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MILWAUKEE — The 2026 Brewers aren’t your typical postseason buzzsaw. They’ve won with defense and relief pitching, and their eight postseason victories have come by a combined 13 runs. Half of those games ended either with a Milwaukee walk-off hit, or with the opponent’s tying run on base. Every postseason game the Brewers have played was a one-run game in the sixth or later; they haven’t scored more than seven runs in a game since their 101st regular-season win.

But they are a buzzsaw, and in Game 1 of the World Series — Milwaukee’s first Fall Classic game in 44 years — into the blade went the Tampa Bay Rays. The Brewers put two runs on the board in the top of the first, and they led the rest of the way, albeit not by much. Jacob Misiorowski allowed one run over five innings, tying the longest postseason outing of his career, and the Rays struggled to put a counterattack together until a furious but ill-fated ninth-inning rally.

Round 1 went to the home team, 3-2. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve watched a postseason game in the last decade, you’ve heard the theory. Honestly, if you’ve watched a postseason game in the last decade, you’ve probably thought of the theory yourself. When a team eschews a regular starter and instead uses a string of relievers, surely one of those relievers is bound to be a little bit off. There are just so many of them. What, they’re all going to have it? C’mon, man. Be reasonable. And what happens as a result? Well, that reliever is going to give up a bunch of runs. You know, like pitchers do when they don’t have it. Obvious!

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Mathemadage. This time, we’re hot on the trail of what I like to call the Inevitable Reliever Blowup Theory. There isn’t one specific adage to point to here, but I’ve always wondered about this effect myself, and last week Other Ben (Lindbergh) forwarded me this tweet:

I hear this every bullpen game that the risk is law of averages says one of the relievers wont have it.

I have not seen any actual study anyone has done about this. Seems like it is just passed around as conventional wisdom.

— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) October 3, 2026

That was a good enough excuse for me to dig in – like I said, I’ve had this on my mind for a while, and the playoffs are the perfect time for a deep dive. But before I started cracking open my spreadsheets and coding agents, I did a literature review, because I knew I couldn’t be the first person to have investigated this. Back in 2015, Henry Druschel found that starters had more “disaster” outings than relievers, though he didn’t delve into the stacking aspect of using multiple relievers in a single game. I also found former colleague Kevin Goldstein’s investigation into the subject, which focused on the Rays’ ability to avoid reliever blowups. But those didn’t settle the debate for me, so I pressed on. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an old saying that goes, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

In baseball terms, how do you eat the two-time reigning champs with a $412 million payroll and steamroll into the World Series? One shrewd acquisition at a time.

Throughout the National League Championship Series, the ragtag Milwaukee Brewers played their most inspired ball of the season, taking down the almighty Los Angeles Dodgers in a series that marked a slight shift in National League power. The Brewers — forever subject to backhanded compliments about being better than the sum of their parts, or great for a small market team — are also just immensely talented. There’s no two ways about it. A team doesn’t progress this deep into the postseason without having some dogs that can put the barrel on the ball and prevent the other team from doing the same. But if you were to stop a random person on the street and ask them if they know who Shohei Ohtani is, it’s fairly likely they could tell you he’s a baseball player, or that they’ve at least heard the name. If you asked the same thing about Jake Bauers, they might furrow their brow and wonder aloud if that’s someone they went to high school with. Quite honestly, showing them a photo of Bauers might only reinforce the idea that he’s a long lost childhood classmate, what with his everyman appearance and Saved by the Bell sounding name. What you really need to do to jog the memory is play them a sound, particularly this one of Bauers’ bat taking a large chunk out of the elephant.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow night, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays will kick off the 2026 World Series. They’ll both deploy unhittable aces to open the series, and they’ll both back them with a squad made up of speedsters, platoonable hitters, a young superstar, and relievers as far as the eye can see. To a first approximation, these teams might as well be a mirror image of each other. They’re small-budget operations that rely heavily on pitching, speed, and defense. They put the ball in play. They wreak havoc on the basepaths. They play indoors – at least some of the time, in Milwaukee’s case. But while the Rays and Brewers are superficially similar, key differences will have a lot to say about how this series turns out. So let’s take a look at where the equivalence ends, and how each team will try to use that to their advantage.

Pair of Aces

The Brewers and Rays each have an obvious leader in their respective rotations. Jacob Misiorowski and Drew Rasmussen are two of the best pitchers in baseball, and they’re both having career years. Misiorowski is a shoo-in for the National League Cy Young, and while Rasmussen probably won’t win the American League version, he just put up his sixth (!) straight season with a sub-3.00 ERA, posted over a career-high 172 innings. He’s found another gear in the playoffs — three starts, 21 innings pitched, and just three runs allowed. The Miz hasn’t looked quite so steady – two starts, 8 1/3 innings, three runs – but his 1.80 ERA and 2.17 FIP in the regular season were downright ludicrous. Read the rest of this entry »

The way people talk about Jacob Misiorowski bothers me a little. Yeah, he’s taller than almost any other starting pitcher and throws harder than literally any starting pitcher in history. He led all major league pitchers in WAR this year, and if he wins the NL Cy Young Award next month — as he’s almost universally expected to do — it will be a deserved victory.

But Miz didn’t lap the field or post paradigm-altering results. I can’t make a defensible case for Chris Sale or Cristopher Sánchez to win the Cy Young over Misiorowski, but I suspect the eventual vote total will not reflect how close the statistical margin was between Miz and his rivals.

In other words, this is an outstanding pitcher — maybe the best in the world at the moment, perhaps even a future Hall of Famer — but he’s not 1999 Pedro Martínez, or Victor Wembanyama with a curveball. This is a fairly inexperienced 24-year-old with real flaws in his game.

He can be got at. Read the rest of this entry »

The World Series — our annual signifier of another season smoked to its filter — is always a culmination of the sport’s beauty. Teams get rewarded for playing a winning brand of baseball all throughout October, managers are vindicated in all of the micro-decisions that got them there, and front offices can comfortably rest their heads at night knowing their systems and philosophies weren’t totally off base.

But more visible than all that — and the thing that gives the sport its humanity among so many numbers, figures, and entropy beyond the players’ control — is the heartwarming sight of a veteran finally getting a chance for his Ray Bourque moment. For the Tampa Bay Rays, who stand just four wins away from the franchise’s first title, that man is quite literally impossible to overlook. The circumference of his arms threatens a solar eclipse every time he raises them. His physical composition is probably best described in terms used to measure quartzite. He is Yandy Díaz, the 35-year-old igneous rock at the top of the Tampa Bay lineup, who, despite having all the hulking characteristics of a home run-mashing slugger, is also the best pure hitter in this World Series.

Díaz, who has hit safely in all but one of the Rays’ nine postseason games, is above average at nearly every element of hitting. He rarely swings and misses, which leads to very few strikeouts. In turn, he squares the ball at an 85th-percentile clip, and can do that while peppering it to right field. When he puts the ball in play, 29.9% of the time it’s going to the opposite field, a skill he shares with teammates Chandler Simpson and Jonathan Aranda, who are also among the five most frequent opposite-field hitters in the American League. Díaz is not going to take many walks — 8.2 BB%, good for the 37th percentile — but hitting .293 still helps him post a .359 on-base percentage, placing him in the top 20 of qualified AL batters. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday, I published the first half of my ballot for this year’s Fielding Bible Awards, which will be announced at 3 PM ET tomorrow. Today, I’m going to cover my votes for the three outfield positions and pitcher, as well as the best multi-positional defenders, defensive player of the year, and defensive team of the year. Update: the winners have been announced. Winners are denoted by asterisks below.

If you’re curious about the methodology I used to help guide my voting, you can read about it in Monday’s article, but here’s a quick refresher: I used a weighted blend of DRS, FRV, and DRP (the three flagship public defensive metrics), with the weights based on how well each metric did on reliability and consistency. That gave me an initial rough order at each position. From there, I used my own insights gleaned from both statistical and video deep dives on individual players, as well as the copious amounts of baseball I watched this year, to assemble my final rankings. I deferred to the defensive metrics when the gaps were big, but for close calls, I leaned heavily on my own judgment.

That’s a fair number of words, and there will be a lot more as I go through each of these positions, so let’s get right to it, starting with left field.

Left Field
1. Cody Bellinger*
2. Chandler Simpson
3. Jackson Chourio
4. Ian Happ
5. Wyatt Langford

Last year, Bellinger played all over the outfield. This year, he mostly played in left, and he was pretty spectacular. He’s one of the best outfield defenders in the sport, and now that he’s playing full-time at a relatively weak position, he stood out from the pack here. He does it all: great anticipation and route-running, good speed, and a terrific throwing arm. With Steven Kwan now in center, Bellinger is the class of the position, and I didn’t seriously consider anyone else for my first place vote. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple years ago, I wrote an article about Amed Rosario. Rosario was just coming off the best season of his career, a 3.1-WAR 2022 campaign in which he’d posted a 104 wRC+ and manned shortstop for the Guardians. He’d led the majors with nine triples, but I was interested in another category where he’d not only led the league but also left everyone else in his dust. Statcast credited Rosario with 369 competitive runs. That was nearly 70 more than any other player in 2022, and it’s still the highest single-season total ever recorded.

As there’s no reason for you to remember what a competitive run is, let’s start with a refresher. In order for Statcast to do a good job of measuring a player’s average sprint speed, it needs to pick the right plays, when they’ll be running hard and reaching their maximum speed. If you hit a routine groundout to the shortstop and run down the baseline at a businesslike 80%, that’s not really a reflection of your top speed. You’re not running competitively. Statcast only assesses sprint speed on plays where a batter is running to first after a “topped” or “weakly hit” ball, or plays where they run two or more bases (except when they score from second on an extra-base hit). Those are competitive runs, and I’m going to quote from my old article to explain why I think they’re worth writing about:

I don’t know about you, but I think this is incredibly fun. Competitive runs is an incidental statistic. It’s just scaffolding for another stat, but there’s one person who plays baseball like competitive runs is his own personal pinball machine. The other reason I love it is that even though competitive runs exists only to serve a higher master, it’s still a descriptive stat in its own right. A player’s competitive runs total tells you plenty about the way they play the game.

In order to lead the league in competitive runs, you need to put the ball in play a lot, which means no striking out and, to a lesser extent, limited walking. You need to hit the ball weakly and on the ground, but you also need to reach base a lot so that you can make all those first-to-thirds and second-to-homes. Your offensive game needs to revolve around speed and ground-based contact. I’ve left out one other prerequisite, but already, it’s starting to sound like I’m describing one player in particular, right?

Read the rest of this entry »

After a dominant run through the American League East this year, the Tampa Bay Rays have punched their ticket to the World Series. Down 2-1 in the ALCS, they reeled off two straight wins in Cleveland over the weekend to take a 3-2 lead back home. And with a chance to put the series away, following a wild weekend of rain, rescheduling, and bullpen games as far as the eye could see, the Rays rose to the occasion, jumping all over the Guardians early and tacking on late to cruise to a 7-3 Game 6 win on Monday night. It was a comprehensive victory for the top seed in the American League, and it showed off their ability to do whatever is needed to win, whether it’s one-upping the opposition at their own game or putting a contest to bed with late-inning power.

Cleveland is a club that needs to make the most out of every opportunity to outscore its opponents. The team’s much-ballyhooed “Guards Ball” style depends a lot on a dominant pitching staff and a little on turning balls in play into baserunners, pressure, and eventually runs. But time and again on Monday, the Rays were the Guardians’ match when it came to the small plays that can flip the game – and they showed off an extra gear when push came to shove. Time and time again, they turned the Guardians away in big moments and extended the lead when they got their own chances.

One sequence was emblematic of the night: In the top of the fourth inning, the Guardians staged an all-too-rare rally against Freddy Peralta. Jo Adell led off the inning with a roped line drive double. Nathaniel Lowe battled back from 0-2 to draw a walk. After a fly out, Patrick Bailey came up and chopped a grounder over Peralta’s head. It was the kind of ball that could rattle around and lead to chaos. But Taylor Walls was having absolutely none of it. He rampaged across second, waved Richie Palacios out of the way, and snared the ball at a full sprint, headed directly toward Lowe, who panicked and slammed on the brakes, but to no avail. Walls ran him down, brushed a tag as Lowe fell out of the basepath, and fired to first to complete a double play. What might have been a big inning instead ended without a run scoring. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been following the postseason closely, you probably know why every Guardians player celebrates a single by turning to their dugout and flashing their teammates a thumbs down. “When a Guardians hitter notches a single, he stands on first base, peers toward the dugout and flashes either two thumbs up or two thumbs down, depending on how hard he struck the ball.” That’s how The Athletic’s Zack Meisel described the celebration back in July, in an article documenting the remarkable way that Steven Kwan was turning things around after a dismal start to the season.

The celebration is actually more specific than that, though. The Guardians aren’t just indicating whether they hit the ball hard. They’re indicating whether it met Statcast’s official threshold for a hard-hit ball. Travis Bazzana explained the premise to some sort of FanDuel-affiliated Instagram influencer at the All-Star Game back in July:

“Yeah, so it’s funny. When you hit it hard, if you hit it over 95 mph, you’re supposed to give a thumbs up. And if you hit it a little soft, like dink hit or groundball, it’s a thumbs down. The joke in today’s game is you want to hit the ball hard, you want to hit the ball in the air. And so it’s like, ‘Oh it’s a bad hit if I hit it soft.’ It’s kind of a funny joke.”

If you’re wondering why Bazzana felt the need to bookend the explanation with avowals that the joke was indeed funny, it’s because he delivered it with all the enthusiasm of a recently dissected frog. Clearly, life has taught Bazzana that if he wants someone to pick up on the fact that he’s telling them a joke, he’ll need to say so explicitly both at the beginning and end of that particular instance of hilarity. I would love to see him attempt stand-up comedy. Read the rest of this entry »