Author Archive: Michael Baumann

LOS ANGELES — The Brewers had the NLCS pretty much in the bag since they struck right back at Blake Snell in the top of the seventh on Wednesday night — it was just a matter of when the coup de grace came. You could argue when it became obvious that they’d log the Dodgers off with a sweep: Was it when they chased Tyler Glasnow, making it clear that this would become yet another battle of bullpens? When Jake Bauers worked his last climactic walk off Alex Vesia to tie the game?

I’ll tell you the exact pitch when I knew that Thursday was going to be the Brewers’ night. William Contreras came to the plate with two on and two out in the top of the fifth, and the Dodgers still up 4-3. Evan Phillips started Contreras off with a first-pitch sweeper, right down the middle for a called strike.

Contreras stepped back from the plate and nodded theatrically. That’s when I knew the Dodgers were drawing dead. Read the rest of this entry »

LOS ANGELES — On Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium, Blake Snell took the mound with his team down 2-0 in the NLCS and made one of the best postseason starts I’ve ever seen. For six scoreless innings, he was nearly unhittable. At one point, he set down 14 Brewers in a row, striking out nine of them. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — Game 1 of the NLCS was an exemplary display of mid-2020s playoff baseball, a dramatic and finely poised showcase of high-powered pitching and expansive defense. Game 2 was a hot dog, loaded with chili and onions, and dropped clumsily down the diner’s shirt.

And yet, the result was the same: The Brewers got the odd solo homer to center to erase an early Dodger lead, and a small-ball run put Milwaukee up for good. This one had a little more action — the 7-4 final marks the highest-scoring NL playoff game this year, as well as the Brewers’ highest offensive output in their past 13 postseason games. They are now halfway toward answering a humiliating sweep in last year’s NLCS with a sweep of their own.

Heroes outnumbered passengers for Milwaukee in Game 2. William Contreras went 3-for-4 with a walk and a monster home run, but four of his teammates also had multi-hit games. Every Brewers position player except Jackson Chourio reached base. As they piled on the insurance runs, four of their pitchers contributed perfect relief stints. When Game 2 started, only two Brewers in history had scored three runs in a playoff game; David Hamilton and Brice Turang both tied that record in the span of three plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — A year ago, the Dodgers came to Milwaukee as the lower seed in the NLCS and blew the doors off the Brewers. Milwaukee scored four runs, total, in a four-game sweep. Both teams’ rosters have evolved, and individual players have changed for better (Jacob Misiorowski) or worse (Shohei Ohtani), but what could possibly be so different this time around? As Dan Szymborski wrote in his series preview, teams that get beat in a playoff series are 17-28 all-time when afforded a rematch the following year. Teams that get swept are 0-5.

Well, at least one thing’s different: The Brewers aren’t going to get swept this time. They checked off the hardest item on their to-do list — beat Tarik Skubal — right away, with a 2-1 win at a sold-out American Family Field. Misiorowski made hard work of his 4 1/3-inning stint, but some terrific infield defense allowed him to escape with a single run on the board, and a solo homer by Brice Turang preceded an RBI single by Luis Lara an inning later. After another four innings, the Brewers had taken Round 1. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably heard this fun fact 500 times in the past 48 hours, but I’ll repeat it here: The White Sox haven’t clinched a postseason series at home since 1906. And while I’d take the under on another 120-year wait for a home clincher, White Sox fans are going to have to sit tight for at least another 24 hours.

Jo Adell cleared the bases with a third-inning triple to put the Guardians on top, and they stayed there thanks to some old-school grit-and-grind ball by José Ramírez. A cavalcade of six relievers just barely kept Chicago at arm’s length through the middle and later innings, and the Guardians stayed alive with a 9-3 win. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday night’s encore performance of the Ray Kerr Variety Hour felt like a turning point in this postseason. The Braves had not only survived the Chris Sale bullpen fiasco, they were headed back home with the series tied and their two best starting pitchers lined up on full rest. The Dodgers have been on the ropes before during their back-to-back World Series-winning run, but those ropes felt especially menacing against Sale and the resurgent Braves.

Not to worry, Dodgers fans. Los Angeles escaped this crucible with a 3-1 win, and now sit one game from a third straight NLCS appearance. Regularly scheduled programming has resumed. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tampa Bay Rays won the most games in the American League this year while running the AL’s second-lowest payroll. That’s a feat of team-building, first and foremost, but it also speaks to how well their players dodged leaks. On offense, they had the lowest strikeout and whiff rates in the majors; their pitchers had the league’s lowest walk rate and just 18 blown saves. You can’t make mistakes if you’re the Rays.

That’s a well-worn cliché, but here’s a novel spin on it: You can’t make mistakes if you’re the Yankees either. Presumptive AL Cy Young winner Cam Schlittler did some terrific work in his first career playoff road start, and no one’s going to remember it, because the other eight guys in gray pajamas played like the ball was covered in dish soap in Game 2.

The Yankees committed three errors in the bottom of the first inning, and another in the fifth. The Rays scored five runs across those two half-innings, and there’s your final score: Rays 5, Yankees 2. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 12, 1862, a group of 24 Union spies — most of them volunteer soldiers, led by civilian James Andrews — commandeered a locomotive in Big Shanty, Georgia, and headed north. Their goal was to rendezvous with Union forces in Chattanooga, destroying rail and telegraph lines as they went. Andrews and his men ran out of fuel less than 18 miles from their destination; all of the raiders were captured and eight, including Andrews, were executed.

Some 164 years later and 15 miles southeast, another group of 20-odd belligerents from up north attempted a heist of their own. The Phillies had just stolen Game 2 of the Wild Card Series against the Braves, and a repeat performance would win them the series.

They fared little better than the Andrews Raiders. Michael Harris II put Atlanta ahead with a three-run first-inning home run, and Ray Kerr turned in an improbably spectacular spot start that kept the Braves on top the rest of the way for an eventual 6-2 win. None of Don Mattingly’s men were hanged, at least not yet. We’ll see what kind of a reception they get back home. Read the rest of this entry »

Big league front offices are, for the most part, populated by cowards. They say they want to win, but what they want most of all is to keep their jobs and not get yelled at. OK, maybe I came on too strong. That’s not cowardice, that’s just life under capitalism. A clever observer might note that one of the major sources of “getting yelled at” for major league GMs is the media — i.e., people like me. Maybe I should be nicer.

Two decades after the sabermetrics revolution shook up baseball’s norms, 30 GMs and/or Ps of BO have converged on a new conventional wisdom: You can never have enough pitchers.

During the regular season, sure. The 162-game slate is a siege by design. Teams play six times a week for six months, and most of the innings of most of those games are pretty pointless. Let’s say the average team plays about 55 defensive innings per week; the team’s top three starters and top two relievers might combine to throw, what, 25 of those innings? Read the rest of this entry »

A high-stakes game between two archrivals, featuring two of the best left-handed starters in the league against two extremely top-heavy lineups: It was always going to come down to fine margins. One pitching change, one missed call, one baserunning mistake.

In Game 1 between the Phillies and Braves, those margins were physically perceptible, as the two teams traded jabs for seven and a half innings, before Austin Riley bounced a game-winning three-run homer off the top of the right field wall at Truist Park. The Braves, 5-3 winners in the postseason curtain-raiser, are now on the verge of a date with the Dodgers in the NLDS. Read the rest of this entry »