Despite being second and third in record among AL clubs and sporting the top two run differentials in the Junior Circuit, the Rays and Rangers will meet in the wild card round as the fourth and fifth seeds, respectively. Tampa Bay secured the top wild card spot after losing a close division race, finishing just two games behind the first-place Orioles, the only 100-win team in the AL, and will play host to the Rangers. Their 90 wins tied them with the Astros for first place in the West, but they lost the division crown via tiebreaker under the new rules that sent Game 163 into extinction. These two squads may be a bit above the caliber of the average wild card series, but only one will be on a flight to Baltimore this weekend for the ALDS. Read the rest of this entry »

Once again, the PC on my office desk (possibly with a cat sleeping on it) has started crunching the postseason numbers. Indeed, if you’re a particularly keen observer, you may have noticed that the ZiPS Game-by-Game Postseason Odds are now available for your adoration or scorn. Yes, these are technically probabilities rather than odds, but you don’t get the name the articles, bossypants!

For those of you who are new to the ZiPS playoff projections, or who wisely don’t reserve portions of their brain for remembering Dan Szymborski stuff, the playoff model is much different than the generalized seasonal model you see utilized in the articles I publish over the course of the season. The macro-level projections used to forecast a full 162-game season are less suitable when applied to the postseason, given the more compact nature of a three-, five-, or seven-game series. When you’re looking a week into the future rather than half a year, you’re able to take a more ground-level view of the relative strength of teams. You’re able to make educated guesses as to who is starting each game, what the lineups will look like, who is healthy and who is not, and so on. 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. The playoffs also come with the benefit of being able to run the full, more robust model of ZiPS rather than the simpler model used during the regular season, a compromise necessitated by the fact that projecting a majors’ worth of players takes more than a day.

For 2023, I’ve continued to refine my models to try to more accurately project playoff bullpen usage, and have also done some more work on modeling how individual pitchers will fare when being used on short rest. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the novelties we’re going to see this postseason, this series is one of the weirdest. The Phillies and Marlins have never met in the postseason before. In fact, they’d never made the playoffs in the same season before; apart from a stretch from 2003 to ’09 when it seemed like they only ever played each other, the two franchises had never even finished above .500 in the same season before.

But here we are: Three games to determine who gets eternal claim to the legacy of Darren Daulton and Alex Arias, and more importantly, a berth in the NLDS against Atlanta. Read the rest of this entry »

The end of the regular season is always bittersweet for me. On one hand, playoff baseball is one of my favorite times of year. Taking the leisurely pace of the game and injecting it with win-or-go-home drama makes for great viewing. Who could forget last year’s rally goose, or Bryce Harper’s monster NLCS-deciding homer? Who could forget the Astros winning one for Dusty?

But there’s no more regular-season baseball to watch, and that’s also something I love. No-drama afternoons, sixth innings where your team is down five and the announcers are looking for something to talk about — that’s the regular rhythm of my summer, and it’ll be weird to move on without it. So to ease the transition from one style of baseball to another, I gathered a few whimsical things and a few high-drama things and combined them into one, well, Five Things. Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs start on Tuesday, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its American League counterpart, which will run tomorrow, will break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Twins and a short first round playoff series: Name a more iconic duo. The Twins have been quietly excellent this year, compiling the seventh-best run differential in baseball. To be sure, some of that is because they have the good fortune of facing fellow AL Central clubs, but a lot of it is because their team is full of good pitchers. They’ll meet the Toronto Blue Jays in a Wild Card clash. You’ve probably watched and heard a lot about the Blue Jays this year, and I’ll get to them, but let’s start with the thing you probably most need to hear: The Twins are good, not just the token AL Central representative, and they got a lot better when you probably weren’t paying attention.

The Minnesota rotation might be short on name recognition relative to some other playoff squads, but Pablo López and Sonny Gray are each top 10 pitchers by WAR this year. Joe Ryan, Kenta Maeda, and Bailey Ober are both above average as well – Ryan will likely draw the third start, but the other two will surely be available to relieve him if necessary. They’re one of those classic playoff tropes, the team you hate to face because so much of their value is concentrated in good pitching. López has gone six or more innings while allowing one or fewer runs 11 times this year; Gray has done it nine times himself. It’s easy to imagine the Jays coming into Minneapolis and leaving with very few runs to show for their trip. Read the rest of this entry »