Archive for Dodgers

One of the great underrated joys of baseball is a competitive best-of-seven series that ends in five games. Think the 2024 World Series, when the only game the Dodgers lost was also the only game that was decided by more than three runs. The series scoreboard suggests that it was lopsided, but the individual games were absolutely riveting.

Even more overlooked is the enthralling four-game sweep, which is so rare that we are morally obligated to appreciate it when we see one. For that reason, it is my duty as a baseball writer to marvel at the NLCS that just transpired, when the Brewers came from behind in each of the four games to topple the dynastic Dodgers. Michael Baumann covered the series in Milwaukee and Los Angeles, and you should definitely check out his writing on the action if you haven’t already.

In this week’s mailbag, we’re putting together the best all-time roster of players who’ve never played in the World Series, and considering whether they’d beat an All-Star team from the clubs in this year’s Championship Series. We’re also answering your questions on what would happen if hit-by-pitches were treated as regular balls, and 1-0 games that feature a first-pitch home run. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Orange County native Jake Bauers placed a stake against the heart of the two-time defending champion Dodgers, and Garrett Mitchell and Aaron Ashby drove it home. After an initial four-run flourish from the Dodgers offense, the Brewers plated six unanswered runs; they took the lead in the sixth and never looked back. Ashby worked three scoreless and twice stranded the tying run at third base. The Brewers won Game 4, swept the mighty Dodgers, and are now headed to their first World Series since 1982.

Initially, it looked as though fortune favored Tyler Glasnow and the Dodgers. Brewers star outfielder Jackson Chourio hit an absolute rocket on the first pitch of the game, but it ricocheted off Enrique Hernández at third and right into the hands of Mookie Betts, who was poised to make a bang-bang play. After that, Glasnow was untouchable for a bit, remaining perfect through three innings.

In the meantime, Los Angeles jumped out to a four-run lead. Brewers starter Shane Drohan was bailed out of a wild first by a Will Smith double play ball, then was removed after he allowed a Kyle Tucker leadoff single in the second. Former Dodger Dustin May relieved Drohan, gave up singles to Teoscar Hernández and Andy Pages, and then left a fastball in the happy zone of an ailing Shohei Ohtani, who vaporized it.

Though Ohtani’s catharsis was evident as he rounded the bases, the feeling proved fleeting and would be replaced by frustration, as the Brewers battled back and the Dodgers squandered opportunity after opportunity in the middle innings.

That began in the fourth. Glasnow surrendered his first baserunner via a walk to Brice Turang. Then, somehow, William Contreras (who would later have several consequential blocks on pitches in the dirt) turned on a 96-mph fastball in on his hands and ripped a ground rule double into the left field stands. Up stepped Bauers, who worked a full count when a Glasnow two-seamer nearly nicked the inside corner. In real time, it looked like a pitch that Smith perhaps should have challenged; Glasnow certainly seemed to think so, though Gameday had it off the plate. On the very next pitch, Bauers hit his own ground rule double, and plated two.

Bauers was named NLCS MVP after the game. He went a respectable 4-for-14 with three walks in the series, and a couple of the hits were doozies, most notably the epic at-bat that led to his backbreaking two-run homer in Game 3, which was the moment of the series.

In the fifth, the Brewers tied the game via some small ball and a bit of self-inflicted Dodger damage. Sal Frelick walked, stole second, and then was singled home by David Hamilton. That ended Glasnow’s night. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts turned to Evan Phillips, who struggled. After Chourio hit a 110-mph line out, Roberts decided to intentionally walk Turang, and then Phillips walked Contreras on his own and was removed for Alex Vesia, who walked Bauers to force in a run and knot the game up at four.

In the top of the sixth inning, Roberts turned to Tanner Scott to face the bottom portion of Milwaukee’s order, which is mostly left-handed. Mitchell, who went to high school at nearby Orange Lutheran and to college at UCLA, battled back from an 0-2 count and, on the sixth pitch of his at-bat, got a fastball down the middle.

It was Mitchell’s second home run off a lefty in the series, after he had just one against a southpaw during the regular season.

Brewers manager Pat Murphy would only need two relievers to navigate the final five innings of the game, which hung in the balance several times. Deadline acquisition Jojo Romero needed just 12 pitches to deal with three future Hall of Famers in Ohtani, Betts, and Freddie Freeman in the fifth and became the pitcher of record when Mitchell homered. In the sixth, Romero gave up a left-on-left double to Tucker (who had two hits on Thursday and was the Dodgers’ best hitter in this series) but was able to strike out Max Muncy and strand Tucker at third later that inning.

In the seventh, Murphy called upon Ashby. To call Ashby dominant would be correct – he matched his season-high fastball velocity at 100 mph and punched three tickets – but it would also undersell how many times he and the Brewers had to avoid danger during his three innings of work. Ashby pitched around a leadoff double from Pages (who moved to third via an Enrique Hernández sac bunt) by striking out Ohtani on three pitches and inducing Betts to ground out to shortstop Cooper Pratt, who made multiple dynamite throws from deep in the hole in this game.

In the eighth, Smith finally ran into one and hit a double of his own to right field, then advanced to third as the ball rattled around in the corner and was fumbled by Frelick. Tucker followed him with a jam-shot flare that looked like it could be real trouble off the bat, only for Mitchell to come streaking in so far from center field that he fielded the ball just a few strides from the infield.

After that, Ashby bent in a pair of curveballs from hell to strike out Teoscar Hernández and end the inning. He worked a 1-2-3 ninth to close things out, capping off 6.2 scoreless innings for the series. Once upon a time, Ashby looked like a shell of his former self coming off a shoulder injury. Now he’s one of the nastier lefty relievers on the planet and had about as good an argument for series MVP as Bauers did.

Milwaukee was able to tack on an insurance run in the ninth with a Hamilton homer off of Edwin Díaz, who pitched the final three innings of the game for the Dodgers. Though it was ultimately inconsequential, it was odd to see Díaz throw more than two innings for the first time since 2016 in a one-run elimination game. The homer was the lone blemish on his line. Hamilton had two hits after a failed attempt to bunt for a hit in the third, something Murphy told the fellas at the postgame desk he believed helped Hamilton get good pitches to hit later in the game.

That kind of minutiae has helped propel a very talented Brewers team, which has more wins than any other team in baseball over the last two seasons, within range of its first ever World Series title. Two weeks from now, we will either have a first-time champion in the Brewers or Rays, or watch the Guardians win their first World Series in nearly 80 years. The Dodgers, who should still hold their heads high after two consecutive titles, went 2-for-11 with runners in scoring position on Thursday. After a 100-win season, and despite a punishing rotation, they simply weren’t whole and healthy when the postseason arrived, and were outplayed in every facet by a balanced Milwaukee club. Sometimes that’s baseball.

Whether or not you tuned in for Game 3 of the NLCS between the Brewers and the Dodgers, you surely know by now that the highlight of the game belonged to Jake Bauers. After working a back-breaking 12-pitch walk that hastened Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s early departure from Game 2, Bauers put the Brewers ahead with a homer in the seventh inning on the 11th pitch he saw from Blake Snell. Ben Clemens wrote about it in his game story. Michael Baumann wrote about it in his article about the perils of leaving a starter (particularly this starter) in too long. Over at Brewer Fanatic, Matthew Trueblood wrote about both it and the also-impressive walk that Andrew Vaughn worked immediately beforehand. This is the kind of of moment that deserves to be enjoyed from as many angles as possible. As such, what follows is a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of the at-bat, diving into the intention and execution behind each pitch.

Pitch 1: Slider, Called Strike, 0-1

That may look like a get-me-over slider, and that Snell assumed Bauers would be taking on the first pitch because he’d just walked the previous batter, but it’s not. In his first plate appearance, Snell had started Bauers with a four-seamer and Bauers had fouled it off. In his second, he’d thrown a first-pitch slider just below the zone, and Bauers had whiffed. He’d swung at the first pitch in both his previous times up, and as you can see, he wasn’t up there looking to take. He fired his hips and had to check his swing. In fact, although Bauers had one of the lower swing rates in the league this season, his 33% swing rate on the first pitch was actually slightly above the league average.

Look at Will Smith’s glove as Snell delivers the ball. He’s got it all the way down on the ground. The plan was to repeat the first pitch from the second plate appearance, getting Bauers to chase another low slider for a whiff or maybe even hit a double-play ball. Instead, Snell missed — badly. The ball ended up right over the heart of the plate. This is a meatball, and Bauers failed to make Snell pay for it because he was focused on getting a fastball. “I was looking for a fastball, and I didn’t want to miss it,” he said after the game. “I said I’ll adjust to anything else, but get a heater, don’t miss it.” That’s certainly a reasonable approach, seeing as Snell throws his fastball half the time, and he’d already started Bauers with one earlier in the game. But it cost Bauers a chance at unloading on a good pitch and put him behind in the count.

Pitch 2: Changeup, Ball, 1-1

You can understand why Snell threw a changeup here. Bauers had tipped his hand with that check swing. He was way in front of that slider because he was looking fastball. You don’t want to give him a fastball, and you don’t want to give him two sliders in a row (especially because the last one ended up in murder-me territory). You want to throw something that starts out looking like a fastball, which eliminates the curveball. The changeup is all that’s left, but let’s be clear about how unusual that is. Snell throws his changeup to lefties just 3% of the time, and never in this situation. Over the past 10 seasons, he’d thrown just one 0-1 changeup to a lefty in the regular season. One. In 10 years. But he had also thrown one just 10 days earlier, to Drake Baldwin in Game 2 of the NLDS. The pressure of the playoffs can change even the most deeply ingrained tendencies.

Once again, Snell missed badly. The pitch was supposed to start out a strike and then drop below the zone, but it started too low and ended up bouncing. It never looked like a strike, and Bauers isn’t the kind of guy to chase on 0-1. This year, 206 batters saw at least 200 0-1 pitches. Among them, Bauers’ 35% swing rate ranked 200th.

Pitch 3: Fastball, Ball, 2-1

If we were talking about any other pitcher, you’d say this was supposed to be a get-me-over fastball, an attempt to get back on track after failing to execute two pitches in a row. But Blake Snell is not the kind of pitcher who lives up and chucks a pitch down the middle. Smith’s target was at the top of the zone. Snell had been racking up chases up above the zone for either whiffs or fouls all night, and he wanted another one. It sure looks like Snell yanked this one to his glove side because he was trying to put some mustard on it to make sure he blew it by Bauers. Instead, it was another bad miss and another easy take. This was a remarkable at-bat from Bauers, and it started out with him in an 0-1 hole against one of the best pitchers in the game, but it also started with Snell missing badly on the first three pitches.

Pitch 4: Changeup, Foul, 2-2

Now this is a gutsy pitch. You just walked someone. You’re behind 2-1 because you failed to execute your last three pitches. Why not aim another left-on-left changeup right at the very center of home plate, and just hope that it finishes with enough arm-side run to make it to the edge? If it doesn’t break as much as usual, or if you miss to your glove side, then it’ll just kind of sit there out over the plate begging to be pounded.

Incidentally, we should probably mention Statcast’s run values per 100 pitches. Did you know that when he saw left-on-left offspeed pitches this season, Bauers’ run value was 1.5, and the only lefties with a higher mark (minimum 25 pitches) were Jac Caglianone, Juan Soto, Yordan Alvarez, Shohei Ohtani, Gunnar Henderson, Pete Crow-Armstrong, and James Wood? Sort of sounds like a list of the very best left-handed hitters on the planet, right?

Luckily for Snell, this pitch was perfect. It clipped the very edge of the zone, and Bauers, still looking fastball, was way out ahead of it. He just managed to hold back long enough to nick it. Smith extended the catcher’s mitt toward his pitcher to congratulate him on a perfect pitch. That made it 2-2, and under normal circumstances, that would be a big deal. The league as a whole had a wRC+ of 70 from 2-2 onward this season. Had Snell missed the zone yet again, he’d be 3-1, when the league wRC+ was 214.

Bauers himself ran a wRC+ of 87 after reaching a 2-2 count. Oddly, though, he was up at 127 after getting to 2-2 against lefties, because he walked 24% of the time, the second-highest rate in baseball. Considering Snell’s above-average walk rate and Bauers’ unusual ability to draw a walk in this exact situation, a walk seemed very likely.

Pitch 5: Slider, Foul, 2-2 (again)

This was the slider Snell meant to throw on the first pitch. It was maybe an inch or two higher than he would’ve liked – if he got it down a little bit more, maybe Bauers would’ve missed it entirely rather than fouling it off – but Bauers was again way out in front and on top of it. Look at the way the ball comes off the bat, straight down and hooked so hard that bounces in the left-handed hitter’s batter’s box. That’s not something you see every day. Snell had thrown three pitches in the strike zone, and Bauers was way out in front on all three of them.

Pitch 6: Curveball, Foul, 2-2 (again again)

Oh right, Snell has a curveball. It was his second-best pitch this season, but this was just the second one he’d thrown Bauers all game, because Bauers was one of the best left-on-left curveball hitters in baseball this season. He ran a .458 wOBA against them and had just an 11% whiff rate. Most of the time, he took them for balls. But what else was Snell going to do? The curve is his best non-fastball pitch. He couldn’t seem to get a whiff on the slider, and he’d already risked two changeups to a guy who crushes them. The curveball was the only thing left that could surprise Bauers, and surprise him it did. He took a late, defensive hack, and met the pitch just 20 inches in front of his center of mass. He threw his mechanics out of whack in order to do so, and ended up with another odd foul, chopping it straight down only to bounce back up into his torso as he nearly fell backwards out of the box.

Here, we should stop and note something. This was Bauers’ third foul of the at-bat, and he would go on to foul off three more. In one sense, it shouldn’t be surprising that he has worked some impressive long at-bats in this series. He averaged just under 4.2 pitchers per plate appearances in 2026. Of the 205 players with at least 400 plate appearances, that ranked 24th, putting him in the 88th percentile. However, he didn’t get all the way up there because he’s a wizard at extending plate appearances. To do that, you need to be great at fouling off two-strike pitches and Bauers is actually well below average in that respect. He fouled off 20% of the two-strike pitches he swung at this year, which put him in just the 13th percentile. His plate appearances are long simply because he’s very passive. His 41% swing rate landed in just the sixth percentile. That’s all it takes, people. If you want to be one of the best hitters in baseball at working a count, just don’t swing much. Sometimes it’s a very simple game.

Pitch 7: Fastball, Ball, 3-2

Snell had been busting Bauers inside with fastballs all night. Five of the eight pitches he saw in his first two plate appearances were four-seamers, and he’d flied out and struck out. Bauers was ahead on soft stuff, but not so far ahead that he was whiffing entirely. Perhaps that meant that he was somewhere in between, and after seeing soft stuff for three straight pitches and five of the last six, it would be possible to blow one by him.

But Snell again missed his spot, this time to the arm side. Smith’s target was up again, but Snell was off the plate inside. It wasn’t a comfortable take for Bauers, who was finally seeing the pitch he’d been looking for, but it wasn’t easy either.

Pitch 8: Fastball, Foul, 3-2

There it is. That’s the elevated fastball Snell had been trying to throw. Nice and tempting, impossible to lay off. And at 98.2 mph, it was harder than the first two and with more induced rise than Snell’s average four-seamer. But Bauers wasn’t in between after all. With pinch-runner Christian Yelich breaking for second in the background, he still managed to get a piece of it. It was very high, and very definitely ball four. That’s a pitch designed to rack up whiffs. It was located 3.82 feet off the ground. This year, pitches that came in between 98 and 99 mph and between 3.8 and 4.0 feet had a 53% whiff rate. Maybe if he hadn’t just seen a fastball, Bauers would have been just that little bit farther behind, and Snell would’ve gotten the strikeout.

Perhaps we should acknowledge, though, just how good Bauers was against left-on-left four-seamers this season. He put up a .521 wOBA against them, second only to Ben Rice. His four home runs against them were tied for second. Snell was truly going strength against strength here.

Pitch 9: Changeup, Foul, 3-2 (again)

After throwing two fastballs in a row, and with Bauers clearly hunting velocity, Snell surely thought he’d set Bauers up so that he’d be out ahead of something soft. This changeup was much closer to where he wanted it, just an inch or so from the bottom of the zone. This time, though, Bauers didn’t look like he had to hold himself back for dear life. He was still very much ahead of the pitch, but by significantly less. You can tell because of the fact that he took a full, healthy hack, and Statcast backs it up; he made contact four inches deeper than he had on the first changeup.

Snell is no stranger to deep counts, but this is where things got scary. Bauers had been ahead of all the soft stuff he’d thrown at him. He took a defensive hack at that 2-2 curveball to stay alive. But then he got a piece of that absurdly high fastball, and on the very next pitch, a changeup down (though not quite as down as Snell would’ve liked it), he looked more comfortable. Look at the way he finishes his swing with a hop. This is what people mean when they say someone looks hitterish. That’s concerning.

Pitch 10: Slider, Foul, 3-2 (again again)

And we’re now escalating from concern to alarm. For Snell, it probably seemed like there was no right pitch to throw at this point. Even when he chased a fastball at his eyes, Bauers (like Vaughn before him) got a piece and stayed alive. He looked all too comfortable against the changeup, and how many left-on-left changeups can you really throw in one plate appearance? Until the playoffs, Snell had only once thrown more than one left-on-left changeup in a single game. The curveball might have made sense, but it also offered the least difference from the previous pitch in terms of velocity and movement profile. Snell had only followed a changeup with a curveball once all game, and it was to Vaughn in the previous plate appearance. The slider was the pitch Bauers had seen least recently, and sometimes it might just be that simple.

Regardless of the reasoning behind it, the pitch was nearly catastrophic. It was meant for the outside corner, and instead it ended up belt high out over the plate. Here’s a heat map that shows Bauers’ isolated power when he put the ball in play this season.

All the red and pink are up and out over the plate, right where this pitch was located. And it wasn’t just about the location. The location was a byproduct of the fact that this pitch was a hanger. Snell’s average slider this year had 7.2 inches of induced rise and 3.7 inches of glove-side break. This pitch had 9.4 inches of rise and 0.5 inches of horizontal break. It didn’t drop enough, and it basically didn’t slide at all. Snell hanged it and Bauers banged 305 feet — just foul. Whichever person at Dodger Stadium was caught on mic screaming for their life as this ball zoomed toward the foul pole was exactly right.

Pitch 11: Fastball, Home Run

Clearly, Snell wasn’t going back to the slider. At a certain point, the game theory starts to get too complicated to track. Sometimes you need to just throw your best pitch. Man cannot live on breakers alone. Snell threw Bauers his best pitch, and once again he couldn’t locate it. It ended up in almost exactly the same spot as the first pitch of the at-bat, and you should take that very literally. Pythagoras tells us that the ball crossed the plate a mere 0.87 inches closer to the very center of the zone than that first meatball. Bauers, who had been fighting to stay ready for the fastball throughout the entire at-bat, finally got one to hit. This was the ninth fastball Snell had thrown Bauers on the night. You don’t need to squint to see what’s different about it.

Aside from that one overthrown four-seamer earlier in the at-bat, every single one of those fastballs had been buried inside. Snell threw his second meatball of the at-bat, and Bauers was ready to dig in.

This was truly an impressive at-bat. Although Snell, at the end of a brilliant performance, failed to execute several of his pitches, most of his misses were either well out of the zone or within an inch or two of the edge. He threw Bauers every pitch he had, even the changeup. He changed speeds and eye levels. Across 11 pitches, he only threw the same pitch in a row once, and he only repeated the same two-pitch sequence twice. Bauers looked more and more comfortable as the at-bat went on, and when Snell missed over the fat part of the plate, he crushed the ball, twice. He went from taking defensive hacks to stay alive to punishing mistakes. It would be hard to ask for much more on an October evening.

LOS ANGELES — On Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium, Blake Snell took the mound with his team down 2-0 in the NLCS and made one of the best postseason starts I’ve ever seen. For six scoreless innings, he was nearly unhittable. At one point, he set down 14 Brewers in a row, striking out nine of them. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re searching for a metaphor for how differently the 2026 NLCS has gone than last year’s version, look no further than Blake Snell. In 2025, the two-time Cy Young winner humbled Milwaukee in the series opener, allowing one hit over eight strong innings, a prelude to the drubbing the Dodgers put on the Brewers in a sweep. This year, Snell got the start in Game 3, attempting to keep his team in the series after two Milwaukee victories, but the Brewers proved far more formidable this time around. Last year’s series was all about dominant Los Angeles pitching. The current edition has been about back-and-forth games and a resilient Milwaukee offense, and Wednesday’s contest — which the Brewers ultimately won 6-2 to pull within one win of their first World Series appearance since 1982 — delivered on both counts.

In last year’s NLCS start, Snell faced the minimum, erasing the only Brewers baserunner with a double play. This time, his brush with perfection lasted all of one pitch. Snell eased a fastball down the middle to Jackson Chourio to start things off, and Chourio tattooed it, a line drive missile that screamed out to right field, landing in the Dodger Stadium seats before many of the fans did. (This being Los Angeles just after 5 PM local time, only about a quarter of the spectators had arrived.) Snell recovered to retire the next three batters in order, but the tone was set: This iteration of the Brewers wasn’t going to go meekly into the L.A. night.

Snell has been spectacular when available since joining the Dodgers, and he had it all working in the early innings of Game 3. His curveball fizzed with menace, he located his changeup near perfectly, and playoff adrenaline had him up a few ticks on his fastball, which turned an already-good pitch into a monster. He used the curveball to clip the bottom of the zone and the fastball to bully the top of it, a combination that Milwaukee hitters had few answers for over his first six innings of work.

Snell’s counterpart, Robert Gasser, didn’t have the same dominant stuff, but he too gave the opposing lineup fits. He managed as many strikeouts in his five innings of work as Snell recorded in the first inning. He let the leadoff runner reach in three of those five innings. The Dodgers racked up a pile of loud contact; when Gasser departed, seven of the eight hardest-hit balls of the game had come against him. Read the rest of this entry »

When you manage a big league ballclub, life is unfair. You’re always one bad season, maybe just one really bad month, from getting fired. Even when you’re doing a good job, a vocal contingent of your fellow citizens is likely still agitating for your ouster, mostly because they just kind of like the way they sound when they’re agitating for someone to lose their livelihood. Writers you’ve known for years will one day fire up their laptops and pen a thousand words about why you no longer have what it takes. And on top of all that unrelenting judgment, whenever you’re out there doing your job during the game, a camera is trained directly on your face. Any time you react to what you see, you’re likely to wind up on television, often in slow motion, slamming your hand in frustration or launching an F-bomb.

For that reason, managers tend to at least try to maintain a stoic front. Some are better than others, but I’ve always enjoyed watching Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy in particular. He seems to feel the game more than most managers. He’s constantly checking his notes, or scribbling more notes, or retreating a few steps into the tunnel that feeds into the dugout to think things through. Also, he tends to snack a lot. But on Monday night, as the Brewers took care of business against the Dodgers in Game 2 of the NLCS, I noticed that one emotion seemed to show as clear as day on Murphy’s face every time the camera found him. All night, it seemed to me, no matter how well things were going on the field, Murphy looked pissed off. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — Game 1 of the NLCS was an exemplary display of mid-2020s playoff baseball, a dramatic and finely poised showcase of high-powered pitching and expansive defense. Game 2 was a hot dog, loaded with chili and onions, and dropped clumsily down the diner’s shirt.

And yet, the result was the same: The Brewers got the odd solo homer to center to erase an early Dodger lead, and a small-ball run put Milwaukee up for good. This one had a little more action — the 7-4 final marks the highest-scoring NL playoff game this year, as well as the Brewers’ highest offensive output in their past 13 postseason games. They are now halfway toward answering a humiliating sweep in last year’s NLCS with a sweep of their own.

Heroes outnumbered passengers for Milwaukee in Game 2. William Contreras went 3-for-4 with a walk and a monster home run, but four of his teammates also had multi-hit games. Every Brewers position player except Jackson Chourio reached base. As they piled on the insurance runs, four of their pitchers contributed perfect relief stints. When Game 2 started, only two Brewers in history had scored three runs in a playoff game; David Hamilton and Brice Turang both tied that record in the span of three plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — A year ago, the Dodgers came to Milwaukee as the lower seed in the NLCS and blew the doors off the Brewers. Milwaukee scored four runs, total, in a four-game sweep. Both teams’ rosters have evolved, and individual players have changed for better (Jacob Misiorowski) or worse (Shohei Ohtani), but what could possibly be so different this time around? As Dan Szymborski wrote in his series preview, teams that get beat in a playoff series are 17-28 all-time when afforded a rematch the following year. Teams that get swept are 0-5.

Well, at least one thing’s different: The Brewers aren’t going to get swept this time. They checked off the hardest item on their to-do list — beat Tarik Skubal — right away, with a 2-1 win at a sold-out American Family Field. Misiorowski made hard work of his 4 1/3-inning stint, but some terrific infield defense allowed him to escape with a single run on the board, and a solo homer by Brice Turang preceded an RBI single by Luis Lara an inning later. After another four innings, the Brewers had taken Round 1. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Los Angeles Dodgers finished off the Atlanta Braves in Game 4 of the NLDS, they set up a rematch of last year’s NLCS against the Milwaukee Brewers. Last time around, the Brewers, coming off an extremely successful 97-65 season, ran into the Dodger buzzsaw and were swept out of the postseason. While Milwaukee mostly kept Los Angeles’ offense in check, the Brew Crew could only muster one run in each of their four games, and when that’s all you manage to score, you have to pitch shutouts to prevail. As noted in many a book and movie, revenge frequently comes with a good deal of satisfaction, whatever Herman Melville may have thought. And the Brewers now have the chance to turn the tables on the Dodgers and stymie their quest for baseball’s first three-peat (please don’t sue me, Pat Riley) of the 21st century.

Going back to the start of the modern World Series in 1903, there have been 45 consecutive-year postseason rematches in major league history (here we’re including a rematch in any playoff series the following year). In 17 of those 45 rematches, the previous year’s loser got their revenge, but no team has immediately avenged a playoff sweep. Granted, before now, there have only been five chances for a team to get vengeance the year after being swept in the playoffs — Orioles-Twins in 1970, Yankees-Rangers in 1999, Cardinals-Padres in 2006, Red Sox-Angels in 2008, and Yankees-Twins in 2010 — but it still gives the Brewers the opportunity to do something that’s never been done before.

ZiPS favors the Dodgers by a significant, but not overwhelming, margin in the NLCS. But with the fourth-most wins in the majors over the last decade, including the most wins in each of the last two seasons, the Brewers aren’t your typical scrappy underdog fighting for table scraps. Yet, in another sense, they are: Every year, they crush the expectations of fans, the Vegas oddsmakers, and projection systems. As the developer of one of those projection systems, I’ve spent a lot of time scratching my head over how the Brewers so routinely defy the expectations of my model in a way no other team has, and while I think I’ve identified the mechanism of my humiliation, I’m still trying to figure out how to model it. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I led the mailbag with some quick thoughts on the thrilling AL Central race between the White Sox and the Guardians. When I wrote that introduction, Cleveland had just won two of its final three regular-season games against Chicago, and the two teams were tied atop the division.

Neither club was all that good, but each was intriguing in its own way. The White Sox, of course, had the worst playoff odds of any team in the American League on Opening Day and were coming off three straight 100-loss seasons. The Guardians, meanwhile, were postseason regulars, and this year, they had trailed Chicago in the standings for most of the summer before mounting a September comeback. Cleveland maintained its division lead for the rest of the season, but only barely. The Guards finished 85-77; the Sox, 84-78. Their head-to-head records were also separated by just one game, with Chicago holding the advantage there. Now, as the two teams enter tonight’s ALDS Game 5 in Cleveland, the margin between them remains as thin as garlic slices in a mafia movie. Both clubs still aren’t exactly playing crisp baseball — the series has featured bewildering bullpen decisions, befuddling ABS challenges, and more hit-by-pitches (six) than home runs (four) — but they’ve been a ton of fun to watch.

In this week’s mailbag, we’re answering your questions on the worst regular-season players to start regularly for a playoff team, the best starting pitcher matchups in a postseason Game 3, and holy WAR. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »