When I laid out a potential path to a Marlins upset in the NL Wild Card Series, it started with Jesús Luzardo hanging with Zack Wheeler. The 33-year-old righty has been one of the best starters in baseball over his tenure with the Phillies, whose run to last year’s pennant was in large part the result of a procession of dominant Wheeler starts. But Luzardo is an excellent pitcher himself; perhaps a player of his youth and talent could raise his game in the biggest start of his life.

Luzardo didn’t pitch badly by any means, but on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, there was simply no hanging with Wheeler. I’ll list his stats here, but they don’t do the performance justice: 6.2 innings, five hits, no walks, one run, eight strikeouts. The Phillies won, 4–1, and now have a stranglehold on a series they were heavily favored to win from the start.

“I think the story was Wheeler,” said Marlins manager Skip Schumaker. “He was excellent tonight. The sinker/sweeper combination gave us trouble. A lot of weak ground ball contact…. He was just excellent.” Read the rest of this entry »

It looked like the mismatch of all mismatches. Brandon Pfaadt is not a playoff ace, to put it mildly. The Diamondbacks rookie struggled mightily in his first taste of the majors; though he’s undoubtedly a top prospect, he scuffled his way to a 5.72 ERA and 5.18 FIP. He was better after a midseason demotion, but not that much better, running up a 4.22 ERA and 4.35 FIP in his second major league go-round.

On the flip side, Corbin Burnes is a Cy Young winner who righted the ship after an iffy start to the season. The Brewers gave him a light workload in September to set him up for the playoffs, and he rewarded them with a 2.51 ERA (3.15 FIP) in the month. A matchup against Zac Gallen might have been a fair fight. Instead, the Brewers spent time setting up their ace for the Game 1 start, and the Diamondbacks had to improvise after a furious push to the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

Royce Lewis returned from the injured list on Tuesday to start the Twins’ postseason run. He hadn’t played in a game since September 19 due to a hamstring strain, and it wasn’t completely clear if he would be activated for the series. It’s a decision not without risk. Rushing a player back from a hamstring strain can be suspect, and Lewis’ young career has been filled with health challenges. From a mechanical standpoint, hamstring strains can compromise how you interact with the ground and cause compensations up the kinetic chain.

Given how important every at-bat is in the playoffs, there’s very little room for error. But while Lewis still may not be able to get into a full sprint, that doesn’t matter so much if you’re trotting around the base paths. In his first two at-bats of his playoff career, he took Kevin Gausman yard for two no-doubt home runs, leading the Twins to a 3–1 victory over Toronto and their first postseason win since 2004. Read the rest of this entry »

Well that was decisive. The Texas Rangers dominated the first contest of their Wild Card Series in all three phases of the game. Bruce Bochy’s club outhit, outpitched, and absolutely out-defended the Tampa Bay Rays en route to a 4-0 victory. If baseball involved special teams, they surely would’ve crushed Tampa on that front too. Fresh off the best season of his seven-year career, Jordan Montgomery silenced a Rays team whose 118 wRC+ was second in the majors only to Atlanta’s this year, and whose 120 wRC+ against left-handed pitching ranked fourth. Meanwhile, the Tampa defense, which ranked 18th on our leaderboard this season, set a franchise single-game postseason record with four errors.

Surprising no one, Randy Arozarena’s playoff heroics continued, as he went 2-for-4 with a double. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much help, as the rest of the team notched just four hits.

Defense was the story from the very beginning of the game, overshadowing an impressive performance from ace Tyler Glasnow. Clad in their fun (but possibly cursed) throwback Devil Rays uniforms, Tampa Bay made three errors in the first three innings. Although none of them led directly to a run, they did contribute to Glasnow’s rising pitch count; he needed 51 pitches to get through those first three frames. And it wasn’t just the errors. There were several plays, some of them very tough but all of them makable, that the Rays just couldn’t come up with. Corey Seager, batting second, reached on an error by first baseman Yandy Díaz in the first. Glasnow was able to work through the mistake, striking out the last two batters of the inning. Read the rest of this entry »

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After missing out on the postseason last year, breaking a four-year streak, the Brewers are back in the playoffs this year. They’ve been the model of consistency over this past half decade; they are the only other team apart from the Astros and Dodgers to have won at least 86 games in each of the last six full seasons. But for all that regular season success, they’ve only won one postseason series during this stretch, a Division Series back in 2018. They have one of the strongest run prevention units in baseball and are hoping that will carry them deep into October.

Milwaukee’s first-round opponent, the Diamondbacks, will be making their first playoff appearance since 2017. They’re breaking out of a long rebuilding cycle a little ahead of schedule thanks to the phenomenal rookie campaign of Corbin Carroll. On paper, they’re significant underdogs when compared to the dominant arms the Brewers can bring to bear, but they’ve got enough young talent to make some noise as a surprise contender:

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The playoffs start today, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its National League counterpart break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

The race to the playoffs provided plenty of drama over the past month. The battle for a Wild Card spot ended up coming down to the wire in both leagues, and the AL West wasn’t completely wrapped up until the final day of the season. But we’ve finally made it to the main event, where anything can happen and underdogs can topple giants. Here’s a look at the 12 teams in the playoffs and how they stack up against each other.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. Since regular season records don’t matter in the playoffs, I’ve removed the factors for win percentage and expected win percentage from the calculations. Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Twins and a short first round playoff series: Name a more iconic duo. The Twins have been quietly excellent this year, compiling the seventh-best run differential in baseball. To be sure, some of that is because they have the good fortune of facing fellow AL Central clubs, but a lot of it is because their team is full of good pitchers. They’ll meet the Toronto Blue Jays in a Wild Card clash. You’ve probably watched and heard a lot about the Blue Jays this year, and I’ll get to them, but let’s start with the thing you probably most need to hear: The Twins are good, not just the token AL Central representative, and they got a lot better when you probably weren’t paying attention.

The Minnesota rotation might be short on name recognition relative to some other playoff squads, but Pablo López and Sonny Gray are each top 10 pitchers by WAR this year. Joe Ryan, Kenta Maeda, and Bailey Ober are both above average as well – Ryan will likely draw the third start, but the other two will surely be available to relieve him if necessary. They’re one of those classic playoff tropes, the team you hate to face because so much of their value is concentrated in good pitching. López has gone six or more innings while allowing one or fewer runs 11 times this year; Gray has done it nine times himself. It’s easy to imagine the Jays coming into Minneapolis and leaving with very few runs to show for their trip. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in August, my colleague Ben Clemens crafted an article titled Wait, Zack Littell is a Starter Now?! It was an apt headline. Not only had the 27-year-old right-hander been DFA’d by the Red Sox a few months earlier — Boston having been his third organization in as many years, and his sixth overall — he’d logged a 4.08 ERA over 145 big-league appearances, all but four out of the bullpen, with just three saves. As Clemens pointed out, Littell “wasn’t even a dominant reliever.”

Of course, this was the Tampa Bay Rays who’d moved him into their rotation. Much for that reason, Clemens qualified his skepticism by saying, “What else can we do but wait and see the results?”

The results have remained largely positive. Littell has a not-so-great 6.75 ERA in 14 appearances out of the bullpen this year, but in the same number of outings as a starter his ERA is 3.41. Moreover, he’s consistently gone five-plus innings. As Rays beat writer Marc Topkin told me for an article that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. the under-the-radar righty “has basically saved the starting rotation.”

How did the opportunity come about? Read the rest of this entry »