SEATTLE — There’s an age-old question among pitching philosophers. Should an approach focus more on the pitcher’s strengths or the hitter’s weaknesses? In my experience, pitchers do not ask themselves this question, though. They almost always prefer to pitch to their own strengths. They might tweak their strategy if a hitter has an obvious and exploitable weakness that they feel comfortable attacking, but mostly they’d rather stick to what they do best.

But what happens when what a pitcher does best aligns perfectly with what his opponent does best? When it’s not just that he’s ignoring the hitter’s weakness, but that he’s also pitching to the hitter’s strength? Game 3 of the ALCS between the Mariners and the Blue Jays gave us a data point to consider when answering that question. Toronto walked away with a 13-4 victory in Seattle to cut the Mariners’ series lead to 2-1, and did so by sticking to its strengths in the batter’s box. Read the rest of this entry »

SEATTLE — On a per-game basis during the regular season, the Mariners and Tigers both scored and allowed roughly the same number of runs — 4.70 and 4.28, respectively. Through the first four games of the best-of-five ALDS, each team eked out a one-run win and each team triumphed in something of a laugher. Both teams won one game at home and one game on the road, and both teams relied extensively on their bullpens. Heading into Game 5 on Friday night in Seattle, it was clear one team was going to need to do something to distinguish itself. These teams entered the night locked in a dead heat, having played matching hands for much of the series and needing a new strategy, something different to get an edge and break the stalemate, and even then, it required 15 innings and four hours and 58 minutes to do that. When it was all over, the Mariners had outlasted the Tigers, 3-2, on a walk-off single by Jorge Polanco to advance to the American League Championship Series for the first time in 24 years.

“I don’t even know where to begin to try to recap all the heroic efforts that went into today,” manager Dan Wilson said. “And 15 innings? I’ve got to say, I don’t know how the fans kept their energy going. It was unbelievably loud, even in the 15th inning. And this is a special place. T-Mobile Park is a special place, and they showed us that tonight. And just an incredible ballgame from top to bottom.”

Both starting pitchers were taking the mound for a second time in the series, and both brought a slightly different approach to Game 5 than what they put on tape in their prior starts. In Game 1, Seattle starter George Kirby threw his slider 31% of the time; it was the first pitch he threw to eight of the 22 batters he faced. In Game 5, Kirby went to his slider 50% of the time and threw it as the first pitch to 10 of the 18 batters he faced. After the game, he confirmed this was a conscious shift in strategy to show Detroit’s lineup something different from what it’d seen from him six days prior. “All those guys from top to bottom are probably looking for a heater to start,” Kirby said, “and just starting off with a slider, curveball, whatever it may be, just — if I kept them off balance a little bit, I was able to attack the zone a little bit more with my fastball.” By mixing in more sliders early in the count, he was able to maintain the effectiveness of his four-seamer despite the recent exposure. Though the slider-heavy approach meant Kirby racked up fewer strikeouts than usual, he finished his outing allowing just three hits and one earned run over five innings with six punchouts. Read the rest of this entry »

SEATTLE — “We didn’t steal one. We earned it.” Those were the first words spoken by Tigers manager A.J. Hinch following Game 1 of the ALDS at T-Mobile Park on Saturday night. Hinch took umbrage with a reporter’s characterization of a 3-2 victory that spanned 11 innings in a road ballpark as “stealing one.” Managers should bring that type of bravado to the press conference. Especially Hinch, who is tasked with imbuing confidence in a squad that has been dogged by tales of its epic collapse for over a month.

But with all due respect to Hinch, to describe any one-run, extra-inning game as one where either team definitively earned the win, or on the flip side deserved to lose, places all the emphasis on the final result and glosses over exactly how that result came to be. The Tigers got the win, and now they enjoy a 1-0 series lead with Tarik Skubal, the reigning (and presumptive) AL Cy Young award winner, taking the mound for them in Game 2. They get to bask in the glow of that advantage, and they absolutely should. But if Hinch gets to quibble with verbiage, so do I. Read the rest of this entry »

SEATTLE — Every year, pitchers and catchers report for spring training, and just as spring represents a reawakening in the natural world, spring training provides a reawakening for every team, a fresh start, full of renewed optimism. No matter the team, fans across the league allow themselves to dream a little, to believe that this year might be the one.

You could be my silver springs
Blue-green colors flashin’
I would be your only dream
Your shining autumn, ocean crashing.

But for 29 teams, the season will end in heartbreak. For some teams that heartbreak might come as early as June or July, for others in August or September, and a few will experience the agony of October sorrow. Over the last several years, the Seattle Mariners have unwittingly built a tradition of remaining very much in the playoff hunt until the final week of the regular season, only to miss the cut by a harrowingly thin margin. They did make the playoffs in 2022, ending a 20-year postseason drought, but they struggled to cross that threshold again. Instead, they fell into a familiar rhythm, playing hard until the very end, but then their season was over. Their time was up.

Time cast its spell on you, but you won’t forget me
I know I could have loved you, but you would not let me.

This season is different. The Mariners not only secured a place in the postseason, but they also won the AL West for the first time since 2001. In doing so, they eschewed the Wild Card Series and advanced directly to the best-of-five Division Series, which begins on Saturday against the Tigers in Seattle. And all it took was a little witchcraft. Read the rest of this entry »

They say that in order to thrive in stressful and uncertain times, the key is to focus on the things you control. And who are “they” exactly? Mostly people who traffic in self-help cliches on the internet. But cliches are cliches for a reason. They’re rooted in some measure of truth. And in a decisive Game 3 on Thursday, the NL Wild Card Series between the Cubs and Padres was ultimately decided by control — in nearly every sense of the word. The type of control that refers to whether a pitcher can find the strike zone, the type of control a manager exercises over bullpen usage, and the type of control exerted over batted ball outcomes when lockdown defense becomes a critical component of a team’s identity.

In a 3-1 Cubs victory over the Padres, neither team looked dominant, but Chicago dominated the variables within its control, while San Diego seemed to be pulling blocks from a Jenga tower on an inning-by-inning basis and hoping to stay upright until its offense could break through with a few runs. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 8, the Tigers had 59 wins, while the Guardians had just 42. With one week remaining in the regular season, the Tigers have 85 wins and the Guardians have 84. A single game separates the two teams in the race for the AL Central title, a division that seemed all but sewn up for the Tigers as recently as September 13, when Detroit’s odds to win the Central sat at 98.2%, putting Cleveland’s odds at 1.8%. As of this writing, the Tigers are still favorites to win it, at 62.7%, but given that three of Detroit’s last six games are against Cleveland, the error bars on those odds are huge.

That wild swing in divisional odds happened over the course of the last week, but such a dramatic swing could only occur because in the two months leading up to it, two teams that had been heading in opposite directions both gradually rerouted and wound up on a collision course. Through April 25, both teams were winning games at roughly a .600 clip, but their fates diverged from there. By July 8, the gap in winning percentage had widened to 167 points, which translated to an additional 17 wins for the Tigers compared to the Guardians. Ever since July 8, that divide has slowly evaporated, and now the two teams own nearly identical records. Read the rest of this entry »

In the eighth inning of Wednesday’s 7-5 loss to the Orioles, Padres reliever Mason Miller threw an immaculate inning — nine pitches, three strikeouts. Immaculate innings are rare, but not that rare. Since 2005, we’ve seen 63 immaculate innings in the majors, so around two or three per season. Miller’s is the fourth of 2025, after Cal Quantrill on May 18, Brandon Young on July 8, and Andrew Kittredge on August 6. Immaculate innings are a special treat we get to enjoy from time to time. They happen infrequently enough that they do genuinely feel special, but not so infrequently that every single one demands an article memorializing the event.

Another special treat that I’ve enjoyed recently is attending a concert with my best friend. We don’t live within driving distance of one another, so due to logistical barriers, we’ve only done this four times in the last 10 or so years. So like an immaculate inning, it’s a cool thing that doesn’t happen very often. What makes our concert history extra special is that twice now touring artists have scheduled shows on my birthday — Tame Impala’s Currents Tour in 2016 and Weird Al’s Bigger and Weirder Tour this year. And what makes Miller’s immaculate inning extra special is that he threw nothing but sliders. Trust me, you’ll see how these two things are connected in a minute, but first more about all those sliders.

If you know anything about Mason Miller, it’s probably that he fires fastballs past hitters at roughly 2,700 giga-miles per hour, which means you know that his primary pitch is not a slider — it’s his fire-breathing fastball. This season Miller is throwing his slider around 45% of the time and his fastball the other 55% of the time, with the very occasional changeup sprinkled in. In his major league career, Miller has appeared in 146 innings in which he has faced at least three batters. He had not gone Oops! All Sliders in any of them prior to Wednesday. And he only topped 65% sliders in four of those innings. His next-highest single-inning slider ratio is 85%, thrown in the final inning of a start against the Mariners in May of 2023. His slider-heavy final frame was the capper on a seven-inning no-hit outing. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 20, Paige Bueckers, rookie for the WNBA’s Dallas Wings, dropped 44 points against the Los Angeles Sparks, the most ever scored by a rookie in a single game. When Bueckers passed the previous single-game rookie scoring record (40 points, set by Candace Parker, who won MVP that year), one of the broadcasters remarked that her performance in the game effectively guaranteed her Rookie of the Year honors. Heading into the season, Bueckers was favored to win the award, but strong play from Washington Mystics rookie Sonia Citron forced WNBA analysts to reconsider what once had felt like a foregone conclusion. Bueckers needed the 44-point game to reclaim her place as the sport’s top rookie.

In the WNBA’s 40-game season, one game can legitimately swing an awards race, especially in the context of a sport where a star player can dominate a game and a point guard like Bueckers touches the ball on every possession. To find an analog in a 162-game baseball season, one might have to look for a hot streak spanning several games or a particularly close race that features a game with enough narrative heft to sway the sensibilities of the writers voting on the award. Looking back at recent rookie seasons reveals a few possible examples. Read the rest of this entry »

Though many predicted heading into the 2025 season that the Orioles’ weak starting rotation and general inactivity over the offseason would come back to haunt them, even Baltimore’s biggest skeptics weren’t prognosticating that the team would sit well under .500 and 7.5 games out of playoff position at the end of July. Such as it is, the Orioles spent this year’s trade deadline turning over roughly a third of their roster. Over the last week or so, the O’s have traded relievers Gregory Soto, Seranthony Domínguez, and Andrew Kittredge, along with infielders Ryan O’Hearn and Ramón Urías. Then on Thursday afternoon, Anthony DiComo reported that Cedric Mullins was on his way to the Mets; a few hours later, Jeff Passan broke the news that Charlie Morton would be joining the Tigers. The only healthy pending free agent who wasn’t traded out of Baltimore is Tomoyuki Sugano, and with Zach Eflin hitting the IL mere hours before the deadline, Sugano is now a load-bearing member of the rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs sit just one game back of the Brewers in the NL Central, but the two division rivals exist as almost perfect inverses of one another when it comes to on-field performance. Chicago ranks second in wRC+ at 117 and 15th in ERA- at 98, while Milwaukee ranks 13th in wRC+ at 102 and fifth in ERA- at 89. Their common ground is on defense, where both teams are top three in defensive value.

Coming off a series loss against the Brewers and with the trade deadline bearing down, the Cubs added some depth to their weaker side of the ball on Wednesday by acquiring pitcher Michael Soroka from the Nationals. Soroka will be a free agent at the end of this year, after signing a one-year $9 million dollar deal with the Nats last December. In return, Washington received Triple-A outfielder Christian Franklin, Chicago’s fourth-round pick in 2021, and 18 year-old shortstop Ronny Cruz, whom the Cubs selected in the third round of the 2024 draft. Read the rest of this entry »