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Yesterday, the Diamondbacks introduced Mike Hazen as their new general manager and head of baseball operations, who is taking over for Dave Stewart after a two-year failed experiment in their front office. Hazen was most recently the GM in Boston, serving as Dave Dombrowski’s second-in-command, and has been an integral part of a Red Sox front office that built one of the best young cores in baseball. The Diamondbacks are hoping Hazen will lead them in that direction now, and allow them to build a sustainable winner in Arizona.

But before he can do that, Hazen and his staff will have to determine their course of action this winter, and whether the team is going to try and retool a roster that just lost 93 games or if he’s going to pivot away from the team’s attempt to contend in the short-term in favor of acquiring assets for the long-term. When asked about this at the press conference, Hazen demurred.

“I don’t have a defined view just yet,” Hazen said. “It would be irresponsible for me at this point to sort of say exactly how we’re going to attack the roster.

“We want to bring a championship to this city and state, but we also know that there’s going to be decisions that need to be made. We’ll have more concrete answers on that as we move through the offseason. We’ll see what the landscape is in the marketplace.”

That’s a nifty non-answer, but in reality, it’s also likely the correct one. It doesn’t really make sense to be committing to a certain path on your first day on the job, for one, but also, despite the dumpster fire that was the Diamondbacks 2016 season, it isn’t actually clear what the Diamondbacks should do this winter, and they probably do need to explore both paths.

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As the Blue Jays take the field in Toronto tonight, they’ll find themselves down two games to none in the ALCS, with Game 3 representing as close to a must-win game as you can get without actually facing elimination. Teams have come back from down 3-0 before, of course, so the Blue Jays aren’t definitively done if they can’t figure out how to win on Monday night, but having to win four straight games against any good team is a massive challenge. And the idea of winning four straight against Andrew Miller’s team seems downright impossible, because right now, Andrew Miller is basically the walking embodiment of the perfect relief pitcher.

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It’s safe to say that Dusty Baker is not exactly the most progressive manager in baseball. Baker has always been an old school guy, and relative to what is becoming the new normal, he’s definitely a traditionalist. So as we live-blogged game five of the NLDS last night, one of the common questions in the early innings is what mistake Baker would make that would cost his team the game. The expectation was set in advance; if the Nationals lost, Baker’s old-school philosophies would be part of the reason why.

Of course, the Nationals did lose, 4-3, in one of the most intense playoff games you’ll ever see. And as is the case in any one run loss, there’s always second guessing of decisions the next morning, wondering if things would have turned out differently if other choices would have been made. But in reality, Dusty Baker’s big expected mistake last night never came, and we shouldn’t blame him for last night’s loss.

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In a few hours, the Dodgers and Nationals are going to play for their seasons; one team will advance, one will go home. The Nationals are in a pretty good position, hosting the game in Washington while throwing their ace, Max Scherzer; it’s hard to ask for much more than that if you’re in an elimination game. The Dodgers used their ace in Game 4, however, so they’re going to be mixing and matching in order to try win this one.

While they haven’t officially announced anything, the team is expected to start Rich Hill. Given his health track record, however, and the fact that he’s going on three days rest, they’re probably not going to have him work too deep into the game. In fact, reading the tea leaves from Andy McCullough’s game preview, it sounds like the Dodgers are going into this game planning for something of a tandem start.

“We talked about Rich as an option, obviously,” Manager Dave Roberts said after the Dodgers’ 6-5 win on Tuesday. “But so is Julio, and how we want to strategize to win Game 5, we’re going to talk through it.”

…

The combination of Hill and Julio Urias is unorthodox, but it would reduce the chances of Washington’s top four hitters — Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, Jayson Werth and Daniel Murphy — from getting comfortable at the plate against either. Hitters tend to perform better when they have seen a pitcher more than once in a game. The Dodgers will try not to allow that to happen on Thursday.

If the Dodgers are serious about limiting Hill and Urias to one trip through the order, that would be something indeed; they’d be limiting themselves to getting likely six or seven outs from each pitcher, and would be relying on the rest of their bullpen to get the other ~13 outs, despite being worked pretty heavily in both games in Los Angeles. It would be the most aggressive kind of bullpen game we’ve been expecting so far in the playoffs, but unfortunately for the Dodgers, I’m not sure how well set up they are to actually pull it off.

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This probably has to be said up front; Bruce Bochy has historically done a masterful job of running his pitching staff in the postseason. It’s one of the main reasons — well, along with Madison Bumgarner anyway — that he has three world series championships, and is almost certainly going into the Hall of Fame someday. Over the long run, I don’t think bullpen management has been a weakness of Bochy’s Giants.

But there’s one thing about this Giants second half bullpen meltdown that I’ve never really been able to understand, or seen explained with solid reasoning. And this thing was only magnified during the season-ending bullpen meltdown in the ninth inning of the NLDS; why doesn’t Bochy trust Will Smith?

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The Dodgers, of course, announced that they’re going with Kershaw today. But I’d still have gone the other way.

It’s becoming an October tradition; as the Dodgers head into game four of the NLDS, they are considering whether to bring back Clayton Kershaw on three days rest. As I sat down to talk about their decision on who to pitch today, I realized this is the third time in four years we’ve written this same post.

Back in 2013, Jeff Sullivan wrote about the decision between starting Kershaw or Ricky Nolasco. In 2014, Jeff again wrote about the call to pick Kershaw over Dan Haren. Last year, apparently we got distracted by Chase Utley’s slide or something, because we didn’t appear to write about the Dodgers using Kershaw in game four of the series against the Mets, but that happened too; the Dodgers have thrown Kershaw in games one and four of the division series three straight years, bringing him back on three days rest each time.

This year, though, I think they should do it differently. I think they should start Julio Urias today.

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In a few hours, the Red Sox play their first win-or-go-home game of the season. And with their season on the line, they’re handing the ball to Clay Buchholz.

Yes, the same Clay Buchholz who posted a 4.78 ERA, 5.06 FIP, and 5.32 xFIP this season while getting bounced from the rotation. Buchholz is getting the ball in large part because of how he finished the season, as he ran a 2.86 ERA over his final 10 appearances. But despite some talk of changes in his approach, the Red Sox should not fall victim to overweighting recent performance; most of the evidence suggests that Buchholz is still not a very good pitcher, and shouldn’t be allowed to dig the team any kind of hole this afternoon.

Even if we accept the arbitrary endpoints that allow a focus on just his 10 most recent appearances, Buchholz actually wasn’t even that good down the stretch. Here’s his line from those 10 outings, compared to his 27 appearances prior to that stretch.

The walks are down a little bit, the strikeouts are up a little bit, and overall, Buchholz did pitch better in the last 10 games than he did at the start of the year. But really, there’s one column there driving almost all of the difference: his home run rate got cut in half, which led to him stranding a bunch of runners. John Farrell even states this, without using numbers, in his assessment of Buchholz’s improvement.

“Where he was burnt earlier in the season by the big inning, he’s avoided the big inning by virtue of not allowing multiple runners inside of a given inning then a big blow, a three-run homer or something like that, has followed.

The argument for Buchholz as a pitcher worthy of starting an elimination game relies on buying into six weeks of home-run suppression; outside of the 7% HR/FB ratio he put up in those last 10 outings, he still didn’t really pitch all that well. And it’s not like Buchholz has a long history of running very low HR/FB rates; his career mark is 10%, just a tick below the league average over those years. His career FIP and xFIP are almost identical, so there just isn’t any real reason to think that Buchholz is now a guy who give up long fly-ball outs without giving up home runs.

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