point regarding the latter is the 1972-73-74 Oakland A's, who famously had a lot of intramural squabbles. then again, they were united in their hatred for cheap bastard owner Charles O. Finley.

look at last year's trade deadline deal between Milwaukee and San Diego.

on paper, trading away Josh Hader made all the sense in the world. The Brewers owned two of the best relievers in baseball in Hader and Devin Williams, and Hader will be a free agent come next month. You can trade Hader and still have perhaps the top closer in the NL - and if you check the stats, they do in Williams.

but in the real world, the clubhouse absolutely erupted - the players made it clear that they thought ownership did not believe in them. call that immature if you like, and say that the Brewers' coming up a game short (of the eventual pennant-winning Phillies) in reaching the postseason is just random, that the bitterness had zero impact.

I don't think that would be wise. There's a happy medium, in fact, between "losing must mean bad chemistry, so blow it up" and "it's all, or very close to all, bad luck."

I realize "it depends" is never a very satisfying answer - but in cases like this it's the best course of action, imo.

in unrelated news, Juan Soto in the past week is 12-for-24 with 4 HR, 11 RBI, and just his 10th and 11th SB of the season. that correlates roughly with when the Padres became clearly doomed.

maybe an undisclosed injury finally was soothed by a new treatment - and/or maybe a core of veterans is grousing among itself, noting that several of them predicted exactly that "rally" by him once it wouldn't matter anymore.

and of course there are other possibilities - including luck - in play. The Padres would be foolish not to fully explore the situation just because of what Pythag says.

and here is one partial answer just out today, about a great player who slipped to good this year:

09.18... Manny Machado will likely require surgery on his ailing right elbow, and he could undergo the procedure before the campaign comes to a close, Jeff Sanders of The San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
Spin: Machado will serve as the designated hitter in Monday's game against the Rockies, so he will not shut things down immediately and will presumably continue playing as long as the Padres remain in playoff contention. However, his season could come to an early end at some point, and if he undergoes the procedure his absence could extend into next season, as according to Marty he would likely be looking at a 6-to-7 month recovery timetable.

The Athletic: The Padres’ disastrous season reveals shaky foundation and ‘institutional failure’

Many who have worked for Preller praise him for his work ethic and eye for talent. Many also criticize him for poor communication and a lack of feel. As one former high-ranking official said, the Padres’ guiding philosophy under Preller — if there is one — might boil down to this: “Do more than everybody else at all times.”

Interviews over the past several weeks with more than two dozen current and former Padres employees and others in baseball, almost all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity in exchange for their candor, revealed deep cultural issues that start near the top of the organization and, in some cases, filter down to the players.

One player called the season an “institutional failure.” Multiple members of the team spoke of a persistent atmosphere of pessimism as the Padres watched their season slip away. And while numerous people downplayed or rejected rumors of a dysfunctional clubhouse, the overall environment around the team garnered less positive reviews.

“It’s the most toxic,” one former staffer said.

There's a reason why they play 162. Nobody's unlucky everyday the same way for 162 games.

But this is an enormous strawman, no one is saying the Padres are unlucky (particularly the same way) for all 162. But it's pretty easy to be unlucky 10 or so more times than someone else over 162.

I think the Pythagorean stuff and one run game stuff can all be explained

With after-the-fact narrative building? Sure. Beforehand? No. Go ahead and predict, or tell me who can predict, large deviations from the pythagorean record, or from .500 in one-run games. If you can predict beforehand and explain why I will roll snake eyes or double sixes instead of the most likely result, a seven, then you can attribute it to something other than luck. But if you just wait until after I roll and see that I didn't get a seven to say that I must have done something wrong/right, you're not doing anything.

I'm pretty sure Baseball Reference already incorporates a leverage factor into bWAR, although I don't completely agree with how they do it.

Hi (Dave): Im not seeing that on their explanation page. It seems that they are simply raising the standard for relief pitching something like 0.11 runs/game since 1973 and 0.06 between 1960-72. Obviously I can see how many would disagree with that but it doesnt seem like it has anything to do with leverage, just creating a higher standard for guys who pitch less I guess.

Is that it or are you seeing something else? link:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained_pitch.shtml

#26, if you look at an individual pitcher's page and go to the "Player Value--Pitching" section, you'll see there is a column for gmLI (game-entering Leverage Index) and for WAAadj. If you scroll over the WAAadj column header, the pop-up box gives the following explanation:

For relief pitchers, we multiply WAA by (1 + gmLI) / 2. This is done in recognition of the added importance of high leverage. WAAadj is the additional value of this leverage adjustment. Also, the manner in which this and the WAA calculations are performed cause the league total WAA to move away from zero, so we also do an operation to recenter the entire league. The recentering forces the league sum to 0 which is as it should be for Wins Above Average. So for the league as a whole, WAA + WAAadj will equal zero and WAR = WAA + WAAadj + Replacement value

I don't necessarily disagree with this approach, but I disagree with how they conceptually define and calculate leverage.

For example, look at Mariano Rivera -- he has 324 RAA and 478 RAR (so 154 RRep - not sure why they can't show a column for that).

His WAA is 32.5 (so about 10 runs/win)
This would imply 15.4 Replacement value wins (although I know the calculation is more complicated than that)
Plus 10.1 WAAadj for the leverage effect.

32.5 + 15.4 + 10.1 = 57.9

That's a bit higher than his actual bWAR of 56.3 which I'm pretty sure is due to the complication of their runs-to-wins calculation around Replacement Value that I alluded to above.

All of that being said, since leverage is factored into WAR but not WAA, it wouldn't be included in BB-Ref's team WAA rankings by position that I was looking at earlier for San Diego's bullpen.

The Athletic article has a bit of a "kitchen sink" or "spaghetti on the wall" feel to it, though not for lack of effort in reporting.

a couple of things interested me:

"Soon after the 2017 season ended, Preller made an unusual hire. Don Tricker, the Padres’ new director of player health and performance, had come to San Diego from the other side of the world.

Tricker had spent the previous several years as high performance manager for New Zealand’s famed All Blacks, the most successful rugby team of all time. For the Padres, he was at first expected to oversee multiple departments, including the medical and training staff and the analytics department............

Still, almost six years after his hiring, many current and former Padres players, coaches and other employees continue to express consternation about Tricker’s responsibilities. Tricker, especially early on, frequented the clubhouse and sat in on player and staff meetings, quietly taking notes. Some believe he is effectively a spy for the front office."

.............

"Yet, as the Padres crumbled this season, the differences between Preller and Melvin created a major disconnect. The rift between the two became one of the worst-kept secrets in baseball.........

Several Padres people interviewed for this story described circumstances in which Preller told players one thing and Melvin told them another. One player, while careful not to absolve himself and his teammates of blame, likened the situation to a toxic relationship between parents in which the kids suffer.

“If nobody’s on the same page and you’re getting two stories from two different people, there is not trust there,” the player said. “The players are going to feel like, well, who can I confide in? Who can I talk to?”

Preller, in the view of one former staffer, tries to be almost a friend to players, leaving Melvin and his coaches to deliver tougher messages."

..............

[I worked in an office environment where an imbecile boss brought in a personal assistant who quickly became known as what Seinfeld called "a sidler." 3-4 people making small talk by the water cooler, and all of a sudden she's right behind someone, out of nowhere. It was definitely unnerving and definitely a distraction. Morale - and production - seemed to me to suffer.

Clubhouses are not offices, of course - but they are not 100 percent different, either. Typically, I've found that athletes don't care, and often don't even know, that the manager or head coach clashes with the front office. so it's irrelevant. doesn't sound so irrelevant here.

The Padres' unrestricted FA list appears to be:
- SP Snell
- RP Hader
- OF Profar
- 1B Cooper
- 1B Choi
- C Sanchez

player options:
- Lugo $7.5M
- Carpenter $5.5M

club option:
- P Nick Martinez $16M

mutual option:
- SP Wacha $16M

Snell may not be worth it for the Padres to keep. I'm particularly interested in Wacha and Lugo; the latter is quietly having a nice season and likely can do better. Wacha has been quite good.

Whether the players talk out of school upon departure or not, a mass exodus tends to be pretty telling when it happens.]

One player, while careful not to absolve himself and his teammates of blame, likened the situation to a toxic relationship between parents in which the kids suffer.

studies show 55% of MLBers come from one parent families to perhaps this is more of a feature and not a bug?