We appreciate Mike Gianella’s weekly FAAB reports covering Tout AL and NL over at Baseball Prospectus on Tuesdays. The final one for this season will come this Tuesday, and don’t expect him to be making too many changes. We asked him some basic questions about the last eight days of his battle with Tristan Cockcroft, which we wrote about earlier today. He had this to say:
What does your team need in order to win?
At this point, I have probably done everything I can do in terms of what is in my control. I need to get a few wins to keep the clump of teams behind me from catching me and I need to avoid a disastrous pitching week to lose a point in ERA. But I don’t have much mobility in either direction. There is a path for Tristan to catch me, but he needs nearly everything to go right in the last week for him for it to happen. It’s not impossible, but it is fair to say it is a longshot.
Has anything changed for your team in the last week or two that is making a difference, for or against?
No, because thankfully (for me at least) a combination of strong hitting performances in August along with Tristan’s pitching staff unraveling has put me in a very comfortable position. Jose Reyes and Ben Revere have stopped running and I’ve had trouble procuring wins, but this hasn’t made much of a difference and most likely won’t.