When I laid out a potential path to a Marlins upset in the NL Wild Card Series, it started with Jesús Luzardo hanging with Zack Wheeler. The 33-year-old righty has been one of the best starters in baseball over his tenure with the Phillies, whose run to last year’s pennant was in large part the result of a procession of dominant Wheeler starts. But Luzardo is an excellent pitcher himself; perhaps a player of his youth and talent could raise his game in the biggest start of his life.

Luzardo didn’t pitch badly by any means, but on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, there was simply no hanging with Wheeler. I’ll list his stats here, but they don’t do the performance justice: 6.2 innings, five hits, no walks, one run, eight strikeouts. The Phillies won, 4–1, and now have a stranglehold on a series they were heavily favored to win from the start.

“I think the story was Wheeler,” said Marlins manager Skip Schumaker. “He was excellent tonight. The sinker/sweeper combination gave us trouble. A lot of weak ground ball contact…. He was just excellent.” Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the novelties we’re going to see this postseason, this series is one of the weirdest. The Phillies and Marlins have never met in the postseason before. In fact, they’d never made the playoffs in the same season before; apart from a stretch from 2003 to ’09 when it seemed like they only ever played each other, the two franchises had never even finished above .500 in the same season before.

But here we are: Three games to determine who gets eternal claim to the legacy of Darren Daulton and Alex Arias, and more importantly, a berth in the NLDS against Atlanta. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, Johan Rojas knocked a single up the middle off Pirates closer David Bednar. Cristian Pache, who’d just entered the game as a pinch runner to start the 10th inning, came around to score easily. When he crossed home plate, the Phillies were guaranteed a playoff spot for the second straight year, and by night’s end they were locked in as hosts of one of the NL Wild Card series.

Typical scenes ensued. In college baseball, where budgets are smaller and buying alcohol for the freshmen and sophomores can get a little dicey from a legal standpoint, this kind of celebration takes the form of a dogpile. In fact, “dogpile” has become the accepted shorthand for a victory that either secures or advances a team toward a championship. You’ll hear “two dogpiles to Omaha,” and the like.

Big leaguers don’t dogpile, or rather, they don’t only dogpile. And the Phillies, having developed a reputation over the past 18 months as baseball’s lascivious chaos agents, know the post-dogpile rigmarole by heart. Champagne and beer were sprayed around the clubhouse, cigars handed out, and Garrett Stubbs procured a set of overalls. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February, I took a look at Adolis García, a player who had long vexed me. Here was one of the few remaining survivors of the Rangers’ late-2010s rebuild, coming off back-to-back three-win seasons just as his club was swinging back into contention.

García may have been an above-average all-around right fielder, but he got there creatively: Good defense, aggressive baserunning, and hard contact when he got wood on the ball. But because he swung the bat more or less indiscriminately, he never walked and contact was hard to come by.

I try not to be too much of a sabermetrics 2.0 stick-in-the-mud, but OBP is really important, particularly at a position like right field, which comes with high offensive expectations. The ability to get on base might be the single thing I’d value most in a corner player, and García just wasn’t good at it. Read the rest of this entry »

You can understand the excitement around the Phillies at the moment; this is the defending National League champion, on the verge of clinching a home playoff series, with tons of nationally recognizable players.

But no amount of juice can replace the excitement of the new, because the most interesting player on this team is a relief pitcher who made his MLB debut on Sunday. In case you weren’t aware of him already, here’s Orion Kerkering.

What a moment for Orion Kerkering. ? pic.twitter.com/OoT5nsb9GV

— NBC Sports Philadelphia (@NBCSPhilly) September 25, 2023

If you follow either the Phillies or the minor leagues in the northeastern U.S., you’ve been waiting for this moment for months. If not, you’re probably wondering why anyone should care about a pitcher who’s clearly named after a spacefaring outlaw whose rakish charm and rough exterior belie the fact that deep down he has a heart of gold.

The Phillies are still paying a reputational penalty for running out some of the worst bullpens in MLB history in the late 2010s, but this current crop of relievers is perfectly serviceable — perhaps even more than that once Rob Thomson figures out how he wants to use his various swingmen in the playoffs. Kerkering has the potential to be the best of the bunch. After 12 pitches at the major league level, he might be that now. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few weeks, I’ve done a few big-picture stories looking at things like bunting and aggressive baserunning. Small ball, you might say if you were feeling charitable. “That Max Carey-Lookin’ Nonsense,” you might say otherwise.

During that process, I kept running into Rockies center fielder Brenton Doyle. Not literally, of course. Doyle is extremely fast (98th-percentile sprint speed); I could not run into him unless I were chasing him on a bicycle over level ground, and even then it’d be dicey.

Doyle gets the most out of his legs. He’s 19-for-23 in stolen bases on just 101 opportunities, and the defensive components of his Baseball Savant page are all in red and pegged to the right: 99th percentile not just in arm value, but range as well. Despite playing just 112 games, he’s been 19.4 defensive runs above average, making him the fourth-most valuable defender in the league this season and the second-most valuable non-catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like the Rays have been trying to ditch Tropicana Field since they got there, and apparently it’s finally going to happen. The Royals are likewise pursuing plans to build a replacement for Kauffman Stadium, though the club announced Wednesday that the planned reveal of a new ballpark site was being postponed for the time being.

Both clubs want to replace their aging, arguably obsolete concrete bowls with something more modern — more glitzy. The unspoken promise is that the Royals and Rays — two small-market teams that ranked 25th and 27th in payroll this season, respectively — would turn their new taxpayer-funded playgrounds into an economic engine that would not only boost community welfare but also allow the team to compete economically with the Yankees, Dodgers, and so forth.

We all know this is bunk. Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Scott isn’t just what you get when you put James McAvoy under a UV lamp.

Okay, now I have to pretend this entire article was more than a flimsy pretext to make that joke. Here goes.

Scott has been one of the best relief pitchers in baseball this season, and an unlikely linchpin to Miami’s persistent postseason challenge. The headline numbers look pretty good for Scott: 9-5 with nine saves, a 2.44 ERA, a 2.32 FIP (second among relievers behind Félix Bautista and Matt Brash), 2.4 WAR (second to Bautista) and a 32.7% strikeout rate. But because of where Scott plays, his performance means even more than what it looks like. Read the rest of this entry »

Kirby Yates had all but closed the door on the NL East, but he couldn’t quite get the latch to click. Tasked with preserving a 4–1 lead on the road against the Phillies, Yates set down Alec Bohm and Bryson Stott without much undue fuss, but Brandon Marsh just would not go away.

Yates has two punches to throw: a hard-fading four-seam fastball, and a splitter that drops out of the air like a goose that’s run into a power line. Down 2–0 to Marsh, he threw one blow after another: fastball up, splitter down. Marsh kept parrying the ball away — five foul balls in a row. Finally, the 36-year-old righthander ground the ball into his mitt and initiated the herky-jerky delivery that once made him one of the best relief pitchers in baseball, stabbing his arm down behind his right leg before bringing it up and around as he leapt forward off the rubber. Another splitter — and finally, Marsh swung over this one.

The kings of the NL East are celebrating in Philly ? pic.twitter.com/uol9pb0Upt

— Bally Sports: Braves (@BravesOnBally) September 14, 2023

Yates picked up the save. The Braves, for the sixth year in a row, were NL East champions. Read the rest of this entry »

With the season the Atlanta Braves are having, there isn’t that much spotlight to go around. Ronald Acuña Jr. is rewriting the record book, Matt Olson has an outside shot at 60 home runs, and beyond that Atlanta literally has an above-average starter at every position on the field:

And because these guys never seem to get hurt or take a day off, there hasn’t been a story about an unsung hero picking up the slack when a star goes down. So Michael Harris II, a 22-year-old center fielder with a plus-plus glove and a 115 wRC+, goes under the radar a little. Read the rest of this entry »