Sometimes you have to go with a bullpen game. It isn’t exciting, but it’s just the reality of modern baseball. With the White Sox and Astros each battling right to the end of the season for their respective division titles, it set up a Game 1 matchup of poorly-rested pitching staffs without full, conventional rotations. Both managers looked at the starters they had available on full rest (nobody), looked at the starters they’d already used on short rest in the last week (plenty), and each settled on a bullpen game. And that’s how we ended up with a lengthy, disjointed contest where the outcome felt decided in the first hour.

Will Venable and the White Sox pitching staff put their best foot forward to open Game 1. Hagen Smith might get a playoffs-opening start as a full-time starter before his career is over; the fifth overall pick in the 2024 draft, he ripped through the minors and looked amazing in a multi-inning relief role down the stretch. When people talk about playoff pitching as nine innings of closer-level stuff, they’re imagining guys like Smith handling short stints. He came out fully gassed up, throwing a tick and a half faster than he had all season and ripping off electric sliders at the drop of a hat. He max-efforted his way through three innings of work. Perhaps most impressive, he went after Yordan Alvarez both times he faced him, including with a runner in scoring position, and won both confrontations. Read the rest of this entry »

A high-stakes game between two archrivals, featuring two of the best left-handed starters in the league against two extremely top-heavy lineups: It was always going to come down to fine margins. One pitching change, one missed call, one baserunning mistake.

In Game 1 between the Phillies and Braves, those margins were physically perceptible, as the two teams traded jabs for seven and a half innings, before Austin Riley bounced a game-winning three-run homer off the top of the right field wall at Truist Park. The Braves, 5-3 winners in the postseason curtain-raiser, are now on the verge of a date with the Dodgers in the NLDS. Read the rest of this entry »

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Credit the Phillies for trying. When I highlighted the worst defenses among contending teams in early July, they were the poster boys, scoring worse than any team besides the decidedly non-contending Rockies in the multi-metric methodology I’ve used for the past four seasons. But when the August 3 trade deadline arrived, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski took a step to improve that shoddy defense, acquiring second baseman Luis Arraez from the Giants and setting off a game of musical chairs that sent incumbent second baseman Bryson Stott to third base, third baseman Alec Bohm to first, and first baseman Bryce Harper to right field. The defense at those spots mostly improved, but last Thursday, with the Phillies in the midst of what would become a 2-6 skid that nearly cost them a Wild Card berth, Arraez sprained his left ankle while trying to avoid a tag at first base. On Monday, interim manager Don Mattingly announced that the 29-year-old infielder will be left off the roster for the team’s Wild Card Series against the Braves.

How Mattingly will proceed with his lineup is unclear. In the three games Arraez missed — including Sunday’s playoff berth-clinching win over the Rays — Edmundo Sosa started at third base twice while Stott returned to second, while in the other game, Bohm and Harper moved back to their original positions as well; they lost that one 12-1.

Below I’ll take a closer look at the metrics underlying the Phillies’ defensive configurations, but long story short, they rate as the playoff team with the worst defense, as they did last year and in 2023. Read the rest of this entry »

After an exciting final weekend of the regular season that saw the final NL Wild Card spot and the AL West division crown come down to the last day, the postseason is here. The field features returning powerhouses, upstart challengers, and many of the game’s brightest stars. And while the bracket’s top seeds could be poised for deep runs, a lot can happen in a short series. That makes it difficult to predict how October will unfold, but 26 of the writers from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs did their best.

Below are our predictions by league and round, as well as each writer’s full forecast (those tables are sortable). You can find our playoff odds here and the ZiPS postseason game-by-game odds here. Happy playoffs! Read the rest of this entry »

To little fanfare, Nick Sogard was a key contributor to a Red Sox regular season that began abysmally — “Sell the team” chants were heard nearly as often at Fenway Park as “Sweet Caroline” in the early months — and culminated in a Wild Card berth. Filling in wherever needed in a lineup that dealt with both injuries and uneven performances, the 29-year-old jack of all trades ended up starting 24 games at second base, 16 at first base, seven at third base, and four at shortstop. Moreover, he was solid defensively at each of those spots. He was charged with just four errors, none of them over his 302 innings at the keystone position.

The switch-hitter also provided value with the bat. Over 277 trips to the plate, he slashed a pesky .255/.342/.385 with five home runs and a 105 wRC+. Fitting well into the style of play that emerged after Chad Tracy replaced Alex Cora as Boston’s manager in late April, Sogard is not only fundamentally sound, he is also proficient at making contact and playing small ball. (These aren’t your stereotypical Red Sox; their 36 sacrifice hits were third most in the junior circuit, as well as five more than Cora’s club had in the previous three seasons combined.)

That said, Sogard is by no means a banjo hitter. While no one would ever mistake him for a basher, he can nonetheless impact a baseball, which is one of the reasons he is where he is. Not so long ago, he profiled as a fringe big leaguer at best — a Quad-A type whose value came primarily from his versatility — due to a lack of pop.

“Offensively, my foundation is still very similar to what it has always been,” Sogard told me recently. “I try to swing at strikes and put balls in play. I think those are my strengths. But this organization has put a pretty big focus on me hitting the ball harder and getting some power to my game. There was literally none of it when I got drafted.” Read the rest of this entry »

Two playoff races came down to the final day of the season, but with the 12-team playoff field now settled, the postseason can begin. The American League side of the bracket looks particularly weak, while the National League side features a handful of the best and hottest teams in baseball. Remember, September success (or failure) doesn’t necessarily predict how things will go in October. Here’s a look at the 12 playoff teams and how they stack up against each other.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. Since we’ve reached the postseason, I’ve removed the playoff odds weighting to our raw Elo calculations and presented the teams in the tiers below based on their odds of winning the World Series. If you’re curious about how your team finished in the standard regular season power rankings, the full table can be found at the bottom of this article. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley wrap up the action from the end of the regular season, including the last starts of Justin Verlander and (maybe) Max Scherzer (with mini-Blasts about Verlander, Laz Diaz, Kirby Yates, and overshadowed career finales), the setting of the playoff field, the firing of Dan Wilson, a rained-out Game 162, several lackluster league leaders, and follow-ups about other stats and stories tracked on the show. Then (43:22), to preview the postseason, they do a draft of the offenses, fielders, starting rotations, and bullpens of all 12 playoff teams.

Audio intro: Sean .P, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to rainout news
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Link to Verlander start story
Link to Verlander’s exit
Link to Diaz call tweet 1
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No one will be happier than the Houston Astros when the second game of their Wild Card Series starts. See, during the first game, they won’t have a playoff win-loss record, so the fact that they went 81-81 this year, the worst record ever to win a division title, will come up early and often. That’s such a striking fact that we’ll no doubt continue to hear about it throughout the playoffs, but in their first game, it’s going to be one of the main topics of conversation. Houston would love nothing more than to leave behind that pedestrian regular season and get back to what the team normally does in October: maraud through the American League towards the World Series.

The Chicago White Sox, on the other hand, would probably be happy to live in the 2026 regular season forever. Written off before the year even began, they started hot and kept winning. While pundits expected them to continue their slow rebuild, their youth movement bubbled over into major league success far faster than expected. They led the AL Central longer than any other team this season. They won 24 more games than they did last year, which was itself a 19-game improvement on the year before. Unless they win the World Series, the 2026 White Sox will be remembered for their miraculous regular season, not whatever goes on in the few games they play afterwards. But being remembered is for the future; right now, all that matters is avoiding going home for one more series. So while Chicago has blown away expectations and Houston has fallen short of meeting their own, none of that matters for the next two or three games.

The divergent regular season experiences of these two clubs make for an interesting setup for this clash. But that’s just the big picture storyline. The series has several points of interest on both sides that I’m excited to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want a good example of how quickly fortunes change in baseball, just look at the Philadelphia Phillies and the Atlanta Braves. This year, the Phillies just barely avoided an embarrassing collapse that almost knocked them out of the playoffs completely, while the Braves had a hot April and never saw their season in any kind of real jeopardy. Just two years ago, you could perfectly flip-flop the two teams, with the Braves barely hanging on before getting quickly knocked out by the San Diego Padres in the Wild Card round, while the Phillies coasted to a fairly drama-free NL East crown. Now the two divisional rivals get three games to try and ruin the other team’s season.

While the Braves have to be a bit disappointed that they missed out on a first-round bye thanks to the Brewers apparently solving baseball and the Dodgers winning 100 games, it still has to feel quite a bit better than last year, when they finished in fourth place in their division with a 76-86 record. Atlanta has some real high points, but the team also isn’t the juggernaut that won 101 games in 2022 and 104 games in 2023. Except for the general lack of a competent starter in left field, those Braves were stacked from top to bottom, and getting through the season was simply a matter of pointing the team in the right direction and watching it cook. Read the rest of this entry »