The Astros knew exactly what they were doing when they hired Dusty Baker to manage the team in the wake of commissioner Rob Manfred’s report on the club’s illegal sign-stealing efforts during the 2017 and ’18 seasons. The septuagenarian skipper’s old-school reputation stood out as an effort to rebrand an analytically-inclined organization that Manfred criticized as “insular” and “problematic,” to say nothing of outside criticisms of the team’s methods as “dehumanizing.” Baker’s human touch and his skill at dealing with the media have helped to offset some of the anger and hostility directed at the team by fans, while the Astros have continued their deep postseason runs, presumably without the benefit of illegal electronic help.

The Astros limped to a 29-31 record during the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season due to myriad injuries and underperformances, but in the expanded postseason, they went on a tear, upsetting the higher-seeded Twins in the Wild Card Series and the A’s in the Division Series before falling to the Rays in the AL Championship Series, that after rallying back from a three-games-to-none deficit. This year, despite a rotation full of question marks, they overcame an 18-17 start, took over sole possession of first place in the AL West for good on June 21, and breezed to the AL West title with a 95-67 record. Since then, they outlasted both the White Sox in the Division Series and the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series.

In doing so, Baker became just the ninth manager to win pennants in both leagues, and before that, the first manager to win division titles with five different teams; he had already become the first manager to take five different teams to the postseason last year. Read the rest of this entry »

Yordan Alvarez is an imposing figure in the batter’s box. The lefty stands 6-foot-5, towering over home plate with his knees bent and bat coiled, simply daring the pitcher to throw him a pitch in the zone while having the patience to spit at pitches not to his liking. With his toothpick-gnawing manager, Dusty Baker, looking on from the dugout, I couldn’t help but be reminded of another hitter from Baker’s past who led him to his only other World Series appearance back in 2002. No other hitter is quite like Barry Bonds, but Alvarez has been a treat to watch with his impressive blend of patience (18.6% walk rate) and power (.353 ISO). He earned ALCS MVP honors after going 12-for-23 with five extra base hits, and he capped off the series with a massive 4-for-4 night in the decisive Game 6 to knock the Red Sox out of the playoffs and advance to the World Series:

Game 6 was a microcosm of his performance all postseason: roasting extra base hits from line to line, whether he’s seeing offspeed pitches at the knees or high-90s fastballs painted on the outside corner. Here’s how his performance has staked up against other hitters this October:

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In Game 6 of the ALCS, en route to clinching the American League pennant for the third time in five years, the Astros received quite the start from Luis Garcia. As a team hampered by rotation issues, issues only accentuated by the injury to Lance McCullers Jr. in the ALDS, Houston needed someone other than Framber Valdez to step up and perform. Non-Valdez starters had recorded just 12 measly outs in Games 2 through 4; in retrospect, the Astros were probably lucky to have come away with even one of those games.

After a brilliant Valdez start to put Houston up three-games-to-two, it was once again Garcia’s turn to get the ball. The team’s No. 3 starter during the regular season, he had been productive all year but exited Game 2 of the ALCS with an injury; Garcia’s fastball velocity in his second inning of work was down almost 4 mph relative to his first inning mark. On Friday, though, the script was completely flipped: Garcia was airing it out. After only throwing one 97 mph pitch the entire regular season, he recorded eight against Boston. His 5 2/3 shutout innings, allowing just one hit and one walk, made him the most valuable Houston player of the evening, with a +.308 WPA. That type of performance is a necessity if the Astros want to triumph over the Braves and win the World Series.

In the midst of his excellent outing, there was a lot of oohing and aahing over Garcia’s velocity. As ESPN’s Jeff Passan tweeted during the game, Garcia’s stuff was “ticking way, way, way up.” For those counting at home, that’s three “way”s, and deservedly so. Garcia threw the five fastest pitches of his career in Game 6; he has thrown the eight fastest pitches of his career all in the postseason (seven in Game 6, one against the Rays last year). The righty averaged just 93.3 mph on his four-seamer during the regular season, but in Game 6, he averaged 96.0. That average fastball velocity was 1.4 mph faster than his highest average in any other outing this season (94.6 mph, April 12). He was amped up. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first two installments of this feature, I graded the postseason performance of two managers per article. This time, I’m sure you were expecting the same: the losing managers for the ALCS and NLCS lined up for some random internet writer to opine on their faults. That’s still basically the idea here, but I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel like fitting a chance to enumerate Dave Roberts’ strange decision-making into only half an article. That main course is still to come; for now, you’ll just have to settle for an accounting of Alex Cora’s playoff acumen.

Lineups/Pinch Hitting

Grade: A-
The Red Sox aren’t built for versatility. By the end of the season, they mostly plugged in their best hitters and let them go to work. An injury to J.D. Martinez meant even less flexibility in several early games. Even so, I liked some of the small moves Cora made to extract a tiny bit of extra value from his lineup.

When Boston faced a lefty pitcher, Enrique Hernández led off, with Kyle Schwarber batting second. Against righties, that order was flipped. That might seem like a small thing, but I like that it always keeps a starter from having a (relatively) easy matchup when the order turns over for a third time. If you’re trying to get extra outs from your starter, you’ll be doing it at a disadvantage. And if you pull your starter, the second batter your reliever faces will have the platoon edge anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fall Classic is here, the 117th World Series, which will end with the Commissioner’s Trophy and a stage with room for just one victorious organization. Two supremely talented teams are at the end of an eight-month gauntlet — one that began with the singular, casual, quiet pop of catchers’ mitts in Florida and will end in a pressure cooker, with screaming masses and the attention of the sports world, as the AL champion Astros, in their third World Series of the last five years, will face the NL champion Braves in their first since 1999.

It’s been a mixed, inconsistent decade for Atlanta in the post-Bobby Cox era. The franchise’s 15-year reign over the NL East, which it won every year from 1991 to 2005 except for the strike-shortened ‘94 season, holds a unique place in the baseball culture. Anyone over 30 saw most of it unfold every day on cable if they wanted to — my ex-brother-in-law grew up in Pennsylvania with Andres Galarraga’s number painted in Wite-Out on his fitted cap — thanks to the club’s presence on TBS. The Braves’ 22-year World Series drought hasn’t been entirely hapless, and they have had stretches of contention, making the next six postseasons after their ’99 sweep at the hands of the Yankees, even as some of that core aged and/or moved on. Fittingly enough, the final two seasons of their division champions streak ended with postseason losses to the Astros, in both the 2004 (Carlos Beltran’s Godtober) and ’05 (Clemens, Oswalt, Pettitte) NLDS; so too did their tenure on TBS, which concluded with a 3–0 loss in Houston at the end of the 2007 regular season.

Then came, relatively speaking, a swoon. The Freddie Freeman/Brian McCann/Jason Heyward/Andrelton Simmons core drove the Braves to four consecutive 89-win or better seasons from 2010 to ’14, but that group won just two postseason games during that stretch. It was during this time period that Cox retired and a brief descent to the bottom of the division began. The arrival of the current core (Ozzie Albies, Dansby Swanson, Ronald Acuña Jr., etc.) has put them back on top of the NL East for the last four years, and they’ve slowly crept deeper and deeper into the postseason, culminating in this year’s pennant.

Those Astros postseason victories in 2004 and ’05 marked the tail end of Houston’s “Killer B’s” era, dominated by Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Lance Berkman, and others (Billy Wagner, Moises Alou, Octavio Dotel… these teams were absolutely stacked). Houston finished over .500 ten times in eleven years before losing the NLCS to Albert Pujols and the Cardinals in ’04 and the World Series to the White Sox in ’05 and slowly beginning a fall from grace, both on and off the field. Jeff Luhnow was hired away from the Cardinals front office to helm an intense rebuild that included three consecutive 100-loss seasons, and the draft picks from that stretch produced Carlos Correa, Lance McCullers Jr., Kyle Tucker, and Alex Bregman … as well as the Brady Aiken controversy that would pale in comparison to what lay ahead for the franchise.

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We have a hard time making ourselves feel it when probability offers good news. Going into Saturday’s NLCS Game 6, our ZiPS postseason game-by-game odds gave the Braves a 71.4% chance of advancing to the World Series. They had largely outplayed the Dodgers. Max Muncy and Justin Turner were still sidelined, and Joe Kelly had just joined them. Max Scherzer had been scratched with arm fatigue, leaving Walker Buehler to start on short rest. Game 7 might mean a bullpen game for Los Angeles, if there were a Game 7 at all. The Dodgers were up against it; the Braves, at worst, had another shot.

That is what we knew; feeling it was another matter. After all, the Dodgers had won 18 more regular-season games than the Braves, and in a harder division. They were riding a seven-game win streak in postseason elimination games, including an 11–2 drubbing in Game 5 to stay alive. Atlanta had dealt with injuries of its own, and this series had so far followed 2020’s pattern, causing an itchy bit of worry in the back of Braves fans’ minds as they remembered going up three-games-to-one in last year’s NLCS only to have Los Angeles claw its way back in Game 5 and take the next two. Ian Anderson, the Braves’ Game 6 starter, had only managed three innings in Game 2; Atlanta won, but he’d walked three and allowed two runs, and then there were all those bad first innings to think of. What if Eddie Rosario’s bat cooled? What if Chris Taylor’s didn’t? Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros are heading to their third World Series in the last five years, besting the Red Sox, 5–0, on Friday night to finish the ALCS in six games. The Red Sox had the pitcher they wanted on the mound in Nathan Eovaldi, but the offense they needed never materialized as Houston’s starter, Luis Garcia, pitched 5 2/3 masterful innings, striking out seven against just a single walk and one lonely hit.

As one of the first front offices to go all-in on modern analytics, Houston has long been an organization that takes glee in upending conventional wisdom. Despite a rotation torn apart long-term by veteran departures and short-term with an injury to Lance McCullers Jr. (and what possibly looked like one to Garcia), the Astros stymied Boston’s lineup. Pitching woes, schmitching woes; despite the very reasonable worries about the rotation, they limited the dangerous Red Sox offense to three runs over the final three games.

Everyone likes tales of comebacks or redemption, and Garcia, one of the AL Rookie of the Year favorites, provided a good one. He got knocked out in the third inning of his first start this postseason, giving up five runs against the White Sox in Houston’s lone ALDS loss. The follow-up performance didn’t go any better: the Red Sox scored five runs off of him before he was removed with a knee strain in the second inning.

Some teams would have been a little uneasy about starting Garcia in Game 6, but one of the reasons the Astros are in position to win another World Series championship is that they put a lot of faith in the young pitching talent that remained after most of their big-name starting pitching was gone. As with the Rays and their never-ending supply of nameless relievers who become all-world or the White Sox going with Carlos Rodón in Game 4 of the ALDS, there’s a lot of appeal in sticking with the people that got you here. There would have been second-guessing and what-ifs about not acquiring a J.A. Happ type a few months ago if Garcia had again struggled. But he didn’t, and while this wasn’t John Smoltz facing off against Jack Morris in the World Series, he dominated Boston’s offense in his 5 2/3 one-hit innings.

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If the Houston Astros win tonight, they’ll go to the World Series. That’s in line with what they expected to be doing before the season — this is the fifth straight year the Astros have played in the ALCS, and they’ve been to the World Series in two of those four years. But if they make it three out of five this year, they’ll do so despite pitching injuries that have left the team rebuilding their rotation on the fly, much as they’ve been doing since the start of the year.

Yesterday, Dusty Baker intimated that Lance McCullers Jr. is out for the remainder of the postseason. Given that he was left off the ALCS roster, that’s hardly a surprise, but it does mean that the Astros need to plan for how their rotation will work without him going forward.

With their presumptive ace gone, the top of the rotation now starts with Framber Valdez. I’d argue that it might have started with him in any case, but with McCullers out, he’s clearly the best option. That lines him up to start a World Series opener if they make it that far, but does make him mostly unavailable before then. Easy enough, here’s the rotation through one spot:

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For much of this postseason, the main storyline for the Los Angeles Dodgers has been a pitching staff that’s been stretched to its limit, but that focus neglects the fact that the Dodgers have also struggled to hit like they did earlier in the year. Entering Game 5 of the NLCS, they’d scored just 3.5 runs per game in their 10 previous playoff tilts. They were shutout twice by the Giants, and held to fewer than four runs four other times. It was an uncharacteristic slump for what had been one of the National League’s most potent lineups during the regular season. As a team, they were hitting just .231/.303/.356 (.286 wOBA) in October, a far cry from their .251/.339/.446 (.337 wOBA) regular season effort.

With their season hanging in the balance, the Dodgers bats finally came alive on Thursday night. They collected 17 hits against the Atlanta Braves — every position player in the lineup collected at least one hit except for Will Smith — and pushed 11 runs across the plate to force a Game 6 in Atlanta this weekend. This was the Dodgers’ seventh straight postseason win while facing elimination, the third longest streak in baseball history.

The hero of the game was undoubtedly Chris Taylor. He started his night by blasting a two-run home run off a center-cut fastball from Max Fried to give the Dodgers a 3-2 lead in the second inning — a lead they wouldn’t relinquish for the remainder of the night. In the third with runners on the corners, Taylor blooped a single into center for his second hit and third RBI of the game. He hit his second home run in the fifth inning, another two-run shot off Chris Martin, who had just entered the game in relief of Fried. Taylor came up again in the seventh inning with the bases empty and deposited a pitch into the left-center field bleachers — his third homer of the game and sixth RBI. His final at-bat came in the eighth and he came close to a fourth home run when he lined a hanging curveball down the left field line; it curved foul and he ended up striking out to end the inning:

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As bullpen cogs go, Tyler Matzek has been an indispensable one for the Braves in each of the past two seasons, helping them win back-to-back NL East titles and get within one win of the World Series — and this time around, perhaps to outdo that. The 31-year-old lefty has become the Braves’ “Everyday Eddie” in October, pitching in all eight of the team’s postseason games thus far and generally dominating. His performance has been all the more impressive given his backstory, an odyssey that took him from being the Rockies’ first-round pick in 2009 to taking leave from the team six years later due to performance anxiety issues to pitching for an indy-league team called the Texas Airhogs before returning to the majors.

So far this October, Matzek has pitched a total of 8.1 innings, nearly all of them high-leverage, for a unit that has delivered a postseason-best 2.60 ERA in 34.2 innings — 10 fewer than any of the other three remaining teams, if you’re looking for a commentary on the stability of the Braves’ rotation relative to those of the Dodgers, Astros, and Red Sox. The starters’ comparatively strong performance (2.55 ERA, 3.25 FIP, and five or more innings five times) has allowed manager Brian Snitker to line up his bullpen to best effect, and that’s generally meant calling upon Matzek and righty Luke Jackson ahead of lefty closer Will Smith late in the game. After the Braves’ 9-2 victory over the Dodgers on Wednesday night, during which Matzek pitched a scoreless, 14-pitch eighth inning when the margin was still just three runs, Snitker gushed, “Our bullpen guys… all they do is answer the phone and get ready. And I ride them. I told them all they got saddle cinches on their sides because I have tightened that thing so hard riding them. They have done a great job.”

In his 8.1 innings, Matzek has allowed four hits, four walks, and two runs while striking out 13 (39.3%) on the strength of his fastball/slider combination. The runs and two of the walks came in Game 2 of the NLCS against the Dodgers, and they weren’t entirely his fault. Summoned in the sixth inning of a 2-2 game — the earliest he’s entered any of this year’s postseason games — he struck out Albert Pujols with two outs and a runner on third, then returned to pitch the seventh where he lost a 10-pitch battle to Mookie Betts, whom he walked before striking out both Corey Seager and Trea Turner on three pitches apiece. During Seager’s plate appearance, Betts stole second, so Snitker ordered Matzek to walk Will Smith (the Dodgers’ catcher, not the Braves’ closer) and then called upon Jackson. The intentional walk backfired, as Jackson hit Justin Turner with a pitch to load the bases, and then served up a two-run double to Chris Taylor, giving the Dodgers a 4-2 lead and charging the runs to Matzek’s room. The Braves would come back to tie the game after Dave Roberts‘ ill-fated and puzzling decision to use Julio Urías to pitch the eighth inning, and to win in the ninth via Eddie Rosario’s walk-off single off Kenley Jansen. Read the rest of this entry »