When Freddie Freeman clutched the throw from Dansby Swanson to secure the final out of this year’s World Series, the 2021 Braves instantly matched the total number of championships won by the franchise from 1991-99, a span during which a core laden with future Hall of Famers won five pennants but lost four World Series. That this year’s Cinderella team stands with that dynasty — yes, I’m using that word to describe even a non-contiguous run — in total championships is a reminder of one of current third base coach Ron Washington’s famous catchphrases: “That’s the way baseball go.”

Indeed, the game does not always distribute its rewards evenly or justly, and sometimes the player or team that’s streaking or simply lucky is the one that wins, particularly in a short series, where injuries and hot hands can have a disproportionate effect. Suffice it to say that if NLCS MVP Eddie Rosario were a true-talent .383/.456/.617 hitter, he would not have been available at the trade deadline in exchange for a sack of Pablo Sandoval’s laundry.

This is not intended to slight the Braves, who were clearly a better team than their full-season .547 winning percentage — lower among World Series winners than all but the 2014 Giants (.543), 2000 Yankees (.540), 1987 Twins (.525), and 2006 Cardinals (.516) — indicated. From the point of the trade deadline, when they were 51-54 (.486) but had reassembled their outfield on the fly with Rosario, Adam Duvall, Joc Pederson, and future World Series MVP Jorge Soler, they went 37-19 (.661), outplaying every team in the majors but the white-hot Dodgers (.772) and Giants (.729). In the postseason, they knocked off the 95-win Brewers, 106-win Dodgers, and 95-win Astros by going a combined 11-5 and never facing an elimination game themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

There will be no Game 7 this year. We’ve only had two in the last five World Series, so it’s far from a safe assumption. I attended a pair of them during my time with the Astros, including the last World Series (and Houston) game I went to, just over two years ago: Game 7 in 2019. It was a miserable experience at the time, and only exacerbated by the things to come, both publicly and privately. At the same time, the last two minutes of the game reinforced my love of baseball.

The World Series is incredibly stressful for teams, and that stress is magnified greatly by the time one reaches the finale. Between exhibition games, the regular season, and the playoffs, teams are approaching their 200th game of the year, and with all of that, it still comes down to nine innings. Win the game, and your team is part of history. Lose, and you are little more than the answer to a trivia question.

The stress of the day is overwhelming, and it feels like game time will never arrive. My wife, who had been traveling with me since Game 3, decided to drag me away from my nervous energy by finding an afternoon movie to help distract from the importance of the evening to come and pass the time before we headed to the ballpark. She suggested something popular on the indie film scene at the time: Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse.

If you know the film, you are likely already laughing at the thought of it serving as a stress reliever. While it is quite excellent, it’s a claustrophobic, incessant doomfest about a pair of lighthouse workers, isolated during a storm, as they spiral into insanity, or maybe just more into insanity, given that they arrived there already well on their way.

Beyond striking visuals and a pair of incredible performances from Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, what stands out most about The Lighthouse is the sound design, which is among the most memorable I can think of. Sound plays a massive role in the film; the music and ambient noise are constant and always foreboding, but the most iconic sound from the film is a frequent foghorn (as heard in the beginning of that trailer) that acts as an indicator of things ramping up. That foghorn stays with you, and it still enters my headspace at times of high stress.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves ended the 2021 season with a bang on Tuesday night, crushing the Houston Astros in a seven-run rout that rarely felt even as close as the eventual score. Atlanta had failed to make the World Series in any of their last 12 playoff appearances since being swept by the Yankees in 1999. But as they always say, the 13th time’s the charm, and the Braves took home the big trophy in front of a disappointed Minute Maid crowd.

The post-Milwaukee period was a tough one for the Braves, as they spent most of the 1970s and 80s fighting with Cleveland and San Diego for the unofficial title of the league’s most moribund franchise. They were more or less a Ted Turner-driven sideshow that existed to fill up hours on TBS between reruns of Alice and The Andy Griffith Show. They hit it big in the worst-to-first 1991 season, and even with a lengthy rebuilding phase in the mid-2010s, they’ve won the second-most games in baseball since the start of that season, behind only the New York Yankees. Despite impressive feats like dominating the top of the NL East for over a decade, one thing always marred their legacy: the lack of World Series victories. For all their dominance — the Braves won 100 games on four occasions in the 1990s and had chances at two more if not for the 1994 strike — they only emerged with a single World Series win in 1995.

It’s not entirely fair to count World Series titles in light of baseball’s greatly expanded modern playoffs, but life is rarely known for playing fair. The team that won Game 6 in 2021 is a very different one from that which won Game 6 in 1995. These Braves were not a dominating team, but rather one that wasn’t a heavy favorite to win the division and lost their franchise player, Ronald Acuña Jr., halfway through the season with a torn ACL. The 1995 team had Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz in their primes. This one had to throw two consecutive bullpen games in the World Series because the broken leg Charlie Morton suffered in Game 1 reduced them to a two-man rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

“Doing the little things right” is an overused cliché in baseball. In its yearning for sacrifice bunts, productive outs, and pitching to contact, it’s one that doesn’t typically go well with the analytical thinking common to this website. But there’s still no better characterization for what Martín Maldonado did in the fifth inning of Game 5 than that very cliché. He did the little things right; in fact, what he did was rather ingenious.

In the early portion of Sunday night’s back-and-forth affair, the Astros erased a four-run deficit but found themselves behind yet again after Freddie Freeman went yard in the bottom of the third. Just two innings later, though, they would take the lead for good. Their half of the fifth went like this: A single by Carlos Correa, a strikeout of Yordan Alvarez, a single by Yuli Gurriel, and then a groundout by Kyle Tucker. With two outs, that left runners on second and third for Alex Bregman, who had been moved down in the order as a result of recent struggles. A.J. Minter and the Braves wanted no part of him nonetheless, not with Maldonado on deck; he seemed like the best matchup by far.

Even in retrospect, the Braves would clearly make the same move again. Maldonado is a career .212/.290/.348 hitter, and over 426 plate appearances with the Astros this season, all three legs of the slash were even worse than that: .172/.272/.300. This postseason, he’s been invisible offensively: .114/.184/.114. Put simply, he is not a threat at the plate. But in the highest-leverage moment of a World Series elimination game, he came through. With the bases now loaded after the intentional free pass, Maldonado walked. Read the rest of this entry »

“Fortune favors the brave(s).”

Matt Damon uses something like this phrase to punctuate an ill-conceived cryptocurrency commercial that has been running during the World Series, the copy for which includes more polysyllabic words (that aren’t “Domino’s” or “America”) than most ads. To this point, the commercial had provided an eerie narration of the Series itself. Atlanta had been the team improvising (Dylan Lee opening Game 4) and experimenting (Ozzie Albies hitting right-on-right), sometimes out of necessity (Game 5 starter Tucker Davidson), and it was Atlanta that entered Sunday night with a commanding 3-1 series lead before leaping out to a 4-0 lead in Game 5. But with their backs against the wall, the iron-jawed Astros withstood a first-inning grand slam and battled back to win 9-5, sending the series back to Houston.

The game began with tremendous good fortune for Atlanta. In the first, Albies was treated to a shift-aided, room service double play ball off the bat of Carlos Correa that erased a Michael Brantley walk and ushered Davidson past what was likely a jittery inning of work. In the bottom half of the frame, the topspin of a chopper off the bat of Jorge Soler made the ball’s hop shallow, allowing it to slip underneath the glove of Alex Bregman, who expected the hop to be bigger. That gave the Braves a meaningful extra out to work with, and instead of an Albies groundout ending the would-be five-pitch inning for Houston starter Framber Valdez, Austin Riley and Eddie Rosario were able to prolong the first with a single and walk before Adam Duvall delivered a huge blow in the form of a wall-scraping, opposite-field grand slam. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you have to let Dylan Lee pitch. Lee wasn’t supposed to be part of Atlanta’s plans for the playoffs. He wasn’t supposed to be part of Atlanta’s plans for the year, period: the Marlins released him just before the start of this season, and the Braves picked him up and stashed him in Triple-A for depth. He was added to the NLCS roster to replace Huascar Ynoa (Lee was on the NLDS roster but didn’t pitch), then tabbed to start tonight’s game as an opener.

Sometimes, you have to give Kyle Wright bulk innings. After Lee let three of the first four Astros reach base, Wright came into the game, no doubt earlier than Brian Snitker had intended. He wriggled out of the jam with only a single run in, getting Carlos Correa on a grounder before striking Kyle Tucker out to end the threat.

Like Lee, Wright wasn’t part of Atlanta’s playoff plans. He wasn’t on the NLDS or NLCS roster, and he threw only six innings in the big leagues this year. With Ynoa out, the Braves wanted someone to get them bulk innings, and Wright made 24 starts in the minors this season; he figured to be a mop-up guy who could handle bulk innings in case of emergency.

Like Lee, Wright struggled to tame a deep Houston lineup. He’s a sinker-first, sinker-second pitcher, and the Astros eat minor league sinker-ballers for lunch. The Astros swung at 17 sinkers; they missed exactly once. Of the 22 Astros he faced, eight reached base. Jose Altuve socked a home run. Houston had at least two runners on base in four of the first five innings.
Read the rest of this entry »

Only two pitchers have ever thrown a postseason no-hitter: the Yankees’ Don Larsen with his perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, and the Phillies’ Roy Halladay in the 2010 Division Series opener. On some level, the Braves’ Ian Anderson was vying to be the third; in Game 3 of the World Series on Friday night, he held the Astros hitless through five innings. But even from the start, anybody who has watched this postseason — where starters have averaged a hair over four innings per game — and understands the impact of the year-over-year workload increases that these pitchers are shouldering following the pandemic-shortened 2020 season could have told you that he wouldn’t get a chance to finish the job. That was doubly true on a raw and rainy night in Georgia and with a rested bullpen behind him. Backed by just two runs, Anderson and four relievers carried the no-hitter into the eighth and settled for a two-hit shutout, giving the Braves a 2–1 World Series lead.

Houston’s first hit finally came via a chip shot — 39 degrees, 70.7 mph — into left field by pinch-hitter Aledmys Díaz, the first batter faced by reliever Tyler Matzek. It fell in just in front of left fielder Eddie Rosario; according to Statcast, the catch probability for the play was 85%, but with shortstop Dansby Swanson running toward him and the cost of missing the ball being the tying run in scoring position, Rosario chose not to lay out.

It proved to be the right move. In fact, just about every major move the Braves made in Game 3 proved to be the right one, particularly manager Brian Snitker’s decision to trust his bullpen, no-hitter or not.

Read the rest of this entry »

José Urquidy delivered a relative gem in Game 2 of the World Series, punching out seven and giving up two runs with no walks in five innings. Included in that was a big bump in velocity across the board: Urquidy’s fastball gained 0.6 mph from its regular-season average (93.1 versus 92.5); his changeup spiked nearly two miles per hour (86.2 versus 84.4); and his slider saw the largest increase, from 79.3 mph to 81.7. Dialing up the velocity to this extent can effectively create new pitches, and with that an element of unpredictability, particularly when it comes to a pitch’s movement. That can be a plus in the postseason, but what about the flip side; could that extra velocity and movement make things worse?

On the surface, Urquidy throwing his hardest fastballs of the year in his most important start can’t be a bad thing, assuming it doesn’t compromise his command. Can he so precisely regulate the velocity of his offspeed offerings? Amazingly, we might be seeing the reverse from Urquidy, who seems to be throwing the offspeed stuff harder but holding back on the fastball.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros have powered their way into their third World Series in the last five years without the offensive contributions of one of their key players. In Houston’s 12 postseason games this October, Alex Bregman has hit a paltry .239/.308/.326 (.273 wOBA). He fared well against the White Sox in the ALDS, collecting six hits and two walks in those four games, but has just five hits in the eight games since and has been held hitless so far in the World Series. When your lineup is as deep as Houston’s is, you can survive a prolonged slump from one of your stars because there are so many other good hitters who can pick up the slack. Still, the Astros would rather Bregman hit than not.

These postseason struggles are just a continuation of a rough end to the regular season for the third baseman. He lost over two months of the season to a quad injury, keeping him sidelined from June 17 to August 25. After being activated from the injured list, he collected hits in 16 of his first 18 games back, but ended the season with just six hits in the team’s final 14 games. If you tack his postseason performance on to the end of his regular season, he’s hit just .200/.293/.313 (.269 wOBA) over his last 30 games. That late season swoon brought his wRC+ down from 130 on September 16 to 115 just 14 games later.

Bregman started his major league career with just two hits in his first 10 games, but pushed his wOBA up to .315 by his 30th game in the bigs. He’s had some slumps over the years — notoriously starting off each season slowly — but there’s never been a 30 game stretch where his wOBA has fallen as low as it is right now. Just looking at some of his peripheral stats during this stretch reveals where most of Bregman’s problems lie:

Read the rest of this entry »

After a rough Game 1 loss to the Braves, Astros manager Dusty Baker spoke confidently about his team: “I’ve never seen these guys worry. They know they can play.” His confidence was reflected in his decision to stick to the script and start José Urquidy in Game 2 rather than go with a fully rested Luis Garcia, the star of Game 6 of the ALCS. Part of the logic of having Urquidy pitch Wednesday came down to his fly ball tendencies and the availability of the DH, which allowed the Astros to run out their best outfield defense (in Games 3, 4 and 5, the Astros will likely be somewhat compromised in the field by starting Yordan Alvarez in left). In Urquidy’s disastrous first postseason outing, he only managed to get five outs while allowing five earned runs, mostly due to command struggles that led to a grand slam by Kyle Schwarber. But when Urquidy is right, he throws endless strikes and gets weakly hit fly balls and pops ups with a plus fastball that he throws over 50% of the time.

Urquidy looked sharp to start the game, pumping fastballs and working tremendously quickly. He has pretty strong reverse splits thanks to a nasty changeup that he features to lefties, and he got Atlanta’s hottest hitter, Eddie Rosario, to strikeout swinging on a changeup to lead off the first. It was a glimpse of things to come. His other key secondary offering is his slider, which is his main weapon against righties. After Ozzie Albies reached with two outs on a swinging bunt (55.8 mph exit velocity), the right-handed heart of the Atlanta’s lineup came up. It quickly became clear that Urquidy didn’t have his slider. Austin Riley drilled one into right field for a base hit, after which Urquidy hung a couple to Jorge Soler before getting him to strikeout on a fastball to end the threat.

Unlike the Astros, the Braves didn’t really have any questions about who they were running out for Game 2. Max Fried was their ace during the second half of the season and one of the best pitchers in baseball over that span. The injury to Charlie Morton in Game 1 put even more pressure on Fried to step up and deliver not one, but two strong outings in this series. A matchup with the Astros isn’t easy for any pitcher but it’s especially difficult for a lefty like Fried, as Houston posted a 117 wRC+ against southpaws this season, tops in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »