Through the first three rounds of the playoffs, two competing storylines took shape: The Astros, indomitable, sheared through the American League undefeated. The Phillies, resilient, ebullient, and unpredictable, shocked the National League by dominating the senior circuit’s best.

When these two narratives finally intersected in Houston Friday night, spraying hits and disorder all over the field like debris from a train crash, the result was an instant classic. The Astros dominated early, staking out an early five-run lead that by all rights ought to have demoralized their opposition. But the Phillies, a $255 million monument to not knowing when you’re beaten, struck right back for a historic comeback win:

How historic? The Phillies’ 6-5 win was the biggest comeback by an NL team in the World Series since 1956. When Houston’s win probability peaked with one out in the top of the fourth, they were roughly 16-to-1 favorites to win the game. Instead, the Phillies erased that lead in two innings, hung around long enough for J.T. Realmuto to win the game in the top of the 10th, and survived a Houston rally that came within 180 feet of turning a series-changing Phillies win into a crushing loss. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how many photo ops he posed for with the retiring Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina, no matter how many cameos he made in the broadcast booth, Adam Wainwright never actually said that 2022 would be his last season in professional baseball. And sure enough, as first reported by Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wainwright will return to the Cardinals in 2023.

Surely, if Wainwright were to pitch anywhere this year, it would be here. The Cardinals, perhaps by dint of producing so many memorable players in this century, do seem to be uniquely sentimental about their old guys. And Wainwright has been pitching there so long he probably still refers to Missouri as “French Louisiana.” Still, this is no mere victory lap. Wainwright is not the all-spinning, all-conquering ace he was 10–12 years ago, but he can still pitch. This past year, in a season during which he turned 41, he finished second on the Cardinals in innings and strikeouts and 13th and 32nd in the entire league in innings and ERA-, respectively. That’s quite impressive for someone who’s older than Blade Runner.

There are two main questions regarding Wainwright’s outlook this year: What can one last season do for him; and what can he do for the Cardinals? Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres shake off the hurt from their NLCS loss, they’ll have plenty of reasons to look back on this season as a success in its own right and a springboard to more and better in 2023. They won 89 games and advanced further into the playoffs than they had in 24 years. Along the way they knocked off not one but two 100-win teams, including the hated Dodgers. Their top three starting pitchers are coming back, as are at least six starters of the remaining eight defensive positions. Oh yeah, and they’ll have a full season of Josh Hader and Juan Soto to look forward to.

Here’s the best news: At some point this postseason, you probably looked at Ha-Seong Kim and thought, “Was he always their shortstop? Didn’t they used to have this other guy? Tall fella, Freddie something?”

Fernando Tatis Jr.’s 2022 campaign was about as bad as his teammates’ season was good. Not only did he fail to play a single competitive game, but he also missed the season for pretty embarrassing reasons. First, he broke his wrist in a motorcycle accident — apparently one of several he suffered during the offseason — and thanks to the lockout the team didn’t find out the extent of his injuries until he arrived in camp in March. Then, just as his return seemed imminent, he tested positive for clostebol, an anabolic steroid, which cost him the rest of the year. As reasons for missing an entire season go, a careless and avoidable injury followed by a careless and avoidable suspension are not ideal.

But he’s coming back next year. After being suspended the last 48 games of the regular season, plus 12 more in the playoffs, his return date should be April 20 against Arizona, barring unexpected setbacks from a second wrist surgery last week.

A lot of the talk around Tatis’ reintegration has centered on winning his teammates and Padres management back over. (My advice: A sincere and concise apology, follow-up conversations with individuals as needed, perhaps followed by a small gift to show contrition and re-establish an atmosphere of collegiality. I hear athletes send each other protein powder in lieu of flowers.) But that’s between him and his team, and besides, forgiveness is easy to come by when you’re a shortstop with a 153 career wRC+. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — This was what the Phillies had in mind all along: Sweeping three home games to clinch the NLCS, the decisive game featuring a dominant Zack Wheeler performance, a Rhys Hoskins home run, and the other runs scored by the stars the Phillies brought into supplement him — Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber, and J.T. Realmuto. And atop it all, Harper, battling to break through against an unhittable reliever, at long last flicking a 98.9-mph slider off the outside of the plate and into the seats.

“I told [hitting coach Kevin] Long before I walked up the steps,” Harper recounted at his postgame press conference. “I said, ‘Let’s give them something to remember.'”

The ensuing at-bat was the most memorable of Harper’s already storied career, turning a 3–2 deficit into a 4–3 pennant-clinching win. An excitable but anxious crowd brought from despair to ecstasy, a dugout full of postseason novices leaping over each other and onto the field to celebrate, and the $330 million man, the one-time child prodigy now a week on the gray side of 30, cantering around the bases.

“J.T. set the tone and put pressure on them right away with a base hit. Then it’s the MVP, right? It’s the showman,” Hoskins said. “This guy finds ways in big situations every single time. I don’t even know how many times he did it this series.”

As much as Harper joined this team with precisely this kind of moment in mind, elements of this victory were not planned. Several years of false starts after the shift out of rebuild mode in the late 2010s, for example. Or a midseason managerial change. Or a sudden rainstorm that almost derailed the whole enterprise and brought the series back to San Diego. No matter. Within minutes of Harper’s home run, Calum Scott and Tiësto’s cover of “Dancing On My Own” was piping through the Citizens Bank Park loudspeakers, and lampposts were already being climbed at Broad and Locust. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — There are baseball games, and then there’s the Phillies 10-6 win over San Diego in Game 4 of the NLCS. This game lasted four days, saw 19 home runs, and involved 31 pitchers. It was interrupted in the bottom of the fourth inning by plagues of frogs and locusts and decided in the eighth by the timely arrival of Hessian mercenaries. It was loud, maximalist, and weirdly bawdy, like the works of Ken Russell or Electric Six.

The tactical puzzle of postseason baseball has always been about getting the highest possible percentage of innings from the team’s best pitchers. This has been so since Three-Finger Brown. But since 2015, the pursuit of the lockdown postseason pitching staff has consumed the attention of baseball’s top thinkers and empiricists as never before. Can a team conjure an entire staff of front-line starters and lockdown relievers? The Astros seem to have done that this season, but that might be a unique achievement in modern baseball history.

Still other managers — especially Terry Francona in 2016 and Dave Martinez in 2019 — have schemed, finagled, and cajoled their best starters and most trustworthy relievers into the most important situations available. To some extent, this has become the blueprint in October. Pitchers start on short rest, one-inning relievers get stretched to six or seven outs, starters close games on their throw days. Anything to keep the Other Guys out of close games. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — Jean Segura experienced the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat all in one inning, Rob Thomson managed as if there were no tomorrow, and Ranger Suárez excelled in the biggest start of his career as the Phillies beat the Padres, 4-2, to go up two games to one in the NLCS.

The Padres and Phillies are not only closely matched, but with their great top-end starting pitching and star power at the plate, they make excellent foils for one another. This was the third consecutive tense, close-fought game between the two. After the pitchers’ duel in Game 1 and Game 2’s tilt between Sir Gawain vs. the Green Knight, Game 3 was a contest of tantalizing opportunities. Each side opened the door to the other through some, um, creative defense, but in the end, the Phillies made more of their opportunities.

The recurring theme of this game was the ball on the ground. The night’s 69 plate appearances produced 51 balls in play; of those, 30 were grounders, 18 by the Padres. And even though both teams shifted heavily throughout the game, these grounders seemed to have a habit of going where the fielders weren’t. The Padres had four infield hits, two by Brandon Drury on balls with a launch angle of -20 degrees or worse. There were three groundball double plays, and there could have been a few more.

While the fate of the game was always figuratively just within or just out of reach, an unusually large percentage of Friday was spent with infielders literally reaching for the ball. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The first six batters of the game hardly indicated what was to come. Two of Suárez’s three strikeouts came in the first two plate appearances of the game, while Joe Musgrove started the bottom of the first by surrendering the only home run and the only two walks allowed by any pitcher on the night. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you eat the bear. Sometimes, the bear eats you.

And at still other times, you eat it against the left center field wall. For the second day in a row Michael Harris II, who despite his youth is already one of the best defensive outfielders in the game, came off worse in a confrontation with a fence. On Friday night, the W.B. Mason sign knocked the ball out of his mitt, turning what would’ve been a spectacular catch into an RBI double for Bryce Harper. And not 24 hours later, Harris, the ball, and a neighboring State Farm ad came together to produce an inside-the-park home run for J.T. Realmuto.

With an 8–3 win in front of a bloodthirsty home crowd, the Phillies completed an upset victory over the rival Braves and are on their way to the NLCS. The inside-the-park home run wasn’t the play that made the game; in fact, by win probability, it was only the fourth-most impactful dinger of the afternoon. But if you watch enough baseball, you’ll learn to recognize signs that this just isn’t your day. For the Braves, surrendering the first inside-the-park homer by a catcher in postseason history, minutes after their starter got knocked out of the game by a line drive… signs don’t come much clearer than that. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not just that Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat on the ground. It’s that Rhys Hoskins spiked his bat on the ground. Rhys Hoskins would’ve spiked his bat through the ground if he were able.

“I didn’t know what I did until a couple innings later,” Hoskins said after the game. “It’s just something that came out, just raw. But God, it was fun.”

A celebration that emphatic isn’t about happiness, or excitement, or even a desire to get one over on one’s opponent. It’s about catharsis — for Hoskins, his teammates — now a game from the Phillies’ first NLCS since 2010 — and many thousands of their most ardent, and nervous, admirers.

There’s an iron law of Philadelphia sports, little known outside the region but cited frequently within it. As articulated by Twitter user @historiancole: “Philadelphia only has two speeds: cocky or distraught.” This postulate is the Tungsten Arm O’Doyle tweet of Hoagieland; it comes up whenever the lead changes in a Phillies game, the Sixers update their injury report, or the Eagles do anything at any time. It captures the duality of the high-leverage sports experience: exuberance when things are going well, counterbalanced by abject terror that everything will fall apart.

For 11 years, Phillies fans have felt little but pessimism; long gone are the days when they dominated the National League the way the Dodgers do now. In between the team has suffered the slow recognition that a rebuild was necessary, the utter failure to execute that rebuild, and years of futile attempts to patch the wreckage into a playoff team. The 45,538 unfortunates who packed themselves into Citizens Bank Park on Friday afternoon know every contour of this story, and from it they’ve learned to expect the worst. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s some hard-won advice, earned over a lifetime of experience as an oldest child: Whatever you do, never let your little brother win. Love your siblings, protect them, sure, but don’t give them an inch. Once they get it in their heads that they can beat you, they will.

The Dodgers understand this. Their rivalry with the Padres teases us with thrilling talent and occasional flash points of ferocity, but it remains one-sided. Tuesday’s 5-3 Game 1 win is merely the latest example. The Dodgers couldn’t complete the rout they threatened in the early innings, but just as they couldn’t put the game to bed early, neither could the Padres claw all the way back. Read the rest of this entry »

The National League’s adoption of the designated hitter this season eliminated the most noticeable difference between it and the American League. Now, the National League is what makes grown men in scarves weep on public transit, and the American League comes with a slice of melted cheese on top. (No, I have not updated my pop culture references since 2009, and I have no plans to do so.)

The only remaining difference is that the AL gets an extra off day during the Division Series. MLB announced in August that contrary to prior practice, the Division Series would no longer have a travel day between Games 4 and 5. But while the NL would play two games, get a day off, and then play three in a row, the American League gets an extra day off without travel between Games 1 and 2.

When the league announced this new scheme, an obvious question occurred to my colleague Dan Szymborski: How would this affect pitcher usage? Previously, a Division Series contestant could run four pitchers on full rest, and have both its Game 1 and Game 2 starter on full rest for the decisive match, if necessary. Or it could bring back its Game 1 starter on short rest for Game 4, and have everyone else start in order on regular rest. Moving or eliminating the off day throws that practice into chaos. Read the rest of this entry »