Playoff baseball is a game of rapid reversals and slow-motion disasters. When heartbreak comes, it will either slap you in the face or gradually immure you in slime.

We saw both at Busch Stadium on Friday afternoon, as the Cardinals struck a lightning blow against the Phillies, then — just two outs from a commanding series lead — turned around to find out that the world was ending at a walking pace. A 2-0 ninth-inning lead turned into a 6-3 loss over the course of one bizarre half-inning. The Phillies are now, improbably, merely one win from advancing to the NLDS. Behold the fallout, a win probability chart that looks like a slide whistle sounds:

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The Wild Card Series opener between the Rays and Guardians was quick-moving from the beginning. Rays ace Shane McClanahan worked around a few weakly hit singles in the early innings. Cleveland starter Shane Bieber’s only baserunner in the first four frames — Ji-Man Choi, who walked — was quickly erased by a Manuel Margot double play. The first five full innings were completed in just an hour and nine minutes despite playoff-length commercial breaks, largely due to the lack of offense and Bieber’s ridiculously quick pace on the mound. The matchup of two premier starters — the AL’s fifth- and seventh-best qualified pitchers by ERA — seemed to be everything fans were hoping for.

Bieber’s start was masterful, matching his MO from the regular season: steal strikes with four-seam fastballs, then get hitters to chase his cutter and slider off the plate. The Rays’ righty-heavy lineup couldn’t figure it out for the entire game, coming up empty on 17 of their 27 swings against those two pitches. Unsurprisingly, every single one of those swinging strikes was located down and to his glove side. Bieber’s impeccable placement of pitches on the outer half was especially noteworthy against the chase-happy Christian Bethancourt and Randy Arozarena, who went a combined 0–6 with five strikeouts, four of which came on breaking balls off the plate. Bieber’s 7.2 innings of one-run ball made for the longest playoff start by a Cleveland pitcher in 15 years and will likely be among the longest starts of any pitcher this postseason. That’s a continuation of the impressive volume he put up in the regular season; he was one of just three AL pitchers to cross the 200-inning threshold. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to our Wild Card Game 1 chat-a-thon

12:01

Jay Jaffe: I’lll be joined here shortly by Dan Szymborski and David Laurila, and then at some point, the bullpen will open up and we’ll get some fresh arms in here as well

12:02

David Laurila: Greetings all. Happy postseason baseball.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: it’s time to play “Which Channel is That Game On Anyway,” and if  you’re asking about the Rays and Guardians opener about to begin, it’s on ESPN

12:04

Jay Jaffe: For me? Yes, but that’s because I’m working. you’re free to crack one open but I suggest pacing yourself

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The expanded playoff format might have put an end to Game 163 tiebreakers, but this postseason still promises to deliver some great matchups, featuring division rivals, electric starters, fearsome bats, and multiple teams that finally put an end to long playoff droughts. And though the field boasts four 100-plus-win clubs that seem poised for deep runs, a lot can happen in a short series. That makes it difficult to predict how October will unfold, but 30 of our writers from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs did their best.

Below are our predictions by league and round, as well as each writer’s full forecast (those tables are sortable). Happy playoffs! Read the rest of this entry »

There isn’t a lot to ponder for most teams when it comes to Wild Card starters. The Padres should start their best three starters. So should the Phillies, Guardians, Blue Jays, Mariners, and Padres. That leaves the Rays, Mets, and Cardinals as teams that have decisions to make, at least in my estimation. The Rays — well, let’s just say that if the Rays called up a sentient ham sandwich to start in the playoffs, we analysts would dig into Ham Sandwichson’s minor league numbers and try to figure out what they saw. There’s no predicting Tampa Bay. That just leaves the Mets and Cardinals.

New York Mets

Wait, the Mets? They have Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom, backed by Chris Bassitt and Carlos Carrasco. They’ve already announced Scherzer for the first game; can’t they just run out deGrom and then Bassitt (or Carrasco) in case of a deciding game? Sure, they could. But they should — and probably will — get fancy by holding deGrom back, something I expect them to do should they win the first game of the series.

This doesn’t sound like a good plan offhand. Leave the best starter on the planet behind Bassitt, a man whose fastball can best be described as “adequate,” in a game where you could end the series with a win? That sounds too cute by half for a franchise eternally stepping on rakes. Read the rest of this entry »

The expanded postseason field made for a distinct lack of drama as the regular season wound down. Most of the field was set by mid-September, with just a few races lasting into the final weeks of the season. But the board has been reset in the postseason. With the new Wild Card round set to begin today, here’s a look at the 12 teams in the playoffs and how they stack up against each other.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. Since regular season records don’t matter in the playoffs, I’ve removed the factors for win percentage and expected win percentage from the calculations.

Despite winning 111 games during the regular season, the Dodgers’ World Series odds sit below the Astros — and the Braves too! On paper, they have a juggernaut of a team, but their deep roster is more suited to the grueling pace of a long regular season. During a short series, that depth is wasted to a certain extent. The other reason why the projection systems are discounting their chances is some uncertainty in their pitching staff. Los Angeles won’t have Walker Buehler this postseason, and Dustin May could miss the Division Series. That means leaning on Tyler Anderson and Tony Gonsolin to make critical starts. Both had phenomenal regular-season numbers, but the projections don’t fully trust them as top-tier starters, and Gonsolin only just returned after a month-long absence due to a forearm issue. There’s also some uncertainty in the bullpen, as Craig Kimbrel lost his ninth-inning role during the final month of the season. It’s never a good sign when a team enters the postseason with high-leverage roles in flux.

The Astros have fewer questions to work through. They ran away with the best record in the American League en route to their sixth consecutive playoff appearance, and the only player they’ll be missing from their roster is Michael Brantley, who injured his shoulder in June and will be sidelined until next year. To replace him, Houston acquired Trey Mancini from the Orioles at the trade deadline, though he hasn’t been able to replicate his previous success in his new digs, with a mere 77 wRC+ as an Astro. The pitching staff is once again led by Justin Verlander, who missed the team’s last two October trips. Lance McCullers Jr. will likely play a significant role as well. He injured his forearm during the 2021 postseason and was sidelined for the majority of the regular season but made eight solid starts down the stretch. Read the rest of this entry »

Of the 12 teams in the playoffs in 2022, only one was projected by both ZiPS and FanGraphs in the preseason as a sub-.500 team: the Cleveland Guardians. But this lone Cinderella in a sea of mean stepsisters toppled the White Sox handily this year, pulling away from the pack late to finish with an 11-game cushion in the AL Central. As the league’s No. 3 seed by virtue of winning the division, Cleveland now hosts the Tampa Bay Rays in the three-game Wild Card Series.

Broadly speaking, there are broad similarities between the Guardians and the Rays. Both play in smaller markets and, depending on how you look at the issue, have a payroll attitude somewhere on the spectrum from admirably thrifty to Ebenezer Scrooge on tax deadline day. However they got there, these teams embraced modern analytics early on, long before it was de rigeur in baseball, and have seen advantages. The Rays were the league doormat during the early, very non-sabermetric days of the franchise, but after an abrupt change in direction, they have the fourth-most wins in baseball over the last 15 years. The Guardians are not far behind.

Despite both teams regularly making the playoffs, they’ve only met in the postseason once before, in the 2013 AL Wild Card Game. Things didn’t go Cleveland’s way then, as Alex Cobb and Tampa’s bullpen combined for a shutout, causing a quick exit from October. Now Cleveland has a three-game series to get its revenge. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2022 season was the year to break long-standing playoff droughts. The Mariners ending their two-decade stretch of futility got the bigger headlines, but the Phillies closed out their own decade of suffering by clinching the NL’s final Wild Card berth on Monday. It didn’t come easy — under the previous playoff structure, they would have missed out on the postseason by two games — but the expanded field gives them an opportunity to make some noise in October. Their opponent will be a familiar one: the Cardinals, who eliminated the Phillies in a hard-fought Division Series the last time they were in the playoffs.

St. Louis hasn’t had to weather a lengthy playoff drought since the 1970s, qualifying for the postseason for the fourth consecutive year and winning its second division title in that span. The Cardinals also posted their third 90-plus win season in that period, with the shortened 2020 season as the only outlier. More remarkably, they haven’t finished below .500 since 2007, with 10 postseason appearances in those 15 years. As far as consistent competitors go, the Cardinals are essentially an October staple.

The Phillies’ route to their Wild Card berth wasn’t a straight one. They wandered through the first two months of the season, posting a disappointing 21–29 record, which led to the dismissal of manager Joe Girardi on June 3. But after that, they went 64–46 under interim manager Rob Thompson, the fourth-best record in the NL over the rest of the season. All that success during the summer came despite losing Bryce Harper for a significant chunk of the year. He fractured his thumb on June 25 and returned on August 26 but never truly regained his MVP form, with an 84 wRC+ over the final month and change of play.

With its superstar on the shelf, a number of Philadelphia’s veteran sluggers stepped up to lead the offense. The biggest contributor was J.T. Realmuto. As Michael Baumann covered a week ago, the veteran catcher carried the load with a 162 wRC+ in the second half, accumulating the third most WAR in that time behind Aaron Judge and Adley Rutschman. Despite his slow-ish start, Realmuto wound up posting career bests in wRC+ and WAR. Then there was Kyle Schwarber, who led the NL in home runs with 46, a surprise given his similar slow start to the season; he hit just 11 homers in the first two months of the season but exploded in June with 12 and added 23 more over the next three months.

The other big free-agent deal the Phillies handed out over the offseason hasn’t worked out as well. After posting a 122 wRC+ over the last five seasons, Nick Castellanos couldn’t find his footing in Philadelphia, slumping to a 95 wRC+, his worst year at the plate since 2015. His biggest problem was a bad case of chasing breaking balls off the plate, leading to big issues making authoritative contact. His barrel rate and hard-hit rate fell to career lows, resulting in a dismal .392 slugging percentage.

But we can’t talk about the Phillies without talking about their defense. Put simply, it’s bad. It’s not a surprise either, considering that Schwarber and Castellanos occupy the corner outfield spots. The only positive contributor in their starting lineup is second baseman Jean Segura, who graded out as a +4 in Outs Above Average this year. The Phillies’ biggest issue, though, isn’t making mistakes; they actually committed the fourth-fewest errors in the majors this year. Instead, they simply let too many batted balls find the grass, which significantly hurt their ability to prevent runs from scoring. It’s a big reason why their pitching staff posted a top-10 FIP in baseball but a team ERA that was just 18th.

Leading said pitching staff is Aaron Nola, a quiet contender for the NL Cy Young award this year. One major reason why is that the righty was able to cut his home run rate to just 9.8% this year, a huge improvement over his career rate of 13.2%. He also posted a career-low walk rate this year while still maintaining his big strikeout totals. He’ll be on the mound for Game 2 of this series. To open, the Phillies will turn to Zack Wheeler. He followed up a career year in 2021 with a season nearly as good, though he pitched 60 fewer innings. The health of his forearm was a big question mark through the end of the summer, but he managed to make it back to the mound in late September and posted three good starts to finish the regular season. If the series goes to a Game 3, Philadelphia will likely turn to Ranger Suárez, a quality starter in his own right but not up to the level of Nola or Wheeler.

Where the Phillies will lead off with their two aces, the Cardinals enter this series with less established options up top.

Ordinarily, it would be hard to imagine a Cardinals playoff series without Wainwright, but given how the final month of the season went, manager Oli Marmol may opt for hiding his veteran righty.

Wainwright allowed a whopping 23 runs in his six September starts, and his strikeout and walk rates both took a turn for the worse. That performance has likely pushed him out of the picture for a Wild Card start; at best, the Cardinals could hand him the ball on an extremely short leash and have Montgomery or Flaherty ready on standby if things go south quickly.

Luckily, Mikolas and Quintana finished the regular season on strong notes; the latter, per Marmol on Thursday, will take the ball for Game 1, and the former will start Game 2, with Game 3’s starter TBD. Quintana hasn’t pitched this well since he was a member of the White Sox back in 2017 and has been even better since coming over from the Pirates at the trade deadline. Chris Gilligan looked at Quintana’s rejuvenation earlier this week and noted his transition from a pitcher who relied on strikeouts to one who induces tons of weak contact:

He has deployed his arsenal by throwing mostly outside the strike zone, elevating his fastball more and making hitters reach for curveballs and changeups. His 35.4% zone rate is the lowest in a full season of his career, around 10 percentage points lower than his typical early-career season, and the second-lowest among qualifying pitchers this year. And it’s working – he’s enticing swings on a career-high 36.2% of his pitches outside of the zone, the 10th-highest rate among qualifiers. … By drawing hitters outside the strike zone, he has significantly diminished the quality of their contact without conceding bases on balls with any sort of damaging frequency.

That leaves Montgomery, Flaherty, and Wainwright to start in a potential Game 3. Like Quintana, Montgomery holds the platoon advantage over some of Philadelphia’s more potent bats, and Flaherty’s stuff could play up in shorter outings if he were pushed to the bullpen. So the decision comes back around to what to do with Wainwright, and that’s not an easy one given how much history he has with the franchise, particularly in the playoffs.

Offensively, St. Louis has far less to worry about. Led by superstars Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, the Cardinals had the third-best offense in the NL, scoring 4.77 runs per game. After looking like an MVP candidate for most of the season, Goldschmidt slumped a bit in September, posting a 108 wRC+ over the last month of the season, which cost him a shot at the Triple Crown after he made a run at it through the summer. Arenado, meanwhile, bounced back from a disappointing first year in St. Louis to post the best season of his career. Those two provide a fantastic one-two punch in the heart of the lineup.

The biggest story in St. Louis, though, has to be the rejuvenation of Albert Pujols. He returned to the Cardinals for one last reunion tour after a slow and painful decline in Los Angeles but has defied time and age by becoming a key contributor as the team’s semi-regular designated hitter. He hit just six dingers during the first half of the season, but chasing his milestone 700th home run sparked a miraculous second half. He blasted 18 bombs after the All-Star break — only Judge hit more during that span — with all of his power peripherals taking a sudden turn for the better. I’m sure the Cardinals couldn’t have imagined their franchise icon leading them to the postseason again when they signed him back in the winter, but here we are.

As far as roster construction goes, these two teams found their success through very different means. St. Louis’s position group put together a cumulative 33.1 WAR, second in the NL and a testament to their quality production at the plate and phenomenal defense in the field. Philadelphia’s lineup can score runs in bunches, but the defense is atrocious. The team’s strength lies instead in a top-heavy rotation led by two of the best pitchers in the league. Also worth noting is that the Cardinals went 53–28 at home during the regular season, giving them the advantage at the outset. But these teams are more evenly matched than they appear on paper, which should make for some excellent baseball this weekend.

While the postseason drought spanning more than two decades is over, so too is the celebration in Seattle, as the Mariners travel to the other side of the continent to face the slugging, battle-tested Blue Jays, who emerged from baseball’s best division as the top wild card.

Toronto’s lineup is dangerous from top to bottom, stacked with marquee names who have thirteen combined All Star appearances (George Springer has four of his own, Matt Chapman somehow only has one). The group had the fifth-lowest strikeout rate in baseball during the regular season, ranked third in slugging, and were second only to the Dodgers in team wRC+. Except for Raimel Tapia and Whit Merrifield, every member of the Blue Jays’ regular starting lineup posted a wRC+ over 100 on the season, and Merrifield closed the season on a .361/.385/.639 heater. If Lourdes Gurriel Jr.’s hamstring is healed in time for him to be inserted in the lineup, he’s an easy offensive upgrade on Tapia, though he may not have his timing immediately due to his lack of at-bats.

While Toronto’s lineup has undeniable star power, it may have an unexpected fault at its core. While his season, overall, was very good, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is ice cold right now. During the last month of the season he slashed a paltry .235/.290/.390 and struggled with plate discipline. Vladdy’s chase rate during September (40%) was a full ten percentage points higher than his career norm (31%), as he struggled to lay off sliders away from him and well off the plate. Two-pitch Robbie Ray should be a great matchup for Vlad, as he doesn’t have a secondary pitch that moves away from right-handed hitters aside from an unfamiliar changeup. But the Mariners have bullpen weapons that are well-suited to exploit his recent issues in Penn Murfee, Diego Castillo, and Matt Brash, who all have sliders that finish in a spot Guerrero can’t seem to get to right now. Streaky Jays shortstop Bo Bichette has been the polar opposite, second only to Aaron Judge in WAR since the calendar flipped to September, slashing .405/.443/.664 and clubbing 19 extra-base hits during that span and entering postseason play as one of the planet’s most dangerous hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are particularly sharp-eyed, you may have noticed that the ZiPS postseason game-by-game projections are now live.

These projections differ from the in-season projections in a few important ways. Where regular season projections are generally geared more towards a macro view of a team’s fortunes, when we get to the playoffs and have an idea of individual matchups, we can shift to more micro-level projections that reflect the very different ways players are used during the postseason. The ZiPS game matchup tool has a built-in lineup estimator that projects every pitcher’s and batter’s line against every other pitcher and batter, so there is no need to look at a team’s generalized offensive strength. We also use what I call the “full-fat ZiPS” rather than the simpler in-season model; the latter is necessary given the realities of daily updates, but isn’t come October. For some players and teams, this makes a difference. For instance, when all of the Statcast and similar data are baked in, ZiPS likes the Guardians more than it would using the in-season version.

For 2022, I’ve refined my model of bullpen usage, and ZiPS also now does a better job projecting the probability of a close game, which changes the odds of each pitcher being used. Read the rest of this entry »