Author Archive: Kiri Oler

At no point during the National League Division Series between the Brewers and the Padres did either team lead by more than two runs. The total runs scored in a game never exceeded seven. But neither fact should in any way imply that the series was a no-offense snoozefest.

All four games produced a disproportionate number of baserunners given the actual number of runs allowed, at least when compared to regular-season averages. During the 2026 season, the league averaged nine runs per game on around 24 total baserunners. The Brewers and Padres likewise averaged 24 baserunners per game, despite logging combined run totals between four and seven. Close games and that much traffic on the basepaths made this series a real booty-hole-clenching experience for fans of both teams, as well as the empathetic neutral observers. By the time the fans watching Game 4 could finally unclench, the Brewers had defeated the Padres, 3-1, to advance to the NLCS against the Dodgers.

Though both teams named a traditional starter for Wednesday’s Game 4, neither Walker Buehler for the Padres nor Robert Gasser for the Brewers was expected to pitch particularly deep in this game. Buehler was healthy enough to make 32 starts this season for the first time since 2021, but he wasn’t able to match his innings total (207 2/3 IP) or replicate the 60 ERA- he posted that year. Instead, he was a slightly below-average starter, with an ERA- of 115 over 153 2/3 innings. He also missed the first two games of the NLDS on paternity leave, which likely interrupted his typical throwing schedule, and any departure from routine has the potential to leave a pitcher feeling out of rhythm. Buehler wound up going three innings, allowing one run on a pair of consecutive singles from Sal Frelick and Garrett Mitchell. His command looked shaky from the jump and alternated between non-competitive pitches outside the zone and offerings that caught way too much of the plate.

For his part, Gasser covered four innings, and the only real blemish on his evening was a solo shot hit by Fernando Tatis Jr. to lead off the third. After spending the first half of 2026 on the Triple-A shuttle, Gasser was able to stick in the majors from July 11 onward, posting a 93 ERA- over 109 1/3 innings. A lefty with a low arm slot, he gave the Brewers the option to throw a slightly different look at the Padres than what they’d seen during the first three games of the series. He relied heavily on his sinker, using it to set up his changeup and sweeper. Because of how the pitches interacted with one another, he locked up hitters for 10 called strikes on his sinker, while getting hitters to chase his changeup and generate weak contact on his sweeper.

But with the starters out relatively early and the score knotted at one through four innings, the game would ultimately be decided by the pitchers entering from the bullpen. Both teams had used almost their entire pitching staff extensively over the first three games, making the hitters more familiar with their opponents on the mound than new dads Buehler and Mason Miller are with their newborn children. (Miller missed Game 3 for the birth of his first child.) Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers earned a 3-2 victory over the Padres in Game 1 of the NLDS on Saturday. With this year’s presumptive Cy Young winner starting for the Brewers and a former Cy Young winner (and still an above-average starter) going for the Padres, a low-scoring affair was not a surprising outcome. Still, the game script didn’t exactly play out as anticipated. Instead, the contest took on a late-inning feel almost from the beginning, and with both emotions and the leverage index consistently running high, perhaps the best way to tell the story of Game 1 is via reactions sourced from one of the most emotive players in either dugout — Milwaukee outfielder Sal Frelick.

The Frelick shown above was struggling to process an unusual double play that he initiated during last year’s NLCS, but that confused sentiment also applies to the experience of watching Brewers starter Jacob Misiorowski allow three consecutive singles during the second inning on Saturday. In over half of Misiorowski’s 30 starts this season, he allowed three or fewer hits across the entire outing, making three hits over three plate appearances feel fairly baffling. The trouble began with a one-out, infield single off the bat of shortstop Xander Bogaerts. The hit was the culmination of a six-pitch skirmish. Bogaerts took the first four pitches he saw (two four-seamers were called balls, while another four-seamer and a cutter were called strikes). He fouled off a 2-2 fastball, then rolled over a slider for a groundball that forced shortstop Cooper Pratt to range far enough to his right that by the time he made the diving stop, he couldn’t get the throw to first in time to beat Bogaerts to the bag.

Though Misiorowski got the type of batted ball that pitchers are usually pleased with, the whole interaction with Bogaerts highlighted a burgeoning problem for the Milwaukee righty. For the flamethrower’s fastball to function, he needs hitters to swing through it, and relatedly, he needs hitters to be willing to offer at it, even when it’s a touch out of the zone. On the season, his four-seamer averaged a 40.2% whiff rate and a 34.3% chase rate. But on Saturday night, it was generating whiffs only 14.3% of the time and getting hitters to chase just 24.1% of the time. Bogaerts was content to watch three heaters from The Miz and then fouled off the fourth. Since the San Diego batters were often fouling off fastballs in the zone and laying off the pitch when it missed the zone, Misiorowski pivoted to his 96-mph cutter as a pitch he could more reliably throw in the zone for called strikes in order to counter the obnoxiously patient Padres. Read the rest of this entry »

“He’s not coming out of this game” was the comment from NBC play-by-play announcer Dave Flemming while the broadcast lingered on a shot of Padres Game 1 starter Michael King as he sat in the dugout looking through a notebook during the bottom of the sixth inning. “He’s not reading War and Peace either,” added color commentator Mark Grant. “He’s studying hitters.”

But that’s not to say King and the Padres wouldn’t find certain aspects of War and Peace relatable. Speaking in reference to his own work, Leo Tolstoy acknowledged that War and Peace defies conventional attempts at classification, saying it is “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” Comparatively, analysts have struggled all season to properly define the 2026 Padres. If Tolstoy had scripted the Friars, he might have said they are “not a playoff team, much less a contender, and still less a club in the midst of a rebuild.”

Instead, the Padres were a team that went 30-20 in its first 50 games, 19-31 over the next 50 games, and then finished out the season by going 42-20. On July 22, their odds of making the playoffs bottomed out at 7.4%. Then they went on a run, and just one month later, their odds had surged to 68.9%. But rather than continue that upward trajectory en route to clinching a playoff spot, they first endured a backslide that shrank their odds to 39.2% as recently as September 2. It would have been logical for San Diego to sell at the trade deadline, but Padres POBO A.J. Preller was born without the specific bit of genetic code that allows humans to understand selling as a strategic concept. Instead, they added starting pitchers Robbie Ray and Casey Mize and finished the year as the top-seeded Wild Card team in the National League. Read the rest of this entry »

Royalty is all about taking a select few and placing them upon a pedestal for adoration and worship by the faceless masses. And often, when a team wins a title, it happens as a result of star players doing what star players do — making big plays at pivotal moments and swaying outcomes with jaw-dropping feats. But as the championship series of the WPBL’s inaugural season progressed from one game to the next, the stories behind each result weren’t written by the team captains or the players with the most impressive regular-season stats. Rather, a varied cast of unlikely heroes took the stage each night and managed to put on a unique rendition of a show we’ve all seen dozens of times before. We’re all familiar with how a playoff series typically unfolds, and we’ve even seen how it’s gone when these exact teams faced one another during the regular season. And yet, a band of unlikely heroes with representation from both the Los Angeles Queens and the San Francisco Firebells came together to offer us something completely unexpected.

Below we’ll walk through the five-act play that was the WPBL’s championship series, which went the full five games and which the Queens ultimately won, and highlight the unlikely heroes from each game by describing what they did and why their accomplishments were so improbable.

Game 1: Queens 7, Firebells 6

Because their first-round series with the Heights went the full three games, the Queens had just one day off prior to Game 1 of the championship series on Wednesday. Comparatively, the Firebells’ last game was the previous Friday, since their series against the Hunters began one day prior to Queens-Heights and San Francisco dispatched of Boston in a two-game sweep. Michelle Roche — the Queens’ most effective starter — threw 3 1/3 innings in Game 3 against the Heights, and Ayami Sato — their only other pitcher with more than one start during the regular season — threw two innings in Game 3 after covering three innings in Game 2. Out of necessity, Game 1 was a bullpen game for Los Angeles, while the Firebells got to line up their optimal rotation, which meant no. 1 starter Kelsie Whitmore took the ball for San Francisco in the series opener. Read the rest of this entry »

To the extreme dismay of schoolchildren everywhere, the semifinal series between the Los Angeles Queens and the New York Heights came down to which team was the most thorough in completing its homework. In any league, a playoff series provides the opportunity to devote more dedicated study time to an opponent than is typically afforded by the day-to-day grind of the regular season. It’s a group project with season-ending consequences, if not done properly. Both sides delivered a strong showing during the practical exam, but Monday’s decisive Game 3 ended with a 15-11 victory for Los Angeles. Yet, despite the win on the scoreboard and in the series, it would be a bridge too far to say that the Queens aced the test. At several points during the series, the Heights posed a question and the Queens had no answer, but Los Angeles kept New York guessing too, and you can only default to bubbling in B on the scantron so many times before your score starts to look ugly.

Here’s the game-by-game breakdown of how the Queens ultimately outwitted the Heights.

Game 1

Queens Game 1 starter Michelle Roche was interviewed on the field following their 10-3 win. She went five innings, threw a modest 65 pitches, and allowed just one run on four hits and a walk with two strikeouts. When asked what made her so effective, Roche said the team’s pitchers and catchers got together and, “Went through all the data, all of the games, and just figured out the weaknesses of their batting, but also the strengths of our pitching — and just went with our strengths.”

By contrast, here’s a quote from Heights manager Rocky Henley during a postgame press conference on August 19, “I really don’t know about Trackman yet. Trackman is available, but it takes so much time,” she said. “My days are just so full of other things right now that I just can’t sit down and learn Trackman. I need someone to actually walk me through it, so I can kind of learn a little bit more about it, and I’m waiting for that day. Maybe this weekend, I can really sit down on Sunday and start really diving into those numbers.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Firebells took on the Hunters in a best-of-three postseason series that began last Wednesday. The WPBL’s regular season had concluded three days prior, with San Francisco holding the league’s best record at 10-5, while Boston finished the year at 4-11. Despite the dramatic difference in winning percentage between the one-seed and the four-seed, the Hunters made the series closer than the sweep suggests.

The Firebells won the first game of the series 6-4, then came away with a 9-6 victory in Game 2. Given that the average margin of victory in a WPBL game is over five runs, the Hunters at least forced the Firebells into a save situation to close out both games — a feat they had only managed in two of their 11 regular season losses. But even though the Hunters looked better on the postseason stage, they still didn’t have the firepower to go toe-to-toe with the Firebells’ league-leading offense. Read the rest of this entry »

The WPBL’s first ever regular season is complete, making this the final weekly recap before the playoffs. Next week’s edition will cover the semifinal round of the postseason. As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to run through each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors section typically discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week, because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress, but my gripes are fairly minimal this week, so in a season already awash in firsts, we’ll add one more to the pile and make this the first recap without an Unforced Errors list.

And on the topic of firsts, rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into a new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to your weekly WPBL recap! Week Five marked the league’s second-to-last week of the regular season, and several teams are using their last few games to test out new defensive alignments and lineup configurations with an eye toward optimizing their strategies before the postseason. Certain tactics were more effective than others, and as such, no team’s performance this week was an unqualified success. Rather, the teams that flourished demonstrated an ability to puke and rally when things went sideways.

As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors section discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into a new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »

With Week Four wrapped, we are now two-thirds of the way through the WPBL’s first season. Each team has just five regular season games remaining on the schedule over the next two weeks. Over this past week, the teams at the bottom of the standings were able to close the gap against the teams at the top. Following Week Three, the California teams had the west coast looking like the best coast, but as we’ll explore, reports of beasts in the east are growing louder all the time.

As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors section discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into a new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »

Week Three has concluded in the WPBL, and as such, let’s get to recapping. As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors list discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into their new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN.

If you need a refresher on the league’s structure and mechanics, check out the Week One recap.

Without any further ado, your Week Three winner is the San Francisco Firebells. The Firebells went 3-0 on the week with two decisive wins over the second-place team in the standings (the Los Angeles Queens), and team captain Kelsie Whitmore issued a temporary moratorium on the Denae Benites MVP chatter. Read the rest of this entry »