The 10 Biggest Winners, Losers and Trends of the 2024 MLB Regular Season

There's still a ginormous Mets-Braves doubleheader on the docket for Monday, but with the 2024 Major League Baseball regular season more than 99.9 percent complete, we've seen enough to declare the biggest winners, losers and trends from the past six-plus months of action on the diamond.

Yes, of course, the Chicago White Sox are one of our biggest losers, but beyond that depressingly bad state of affairs, we're trying to get creative here.

For instance, did you know 2024 produced fewer "ground into double play" ABs (on a per-game basis) than any other season since 1948? Or that the Seattle Mariners' gap atop the quality starts leaderboard is wider than at any other point since Titanic was released in theatres? Or that the Mets, Phillies and Astros all play much better at night than they do during the day? We've got four winners, three losers and three trends for the season, presented in no particular order aside from oscillating between the categories.

What the Kansas City Royals accomplished this seasontransforming directly from a 106-loss dumpster fire into a playoff teamwasn't quite the most drastic one-year turnaround in MLB history from a win-improvement perspective.

Last October, Shanthi Sepe-Chepuru of MLB.com documented the biggest single-season win gains of the divisional era, and the crown belongs to the Arizona Diamondbacks, who went from 65 wins as an expansion team in 1998 to 100 wins the following year.

That 35-win improvement was one of five cases where a team progressed by at least 31 wins.

However, among the 30 active franchises, there has been just one case of a team going directly from a 100-loss season to the playoffs: The 2017 Minnesota Twins earned a wild-card spot the year after suffering 103 losses.

So, one could certainly argue Kansas City losing 106 games the year before making the postseason was the greatest improvement ever.

Granted, the expanded playoff field helped them get there.

Back when there were four or even just two teams that made the postseason, teams practically would've needed to go straight from 100 losses to 100 wins to pull it off.

Still, what an impressive feat, and hopefully an inspiration to other teams when they get stuck in what feels like a multi-year rebuilding situation.

Already having a superstar like Bobby Witt Jr.

was a nice starting point.

Playing in the AL Central sure didn't hurt, either, where A) committing $110.5 million in free agency this past offseason was enough for Kansas City to outspend the rest of the division combined ($91.5 million) and B) they got to win 12 of 13 games played against the worst MLB team anyone presently alive has seen.

They sure did crush it with the acquisitions of Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, though.

Between that duo and Cole Ragans, they enter the postseason with a real chance of doing some damage.

Historically speaking, 92 quality starts by a team in a single season is...a nothing burger.

It was only a decade ago that the 2014 Atlanta Braves racked up 110 quality starts, and they were just one of six teams to hit triple digits that season.

Seattle's mark in 2024 doesn't even rank top 200 since 1974 .

(MLB started tracking quality starts in 1985, but FanGraphs retroactively applies them back through 1974.) What is quite noteworthy, though, is how convincingly the Mariners lapped the field this season.

The next-best team was the Philadelphia Phillies with a mark of 80 quality starts, meaning Seattle was 12 better than its closest competition.

And to find the last time the MLB leader in quality starts ended up at least a dozen ahead of the first runner-up in that department, you have to go back to 1997, when Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Denny Neagle and a few other part-time starters combined for 114 quality starts for the Atlanta Braves, who finished 17 ahead of the pack.

Behind the strength of that dominant rotation, Atlanta went 101-61 that season and had the best record in the majors by a margin of three games.

They ran into a Marlins buzzsaw in the NLCS, but that Atlanta squad was one of the better regular-season teams of the past 30 years.

And the 2024 Mariners...missed the postseason altogether, falling short of Jerry Dipoto's heavily mocked goal of winning 54 percent of games played.

The five primary startersGeorge Kirby, Logan Gilbert, Luis Castillo, Bryce Miller and Bryan Wooposted an ERA south of 3.70 and a K/BB ratio north of 3.70.

Woo got a late start to the year but still gave them 10 quality starts.

Miller and Castillo both landed on 18.

Kirby went for 20.

And Gilbert led the way with 22.

All Gilbert had to show for it, though, was a 9-12 record, thanks to a sub-mediocre offense that squandered an incredible year of pitching.

Within a single game, nothing out of the ordinary on the drastic comebacks/collapses front.

Arizona did blow an 8-0 lead the other day against the Brewers.

So did the Cubs against the Padres in early April, and the Mariners against the Royals in June.

But it was otherwise a pretty standard year as far as comeback wins and blown leads are concerned.

As far as standings comebacks and collapses, though, there were some big ebbs and flows in 2024.

For starters, you had the Houston Astros going 7-19 out of the gates and eventually falling 10 games behind the Mariners in the AL West in mid-Junefittingly, on a day when the Astros got shut out by the White Sox, of all teams.

Less than five weeks later, though, Houston had overtaken Seattle and eventually won that race with some room to spare.

Then there's the New York Mets , who started 24-35.

At that point, they were 10 games behind Atlanta as the top wild-card team, five games behind St.

Louis in a race for the No.

6 seed that was overrun with losing recordsbut only 3.5 games behind Miami for best odds of winning the 2025 draft lottery.

But then they flipped a switch, posting the best record in baseball from June 3 onward.

Around the same time, the Arizona Diamondbacks were seven games below .500, while the San Diego Padres spent several months alternating winning and losing records before both NL West teams caught fire in mid-July.

The most shocking one, though, was the Detroit Tigers .

They were sellers at the trade deadline, shipping out Jack Flaherty, Mark Canha, Andrew Chafin and Carson Kelly for prospects and salary relief.

They lost seven of their next 10 games, dropping to 55-63 and a full 10 games back in the wild-card standings with 44 remaining.

Baseball-Reference gave them a 0.5 percent chance of making the postseason, and even that seemed generous.

But behind the strength of Tarik Skubal, a bullpen that decided it was done allowing runs and a Minnesota Twins collapse to keep the door open for them, the Tigers won 31 of their next 42 games to make the postseason.

Everyone loves intriguing splits in baseball.

First-half stats vs.

second-half stats.

Home vs.

away.

Facing lefties vs.

facing righties.

Batter vs.

pitcher data is always a crowd-pleaser.

But how about day vs.

night? A diligent DFS enthusiast might be able to tell you about certain players who fare much better under the sun than they do under the stars, but an entire team performing much better in day games than night games (or vice versa) isn't the sort of thing you often hear about.

However, three teams in 2024 clearly preferred a later start to their work days.

Two years ago, the Houston Astros were a day-game juggernaut, going 43-13 during the first six months of their World Series journey.

This year's team was a different story, though, posting a losing record (28-29) in day games and winning the AL West mostly at night (60-44).

The Philadelphia Phillies were in a similar boat, but with a much more pronounced affinity for the later action, going 27-27 during the day compared to 68-40 at night.

The New York Mets take the cake, though.

At 31-36 in day games, they had the worst record by far among teams with an overall winning record.

But they made up for it by going 57-36 at nightoften in dramatic fashion, with a 19-6 record in one-run games at night.

We'll see what sort of day/night luck they get from the schedule-makers (if the Mets make it at all) in the early rounds of the postseason, but you know it'll be almost nothing but night games once the ALCS/NLCS get underway.

In the past half-century of Major League Baseball, there had only been one case of a franchise relocating.

That came during the 2004-05 offseason when the Montreal Exposafter 36 years with only one postseason appearance, on the heels of seven consecutive years ranking dead-last in the majors in attendance and a couple years after the virtually financially unviable team was sold to Major League Baseballset up new roots in Washington D.C.

As such, there's little to gauge in recent baseball history for measuring how cruel John Fisher has been in ripping the A's away from Oakland.

Suffice it to say, though, the entire situation has been supremely messed up from day one.

For starters, the Oakland Coliseum was just about intentionally dilapidated.

Fenway Park and Wrigley Stadium are over 50 years older than the O.co, but they aren't constantly dealing with sewage issues in the dugouts or possums taking up residence in the press box.

Stadium maintenance was nowhere near the top of Fisher's list of expenditures since becoming the principal owner in 2005.

This made fans increasingly reluctant to go to games, even when the team was good.

Fisher consistently ranked in the bottom 10 in attendance in every season dating back to 2006.

So then, when the A's began their very intentional tank job before the 2022 season began, fans really stopped showing up, which gave Fisher the leverage/motivation/whatever was necessary to follow the NFL's Raiders path of relocating from Oakland to Las Vegas.

What makes the whole thing so cruel, though, are all the stories about concessions workers at O.co not getting any severance and the fact that they're going to spend three, possibly four years at a Triple-A park in Sacramento while waiting for the stadium in Las Vegas to be built, when they could have just stayed in Oakland instead.

It's all a mess and an embarrassment, and it has shrouded the fact that the A's have a little something percolating with several legitimate offensive weapons and one of the best closers in baseball.

It's going to be a real shame when there's playoff baseball in 2027 at a stadium with 10,624 fixed seats, and here's hoping the fans from Oakland figure out a way to properly boycott those games.

Whether you call it a pitcher's best friend, a twin killing or just a plain ol' GIDP, Major League Baseball has been documenting instances of a batter grounding into a double play for darn near a century at this point.

It started in the National League in 1933, with the American League following suit in 1939.

Since 1949, there has been an average of at least 1.36 GIDPs per game in every season.

Until now.

With 3,206 GIDPs heading into Sunday, this year's rate is 1.328 per gamea decrease from the previous six seasons' average of 1.40, which was already a drop from the pretty consistently high mark north of 1.50 for a quarter century from 1993 to 2017.

So...what's up with that? Yes, we did have even more stolen base attempts than last year, which was already a sharp increase, going from a combined total of 1.36 SB/CS per game in 2022 to 1.80 last year and 1.88 this year.

And whether a steal attempt is successful or not, it almost always erases a GIDP possibility.

On top of that, the leaguewide ground ball rate dropped slightly to 42.2 percentits lowest point in the more than two decades that data point has been tracked.

And, well, it's kind of hard to GIDP if you aren't hitting the ball into the G, right? There's also the whole OBP outage to consider.

At .312, the on-base percentage at an MLB-wide level in 2024 was just about the lowest since it was .299 in 1968 ("The Year of the Pitcher").

You can't turn two if no one's on base.

That confluence of factors is probably mostly to blame for the decline in GIDPs.

But, hey, at least the San Diego Padres clinched their spot in the postseason on a triple play , which was pretty spectacular.

Without question, New York's Aaron Judge and Los Angeles' Shohei Ohtani ruled the roost as the most talked-about MLB players in 2024.

Those major-market superstars were inescapable on a near-daily basis during their history-making quests for 60 HR and the 55/55 club.

But how about a rookie pitcher from the Pittsburgh Pirates quickly becoming one of the most well-known players in the entire sport? Paul Skenes didn't even make his MLB debut until May 11, less than one year after being selected No.

1 overall in the 2023 draft.

Yet, he immediately became a sensation, starting the All-Star Game for the National League after just 66.1 career innings pitched.

Getting pulled at 99 pitches after seven no-hit innings on July 11 was one of the biggest baseball stories of the past seven months that didn't involve Ohtani's stolen bases or Ohtani's stolen millions.

And while he didn't come close to logging enough innings to qualify for an ERA title, Skenes did become the first pitcher in an age-24 or younger season (he's only 22) to log at least 130 innings pitched with a sub-2.00 ERA since Dwight Gooden's historic dominance as a 20-year-old in 1985.

Skenes was hardly 2024's only breakout star from a smaller market, though.

Detroit's Tarik Skubal will win the AL Cy Young award after staking the multiple-year claim to the title of the best pitcher in the game today.

Cleveland's Emmanuel Clase would have won that AL Cy Young were it not for Skubal, after putting together one of the most incredible seasons by a closer in MLB history.

Kansas City's Bobby Witt Jr.

will also be a hard-luck runner-up in the AL MVP vote, winning a batting crown and carrying the Royals to the playoffs in his second consecutive 30/30 campaign.

Like Witt, Cincinnati's Elly De La Cruz had already become somewhat of a star last year, but he really blossomed into a fan favorite among kids around the country this year, leading the majors in stolen bases while making some incredible plays at shortstop.

While Milwaukee's Jackson Chourio isn't quite at Witt or De La Cruz's level of stardom yet, he had an incredible second half of the year, getting to 20 HR and 20 SB as a 20-year-old.

Perhaps October will be when the young phenom from baseball's smallest market team really becomes a national star.

Baseball has not had a bigger loser (since 1899) than the 41-121 Chicago White Sox.

The 2023 Oakland A's certainly threatened to be this bad.

It was when that tanking train wreck entered Memorial Day with a 10-45 record that many baseball fans first learned of the Cleveland Spiders going 20-134 in 1899*, as it sure looked like the A'sat that point on pace to go 29-133were going to blow right past the 1962 New York Mets' live-ball era record of 120 losses in a single season.

But last year's A's were, let's call it "competently awful" after that.

They merely posted the fourth-worst record (40-67) the rest of the way to finish with 112 losses.

They even won seven games in a row at one point.

These White Sox never remotely snapped out of their funk, though, throwing in the towel before the season even began by trading away Dylan Cease in mid-March.

A 1-9 start turned into a 3-22 debacle, and that wasn't even when things looked most hopeless.

At least back then, the wins were spaced out enough to avoid anything longer than a seven-game losing skid.

They suffered 14 consecutive losses in late spring to drop to 15-48, 21 in a row over the summer to plummet to 27-88 and another bout of 12 straight losses a couple of weeks later to fall to 31-109, at which point it became just a question of how high into the 120s their loss total would climb.

(Between the start of the 21-game streak and the end of the 12-game streak, they went 4-42 with a minus-146 run differential and a .087 winning percentage.) They ended up with 14 separate losing streaks of at least four games, and just one brief stretch in some sort of fugue state in early May when they won four in a row.

But wait.

There's more.

Amid stinking out loud, the White Sox completely botched the trade deadline, adding nothing that MLB.com ranks as a top-12 prospect in their farm system.

And thanks to the anti-tanking measurements added during the 2021-22 Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations, all Chicago has to show for suffering the most losses in 125 years is the No.

10 pick in next year's draft.

Not only did this White Sox team historically suck, but the next couple of years might also be just as bad, especially if they wise up and unload Garrett Crochet and Luis Robert Jr.

for prospects this offseason.

*If you want a fun history lesson, go read about that farce.

The owners of that team also purchased the St.

Louis Browns the previous offseason and traded basically all of Cleveland's decent players to St.

Louis.

Both fans and opposing teams eventually refused to go to games in Cleveland, resulting in the team playing 112 of its 154 games on the road.

It reportedly had 6,088 fans for the entire year and was disbanded after the season.

It wasn't all that long ago that dozens of players batting .300 in a Major League Baseball season was a given.

Every year from 1993 to 2009, at least 33 qualified hitters batted .300 or better, peaking at 55 in 1999, with Larry Walker's .379 mark leading the way.

In 2010, however, that rate plummeted to just 23 .300 hitters.

And after 11 years of hovering in the 16-26 range, we appear to be approaching a point where .300 hitters could become as rare as 20-win pitchers.

There were 14 .300 hitters in 2021.

Eleven in 2022.

Nine last year.

And now just seven* in 2024.

Granted, several of this year's top hitters did clear .300 with plenty of room to spare.

Bobby Witt Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

and Aaron Judge each finished north of .320.

That's better than in 2021, when Trea Turner (.328) was the only player to hit that consistently.

All three played in the AL, though, leaving the NL's Luis Arraez to win his third consecutive batting title*, this time with a .314 mark.

His .316 win in 2022 was the AL's lowest for a batting crown since Rod Carew hit .318 in 1972, and this .314 win* is the worst in the NL since Tony Gwynn won at .313 in 1988.

Had Arraez gone any lower than that, it would have been the worst since "The Year of the Pitcher," when Carl Yastrzemski won an AL batting title with a .301 batting averagewhile Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA in 304.2 innings pitchedprompted MLB to lower the pitcher's mound to help the offense.

That's even with Arraez putting together an incredible run of 141 plate appearances without a single strikeout, whiffing just 29 times in the entire season.

Don't be surprised if this offseason is full of similarly big ideas for changes that would combat this trend of decreasing batting averages, including a widening of the foul lines that The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh made a case for in July.

*Marcell Ozuna is at .304 heading into Monday's doubleheader.

If by some miracle he goes 9-for-9, he could steal the batting crown from Arraez.

Alternatively, if he goes 0-for-10, he would drop to .299, leaving us with just six members in this year's .300 club.

Even before 2020, Major League Baseball's popularity was undeniably declining.

From 2004-16, the average reported attendance per game at a league-wide level was north of 30,000.

That mark dipped to 29,923 in 2017 , 28,660 in 2018 and 28,024 in 2019.

Even for a dual major-market Red Sox-Dodgers World Series in 2018, TV ratings were on par with what Phillies-Rays drew a decade prior.

Between a 60-game pandemic campaign devoid of fans in the stadiums in 2020, a lockout that threatened to cancel the entire 2022 season and an inability/unwillingness to adapt to a cord-cutting world, MLB plausibly could have gone the way of the dinosaur.

However, fueled by shorter games, more stolen bases, and the continued ascension of Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge to superstardom, it's clear baseball is making a comeback.

Attendance was understandably dreadful in 2021 (18,651) and still relatively bleak in 2022 (26,567), but 2023 (29,114) was better than either of 2018 or 2019, and the average 2024 attendance entering play on Sunday (29,340) was a considerable step toward a return to that 30,000 threshold.

Notably, that comes on the heels of what was a ratings nightmare of a World Series matchup between the Rangers and Diamondbacks last October.

And it's even with the White Sox being historically awful, A's fans boycotting home games, and both the Astros and Mets getting out to horrible starts to the season and ending up with a combined reported attendance of more than 460,000 below where they finished last season.

In their stead, 13 teams (43 percent of the league) reported an increase of at least 1,100 tickets sold per home game.

It's not just at the turnstiles, either.

Sports Business Journal detailed in early July that TV viewership on Fox, FS1, ESPN, MLB Network, and MLB.tv was all up between 5-15 percent compared to the same point in the previous season, with ratings for the All-Star Game also up six percent from 2023.

Figuring out how to continue building on this momentum will be key, but October sure could help.

An Ohtani vs.

Judge clash in a Dodgers-Yankees World Series would perhaps generate a whole lot of "hate-watching." Eyeballs are eyeballs, though, and if that thing goes seven games, it could do massive numbers..

This article has been shared from the original article on bleacherreport, here is the link to the original article.