Archive for 2026 Postseason

Credit the Phillies for trying. When I highlighted the worst defenses among contending teams in early July, they were the poster boys, scoring worse than any team besides the decidedly non-contending Rockies in the multi-metric methodology I’ve used for the past four seasons. But when the August 3 trade deadline arrived, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski took a step to improve that shoddy defense, acquiring second baseman Luis Arraez from the Giants and setting off a game of musical chairs that sent incumbent second baseman Bryson Stott to third base, third baseman Alec Bohm to first, and first baseman Bryce Harper to right field. The defense at those spots mostly improved, but last Thursday, with the Phillies in the midst of what would become a 2-6 skid that nearly cost them a Wild Card berth, Arraez sprained his left ankle while trying to avoid a tag at first base. On Monday, interim manager Don Mattingly announced that the 29-year-old infielder will be left off the roster for the team’s Wild Card Series against the Braves.

How Mattingly will proceed with his lineup is unclear. In the three games Arraez missed — including Sunday’s playoff berth-clinching win over the Rays — Edmundo Sosa started at third base twice while Stott returned to second, while in the other game, Bohm and Harper moved back to their original positions as well; they lost that one 12-1.

Below I’ll take a closer look at the metrics underlying the Phillies’ defensive configurations, but long story short, they rate as the playoff team with the worst defense, as they did last year and in 2023. Read the rest of this entry »

After an exciting final weekend of the regular season that saw the final NL Wild Card spot and the AL West division crown come down to the last day, the postseason is here. The field features returning powerhouses, upstart challengers, and many of the game’s brightest stars. And while the bracket’s top seeds could be poised for deep runs, a lot can happen in a short series. That makes it difficult to predict how October will unfold, but 26 of the 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). You can find our playoff odds here and the ZiPS postseason game-by-game odds here. Happy playoffs! Read the rest of this entry »

To little fanfare, Nick Sogard was a key contributor to a Red Sox regular season that began abysmally — “Sell the team” chants were heard nearly as often at Fenway Park as “Sweet Caroline” in the early months — and culminated in a Wild Card berth. Filling in wherever needed in a lineup that dealt with both injuries and uneven performances, the 29-year-old jack of all trades ended up starting 24 games at second base, 16 at first base, seven at third base, and four at shortstop. Moreover, he was solid defensively at each of those spots. He was charged with just four errors, none of them over his 302 innings at the keystone position.

The switch-hitter also provided value with the bat. Over 277 trips to the plate, he slashed a pesky .255/.342/.385 with five home runs and a 105 wRC+. Fitting well into the style of play that emerged after Chad Tracy replaced Alex Cora as Boston’s manager in late April, Sogard is not only fundamentally sound, he is also proficient at making contact and playing small ball. (These aren’t your stereotypical Red Sox; their 36 sacrifice hits were third most in the junior circuit, as well as five more than Cora’s club had in the previous three seasons combined.)

That said, Sogard is by no means a banjo hitter. While no one would ever mistake him for a basher, he can nonetheless impact a baseball, which is one of the reasons he is where he is. Not so long ago, he profiled as a fringe big leaguer at best — a Quad-A type whose value came primarily from his versatility — due to a lack of pop.

“Offensively, my foundation is still very similar to what it has always been,” Sogard told me recently. “I try to swing at strikes and put balls in play. I think those are my strengths. But this organization has put a pretty big focus on me hitting the ball harder and getting some power to my game. There was literally none of it when I got drafted.” Read the rest of this entry »

Two playoff races came down to the final day of the season, but with the 12-team playoff field now settled, the postseason can begin. The American League side of the bracket looks particularly weak, while the National League side features a handful of the best and hottest teams in baseball. Remember, September success (or failure) doesn’t necessarily predict how things will go in October. Here’s a look at the 12 playoff teams and how they stack up against each other.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. Since we’ve reached the postseason, I’ve removed the playoff odds weighting to our raw Elo calculations and presented the teams in the tiers below based on their odds of winning the World Series. If you’re curious about how your team finished in the standard regular season power rankings, the full table can be found at the bottom of this article. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab. Read the rest of this entry »

No one will be happier than the Houston Astros when the second game of their Wild Card Series starts. See, during the first game, they won’t have a playoff win-loss record, so the fact that they went 81-81 this year, the worst record ever to win a division title, will come up early and often. That’s such a striking fact that we’ll no doubt continue to hear about it throughout the playoffs, but in their first game, it’s going to be one of the main topics of conversation. Houston would love nothing more than to leave behind that pedestrian regular season and get back to what the team normally does in October: maraud through the American League towards the World Series.

The Chicago White Sox, on the other hand, would probably be happy to live in the 2026 regular season forever. Written off before the year even began, they started hot and kept winning. While pundits expected them to continue their slow rebuild, their youth movement bubbled over into major league success far faster than expected. They led the AL Central longer than any other team this season. They won 24 more games than they did last year, which was itself a 19-game improvement on the year before. Unless they win the World Series, the 2026 White Sox will be remembered for their miraculous regular season, not whatever goes on in the few games they play afterwards. But being remembered is for the future; right now, all that matters is avoiding going home for one more series. So while Chicago has blown away expectations and Houston has fallen short of meeting their own, none of that matters for the next two or three games.

The divergent regular season experiences of these two clubs make for an interesting setup for this clash. But that’s just the big picture storyline. The series has several points of interest on both sides that I’m excited to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want a good example of how quickly fortunes change in baseball, just look at the Philadelphia Phillies and the Atlanta Braves. This year, the Phillies just barely avoided an embarrassing collapse that almost knocked them out of the playoffs completely, while the Braves had a hot April and never saw their season in any kind of real jeopardy. Just two years ago, you could perfectly flip-flop the two teams, with the Braves barely hanging on before getting quickly knocked out by the San Diego Padres in the Wild Card round, while the Phillies coasted to a fairly drama-free NL East crown. Now the two divisional rivals get three games to try and ruin the other team’s season.

While the Braves have to be a bit disappointed that they missed out on a first-round bye thanks to the Brewers apparently solving baseball and the Dodgers winning 100 games, it still has to feel quite a bit better than last year, when they finished in fourth place in their division with a 76-86 record. Atlanta has some real high points, but the team also isn’t the juggernaut that won 101 games in 2022 and 104 games in 2023. Except for the general lack of a competent starter in left field, those Braves were stacked from top to bottom, and getting through the season was simply a matter of pointing the team in the right direction and watching it cook. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s labor fight might get ugly in two months, but for now, we have the joy and chaos that is the postseason. And since the whole purpose of a baseball projection system is to project baseball, the ZiPS game-by-game postseason probabilities are now live. These projections are almost certainly going to see some shifts as team rosters, lineups, and starting pitchers firm up as we get closer to the start of play. And when it comes to starting pitchers, the changes could be significant! Hat tip to the last few playoff stragglers for getting their matchups sorted out relatively early on Sunday so I had time to run the tool.

Just to remind everyone, the ZiPS playoff model is rather different than the normal projections you see on the site during the regular season. From April through September, ZiPS needs to see the forest for the trees, but in a short sprint, we can focus more on the individual trees themselves. We can make educated guesses as to who is starting each game, what the lineups will look like, who is healthy and who isn’t, and so on. The ZiPS game matchup tool has a built-in lineup estimator that projects the line of every pitcher and hitter against every opposing hitter and pitcher, so there is no need to look at a team’s generalized offensive strength. The postseason also comes 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 the entire league takes more than a day.

Is the model perfect? Of course not. All models are wrong, but some are useful. The approach I take has benefits in some very specific situations where a team’s seasonal record isn’t a good predictor of performance. For instance, in 2019, ZiPS saw the Nationals as being a far more dangerous opponent for the Dodgers than the conventional wisdom did by virtue of Washington’s ability to concentrate a very large percentage of the team’s innings in a few excellent pitchers. And yes, I will keep using this example until an even better one comes along! Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the nor’easter dumping rain up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the Cubs have traveled from Chicago to Boston to St. Petersburg and finally all the way across the country to San Diego in the past five days, but they don’t sound daunted by the challenge. “Just tell us where to play,” manager Craig Counsell told reporters on Friday. “We’ll show up and play.” Well, on Tuesday, the Padres and Cubs face off in the Wild Card Series between the National League’s top two non-division winners. Both teams have plenty of offense, a great defense, and some question marks on the mound. You’re playing in San Diego, Craig. Get yourself one of those burritos with French fries in it and get to the ballpark.

The other Craig – that would be Padres manager Craig Stammen – is in his first season skippering a major league club. Or any club, for that matter. You could view his inexperience as a liability, or you could view his long, recent playing career as a reliever as a tactical advantage for pulling the right bullpen strings in a short series. Either way, you should also probably get yourself a California-style burrito before the game, Other Craig. They’re so good.

The Padres look to be peaking at the right time. They went out and grabbed the first Wild Card spot, ending the season on a 17-3 run, with just enough of a cushion to line up their three best starters for the Wild Card series. But they’re a lot more than a team on a hot streak. At 41-18, they’ve had the best record in baseball since July 24. How long do you need to be playing like the best team in baseball before you simply are the best team in baseball? The Padres have some major concerns when it comes to pitching, but they’ve also got a couple of the little things that can make an outsized difference in a short series. Their rotation is front-loaded. They’ve got an all-world closer. They’re one of the better baserunning and base stealing teams in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

For the second season in a row, the American League East’s top rivals will square off in a best-of-three Wild Card Series in the Bronx. This matchup, though, is hardly a carbon copy of the last one, when the Yankees advanced thanks to rookie Cam Schlittler’s dominant Game 3 performance. For one thing, both the Yankees (93-68) and Red Sox (87-75) have experienced some turnover, and each may be without one of their biggest superstars. At this writing, the Yankees are expected to go without Aaron Judge, who played in just seven games between returning from a stress fracture in his right first rib that cost him all of June, July, and August, and a right calf strain that sent him back to the injured list retroactive to September 17. The Red Sox are still evaluating whether 2025 AL Cy Young runner-up Garrett Crochet will be part of their bullpen; he hasn’t pitched in a competitive game since April 25 due to shoulder capsule inflammation and a subsequent lat strain, and did not have time to rebuild to a starter’s pitch count.

Beyond that intrigue, these are hardly the offensive juggernauts of yesteryear. Last October’s matchup pitted the AL’s highest-scoring team (the Yankees, 5.24 runs per game) against the third-highest scoring (the Red Sox, 4.85 runs per games), but this year’s pair respectively ranks second (4.59 runs per game, 101 wRC+) and 10th (4.25 runs per game, 99 wRC+). Instead, these are the league’s top two teams in terms of run prevention, with the Yankees allowing 3.73 runs per game and the Red Sox 3.77.

For both teams, this was a tale of two seasons. After the Red Sox skidded to a 10-17 start, chief baseball officer Craig Breslow fired manager Alex Cora — who guided the Red Sox past the Yankees during the 2018 and ’21 postseasons, with a championship in the first of those years — and shook up the coaching staff. Under interim manager Chad Tracy, the Red Sox reached the season’s halfway point with a 35-46 record before climbing above .500 during a franchise record-tying 15-game winning streak from July 3–22. Though they went just 12-12 in September amid injuries, Tracy was rewarded last week with a three-year contract and the removal of the interim tag from his title. The team has gone 77-58 on his watch. Read the rest of this entry »

Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley, and Freddie Freeman were vital contributors to the Braves when they won the 2021 World Series after getting as far as Game 7 of the National League Championship Series against the Dodgers the year before. Half a decade later, all three remain lineup staples — the first two in Atlanta, the third in Los Angeles — but as the postseason approaches, they rate as significant concerns for their respective teams. Though neither Albies nor Riley has turned 30 yet, both have not only had disappointing seasons, they appear to be multiple years into their decline phases, held in place by a combination of loyalty, track record, and long-term extensions. Freeman is 36 years old and a future Hall of Famer nearing the end of his 10th All-Star season, but while he would seem to be on firmer footing, he’s been dealing with a power outage that has coincided with a bout of patellar tendinitis in his right knee. He’s played through it at a time when the Dodgers have dealt with bigger injury concerns, though at least he’s got a first-round bye to help him recover for a few days.

Earlier this week, I went around the diamond to identify the most notable vulnerabilities in the lineups of teams still contending for playoff spots in the American League — a companion of sorts to my annual pre-deadline Replacement Level Killers series, albeit among a more limited field. For the National League, that means the Brewers, Dodgers, Braves, Cubs, and Padres, all of whom have clinched spots (the last two of those on Thursday), plus the Phillies and Diamondbacks. Arizona trails Philadelphia by two games with three to play and has Playoff Odds of just 11.1% before accounting for the complicated and unresolved tiebreaker scenario involving those two teams.

While full-season performances play a significant part in these selections, I’m more concerned with who’s worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Each position has a headliner (or two, if it’s a job share), but at several positions, I’ve noted other teams with concerns, particularly injury-related ones. Read the rest of this entry »