Watching playoff baseball is like cramming for a test. Most people watching are either casual fans of the sport or diehard fans of one team only, so it’s incumbent on national writers and broadcasters to get their audiences up to speed quickly. Sometimes that takes the form of an information dump; other times, a team gets distilled down to a couple of talking points. And for a team that was not expected to make the World Series, has a lot of young players, and doesn’t play in a particularly fashionable media market — like, say, the Arizona Diamondbacks — the talking points can be a little crude.

In this case, the Diamondbacks are like a preschooler on a sugar high: Young, small, and always running.

For the first five games of the NLCS, this bullet point looked a little silly, as Arizona attempted just a single stolen base against a Phillies team that holds runners well. But in Games 6 and 7, the Diamondbacks opened up the taps and reaped the rewards: eight stolen bases in eight attempts, leading directly to two runs. Which in turn led to, as you know, winning the pennant.

Can they repeat the trick against the Rangers in the World Series? Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – “A lot of people don’t believe in us,” Diamondbacks infielder Geraldo Perdomo said before Game 7 of the NLCS. “I think that’s why we play with the patience we’re playing with right now, to prove to everyone we can do it.”

“Nobody believed in us” is such a hackneyed trope in sports motivation, one that’s been co-opted over and over by teams that everyone believed in. But Perdomo was absolutely right to invoke it; the Diamondbacks were the lowest seed in this year’s playoffs, and before that a dark horse to make the postseason at all. They were under .500 in August, for goodness’ sake. Manager Torey Lovullo was asked after Game 7 if, in mid-August, he thought he’d be in this situation now. “To be totally honest, no,” he said.

But here they are. They took two must-win games against the defending National League champions in one of the most hostile environments in baseball, the latest by a score of 4-2. And now the Diamondbacks, pennant in hand, are off for Texas and a shot at the second World Series title in club history. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — In the franchise’s biggest game in 22 years, the Diamondbacks played their best game of the NLCS. They finally did serious damage against the Phillies’ rotation, tagging Aaron Nola for four runs in five innings. Merrill Kelly navigated a rough opening stretch and grew stronger as the game grew on, holding Philadelphia to a single run in five innings of his own.

The Diamondbacks’ 5–1 win pushes this series to a Game 7, the first in franchise history for the Phillies, a club that’s been around longer than 12 U.S. states. It also raises a new set of questions: Can Brandon Pfaadt recreate his series-changing Game 3 magic? Can the Phillies right the ship offensively after a dud of a performance in an essential game? And the aliens who abducted Nola before the second inning: Who are they? Where did they come from? And what do they want? Read the rest of this entry »

Every play in a scoreless postseason game is pivotal. The Phillies, despite being the better team on paper with a 1–0 series lead in the bag, could ill afford to give away cheap outs on either side of the ball. Six days ago, Brandon Marsh listed the lessons the team had learned from blowing a lead in Georgia two nights previous: “Put them out of it. Finish the job. Don’t let them climb back in the game.”

Trea Turner committed two errors in that game, the second of which led directly to Atlanta’s first run of the playoffs. It snapped the best offensive team of the regular season back to life and arguably started a stunning comeback that could’ve knocked the Phillies off their axis.

Aaron Nola was excellent in his first two postseason starts of 2023, but he’s been prone to big innings both in this regular season and last year’s playoffs. The last thing he needed was one of the fastest players in the league to reach base and cause trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA – The last time the Arizona Diamondbacks won a game in the NLCS, Randy Johnson took the win and Erubiel Durazo hit the game-winning home run off Tom Glavine. It’s been a minute.

When Diamondbacks ace Zac Gallen took the mound in Philadelphia, he was hoping to make a dent in that history; the Phillies have been red hot all October, but so has Arizona, and Gallen’s arm is one of the best weapons the D-backs have. But Kyle Schwarber hit the first pitch Gallen threw off the video board on the facing of the second deck at Citizens Bank Park. A minute? The Phillies took the lead in seconds. Two batters later, Bryce Harper crushed another fastball out to right center. It wasn’t quite over before it began, but the Phillies took the lead on the first pitch they saw and never gave it up.

“The reality is we were probably going to lose a game at some point,” Evan Longoria offered after the game, attempting to put the defeat in perspective. But the Phillies roughed Gallen up early and held off a series of late rallies to win 5-3. Surely it was not the manner of defeat anyone from the Diamondbacks had in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — You know what they say about first impressions, right? Well forget it. It’s nonsense.

The Phillies have run back last season’s NLDS result: a 3-1 victory over the rival Atlanta Braves, the no. 1 seed in the National League bracket. This time out was a little more acrimonious than the last, at times a little more touch-and-go, as a cavalcade of pitchers only barely kept the cap on the violently fizzing soda bottle that is Atlanta’s offense.

But with Braves ace Spencer Strider standing between the Phillies and a return to the NLCS, two players who were on the verge of being run out of town in the past 12 months — Nick Castellanos and Trea Turner — put the team on their backs. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — When Bryce Harper sees a breaking ball middle-middle or middle-in, the most common outcome is not what you might think: He fouls it off. Over the course of the regular season, he saw 61 such pitches and hit 25 of them foul. Six others he took for strikes, nine more he swung at and missed, 11 others were hit in play for outs. Only two of those 61 balls went into the seats.

That still makes him one of baseball’s most dangerous hitters on such pitches. On breaking balls middle-middle and middle-in, he slugged an even 1.000 with an ISO of .524. This season, 161 hitters saw 750 or more pitches from the left side; Harper was 12th in wOBA, fifth in xwOBA, 16th in ISO, and tied for 11th in slugging percentage.

You don’t want to pitch him there. Because what if he doesn’t foul it off?

In the Phillies’ 10–2 win over the Braves in Game 3 of the NLDS, Harper saw 19 total pitches, 16 breaking balls. Three floated into the middle-middle or middle-in region. Sure enough, Harper fouled one of them off. The other two decided the game. Read the rest of this entry »

BALTIMORE — “We need to start taking a little bit of pressure off our pitchers and start scoring earlier in the game,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said before Game 2 of the ALDS against Texas. The previous afternoon, Baltimore had lost a cagey affair, playing from behind most of the way. And despite numerous opportunities, the Orioles never could tie the game back up.

In the bottom of the first inning on Sunday, Hyde’s offense obliged him, stringing together three singles (including an honest-to-God Baltimore chop from Ryan Mountcastle) and a walk to pull in front, 2–0, against the previously unhittable Jordan Montgomery. The Orioles had the lead and the initiative, and the Camden Yards crowd was out for blood.

Fifty-five minutes, three pitching changes, and just seven outs later, the Rangers led 9–2 in the top of the third. Though the Orioles cut the lead to 11–8 by the end of the night, the game was basically over then, leaving the Rangers in the driver’s seat and Baltimore in need of a mighty comeback in order to extend a Cinderella season. Read the rest of this entry »

BALTIMORE — The Orioles were one of the toughest teams to put away in the regular season, as their record, status as the AL’s top seed, and distinction of never having been swept all attest. But in Game 1 of the ALDS against a Rangers team that kept going the wrong way in the standings in September, the script was reversed.

In front of a capacity crowd in a game delayed an hour by rain, it was the Rangers who clung to a narrow lead for six innings, as every Baltimore rally fell short. Despite the conditions and an unfavorable pitching matchup, Texas took an upset 3–2 win behind the tandem of Andrew Heaney and Dane Dunning. With that win comes control of the series. Read the rest of this entry »

I guess we statistically inclined writers aren’t technically supposed to believe in momentum. At least, we’re not supposed to believe it’s measurable or predictive. In baseball as in physics, the trajectory of events can be altered in the blink of an eye. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the moment momentum changes. Not so here.

On Wednesday night, Aaron Nola followed up Zack Wheeler’s Game 1 masterpiece with seven scoreless innings of his own. The Phillies got to Braxton Garrett early and broke the game open with a late Bryson Stott grand slam. Final score: 7-1. Time to crank the Tiësto remix of Calum Scott’s cover of “Dancing On My Own,” play the video of Harry Kalas singing “High Hopes,” and hop on a plane to Atlanta for the NLDS.

It looked very, very easy, even by the standards of a two-game sweep, but it was not preordained. Needing one win to clinch the series, the Phillies were presented with two obvious chances to seize control of the game. They grabbed both without hesitation. Read the rest of this entry »