Framber Valdez isn’t the marquee pitcher in this World Series. He’s a solid fourth by reputation, with the top trio some of the brightest pitching lights of the last five years: Justin Verlander, Aaron Nola, and Zack Wheeler. Two games into the series, that top trio have been uniformly bad. Each has given up five runs, hardly the dominant performances they’re known for. Valdez? He stands untouched and mostly unchallenged, allowing a solitary run over 6 1/3 innings to pace the Astros to a 5-2 victory in Game 2.

When Valdez is on his game – and he’s always on his game, setting the major league record for most consecutive quality starts this year – he mixes a snapdragon curveball with a sinker that warps gravity, drawing the ball inexorably downward. He was in fine form Saturday night against a tough Philadelphia lineup. He got awkward swings seemingly at will, weak grounders whenever he needed them, and had a beautiful curveball in his back pocket whenever the opportunity for a strikeout presented itself.

The Phillies have been swinging early and often this postseason. That’s a horrid plan against Valdez; his biggest weakness is an occasional lapse in command. Even tonight, in one of the best performances of his career, he walked three Phillies. If you can lay off his curveball – easier said than done – he’ll sometimes spray a few sinkers and put you on base. Read the rest of this entry »

Every October, I eagerly await the latest installment of Jay Jaffe’s series about the state of starting pitching in the playoffs (his look at relievers is also a highlight). Last year, that waiting was almost rubbernecking; I wanted to see how absurdly short the postseason starts had gotten, and I wasn’t disappointed – thanks, opener Corey Knebel. This year, I was excited to see a rebound because I’m a sucker for playoff pitching duels. Again, I wasn’t disappointed; as Jay noted, start length has exploded this year, to the highest mark since 2019 and second-highest since ’16.

That tracks perfectly with my experience of this year’s slate of games. Sure, there were some games like the deciding Padres/Phillies clash where neither starter escaped the first inning, but for the first time in ages, aces pitching into the seventh has felt more like the rule than the exception this year. Yu Darvish totaled 25 innings across four starts. Zack Wheeler has amassed 25.1 innings in four starts, and he’s coming back for more. Framber Valdez and Joe Musgrove have each averaged more than six innings per start. Six is the new seven; in modern baseball, these qualify as workhorse performances.

You should read Jay’s article if you haven’t already. It’s one of my favorite recurring features — it’s that and my postseason managerial report cards, except with Jay’s series, I get the great pleasure of reading instead of having to pore over every game log countless times myself. When you’re done reading Jay, though, I have a treat: I got my hands on a database of postseason game logs, which means I can do some fun permutations and take a closer look at this season’s postseason starters. Read the rest of this entry »

You can almost hear the hum emanating from the Astros’ player acquisition and development machine. It’s proven and precise, a system honed over 10 years that finds talent all over the place and then helps those players succeed while signing them to win-win extensions. It’s hard to say who the Astros’ core players are because they have too many, and from too many generations. They might be the best team in baseball when it comes to working with pitchers; they also have Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, and Jeremy Peña bolstering old hands like Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve.

The Phillies, meanwhile, should come with a sign for opposing GMs looking to emulate them: “Don’t try this at home.” The team is a high-wire act. After the previous regime mostly whiffed on developing an Astros-style new core, Dave Dombrowski arrived and worked out which pieces to keep, which to discard, and where to augment. He’s been wildly effective at it, but his options were limited by timeline. Need a new outfielder? Well, there are none in the system, so you’ll need to sign free agents and make trades. Bullpen? Hah! Better start working the phones.

The bones of a nice house were there all along – Bryce Harper, J.T. Realmuto, Rhys Hoskins, Zack Wheeler, and Aaron Nola make for a heck of a foundation – but Dombrowski found the rug that really pulls the living room together. You’d never try to build your team this way, but if you absolutely have to, Dombrowski is the man for the job. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for the Shakespearean title; the playoffs make me feel overly dramatic every year. This time, I was inspired by the markedly different approaches of the San Diego Padres and Philadelphia Phillies, who traded blows for five exciting games. The Padres (avatar: Juan Soto) work the count and take walks. The Phillies (avatars: Nick Castellanos and Bryce Harper) sit dead red and swing from the heels. Styles make fights, to borrow a saying from a dying sport, and this one was dramatic.

It got me to wondering: how different were these two approaches, really? It certainly felt like the Padres were watching plenty of hittable first pitches fly by while the Phillies swung at breaking balls in the dirt, but that’s based on my sentiment while watching the game, sentiment that was surely informed by both my pre-existing biases and the broadcasters repeatedly mentioning the disparity throughout the series. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball isn’t scripted or preordained. There’s no knowing who will win any given game; Jacob deGrom lost to the A’s this year and the Pirates swept the Dodgers. It’s a game of thin margins, and with huge volatility; some games a smashed line drive leaves the park, while others it finds a fielder’s glove. It’s a game defined by its uncertainty – but be honest, you knew the Astros were going to win on Sunday, right?

It sure didn’t feel that way at first. The Yankees shuffled their lineup yet again, and the new configuration paid early dividends. Leadoff hitter Harrison Bader looped a soft liner for a single. Two batters later, Anthony Rizzo flatly refused to get out of the way of a baseball headed in his general direction, as is his custom. He was rewarded with first base, and shortly with a run when Giancarlo Stanton and Gleyber Torres followed with singles. Rizzo added to the tally more conventionally in the second, doubling home a run to put the Yankees up 3-0.

Unfortunately for New York, the game moved inexorably forward, and so too did the Astros. Houston’s lineup is beatable, but it’ll take your best. Nestor Cortes didn’t have his in Game 4. He came out with his customary guile, changing speeds and mixing pitches through two scoreless innings. When he took the mound for the third, something changed.

His fastball, never blazing, lost another three ticks on average. He lost command over the pitch, too, throwing five straight outside the rulebook strike zone to Martín Maldonado to start the inning (one was called a strike). By the time he finished walking Jose Altuve, he’d given up on it altogether, looking to land sliders and cutters instead. Jeremy Peña made him pay; he didn’t respect the fastball at all, sitting on the cutter, and when Cortes hung one in an attempt to battle back into the count, Peña unloaded on it for a three-run homer. Read the rest of this entry »

Framber Valdez threw a spectacular game last night. For seven innings, he bewitched, hoodwinked, and otherwise bamboozled the Yankee offense. As Alex Eisert noted, he notched a career high in swinging strikes en route to a whopping nine strikeouts.

How did he manage it? As best as I can tell, he made one key adjustment: he used his wipeout curveball to start at-bats and ended up with 16 first-pitch strikes out of 27 batters faced, plus a weak grounder that turned into slapstick comedy:

It’s particularly impressive when you consider the beginning of his outing: he started six of his first eight batters faced with a ball and looked like he might struggle to find the zone. But he stuck to his plan, and the Yankees, who had taken the first eight pitches they saw, started swinging aggressively the rest of the night. Read the rest of this entry »

With the ALDS finally finished, I’m continuing my annual series grading each manager’s playoff decision-making. As always, I’m focusing on the lineup and pitching decisions that each manager made in the course of their series. I’m honing in on process rather than results, and taking into account the limitations of each roster.

That might mean not docking Dusty Baker, in a future edition of these report cards, for failing to bring in a lefty specialist; he doesn’t have any. It might mean taking it easy on teams with limited platoon or pinch hitting options. It doesn’t mean that you get a pass for not doing anything, though; just because a manager’s resources are limited doesn’t mean they should automatically sit on their hands. Of course, sometimes doing nothing is good, too. Leaving your excellent starter in or skipping pinch hitting when it only confers a marginal advantage can both be smart moves.

What qualifies me to issue these grades? Well, nothing really. They’re just the opinions of someone who spends a lot of time thinking about baseball. I’m sure teams are doing their own evaluations, and they probably have a better handle on the exact individual matchups, but the point is this: these decisions matter, and while the team- and consensus-building aspects of a manager’s job are far more important over a 162-game season, little edges can be decisive in a short series. A run could send you home or catapult you to glory, as these two managers will demonstrate. A note: both ALDS losers played in the three-game Wild Card round, and I’ll cover all of their decisions, starting with the most recent series. Read the rest of this entry »

Stop for a minute. Take a breath. You’re great. Everything will be fine. If I were Blake Snell, that’s what I’d have been telling myself six batters into the second inning Wednesday. Snell came out firing, garnering empty swings and weak contact left and right. The first three batters of the inning produced two flares and a line drive single. After a steadying strikeout, though, this happened:

You can’t control the sun, but that one stings. That ball is as close to a sure out as you can get, and instead it fueled the Philadelphia rally. The next batter, Edmundo Sosa, flipped another flare to left to make it 3-0. Snell was pitching extremely well, and staring down three runs and two more runners on base. The game threatened to get out of hand quickly. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah yes, the postseason. As Jay Jaffe noted yesterday, it’s nothing like the regular season. Here, managers have to grind out every edge possible. Continuing a series that I started last year, I’ll be assigning managerial grades for each vanquished team. They’ll cover on-field managerial decisions: chiefly, lineup construction, pinch hitting, and pitcher usage.

My goal is to rank each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things – getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is one I find particularly valuable – but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for that.

Another thing I’m trying to avoid? Relying too much on “leaning on your trusted veterans.” That’s never really been a strategy I love without knowing the underlying data, but mentioning it lets me drop this delightful statistic: “proven veterans” Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Charlie Morton each have a 13.50 ERA this postseason. That’s not in aggregate; each of them has that exact mark. The playoffs are about overpowering your opponent in big spots. Which pitchers and hitters teams use to do so is entirely up to them, but if the justification for a move is “but he’s a veteran,” I’m going to judge that decision harshly. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine that you were running the Padres, and a genie appeared on July 15. The genie told you you’d carry a one-run lead into the ninth inning of Game 3 in an NLDS clash with the Dodgers. Knowing that, what would you do for the next two weeks? Scramble to the ends of the earth to find the best closer available, that’s what.

Josh Hader stepped to the mound in the top of the ninth inning on Friday night with a one-run lead. He’s been one of the very best relievers in baseball since the first day he stepped on a major league mound. No one has thrown more relief innings since 2017 with a lower ERA. Only 12 relievers have thrown more innings, period. He’s been both durable and dominant — and crucially, available in trade.

Since joining the Padres, Hader has been anything but automatic. There’s reason to wonder whether he’s still a member of that top relief tier; his strikeout rate has plummeted and his walk rate has increased, never a welcome sign for a fastball-dominant reliever. But he’s still Josh Hader, and he put up a vintage Hader month in September. As bullpen toppers go, he’s one of the best. He’d have to be, facing the smallest possible lead against the scariest possible opponent, and in the pressure cooker of the playoffs to boot.

How did the Padres get to this situation that A.J. Preller perfectly outfitted the team for? It’s a long story, and one that wasn’t preordained. If a few early breaks had gone a different way, the Padres might have led by five. They might have trailed. That’s an inevitable fact of baseball. The margins are so slim, the teams so evenly matched from night to night, that no outcome is inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »