The Atlanta Braves finished sweeping the Miami Marlins on Thursday afternoon, issuing a 7-0 shellacking to knock the Fish out of the postseason. After holding Cincinnati’s bats firmly in check in two Wild Card games, the Braves’ bats exploded in Games 1 and 3, with a generally ineffective Miami lineup struggling to keep up.
Coming into the 2020 season, one of the big question marks surrounding the Marlins was just how effective they’d actually be at scoring runs. In 2019, the team finished last in the National League in runs scored, nearly half a run per game behind the 14th-place San Diego Padres. The Marlins added some veteran depth to the lineup in the form of Jesús Aguilar, Jonathan Villar, Corey Dickerson, and Matt Joyce last offseason — which feels like it was about five years ago at this point — and the hope was that with the team’s impressive stable of young pitching improving, they’d score just enough runs to become relevant. With an assist from a 16-team playoff format, that’s exactly what happened; the offense managed to support a generally solid rotation, and the weak bullpen (5.65 FIP) didn’t sink the team enough to drop it below .500.

That blueprint worked against the Cubs and their 10th-ranked offense and thanks to Sandy Alcantara and Sixto Sánchez, seven runs in two games still left Miami with significant room to spare. But shutting out the Braves is a trickier proposition and when Atlanta’s run-scoring machine ramped up, the Marlins failed to match it, leading them to be the first team eliminated from the round of eight. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees lost to the Rays for the second night in a row on Wednesday night to fall behind in the Division Series, two games to one, but Giancarlo Stanton continued his rampage. The 30-year-old slugger, who was limited to just 23 games this year due to a Grade 1 left hamstring strain, has now homered in all five of the Yankees’ postseason games, with a consecutive games steak that’s one short of the record.

Stanton’s latest blast, his sixth of the postseason, came in the eighth inning off Shane McClanahan, a 23-year-old lefty who in Game 1 became the first pitcher in major league history to debut in the postseason without having pitched in a regular season game. He got out of that one unscathed, but not so on Wednesday:

The homer, Stanton’s second hit of the night, came with a man on base and trimmed the Rays’ lead to 8-4, but the Yankees could draw no closer. To date, they’ve scored 18 runs in the Division Series, 10 of which have been driven in by Stanton with his four homers. He broke open Game 1 with a ninth-inning grand slam off John Curtiss, extending a 5-3 lead to 9-3:

Stanton followed that up with a pair of homers off Tyler Glasnow in Game 2, first with a game-tying opposite field liner in the second inning, and then a three-run blast — and I do mean blast — in the fourth, which cut a 5-1 lead to 5-4, though the Rays eventually pulled away for a 7-5 win:

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There’s a moment in almost every Clayton Kershaw postseason start where the entire enterprise threatens to swing completely off its axis — where the boulder, finally nearing the top of the hill, begins its inexorable roll back down, leaving the three-time Cy Young winner flattened underneath it. It never happened in the Wild Card round, when Kershaw sliced and diced a punchless Brewers lineup over eight scoreless innings, but it arrived in Game 2 of the NLDS against the Padres in the sixth inning, when two pitches and two swings seemed like they would undo all of the veteran lefty’s hard work.

Clayton Kershaw is not Clayton Kershaw™ any more. At the same time, he is neither bad nor finished, and his 2020 was a resurgence previously hard to imagine for a 32-year-old man with 2,300-plus innings on his arm and a wobbly back that shifts and grinds like tectonic plates. He made 10 starts and threw 58.1 innings and struck out 62 batters and posted a 2.16 ERA, a hair off his 2.13 mark in 2016, the last year when he was really, truly the best pitcher in baseball. Since then he’s been more passable imitation of himself than the genuine thing, but this season was proof that he could adjust and thrive despite a fastball that’s past its peak.

The trick to Kershaw’s success, as Ben Lindbergh noted over at The Ringer, is that he starts off with that fastball — which, after dipping to an average of 90.5 mph, a career low, in 2019, rose back up 91.6 this year and got up to 93–94 — and then goes to his slider. It’s a winning strategy for several reasons: Hitters tend to let the first pitch go, allowing Kershaw to pump in strikes and get ahead; and his slider is a monster of a pitch. None of that likely works without that four-seamer getting a little more life on it, but Kershaw also has smarts and savvy and spin on his side, and he can reach back and find his old self albeit without the heat.

So it was against Milwaukee and so it looked against San Diego. For the first five innings, Kershaw stuck to his plan: 19 first-pitch fastballs out of 24 offerings, 45 fastballs total averaging 91.7 mph and peaking at 93.6, lots of two-strike sliders. And for five innings it worked, aside from a Wil Myers RBI double in the second on a slider that caught too much of the plate; otherwise, weak contact and strikeouts abounded. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Yankees had a chance. It was the third inning; the bases were loaded, the game was tied, and Luke Voit — baseball’s home run champ in the regular season — was at the plate. When Tampa Bay Rays starter Charlie Morton fell behind him 3-0, you could practically hear the Yankees’ bench vibrating with anticipation. Then back-to-back pitches were called strikes at the knees, and there was a new kind of tension. Both offerings could have been ruled out of the zone to force home a run, but they weren’t, and now Voit had just one more shot to do damage. Instead, he grounded out harmlessly to the shortstop.

Then the Rays got their chance. Joey Wendle singled to lead off the top of the fourth against Yankees right-hander Masahiro Tanaka, who followed that with a walk issued to Willy Adames. Then Kevin Kiermaier turned on the first pitch he saw and launched it into the empty seats in right field for a three-run homer to put the Rays ahead. Tampa Bay added on with two more big homers in the ensuing innings while simultaneously holding the Yankees to their smallest run total of the postseason in an 8-4 victory in ALDS Game 3 on Wednesday at Petco Park in San Diego. The Rays, the AL’s top seed in the playoffs, are now up 2-1 in the series and just a game away from eliminating their division rivals. Read the rest of this entry »

After their regular season dustup — not to mention Houston’s jawing leading into the ALDS — it seemed as if the Astros and the Athletics might come to postseason blows. Instead, they’ve settled for a barrage of long balls. Wednesday’s Game 3 featured seven more home runs, including five from the eventually triumphant Oakland, tying a postseason franchise record set during the Jose Canseco era. The A’s avoided a sweep and pushed the series to a fourth game while the combined home run count in the series climbed to 18.

For the first time in the postseason, the grind of a five-game series without an off day had a clear impact on which pitchers were deployed and how they performed. With electric rookie reliever Enoli Paredes unavailable after pitching in the first two games, and the other Astros starters unavailable to piggyback due to the Division Series schedule and the smoldering questions surrounding Zack Greinke’s health, the soft underbelly of the Astros bullpen was exposed late in the game as the Athletics scored five combined runs to take the lead.

Most of Oakland’s damage, as well as both the most significant narrative and literal swing in the game, came against reliever Josh James, who entered the game with a two-run lead. After pitching a scoreless, double play-aided sixth inning, James returned for the seventh and surrendered singles to Marcus Semien and Tommy La Stella before Chad Pinder, who had been in a strict left/right platoon with Jake Lamb leading up to the game, was left in to face the same-handed James. He sent a first-pitch breaking ball over the right field wall, tying the game at seven. Read the rest of this entry »

This time there wasn’t much offense. On the heels of a Game 1 that finished 9-5, the Atlanta Braves took a commanding two-games-to-none lead in the NLDS by pushing past the Miami Marlins by a score of 2-0. Ian Anderson and four relievers combined for the shutout, with a pair of solo home runs providing just enough run-support for a suddenly-stellar pitching staff.

What scoring there was came early. Dansby Swanson took Pablo López deep in the second inning with what was his second home run in his last two at-bats. In Game 1, the 26-year-old shortstop — given name James Dansby Swanson — had homered his final time up to cap a six-run Atlanta seventh.

Travis d’Arnaud, who’d preceded Swanson’s Game 1 blast with one of his own, then went yard against López in the fourth. Seven plate appearances into the NLDS, 31-year-old backstop — given name Travis E. d’Arnaud — now had a single, a double, and a pair of walks to go along with his two dingers.

Anderson wasn’t giving up anything. A suddenly-feeble Marlins lineup managed just three hits off him in five-and-two thirds innings — a near copy-cat of his no-runs-on-two-hits, six-inning performance last week in the Wild Card round. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres knew this was the outcome they risked. Just two pitches into the second inning of his start in Game 1 of the NLDS against the Los Angeles Dodgers, right-handed pitcher Mike Clevinger made a somber exit from the game, wincing at a pain in his elbow. He would later say it felt like bones were hitting the back of his elbow. The Padres knew this might happen, because it was almost exactly what did the last time Clevinger started a game, back on September 23. It was the reason his attempt to clear himself for the team’s Wild Card series last week failed. This was the risk the team took, however, because it was still the Padres’ best chance at avoiding precisely what happened anyway — a revolving door of relievers being asked to keep the team afloat for a fourth time in as many playoff games.

It wasn’t the Padres’ bullpen that stole the show on Tuesday, however, but that of the Dodgers, who picked up another short start by Walker Buehler by silencing San Diego’s deep lineup en route to a 5-1 victory to open the best-of-five series at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. The second game of the series will take place Wednesday at 9:08 p.m.

Buehler went four innings for the Dodgers while allowing just one run on two hits, but walked four and threw 95 pitches. Behind him, Dustin May, Victor González, Blake Treinen and Kenley Jansen combined for five innings of one-hit shutout baseball, striking out six and walking none.

For five innings, the Padres’ bullpen had walked a high-wire act without falling: eight walks, a hit by pitch, and an error in the field behind them, yet somehow just one run allowed. Those numbers suggest shoddy command, to be sure, but they also show the lengths to which the ‘pen was willing to go to avoid giving into the Dodgers’ powerful lineup. Of the 116 pitches thrown by Padres arms over those innings, just 58 were strikes. That led to a mind-numbing 11 hitters reaching three-ball counts; it also led to the Dodgers not recording a hit.

In the sixth inning, the dam finally broke. With the game tied at one apiece, Padres right-hander Garrett Richards walked Chris Taylor with one out before surrendering the first hit of the game — a Mookie Betts double to right-center. Left-hander Matt Strahm was then brought into face Corey Seager, who scored Taylor on a fly ball to give Los Angeles its first lead of the game. Read the rest of this entry »

In this astonishingly homer-heavy postseason, no teams have played homer-heavier games than the Yankees and the Rays in this ALDS. Of the 24 runs they’ve scored, all but four have come via the long ball. In every playoff game this postseason, the team that has out-homered the other has won. And so it went in Game 2, with the Rays’ four homers — accounting for six of their seven runs — surpassing the Yankees’ two, en route to a 7-5 final score.

All of the Yankees’ home runs came off the bat of Giancarlo Stanton, whose extraordinary power manifested in the form of a shockingly casual rocket into right field, tying the game at one in the second, and a three-run shot crushed to the tune of 118 mph in the fourth, both off Rays starter Tyler Glasnow. They were his fourth and fifth homers in four postseason games this year.

Unfortunately for the Yankees, though, both of these homers were hit while trailing. Overshadowing Stanton’s displays of strength was the way that the Yankees chose to set up their pitching. The rookie Deivi García was ostensibly tapped for the start. But after pitching a single inning and giving up yet another Randy Arozarena home run, García was lifted, a secret opener for J.A. Happ. Read the rest of this entry »

I, personally, have never hit a home run in Dodgers Stadium. After the past two days, however, I might be one of the few baseball-adjacent people who can’t say that. The A’s and Astros engaged in another slugfest in the early innings today, launching five home runs in the first five frames of Game 2 of the ALDS. Combine those with the six they hit yesterday, and it’s a bad time to be a cardboard cutout in the Chavez Ravine outfield.

Khris Davis got the party started in the second by pouncing on a hanging curveball. He got under it a bit, and George Springer camped where he expected the ball to land. That worked out like this:

He needn’t have worried, however, because Dodgers Stadium gave to both sides today. With a runner aboard in the top of the next inning, Springer got a belt-high curveball of his own and didn’t miss:

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By and large, today’s NLDS Game 1 between the Braves and Marlins followed a predictable script. Atlanta came in having lost just once all year with Max Fried on the mound, and while the southpaw wasn’t sharp, he held the fort long enough for his homer-happy teammates to take control. Rallying behind long balls by Travis d’Arnaud and Dansby Swanson — and buoyed by the usual strong bullpen effort — the Braves prevailed by a score of 9-5.

The top of the first didn’t portend what was to follow. Fried’s first inning comprised just 11 pitches — it would have been eight had third baseman Austin Riley not committed a two-out throwing error — and all of them were strikes. A repeat of last week’s pitch-efficient, cruise-control effort versus the Cincinnati Reds looked to be in the works.

Looks can be deceiving, though Miami’s starter didn’t exactly string together goose eggs either. Two pitches into Sandy Alcantara’s outing, Atlanta led 1-0. Reminding everyone that he’s one of baseball’s best players, Ronald Acuña Jr. deposited an outside fastball into the right-field seats at Houston’s Minute Maid Park. (Hello bubble.) The tale of the tape was 428, the bat flip was just juicy enough, and Alcantara was anything but happy. Read the rest of this entry »