My favorite part of the animated series Attack on Titan, in which a race of giants appears out of nowhere and starts feasting on humanity for no apparent reason, is watching the humans try to assess and exploit the giants’ vulnerabilities more quickly than they’re being consumed. It’s analogous to any series against the juggernaut Los Angeles Dodgers, a club coming off a major-league best 43-17 regular season and the presumptive National League favorites to advance to the World Series. Do the Dodgers have a weak spot, a thread on which the limping Milwaukee Brewers can pull and unravel their season? Read the rest of this entry »

Asking baseball writers to predict the postseason is unkind under the best of circumstances. Throw in a 16-team field and a best-of-three Wild Card Series where the higher seed’s only real advantage is playing at home, and something is bound to go sideways. Still, our readers demand their answer, so I asked my colleagues to predict which team will emerge from the postseason gauntlet with a trophy, and which squads are bound for early exits. Twenty of us answered the call. Below are the results by league and round, as well as each writer’s complete forecast in a sortable table. Happy playoffs!

American League Wild Card Series

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The Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds are set to play each other in a three-game postseason series beginning on Wednesday. But before we break down that matchup, let’s start with how they got here.

The Braves were projected to go 33-27, and they finished just above that at 35-25. Meanwhile, the Reds were projected to go 31-29 and hit that mark exactly. Does that mean both teams saw their seasons — COVID-19 permutations excepted — pretty much go as expected? Not in the least.

The NL East champs persevered despite the decimation of a starting staff that was supposed to comprise some combination of Mike Foltynewicz, Max Fried, Cole Hamels, Felix Hernandez, Sean Newcomb, and Mike Soroka. Between injuries, ineffectiveness, and King Felix’s opt out, that sextet combined for just seven wins. All were credited to Fried, whose spotless record was augmented by a sparkling 2.25 ERA.

Fried will be joined in Atlanta’s opening-round rotation by youngsters Ian Anderson and Kyle Wright. The duo exudes potential — each is a former first-round pick — but to this point in time they’ve combined to make all of 18 big-league starts. It’s hard to imagine either having a particularly long leash in the days (and possibly weeks) to come. Read the rest of this entry »

Seventeen years ago, the Cubs and Marlins met for the first and, until now, last time as postseason opponents in the 2003 NLCS, a series that then-Florida took en route to its second World Series title after a grisly Game 6 collapse by Chicago. The goat will always be Steve Bartman, who even in a Wrigley Field devoid of fans will be mentioned on the series broadcasts somewhere between 15 and 20,000 times, but plenty of players deserve a fair share of blame for the way the Cubs’ dreams of ending a long championship drought fell apart.

But that was then, and the failings of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood and Dusty Baker and Alex Gonzalez have little to do with whatever happens between these iterations of the Cubs and Marlins. The former are here by virtue of winning the NL Central, a mud fight of a division with four playoff teams that Chicago led virtually wire-to-wire; the Cubs are seeking to reverse a run of diminishing October returns. The Marlins, however, are here as predicted by roughly no one — literally no one, in the case of your humble FanGraphs staff — and thanks in large part to the rest of the National League East, the Braves excepted, being the equivalent of a stopped toilet. Even a long stoppage of play caused by over a dozen positive COVID-19 tests and the loss of nearly half the roster for multiple games wasn’t enough to slow down the Marlins, who snapped a playoff drought stretching back to that fateful 2003 season. (Fun fact: Every year the Marlins have made the playoffs, they’ve won the World Series, so get your bets in now.) Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox were one of the better hitting teams in baseball this season, posting a 114 wRC+ over their 60 games. What’s somewhat unusual, as was pointed out to me on twitter, is that they have done their damage by crushing left-handed pitching. Indeed, while that snippet of information might not making this next fact a complete surprise, the White Sox did not lose a start to a left-handed pitcher all season, winning all 14 of their matchups against southpaws. Later today, the A’s will send lefty Jesús Luzardo to the mound for Game 1 of their Wild Card Series against Chicago. What are we to make of this matchup?

The White Sox have a fine offense against right-handed pitchers, with a 106 wRC+, but their 143 wRC+ against southpaws was first in the majors this season:

The Tigers were close, though they put up their numbers in roughly 100 fewer plate appearances. On a seasonal level since integration, it doesn’t appear that any team has had at least 500 plate appearances against lefties and put up better numbers than the White Sox in 2020. Now a full season probably isn’t fair to compare to a shortened slate, so I went through our splits leaderboards, which go back to 2002, and looked at half-season performances that might rival what the White Sox have done:

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It’s grimly fitting that San Diego’s playoff drought would end in a year like this. After nearly 15 years of baseball as forgettable as the half-dozen jerseys they cycled through in that time, of course the Padres snapped their October skid in such an exciting matter — and in such killer threads — right when nobody could come watch them do it. Par for the course for arguably the country’s most luckless sports city.

But for any Friars fan who can overcome the first half of “bittersweet,” the deck is actually stacked pretty well for them here. While any fair bracket would slot them in the two-seed most years, this season’s weird format actually plays to their advantage. Anything can happen in a short series but at least this set isn’t as short as it would have been normally: Were this any of the past eight seasons, San Diego would have suffered the misfortune of posting the league’s second-best record and getting a trip to the coin-flip round for their trouble.

Instead, they’ll live to fight another day if Game 1 goes south, an extra benefit given their opponent. Few clubs would be at a significant disadvantage in a best of three, but if you were looking to tip the scales toward one side, you’d have their foe limp into the series physically and mentally drained. Such is the case here, where the Padres battle the beleaguered St. Louis Cardinals, who are still catching their breath from playing 10 double headers over the past 45 days.

A baseball season is said to be a marathon, not a sprint; for St. Louis in 2020, it was arguably both. Given their daunting schedule, the Redbirds can be slightly forgiven for mediocre underlying metrics. I’ll buy the idea that they’re a little better than they played. Read the rest of this entry »

As the final day of the season dawned, there were no fewer than six possible matchups for this series, with the Twins, White Sox, and Indians all having paths to second place in the AL Central and the number four seed, and likewise for the Yankees and Blue Jays in the AL East and the number five seed. The Yankees fell to the Marlins, 5-0, their sixth loss in the past eight games, but because the Blue Jays blew a 4-1 lead and lost to the Orioles, New York finished 33-27, barely holding onto second. Meanwhile the Indians dug their way out of a 6-2 hole against the Pirates, and only when the White Sox’s comeback from a 10-1 deficit stalled at 10-8, with the tying run at the plate in the bottom of the ninth on a questionable called strike was this matchup set.

The Indians finished with the better record, going 35-25, but a slightly worse run differential (+39 versus +45), but how the two teams got there is very different. The Yankees led the AL in scoring (5.25 runs per game) and wRC+ (116) while ranking sixth in run prevention (4.50 runs per game). The Indians, on the other hand, tied for second-to-last in the AL in scoring (4.13 runs per game) and were second-to-last in wRC+ (86), but they were the stingiest team in the AL, allowing just 3.48 runs per game. As this series will be played entirely at Progressive Field, the Yankees’ offensive advantage may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Worth noting: Indians manager Terry Francona has been sidelined by gastrointestinal and blood clot issues for most of the season, managing just 14 games, during which his team went 8-6. First base coach Sandy Alomar Jr. has been serving as acting manager since mid-August and will likely remain in that capacity through the postseason, though Francona has entered the bubble to keep that option in play. The team has gone 28-18 on Alomar’s watch.

Rotations

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We’re a day away from the start of a bizarre, expanded postseason, one with an abnormally large field of teams, a short Wild Card round that makes the better ones unusually vulnerable, and a five-game Division round without an off day. The postseason’s new structure presents one-time advantages and disadvantages that could impact series outcomes. I’ve considered which aspects of roster construction might suit this unique situation (some more familiar than others) to determine which lower-seeded teams are especially strong and are perhaps teed up to make a sneaky deep October run.

For this exercise I’m only considering teams that currently have a winning percentage under .550, since while the Yankees and White Sox are currently seeded fifth and seventh respectively in the American League, I think they’re quite good and relegated to a lower seed purely due to the quality of their divisions. They’re not sleepers, they’re just a lower-seeded contenders. Let’s begin by looking at the obvious criteria.

It’s a tale as old as time, but having starters who can twirl a gem gives you a puncher’s chance in a playoff series. Even if your offense does nothing, a dominant start means you’re, at worst, in a close game with a chance to squeak out a victory despite scoring few runs.

I’m certain this category is the one already most familiar to even casual baseball fans, let alone FanGraphs readers, who can all point at Trevor Bauer, Luis Castillo and Sonny Gray and know the Reds are especially dangerous in this respect. But I wanted to apply some amount of rigor and objectivity to this to make sure I’m not either overrating or overlooking anyone. So I turned to Game Score Version 2. It’s a nice shorthand more than it is a precise, meaningful stat, but while FIP (which I’ve also included in the following table) is a better proxy for overall pitcher quality, I wanted a measure that indicates a pitcher’s capacity to have a dominant and/or elite-level start. As such, in the table is each pitcher’s 2020 FIP, as well as how many times they’ve had a Game Score v2 start of 65 (Strong Starts) or better, and how many they’ve had at 72 (Elite Starts) or better. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time since the 2006 postseason, the Minnesota Twins will face a first-round opponent that isn’t the New York Yankees. Their previous four playoff appearances have resulted in futility in the Bronx, getting swept in three Division Series and one Wild Card game. It must be a relief to see another opponent across the diamond.

The Astros enter the 2020 postseason on their back foot. After dominating the American League West for the last three years, winning a World Series championship in 2017, and losing in the World Series last year, the Astros limped their way into the playoffs in this abbreviated season. Despite being the sixth seed, they had the worst regular season record among the AL playoff field:

This three-game series is a matchup between two opponents with plenty to prove. Both teams’ offenses have taken a step back from what they accomplished last year. The Bomba Squad has seen its home run output drop a bit this season. After smashing the major league single-season home run record in 2019, the Twins launched the sixth most home runs in the majors in 2020. While the power was still mostly intact, their overall offensive production fell to just above league average. Diminished seasons from a few key players is the likely culprit. Miguel Sanó, Jorge Polanco, and Mitch Garver each saw their wRC+ drop by at least 38 points, with Garver’s dropping by an incredible 114 points. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox very nearly pulled off the shock of baseball’s dramatic final day of the regular season on Sunday. They entered the afternoon trailing the Minnesota Twins by a single game in the American League Central, but could still steal the division crown with a victory and a Twins loss. That bit of intrigue quickly felt moot when the Cubs stormed ahead 6-0 in the second inning and took a 10-1 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning, but with Minnesota in the midst of a tight battle with Cincinnati, the White Sox didn’t quit. They scored seven runs over the final two innings and brought the tying run to the plate in the bottom of the ninth in the form of outfielder Nomar Mazara, who had already collected two hits.

Just as suddenly as Chicago’s rally came together, however, it came to an end. An Andrew Chafin fastball on a 2-2 count finished close enough to Mazara’s knees for the home plate umpire to rule it strike three, putting an end to the hopes of a division title and early home field advantage for the White Sox. Don’t feel too badly for them, though — they still have postseason berth, their first since 2008 and just their second since winning the World Series in 2005. They’ll enter the postseason as the No. 7 seed, meaning they will travel to Oakland and take on the No. 2-seed Athletics in a best-of-three Wild Card series beginning on Tuesday.

The last 11 years of playoff-less baseball on the south side of Chicago haven’t all been lost causes. The 2010 team won 88 games, but missed the postseason because the New York Yankees got the then-lone Wild Card spot with 95 wins. In 2012, the White Sox won 85 games, but again missed the playoffs because there were seven AL teams that won at least 88. The following year, the White Sox slipped to 63-99, and haven’t won more than 78 in any season since. Read the rest of this entry »