The Kansas City Royals have a great starting rotation, a bullpen that’s come together nicely over the past few weeks, and a lot of team speed. The offense? Eh, it’s not great. Let’s not underestimate the impact of Bobby Witt Jr., who was the best normal-sized player in the American League this year, and should count as two All-Stars. They’ve got a couple big dudes to drive in Witt, but Salvador Perez is 34 going on 50, and Vinnie Pasquantino is working with a barely healed right thumb. That’s no small issue — the thumb is what separates us from the apes.

I was going to break out the old cliché about bringing a knife to a gunfight, but there have been times when manager Matt Quatraro was probably looking around and thinking, “You know what, I would settle for some cutlery right about now.”

Nevertheless, the Royals cooked the Orioles in the Wild Card round, and split the first leg of the ALDS at Yankee Stadium, coming very close to winning both games. That’s because, in his search for a barely survivable amount of offense, Quatraro is pushing all the right buttons. Read the rest of this entry »

Every pitcher starts an at-bat with a plan of some sort. Usually, they execute the plan. But sometimes the plan goes awry. And the plan definitely went awry when Emmanuel Clase faced Kerry Carpenter in the ninth inning of Game 2 of the Tigers-Guardians ALDS.

Oh, I leave quite an impression

423 feet to be exact! #ALDS pic.twitter.com/yq6k6Fvss1

— MLB (@MLB) October 7, 2024

On the sixth pitch of the plate appearance, Carpenter uncorked a massive blast off Clase to give the Tigers a late 3-0 lead. A half-inning later, and Detroit had the series tied up at one game apiece. It was the hardest hit ball that Clase had ever given up. It was the first home run this season he’d allowed to a lefty. He allowed five earned runs the entire regular season; on that chuck alone, he gave up three. Read the rest of this entry »

After the Detroit Tigers beat the Houston Astros in the opener of their Wild Card series, I wrote that while Tarik Skubal wasn’t perfect, he was very good, and that was enough to lead his team to a 3-1 win. The same was true in Game 2 of the ALDS, although this time he wasn’t the biggest story. On an afternoon where the ace left-hander hurled seven scoreless innings, Kerry Carpenter came off the bench and hit the biggest home run of his life against a lights-out closer. When the dust had settled, the Tigers had evened their series against the Cleveland Guardians at one game apiece with a 3-0 win.

The matchup between Skubal and Matthew Boyd offered both a contrast in styles and, at least on paper, a mismatch. After undergoing Tommy John surgery last year, the 33-year-old Boyd wasn’t offered a major league contract during the offseason, and he remained unsigned until June, when he signed a one-year deal with Cleveland for an undisclosed salary. He appeared in only eight big league games during the regular season. As it turned out, Boyd ended up matching this season’s likely American League Cy Young winner pitch-for-pitch for four-plus innings before the Guardians turned to what has been baseball’s best bullpen this season.

The early frames accentuated the contrast in styles. Through three innings, Boyd relied heavily on soft stuff, throwing more changeups than fastballs, while Skubal relied primarily on high-90s heaters, mostly leaving his own plus changeup in his back pocket. Hitters on both sides were left floundering. By the time the Guardians batted in the bottom of the fifth, the Tigers had the game’s only four hits, and one of them was of the infield-dribbler variety. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Justyn-Henry Malloy was in the Atlanta Braves organization when he appeared as a guest on FanGraphs Audio in October 2022, this while finishing up his first full professional season in the Arizona Fall League. He became a Tiger soon thereafter. In early December of that year, Detroit acquired the now-24-year-old outfielder, along with Jake Higginbotham, in exchange for Joe Jiménez.

Then a promising-yet-unpolished 2021 sixth-round pick out of Georgia Tech, Malloy was described in our trade recap as possessing “a combination of power and patience.” It was the latter that stood out most. Plate discipline was the youngster’s carrying tool, as evidenced by a .438 OBP as a collegian and a .408 OBP across three levels in the minors. Despite a higher-than-ideal strikeout rate and questions about his defensive future — he’d recently transitioned to left field from the hot corner — Malloy seemed well positioned to join a young Tigers lineup in the coming seasons.

He arrived, at least in part, this summer. After doing his thing in Toledo — his stat line with the Triple-A Mud Hens this season included a .403 OBP and a 129 wRC+ — Malloy made his MLB debut in early June, and with the exception of brief demotion in late August remained on the roster throughout. His numbers were admittedly not great. In 230 plate appearances against big-league pitching he slashed just .203/.291/.366 with eight home runs. Moreover, a pedestrian 10% walk rate belied the discerning-eye approach that helped him get there.

How different is the present day Justin-Henry Malloy from the up-and-coming prospect I’d talked to two years ago? I asked him that question when the Tigers played in Chicago on the final weekend of the regular season. 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.

It would be easy to look at what happened across the two American League Wild Card Series as the best possible outcome for the Yankees. The Astros, the team that had made it to the ALCS in each of the last seven seasons and eliminated New York three times to advance to the World Series in that span, saw their season end after losing to the Tigers; meanwhile, the Orioles, the Yankees’ up-and-coming division rivals who gave them fits all season, were bounced in Baltimore by the Royals.

That’s right, the two biggest AL threats to the Yankees this postseason were knocked out in the first round. To paraphrase manager Aaron Boone, it’s all right there in front of them. Indeed, their path to their first World Series appearance in 15 years is a bit clearer, in the sense that neither their past nemesis nor their latest challenger is standing in their way.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. The Astros look more like the decaying New Rome of Megalopolis than the burgeoning empire that ransacked the AL for the better part of a decade, and Baltimore’s nearly completed rebuild still hasn’t gotten off the ground in October. Besides, the Royals are pretty good in their own right. They have a trio of excellent starting pitchers atop their rotation and a strong group of high-leverage relievers. They run the bases well and are either the best or one of the best defensive teams in the majors. And then there’s shortstop Bobby Witt Jr., a true five-tool player who posted 10.4 WAR this year and has carried Kansas City further than almost anyone could’ve expected when the season began.

To keep going, they will have to overcome the Yankees, who had the best record in the AL and won five of their seven games against the Royals this season. Kansas City’s first chance to do so comes Saturday night, when veteran right-hander Michael Wacha takes on reigning Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole in Game 1 of the ALDS at Yankee Stadium.

It certainly won’t be easy. The Yankees enter this weekend with the best odds of any AL team to win the World Series. Perhaps that makes sense, considering New York won’t have to go through Houston this time, but there’s a more specific explanation for why the Yankees are the team to beat this postseason: This is the best team they’ve had in years.

Wait, these Yankees, who won 94 games and were the second-worst team in baseball for six weeks, are better than the 100-win teams of 2018 and ’19? And the 2022 club that won 99 games? Even the upstart Baby Bombers squad in 2017, the one that many fans still claim would’ve won it all if not for the Astros’ sign-stealing scheme? Really? Sure!

Why? The main and most obvious reason is that the Yankees are no longer just the Aaron Judge show. They have two MVP-caliber talents batting back-to-back in their lineup, and somehow, describing Judge and Juan Soto as “MVP-caliber talents” doesn’t quite encapsulate their excellence or their importance to the Yankees. Think of it this way: The Yankees have both the best hitter in baseball since Barry Bonds and the second coming of Ted Williams. Or put another way, Judge and Soto are the second pair of teammates ever to finish with at least 8 WAR and a 175 or better wRC+. The first pair? Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who did it a ridiculous four times (1927-28, 1930-31).

The rest of New York’s lineup is, at best, inconsistent, but that was the case in prior seasons, too, when Judge was the only player around. In 2022, for example, excluding Judge, the Yankees were roughly league average at the plate (102 wRC+); this season, the Yankees have a 104 wRC+ without Judge. That isn’t much better, but consider where they would be without both Judge and Soto; excluding them, New York hitters have combined for a 92 wRC+. The point here is that the Yankees now have two elite players to lean on instead of just one, and if either Judge or Soto goes cold, the team still has one of the top three hitters in baseball to pick up the slack.

Also, it’s worth noting that Boone acknowledged earlier this week that Judge was pretty banged up during the 2022 postseason, which probably contributed to his struggles (35 wRC+ in nine games); before that year, Judge had a 126 wRC+ across 160 postseason plate appearances. Boone also said both Judge and Soto enter this postseason about as healthy as any player can be after playing a six-month season.

Beyond Judge and Soto, the Yankees also have Giancarlo Stanton, who seemingly levels up when the calendar turns to October. Since joining the Yankees, Stanton is slashing .297/.373/.734 with nine home runs, a .443 wOBA, and a 186 wRC+ over his 75 postseason plate appearances. Additionally, there’s second baseman Gleyber Torres, who had a disappointing contract year this season; he finished with a .257/.330/.378 line, 15 home runs, a 104 wRC+, and 1.7 WAR — all down from his resurgent 2023 campaign. That said, those numbers are pretty remarkable considering how poorly Torres played over the first few months of the season. Entering the All-Star break, he had an 88 wRC+ and 0.3 WAR across 93 games and 380 plate appearances; over his 61 games (285 PA) since then, he has a 124 wRC+ and 1.4 WAR.

The arrival of Jazz Chisholm Jr., for whom the Yankees traded in late July, coincided with their turnaround after their six-week slide. Playing all but 14 of his innings with the Yankees at third base, a position he’d never played professionally before, Chisholm helped shake the team out of its midsummer snooze. With the Yankees, he batted .273/.325/.500 with 11 home runs, 18 steals, and a 132 wRC+ over 191 plate appearances. Thanks to that offense and stellar defense at the hot corner (6 OAA), Chisholm had 2.3 WAR during his 46 games with the Yankees.

This lineup still has plenty of questions, though. Rookie catcher and cleanup hitter Austin Wells had a dreadful September, when he hit for a 22 wRC+ across 83 plate appearances. That probably has something to do with fatigue; through the end of August, Wells slashed .259/.348/.447 with a 126 wRC+. He hasn’t played since the Yankees locked up the no. 1 seed last Saturday, so we’ll see if he rebounds following a week of rest.

The Yankees also have a significant hole in left field, where Alex Verdugo played most of the season and was one of the 10 worst hitters in the majors (83 wRC+). More recently, Jasson Domínguez has started in left, but he’s looked shaky in the field and hasn’t hit much either, though his 84 wRC+ has come in a much smaller sample. Boone has not yet committed to playing one over the other.

Despite the struggles of some players, the Yankees were one of the best hitting teams in baseball overall, ranking third in runs (815), second in wRC+ (117), and first in home runs (237). They’ll face a Royals pitching staff that was one of the best in the majors. Kansas City ranked seventh in ERA (3.76), fourth in FIP (3.76), and third in WAR (20.2). The Royals rotation was especially excellent this season, with a 3.55 ERA and 16.7 WAR, both of which ranked second among all big league rotations.

Their top three starters deserve much of the credit for their success. Cole Ragans, who threw six scoreless innings in Game 1 of the Wild Card round and would’ve kept going if he hadn’t started cramping, broke out this season with a 3.14 ERA, a 2.99 FIP, and 4.9 WAR over 186 1/3 innings — more than 50 innings above his previous career high at any professional level. That workload could become an issue, though. As Ben Clemens noted in his AL Wild Card Series preview, “He’s been walking more opponents and striking out fewer of them in August and September; only a mid-.200s BABIP has kept his ERA from reflecting it.” Ragans is slated to start Game 2 on Monday.

Seth Lugo wasn’t at his best against the Orioles on Tuesday even though he allowed just one run on five hits and struck out six. He labored most of the night and looked gassed when he was removed with one out in the fifth. At 34, Lugo just completed the best season of his career, one that should earn him a top-five finish in the Cy Young voting. He had a 3.00 ERA, a 3.25 FIP, and 4.7 WAR across 33 starts and a whopping 206 2/3 innings, the second most in the majors. One of those starts came last month in the Bronx, when Lugo silenced the Yankees across seven scoreless innings; he struck out 10, walked none, and gave up just three hits. After that start, Jay Jaffe went into depth on Lugo, and I’d encourage you to check out that piece if you haven’t already. Lugo will start Game 3 on Wednesday in Kansas City.

That leaves Wacha, KC’s Game 1 starter, who is having his best season (3.35 ERA, 3.65 FIP, 3.3 WAR, 166 2/3 IP) since at least 2017. Like Lugo, Wacha revived his career last year in the Padres’ rotation and turned that into a multi-year deal with the Royals. In his Wild Card preview, Ben also compared the two Royals veterans to describe Wacha, whom he said “is like Lugo with the volume turned down 5%. He throws a ton of pitches, but his only plus offering is the changeup that made him famous back in his St. Louis days.” Another thing about Wacha? He’s held Judge to just one single and three walks with 11 strikeouts in the 21 times he’s faced the Yankees slugger during his career, for whatever that small sample is worth.

Like the Royals, the Yankees have a deep rotation. Cole missed the team’s first 75 games with an elbow injury, and his first seven starts were the work of a rusty pitcher who might have returned to the mound too quickly. Since the beginning of August, though, Cole has a 2.25 ERA and a 2.62 FIP across 10 starts (60 innings), and for the most part, he’s been even better than those numbers suggest during that stretch. Seven of the 15 earned runs he’s allowed in that span came in his bizarre September 14 start against the Red Sox, when he intentionally walked Rafael Devers with the bases empty. What’s more, only two of the 11 home runs hit off him this year have come within the past two months (in fact, those two homers came in the same start, on August 27 against the Nationals).

Cole is set to start Game 1 on Saturday, followed by Carlos Rodón in Game 2 on Monday. Boone has not yet announced who will get the ball in Wednesday’s Game 3 in Kansas City, but it will most likely be either Clarke Schmidt or Luis Gil, with the other one, along with Marcus Stroman, relegated to the bullpen.

During the second half of the season, Rodón looked more like the pitcher the Yankees thought they were getting when they signed him to a six-year, $162 million deal before the 2023 season. Over his 12 starts since the All-Star break, he is 7-2 with a 2.91 ERA, 3.93 FIP, and 3.67 xFIP. Home runs were his biggest problem this season; his 1.59 HR/9 was the fourth-highest rate among major league starters.

For his part, Schmidt (2.85 ERA, 3.58 FIP, 85 1/3 IP) has been the best Yankees starter on a rate basis this season, but he missed more than three months with a lat strain and has not been as strong since returning from the injured list. After posting a 2.52 ERA and a 3.53 FIP during his first 11 starts (60 2/3 IP), he had a 3.65 ERA and a 3.69 FIP in 24 2/3 innings across his five September starts.

Gil, a Rookie of the Year candidate, dominated during his first 14 starts of the season (2.03 ERA, 3.06 FIP, 80 IP) and anchored the Yankees rotation while Cole was on the shelf. He then looked completely lost for three starts — allowing 16 runs in just 9 2/3 innings — before rounding into form again after making an adjustment to his pitch mix. Over the first half of the season, Gil was mainly a fastball/changeup guy who also had a slider; that worked for the most part. But in early July, after his third straight clunker, he started leaning on his slider more, with his changeup becoming his third pitch.

With the way the ALDS schedule works out — an off day Sunday and then travel days on Tuesday and, if necessary, Friday — both teams will need only three starters to get through the best-of-five series.

Witt is by far the most threatening hitter the Yankees’ staff will face in a lineup that is otherwise fairly light on impact batters. Salvador Perez, who is somehow only 34 years old, is coming off a solid season in which he hit 27 home runs and had a 115 wRC+ while splitting his time between catcher and first base. Expect him to be behind the plate for the entire ALDS as long as first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino remains healthy enough to be in the lineup. Pasquantino, who hit 19 homers and had a 108 wRC+ this season, recently returned from a broken right thumb.

The Yankees bullpen is their biggest question heading into this series. Luke Weaver made a point to say earlier this week that he does not consider himself to be the team’s closer, even though Boone has turned to him in save situations instead of Clay Holmes, who was displaced as the closer last month. No matter what you call Weaver’s role, there’s no denying that he’s been the most impactful Yankees reliever this year. Over 62 appearances spanning 84 innings, he has a 2.89 ERA, a 3.33 FIP, and 1.0 WAR.

Holmes has blown a league-high 13 saves this season, but overall, he’s been solid: 3.14 ERA, 3.02 FIP, 63 IP. Some of his woes can be attributed to bad luck. As David Laurila detailed today, Holmes is still a groundball pitcher, but far more of the fly balls he’s allowed this season have been hit for home runs (11.8%, up from last year’s 7.1%). Opponents also have a .322 BABIP against him; that’s the highest it’s been in a full season. The Yankees’ bullpen also includes righties Tommy Kahnle (2.11 ERA, 4.01 FIP) and Ian Hamilton (3.82 ERA, 3.03 FIP), and lefty Tim Hill, who has a 2.05 ERA and 3.62 FIP in 44 innings since coming over from the White Sox in June.

Closer Lucas Erceg has anchored the Kansas City bullpen since the Royals traded for him at the end of July, and he’s been better than they could’ve expected when they acquired him. Michael Rosen just wrote about what makes Erceg special, and I’ll refer you to his piece rather than going into depth here. Lefty Kris Bubic, their second-best reliever, is also excellent; he struck out 32.2% of the batters he faced this season while posting a 2.67 ERA and 1.95 FIP over 30 1/3 innings. The Royals also feature relievers John Schreiber, a righty, and lefty Angel Zerpa, who replaced Lugo on Wednesday with one out in the fifth to escape a bases-loaded jam. For the first out he recorded, Zerpa threw a sinker that was so nasty that Colton Cowser swung at it even though it hit him.

It’s going to be a fun series. The Yankees are the better team, but the Royals, to quote the face of their franchise, “didn’t come this far just to come this far.” He added, “We’re going to keep getting after it, keep trying to create our own legacy.” What exactly that legacy turns out to be remains to be seen.

The Dodgers built up a formidable seven-game NL West lead over the first half of the season. While they had to withstand a late charge by the Padres — whom they’ll face in a Division Series that starts on Saturday, a rematch of the 2022 pairing that ended up sending a 111-win Dodgers squad home — they were able to do so despite their starting pitching fraying at the seams. Even before Mookie Betts and Max Muncy returned from lengthy absences due to injuries, the emergence of Gavin Lux as an offensive force played a key role in the team’s second-half offensive uptick.

Lux’s overall numbers for 2024 — .251/.320/.383 with 10 home runs — don’t scan as particularly special. Dragged down by a September slump that he began to emerge from during the season’s final week, he finished with a modest 100 wRC+. Based on his overall batted ball data, including a .262 xBA and a .393 xSLG, it’s tough to make the case that he should have done much better. The key point is that he had to hit well enough to get his head back above water after a slow start that looked as though it might cost him his spot in the lineup.

The Dodgers have shown great patience with the 26-year-old Lux, both in the past and this season. A 2016 first-round pick out of a Kenosha, Wisconsin high school, he placed second on our Top 100 Prospects list as a 70-FV prospect four years later (behind only Wander Franco). While he had already debuted in the majors the previous September, he didn’t get a foothold until 2021, and needed a strong September to prevent that season from being a disappointment, though interruptions due to wrist and hamstring injuries probably played a part in his woes. Read the rest of this entry »