Archive for 2026 Postseason

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 »

Baseball is a team sport, but sometimes there’s only room for two faces on a poster.

Before every playoff series, the league, its broadcast partners, and anyone else with an interest in promoting the event will circulate something based on the poster for the 1997 John Woo film Face/Off.

Half Cage, half Travolta, all smoldering scene-chewing and cartoonish violence. If that doesn’t get your blood pumping I don’t want to know you. There’s more to each side of the matchup than just the one guy, but in baseball as in film you put the superstar’s mug on the promo material if you want to sell tickets. Read the rest of this entry »

With the trade deadline having come and gone, we’ve officially entered the homestretch of the 2026 season. And while teams surely want to avoid tempting the fury of the fates by assuming they’re postseason-bound, they’d be lying if they said they weren’t thinking about October baseball at least a little bit. And why shouldn’t they? Winning the World Series is the ultimate goal, and many of the league’s playoff-relevant teams made deadline moves for the express purpose of improving their postseason chances.

Before you set out on a vacation, it’s natural, even prudent, to contemplate your trip, though it might mean making plans for a destination you never reach. If you’re heading to the beach, you’re likely going to think about the sun and the sand, even though there’s always a chance the alternator in your 1988 Ford Tempo dies on U.S. Route 50 near Easton, Maryland, forcing you to call your friend Alan on your janky 1990s Motorola “car phone,” only for him to gormlessly drive right past you despite your hazard lights and frantic waving. Baseball has its own broken alternators, injuries and losing streaks that render October plans suddenly irrelevant. Still, teams have good reason to think about what will happen if they get there; after all, it’s important that someone remember to pack sunscreen. And since we’re nerdy baseball fans and have access to a projection system, we might as well look ahead too. So which teams are actually built to be the most dangerous in October, and which ones might be better or worse postseason teams than their regular-season records suggest?

When it comes to projecting October, we have to think about teams somewhat differently than we do during the regular season. Projecting the regular season and a playoff series are two very different tasks. Not because of any playoff-related mythology, or because a team possesses specific characteristics that work better or worse in the postseason, but simply because teams use players very differently in October. It’s not quite as extreme as, say, the difference between how 100m gold medalists and 500m gold medalists are built, but it at least rhymes. In the playoffs, you get to ride your top talent hard since you no longer need to keep them fresh and healthy for a six-month marathon. And because of the postseason’s frequent off days, you also get to have a higher proportion of your innings pitched by the pitchers you actually want in the game. Read the rest of this entry »