We have a hard time making ourselves feel it when probability offers good news. Going into Saturday’s NLCS Game 6, our ZiPS postseason game-by-game odds gave the Braves a 71.4% chance of advancing to the World Series. They had largely outplayed the Dodgers. Max Muncy and Justin Turner were still sidelined, and Joe Kelly had just joined them. Max Scherzer had been scratched with arm fatigue, leaving Walker Buehler to start on short rest. Game 7 might mean a bullpen game for Los Angeles, if there were a Game 7 at all. The Dodgers were up against it; the Braves, at worst, had another shot.

That is what we knew; feeling it was another matter. After all, the Dodgers had won 18 more regular-season games than the Braves, and in a harder division. They were riding a seven-game win streak in postseason elimination games, including an 11–2 drubbing in Game 5 to stay alive. Atlanta had dealt with injuries of its own, and this series had so far followed 2020’s pattern, causing an itchy bit of worry in the back of Braves fans’ minds as they remembered going up three-games-to-one in last year’s NLCS only to have Los Angeles claw its way back in Game 5 and take the next two. Ian Anderson, the Braves’ Game 6 starter, had only managed three innings in Game 2; Atlanta won, but he’d walked three and allowed two runs, and then there were all those bad first innings to think of. What if Eddie Rosario’s bat cooled? What if Chris Taylor’s didn’t? Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Glasnow deliverers his high-octane fastball with a standard four-seam grip. That hasn’t always been the case. Back in his Little League days, the Tampa Bay Rays right-hander relied on an extra digit when throwing a baseball.

“I used to throw my heater with three fingers on top,” explained Glasnow, who at 6-foot-8 has grown exponentially since those formative years. “One time I was throwing to one of the coaches with my three-finger grip, and he was, ‘Whoa. That’s weird. Try throwing with two fingers.’ I did, and I think the movement got a little better, and I threw it a bit harder, but I couldn’t throw it for strikes. So I stayed with that three-finger approach for a little bit — a four-seam grip with three fingers — and then as my hands got bigger, I went to two fingers.”

His curveball is another story. Glasnow told me that he first began throwing a breaker around his sophomore year of high school… or maybe it was prior to that? He’s not entirely sure. When I suggested that age-12 isn’t uncommon, the So. Cal native said that may well have been the case. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros are heading to their third World Series in the last five years, besting the Red Sox, 5–0, on Friday night to finish the ALCS in six games. The Red Sox had the pitcher they wanted on the mound in Nathan Eovaldi, but the offense they needed never materialized as Houston’s starter, Luis Garcia, pitched 5 2/3 masterful innings, striking out seven against just a single walk and one lonely hit.

As one of the first front offices to go all-in on modern analytics, Houston has long been an organization that takes glee in upending conventional wisdom. Despite a rotation torn apart long-term by veteran departures and short-term with an injury to Lance McCullers Jr. (and what possibly looked like one to Garcia), the Astros stymied Boston’s lineup. Pitching woes, schmitching woes; despite the very reasonable worries about the rotation, they limited the dangerous Red Sox offense to three runs over the final three games.

Everyone likes tales of comebacks or redemption, and Garcia, one of the AL Rookie of the Year favorites, provided a good one. He got knocked out in the third inning of his first start this postseason, giving up five runs against the White Sox in Houston’s lone ALDS loss. The follow-up performance didn’t go any better: the Red Sox scored five runs off of him before he was removed with a knee strain in the second inning.

Some teams would have been a little uneasy about starting Garcia in Game 6, but one of the reasons the Astros are in position to win another World Series championship is that they put a lot of faith in the young pitching talent that remained after most of their big-name starting pitching was gone. As with the Rays and their never-ending supply of nameless relievers who become all-world or the White Sox going with Carlos Rodón in Game 4 of the ALDS, there’s a lot of appeal in sticking with the people that got you here. There would have been second-guessing and what-ifs about not acquiring a J.A. Happ type a few months ago if Garcia had again struggled. But he didn’t, and while this wasn’t John Smoltz facing off against Jack Morris in the World Series, he dominated Boston’s offense in his 5 2/3 one-hit innings.

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For much of this postseason, the main storyline for the Los Angeles Dodgers has been a pitching staff that’s been stretched to its limit, but that focus neglects the fact that the Dodgers have also struggled to hit like they did earlier in the year. Entering Game 5 of the NLCS, they’d scored just 3.5 runs per game in their 10 previous playoff tilts. They were shutout twice by the Giants, and held to fewer than four runs four other times. It was an uncharacteristic slump for what had been one of the National League’s most potent lineups during the regular season. As a team, they were hitting just .231/.303/.356 (.286 wOBA) in October, a far cry from their .251/.339/.446 (.337 wOBA) regular season effort.

With their season hanging in the balance, the Dodgers bats finally came alive on Thursday night. They collected 17 hits against the Atlanta Braves — every position player in the lineup collected at least one hit except for Will Smith — and pushed 11 runs across the plate to force a Game 6 in Atlanta this weekend. This was the Dodgers’ seventh straight postseason win while facing elimination, the third longest streak in baseball history.

The hero of the game was undoubtedly Chris Taylor. He started his night by blasting a two-run home run off a center-cut fastball from Max Fried to give the Dodgers a 3-2 lead in the second inning — a lead they wouldn’t relinquish for the remainder of the night. In the third with runners on the corners, Taylor blooped a single into center for his second hit and third RBI of the game. He hit his second home run in the fifth inning, another two-run shot off Chris Martin, who had just entered the game in relief of Fried. Taylor came up again in the seventh inning with the bases empty and deposited a pitch into the left-center field bleachers — his third homer of the game and sixth RBI. His final at-bat came in the eighth and he came close to a fourth home run when he lined a hanging curveball down the left field line; it curved foul and he ended up striking out to end the inning:

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BOSTON — For the second straight game, a close contest turned into a blowout. Fueled by a five-run fifth inning, the Astros rolled to a 9–1 win over the Red Sox in ALCS Game 5. Played under a full moon in front of 37,599 fans at Fenway Park, the victory gave Dusty Baker’s squad a 3–2 lead in a series that now moves to Texas for Game 6 on Friday.

Chris Sale and Framber Valdez were on the mound to start, and both did what has become all too rare in the modern-day postseason: provide quality innings beyond the third, fourth, and fifth. But it was Houston’s pitcher that ultimately shone brightest.

The game began with Jose Altuve flying out on a first-pitch changeup, an offering that Sale has struggled to execute in recent outings. The southpaw then recorded a strikeout and a groundout, both on fastballs, and finished the frame having thrown just nine pitches. Unlike in his earlier October starts, he looked sharp. Valdez was nearly as efficient in the bottom half, setting down the Red Sox in order on just a dozen pitches. Like his adversary, he recorded one of the three outs on a strikeout. Read the rest of this entry »

BOSTON — A pitchers’ duel through eight innings, Tuesday’s ALCS Game 4 culminated in an Astros offensive explosion. Turning the tables on a Boston team that had bashed its way to wins in Games 2 and 3, Houston scored seven times in the ninth inning to turn a 2-2 tie into a series-evening 9-2 rout.

What happened late was everything that didn’t happen early.

The Astros got the early edge they so desperately wanted. Two innocent outs into the top of the first, Alex Bregman turned on a Nick Pivetta fastball and lofted a 354-foot Fenway fly that settled in the Monster seats. The Astros had now homered in all seven of their postseason games, and Zack Greinke had a 1-0 lead as he took the mound for what could conceivably be his final big-league appearance.

The bottom of the first also began with a pair of outs, but then it was Boston’s turn to get homer-happy. Rafael Devers drew a walk, and with “Greinke” chants emanating from the stands, Xander Bogaerts drove a slider deep into the night. Statcast measured the two-run blast at 413 feet. Read the rest of this entry »

In a postseason defined by pitcher usage, Game 3 of the NLCS between the Braves and the Dodgers was supposed to be the exception. We weren’t going to see each team use seven relievers (and maybe even some starters) out of the bullpen, and certainly not with Charlie Morton and Walker Buehler starting. Both had gone at least six innings in their first playoff starts, and while each delivered fewer than five in their followups, those came on three days rest; this game provided double that. On a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles, both teams likely expected a minimum of 15 outs from each, with a hope for 18 or maybe more. It all felt very old school.

By the end of the first inning, all of those expectations were dashed. And by the end of the ninth, the Dodgers had pulled off a dramatic 6–5 comeback victory that quite possibly saved their season.

The game diverged from the narrative within the first few minutes, with back-to-back singles against the shift by Eddie Rosario and Freddie Freeman. Things temporarily went back to normal when Ozzie Albies hit a line drive to center fielder Gavin Lux that carried more than Rosario thought it would, with Lux catching it and quickly firing to second base for a crushing double play. A strikeout of Austin Riley got Buehler out of the jam, and he escaped it with just 13 total pitches; the pitcher’s duel was still on.

Morton failed to keep his part of the bargain in the bottom half of the frame, walking Mookie Betts and giving up a mammoth home run to Corey Seager on a curveball. In a rare occurrence, the veteran righty got around on the pitch, losing downward bite and instead delivering a horizontal spinner that broke into Seager’s bat at the top of zone. One swing, 109 mph and 444 feet later, the Dodgers had an early 2–0 lead thanks to the first Morton breaking ball hit for a homer in his lengthy postseason career.

The home run pitch to Seager was a harbinger of things to come. Just when it looked like Morton had rebounded with two quick outs, his ability to harness his big-moving stuff abandoned him, as he began to yank both his fastball and off-speed pitches to both sides of the plate, leading to three straight walks to load the bases. A Chris Taylor flair to Dansby Swanson ended an inning that could have been much worse, but the damage was done, both on the scoreboard and to Morton’s pitch count, now at a massive 34. Even if he could find his command and pitch efficiency once again, getting a long start out of him on the day before a planned bullpen game quickly looked like a pipe dream.

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BOSTON — The Red Sox came into Monday’s ALCS Game 3 having recorded double-digit hits in each of their last five games, a postseason streak matched only by the 1989 Cubs, the 2002 Angels, and the ’04 Astros. More importantly, they’d scored 39 runs and won four times, with the lone loss inconsequential in the club’s quest for a World Series championship. Returning to Fenway Park looking to gain an edge in a series knotted at a game apiece, Boston boasted the hottest bats of the four teams still standing.

The onslaught continued on a chilly night that started with a game-time temperature of 54 degrees. Buoyed by four home runs, Boston bashed Houston by a score of 12-3, swatting 11 hits along the way.

Game 3 was similar to Saturday’s Game 2 — a 9-5 Red Sox win — in several respects. Early offense set the tone, and it came after Eduardo Rodriguez began by firing bullets. The Red Sox southpaw retired the first six Astros batters, four by way of the strikeout, and the 95.8 mph heater that Michael Brantley swung through wasn’t just a whiff, it the hardest pitch he’s thrown in 2021.

By evening’s end, Rodriguez had received the most run support he had all year, too. Read the rest of this entry »

8:01	Dan Szymborski: Good evening!

8:01	Dan Szymborski: For a day of events of a baseball nature.

8:01	Dan Szymborski: Well an evening

8:03	Dan Szymborski: Dunno, price?

8:03	Dan Szymborski: How many are unsold?

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