I started writing this article just before the playoffs began, and I framed it to myself as a trailer for an early-2000s romantic comedy. I thought Matthew Boyd and the Cleveland Guardians fit the rom-com formula surprisingly well. After his second breakup with his ex (the Tigers), Boyd was hurt (recovering from Tommy John surgery), unemployed (a free agent), and short on suitors (unsigned well into the season). When he had his meet cute (signed a contract) with the Guardians, they were successful (best record in the AL) but something was missing (starting pitching). Sparks flew instantly. Boyd pitched to a 2.72 ERA in eight starts. Cleveland won six of those eight games.

Now, the Guardians are just a baseball team, standing in front of a Boyd, asking him to start in the ALDS. Replace Boyd with Kate Hudson and make him a journalist instead of a baseball player, and you’ve got your movie. About a Boyd. To All the Boyds I’ve Loved Before. You get it.

Unfortunately for me (and fortunately for the rest of you), my colleague Kiri Oler came out with an excellent piece not so long ago that just so happened to use a Kate Hudson rom-com as a framing device. I was delighted that two different writers thought to write about Kate Hudson on a website that usually couldn’t have any less to do with Kate Hudson, let alone the fact that we both thought to do it in the same week. At the same time, I was disappointed I’d spent so much time coming up with “Boyd” puns for nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Let’s just get this out of the way up top: Jazz Chisholm Jr. should have been called out at second base.

The replay review of his seventh-inning stolen base showed that his foot had not yet touched the bag when Royals second baseman Michael Massey applied the tag. Chisholm then scored the go-ahead run on Alex Verdugo’s single to left field, and the Yankees won a somewhat sloppy, back-and-forth Game 1 of the American League Division Series, 6-5, on Saturday night at Yankee Stadium.

“They just said there was nothing clear and convincing to overturn it,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said Sunday morning, after he asked MLB why the call on the field was not reversed. “If he had been called out, that call would have stood too.” Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone thought it was gone. Jurickson Profar hopped around, ostensibly upset that Mookie Betts’ fly ball had dropped into the left field seats. The camera panned to Betts triumphantly rounding the bases. The scorebug flipped from zero to one under the Dodgers logo. And then, a few seconds later, all was clear: Profar had pulled a Julio Rodríguez, fooling everyone into thinking it was a homer before whipping the ball back into the infield. He wasn’t hopping out of frustration, it turned out; on second look, he was engaging in some well-earned taunting, goading the assembled Dodgers fans after his excellent defensive play.

JURICKSON PROFAR ROBS MOOKIE!!! #NLDS pic.twitter.com/bvByqwsAKB

— MLB (@MLB) October 7, 2024

Profar’s first-inning home run robbery and subsequent gloating was a sign of things to come. In a tense clash between these two Southern California rivals, the Padres came out on top, 10-2, to level the NLDS at a game apiece, battling their opponents both on and off the field throughout the course of this bizarre evening.

The weirdness peaked in the seventh inning, when the game was delayed for over 10 minutes while fans threw things — including baseballs and beer cans — onto the field, pausing the action. While security guards attempted to get the crowd under control, Padres manager Mike Shildt gathered his fielders, issuing a fiery impromptu pep talk as the team huddled around their appointed leader. After the inning, an even larger group meeting was held in the Padres dugout, this time led by the on-the-field leader, Manny Machado, who issued marching orders to the rest of the San Diego roster. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a scene in The Way of the Gun where Ryan Phillippe’s character is torturing some dude — the details are unimportant but gruesome — and he’s leaning over his poor victim, describing all the horrible things he’s going to do if he doesn’t talk. One line has always stuck with me: “Whatever I do after that, I’ll pour gasoline in your eyes from time to time just to keep you from passing out.”

Baseball can be like this. You can check out of a blowout, but a failed comeback only makes defeat hurt worse. No hope isn’t as bad as false hope. Is your team showing signs of life, or are you about to get another splash of gasoline in your eyes?

Either the Mets or Phillies could’ve gotten the splash on Sunday, as Nick Castellanos and Mark Vientos, among others, traded clutch hits, and both teams watched their high-leverage relievers get torched. In the end, the Phillies bounced back one more time than the Mets, salvaging a home split with a 7-6 walk-off win in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. It was an instant classic in its own right, and a victory of immense import for a team that looked dead on its feet. Read the rest of this entry »

Three of the best handful of hitters on the planet were on the same field at Yankee Stadium yesterday, and the Phillies/Mets rivalry is as venomous as any in baseball, but take a straw poll of the real sickos and they’ll tell you the marquee Division Series tilt is the one between the Dodgers and Padres. It’s not only a bitter intradivisional matchup, it marks the MLB playoff debut of the Face of Baseball and features so many of the game’s stars that this paragraph would need to cup its hands together to carry all of their names. Game 1 absolutely delivered on the hype, as the teams traded haymakers every other inning for the first half of an incredibly tense contest before the Dodgers’ relievers snuffed out whatever embers of a rally the Padres could muster from the fifth inning on. Los Angeles won 7-5 to take a 1-0 lead in the best-of-five series. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Alex Verdugo spent the last five months of the 2024 season dragging down the Yankees’ offense, so much so that in the season’s closing weeks, the team gave an abbreviated look to 21-year-old top prospect Jasson Domínguez. Not until late Friday night did word leak that manager Aaron Boone would stick with Verdugo to start the Division Series opener against the Royals, but the 28-year-old left fielder made the decision look brilliant. In a seesaw battle that included runs in every inning from the second through the seventh — creating five lead changes, a postseason first — Verdugo sparked a pair of two-run rallies with a third-inning single and sixth-inning walk, made a sparkling defensive play with a sliding catch to end the fourth, and drove in the decisive run in the seventh in the Yankees’ 6-5 win.

“He didn’t have his best season this year, but he’s gonna show you guys that this is his time,” said Jazz Chisholm Jr. “This is what he’s made for.”

During the regular season, Verdugo hit just .233/.291/.356 for an 83 wRC+, the ninth-lowest mark of any qualifier, and from May 1 on, he hit an even more dismal .225/.275/.336 for a 72 wRC+, the fourth-lowest of any qualifier. Nonetheless, Boone stuck with him through thick and thin, and the Yankees initially bypassed an opportunity to recall Domínguez — whose season included rehabbing from Tommy John surgery and then an oblique strain — when rosters expanded on September 1. They eventually called up Domínguez on September 9, and he started 15 of the team’s final 19 games, including eight out of the last 10 in left field while Verdugo sat.

But unlike last year, when he homered four times in eight games before tearing his right UCL, Domínguez scuffled at the plate (.179/.313/.304, 84 wRC+), leaving the door open for Verdugo. He was ready when Boone called his number, a decision that owed plenty to his familiarity with Yankee Stadium’s spacious left field and the way Domínguez, regularly a center fielder, struggled when shifted over to the less familiar position. “Obviously Alex has been tremendous for us out there defensively, and even though it’s been up and down for him in the second half, especially offensively, I still feel like there’s a really good hitter in there that can provide something for us at the bottom,” said Boone before Game 1. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — I suppose coming back from a 1-0 deficit is child’s play to a team that, last time out, overturned a 2-0 ninth-inning deficit against one of the best closers in the league. A team that clinched its playoff berth with a six-run eighth inning in Atlanta, coughed that lead up, then took it back for good an inning later. A team that, on August 28, was just five games over .500, with a 13.1% chance of making the playoffs.

And this was supposed to be a rebuilding year anyway. After beating the Phillies in Game 1 of the National League Division Series, 6-2, and weathering the best starting pitcher they’re going to see at least in this series, maybe for the rest of the postseason, the Mets now have a chance to go up 2-0 in enemy territory on Sunday. With two advancement-clinching wins already in the bag, and as many iconic victories over the team’s two most hated division rivals, this is the best week the Mets have had in… well, it’s been a while. Read the rest of this entry »

They played nine innings in Cleveland on Saturday afternoon. They really did, a whole baseball game’s worth of innings, but Game 1 of the American League Divisional Series between the Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Guardians was decided long before all that. The game wasn’t just over after the first inning; it was over before the Tigers had so much as pitched a third of a frame. It’s one of baseball’s quirks that we measure pitching performance in innings pitched, which is to say by the number of outs recorded. There are plenty of stats that make more sense if we use total batters faced as the denominator, and that’s before you think about the occasional outing in which the pitcher doesn’t record an out. Dividing by zero doesn’t really work, and on Saturday, no one was more acutely aware of that bleak mathematical reality than Tyler Holton, Detroit’s starter (or opener, or — maybe more accurately — sacrificial lamb), who had the first no-out outing of his short career.

Last week, A.J. Hinch described his pitching strategy as “Tarik Skubal tomorrow and pitching chaos the rest of the way.” With Skubal lined up to start Game 2, Saturday was a day for chaos. Holton ran a 2.19 ERA over 93 1/3 innings this season, putting up 1.4 WAR. He gave up just five total runs in the second half, and not all of them were earned. But his name didn’t even appear in Jake Mailhot’s series preview. I point that out not to malign Jake, but to emphasize the sheer volume of excellent Tigers relievers that both we and the Guardians need to keep track of in this series. There were so many that Detroit’s Game 1 starter (or opener, or losing pitcher) didn’t even rate a sentence.

One of the more depressing things about chaos theory is that it’s almost entirely devoted to explaining that what looks like chaos is actually just complexity. So much of the randomness, disorder, and inexplicability that we humans find so compelling can actually be explained in mathematical terms that make us want to repeatedly bang our foreheads against the nearest school desk. It’s all about understanding the initial conditions so that you can see how each action affected the system as a whole.

The initial conditions in Cleveland were lovely. It was bright and sunny, 68 degrees at game time. In Tanner Bibee, the Guardians had their ace on the mound, well rested and coming off a September in which he ran a 2.64 ERA. The last time he didn’t leave a game with more strikeouts than innings pitched was August 11. The Tigers, with Skubal lined up to pitch in Game 2 and 5, were starting out with house money. Hinch could organize his chaos just how he liked, and for the second game in a row, he led off with Holton.

Bibee had some ugly misses in the top of the first, letting his fastball sail way above the zone and to his arm side. It could have been nerves, but either way, he was able to locate his slider in the zone. Still, after he struck out Parker Meadows swinging on a changeup, Kerry Carpenter stayed back on a curveball and drove it up the middle for a line drive single, and for a moment it looked like Bibee’s wildness might end up costing Cleveland. Matt Vierling hit a soft chopper to second base for a fielder’s choice, moving Meadows to second, then Bibee hit Riley Greene in the front foot with a curveball, prompting an early mound visit from pitching coach Carl Willis and a brief infield huddle. Whatever Willis said worked just fine. Colt Keith lined out to left field to end the top of the first. It was the last time the Guardians would have anything to worry about.

In the bottom of the inning, Holton started Steven Kwan with sinker off the plate outside. That would be the high point of the day for the Tigers; a 1-0 count on Steven Kwan was as good as it got, the initial condition from which all ensuing calamities cascaded. Kwan ripped Holton’s second pitch, a sinker off the plate inside, off the top of the right field wall for a double, missing a homer by a foot or so. David Fry took Holton to a full count, then fouled off a cutter and a changeup before earning a walk.

With no outs and runners on first and second, superstar José Ramírez came to the plate. Things couldn’t have looked better for Cleveland, but their luck would only improve. Ramírez chopped the ball down the third base line, and the topspin seemed to confuse Zach McKinstry. What looked like a high but routine bounce completely flummoxed him. He just kind of whiffed on it, so handcuffed that he never made a real attempt to catch the ball or even get in front of it. Kwan came around to score on the error, and the Guardians had runners on second and third with no outs.

The Tigers brought their infield in, and their luck didn’t change. The left-handed Josh Naylor rolled over a sweeper, slipping a soft grounder neatly between the first and second basemen to score Fry. That was the end of Holton’s day. He threw 20 pitches and surrendered one hard-hit ball. He allowed three hits, one walk, and one batter to reach on an error. He did not retire a batter.

For the first time all year, Reese Olson entered the game as a reliever instead of a starter. Olson didn’t have Holton’s season, but he still managed a 3.53 ERA and 3.17 FIP over 22 starts, racking up 2.4 WAR in the process. The first postseason pitch of his career was a slider. It was also the first postseason pitch of Lane Thomas’s career. It brings me no joy to report that for the next few days, you will necessarily be hearing the phrase “Lane Train” more often than you would like to hear it, which – and I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here – is exactly zero times. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Thomas was sitting slider. He demolished the pitch, launching it 394 feet into left field to make it 5-0.

Remember, the Tigers had yet to record an out at this point. Four of those five runs belonged to Holton, making his ERA for the game four divided by zero times nine.

Olson eventually made his way out of the inning, and then a bunch of people started singing about colon cancer screenings. One of their neighbors was wielding hedge trimmers. He was finishing off a topiary of an anthropomorphic box in which you can mail a stool sample to the company that made the people start singing about their colons. The real CGI box just kind of stood there next to its horticultural doppelgänger, seemingly not at all surprised to be looking into its own eyes, only in the form of a bush. Somehow, it felt of a piece with the baseball that preceded it.

After that, Olson settled down beautifully. He pitched five innings, allowing just two more hits and a walk. Ty Madden would relieve him in the sixth, surrendering two more runs to make it 7-0 Guardians. That’s how the game would end. Despite a few more ugly misses in the early innings, Bibee would cruise through 4 1/3, surrendering just four hits and a walk while striking out six Tigers.

All season, Cleveland’s bullpen has been the opposite of chaos. Stephen Vogt’s crew has been running like clockwork, and that continued in Game 1. Cade Smith followed Bibee, striking out all four batters he faced. Tim Herrin struck out two more in the seventh, Hunter Gaddis worked a clean eighth, and Emmanuel Clase needed just eight pitches to shut the door in the ninth, giving the Guardians the victory and a 1-0 lead in the series.

You could argue that the Tigers needed this game much less than the Guardians. They’ve got Skubal going in Game 2, and he’s lined up for Game 5. They came into the game wanting to win, sure, but also thinking that they’d be happy to steal just one of out of their three potential chaos contests. However, after seeing how that went, the Tigers must be discouraged. Save for one pitch, they wasted a brilliant bulk-relief appearance from Olson, and their offense mustered just four hits while striking out 13 times. If chaos really is just unpredictability that can be unraveled if you math hard enough based on how things start, Detroit might need a new plan.

Can anyone stop the Mets? That’s not a question I expected to be asking this year, unless it was “Can anyone stop the Mets from signing marquee free agents?” or “Can anyone stop the Mets from imploding in the most Mets-y way imaginable?” But as the National League Division Series starts, the Mets are on one of those team-of-destiny runs that feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s no deficit they can’t overcome, no lead they can’t squander and then retake in the next inning. They’re upping the degree of difficulty significantly starting Saturday, though: The Phillies have been one of the best teams in baseball all year, and they’re rested and ready for what promises to be an exciting series.

A tale of the tape – Francisco Lindor is good at x, Bryce Harper is good at y, Zack Wheeler and Kodai Senga will square off in Game 1, so on and so forth – doesn’t feel like the right way to describe this series. Instead, I’m going to focus on how each team tries to win, and how these plans are most likely to go awry.

The Mets have thrived offensively this year with a simple blueprint: power at the top of the lineup and Jose Iglesias somehow doing everything else. Lindor is so good that he’s almost an offense unto himself: He led the Mets in runs (107), RBI (91), steals (29), on-base percentage (.344), slugging percentage (.500), and pretty much everything else you can imagine, except for home runs (33). In that category, he finished one off the team lead behind Pete Alonso. Alonso had a down year in 2024, but he’s very good at the skill the Mets most need from him: clobbering homers to drive in Lindor, Brandon Nimmo, and sometimes Iglesias. Mark Vientos functions as a second Alonso; he’s there to hit homers or advance runners with situational hitting, but he’s fresh out of situational hitting.
Read the rest of this entry »

The NL West race may have been settled in favor of the Dodgers this year, but everybody goes back to the starting gate in the playoffs. The only difference is the possible extra home game the Dodgers get in each individual series, though home field advantage has been far from a valuable perk for teams except for sales of tickets, hot dogs, and $59 foam fingers. With Los Angeles getting a few extra days to try and heal up a little more, the Padres got here the hard way, having to win the best-of-three Wild Card Series against the Atlanta Braves, a team that still managed to squeeze out 89 wins without Spencer Strider and mostly missing Ronald Acuña Jr.

While some of baseball’s best rivalries are the classic ones that have endured for the last century, such as Yankees-Red Sox and Dodgers-Giants, this one between the Dodgers and Padres is a good example of how new rivalries can pop up and be a lot of fun, too. Despite the fact that the two teams have played in the same division for more than five decades, only in recent years has the so-called I-5 Rivalry really heated up. San Diego has infrequently sustained runs of relevance – this is only the second version of the Friars to string together three winning seasons in a row – leaving Dodgers fans with few nightmares featuring a brown-and-mustard palette. But these Padres have been aggressive, and unlike in the past when short-term bursts of ambition were tempered quickly with brutal fire sales, they’ve consistently tried to make the Dodgers uncomfortable at the top of the NL West. Even as the Padres traded Juan Soto over the winter, they acquired their Wild Card Series Game 1 starter Michael King in that deal and then traded for Dylan Cease, who’ll start Game 1 of the Division Series, just before Opening Day. Yet, ultimate success has proven elusive for San Diego, with two disappointing playoff misses in 2021 and 2023 and still no returns to the World Series since 1998’s debacle.

The Dodgers enter the Division Series with something to prove as well. While they do have a World Series trophy from the COVID-shortened 2020 season, with five 100-win seasons in the last seven normal years, they crave to have more hardware to show for their success. Sure, we’re used to the idea that when you have large playoff formats, winning the World Series takes a lot of luck, but neither fans nor history care much about that. Winning the World Series this year would wipe out most, if not all, of that disappointment; taking care of business in this series would get the Dodgers one step closer to that while also giving them a little revenge against the Padres for knocking them out in the 2022 NLDS, after Los Angeles won a franchise-best 111 games.

So, how do the teams stack up? Let’s start with the ZiPS projections. As I type this, Joe Musgrove has been officially ruled out for the NLDS due to his elbow injury, which has now been confirmed to require Tommy John surgery. That means no Musgrove this postseason – or next season – but for now, we’ll just deal with the impact of the news on this series.

For contrast, here are the projections for if Musgrove had been able to pitch in this five-game set.

Replacing Musgrove with Martín Pérez, likely the next man up, basically flips the win probabilities for Game 4. Where every game previously favored the home team in the projections, now the Dodgers are expected to win on the road against Pérez.

Even though the Dodgers are favored to win with Musgrove out, it would still be wrong to call them overwhelming favorites. This is a close series overall, but also a swingy one, with four of the five games projecting to be at least a 55-45 split, meaning that for the most part, these games aren’t projected to be coin flips despite the tightness of the series as a whole. “Breaking serve” here by winning on the road has quite a lot of value. If the Padres can get to Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Jack Flaherty and win one of the first two games, they would expose one of the Dodgers’ current weaknesses: a thin rotation due to injuries. Walker Buehler had only three quality starts out of his 16 outings since returning from Tommy John surgery in May; his performance was shaky enough that in mid-June the Dodgers optioned him to the minors, where he spent two months trying to get right, before they brought him back up to start on August 20. And despite a superficially appealing ERA, Landon Knack would be about the 12th choice for Los Angeles if everyone were healthy. If the Dodgers are able to get out to a 2-0 lead without any bullpen-exhaustion events, like an 18-inning game, they might be in a position of strength to run a bullpen game and axe one of their uncertain starters from the NLDS rotation.

Where the Dodgers have the advantage is their front-line offensive talent, which gives them what appears to be the superior offense overall, an edge large enough that it isn’t erased if you view players such as Jurickson Profar and Donovan Solano with less skepticism than ZiPS does.

Dylan Cease is a terrific pitcher, but ZiPS thinks the Dodgers’ Big Four of Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, and the good platoon side of Max Muncy has a fighting chance of getting to him. It’s more of an uphill climb against Yamamoto; ZiPS has Luis Arraez as the only San Diego batter projected to have a .300 OBP against Yamamoto, and it gives none of the Padres a .450 SLG projection against him. Now, contrast that with the projections at home against Knack and Buehler.

One of San Diego’s other advantages, at least in the eyes of the computer, is its bullpen. While ZiPS has both teams performing similarly overall, it much prefers the depth of the Padres’ unit. To test their bullpens, in each simulation, ZiPS was instructed to knock out both starters after two innings in one game and have another game last 15 innings; in these scenarios, the odds of the Padres winning the series go from 42% to 47% – nearly a coin flip. In a short series, things like roster construction can make a real difference. Look at the way the Nationals were configured in 2019, with four good starters, two relievers they trusted, and a dumpster fire behind them. That kind of distilled performance meant that even when Washington won 13 fewer regular-season games than Los Angeles that year, ZiPS projected the teams as nearly equal when they met in the 2019 NLDS.

Here’s what I get from these reams of data: The Dodgers should stay the course with what’s worked for them all year, trust their elite hitters, and avoid the temptation to get too cute with their managing tactics, but the Padres ought to be aggressive. If they see an opening to get to Yamamoto or Flaherty, treat that game like it’s Game 7 of the World Series. San Diego can’t afford to save any wacky tricks for later. If the Padres can push the Dodgers back on their heels quickly and early, the latter may run out of time to right themselves.

One thing you’ll hear a lot (in all four series), especially early on, is the claim that the layoff is a big disadvantage for teams. Don’t believe it. If the Padres upset the Dodgers here in the five-game series, it won’t be because Los Angeles was too rested. Instead, it’ll be because the Padres played better.