They opened the roof. That’s the first thing you need to know about Game 2 of the NLDS between the Milwaukee Brewers and the San Diego Padres. Nobody had to worry about knocking the ball off a girder or a wire or a catwalk or a dangling chain of sausage links hanging from the ceiling. More importantly, nobody had to worry about the damn thing blowing off in the bottom of the ninth, when Jackson Chourio, one strike away from defeat, turned around a 101-mph Mason Miller fastball for a game-winning, two-RBI single. Against the most formidable reliever in baseball, after trailing since the fourth batter of the game, the Brewers turned water into, well, beer, beating the Padres 4-3 to take a 2-0 lead in the series. It marked the first time in more than a month that the Padres have lost two games in a row.

American Family Field presents quite a beautiful backdrop when it’s open to the sky and full of natural light. It feels vibrant and alive. It’s also not the friendliest place for hitters, who get to shift their worries from the roof to the shadows. The 3:09 PM local start time meant that when Logan Henderson threw the first pitch of the game, his shadow, already much longer than his six-foot-tall frame, stretched all the way across the mound and onto the infield grass toward third base. It twitched and wriggled as he went into his delivery, as if it believed this might be its chance to escape once and for all.

No player was more grateful for the open sky than Ty France, who on Saturday night experienced an even more unfriendly side of American Family Field. As you surely know by now, France flew out to deep left field by way of a ricochet off something or other up there by the roof. There’s some debate as to whether that ball would have both cleared the fence and stayed fair, but regardless, France certainly played like a man with a score to settle. He went 2-for-3 with two RBI singles and a hit-by-pitch, pushing his batting average this postseason to a respectable .487. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember that brief period of time when Tarik Skubal didn’t look like Tarik Skubal? In June, in his first three starts after returning from tiny-needle surgery, Skubal went 0-2 with a 4.96 ERA and a 5.86 FIP. He struck out as many batters as ever, but he just kept giving up home runs, and everyone whispered to their neighbors with alarm, “Maybe the needle wasn’t as tiny as we thought it was. Is it possible that it was just a regular needle with a good publicist?” Well, that period of time was shorter than you might remember. It was, in fact, just 12 days long. Over his final 16 starts, Skubal regained his form. He went 9-3 with a 2.36 ERA and a 2.14 FIP. Only once over that period did he allow even four runs in a start.

With Game 1 of the NLDS in the books, Skubal has extended that unhittable stretch to 17 starts. Under an oppressively hot midday sun in Los Angeles, the Dodgers quashed the Braves by a score of 5-3. The game started out looking like a pitcher’s duel, spent a few innings looking like it might be a rout, and ended up surprisingly close. All eight runs scored by way of the home run. Skubal was brilliant, striking out seven, walking two, and allowing two hits across six innings. At one point he retired 15 Braves in a row. The effort allowed him to lower his career postseason ERA of 2.04 even further. With a 1-0 series lead, the Dodgers have rounded into form, and the two-time defending champs look every bit the juggernaut we expected back in the spring. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the strong side of the bracket. This ain’t no Guardians-White Sox. They may not have been sanctified by the Bishop of Rome, but we’ve got a matchup between the Rays and the Yankees, the two best teams in the American League. Or, at least, the teams with the two best records. The Rays won 98 games, which gave them the best record in the American League by a whopping five-game margin. With 93 wins, the Yankees were the only team within 11 wins of the Rays! But according to both their BaseRuns and Pythagorean records, the Rays played above their heads and the Yankees are the better team.

The Rays won the season series, 7-6, but four of those 13 games took place very recently. In the penultimate series of the regular season, the Yankees took three of four from the Rays in the Bronx. Somehow, this is just the second time the Rays and Yankees have ever faced off in the playoffs. Tampa Bay beat New York, 3-2, in the 2020 ALDS. Gerrit Cole went 1-0 in two starts in the series, and Giancarlo Stanton batted .316 with four home runs. Aaron Judge knocked two homers of his own, but batted just .143. Yankees reliever Ryan Yarbrough pitched pretty well too, but he did so for the Rays. Anyway, that was six years ago in a season that just barely happened. So much for history.

In years past, we’ve hashed out and rehashed the great debate: Would you rather have a bye and risk the rust, or would you rather come off a series win, triumphant but unrested? This conversation has always been at least a little bit silly because it’s always better to take the bye; no one has ever lost a bye. Still, this year, it’s different. The Rays will be coming off five full days of rest. They could be rusty. But the Yankees won’t be tired. They got three days off before the Wild Card series, and they finished stomping a mudhole in the Red Sox on Wednesday night, giving them two full days off to recover. The entire bullpen is rested. Presumptive (read: 100% certain) AL Cy Young Cam Schlittler won’t pitch Game 1, but he’ll be on regular rest for Game 2 and a potential series-deciding Game 5. The offense that everyone was worried about just put up back-to-back nine-spots. Momentum may be a construct, but you’d still rather have it on your side, right? Read the rest of this entry »

When is an injury so bad that it requires time off? That depends on all sorts factors. How badly does it hurt? How badly does the team need that player’s production, and how much would playing through it inhibit that production? Would playing through it keep it from healing, exacerbate it, or lead to other injuries? How big is the drop-off between the injured player and whoever would be taking their place?

When is the right time to return from an injury? At any given time in the spring, summer, and fall, we can point to a dozen players whose performance is suffering as they return from an IL stint. Should they have spent more time on the shelf? Nobody knows this for sure, least of all those of us who are watching from the outside. Players see their performance drop off when they return from injuries all the time. Sometimes they returned too early, but sometimes no amount of rest or recuperation would have allowed them to avoid it. Maybe it’s just the unavoidable cost of catching back up to game speed.

Late on the evening of September 25, after the Orioles’ disappointing 2026 season had come to its abrupt, merciful end, Gunnar Henderson revealed to reporters that he’d spent half of it playing through a right wrist injury. “He declined to share the exact details,” wrote The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, “but said he will not require any surgery.” Even without details, we can draw some obvious inferences. The injury was severe enough to linger for at least three months. That Henderson mentioned it at all indicates that the injury was significant enough to impair his performance, a notion supported by the fact that manager Craig Albernaz “said there were daily check-ins to assess his availability.” Read the rest of this entry »

Defensive metrics take a long time to stabilize. As such, I’ve been waiting for a few months to write this article. But the season is over. We’ve gotten as much information as we’re going to get, and Seiya Suzuki is still grading out as one of the best fielders in baseball. His 8 FRV is tied for 12th among outfielders, his 14 DRS is tied for seventh, and his 1.4 DRP ranks 33rd. To illustrate how surprising that is, let me show you what those numbers have looked like over the course of his MLB career:

Wait, sorry, that graph didn’t include the numbers for the 2026 season. That’s my bad. Let me just add them back in real quick:

Yeah, that’s much better. Suzuki certainly looks like a whole new defender out there. As is the case for many players, the three advanced defensive metrics have rarely agreed about Suzuki’s performance. DRP, by far the most conservative, has generally graded him as slightly above average, while Statcast has almost always been the low man. However, there are some general points of consensus here, the biggest being that Suzuki graded out very badly according to all three metrics last year, and then, in his age-31 season, experienced a miraculous reinvention. He’s been consistent, too. Statcast credits him with at least one fielding run in each month of the season. What is going on in right field at Wrigley? Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the nor’easter dumping rain up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the Cubs have traveled from Chicago to Boston to St. Petersburg and finally all the way across the country to San Diego in the past five days, but they don’t sound daunted by the challenge. “Just tell us where to play,” manager Craig Counsell told reporters on Friday. “We’ll show up and play.” Well, on Tuesday, the Padres and Cubs face off in the Wild Card Series between the National League’s top two non-division winners. Both teams have plenty of offense, a great defense, and some question marks on the mound. You’re playing in San Diego, Craig. Get yourself one of those burritos with French fries in it and get to the ballpark.

The other Craig – that would be Padres manager Craig Stammen – is in his first season skippering a major league club. Or any club, for that matter. You could view his inexperience as a liability, or you could view his long, recent playing career as a reliever as a tactical advantage for pulling the right bullpen strings in a short series. Either way, you should also probably get yourself a California-style burrito before the game, Other Craig. They’re so good.

The Padres look to be peaking at the right time. They went out and grabbed the first Wild Card spot, ending the season on a 17-3 run, with just enough of a cushion to line up their three best starters for the Wild Card series. But they’re a lot more than a team on a hot streak. At 41-18, they’ve had the best record in baseball since July 24. How long do you need to be playing like the best team in baseball before you simply are the best team in baseball? The Padres have some major concerns when it comes to pitching, but they’ve also got a couple of the little things that can make an outsized difference in a short series. Their rotation is front-loaded. They’ve got an all-world closer. They’re one of the better baserunning and base stealing teams in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Back on June 23, I wrote an article called “What’s Going on With Wan Steven Kwan?” A week later, Kwan responded, “Nothing!” Well, he said it with his bat, anyway. On July 1, he went 1-for-2 with a triple, then 1-for-2 with two walks the next day, and then he hit another triple two days after that. Since July 1, Kwan is batting .350 with more walks than strikeouts for a 154 wRC+. My deep dive into Kwan’s troubles was an attempt to answer a question from a reader named Kevin, and now that Kwan is back on top again, Kevin has written back to ask what’s changed. I wanted to write about it, but this graph gave me pause.

Kwan got unbelievably hot at the beginning of July, and then he spent the next two months and change slowly cooling off. Every batter’s rolling wRC+ graph is full of ups and downs, but this one made me a bit wary. Zack Meisel had written a story about the turnaround for The Athletic back on September 1. In it, Kwan described poring over journal entries from previous slumps looking for the right attitude adjustment to get him back on track. And then over the next 12 games, Kwan ran a wRC+ of 80 and struck out twice as often as he walked. That’s the danger of writing about a hot streak. But over Kwan’s most recent 10 games, he’s back on top with a 178 wRC+, and honestly, I’m still curious. Has he fixed whatever was wrong? Is this just about BABIP? I really don’t know, Kevin. I’m writing this introduction before I dig into the numbers so that we can go on a journey of discovery together. Let’s away. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I jumped the gun by a year. Last year, I got excited that the Homerless Qualifier Club might be reopening. Nick Allen was playing every day for the Braves, and Nick Allen’s approach to impacting the baseball is sort of like Atticus Finch’s approach to parenting: It’s composed almost entirely of occasional, gentle nudges in the right direction. If Allen could just get enough plate appearances, I figured, he’d qualify for the batting title without a single home run to his name, making him just the second new member since 2012. The problem was that Allen didn’t just lack punch; he couldn’t get on base at all. The Braves batted him last and pinch-hit for him every chance they got, then gave his spot to waiver wire pickup Ha-Seong Kim. Allen never homered, but he ended up 86 plate appearances short of qualifying. This year is different. This year it’s in the bag. Chandler Simpson has already qualified for the batting title, and he is about to finish the season without a single home run.

As was the case for Allen, the reason that the Homerless Qualifier Club has been closed for business for so long is that it’s really hard for a regular baseball player to be playable without any power whatsoever. Allen’s a defensive specialist whose game has never been built around the home run ball, but he still needs some base level of power to keep his offense from sinking the entire profile. Think of your favorite contact hitter – Luis Arraez, Steven Kwan, Nico Hoerner – these guys are much better at avoiding strikeouts than Allen, and they still hit the ball hard enough to rack up a bunch of doubles and at least a handful of home runs a year. Meager though it is, if that power production were to disappear, their offense would simply be too much of a deficit to overcome. They’d stop getting enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. That’s why the pipeline has dried up.

This season, Allen has just 161 plate appearances with the Astros, but he’s betrayed us to the tune of a whopping three home runs. Stretch that over 500 plate appearances and he’s nearly in double digits. My point is that although these are extreme examples of contact hitters, they still have plenty in common with the rest of the league. They are still looking to drive the ball, at the very least, over the infield. Simpson may as well be playing a different sport. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you see Chase Meidroth’s 2026 season coming? If you expected Meidroth to launch 15 home runs, to put up a four-win season, to be a top-30 position player, then by all means, stand up and take a bow, invest in some Powerball tickets, try your hand at writing horoscopes.

When he debuted last year, patience was his calling card. No qualified batter swung less often at pitches in the zone, and because he had the fifth-lowest bat speed, pitchers threw the ball over the plate and invited him do his worst. I mean that almost literally. When Meidroth swung at a pitch in the zone, he ran a .278 wOBA, which ranked 293rd out of 308 batters (minimum 1,000 total pitches seen). When those swings resulted in balls in play, his .295 wOBA ranked 229th out of the 237 (minimum 250 BIP). But let me share with you some wisdom courtesy of C.S. Lewis: “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

What a sad world it would be if everybody just repeated their rookie season until they retired, if nominative determinism (or, in the case of most ballplayers named Chase, the opposite) were real. Meidroth came into spring training with a new dream. “Just shortening up my swing a little bit,” he told James Fegan for Sox Machine back in February. “Just shortening up the leg kick a little bit. It got a little high last year.” He also opened up his stance and moved up in the box. The goal, Chicago’s hitting coaches explained, was not necessarily to make Meidroth’s already extremely short stroke even shorter, but to help him put the ball in the air a bit more often. The dream came true. Meidroth is hitting more fly balls and line drives and fewer groundballs and popups. This year, he has exactly tripled his 2025 total of five home runs, he’s exactly doubled his .067 ISO to .134, and he’s, well, OK, he’s improved his 87 wRC+ all the way to 112, which is a huge deal, but only an increase of 28.736%. I never promised you all the numbers would be round.

The weird thing is that Meidroth is both swinging the bat and hitting the ball softer than ever. His bat speed dropped from 67.4 mph to 66.9 mph, which moved him from the fifth- to fourth-lowest qualifier. His fast-swing rate dropped from 1.6% to 1.1%. His average and 90th-percentile exit velocities dropped, as did his hard-hit rate. And yet he’s literally doubled his ISO. Read the rest of this entry »

Bobby Witt Jr. is having a down year. He’s running his worst batting line in three seasons. He’s in danger of missing the 20-homer threshold for the first time in his career. A lower back injury in July will also limit him to a career low in games played. Put it together, and Witt is on pace to put up his the lowest WAR total since his 5.9-win 2023 campaign. Oh, and he also grabbed hold of the American League lead in WAR back in July and still hasn’t relinquished it. A down year by Bobby Witt Jr.’s standards is still good enough to make him a deserving MVP.

I don’t know if Witt is going to win his first MVP this year. Ours is the only flavor of WAR in which he leads the AL, and he leads by just a quarter of a win. He ranks third by Baseball Reference’s rWAR and is eighth by Baseball Prospectus’ WARP. Yordan Alvarez leads all of baseball in WARP because he’s hitting like, well, Yordan Alvarez and staying healthy like, well, someone other than Yordan Alvarez. Cam Schlittler leads the AL in Baseball Reference WAR, and he’s been so dominant that he deserves consideration for the Cy Young-MVP combo — if only he’d pitched just 23 fewer innings last year, he could’ve gone for the trifecta with Rookie of the Year. Kevin McGonigle has played like an MVP from the moment he arrived in Detroit, and Junior Caminero has surpassed 40 home runs for the second season in a row as a 23-year-old. All of these guys have a case, and they aren’t the only ones who merit inclusion in the discussion:

Read the rest of this entry »