October hasn’t been the kindest month to Cody Bellinger. Though he’s established himself as one of the game’s top sluggers while helping the Dodgers reach the World Series in three of his four major league seasons, and collected some big postseason hits here and there, his overall postseason numbers have generally fallen far short of what he’s done during the regular season. Even after a disappointing, abbreviated 2020 campaign, he’s had his ups and downs this fall, though he finished the NLCS on just about the highest possible note, clubbing a no-doubt solo home run that capped the Dodgers’ Game 7 comeback and sent them to a pennant:

My goodness. Bellinger walked towards first base so slowly and indirectly while admiring the blast that it seemed like he might make a stop to feed the parking meter or grab a hot dog — no extra mustard needed. Statcast measured the exit velocity on that one at 107.4 mph but estimated its distance at “only” 400 feet, the byproduct of its steep 33-degree launch angle.

Bellinger is now hitting .250/.365/.545 in 52 plate appearances during this postseason, good for a 141 wRC+ and a reasonable approximation for his regular season career line (.273/.364/.547, 137 wRC+). It’s a far cry better than the totality of his 2017-20 postseason numbers (.196/.269/.380, 73 wRC+), that’s for sure. Read the rest of this entry »

On a Rays team that’s long on talent but short on household names, Randy Arozarena has carved out an identity with a postseason for the ages. The 25-year-old left fielder, who has just 99 regular season plate appearances in his brief career, became the first rookie position player to win a League Championship Series MVP award via his four-homer, nine-hit performance against the Astros. He now has seven homers in this postseason, one short of a record, not to mention a prominent place on the leaderboards of a few other categories.

Arozarena’s final homer of the ALCS was a two-run first-inning shot off Lance McCullers Jr. in Game 7, giving the Rays a lead that they would not relinquish. That followed his game-tying solo homer off Framber Valdez in the fourth inning of Game 1, his two-run shot off Zack Greinke in the fourth inning of Game 4, and his solo dinger off Enoli Paredes in the fifth inning of Game 5. Here’s the supercut:

For the series, Arozarena collected five other hits as well, and batted .321/.367/.786 while driving in six runs. In winning LCS MVP honors, he joined the Orioles’ Mike Boddicker (1983 ALCS), the Marlins’ Livan Hernandez (1997 NCS), and the Cardinals’ Michael Wacha (2013 NLCS) — all pitchers — as the only rookies to win the award; Hernandez also won the World Series MVP award, lest Arozarena need to set another goal. They don’t give Division Series MVP awards, but his .421/.476/.895 showing with three home runs against the Yankees, and for that matter his .500/.556/1.000 performance in the Wild Card Series against the Blue Jays, might have garnered him additional hardware. The dude is en fuego, hitting a combined .382/.433/.855 through 60 postseason plate appearances, with 11 of his 21 hits going for extra bases (three doubles, one triple, seven homers). He’s tied for fourth in homers in a single postseason:

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On a Braves team that’s now one win away from its first trip to the World Series since 1999, Freddie Freeman has gotten the lion’s share of the attention, at least on the offensive side. This is quite understandable given his MVP-caliber season as well as the big hits he’s come up with thus far in the playoffs, including his homers in Games 1 and 2 of the NLCS against the Dodgers. While Marcell Ozuna’s bat spoke nearly as loudly during the regular season, the 29-year-old slugger had scuffled in the postseason prior to Thursday night’s Game 4, when he snapped out of an 0-for-9 skid with a four-hit, four-RBI night that included a trio of timely extra-base hits, two of them homers.

Ozuna’s first home run came in the fourth inning at a time when the Braves trailed 1-0. Dodgers starter Clayton Kershaw had given up some loud contact to that point, but the four hard-hit balls he’d surrendered (exit velocities of 95 mph or higher) all had launch angles of 11 degrees or lower, including the 104.4-mph grounder that Ozuna hit for an inning-ending double play and a 101.1-mph Freeman liner that preceded Ozuna’s second turn at the plate. This time, Ozuna elevated a slider for a towering blast that left the bat at 108.6 mph and traveled an estimated 422 feet:

Whew. The down-and-in slider wasn’t a horrible pitch from Kershaw; in just about every Statcast zone-based breakdown for this season, Ozuna’s actual and expected stats for that area (zone 7) were his lowest. For example: Read the rest of this entry »

Though undersized by baseball standards — just 5-foot-7 and 160 pounds — Joe Morgan stands tall in baseball history. As the second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds during his prime (1972-79), he helped elevate an already-strong team that starred the more famous Pete Rose and Johnny Bench into a powerhouse for the ages, earning back-to-back NL MVP honors on the Big Red Machine’s 1975 and ’76 championship teams. Over the course of a 22-year major league career (1963-84) with five franchises, Morgan made 10 All-Star teams, won five Gold Gloves, and built a case as the best second baseman in the game’s history, less by attaining traditional milestones and awards than by standing out in ways that became more apparent with advanced statistics. In 1990, he was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility; he would leave a stamp on that institution later in life as well.

Morgan died at home on Sunday in Danville, California at the age of 77. According to a family spokesman, the cause was nonspecified polyneuropathy, a condition that affects the peripheral nerves of the body. He had endured other health woes in recent years, having received a bone marrow transplant in 2016. He’s the sixth Hall of Famer to die this year, after Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, and Whitey Ford, the last two of whom passed away earlier this month. He’s also the third member of the late 1960s and early ’70s Astros to die in 2020, after Jimmy Wynn and Bob Watson. It’s enough to make any baseball fan cry, “Uncle.”

Justifiably hailed as “the game’s most complete player” in a 1976 Sports Illustrated cover story, Morgan had more tools in his belt than the standard five, including an off-the-charts baseball IQ that earned him the nickname of “The Little General,” and, by his own admission, a brand of arrogance. As he told Mark Mulvoy in that SI feature, “To be a star, to stay a star, I think you’ve got to have a certain air of arrogance about you, a cockiness, a swagger on the field that says, ‘I can do this, and you can’t stop me.'”

Morgan hit .271/.392/.427 (132 OPS+) for his career, racking up 2,517 hits, 268 home runs, and, thanks to his keen batting eye and compact strike zone, 1,815 walks (and just 1,015 strikeouts). His walk total ranks fifth all-time, while the 266 homers he hit as a second baseman rank fourth. While he only posted batting averages above .300 in his two MVP seasons, and never finished higher than fourth in that category, he drew at least 100 walks in a season eight times, and topped a .400 on-base percentage eight times as well, leading the league in four of those years, and finishing among the top 10 11 times. He also stole 689 bases, a total that ranks 11th; of his 11 times cracking the league’s top 10 in that category, seven times he ranked second, five of those behind Brock. His 81.0% success rate ranks 17th among players with at least 300 attempts since 1951 (caught stealing data was not consistently available earlier), but fifth among those with 600 ore more attempts. Read the rest of this entry »

The ALCS between the Rays and Astros and the NLCS between the Dodgers and Braves have both produced tight, dramatic contests thus far, full of home runs and low scoring. As such, it’s a good time to check in on some of the trends that defined the brief 2020 season, and how they compare to what we’ve seen in the postseason, and how this October compares to recent regular and postseasons.

For starters, well, there are the starters. As I noted just two weeks into the abbreviated regular season, the length of the average start had fallen below five innings, and while it rose slightly over the remainder of the 2020 campaign, it still finished below five. Updating the table I included with that piece:

The year-to-year drop in innings per start was the largest we’ve seen in this span, and indeed the largest we’ve seen in the Wild Card era, if not longer. Granted, it was a short season, with a short ramp-up, expanded rosters, as well as a ton of seven-inning doubleheaders, something we’ve never seen at the major league level before, but that wasn’t really factor when I checked in on the first two weeks; I used data through August 5, at which point only one seven-inning doubleheader had been played.

Anyway, through this year’s Wild Card and Division Series, starting pitcher workloads decreased even further:

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He was born in Manhattan and raised in Queens, but it was in the Bronx where Edward Charles Ford made his name — “Whitey,” just one of several colorful nicknames — as the most successful pitcher in Yankees history. Amid the team’s longest run of American League dominance, the street-wise, fair-haired southpaw set several franchise records during his 1950-67 run, and carved a spot among the league’s elite, making 10 All-Star teams, leading the American League in pitching triple crown categories five times, and winning a Cy Young award. A near-ubiquitous presence in October, he also set numerous World Series records that still stand and are probably unbreakable given the expansion of the postseason field; he pitched in 11 World Series, six on the winning side, and his count would have been even higher if not for a two-year military stint. In 1974, he was elected to the Hall of Fame alongside teammate and longtime friend Mickey Mantle.

Ford died on October 8 at his home in Long Island. He was 91 years old, and had been suffering the effect of Alzheimer’s disease in recent years. He was the second-oldest surviving Hall of Famer at the time of his death, with Tommy Lasorda the oldest. He’s the fifth Hall of Famer to pass away in 2020, after Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, and Bob Gibson, and as I write this, news of the death of a sixth, Joe Morgan, has just been reported. It’s been a very tough year for baseball legends.

Standing just 5-foot-10 and 180 pounds, Ford measures up physically as the shortest of the post-World War II pitchers elected to the Hall, but what he lacked in brawn, he made up for in brains. The prototypical crafty lefty, Ford “delivered his assortment of breaking stuff (including a devastating spitball, enemy batters claimed) and inside fastballs with commanding intelligence,” wrote Roger Angell in a 1989 New Yorker piece. “He was brusque and imperturbable on the mound — the Chairman of the Board — and light-hearted in the clubhouse. Say ‘Whitey Ford‘ to a fan over forty-five and east of Altoona, and the sun will come out.”

“He never throws a pitch without a purpose,” said pitching coach Johnny Sain in 1961, Ford’s Cy Young-winning season and his biggest one statistically. “He’s always bearing down, never careless.”

“Whitey, you never saw him in a bad mood,” said former teammate Roy White on the occasion of Ford’s 90th birthday. “He always had a smile on his face. Good at a joke, a funny guy.”

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By blowing out the Padres to sweep the Division Series and advance to the National League Championship Series against the Braves, the Dodgers were able to skirt the matter, but by now it’s apparent that for as strong as they have looked thus far in the postseason, they have a closer problem. Manager Dave Roberts has spent the past four weeks limiting Kenley Jansen’s exposure, even in save situations, and in Game 2 of the series, had to go so far as to pull the 33-year-old three-time All-Star because things were getting out of hand; in the end, the Dodgers barely escaped that game with a 6-5 victory. Because he had pitched two days in a row, Jansen was deemed unavailable for Game 3, but even with a vote of confidence, the question of how much longer he’ll be the automatic choice to shut the door will linger.

In the grand scheme, Jansen is an incredible success story, a Curaçao-born converted catcher who spent his first eight major league seasons utterly dominating hitters; for the 2010-17 span, he struck out 40.1%, walked 6.8%, and posted a 2.08 ERA and 1.84 FIP, numbers that put him on the same tier as Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel and nobody else as far as sustained success for the period. His recent seasons have been rocky, however. In 2018, he posted career worsts in ERA and FIP (3.01 and 4.03) in a season interrupted by a bout of atrial fibrillation and then issues finding the right level of medication; in late November, he underwent an ablation procedure. In 2019, as his velocity continued to wane, he set new career worsts with a 3.71 ERA and eight blown saves, three more than he had in the previous two seasons combined.

Jansen reported late to summer camp due to a positive test for COVID-19, but was ready in time to start the season, and in fact pitched well into early September. In his first 17 innings, he posted a 1.04 ERA and 3.01 FIP, with a 35.8% strikeout rate — higher than it had been since 2017 — while converting 10 out of 11 save chances. Then came an unsettling pair of outings. On September 8 against the Diamondbacks, he entered with two outs in the ninth inning of a tie game, escaped via a weird stolen base-error-baserunning blunder sequence by Tim Locastro, and after the Dodgers scored four runs in the top of the 10th, gave three back in the bottom of the inning before getting the final out. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees lost to the Rays for the second night in a row on Wednesday night to fall behind in the Division Series, two games to one, but Giancarlo Stanton continued his rampage. The 30-year-old slugger, who was limited to just 23 games this year due to a Grade 1 left hamstring strain, has now homered in all five of the Yankees’ postseason games, with a consecutive games steak that’s one short of the record.

Stanton’s latest blast, his sixth of the postseason, came in the eighth inning off Shane McClanahan, a 23-year-old lefty who in Game 1 became the first pitcher in major league history to debut in the postseason without having pitched in a regular season game. He got out of that one unscathed, but not so on Wednesday:

The homer, Stanton’s second hit of the night, came with a man on base and trimmed the Rays’ lead to 8-4, but the Yankees could draw no closer. To date, they’ve scored 18 runs in the Division Series, 10 of which have been driven in by Stanton with his four homers. He broke open Game 1 with a ninth-inning grand slam off John Curtiss, extending a 5-3 lead to 9-3:

Stanton followed that up with a pair of homers off Tyler Glasnow in Game 2, first with a game-tying opposite field liner in the second inning, and then a three-run blast — and I do mean blast — in the fourth, which cut a 5-1 lead to 5-4, though the Rays eventually pulled away for a 7-5 win:

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Bob Gibson, who died of pancreatic cancer on Friday, October 2 — the fourth Hall of Famer to die this year, after Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, and former teammate Lou Brock — was as tough and intense as they came. In 1967, about midway through his 17-year run with the Cardinals (1959-75), he was hit on the right shin by a Roberto Clemente liner. He pitched to three more batters before his already-cracked fibula snapped, sending him to the disabled list for over seven weeks. In the 13 months following his return, he was as dominant as any pitcher since the dead ball era, a run that included a 1.12 ERA during the 1968 regular season, still the lowest of any qualifier since 1914.

The indomitable Gibson possessed a mental toughness as well, one founded in a reserve of self-confidence that was the equal of his 95-mile-an-hour fastball and menacing glare. He dealt in intimidation, asserting his ownership of the inside corner of the plate and taking pride in his ability to “mess with a batter’s head without letting him into mine.” In his 1992 autobiography, Stranger to the Game, he described his repertoire: “I actually used about nine pitches — two different fastballs, two sliders, a curve, a change-up, knockdown, brushback, and hit-batsman.”

“He’d knock down his own grandmother if she dared to challenge him,” Hank Aaron once counseled teammate Dusty Baker. In one oft-told story, Gibson plunked former roommate Bill White after he was traded from the Cardinals to the Phillies:

Bob Gibson on hitting his friend Bill White. pic.twitter.com/6jxLF2MB5e

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 3, 2020

“I wanted to own the outside part of the plate. And the only reason you throw in here is to keep a guy from going out there,” said Gibson. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres and Dodgers submitted their rosters for the Division Series on Tuesday morning, a formality for most postseason series but one that this time around carried considerable intrigue. As was hinted by multiple reports in the 24 hours leading up to the deadline, the team has indeed included Mike Clevinger, who has pitched just one inning since September 13 due to issues with his biceps and elbow and who was left off the Wild Card Series roster, and furthermore, they have tabbed him to start Game 1. Dinelson Lamet, who similarly left his September 25 start with tightness in his biceps and missed the Wild Card Series, was not included.

To review: after throwing seven innings of two-hit shutout ball on September 13 against the Giants, Clevinger was scratched from his turn five days later against the Mariners due to soreness in his right biceps. After the team and the 29-year-old righty were reassured by a bullpen session on September 21, he started against the Angels two days later, and pitched a 1-2-3 first inning, striking out both David Fletcher and Mike Trout, but his velocity was down a bit, and he didn’t return for the second inning. The Padres said his biceps was bothering him again, and two days later, they revealed that he had been diagnosed with posterior elbow impingement (a side effect of inflammation) and given a cortisone shot.

Clevinger resumed playing catch on September 28 and then threw a 23-pitch bullpen session the next day, but was left off the Wild Card Series roster. After a higher-intensity bullpen session on Sunday, the Padres sounded notes of optimism that made their way into a handful of tweets suggesting he was likely to be added and to start Game 1. That is indeed the case. Read the rest of this entry »