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With a million games, no off days, and roughly six quality starting pitchers among the teams left in the playoffs, baseball is wall-to-wall action right now. You can’t take two steps without tripping over a four-hour game, and every decision — Bring in the lefty? Ride the hot hand? — feels momentous. But let’s take a moment to ponder something truly important. What if baseball were more like Mario Kart?

If you haven’t played Mario Kart before, first of all: I’m sorry. It’s honestly the best. It’s a racing video game series with a variety of beloved Nintendo characters, but there’s one part I care about most for the purposes of this article: the game actively works to slow down the leader and speed up the laggards. If you’re out front, you can expect middling power-ups and specifically targeted countermeasures to slow you down a bit. If you’re bringing up the rear, the game gives with both hands to help you get caught up. It’s possible to run away with a race, but the game is working hard to make it less likely.

Baseball wouldn’t do anything like that, not least because it would upend more than 100 years of tradition. But if they did, they’d have plenty of options, so I decided to run through a few of them. Topical? Of course not. That’s never stopped me before though, so let’s do it. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Yankees had a chance. It was the third inning; the bases were loaded, the game was tied, and Luke Voit — baseball’s home run champ in the regular season — was at the plate. When Tampa Bay Rays starter Charlie Morton fell behind him 3-0, you could practically hear the Yankees’ bench vibrating with anticipation. Then back-to-back pitches were called strikes at the knees, and there was a new kind of tension. Both offerings could have been ruled out of the zone to force home a run, but they weren’t, and now Voit had just one more shot to do damage. Instead, he grounded out harmlessly to the shortstop.

Then the Rays got their chance. Joey Wendle singled to lead off the top of the fourth against Yankees right-hander Masahiro Tanaka, who followed that with a walk issued to Willy Adames. Then Kevin Kiermaier turned on the first pitch he saw and launched it into the empty seats in right field for a three-run homer to put the Rays ahead. Tampa Bay added on with two more big homers in the ensuing innings while simultaneously holding the Yankees to their smallest run total of the postseason in an 8-4 victory in ALDS Game 3 on Wednesday at Petco Park in San Diego. The Rays, the AL’s top seed in the playoffs, are now up 2-1 in the series and just a game away from eliminating their division rivals. Read the rest of this entry »

This time there wasn’t much offense. On the heels of a Game 1 that finished 9-5, the Atlanta Braves took a commanding two-games-to-none lead in the NLDS by pushing past the Miami Marlins by a score of 2-0. Ian Anderson and four relievers combined for the shutout, with a pair of solo home runs providing just enough run-support for a suddenly-stellar pitching staff.

What scoring there was came early. Dansby Swanson took Pablo López deep in the second inning with what was his second home run in his last two at-bats. In Game 1, the 26-year-old shortstop — given name James Dansby Swanson — had homered his final time up to cap a six-run Atlanta seventh.

Travis d’Arnaud, who’d preceded Swanson’s Game 1 blast with one of his own, then went yard against López in the fourth. Seven plate appearances into the NLDS, 31-year-old backstop — given name Travis E. d’Arnaud — now had a single, a double, and a pair of walks to go along with his two dingers.

Anderson wasn’t giving up anything. A suddenly-feeble Marlins lineup managed just three hits off him in five-and-two thirds innings — a near copy-cat of his no-runs-on-two-hits, six-inning performance last week in the Wild Card round. Read the rest of this entry »

In this astonishingly homer-heavy postseason, no teams have played homer-heavier games than the Yankees and the Rays in this ALDS. Of the 24 runs they’ve scored, all but four have come via the long ball. In every playoff game this postseason, the team that has out-homered the other has won. And so it went in Game 2, with the Rays’ four homers — accounting for six of their seven runs — surpassing the Yankees’ two, en route to a 7-5 final score.

All of the Yankees’ home runs came off the bat of Giancarlo Stanton, whose extraordinary power manifested in the form of a shockingly casual rocket into right field, tying the game at one in the second, and a three-run shot crushed to the tune of 118 mph in the fourth, both off Rays starter Tyler Glasnow. They were his fourth and fifth homers in four postseason games this year.

Unfortunately for the Yankees, though, both of these homers were hit while trailing. Overshadowing Stanton’s displays of strength was the way that the Yankees chose to set up their pitching. The rookie Deivi García was ostensibly tapped for the start. But after pitching a single inning and giving up yet another Randy Arozarena home run, García was lifted, a secret opener for J.A. Happ. Read the rest of this entry »

With just a few weeks of the postseason left, it’s hard to believe that it has been almost eight months since the major league season was postponed. I’m sure that for all of us, these past eight months have felt like a lifetime.

Since March, we’ve been asking for your support and you’ve been there every step of the way. Things looked pretty grim when I published my first update on the state of the site as we grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, but we’re still here and that’s entirely thanks to you. We are so grateful to have such supportive readers.

For the last fifteen years, our small staff’s dedication and love of baseball have allowed us to punch above our weight in the baseball media space despite a tight operating budget. But the revenue landscape for FanGraphs has changed considerably, and once the postseason winds down, we’ll have five baseball-less months to bridge until the start of the 2021 season. And so I’m here to ask for your help once again. Even though our traffic has rebounded to within 10% of our normal August and September levels, our revenue has not, due in large part to the continued depression of online advertising rates. This has forced us to become considerably more reliant on Memberships to make up the difference.

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If you’d been asked, before this postseason, to name as many Astros relievers as you could, how many would you have rattled off before you had to stop? Many fans could probably recall Ryan Pressly, the closer with the high-spin curveball who’s been an integral part of Houston’s bullpen the last three seasons. Maybe Josh James is a familiar face if you’d paid enough attention, a young right-hander with a powerful fastball and questionable command who’s bounced between the rotation and bullpen.

After that, though, it’s likely a lot of blank stares and silence. The relief corps that the Astros turned to throughout the 2020 season was as anonymous as it was unexceptional. Houston’s bullpen ranked 16th in the majors in WAR and ERA and 18th in strikeout rate. By Win Probability Added, they were a miserable 26th. The only stat they were near the top of the league in was walk rate — 12.4%, second-highest in the league. None of that should have come as a surprise: The Astros lost two of their better relievers from 2019 in Will Harris and Joe Smith to free agency, then they saw closer Roberto Osuna throw all of 4.1 innings this year before blowing out his elbow.

The bullpen then became a carousel, spinning constantly as new bodies jumped on seemingly every day. Twenty-two different pitchers trotted out in relief for the Astros, most of them rookies, trying their best to fill what increasingly looked like a bottomless hole. Some of the names cycled through were downright Pynchon-esque: Cy Sneed, Nivaldo Rodriguez, Humberto Castellanos. Some players were barely there for a few days before disappearing while others stuck. And although the bullpen on the whole was never anything more than average, a few of those pitchers managed to secure a spot in Dusty Baker’s circle of trust. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things 2020’s expanded playoff format robbed us of was a real American League East throw down. The Rays earned bragging rights, winning 13 of their 15 games in late August to turn a two-game deficit into a four-and-a-half-game cushion, ultimately taking the division by an impressive seven games and whomping the Yankees by an 8-2 margin in their head-to-head matchups. But the Yankees never really acted as if their season was in serious jeopardy because in the end, it never really was. After all, the stakes for winning the division versus finishing in second place have never been lower. With the pennant race defanged, a Yankees vs. Rays postseason matchup brings real electricity where their other 2020 matchups did not. The winner will be just one series away from a trip to the Fall Classic; the loser will be sent home to make plans for 2021.

What makes this matchup fun isn’t just that the results actually matter. There’s also a real contrast between how the teams are run. The Yankees may not spend with the same unchecked aggression they did 15 years ago, but they still agree to massive contracts when the right opportunity arises; Gerrit Cole isn’t being paid in exposure. New York is a standard modern juggernaut: big payroll, big power, and big plate discipline, but with an interest in developing players from within rather than cashing every top prospect into veteran deadline help.

If the Yankees are a 21st century Goliath, no team better personifies David than the Rays. There’s no denying that Tampa Bay’s tiny payroll includes a healthy chunk of parsimony, but most observers agree that the team lacks the revenue — and the possibility of such — to realistically challenge the luxury tax threshold. Whatever you attribute the club’s low payrolls to, the Rays have to be careful and clever. And as low-spending teams go, their record matches up with that of bigger payroll clubs exceptionally well. Since they dropped the Devil from their name before the 2008 season, the Rays have won 1081 games, the fifth-most in baseball, despite playing in one of baseball’s toughest divisions.

And the contrasts don’t stop at payroll. The Yankees have the name-brand superstars, while the Rays always seem to find a multitude of average-to-above-average players out of nowhere with almost paranormal ease. Back when we thought the season would be 162 games long, ZiPS projected four Yankees hitters to be worth at least three wins; only a single Ray (Austin Meadows) was projected to eclipse that mark. But the computer also projected 17 Rays position players to put up at least one win if used in a full-time role compared to just 11 Yankees. No Tampa Bay starter was projected to equal Cole, just as no Rays reliever was expected to be as dominant as Aroldis Chapman, but ZiPS saw the Rays as having 38 better than replacement level pitchers in the organization, the most of any team in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s well-chronicled that the Twins have now lost 18 consecutive postseason games. What it isn’t is well-explained, and that’s for good reason. A streak this torturous is inexplicable. Getting swept in a short series is by no means uncommon, but having it happen repeatedly, at the worst possible time, is soul-crushingly rare.

Derek Falvey was asked about the failings when he met with the media following Wednesday’s elimination. Moreover, he was asked what can be done to reverse those fortunes in Octobers to come. Minnesota’s Chief Baseball Officer answered as best he could, but again, what’s beset his club is inexplicable.

I introduced that angle in a follow-up question near the end of Falvey’s session: Given the randomness of short series, is there truly anything that can be done to flip the postseason script? Are the Twins akin to the pre-2004 Red Sox in that they’ll only win once the Baseball Gods deem it time for them to win?

“I hear your perspective on trying to make sure we don’t overreact to some history,” responded Falvey. “We want to make sure that we assess this as objectively as we can… but I do think there is some reality that in a baseball season, over the course of two or three, or four or five games, things can go a little haywire on you — even if you feel you have a good foundation. Maybe if you played those games all over again, you might have a different result. I get that. That speaks to your question a little bit about randomness. Read the rest of this entry »

The 0-0 score in the middle of the fifth inning in Friday’s decisive Wild Card series Game 3 between the Padres and Cardinals was, technically speaking, accurate. It was true that neither team had tallied a run to that point in the contest. But the thing about scores is that they hide things, details that influence the way a fan actually feels while watching the game. In this case, the score conveyed a tie — a situation in which neither team had yet gained the upper hand. It probably would have been difficult to find a Padres fan who agreed, however. St. Louis had their ace on the mound going strong, and had yet to even warm up a second pitcher. San Diego, meanwhile, had already used up five pitchers in the game. Even without allowing a run, it felt the team was playing from behind. It had been that way ever since they lost their two best starters the final weekend of the regular season, and when they lost Game 1 of the series, and when they literally named Craig Stammen their starter in a win-or-go-home playoff game.

I’m not sure when it is that feeling went away. Maybe it was when the Padres scored their first run in the bottom of the fifth, or when they added two more in a seventh inning full of defensive miscues from St. Louis. Maybe it wasn’t until the end of the game that it finally set in that the Padres had accomplished something stunning — a 4-0 win carried out by nine bullpen pitchers that advanced the team to an NLDS standoff with the rival Los Angeles Dodgers next week. It is the most pitchers ever used in a shutout during the live-ball era, and the first playoff series win for San Diego in 22 years.

It was the second-straight day the Padres used nine pitchers, after doing so in the team’s 11-9 victory in Game 2 on Thursday. The day before that, the team had used eight pitchers. In both of those games, however, the conga line marching in from the bullpen was the result of starting pitchers who allowed the game to slip away from them early. In Game 1, Chris Paddack only made it 2.1 innings before allowing six runs on eight hits. In Game 2, Zach Davies went just two innings and allowed four runs on five hits. With Dinelson Lamet and Mike Clevinger already ruled out of the series because of injuries suffered last weekend, the Padres’ options for Game 3 were limited. It wasn’t until just a few hours before first pitch that the team announced Stammen — who last started a game in 2010, and held a 5.63 ERA in 24 innings this season — would get the ball in the first inning.

But Stammen got the first five outs of the game while allowing just a single hit, and each arm that followed simply continued to put up zeroes. Padres pitchers allowed just four hits and three walks, striking out eight and enjoying stellar defensive work from the infield behind them. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a philosophical quandary after Miami’s 2–0 Game 2 win over Chicago: Is it really an upset loss if the higher seed never looked like the favorite? The Cubs — NL Central champs, No. 3 in the postseason field, blessed with talent — are gone. The Marlins — bottom feeders the last several years, season nearly ended by COVID before it got started, built out of spare parts and held together with string, in the postseason by virtue only of its expansion — are moving on. And after two games in an empty and chilly Wrigley Field, that result doesn’t feel like a fluke.

The numbers on Chicago’s side of things are grizzly: 18 innings played, one run scored, that coming on a single hit: Ian Happ’s solo homer off Sandy Alcantara in the fifth inning of Game 1. Since then, no runs in 13 straight innings, most of them quiet and all of them frustrating. You saw plenty of that in Game 2: After struggling to get the measure on rookie righty Sixto Sánchez and his booming fastball early on, Cubs hitters seemed to figure something out the second time through the order. In the fourth, Willson Contreras and Kyle Schwarber drew back-to-back walks to open the frame. One out later, Jason Heyward cracked a broken-bat single to right, and perhaps feeling pressure to get on the board, third base coach Will Venable sent Contreras — not a glacier like most catchers, but no one’s idea of Billy Hamilton — from second. The play was close, but a strong throw from Matt Joyce and a nice tag by Chad Wallach got him at home to end the threat and keep things scoreless. Read the rest of this entry »