The pivotal and most crucial decision of Game 5 of the World Series was attended by a wave of boos, even as Dave Roberts got it right.

Amid the carnage and chaos at the end of Game 4 a scant 20 hours prior was the realization that the fulcrum of the series was now the left arm of Clayton Kershaw. That he would be the man on the mound was already known, as he’d been announced as the scheduled starter for Game 5 well before then, but the circumstances surrounding his turn swung as sharply as Game 4 itself. In the moments before Brett Phillips overturned the world, Kershaw was going to take the mound as the man to end Los Angeles’ three-decade run without a title. In the moments after, he became the man who would have to overcome his checkered postseason past to break the deadlock and put the Dodgers on the doorstep of a championship. If he couldn’t, Los Angeles would be facing the end of the road in Game 6.

It’s both unfair and tiresome that the playoffs always seem to swing around Kershaw, but he warps the series around him, a gravity well that sucks up matter and turns it into white-hot takes. There’s also the fact that the Clayton Kershaw Postseason Narrative™ has, for the most part, accurately reflected his October body of work, full of struggles and heartbreaking losses. The irony of these playoffs is that, one weak NLCS start aside, Kershaw has looked more like his regular-season self. Coming into Game 5, his 2020 postseason body of work consisted of eight runs allowed in 25 innings — a 2.88 ERA — and 31 strikeouts, and he was superb in Game 1, holding the Rays to one run in six innings. This is the Kershaw we all know and love. Read the rest of this entry »

In Game 1 of the ALCS, the Astros out-hit the Rays, struck out eight fewer times, watched Framber Valdez whiff eight batters in six innings, put 13 runners on, and threatened in nearly every inning. They lost. In Game 2 of the ALCS, the Astros out-hit the Rays, struck out five fewer times, watched Lance McCullers Jr. whiff 11 batters in seven innings, put 16 balls into play at 95 mph or harder and 13 runners on base, and threatened in nearly every inning. They lost.

Game 3 of the ALCS, though, would be different. Jose Urquidy hit a season-high 98 mph with his fastball, striking out four through five innings. A first-inning homer from Jose Altuve gave the Astros an early lead. They out-hit the Rays yet again and put 11 runners on and threatened in nearly every inning.

They lost.

The battle for the American League is, barring a miracle comeback, over. In beating Houston 5–2, Tampa Bay took a 3–0 series lead in the best-of-seven matchup and can both clinch its first pennant in 12 years and deny the Astros their third of the last four seasons with a victory on Wednesday. The best team in the Junior Circuit during the truncated 2020 campaign has gone 8–2 this postseason and looked virtually unbeatable in every facet of the game. The pitching has been crisp, the defense has been perfect, the offense has kept the line moving. Throughout October, the Rays have been a well-oiled machine. Read the rest of this entry »

When you lose to the Rays, sometimes you get beat by top prospects and players with first-round pedigrees and the kinds of hyper-talented physical freaks who make up the majority of major league rosters. And sometimes you get beat by the back of a bullpen and a light-hitting catcher and a Cuban outfielder who before September was such an unknown that he probably could’ve walked through Ybor City on a Saturday night in full uniform to the attention and recognition of no one.

In taking Game 1 of the ALCS, 2–1, against Houston, Tampa Bay leaned on the parts of its roster that collectively should amount to nothing but ended up making the difference against a team in its fourth pennant series. Blake Snell, the former AL Cy Young winner, started, but given how he wobbled and weaved his way through five difficult innings, he wasn’t the star of this one. (His last inning of work, though, was crucial: Already at 83 pitches and clearly laboring, he was tasked with facing George Springer, Jose Altuve and Michael Brantley for a third time and did so perfectly, sparing Kevin Cash from having to lean even harder on an already exhausted bullpen.) Instead, it was the Rays’ chest full of misfit toys that gave them a 1–0 series lead in this best-of-seven battle.

Case in point: the man who put Tampa Bay on the board, Randy Arozarena. Coming into this series, he’d hit .444/.500/.926 in 30 postseason plate appearances, including three homers in seven games. He treated Yankees pitching like a piñata in the ALDS, and he did the same to Framber Valdez in Game 1, poking a belt-high sinker to right-center in the fourth to make a 1–0 Houston lead vanish. Getting a fastball by Arozarena has proven virtually impossible all month; Valdez learned that the hard way. Read the rest of this entry »

Beyond Giancarlo Stanton going electric and Gerrit Cole proving that investing $315 million in him was one of Brian Cashman’s better decisions, not a whole lot else has gone right for the Yankees against the Rays. Going into Game 4 needing a win to stay alive, they’d found no answer to the Ruth and Gehrig cosplay of Randy Arozarena and Ji-Man Choi. They’d struggled to do much of anything when faced with Tampa Bay’s best relievers. Most of the lineup aside from Stanton, Aaron Hicks, DJ LeMahieu and (unexpectedly enough) backup catcher turned starter Kyle Higashioka hadn’t shown up. New York had come by its series deficit and a potential trip home fairly.

But the biggest problem for the Yankees in this series is the one that was the biggest problem in the 2019 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2018 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2017 playoffs: a pitching staff that hasn’t performed consistently. Granted, that’s a small sample, with only six starts so far and two of those belonging to Cole. But Masahiro Tanaka, normally the postseason stalwart, has been bludgeoned in his two turns, including Game 3. Aaron Boone’s attempt at a Rays-style opener gambit in Game 2 quickly went pear-shaped. Game 4 rested on Jordan Montgomery, who hadn’t pitched in over two weeks and could at best provide three or four innings in what would be his postseason debut. If he went south early, making it to Game 5 was highly unlikely.

Yet for the first time this month, Boone got a capable start from a non-Cole pitcher, and his bullpen was able to hold it together for a 5–1 win. Even better, Game 5 will be in the hands of Cole, who held the Rays in check in Game 1, bulldozed the Indians in the Wild Card round, and would be a popular pick league-wide for “man you most want on the mound in an elimination game.” Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a moment in almost every Clayton Kershaw postseason start where the entire enterprise threatens to swing completely off its axis — where the boulder, finally nearing the top of the hill, begins its inexorable roll back down, leaving the three-time Cy Young winner flattened underneath it. It never happened in the Wild Card round, when Kershaw sliced and diced a punchless Brewers lineup over eight scoreless innings, but it arrived in Game 2 of the NLDS against the Padres in the sixth inning, when two pitches and two swings seemed like they would undo all of the veteran lefty’s hard work.

Clayton Kershaw is not Clayton Kershaw™ any more. At the same time, he is neither bad nor finished, and his 2020 was a resurgence previously hard to imagine for a 32-year-old man with 2,300-plus innings on his arm and a wobbly back that shifts and grinds like tectonic plates. He made 10 starts and threw 58.1 innings and struck out 62 batters and posted a 2.16 ERA, a hair off his 2.13 mark in 2016, the last year when he was really, truly the best pitcher in baseball. Since then he’s been more passable imitation of himself than the genuine thing, but this season was proof that he could adjust and thrive despite a fastball that’s past its peak.

The trick to Kershaw’s success, as Ben Lindbergh noted over at The Ringer, is that he starts off with that fastball — which, after dipping to an average of 90.5 mph, a career low, in 2019, rose back up 91.6 this year and got up to 93–94 — and then goes to his slider. It’s a winning strategy for several reasons: Hitters tend to let the first pitch go, allowing Kershaw to pump in strikes and get ahead; and his slider is a monster of a pitch. None of that likely works without that four-seamer getting a little more life on it, but Kershaw also has smarts and savvy and spin on his side, and he can reach back and find his old self albeit without the heat.

So it was against Milwaukee and so it looked against San Diego. For the first five innings, Kershaw stuck to his plan: 19 first-pitch fastballs out of 24 offerings, 45 fastballs total averaging 91.7 mph and peaking at 93.6, lots of two-strike sliders. And for five innings it worked, aside from a Wil Myers RBI double in the second on a slider that caught too much of the plate; otherwise, weak contact and strikeouts abounded. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’d been asked, before this postseason, to name as many Astros relievers as you could, how many would you have rattled off before you had to stop? Many fans could probably recall Ryan Pressly, the closer with the high-spin curveball who’s been an integral part of Houston’s bullpen the last three seasons. Maybe Josh James is a familiar face if you’d paid enough attention, a young right-hander with a powerful fastball and questionable command who’s bounced between the rotation and bullpen.

After that, though, it’s likely a lot of blank stares and silence. The relief corps that the Astros turned to throughout the 2020 season was as anonymous as it was unexceptional. Houston’s bullpen ranked 16th in the majors in WAR and ERA and 18th in strikeout rate. By Win Probability Added, they were a miserable 26th. The only stat they were near the top of the league in was walk rate — 12.4%, second-highest in the league. None of that should have come as a surprise: The Astros lost two of their better relievers from 2019 in Will Harris and Joe Smith to free agency, then they saw closer Roberto Osuna throw all of 4.1 innings this year before blowing out his elbow.

The bullpen then became a carousel, spinning constantly as new bodies jumped on seemingly every day. Twenty-two different pitchers trotted out in relief for the Astros, most of them rookies, trying their best to fill what increasingly looked like a bottomless hole. Some of the names cycled through were downright Pynchon-esque: Cy Sneed, Nivaldo Rodriguez, Humberto Castellanos. Some players were barely there for a few days before disappearing while others stuck. And although the bullpen on the whole was never anything more than average, a few of those pitchers managed to secure a spot in Dusty Baker’s circle of trust. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a philosophical quandary after Miami’s 2–0 Game 2 win over Chicago: Is it really an upset loss if the higher seed never looked like the favorite? The Cubs — NL Central champs, No. 3 in the postseason field, blessed with talent — are gone. The Marlins — bottom feeders the last several years, season nearly ended by COVID before it got started, built out of spare parts and held together with string, in the postseason by virtue only of its expansion — are moving on. And after two games in an empty and chilly Wrigley Field, that result doesn’t feel like a fluke.

The numbers on Chicago’s side of things are grizzly: 18 innings played, one run scored, that coming on a single hit: Ian Happ’s solo homer off Sandy Alcantara in the fifth inning of Game 1. Since then, no runs in 13 straight innings, most of them quiet and all of them frustrating. You saw plenty of that in Game 2: After struggling to get the measure on rookie righty Sixto Sánchez and his booming fastball early on, Cubs hitters seemed to figure something out the second time through the order. In the fourth, Willson Contreras and Kyle Schwarber drew back-to-back walks to open the frame. One out later, Jason Heyward cracked a broken-bat single to right, and perhaps feeling pressure to get on the board, third base coach Will Venable sent Contreras — not a glacier like most catchers, but no one’s idea of Billy Hamilton — from second. The play was close, but a strong throw from Matt Joyce and a nice tag by Chad Wallach got him at home to end the threat and keep things scoreless. Read the rest of this entry »

Postseason baseball is supposed to be nonsense, a combination of drama and chaos that results in the best laid plans and prognostications of men and metrics being ruined with ease. Every now and then though, you get a game or series that plays out on the field the way it should on paper. Such was the case in Tampa, where the No. 1 seed Rays did as everyone expected and swept the eighth-seeded Blue Jays out of the way with a comfortable 8–2 win in Game 2 to advance to the Division Series.

There was a chance, before things began, that the scrappy young Jays could maybe steal one off the Rays and force things to a winner-take-all Game 3. But the deck was arranged so heavily in Tampa’s favor that those odds were low from the start and plunged as it went on. The Rays had a better and more flexible lineup. They had a better rotation. They had a better and deeper bullpen. They had a better defense that was always in the right spot at the right time. They had home field advantage (for whatever that’s worth when the official attendance is just the few dozen Rays employees and team family members who were sitting in an otherwise empty Tropicana Field). Toronto’s best selling point was that anything can and often does happen in a short series, and the Rays snuffed that out so quickly that, by the time the third inning of Game 2 rolled around, it was hard to see how anyone at all had talked themselves into a Jays upset.

The best hope Toronto had was the man on the mound, left-hander Hyun-jin Ryu. After excelling in his first regular season with the Blue Jays, the rock of the rotation had been pushed to Game 2 to get him some extra rest. That decision didn’t work out. With his team’s season on the line, Ryu needed 25 pitches to get through the first inning, in which he loaded the bases with none out and somehow allowed only a single run. He couldn’t escape his doom in the second, however. A Kevin Kiermaier single and a Mike Zunino homer made it 3–0. Six batters later, with the bases again loaded, Hunter Renfroe lofted a high cutter into the left-field corner for a grand slam. Just like that, it was 7–0 Rays. Ryu’s day was done, and so were the Blue Jays. Read the rest of this entry »

Seventeen years ago, the Cubs and Marlins met for the first and, until now, last time as postseason opponents in the 2003 NLCS, a series that then-Florida took en route to its second World Series title after a grisly Game 6 collapse by Chicago. The goat will always be Steve Bartman, who even in a Wrigley Field devoid of fans will be mentioned on the series broadcasts somewhere between 15 and 20,000 times, but plenty of players deserve a fair share of blame for the way the Cubs’ dreams of ending a long championship drought fell apart.

But that was then, and the failings of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood and Dusty Baker and Alex Gonzalez have little to do with whatever happens between these iterations of the Cubs and Marlins. The former are here by virtue of winning the NL Central, a mud fight of a division with four playoff teams that Chicago led virtually wire-to-wire; the Cubs are seeking to reverse a run of diminishing October returns. The Marlins, however, are here as predicted by roughly no one — literally no one, in the case of your humble FanGraphs staff — and thanks in large part to the rest of the National League East, the Braves excepted, being the equivalent of a stopped toilet. Even a long stoppage of play caused by over a dozen positive COVID-19 tests and the loss of nearly half the roster for multiple games wasn’t enough to slow down the Marlins, who snapped a playoff drought stretching back to that fateful 2003 season. (Fun fact: Every year the Marlins have made the playoffs, they’ve won the World Series, so get your bets in now.) Read the rest of this entry »

From the moment that MLB decided to try to plow ahead with a season in a country seemingly coming apart at the seams, it’s been an open question as to what value sports should have in our lives. “Sports are like the reward of a functioning society,” as Sean Doolittle put it in back in early July — a quote that’s routinely resurfaced on Twitter in the weeks since and mushroomed all over timelines on Wednesday, as the men and women whose bodies and work provide the foundation for their sports decided that this is a society that no longer deserved the privilege.

In the wake of yet another police shooting of an unarmed Black man — this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where local cops fired seven rounds into the back of 29-year-old Jacob Blake as he tried to break up a fight — and protests unfolding across the nation, NBA players, frustrated that their pleas for social and racial justice were bouncing off the walls of the league’s Orlando bubble, said enough. Led by the Milwaukee Bucks and followed soon thereafter by the rest of the teams slated to appear on the day’s playoff schedule, the players — and only the players, without seeking approval from or giving advance knowledge to the NBA — effectively canceled their games. “Boycott” was the initial word of choice, followed by “postponement,” but the most accurate descriptor for all this is “strike” — a labor force demanding change through an emphatic and sudden stoppage.

The NBA was soon joined by the WNBA (here it’s worth noting that the latter league has long been at the forefront of the conversation and action around the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minneapolis, and countless other social endeavors) and MLS in bringing itself to a halt. For a moment, it looked like MLB would follow suit. The Brewers, who have been one of more vocal teams when it comes to supporting the protests and Black Lives Matter on the whole this season, held a meeting during which they voted not to play in their scheduled game against the Reds; Cincinnati’s players, in a show of solidarity, agreed to cancel the contest. Similarly, the Mariners and Padres called off their game in San Diego, as did the Giants and Dodgers in San Francisco. Read the rest of this entry »