Baseball is unpredictable, to a point. It’s a round bat and a round ball; anything can happen in 75 plate appearances. You’ve heard the platitudes. It’s not wild randomness, though. When the pitcher throws the ball to home plate, it won’t turn into a bouquet of flowers halfway there. Smashed line drives become hits most of the time. The Astros were always likely to win the AL West this year. The Dodgers outcome was similarly predictable.

In the same vein, we knew a lot about this Yankees-Twins series coming in. Maybe we didn’t know the outcome, but we could intuit a few themes. There would be dingers, more dingers than you can probably believe. The Twins hit the most single-season home runs by a team in baseball history this year, and the Yankees hit exactly one home run less than the Twins. There would be high-octane relief work; the Twins had the best bullpen FIP- in baseball while the Yankees were second, with both bullpens finishing in the top three in WAR.

And of course, the games seemed likely to go long. There’s a certain undefinable characteristic about Yankees playoff contests that leads to baseball in the hours. The team has long been at the forefront of the three true outcome trend in baseball, and in recent years they’ve spearheaded the transition to the modern, bullpen-heavy style of postseason play. Even ignoring that, however, the playoffs and the Yankees mix together to produce tension, and tension slows the game down.

Want an example? When Kyle Gibson walked Giancarlo Stanton in the bottom of the seventh inning, Cameron Maybin stepped in to pinch run. The game wasn’t over by any means, but the leverage index was a mere 0.24. Gibson walked Gleyber Torres on six pitches, with a stolen base in between. The sequence took what felt like an interminable three minutes and 40 seconds — signs checked and rechecked, long, focusing breaths, pickoff throws, and batting gloves readjusted until they fit perfectly.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How did the ball end up in Gibson’s hands, with the Yankees up 7-4? Naturally, there were five home runs involved. It is 2019, after all. James Paxton, a great condor of a pitcher with arms the length of legs and legs the length of really long legs, is a fly ball pitcher in Yankee Stadium in 2019 — Jorge Polanco took him out of the park on the ninth pitch of the game.

Though Paxton regrouped and José Berríos danced through trouble in the first two innings, they weren’t fooling anyone. Nelson Cruz deposited a 98 mph fastball into the short right field porch for a home run in the top of the third, though Paxton’s greatest skill, his elite strikeout rate, meant that both blasts were solo home runs.

Berríos wasn’t so lucky. The Yankees scratched runs across in un-Yankee-like ways. Edwin Encarnación doubled home DJ LeMahieu, who had reached on a pop-up Luis Arraez couldn’t track down. Gleyber Torres plated two when the Twins booted a double play ball that would have ended the inning. Berríos was hardly sharp — he allowed four hits and three walks in just four innings of work. Still, he kept the ball in the park, something rarely seen in modern baseball, and got three runs for his troubles.

After the Twins managed a small-ball run against Paxton (Polanco again, singling home Arraez), Rocco Baldelli went new school. He pulled Berríos, who needed 88 pitches for his four innings, and went to the aforementioned lethal bullpen. Zack Littell had a 2.68 ERA this year — surely he would be up to the task.

Yeah, not so much. Littell walked Aaron Judge and hit Brett Gardner, with a wild pitch sprinkled in for good measure. Baldelli had seen enough, and he went to the big guns; Tyler Duffey, he of the 34% strikeout rate, 54 ERA-, and 67 FIP-. His strikeout prowess was as advertised, as he recorded all three of his outs via strikeout. His run prevention prowess, on the other hand, was worse; he allowed a walk and a double in the midst of those strikeouts, and the Yankees retook the lead.

Aaron Boone is no stranger to the reliever carousel — Paxton was out of the game in the top of the fifth, and a parade of relievers followed. Tommy Kahnle surrendered a home run, but the Yankees bullpen mostly did what the Twins’ equally excellent bullpen could not; it managed to keep the hits and walks from clustering together, as five walks and two hits, including the aforementioned home run, led to only a single run for Minnesota.

The Twins bullpen couldn’t keep up their end of the bargain. From 5-4, where the game stood after Duffey’s up-and-down inning and the home run Kahnle allowed, they couldn’t hold the line. There were two solo home runs, difficult to avoid in this day and age, but the clustering abandoned them too. But now I’m getting ahead of myself again. Let’s get back to the seventh and Kyle Gibson.

Back on the mound, Gibson regrouped and took a deep breath. He struck out Gary Sanchez on four pitches. Didi Gregorius was next, and it took eight pitches and five minutes and 51 seconds for Gibson to walk him. Gio Urshela didn’t get the message; he put the second pitch in play, a fly ball too shallow to score Maybin from third. It was all for naught, though. DJ LeMahieu lined a hanging slider into left field, plating all three runners, to turn the game from not very suspenseful to not suspenseful at all.

The rest of the game, of course, took nearly an hour anyway. There was no suspense left; no runs were scored. Brusdar Graterol poured 100 mph gasoline past Yankees hitters for two strikeouts in a perfect inning, and the odd couple of J.A. Happ and Aroldis Chapman closed things out for the Yankees. In some sense, the last part of the game was a breeze.

But in another sense, the end of the game matched the overall tenor of the evening. In the real world, time is linear. One minute it’s 6:01, and the next it’s 6:02, on and on until the day is over. In Yankee Stadium, however, it’s not like that. It’s a full count, forever and always, and time never passes. There are runners on, leads to protect at any cost, tension felt deep in a pitcher’s bones.

Aroldis Chapman walked a batter in the ninth, a play that could hardly have been less meaningful — the Yankees had a 99.9% win expectancy before the walk and a 99.7% expectancy afterwards. Even still, the cameras caught Aaron Boone in the dugout, unsubtly swearing. Chapman threw a few pitches to the next pitcher, stepped off the mound for a deep breath, and regrouped. He looked in for the sign, shook his head, and looked in again.

The game ended not long after that, with an uncharacteristic first-pitch pop up. It was hardly an unexpected conclusion, what with the Yankees having been up six runs for nearly an hour, but it still felt like a great accomplishment. The stands were half-empty, the Bronx faithful streaming out to the 4 train in a vain attempt to beat the rush, but the game went on unabated, and felt like it might never end. The natural state of playoff baseball in Yankee Stadium is to beat on, borne ceaselessly from stressor to stressor, and it felt shocking when the game was suddenly finished. Time of game: four hours, 17 minutes.

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Let us dispense with this first, so that we can move on: Derek Jeter isn’t here, and neither are the rest of the Core Four. For that matter, there’s no Johan Santana, Michael Cuddyer, Francisco Liriano, or Joe Mauer. The four Yankees teams that manhandled the Twins in the 2003, ’04, ’09 and ’10 Division Series by a combined total of 12 wins to two are no more relevant to this series than Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig. Aside from “Yankees Bullpen: Still Very Good,” there’s no point overthinking the results of the 2017 AL Wild Card Game, either. These 101-win Twins and 103-win Yankees are a pair of excellent, evenly-matched squads here to write new stories instead of extending old ones.

Some thoughts on the series, which begins at Yankee Stadium on Friday at 7:07 pm ET.

Keeping It 100

This year was the first in major league history with four 100-win teams, and while that seems impressive, it’s an indication of the game’s competitive balance issues (a topic worth revisiting on another day). While 33 teams have won at least 100 games in a season during the Wild Card era, only three previous times have two of them crossed paths in the postseason, all within the past three years: the 2017 World Series between the Astros (101-61) and Dodgers (104-58), the 2018 Division Series between the Red Sox (108-54) and Yankees (100-62), and the subsequent ALCS matchup between those Red Sox and the Astros (103-59). Inevitably, one of these teams will be the unlucky 13th 100-game winner to make a first-round exit, after the 1998 Astros (102-60), 1999 Diamondbacks (100-62), 2001 A’s (102-60), 2002 A’s (103-59), 2002 Yankees (103-58), 2002 Braves (101-59), 2003 Braves (101-61), 2003 Giants (100-61), 2008 Angels (100-62), 2011 Phillies (102-60), 2015 Cardinals (100-62), and 2017 Indians (102-60). It’s going to hurt.

Not all 100-win teams are created equal, of course. This pair had similar levels of scoring and runs allowed, and both similarly overachieved relative to their Pythagen records. However, the Yankees distinguished themselves in a few ways:

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After winning their respective divisions, the Atlanta Braves will face off against the St. Louis Cardinals starting on Thursday. This series looks evenly matched, with our Depth Charts projections (53%) and ZiPS (55%) both seeing the Braves as slight favorites. Before we get to the meat of the preview, let’s lay out the schedule. All games will be televised by TBS.

When and Where:

• Game 1: Thursday, October 3, 5:02 PM EST in Atlanta
• Game 2: Friday, October 4, 4:37 PM EST in Atlanta
• Game 3: Sunday, October 6, time TBD in St. Louis
• Game 4 (if necessary): Monday, October 7, time TBD in St. Louis
• Game 5 (if necessary): Wednesday, October 9, time TBD in Atlanta

What We’ll Be Watching For:

Injured Players
Ender Inciarte will remain out for this series, at least, after a hamstring injury struck him down in mid-August. Matt Joyce and Adam Duvall have platooned some with Inciarte out, though the Cardinals have no lefty starters, so the 35-year-old Joyce could play a big role in the series. He hasn’t shown a ton of power the last few years, but he’s walked 15% of the time against righties since the beginning of 2016 with a decently low 21% strikeout rate. Inciarte’s replacement in center actually meant an upgrade as Ronald Acuña Jr. took over, but the Braves’ star outfielder has injury concerns of his own; an apparent hip injury was classified as a groin strain and it is unclear how that injury might affect his superb baserunning or his defense in center field.

The health worries don’t end there for the Braves. Freddie Freeman has a bone spur in his right elbow, which he is still favoring, and though he played over the weekend, he struck out four times in 11 plate appearances and didn’t come up with an extra base hit. It was only the third three-game stretch all season during which Freeman struck out that often and didn’t get an extra base hit. All three stretches have come in the last six weeks. Every player is going to have sporadic, three-game down stretches, but given what we know about Freeman’s elbow, look for a lot of inside pitches to test whether the injury will continue to hobble the Braves’ first basemen. Josh Donaldson sat out the last game of the season after being hit on the hip with a pitch, but that injury appears less severe. Donaldson, Acuña, and Freeman have accounted for half of the 27.9 WAR accumulated by Braves’ position players this season (Ozzie Albies is the only other position player with more than 2.1 WAR); Atlanta would be a completely different team without that trio at full strength. Read the rest of this entry »

Talk of low payrolls and stadium issues will be afterthoughts when MC Hammer throws out the first pitch before Wednesday’s American League Wild Card tilt between Tampa Bay and Oakland. Both teams created necessary distance between themselves and Cleveland to take a bit of a breath in the season’s final days, though Tampa’s late-September gauntlet (they played consecutive series against the Dodgers, Red Sox, and Yankees, then flew from Toronto to Oakland for this game) seems fairly exhausting. The reward for winning Wednesday is a Friday date with a juggernaut in Houston.

Oakland has yet to officially announce their starter (10 AM Wednesday is the roster deadline) though it’s expected to be lefty Sean Manaea, who will be on an extra day’s rest after throwing in Seattle on Thursday. Righty Mike Fiers threw on Friday and is also a possibility to start. Tampa Bay has already announced that 6-WAR righty Charlie Morton will take the ball. Let’s take a look at our starters (**denotes out pitch**).

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The Nationals would not be here today without Patrick Corbin.

In a season with many ups and downs — really, just one “down” and then one much larger “up” — Corbin was a consistent arm in the Nationals’ rotation, especially as the ace of the staff, Max Scherzer, dealt with injuries in the second half and relative (by his standards) ineffectiveness upon his return. He was not the only rock — Stephen Strasburg was also superb — but he was the new rock, the highlight of the Nationals’ offseason, their prized signing.

On December 4, the Nationals inked Corbin to a six-year, $140 million deal, the largest contract given to any starting pitcher the entire offseason. With one full season in the books, it’s clear that Corbin has come to Washington exactly as advertised. As their third ace, Corbin’s presence in the rotation helped put them over the top. A team with three of the best 13 pitchers in baseball likely won’t stay defeated for long, and the Nationals overcame a horrid 19-31 start to win 93 games and clinch the top NL Wild Card spot.

Of course, this turnaround is not solely due to Corbin’s contributions, but having him in the rotation certainly didn’t hurt. He pitched 202 innings this year to the tune of a 3.25 ERA, 3.49 FIP, and 4.8 WAR. He outpitched both Steamer’s (3.3 WAR) and ZiPS’ (3.5) preseason projections. As a result, the Nationals had the best rotation in baseball, and they hope that their top three starters will be the difference here in October: Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Playoffs begin Tuesday evening as the Milwaukee Brewers (89-73) head to the nation’s capital to face the Washington Nationals (93-69). After a season during which most of the National League was in the playoff picture until very late in the season, both teams finished their respective campaigns in surprisingly convincing fashion, managing to clinch postseason appearances with time to spare. Both squads also fell short in their improbable runs for a division title late in the season, but making the Wild Card is still good enough to earn a bit of bubbly.

For the Washington Nationals, the end of the Bryce Harper era didn’t spell the end of their contending years. As it turns out, there is a foolproof way to replace a Bryce Harper: make a new one. Juan Soto only needed 121 minor league games to prepare for instant stardom in the majors had a fantastic 2018 run, hitting .292/.406/.517 with 22 homers and 3.7 WAR in 116 games for Washington. But Harper was still the Big Name on the team, and it wasn’t until his lucrative departure to Philadelphia that Soto could define Washington’s outfield.

Anything can happen in one game — the Detroit Tigers beat better teams on 47 occasions this season — but if I’m one of the other NL playoff teams, the Nationals aren’t the team I’d be pulling for to win. When considering the playoff construction of the teams — with less of an emphasis on depth and more on the top of the rotation — ZiPS projects the Nationals as the second-best squad in the National League. Second-in-the-National-League means they even edge out the Atlanta Braves by the slenderest of threads.

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Joe Maddon has managed for 14 MLB seasons, and in nine of them his team has won 90 or more games. He captured a pennant in Tampa Bay, and most notably a World Series title with the Cubs. Four of his five years in Chicago have included October baseball.

Not this year: not after a September swoon that saw the Cubs lose nine straight down the stretch. Despite having a plus-106 run differential — by comparison, the playoff-bound Brewers and Cardinals are plus-one, and plus-93, respectively — Maddon’s club is heading home after today’s game.

The bespectacled and thoughtfully-loquacious denizen of Hazelton, PA was to meet with Theo Epstein last night, and not simply for a cold frosty. Speculation has been swirling about Maddon’s future — this is the final year of his contract — and in all likelihood there was some solemnity to the Saturday evening sit-down. It will come as a surprise if we don’t soon learn that the Joe Maddon era is over in Chicago.

Earlier this week Maddon was asked about having used the word “optimistic” when addressing his tenuous-at-best situation. His response suggested something other than an expected return engagement at the Friendly Confines. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Night, Félix Hernández made his final start as a Seattle Mariner, and baseball is a little different for me now. Dimmer, further away. It has been on the road to different for a while, I suppose; it is not an original idea to note how one’s hobby becoming one’s job alters our relationship to our devotions, nor is it novel for a baseball fan or writer to have a guy. You know, your guy? The one who, among all the others, rendered the sport in its most vivid colors, made your appetite for it insatiable, transformed you into a lifer. Your guy. You love your guy! My guy is gone now; I wonder if I’ll ever have another.

To expect that his last outing would mirror his halcyon days would have been to miss the point. Félix is altered, worn. He threw 106 pitches; at times he labored. When the time came, he wept, and the tears marked a father’s face, a man’s; and he had been so young when we came to know him. He added three strikeouts to his career total, which now stands at 2,524, but there were three runs, too. He pitched into the sixth; he never saw October. He may yet pitch again, decamping to some other city after having stayed all of these years, but it won’t be the same. He isn’t their guy. How could he be? He’s ours.

…

It’s such a funny thing, fandom. It houses within it theft; we make symbols of human beings, transfigure persons so as to serve the function of a satisfyingly smooth stone we transfer from pants pocket to pants pocket. We carry them around with our memories and sadness, spirit them into our bits of kindness paid and received. The special ones, the ones who stick with us, who become our guys, are both magical and not so dissimilar from the restaurant where we paused and realized we were in love, or the couch where we sat and learned that our grandma was sick, the familiar street corner in our hometown where we first thought, I need to go away for a while, and go see things. They become guideposts, markers in our memories for both what they are on the field, and who we were.

To imbue these strangers with so much is a bit silly, and I wonder if it isn’t also a bit rude. I have to imagine that franchise cornerstones know that fans will come to adore and scorn them, but Félix never asked to mean this to me; to be burdened with these expectations. He doesn’t know my name, but I call him by his first, casual. Familiar. He never meant to be a lesson; in patience; in greatness; in decline; in things left undone. In still being young; in being finished. To make of these guys what we do, to make them our guys, is to see them at once as they are and as we are. True to themselves but also infected with our own picayune trials.

When Félix debuted, I was distant; from Detroit, where he recorded his first four strikeouts, from home, where the faithful watched and waited for his promise to be fulfilled, from baseball, difficult as it was to make time for amidst school and laundry and finding my way. I grew up a baseball fan, and still observed its rituals, but the sport was now rendered in unfamiliar hues. Not the cool blues and greens I knew, but in a vibrant Phillies red, and later, as I navigated the post-college world of full-time work and financial crisis, a stately pinstripe, a garish Queens orange. Seattle baseball was a long ways off, removed from the normal evening hours it had once occupied, and relegated to a twilight time.

I don’t remember when I first read one more article at Lookout Landing than my lunch break comfortably fit; I don’t know that the first time was that remarkable. It was probably some dumb thing that Jeff wrote, to fill all the dumb, meaningless days when the Mariners still, somehow, had to play baseball. But soon, it was a place I toggled to without thinking, the destination of idle wanderings between meetings and during conference calls. I couldn’t watch Félix at home — home was so far, and not where I lived anymore — but I would watch him in the Bronx, trudge to 161st Street armed with my fellow expats and homemade K cards and a sense that this was time well spent even when it was dumb; even though it was meaningless. Because Félix made it mean something.

The day the Mariners announced Félix’s extension, I remember turning to my coworkers, many of whom were Yankees fans smugly convinced that our King was soon to establish a new court out East, and saying with all the defiance I could muster: Félix is ours, and you can’t have him. Later that evening, I spoke with the professor who would become my graduate school advisor. Félix had declared his home, and I was about to declare what I thought was mine. Félix was to me a connection to both to where I’d been and where I might go, a reminder of what I liked and who I wanted to be at a time when I was struggling to know myself, caught in a job that so often took me into the twilight hours where Félix would wait. To appreciate him for staying was to christen this place, my place, worthy of staying in, and more importantly, of getting back to. But it was more than that. It meant more than that.

Perhaps then it is less a theft and more a drawing of loans one can never fully repay. I cheered for Félix, sure, was one of his court, but I didn’t inspire him to a career. I loved to watch him play, celebrated his day, christened him My Guy, but the people he loves he came to know through other means. And yet Félix is why I am here; the stirring his pitches caused, a warmth that radiated into the tips of my fingers and into the space behind my eyes when that cambio flew shifted things around. The desire to know more, to understand the how of this man, even as he, with tears and yelps and a commitment to stay traced over too many innings, articulated his why, made up a pledge to write things down so as to pick them apart. I sought rigor to explain why he meant so much and how good he was; I embraced whimsy to do justice to all he made me feel. I wrote and wrote until all I wanted to do was write more, and then finally, I got to. And the road to being here is why I’ve collected the people I have, friends I love, and can’t imagine my life without, all new lines of credit, charged against this man. My guy.

…

My guy is gone, bound for other places, returned to a life peopled with his people, rather than one serving as a marker for mine, folks who I don’t know and in whose story I play no part, even as so many of those in whose lives I am firmly planted are there because of the years, and turns, and miseries he spent in this place that for so long, I couldn’t get back to. This guy, whose permission to mean all this I was never able to ask for but who has given me so much, by deciding to stay. He is gone, but the memory of him — perfect, resplendent, royal, wrecked, but importantly ours — will persist. Baseball is a little different now; my life unrecognizable. I am here now. The debt remains, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever be able to pay it back.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra

In 2017 and ’18, for the first time in franchise history, the Colorado Rockies made the playoffs in consecutive seasons. The team didn’t play deep into October in either season, but for an organization that hadn’t even had back-to-back winning seasons since the mid-90s, it was a wonderful result. Problem is, the team gave little thought as to how they got there or the weaknesses that could prevent them from doing so again in the future. The strengths Colorado rode in 2017 and 2018 were absent in 2019, and left the team high-and-dry with no real Plan B.

The Setup

The Rockies clearly believed that 2019 would be another year of contendership. But I’m not sure they realized how dependent they had been on the production of a few stars every season. 91 wins are nothing to scoff at, but to get to the point of barely making the playoffs, the Rockies had to have two legitimate MVP contenders and two legitimate Cy Young candidates. All told, Colorado received 19 WAR from their top four players in 2018, an identical sum as in 2017. In both years, that figure represented more than half the team’s value, a ratio far worse than every other postseason team from 2017, 2018, and now 2019.

In 2017, the Rockies made the playoffs despite an offense that ranked 26th in the league in wRC+. To fix this lack of run-scoring — the team ranked third in baseball in runs scored, but a good offense in Colorado should be crushing the league in runs, even given the most generous application of the Coors Field Hangover — the Rockies did, well, not much. They signed a 35-year-old catcher and given the opportunity to upgrade from fading veteran Carlos González, he of an 85 wRC+ and 0 WAR, decided to upgrade to…Carlos González. Read the rest of this entry »