Last week, the Angels announced that they had signed catcher Travis d’Arnaud to a two-year deal. I was on vacation at the time and I didn’t hear about the move until later. Truthfully, I didn’t think about it too much once I did hear about it. However, I heard immediately about what happened on Sunday, and when I did my ears perked right up. Deep within a Tampa Bay Times article about the Rays’ housing crisis, Marc Topkin buried a gem: “The Rays had interest in” d’Arnaud. Why is that minor detail so consequential? Because it means that We Tried season is officially underway. For the uninitiated, We Tried is what teams sometimes tell their beat reporters after a free agent they coveted signs with another team. The beat reporters dutifully report this retrospective interest to their readers. It’s a bizarre ritual, but it’s also a lot of fun (unless you were a fan of the Mets during the Wilpon Era, in which case I apologize for not including a trigger warning at the top of this article).

Only one team gets to sign each free agent, but every team is free to announce publicly that they wanted that free agent and to do so in whatever language they choose. The Phillies were reportedly in on Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The Red Sox had interest in Kodai Senga. Topkin’s report included the tidbit that d’Arnaud didn’t sign with the Rays because he “supposedly wanted to get back to his native southern California.” Frankly, there’s no reason to limit this to baseball teams. Anybody can do it. For example, I can officially report that I was interested in Michael Wacha. Unfortunately, he decided to return to the Royals for several million dollars before I had time to make my opening offer of $35, unlimited soda from the vending machine, and two of those really big pumpkins you see at the state fair.

“Plans are real things and not experience,” wrote John Steinbeck. “A rich life is rich in plans. If they don’t come off, they are still a little bit realized.” MLB front offices agree with him. Organizations normally go to absurd lengths in order to keep their best-laid plans secret, but once those plans gang agley, they’re more than happy to make sure that the public awards partial credit for them. The move carries no real risk. These reports almost never indicate the name of the executive who made the claim, and even if the claim is untrue, the free agent in question usually has little reason to refute it.

Teams often have legitimate reasons for announcing to the world that they were in on a free agent. First of all, it might simply be the truth, and telling the truth is generally a good thing. It could be a signal to your fans or your current players that you’re really going for it and that good times are coming. It could be a signal to other free agents that you’re open for business. Unfortunately, teams also have plenty of shadier reasons. A team might just say it to make themselves appear more relevant than they really are. Sometimes it’s just a matter of feeding a reporter harmless information in order to keep greasing the skids of a transactional relationship. Sometimes teams want to make a player look bad, or to not-so-subtly intimate that the team that signed them overpaid.

There’s no limit to the number of ways to announce that you tried. You can say that you had interest in a player, that you met with them, that you had talks, that you were in on them, that you were involved, that you were close to a deal, that you couldn’t agree to terms. As the Rays did with d’Aarnaud, you can even provide a reason behind the player’s decision that conveniently absolves you of responsibility. However you couch things, the message is the same: We tried. We failed. We alerted the press because we wanted the whole world to know about our failure. That’s one particularly weird facet of this practice. How often do you hear uber-competitive front office types announce to the public at large that they tried and failed at anything? They’ll only do so when it might also mean making them look good (or making someone else look bad).

Over at Jon Becker’s indispensable Free Agent Matrices, you can find a color-coded spreadsheet that breaks down every team’s interest level in every free agent using 11 different categories. And that’s just one tab. The Matrix is – and I say this with nothing but admiration – a monument to the absurdity of the game we love and a work of absolute madness. Remember the movie Dave, when Dave calls his friend Murray into the White House to eat bratwurst and find $650 million in the federal budget? After perusing the 16 different tabs of the Matrices, I genuinely believe that Becker could balance the budget and fix the deficit in one afternoon even without the bratwurst.

So here’s what I propose: We create a We Tried Tracker. We’re going to steal Becker’s idea, but our matrix is solely for teams that announce that they tried to sign a player after the fact. Just like Becker, I’ve created a spreadsheet to keep tabs on everything. It’s simple now, but we’ll trick it out once things get going. Maybe we’ll color-code things too. Mauve could mean “We were involved.” Chartreuse could mean “We were interested, but we weren’t about to pay as much as those jabronis did.” Fuchsia could mean “We liked the cut of his jib, but the seas are rough out there and our boat is so little.”

I can’t do this alone. I’m sure I’ll miss a We Tried here or there, so I am officially asking for your help. If you see a We Tried, let me know on social media. If you don’t have social media, send me an email at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com. Yes, that’s a real email address and I will be monitoring it. Please be a part of the ridiculous thing that we are building. If and when the We Tried market really heats up, I’ll provide updates. We’ll keep a leaderboard of the teams and players that execute and incite the most We Trieds. We’ll document the different ways that teams express the sentiment. Together, we can make this offseason 10% more fun and at least 20% more stupid.

Update: Jon Becker graciously offered to fold the We Tried Tracker into the Free Agent Matrices, so the link above has been updated to take you deep into the heart of that now 17-tabbed spreadsheet.

As of 1:00 PM Eastern, Becker has yet to balance the federal budget.

Look, we’ve put it off long enough. It’s time to dig in and answer once and for all the question that everyone has been asking: We’re going to determine conclusively which catcher squishes himself into the tiniest little ball when he gets into his crouch. As you may know, catchers these days often go down on one knee or stick their whole leg out to the side in order to get lower to the ground, because getting lower helps them earn called strikes at the bottom of the zone. Those called strikes are important. What’s even more important, though, is how adorable it looks when a grown man in a suit of armor crouches down and gets all tucked into a teensy little ball like a five-year-old about to do a somersault. At long last, we’re going to do the only thing that makes sense and find out who’s best at turning their human body into a bony little sphere.

One hundred different players spent time at catcher in 2024, far too big a sample for me to investigate, so I ranked them by the number of pitches caught and looked at the top 40. I watched catchers setting up for sinkers and soft stuff at the bottom of the strike zone, where they’d be angling for a called strike and therefore trying to get themselves as low as possible. One-knee down stances were fine, but I threw out stances like the one below, where Adley Rutschman is no longer crouched in a ball. That’s the whole point of this exercise. If you’re not in a little ball, what are we even doing here? Read the rest of this entry »

Excuse us while we adjust our Top 50 Free Agents list. Coming off their first postseason appearance since 2015, the Royals have decided to keep the band together. On Sunday, the team announced that Michael Wacha has signed a three-year contract with a club option for a fourth year. Royals starters ran a 3.55 ERA in 2024, second only to the Mariners. Their 16.7 WAR trailed only the Braves. Now that Wacha is locked up long-term, Kansas City is set to return eight of the nine pitchers who started a game for the team during the 2024 season, led by ace Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo, and Wacha. The only exception is midseason acquisition Michael Lorenzen, who has entered free agency.

Wacha joined the Royals as a free agent before the 2024 season, inking a two-year, $32-million deal with a player opt-out. After running a 3.35 ERA and putting up a career-high 3.3 WAR, he was all but certain to exercise that opt-out. Instead, the 33-year-old is set to stay in Kansas City through at least 2027, his age-35 season. He’s also guaranteed to roughly double his career earnings to this point. The deal guarantees Wacha a minimum of $51 million and could be worth as much as $72 million. According to Mark Feinsand, Wacha will earn $18 million in the first two years. In 2027, he’ll have a base salary of $14 million, with performance bonuses that could push it to $18 million. If the Royals exercise their 2028 option, Wacha’s salary will feature the same 14/18 structure. If they decline the option, they’ll pay him a $1 million buyout. As Anne Rogers reported, five of the 10 largest contracts in franchise history now belong to players on the current roster. Wacha joins Lugo, Bobby Witt Jr., and Salvador Perez, who appears on the list twice thanks to two separate extensions, in that club.

The 2025 season will be the first since 2019 in which Wacha doesn’t pitch for a new team. He came up in 2013 and pitched for the Cardinals until 2019, then signed a succession of one-year deals with the Mets, Rays, and Red Sox. In 2023, Wacha signed with San Diego on a convoluted one-year deal that featured a club option for two more years (which the Padres declined), and player options for three more years (which Wacha declined). Read the rest of this entry »

Since the start of 2013, the Dodgers have been the best team in baseball. Over that 12-season span, they’ve won the National League West 11 times, made it to the NLCS seven times, and made it to the World Series four times. Their 1,215 regular season wins are 95 more than the team in second place, and their 64 postseason wins are also the most in the game. Despite all that, until late Wednesday night, they’d only managed one championship. What deserves to go down as one of the most impressive dynasties in the history of the game has been consistently denied that sort of recognition because of the delightful, infuriating unpredictability of playoff baseball. During an absolutely wild World Series Game 5, that unpredictability finally worked in the Dodgers’ favor.

This paragraph is just a list of things that happened during Game 5, so hold on tight. There was a brief no-hit bid from one starter and a disastrous, abortive start from the other. There were monster home runs, broken bat singles, seeing-eye grounders, great defensive plays, calamitous errors, inexcusable mental mistakes, a five-run inning, a five-run comeback, unearned runs, nearly catastrophic baserunning decisions, a catcher’s interference, a disengagement penalty, a surprisingly high number of sacrifice flies, a starter coming in to get the save on one-day’s rest, and, I’m absolutely certain, a bunch of other stuff that I’m too fried to remember. The only thing that didn’t happen, thankfully, was two ding dongs grabbing Mookie Betts. In the end, the Dodgers were the team left standing, securing a 7-6 victory over the Yankees at Yankee Stadium for their eighth World Series title in franchise history and the second in the past five years. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me be very clear: This doesn’t matter. What I’m about to show you is small sample size theater. It’s not statistically significant. It has no bearing on what’s actually going to happen in the World Series. We are here for a fun fact rather than a learning opportunity. Are we all in agreement? Okay, then let me show you something wild. Here are Aaron Judge’s career numbers against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So, uh, yeah. A .389 batting average is good. A slugging percentage in the thousands is good. A wRC+ over 300 is also good. Just in case you were wondering how good those numbers are, here’s a table that shows the best career numbers against the Dodgers, minimum 40 plate appearances, courtesy of our splits leaderboard. Read the rest of this entry »

You are allowed to be sad. You do not have to be psyched about watching two gigantic legacy franchises smash everything in their paths and then start smashing each other in the Godzilla vs. King Kong World Series. You can be bummed that both of the obvious favorites made the World Series even though you also would have been bummed if some undeserving Wild Card team had sneaked in. Anyone who expects you to be rational in your rooting interests is being completely unreasonable. This a matchup designed specifically for fans of hegemony. You do not have to be good. You are allowed to cheer for Team Asteroid.

That said, there’s still a lot to be excited about in this matchup. The World Series offers itself to your imagination. I doubt that there’s one person reading this who doesn’t enjoy watching Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, or Freddie Freeman play baseball, who doesn’t thrill at the thought of seeing them on the biggest stage the game has to offer. It’s just inconceivable that a baseball fan could be so hopelessly lost.

Judge hit 58 home runs this season. He led baseball with a 218 wRC+. That’s the seventh-best qualified offensive season since 1900. The only players who have topped it: Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. Judge is blasting his way onto Mount Rushmore in front of our eyes. Ohtani’s 181 wRC+ ranked second. While rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he put up the first 50-50 season in history. When you combine his offense and baserunning, Ohtani was worth 80.7 runs this season, the 35th-highest total ever. Over 11 postseason games, he has a .434 on-base percentage with 10 RBI and 12 runs scored, and somehow his offensive line is worse than it was during the regular season. Soto was right behind Ohtani at 180. In seven big-league seasons, he’s never once been as low as 40% better than average at the plate, and he is still getting better. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Gaddis didn’t want to throw Juan Soto a fastball. With two on and two out in the top of the 10th inning, Gaddis started the fearsome slugger with three sliders in a row: one for a ball, one for a called strike, and one for a foul ball. Behind in the count now, Soto fouled off two changeups and then another slider. This was supposed to work. Opponents batted .135 against the two pitches this season. They whiffed 30% of the time. Gaddis had clipped the edges of the zone with the nastiest stuff he could muster — some of the nastiest stuff in the game — and Soto simply refused to be beaten. Six soft pitches in a row, and Soto was hanging back and spoiling them at the last possible moment. Surely Gaddis could get away with one fastball, right? Right?

Asked after the game about his mindset during the at-bat, Soto said, “I was just saying to myself, ‘You’re all over that guy.’” Gaddis finally threw a fastball. Soto was all over it.

The four-seamer left Gaddis’ hand at 95.2 mph. It left Soto’s bat at 109.7. Soto didn’t leave the batter’s box at all. He watched as the high, arcing blast traveled 402 feet into the Cleveland night and center fielder Lane Thomas, head craned upward, drifted slowly back to the warning track. By the time Thomas had run out of real estate and the ball had landed safely in the standing room section just past the wall, Soto still hadn’t reached first base.

The blast gave the Yankees a 5-2 lead in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series and propelled them to their first World Series since 2009. The 15-year hiatus matches the gap between New York’s 1981 and 1996 appearances, the franchise’s longest stretch away from the Series since it first reached it in 1921. Asked what was going through his mind when Soto hit the go-ahead home run, general manager Brian Cashman said, “I was thanking God.”

New York’s 4-1 series victory belies a tight and thrilling series that featured multiple extra-inning games, riveting reversals, likely heroes, and extremely unlikely goats. For the third straight game, the Yankees and Guardians were tied during the ninth inning. For the second straight game, the Yankees scored the winning runs off Cleveland’s untouchable high-leverage relievers. The vaunted Guardians bullpen, asked to pitch 28 innings over five games, actually ran a slightly better ERA than New York’s relievers, but Cleveland simply needed more from them. As has so often been the case, the Guardians always looked to be a couple solid bats short.

With Tanner Bibee starting on three days’ rest, the Yankees threatened from the very beginning. Gleyber Torres started the game with a single through the right side, then Soto ripped a low liner into the right field gap and all the way to the wall. Third base coach Luis Rojas waved Torres around third, but a perfect relay from Jhonkensy Noel and Andrés Giménez nabbed him just inches before he was able to slide his left hand across the plate. Giménez’s 94-mph laser was on the money, without a hop.

It took an incredible relay to foil the gutsy send, but two batters into the game, it was still a questionable decision. Instead of second and third with no outs, the Yankees had Soto on second with one out. Bibee hit both Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm Jr. to load the bases, but managed to escape the inning unscathed. Just when it looked like the Yankees might run away with things and get to the overtaxed Cleveland bullpen early, Bibee settled down. He retired the next 10 Yankees in order and faced the minimum over the next four innings, consistently inducing chases on changeups and breaking pitches below the zone.

During the first inning, Carlos Rodón looked every bit as sharp as he had in Game 1, striking out two and retiring the side in order. He started the second inning with a strikeout as well, but the Naylor family slowed his roll. Josh Naylor tapped a grounder off the end of the bat to the abandoned left side of the infield, and the charging Chisholm had no shot at catching him at first base. Rodón struck out Noel to notch the second out, then Bo Naylor worked what would’ve been the at-bat of the game if not for what happened later. He pulled the 10th pitch he saw down the right field line for a line drive double. As Alex Speier noted, it was the first time a lefty had hit an extra-base hit off Rodón since July 28. More importantly, with a full count and two outs, Josh Naylor was running on the pitch, allowing him to score easily. Rodón still looked excellent, but after two Naylor hits and zero hard-hit balls, Cleveland led, 1-0.

The Guardians added an insurance run in the fifth inning, when Gimenéz shot a one-out double down the third base line and Steven Kwan singled him home two batters later. David Fry reached out and broke his bat on a changeup, lifting a popup into shallow left center. Judge, Alex Verdugo, and Anthony Volpe converged on the perfectly placed ball, which went in and out of the diving Judge’s glove. Verdugo tried to hurdle Judge, but somehow he didn’t actually leave the ground and was lucky not to injure the prostrate behemoth. Kwan, who had to wait and make sure the ball wasn’t caught, advanced to third, while Fry reached second with a double. Rodón’s reward for obliterating Fry’s bat on a ball that Statcast gave a 90% catch probability was a trip to the showers. He allowed five hits and two runs over 4 2/3 innings, striking out six and walking one. Four of the five hits came off the bats of Cleveland’s left-handed hitters. Rodón wouldn’t be in line for the loss for very long.

Bibee came out to pitch the top of the sixth, which also meant facing the top of the New York lineup for the third time. At the very least, we have to acknowledge that manager Stephen Vogt didn’t have an easy decision in front of him. The Guardians used nine total pitchers in Games 3 and 4 on Thursday and Friday, seven in each game. Five of them appeared in both games, including the team’s big four of Cade Smith, Tim Herrin, Emmanuel Clase, and Gaddis. The options were to leave in the cruising Bibee, to bring in an excellent but possibly gassed reliever for the third straight game, or to bring in a fresher but worse reliever. Vogt chose door number one, and while the call was defensible, well, we talk about the third time through the order penalty for a reason.

Torres reached out and yanked a soft liner over the third baseman for a single, and Soto ripped a more convincing single right back through the box. With runners on first and second, Judge sent a ball right to short for an easy 6-4-3 double play. That prompted a visit from the training staff, which seemed to be a fairly transparent ploy to buy Cade Smith some extra time to warm up, except Smith didn’t come in.

With Giancarlo Stanton at the plate, Bibee looked appropriately scared; he had no intention of attacking Stanton in the zone, even after he got the red-hot slugger to chase his first two pitches, a slider away and a changeup low. Bibee stuck with that approach and tried to tempt the hulking hitter with three soft pitches off the plate, but all three of them missed the zone by too much, and Stanton laid off. For the 3-2 pitch, Naylor set the target a solid 18 inches outside, but Bibee missed in a far worse spot, spinning a slider right over the middle and slightly down. Stanton did what Stanton does, shooting an absolute missile into the left field stands. The line drive left the bat at 117.5 mph and had a projected distance of 446 feet.

If you’re keeping score at home, on Bibee’s third time through the Yankees lineup, he faced four batters and allowed three hard-hit balls, two runs, and one lead. The game was knotted at two.

Vogt brought in Smith, who struck out Chisholm to end the inning. With the seal broken, the score tied, and his season in the balance, Vogt unleashed the rest of the big four. Despite pitching for the third day in a row, the quartet was effective. Smith got the first out of the seventh inning, then allowed a single, and Herrin finished the inning and pitched a perfect eighth. Clase worked a scoreless ninth, and Gaddis worked the fateful 10th. After Volpe lined out weakly to short to lead off the inning, Gaddis walked Austin Wells, then induced a groundball to second base from Verdugo. It was hit a bit too softly to get the double play, but in an attempt to get both outs anyway, Brayan Rocchio rushed through his part of the turn and botched the play altogether. Giménez’s feed clanked off the top of Rocchio’s glove, then bounced harmlessly to the turf. Everyone was safe.

Gaddis struck out Torres, bringing Soto to the plate. “He’s gonna do it,” said Chisholm after the game. “That’s the only thing going through my mind: He’s gonna do it.” None of the three runs Soto drove in was earned.

In the visitor’s dugout, Aaron Boone had the luxury of managing with the knowledge that his back wasn’t against the wall, and it allowed him to choose door number three. Fourteen relievers threw at least 10 relief innings for the Yankees this season. Among those 14, not one of Mark Leiter Jr., Tim Hill, or Jake Cousins – the first four out of the bullpen on Saturday – ranked higher than seventh in terms of leverage index when entering the game. The three combined for 3 1/3 scoreless innings, walking four Guardians but allowing just one hit. Boone finally called on Luke Weaver to pitch the ninth and 10th innings, and the slight star allowed just one hit before ending Cleveland’s season on a lazy fly ball that landed in the glove of – who else? – Juan Soto.

Stanton, who took home ALCS MVP honors, had four hits in the series, all of them home runs. In Game 5, Soto went 3-for-5 with four hard-hit balls, including a double and the series-winning homer, and raised his OPS in the series from 1.159 to 1.373. When asked why he was so sure Soto would deliver, Chisholm said simply, “Because it’s Juan Soto. Pay my guy! Pay Juan Soto!” The World Series starts on Friday, Soto’s 26th birthday.

This is the Carlos Rodón the Yankees thought they were getting. When Brian Cashman inked the lefty to a six-year, $162-million contract in December 2022, Rodón was coming off a two-season stretch in which he’d gone 27-13 with a 2.67 ERA, 2.42 FIP, and 12.23 strikeouts per nine innings. From 2021 to 2022, his 11.2 WAR ranked the third among all pitchers. But, like Samson of old, Rodón’s strength deserted him when his beard fell victim to the Yankees’ facial-hair policy. A forearm strain and a hamstring issue limited him to 14 starts in 2023, and when he did take the hill, he ran an unsightly 6.85 ERA. He was better this season, but he was by no means the ace the Bronx faithful were expecting.

That guy finally showed up on Monday night. Rodón powered the Yankees to a 5-2 victory over the Guardians in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, going six dominant innings and allowing one earned run on a solo homer. He blew his fastball by the Guardians and tempted them over and over again into chasing his slider as it burrowed into the dirt. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you have a favorite flavor of baseball? Maybe you enjoy a crisp, clean pitching duel, or maybe you prefer the luxurious mouthfeel of a decadent slugfest. But if what your tastebuds really crave is yelling – the sharp, mouth-puckering tartness of unbridled emotion and constant, heartfelt screaming audible through the on-field microphones – then Game 3 of the National League Divisional Series between the Dodgers and Padres was the contest for you. The San Diego fans screamed pretty much all game long and the players screamed whenever anything big happened, which is to say often.

With the series tied at one coming into the game, drama was the watchword of the day. The Padres had roasted the Dodgers, 10-2, in Game 2 on Sunday. The fans threw things at the San Diego players. Manny Machado threw a ball into the Los Angeles dugout. Dave Roberts asked the league office to investigate the throw, which, he said, was directed at him with “something behind it.” When Zapruder-esque video of the toss surfaced online, that something was revealed to be petulant but ultimately harmless. Tensions were high enough that before the game, the Padres released a statement reminding their fans that throwing things at the Dodgers is frowned upon. So rather than throw, the fans just screamed. For hours.

The game featured plenty of action, all of it stuffed into the span of one inning. The teams combined for 10 runs in the bottom of the second and the top of the third, and then, when it looked like the onslaught might never stop, the bats went cold and the game turned into a one-run nailbiter headlined by unhittable bullpens. If you had Walker Buehler surrendering six runs on your bingo card, congratulations on having a bingo card full of extremely probable outcomes. If you had him getting through five innings, then you lucked out. But if you somehow had both of those outcomes, you should probably upgrade from bingo to the Mega Millions, because fortune is smiling upon you. Meanwhile, the Padres started Michael King, who ran a 2.95 ERA this season and threw seven scoreless innings in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series. What looked for all the world like the world’s most lopsided pitching matchup ended up as very nearly a draw.

In the end, the Padres pulled out a 6-5 victory, and they now have a chance to end the Dodgers’ season on Wednesday night. If they do, it will mark the third straight time that the Dodgers have won the division but failed to make it to the League Championship Series. Read the rest of this entry »

They played nine innings in Cleveland on Saturday afternoon. They really did, a whole baseball game’s worth of innings, but Game 1 of the American League Divisional Series between the Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Guardians was decided long before all that. The game wasn’t just over after the first inning; it was over before the Tigers had so much as pitched a third of a frame. It’s one of baseball’s quirks that we measure pitching performance in innings pitched, which is to say by the number of outs recorded. There are plenty of stats that make more sense if we use total batters faced as the denominator, and that’s before you think about the occasional outing in which the pitcher doesn’t record an out. Dividing by zero doesn’t really work, and on Saturday, no one was more acutely aware of that bleak mathematical reality than Tyler Holton, Detroit’s starter (or opener, or — maybe more accurately — sacrificial lamb), who had the first no-out outing of his short career.

Last week, A.J. Hinch described his pitching strategy as “Tarik Skubal tomorrow and pitching chaos the rest of the way.” With Skubal lined up to start Game 2, Saturday was a day for chaos. Holton ran a 2.19 ERA over 93 1/3 innings this season, putting up 1.4 WAR. He gave up just five total runs in the second half, and not all of them were earned. But his name didn’t even appear in Jake Mailhot’s series preview. I point that out not to malign Jake, but to emphasize the sheer volume of excellent Tigers relievers that both we and the Guardians need to keep track of in this series. There were so many that Detroit’s Game 1 starter (or opener, or losing pitcher) didn’t even rate a sentence.

One of the more depressing things about chaos theory is that it’s almost entirely devoted to explaining that what looks like chaos is actually just complexity. So much of the randomness, disorder, and inexplicability that we humans find so compelling can actually be explained in mathematical terms that make us want to repeatedly bang our foreheads against the nearest school desk. It’s all about understanding the initial conditions so that you can see how each action affected the system as a whole.

The initial conditions in Cleveland were lovely. It was bright and sunny, 68 degrees at game time. In Tanner Bibee, the Guardians had their ace on the mound, well rested and coming off a September in which he ran a 2.64 ERA. The last time he didn’t leave a game with more strikeouts than innings pitched was August 11. The Tigers, with Skubal lined up to pitch in Game 2 and 5, were starting out with house money. Hinch could organize his chaos just how he liked, and for the second game in a row, he led off with Holton.

Bibee had some ugly misses in the top of the first, letting his fastball sail way above the zone and to his arm side. It could have been nerves, but either way, he was able to locate his slider in the zone. Still, after he struck out Parker Meadows swinging on a changeup, Kerry Carpenter stayed back on a curveball and drove it up the middle for a line drive single, and for a moment it looked like Bibee’s wildness might end up costing Cleveland. Matt Vierling hit a soft chopper to second base for a fielder’s choice, moving Meadows to second, then Bibee hit Riley Greene in the front foot with a curveball, prompting an early mound visit from pitching coach Carl Willis and a brief infield huddle. Whatever Willis said worked just fine. Colt Keith lined out to left field to end the top of the first. It was the last time the Guardians would have anything to worry about.

In the bottom of the inning, Holton started Steven Kwan with sinker off the plate outside. That would be the high point of the day for the Tigers; a 1-0 count on Steven Kwan was as good as it got, the initial condition from which all ensuing calamities cascaded. Kwan ripped Holton’s second pitch, a sinker off the plate inside, off the top of the right field wall for a double, missing a homer by a foot or so. David Fry took Holton to a full count, then fouled off a cutter and a changeup before earning a walk.

With no outs and runners on first and second, superstar José Ramírez came to the plate. Things couldn’t have looked better for Cleveland, but their luck would only improve. Ramírez chopped the ball down the third base line, and the topspin seemed to confuse Zach McKinstry. What looked like a high but routine bounce completely flummoxed him. He just kind of whiffed on it, so handcuffed that he never made a real attempt to catch the ball or even get in front of it. Kwan came around to score on the error, and the Guardians had runners on second and third with no outs.

The Tigers brought their infield in, and their luck didn’t change. The left-handed Josh Naylor rolled over a sweeper, slipping a soft grounder neatly between the first and second basemen to score Fry. That was the end of Holton’s day. He threw 20 pitches and surrendered one hard-hit ball. He allowed three hits, one walk, and one batter to reach on an error. He did not retire a batter.

For the first time all year, Reese Olson entered the game as a reliever instead of a starter. Olson didn’t have Holton’s season, but he still managed a 3.53 ERA and 3.17 FIP over 22 starts, racking up 2.4 WAR in the process. The first postseason pitch of his career was a slider. It was also the first postseason pitch of Lane Thomas’s career. It brings me no joy to report that for the next few days, you will necessarily be hearing the phrase “Lane Train” more often than you would like to hear it, which – and I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here – is exactly zero times. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Thomas was sitting slider. He demolished the pitch, launching it 394 feet into left field to make it 5-0.

Remember, the Tigers had yet to record an out at this point. Four of those five runs belonged to Holton, making his ERA for the game four divided by zero times nine.

Olson eventually made his way out of the inning, and then a bunch of people started singing about colon cancer screenings. One of their neighbors was wielding hedge trimmers. He was finishing off a topiary of an anthropomorphic box in which you can mail a stool sample to the company that made the people start singing about their colons. The real CGI box just kind of stood there next to its horticultural doppelgänger, seemingly not at all surprised to be looking into its own eyes, only in the form of a bush. Somehow, it felt of a piece with the baseball that preceded it.

After that, Olson settled down beautifully. He pitched five innings, allowing just two more hits and a walk. Ty Madden would relieve him in the sixth, surrendering two more runs to make it 7-0 Guardians. That’s how the game would end. Despite a few more ugly misses in the early innings, Bibee would cruise through 4 1/3, surrendering just four hits and a walk while striking out six Tigers.

All season, Cleveland’s bullpen has been the opposite of chaos. Stephen Vogt’s crew has been running like clockwork, and that continued in Game 1. Cade Smith followed Bibee, striking out all four batters he faced. Tim Herrin struck out two more in the seventh, Hunter Gaddis worked a clean eighth, and Emmanuel Clase needed just eight pitches to shut the door in the ninth, giving the Guardians the victory and a 1-0 lead in the series.

You could argue that the Tigers needed this game much less than the Guardians. They’ve got Skubal going in Game 2, and he’s lined up for Game 5. They came into the game wanting to win, sure, but also thinking that they’d be happy to steal just one of out of their three potential chaos contests. However, after seeing how that went, the Tigers must be discouraged. Save for one pitch, they wasted a brilliant bulk-relief appearance from Olson, and their offense mustered just four hits while striking out 13 times. If chaos really is just unpredictability that can be unraveled if you math hard enough based on how things start, Detroit might need a new plan.