If this afternoon’s contest between the Cardinals and Braves was a game you were interested in watching, hopefully you tuned in early; if you’re a fan of the Braves, or competitive baseball, there wasn’t much worth watching after that. Here was the Cardinals’ top of the first inning:

Things could have gone differently for Mike Foltynewicz. There was an infield single by Paul Goldschmidt; Freddie Freeman committed an error. If Goldschmidt had hit that grounder at an infielder instead of in the hole, or if Freeman had caught Yadier Molina’s gounder, the Braves escape with a 1-0 deficit in the first. That isn’t what happened, though. After a walk and a double, Foltynewicz was done down by four and Max Fried came in to face the pitcher with the bases loaded. Fried walked Jack Flaherty, more damage was done, and by the time the inning finally, mercifully concluded, the Braves’ were in a massive hole, though not until after a wild pitch allowed Marcell Ozuna to reach, and Kolten Wong to score. Read the rest of this entry »

4:52	Craig Edwards: Cardinals lineup: St. Louis Cardinals @Cardinals For all the marbles #NLDS | #TimeToFly 9 Oct 2019

4:52	Craig Edwards: and Braves: Atlanta Braves @Braves Game 5. Winner takes all. #RELENTLESS 9 Oct 2019

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In the fourth inning of Tuesday night’s Game 4, with José Altuve on first base, one out, and the Rays already up by three, Yordan Álvarez hit a deep fly ball to right-center field. You’d have been forgiven, in this home run-happy era, for thinking at first that the ball had left the park. You’d similarly have lost not one whit of credibility had you assumed that Kevin Kiermaier, one of the best center fielders of his era, might catch the ball on the run. But neither of those two things happened; the ball instead bounced beautifully off the right-center field wall and hung, for just a moment, in the air above Kiermaier’s head. That was the moment — when the ball hung briefly in stark contrast against dark blue — in which Gary Pettis, the Astros’ third-base coach since 2014, had to decide whether to send Altuve home.

As Ben Clemens pointed out in the game chat, our WPA Inquirer suggests that at the time Pettis made his decision, the Astros would have had about a 28.1% chance of winning the game had Altuve stopped at third, a 17.7% chance of winning the game if he went and was thrown out (which is what happened), and a 29.8% chance of winning the game had he run and scored. That distribution suggests, all other things being equal, that Pettis had to believe Altuve was likely to score at least 86% of the time in order to justify sending him (29.8 – 17.7 = 12.1; 12.1 * 0.86 + 17.7 = 28.1). Given that math, I find it hard to fault Pettis for his choice to run Altuve. It took two essentially perfect throws, from Keirmaier and Willy Adames in turn, plus a terrific tag from Travis d’Arnaud, to get Altuve at the plate by a hair. I know it won’t make the Astros feel better given the result, but it was fun to watch. Read the rest of this entry »

The death of the starter has been greatly exaggerated. On the heels of a regular season in which starting pitchers threw a smaller share of innings than ever before, and one year after a postseason in which they threw barely over half the total innings, it seemed quite possible that the trend might continue this October, particularly with each of the four 100-win teams spending September scrambling for a fourth option and some of them publicly floating novel ideas about how things might unfold. Admittedly, it’s early in the 2019 postseason, but already we’ve seen some monster pitching performances in the playoffs — Justin Verlander‘s seven innings of one-hit ball, Gerrit Cole‘s 15 strikeouts, Adam Wainwright’s 7.2 scoreless innings — and in general more reliance upon teams’ front-of-the-rotation starters than in the recent past.

Consider: in all of the 2018 postseason, just four times did a starting pitcher throw 100 pitches in a game: Walker Buehler twice (in Games 3 of the NLCS and World Series), Hyun-Jin Ryu once (Game 1 of the NLDS), and Verlander once (Game 1 of the ALDS). Already this year, seven pitchers have done it: Buehler (again), Verlander (again), and Patrick Corbin in their respective Division Series openers, Cole and Jack Flaherty in their respective Games 2, Adam Wainwright in Game 3, and Max Scherzer in Game 4. The count of seven-inning starts isn’t quite there yet, but last year, there were nine in 66 total starts (13.6%), but just four in the Division Series. This year, there have been seven in 28 Division Series starts (25%):

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Ryan Zimmerman gave the best of himself to Washington Nationals teams that were not yet ready to produce moments big enough for him. By the time the talent surrounding him began to live up to his own, he had crossed over into a more treacherous, injury-marred phase of his career. Over the course of 15 years, Zimmerman’s fortunes and those of the Nationals have rarely been in harmony. But on Monday night, staring down elimination on its home field, Washington pulled back the curtains once more, and its first-ever star stole the show.

Zimmerman walked to the plate with a 2-1 lead in the fifth inning, watched Los Angeles right-hander Pedro Báez hurl a high fastball toward him, and crushed the pitch over the center field wall for a three-run homer that powered a 6-1 victory over the Dodgers in Game 4 of the NLDS. Nationals ace Max Scherzer was brilliant in seven innings of one-run baseball, striking out seven and allowing four hits and three walks, before turning the ball over to Sean Doolittle and Daniel Hudson for the final six outs.

With their help, the Nationals preserved themselves for another game against the Dodgers, this time in a decisive Game 5 slated for Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium. Washington will likely send Stephen Strasburg to the bump, while Los Angeles is expected to counter with Walker Buehler. Both starters were dominant in their first games of the series, with Buehler tossing six shutout frames in Game 1 and Strasburg dealing seven shutout innings in Game 2. It will be the fourth time in eight years the Nationals will play Game 5 of the NLDS. They have lost all three of their previous tries.

Monday’s bottom of the fifth inning began with a small-ball sequence from yesteryear. With the game tied 1-1, Washington shortstop Trea Turner lined a single to left field against new Dodgers reliever Julio Urías, and advanced to second on a sacrifice bunt by Adam Eaton. Anthony Rendon then smacked a single to center that scored Turner, and two batters later, advanced to third base on a single by Howie Kendrick. With two on and two out, Los Angeles summoned Báez — a right-hander with a 3.10 ERA and 3.52 FIP in the regular season — to try and keep the game where it was. Báez got ahead with a strike. Ahead 0-1, he elevated a fastball where he thought Zimmerman couldn’t reach it. He was wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Tampa Bay Rays took to Tropicana Field this afternoon to play a do-or-die third game in this ALDS against the Astros, it had been almost six years to the day since they’d held a lead in a postseason series. That was in Game 4 of the 2013 ALDS. They had dropped the first two games in Boston, dominated by Jon Lester and John Lackey, sunk by two terrible starts from would-be aces Matt Moore and David Price, hammered by Jacoby Ellsbury, Shane Victorino, and David Ortiz. From the start, the Rays hadn’t been favored to win the series, a second Wild Card team that had outplayed their Pythag by five games; after their performance in front of the hostile Fenway masses, their outlook seemed grim.

But in Game 3, things took a turn. In front of the Trop’s biggest crowd of the season, the Rays finally got a good starting pitching performance, with Alex Cobb going five innings and allowing three runs (two of them earned). Meanwhile, the offense kept it close with one pivotal swing: Face of the franchise Evan Longoria, with two on and two out in the bottom of the fifth, went deep off Clay Buchholz, preventing the Red Sox from holding onto their lead. Tampa added another run in the eighth. And after Fernando Rodney blew the save, with two out in the bottom of the ninth, Jose Lobaton walked it off. It was the kind of moment that, when teams manage to turn around a postseason series, people look back on–a hinge moment, a moment where hope really returns.

In Game 4, it was Jake Peavy for the Sox and anyone who had an arm for the Rays; for five and a half innings, the two teams traded tense zeroes. Then came a leadoff double in the bottom of the sixth for Yunel Escobar. An out later, a single from David DeJesus drove him in. The Rays, once again, had the lead. Their fate was in their hands. They had a chance of pushing the series back to Boston for a decisive Game 5, and as the Wild Card team, they knew as well as anyone that in an all-hands-on-deck, winner-take-all contest, anything can happen.

Of course, that anything never got a chance to happen. The Rays promptly lost that slim lead. They lost the game, and the series, 3-1. The Red Sox went on to be World Series champions; the Rays didn’t play October baseball again until this year. Read the rest of this entry »

3:04

Jay Jaffe: Hey folks, good afternoon and welcome to our NLDS Braves-Cardinals Game 4 chat. Tony Wolfe will be joining me. First pitch is coming in four minutes, and right now, in the only game that’s live, the Rays are pouring it on the Astros 8-1 in the fourth inning, so it looks like that series will not end with a sweep

3:07	Jay Jaffe: We didn’t have enough bodies available to cover all four games today, and this time slot worked better for me when I planted my flag in our spreadsheet.

3:11	Jay Jaffe: I imagine this will be dictated by results to some degree. He’s at a disadvantage (.314  wOBA vs RHB career, .267 vs LHB, against a lineup with 2 lefties). With a 2-1 lead, he definitely has a longer leash than if the Braves were down 2-1

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After narrowly escaping his ineffectiveness in Game 1, the Carlos Martinez Octobercoaster caused St. Louis to yack up a pivotal Game 3 at home, and cede a 2-to-1 NLDS series lead to the Atlanta Braves. A three-run Braves’ ninth on the back of three hits and two walks spoiled a timeless, if sometimes harrowing, 7.2 shutout innings from 38-year-old Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright, and sent 47,000 fans home in stunned silence.

Up until the twist, Planet of the Apes-y ending, St. Louis had maintained a loose grip on a 1-0 lead first captured on a second-inning Matt Carpenter sac fly, enabled by an earlier Marcell Ozuna double. Throughout the six innings that followed, the Cardinals survived several well-struck fly balls that momentarily stopped the collective heart of Busch Stadium, before they died at the warning track and fell harmlessly into the waiting glove of Dexter Fowler. A Ronald Acuña Jr. laser in the third (107 mph off the bat), a Nick Markakis golf shot (100 mph) in the fourth, and a hanging curveball to Matt Joyce (102.5 mph) in the seventh all amounted to nothing more than a few seconds of concern.

Then came the ninth inning. A leadoff double by Josh Donaldson (who was replaced at second base by human blur Billy Hamilton) immediately put the tying run in scoring position. Consecutive Martinez strikeouts forced Cardinals manager Mike Shildt to make a two-out decision. Either a) have Martinez face lefty-hitting catcher Brian McCann, or b) walk McCann so Martinez could face the right-handed Dansby Swanson, who had doubled off of Wainwright earlier in the game. Shildt chose to face Swanson, who obliterated a first-pitch hanging slider and tied the game on his second double. Adam Duvall followed with a less emphatic, but more significant, single that plated Rafael Ortega (who ran for McCann) and Swanson. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryan Reynolds was a pleasant surprise in a Pittsburgh Pirates season that was anything but. While the frustratingly-frugal team he plays for plodded to a last-place finish in the NL Central, the 24-year-old outfielder put up a .314/.377/.503 slash line. Displaying better-than-expected pop, he stroked 37 doubles and went deep 16 times.

Clint Hurdle wasn’t expecting that kind of production from the switch-hitting rookie when the Pirates broke camp in Bradenton. The since-ousted manager admitted as much when I asked him about Reynolds in the waning days of the season.

“I don’t think I had on the radar that Bryan Reynolds would be hitting .314 on September 25th,” Hurdle said. “From what I’d heard from our scouts, and what I’d seen in the spring, I thought we had a good young player… and it would be interesting to see how he developed. [But] I didn’t have any expectations.”

Nor did a lot of people, although he didn’t exactly came out of nowhere. Reynolds was a second-round pick out of Vanderbilt in 2016, and he came to Pittsburgh from San Francisco as part of the Andrew McCutchen trade. He ranked ninth on our Pirates Top Prospects list coming into this season, with the following commenting his bio standing out: “We keep waiting for Reynolds’ BABIP to regress (it hasn’t).”

Those same words could be written today. His impeccable bat-to-ball skills were no less impressive at the highest level, as Reynolds logged a .387 BABiP in 546 plate appearances against big-league pitching. The approach he brought with him from college played a big role in his success. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Thus far in the Division Series, a Yankees lineup whose relentless efforts to control the strike zone yielded an American League-high 5.82 runs per game despyte myriad injuries is treating the Twins with a familiar ferocity that has become their signature. On Saturday evening, for the second night in a row, two teams that looked quite evenly matched on paper and pixel, and far disconnected from a history that produced four Division Series pummelings by the Yankees from 2003-10, yielded a lopsided result. Grinding out at-bat after at-bat with their signature plate discipline, the Yankees staked themselves to an early lead against starter Randy Dobnak, then pounced when the 24-year-old rookie got into a jam. Didi Gregorius‘ grand slam off reliever Tyler Duffey was the coup de grâce in a seven-run third inning that backed yet another impressive postseason start from Masahiro Tanaka and carried the Yankees to an 8-2 victory. They’ve pushed the 101-win Twins to the brink of elimination as the series heads to Minnesota and have now won 15 of 17 postseason over the Twins dating back to 2003, including a major league record 12 straight. The Twins have lost a record 15 consecutive postseason games overall.

Of the Yankees’ first 21 batters, 14 reached base, via 10 hits, three walks and one hit-by pitch. Amid that parade, every member of the lineup save for Giancarlo Stanton reached at least once, and Stanton, for his part, delivered a sacrifice fly. For the night, the Yankees collected 11 hits and eight walks — against a team whose walk rate was an AL-low 7.2% — while striking out just six times.

“Up and down the lineup, guys are hungry,” said Aaron Judge, who while batting second walked and had two singles within that early span, and later added another walk.

“I absolutely do think it’s contagious,” said manager Aaron Boone regarding his team’s plate discipline before the game. “It’s something we preach ad nauseam… I do think those guys take that to heart and really, as a group, have some faith and trust in each other and take some pride in knowing that, when they do that as a group, it benefits all of them because it wears people down. It nets more mistakes over time, and more often than not, when we do that, we’ve been able to kind of break through at some point.” Read the rest of this entry »