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 season—transforming directly from a 106-loss dumpster fire into a playoff team—wasn'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.